Chayei Sarah - The (3) Lives of Sarah

For Congregation Ner Shalom
November 18, 2011

 

Sarah No. 1

This week's Torah portion is called Chayei Sarah, after the portion's first words. Chayei Sarah - "the life of Sarah," a portion in which, ironically, Sarah, our great mother, does not appear. Instead, the portion opens this way:

ויהיו חיי שרה מאה שנה ועשרים שנה ושבע שנים שני חיי שרה: ותמת שרה...

The life of Sarah was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years, 

these were the years of Sarah's life. And Sarah died...

We are then told that Abraham wept for her and eulogized her. But alas, we are not privileged to hear the words of the eulogy.

Certainly there would have been something about Sarah's larger-than-life life. An epic life. Great journeys. A hard-to-shake sadness, perhaps from decades of unreconciled childlessness. A sardonic sense of humor. Great physical beauty. A regal bearing, as is suggested by her name, Sarah, the Babylonian word for queen. An ingrained practicality, misread as harshness by those who didn't know her well. And a deep and enduring care for her people's posterity, evidenced first through offering her servant Hagar as a surrogate to bear Abraham a child when her own body wouldn't comply, and then by creating a sharp boundary between her family and Hagar's once she'd unexpectedly born a child of her own.     

Abraham, whom our tradition considers a mystic, might have noted Sarah's strong pull to the trait of gevurah, of discipline or boundariedness, in counterpoint to his own attraction to chesed, limitless giving. Even Abraham would have had to admit that he was constitutionally unable to say "no," and that Sarah had no such problem.

In the portion, Sarah's final age is announced in an unusual way; not unprecedented but unusual. Her years are fragmented, as if into different lives: 100 years and 20 years and 7 years. In Hebrew, the word for life - chayim - is grammatically plural. Always. There is no way to distinguish between a singular life and plural lives. Chayei Sarah, the name of this portion, could just as easily mean "the lives of Sarah." *1*

Which reminds me of a little Midrash that says that there were two Abrahams, and this was revealed when he reached out to sacrifice his son, and the angel called out, Avraham Avraham. Why say Avraham twice? The Midrash answers that there is the Abraham of the story and then there is an Abraham who lives in every generation of our people.

I'd argue that the same is true of Sarah. The lives of Sarah. The Sarah in the story, and the Sarahs who find their way into each of our stories. And I'm going to tell you about two of them.

Sarah No. 2: Sade Jacobs (later Newman)

Sarah No.2

Sarah Number 2 is my grandmother, Sade Newman. Sade. Not Sadie. The question of Grandma Sade's name deserves comment before anything else. In 1903, in a village a day's ride from Bialystok, my great-grandmother Rayzl was pregnant, and so was her sister-in-law, also named Rayzl. The mother-in-law they shared, Chayeh Sorke, had recently died and these sisters-in-law, out of custom or affection or both, intended to name their daughters, if they had daughters, after her. But in order that those daughters shouldn't have identical names - a problem already plaguing the recent spate of boys in the family all named Mayshe - one would name her daughter Chayeh Sorke, like their mother-in-law and the other would reverse the order: Sorke Chayeh. My grandmother, though born second, was called Chayeh Sorke, like her grandmother.*2*

But within the next three years both families would cross the ocean on great ships and come down the St. Lawrence Seaway to Chicago, where the two cousins' names would be Americanized. And in the Americanization, the name order of both girls was mysteriously flipped. Chayeh Sorke became Sadie Ida. Sorke Chayeh became Ida Shirley. So somehow the precedence of names evened itself out.

But my grandmother wasn't done with the name changes. She was a formidable child, a spitfire. The name "Sadie" sounded like a diminutive to her, and I suspect she didn't ever want to be thought diminutive, either in size (which she was) or in spirit (which she wasn't). She shortened it to Sade and, while still a child, got all the official documents changed to suit, seemingly having staged an occupation of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the same way she was known to occupy the school principal's office or talent competitions or whatever, until unbending authority bent to her will or skill or charm. She only ever answered to Sade, S-a-d-e, and if more educated acquaintances or later generations connected that name with a certain French Marquis, they were polite (or cautious) enough not to mention it.

But I knew her given name was Chayeh Sorke; she always told me so, and she knew I would listen and remember. And so whenever in my life I stumble onto this week's Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, I inevitably think of her, because "the Life of Sarah," Chayei Sarah, sounds like her name, plain and simple.

Now no one's life is easy, and hers was no exception. In pictures of her as a teenager, she's always in a cluster of friends, smiling, inevitably at the center. She married at 21 and I think over time had trouble fitting her strength of character into changing American expectations of wifehood and womanhood. She had a daughter, my mother. Some years later she had a stillbirth, an event that was never spoken of again, until in my teen years she whispered it to me so that I would know, for the record.

You see even as a kid I was the family historian. She perceived this, and began to give over the family history to me, all she knew of it. Some time, perhaps right around my Bar Mitzvah, I remember taking out sheets of ledger paper and beginning to draw a tree as she dictated the names of her many aunts and uncles and her scores of American cousins, all of whom she knew, all of whose children and grandchildren she knew, all of whom she talked to regularly on the phone. I loved making the tree and recording the names, but mostly I loved this act of transmission. My willingness gave her pleasure, and we two were conspirators in a secret plot for posterity.

As I think about my grandmother, Grandma Sade, Chayeh Sorke, I think she was not so dissimilar from the biblical Sarah. She certainly suffered. She had some terrible times of depression, and even worse times being treated for it. But she loved her grandchildren and her friends and her large family and that web of family - and its preservation and transmission - is where she established herself.

In her 80s, Alzheimer's disease overtook her and began to erase her memory. We never had an official, bilateral goodbye. But we had closure anyway. As the disease progressed, she recognized everyone, even strangers, as a friend or relative, kissing them and fussing over them. Like Sarah No. 1, she began living in reverse. Sarah No. 1 was an old lady who then became a mother. Sarah No. 2 was a mother who then became a little girl. I, still in my 20s, would visit her and she'd decide I was her father. I'd speak to her in my schoolbook Yiddish, and she'd talk back in the domestic Yiddish of her childhood. I didn't mind her thinking me her father. Somehow it didn't matter which end of the line of transmission I was on. We both knew we were on it together.

Sarah No. 3: Sarah Ekshtayn Chinsky

Sarah No. 3

Sarah No. 3 was born Sarah Ekshtayn, in a tiny, independent Jewish farming village called Kolonja Izaaka. Back at the turn of the last century, waves of the village's children had emigrated to America, my grandmother's family among them. But in each of the village's 17 Jewish homesteads, one child remained to inherit and farm the land. Sarah Ekshtayn's parents had been the ones of the Ekshtayn family to stay. In our tribe it was my grandmother's Uncle Itzik.

Our family, the Knishevitsky family, according to the records, held Kolonja Izaaka Farm No. 11. Farm No. 10 was held by the Ekshtayn family. Had my family stayed, Sarah No. 2, my grandmother, would have been the next-door neighbor and probable babysitter of Sarah No. 3, who was perhaps 12 years her junior. But all of this I learned later.

Only 5 years ago did I even discover the existence of this village and my connection to it. In my research I found a short Yiddish essay about life there, included in the Memorial Book of a nearby town, and written by one Sarah Chinsky, née Ekshtayn. The Memorial Book was published in 1968, and Sarah Chinsky's essay included her memories of being a teenager in Kolonja Izaaka in the 1930s. She painted in living color the life my family had left behind and which I could only imagine in black and white. Cherry trees, beehives, and the unpaved, poplar-lined road that ran straight through the village. Shabbos, harvest time, market day. The healing rituals of the town wise-woman. The friendships the young people had with the youth of the nearby shtetlach.*3*

In her essay, Sarah Chinsky mentions my grandmother's cousin, Uncle Itzik's son, one of that wave of Mayshe's born to our family at the turn of the century. The next time I saw Mayshel's name was in the Yad Vashem database of those killed in the Holocaust. It was on a daf ed, a Page of Testimony, recording his death and that of his wife and his mother and his three children. The page was dated May, 1999, and was signed by, again, Sarah No. 3, Sarah Ekshtayn Chinsky.

The Yad Vashem database allows you to search on any field including the name of the person submitting testimony. I found that Sarah Ekshtayn Chinsky had submitted over 60 such pages of testimony, that is, record of over 60 adult members of the farming village and their children. Sarah herself had gone to Palestine with her family in the 1930s, and 65 years later, she sat down in her kitchen in Tel Aviv and somehow managed once more to walk up and down that poplar-lined dirt road, referred to affectionately by the colonists as the boulevard; from house to house, remembering each person who lived there and recording their name for history. Talk about gevurah, about strength, tenacity, heroism. Could any of us remember 17 of our childhood neighbors, spouses, children? She did not know the details of any colonist's death. She only knew that they had lived, and that they lived no more.

I imagine her drawing a map, so as not to overlook any of the 17 families. I've since been told that her younger sisters sat with her to add any names of their early childhood playmates that Sarah might have missed.

I wondered when this heroic woman, Sarah Ekshtayn, had herself died. The internet was silent about her. And one day in 2008, figuring I had nothing to lose, and that maybe I'd find an old neighbor or a child of hers, I wrote a letter, and addressed it to the street number she'd written on the Page of Testimony in 1999 and I sent it off into the ether.

Her first aerogram to me arrived within two weeks. It was in Yiddish and Hebrew in an unsteady hand. We wrote to each other for a couple years; we even met once on Skype, with her son acting as the computer jockey. Despite my declarations that I would be coming to Israel soon, I didn't make it in time. She died last year at an unconfessed age somewhere, I suspect, in her late 90s.

I never met her in the flesh, but she shared with my grandmother, Sarah No. 2, and with our mother of Biblical proportions, Sarah No. 1, a desire or a calling or maybe just an unwanted but unrefusable duty to transmit history; to make sure the stories, the experiences, the truths, the longings of our past find some home in the present. And we, the Sarahs of the present, regardless of our given names, will have to do the same. We will be the transmittors. We already are. We will send something of our lives, chayei Sarah, the lives of Sarah, into the future. It is our calling, it is our inevitability. And what we choose consciously to transmit is for us to decide. May we choose well.

ברוך אתה ה' פוקד שרה:

Baruch Atah Adonai, pokeid Sarah.

Blessed is the One who appoints the Sarah in all of us.

_________________________________
*1*And in fact the first verse ends shnei chayei Sarah - literally, the years of the life of Sarah. But the shnei could also mean the number "2," making the verse end with "the two lives of Sarah."
 
*2*This was likely because her mother had a living sister named Sorke, and custom would have frowned on her sharing a name with a close living relative.
 
*3*About this she wrote:
Our dear young people numbered, taki, rather few. But we drew the attention of all the villages around, and their many young people frequented our Kolonye. In the evening, when our young men and women were still in the fields, who should arrive for a visit but a whole company of meydlach and bechoyrim from Krinek, and Amdur, and Sokolka. Just as if they had all agreed to organize a surprise for us. Suddenly, like thunder and lightning it would start, and we would hurry back from the field, our sickles and scythes in our hands. Soon we would all have assumed a yontifdik appearance, greeted all the guests, eaten, drunk, sung and danced until late at night. And by then it would be too late for those young people to go home, so they would take themselves out and sleep in our haylofts.  

Parashat Lech Lecha: On Greatness, Blessing & Owning Wall Street

For Congregation Ner Shalom, November 4, 2011

Angry anti-Semitic mob enjoying sunshine and used books.

In this week's Torah portion, Lech Lecha, we receive the first of the many blessings bestowed on us by the God of Abraham. And as we all know, even the best of blessings can prove mixed. In the parashah, God famously tells Abraham (then still called Avram) to hit the road and leave his birthplace to strike out for new territory. In exchange, God says:

ואעשך לגוי גדול ואברכך ואגדלה שמך והיה ברכה 

V'e'es'cha l'goy gadol va'avarech'cha va'agadlah sh'mecha veh'yeh b'rachah. 

I will make you a great nation
and I will bless you and make your name great 

and you will be a blessing.

This idea of being a goy gadol, a great nation - not only quantitatively but qualitatively; this sensation of being somethin' special, is in our bones. We are bound up in it. Even we Reconstructionists, who have dismissed the idea of "chosenness" out of hand, are no less susceptible to a certain wonder and, frankly, pride over who our people are, where we've been, what we've suffered and what we have, against all odds, achieved.

Considering our long, long history of marginalization, ghettoization, victimization, our achievements are nothing short of remarkable. And they are quirky too, distributed unevenly across realms of activity. We've always been right up there in scholarship, first our own Torah learning and eventually adding to world's store of philosophy and poetry and science. Music seems to run through our culture, even while our traditional allergy to graven images has kept us more distanced from the visual arts. We've done well competing and excelling in new industries when the timing is right - for instance arriving and taking root in America just in time for the invention of the motion picture.

Historical circumstances in Europe over the past millenium have also shaped some of our areas of achievement. Restrictions on occupations we could engage in; different restrictions on occupations Christians could engage in; heightened literacy among Jews regardless of class or gender; a certain focus on education; the existence of shared Jewish languages and culture throughout the Diaspora - these all set the groundwork for a famous history of involvement in finance and trade. Some elements of these professions were portable; some were not. Jews coming to America, for instance, could not easily enter the old boys' club of banking, but some found their way to the more flexible fields of investment, brokerage, etc. Merchanty skills transferred readily, and we had famous success in retail. The old blue-blood industries - mining, oil, railroads, farming - on the other hand remained a kind of goyim naches. Like hunting or skiing, something Jews just don't do.

But yes, on the whole, our collective story in America is undeniably one involving economic success even though many of our individual stories might not comport with that narrative. And certainly our collective economic success has outshone our political success. We're much better represented in commerce than in politics. We are not people who have ever, at least outside of our current up-and-down experiment in the State of Israel, held political power. America, even now I think, would still rather buy from us than vote for us.

For some Jews, the economic success has been remarkable. A few years ago a Jewish writer in Chicago took the list of Vanity Fair's 100 Most Influential Americans and counted the Jews. (Fine, we all do it, but he published it.) Between the Zuckerbergs and Bloombergs and Katzenbergs, plus many half-bergs with just one Jewish parent, he managed to tally a jaw-dropping 50% of those top 100.

I don't know about you, but as I describe and attempt to quantify the success of our people in the American marketplace, I feel myself tensing up. Because when I hear talk of Jews and finance or Jews and Hollywood or Jews and media, I begin to picture villagers carrying torches. The story of our success has too often been twisted into a battle cry of angry, anti-Semitic mobs, suffering in bad economic times.

Which brings us to Occupy Wall Street - a huge, angry, leaderless movement, protesting not the government but corporate greed, with a special focus on banking and finance and - dare we utter the word? - moneylending. Areas of our historic, disproportionate and somewhat stereotypical involvement.

It sure feels like the blueprint for an anti-Semitic mob.

But interestingly, over six weeks in, it hasn't become one. Yes, there have been people with signs saying Wall Street is owned by Zionist Jews (and if you're ever wondering whether a reference to Jews is anti-Semitic, I say if the word "Zionist" is slapped on, your answer is yes). And while the decentralized structure of the Occupy movement has not even been able to get drummers to take the night off let alone condemn anti-Semitic messaging, there have in fact been responses to anti-Semitism from among the protesters, in a way that is proportional, or so it seems for now, to the tenor of the anti-Semitism on display.

To me, the anti-Semitic threat to worry about is not the crackpot with the sign. But instead the rightwing idealogs who try to discredit Occupy Wall Street by painting it as anti-Semitic at the same time that they reinforce the anti-Semitism they claim to condemn. For instance, Rush Limbaugh a couple weeks ago commenting on the now-famous slogan "We are the 99%." He said, "[T]hat leaves 1%, roughly the percentage of Jews in the population... And Wall Street and bankers have been anti-Semitic code for Jews in this country going back quite a while." For any Rush listeners who hadn't previously associated Jews with banking and wealth, those dots have now been connected. And not in a way that I could call, even in my wildest imagination, "good for the Jews." Thank you, Rush, for caring.

But in the same way that I confess to feeling some pride at how some of our people have succeeded in the world of competitive capitalism, in ways far beyond their immigrant grandparents' dreams, I also feel pride at the visible presence of Jews in both leadership and rank and file of the Occupy movement. And why not? Our heritage imcludes both Rothschild and Trotsky, factory owners and union activists, silver spoons and red diapers.

A few decades ago economist Milton Friedman wrote a famous essay trying to understand why Jews tend toward collectivist, anti-capitalist values despite having benefited from capitalism. He reviews the theories of other economists and historians, dismissing most of them. Instead he sees Jewish leftism in America as an apologetic reflex - Jews specifically distancing themselves from the successes of capitalism in order not to be targets of anti-Semitism. In other words, our value of selflessness over selfishness is just a subconscious ploy to be visibly unlike the stereotype of the greedy Jew.

Interestingly, Friedman rejects the idea that today's Jews are influenced by the prophetic tradition of seeking justice. He quotes sociologist Nathan Glazer's dismissal of that possible connection: "The Jewish religious tradition probably does dispose Jews, in some subtle way, toward liberalism and radicalism, but it is not easy to see in present-day Jewish social attitudes the heritage of the Jewish religion.”

Which might be true, if you remove this particular Jewish social attitude from consideration. But this particular Jewish social attitude is a biggy. Tzedek tzedek tirdof. "Justice, justice shall you pursue." Torah is full of words that speak directly to justice and to economic fairness. Laws about paying your workers. Laws leveling the playing field between rich and poor in legal disputes. Laws requiring landowners - the equivalent of today's corporate CEOs - to designate 10%, not Herman Cain's 9%, of their production for public use. Laws prohibiting wrongdoers from hiding behind the actions of the majority. Torah is vociferous. And Friedman's suggestion that a modern, largely secular Jew cannot take these values to heart - that in the absence of a shtreimel and a kosher lunch there is no reason to think that Jewish values play any significant role in one's world view - is absurd and smug. For many of us it is in fact what is at the core of our Judaism. "Justice, justice shall you pursue." It is when we are protesting and rabble-rousing; when we're standing up or sitting in or shouting back or acting up or being carted off that we feel most Jewish. For how many secular Jews, for how many atheist Jews, has "justice, justice" replaced shema Yisrael as our central creed?

So yes, I think Torah, this still-living Torah, is profoundly relevant in figuring out why we are not just in the Board rooms but also at the barricades.

And I think there is one more element that Friedman doesn't consider at all that feels very real to me. And that is the experience of outsiderness. A thousand years in Europe and still considered aliens certainly has some relevance. But even here and now. More than a century of succeeding in a new country and still not quite being the person this country idealizes. Our outsiderness remains. We are the queers of the American dream. In it but not quite of it. Valued for what we bring to the table, but without clearly a seat at it.

And as queers we've found ways to pass, to make ourselves invisible and unobtrusive. To not identify our successes as Jewish successes. To produce many decades of movies in which Jews do not even figure. To become moguls but only after changing our name from Lifshitz to Lauren. To theorize, like Milton Friedman does, about Jewish participation in the radical left and pretend not to be an outsider when you do it. I can't help but imagine that Jews who really have made it into the inside, wherever that is, probably feel like they're only masquerading as insiders.

And so I think it is in part our outsiderness, our cultural queerness, that allows us to look at systems of power with some distance and some doubt. The ways we have been kept out of power might be different than they are for the 98% of Americans who are not Jewish, but they are no less meaningful. We have, in the aggregate, been successful economically. But we have also experienced the sting of exlusion.

And our historic outsiderness has played a role in instilling in us collectivist values. We take care of our people, whether it is through the old benevolent societies and landsmanshaftn, or through philanthropy or synagogue membership. Taking care of those among us in need has remained defiantly important, even in this new, unapologetically selfish age.

So here we are, Jews, on both sides of the barricades. It is no paradox and it is no wonder.

But one question lingers for me. Do we have something special to offer as Jews in the Occupy movement? Do the Jews participating on this side have any special responsibility to speak our truth, our Jewish truth, to the Jews on the other side? Do we hold them to any standard higher than that to which we hold others of the corporate cast of characters?

I say yes. I say why not? What's the worst that can happen? We'll be disappointed? We're already disappointed. So yes, let's say what we expect of them, not only as living, breathing, thinking human beings, but as Jews. We are inevitably bound up with them and they with us. Such is the mixed blessing of a great nation. We might as well name it.

So what does greatness mean? How do we own our greatness, both as occupier and occupied? Here's a last thought. God says to Abraham,

ואעשך לגוי גדול 

V'e'es'cha l'goy gadol

I will make you a goy gadol. A great nation. The root gadol - great, large, formidable - has another meaning in Hebrew, a rare one, that we see in the word gadil. A twisted cord. Like a wick or a braid. Perhaps our destiny of greatness, if you believe in one, is a prophecy not of economic success, and certainly not of raw numbers, but one of connectedness. We are meant to be bound up together like threads in a cord. And wrapped up with this world also - in all its creativity and its possibility and its struggle. A people integrated, a people of integrity. Threads woven together. Sometimes in a beautiful garment. And sometimes, as gadil is in fact used in Torah, we are inevitably the fringe.

ואעשך לגוי גדול ואברכך ואגדלה שמך והיה ברכה 

V'e'es'cha l'goy gadol va'avarech'cha va'agadlah sh'mecha veh'yeh b'rachah.

I will make you a nation of connectedness, wound together and braided into the fabric of this world. And you will be a blessing.

May we, in fact, be a blessing.



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Below: A Torah scroll is unrolled and read at Occupy Wall Street on Simchat Torah, highlighting texts that speak to matters of social justice.

Simchat Torah: Back to Zero

Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, October 21, 2011

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy...

I am not a narratologist. Or whatever clinical thing you call people who study stories. I certainly like a good narrative. I like novels better than short stories because they end in ways that tend to be forward looking and more often than not optimistic. Whereas short stories always end too soon for me; I haven't built up enough momentum to smash through the sad dead end of their short word count.

As a Jew, I appreciate our practice of narrative multitasking. We read two books at a time, supplementing our weekly Torah portion with a second text, usually from one of the prophets, in what is referred to as a Haftarah. While the connection between the two texts might at first seem superficial, every time we look at them side by side, we can divine a new way that they speak to one another and to us.

I also appreciate our custom of narrative circularity. We no sooner finish reading the end of the Deuteronomy on Simchat Torah than we dive right back into the beginning of Genesis. This is an old, fixed custom. We could have developed a longer reading cycle, going through all our 39 books of scripture over years or decades. How lovely and juicy it would be to spend a whole year with Song of Songs. Or how intense to spend a year with Ecclesiastes, hearkening back to some moody semester of college spent wearing black turtlenecks and reading Sartre.

But no, by formula we read just the first five books, from God's first word to Moshe's last breath, timed to fit the span of one turn around the sun. And then there we are, back again, at one of history's most memorable opening lines. B'reishit. In the beginning...

Of course there are other opening lines that could have worked. For instance, if Torah opened with Cain and Abel, we could have stolen the opening of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Or if Torah started with Noah, we could have gone with Chaucer: "Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote," you know, about April showers. Or, more dramatically, with the Bulwer-Lytton chestnut, "It was a dark and stormy night."

But to start big, to start in a cosmos-sized way, requires ambition. We might have arrived at his: 

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

That, of course, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But I think, all things considered, we did pretty well with b'reishit as written:

In the beginning of God's creating the heaven and earth, the earth was void and without form, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God's spirit fluttered on the surface of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.

Face it. It is the opening of all openings.

Of course we don't get much information about what was going on before this moment, if there was a moment before this moment. But the Kabbalists fill in the gaps. Before this there is nothing. Or more precisely, before this, all is God. There is only Oneness, which is more like nothing than it is like something. Existence is both empty and chock-full. Ayin, אין, an infinite, undifferentiated zero which is, in itself, God. Then somewhere is the flicker of God's first thought. A slight stirring, God's spirit fluttering over the deep.

In this mystical paraphrase, God then performs an act of tzimtzum, a contraction, a clearing of space in which the world will be created. But not physical space - God continues to be everywhere. But conceptual space: God makes room for an idea: the idea of not-God. The idea of multiplicity, of separateness, of uniqueness. The idea that I can feel separate from you and from this podium and from these clothes; and that individually and collectively we can buy into what the mystics would consider the illusion that we are not God.

Meanwhile, back in the plain text of the Torah, the Universe begins to divide like a newly fertilized egg. First into two - light and dark. Then another split into sky and sea. Then water and dry land. Earth and other heavenly bodies. The cell division accelerates so that plants are born, and fish and land animals and birds and then human history is launched, and we leave simplicity further and further behind us in the dust. We become estranged from Oneness or from Zero-ness. Individuals to families to tribes to nations. Languages, cultures, customs. Misunderstanding. Suffering. Enslavement. Freedom and migration. So much to hold and balance and try to understand.

Until, in Torah at least, we reach the brink of salvation, with a view into a Promised Land that looked to our ancestors more like Eden than anything they'd ever seen; a peek into a long dreamed-of future that strongly resembled the distant and simpler and greener past. And with that simultaneous glance forward and back, we reach Torah's end.

Moshe dies, heartbreakingly, on this brink, without crossing over. The story of course continues. The people cross into the land, which turns out less Edenic than it looked from across the river, they conquer it anyway, and mythology gives way to the harsh business of history. The story continues - but not our narrative, not the way we read it.

The way we read it, our narrative backflips to its starting point: Moshe dies, and then the world is created.

Poet Esther Schor has gone as far as to suggest that the seven days of creation are nothing less than God's shiva for Moshe.*

And why not? How can we not see the loop as continuous? Our sages of old specifically said eyn lifney v'acharei batorah - there is no before and after in Torah. To them, sequence always played second fiddle to meaning.

So we cycle around. God inhales Moshe's soul with a kiss, and the next thing we know, there is God's exhale blowing ripples on the surface of the deep. But there is a moment in between. A moment of returning to zero, like a movie actor between takes, like a cross-fade through black. Moshe returns to that Oneness, that same emptiness, that preceded everything. And we go with him.

And then bang - Big Bang - we're off and running again. B'reishit...

What if we could do this in our lives? In all our personal ebb and flow? When our complexity starts to feels like chaos. What if we could have that moment of zero back. Where we empty ourselves of all the distinctions: this and that, before and after, you and me, desire and obligation, love and loneliness. A moment just to be - so purely to be that it's almost like not being at all. Let's all just take a moment to close our eyes and breathe it all out. Let yourself feel empty. Let worries and complexities drain from you. Go to a place inside you that no one else even knows. Embody that space. And then let yourself sink even a little deeper. Back to where you were before language. Before birth. Sit and breathe. Then when you're ready, open your eyes, and enjoy the treat of seeing this world again.

That is a tiny taste. A read practice of going back to zero might feel something like that. There are plenty of Buddhist practices and Jewish ones too aiming at just that.

And the availability of the return to zero is modeled by our Torah reading. From nothing we move into so much and then we circle back to nothing. Every year. Circle after circle after circle.

But there is one more dimension to this incessant spin. Moving through zero might renew us. It might offer us a fresh eye and startling new awareness. But it doesn't actually start us over again. So I don't experience this cycling of Torah as a simple circle. Because even if the words of Torah that I read are the same this year as last, I am not. I see things differently than I did a year ago. I notice different things in the story. Different characters draw me; different problems trouble me.

Our looping Torah is only a circle when looked at flatly, two-dimensionally. But add the third dimension - me - and the circle reveals itself as a spiral, a helix corkscrewing forward. The story circles but moves onward with me. My changing life brings new information and new insight to the story as it and I move forward together. My life becomes the Haftarah.

So every Simchat Torah we go back to the beginning at the same time that we continue to forge ahead. We point in both directions, with the wonder of the newborn and the wisdom of the elder. So given that, what would a suitable closing for Torah be?

We could coopt famous forward-looking closings, like "Tomorrow is another day." Moses could accept his imminent death and intone, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known." Or he could address God using the same petname that Berrine here uses, and say, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Or with equal validity, we might foreshadow our imminent return to the beginning, using the closing of The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

In point of fact, Torah ends this way:

No other prophet like Moshe has arisen in Israel, who knew God face to face. No one else to produce the signs and miracles that God let him display in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and all his land, or to do any of the acts mighty or terrible that Moshe did before the eyes of all Israel.

That's it. There was never and will never be another like Moshe, who saw God face to face.

Never, that is, until the next read-through.

And there he will be again. Poised, looking toward God and God looking back, their eyes locked, their gaze pointing in both directions. And we will be back there too, having passed through zero in order to see this scene anew. We will be back there, because our tradition insists on it. We will have beaten on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. But as we look, we will inevitably be moving forward as well. And why not? After all, tomorrow is another day.

___________________
* If you have limited time, stop reading this drash this instant, and click here to read Esther's brilliant and inspired piece instead.

For Tomorrow You May Live

Kol Nidre Sermon for Congregation Ner Shalom
October 7, 2011

A morning flight over Manhattan this spring triggered these memories.

If you were here for Selichot a couple weeks ago, you might remember my telling about the Seer of Lublin, who instructed his Chasidim to pray that their teshuvah might come from a place of abundance and expansiveness and joy. But we typically think of teshuvah, this process of repentance and forgiveness and repairing of relationships, as being instead a kind of contraction, a constriction. Teshuvah is inherently interior and humbling.

Plus the teshuvah we do this time of year has a special flavor of sadness to it. Yom Kippur serves, explicitly, as a memento mori. A reminder that we will all die. Death hangs over us in the Yom Kippur liturgy like the sword of Damocles. It is strategically placed to impel our teshuvah, to shortcut our resistance and give us quicker access to whatever regrets, old business or other shmutz we're hanging onto. Face it: compared to death, our feeble excuses for not doing the healing work we need to do are, well, feeble.

Awareness of death is so intrinsically part of the Yom Kippur toolbox that when I mentioned to a rabbi friend that I was still deciding on a Yom Kippur sermon topic, he replied, "Mortality always works." Which was meant to be both sarcastic and completely true.

On Yom Kippur we are reminded of being dust and ashes. Our lives are compared to a tzel over - a passing shadow. We ask, "Who by fire, who by water, who by sword, who by beast," and on and on, our possible bad ends spelled out with a kind of masochistic glee worthy of Edward Gorey:

A is for Amy who fell down the stairs
B is for Basil assulted by bears...

So death provides perspective. But it also provides impetus. It is a final Closing of the Gates, an ultimate deadline for getting our houses in order. In Pirkei Avot (2:15), we read the ancient words of Rabbi Eliezer, who says:

ושוב יום אחד לפני מיתתך

"You should repent the day before you die."

"But," Rabbi Eliezer's disciples objected, "one can't know the day of one's death!" Rabbi Eliezer replied, "Then do teshuvah today, lest you die tomorrow."

This instruction becomes the source of our custom of the bedtime shema, recited upon going to sleep, which features an actual vidui, an actual confession, like we do here on Yom Kippur, naming sins, asking for forgiveness and forgiving those who have harmed us.

But here's the irony of the bedtime shema or deathbed wills or impulse marriages or any kind of behavior undertaken in anticipation of imminent death. As Dorothy Parker once wrote:

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die.
(But, alas, we never do.)

We might prepare for imminent death. But then mostly, far more times than not, in fact all times except once really, we live. We just simply live. We are all in this room together today because we have lived. At every juncture when it might have been otherwise, we have lived. So what then is the role of an awareness of the imminence of death in a world in which, mostly, we live? I will tell you a story. 

In September of 2001, someone I know was living temporarily in New York to be part of an Off-Broadway show. September 11 was his birthday, and he was eager to fly home to California and celebrate with his family. He'd intended to take an early morning flight out of Newark, but the show's producer had a scheduling problem, so she had to call a production meeting first thing in the morning on the 11th, despite his birthday and travel plans. So instead he booked a flight home for afternoon.

As you understand from the dates, the towers came down that day. The flight he would have preferred was hijacked and, like three other jets, used as a weapon of destruction. None of the passengers survived, of course.

This story is my story and I don't tell it very much. Because I lived. It is a near-miss story, and no one so much wants to hear a near-miss story, and after a while, no one wants to tell it either. I lived. It was that simple. I was not on that plane. And I might not have been anyway. The seats could have all been booked or I might have chosen a departure an hour later. I lived. I opened my show in New York, I closed my show in New York, I moved back, I began touring, I moved to Sonoma County. The rest you know. The thing I didn't really do was talk or think about this experience. Until a friend challenged me not long ago on the fact that I don't, and she found that suspicious.

But haven't we all had our near misses? Hasn't the Angel of Death passed over all of our houses once, or many times? The problem is that it feels wrong to dwell on our close shaves when there were others whom the Angel actually took.

We have all lost friends in untimely ways to disaster or danger or disease. Sometimes many people. In the 1980s and early 90s I lost so many friends and acquaintances to AIDS that I used to keep a list because I was so afraid I'd forget their names. Isn't this also the experience of survivors of the Shoah? The sea of loss and the inexplicability of survival.

Or the near misses that don't happen in dramatic times of plague or war or genocide, but instead happen on no particular day, in some random week, on a streetcorner. We carry our near misses with us. Whether we think about them or talk about them or not, they are under our skin, in our bones. We were in danger. We survived. Others didn't. This means something.

We have all had near misses, whether we're fully aware of them or not. Each of us has defeated odds to be here. Are we more deserving than those who didn't make it? I look back at some of my ACTUP friends of the early 1990s who were so brave and brilliant and beautiful and who died such miserable deaths and I know that the answer is obviously no. I am not more deserving. None of us is more deserving of life than the ones we lost were.

We are all deserving. They were. And we are. But sometimes we don't quite feel our own worthiness. It is so easy to think of them, think of the people we've lost, and wish that they were here. And think how wonderful the world would be, what a blessing it would be, if they were still here now.

But do we bother to notice how we are also the answer to the same prayer? What if we weren't here, and people were thinking how wonderful it would be if we were still alive. The answer is: it would be this wonderful, exactly this wonderful. This is how it would be. Because here we are. We are here when we might not have been.

The poet Billy Collins has a poem in which he pulls out of the driveway but pulls back in to go into the house and get a book. And he imagines a self that didn't bother, heading out without the book, running ten minutes ahead, living a slightly different life, and at times he feels like he can catch sight of him somewhere just ahead. We all imagine and sometimes wish for the lives we might have had, if we'd made a different decision at some important or unimportant juncture. What if. What if. But we also need to appreciate that right now we are living lives we might not have had at all, if we'd made a different decision at some important or unimportant juncture.

Each one of us is a blessing. Each one of us is unlikely. Every day you are here is a day you in fact might not have been. Every day is worthy of that great a joy. Even a day that is mundane. A day of shopping or bill paying or working or worrying or just hanging in and muddling through. This is a day you might not have had, a day the world might not have had you, a day this community might not have had you. This is a day worthy of celebration and gratitude.

I'll tell you, the thought that I might not have had these ten years; that I might not have had this life in this place with this family and this community; that I might not have had the chance to do this thing that I do here, that I am doing right now: that thought is unbearable. Even with life's typical moments of tediousness and mistakes and annoyances and hurt feelings and car trouble. Not to have had it is unthinkably heartbreaking.

This day is a bonus. Yesterday was a bonus. These 10 years. Or these 30 years. Or the whole thing. Because really what were the odds of any of us being born to begin with? This is all bonus.

So what a waste to spend it hobbled by fear of what could have happened, or numbed by the idea that our lives aren't important or interesting or fill-in-the-adjective enough. We are miracles. Each and every one of us in the room. And you should treat yourself as such. And everyone else in the room.

"Choose life," says Torah. "I have set before you Life and Death, Blessing and Curse. Therefore choose life that you may live." Torah wants us to do more than merely exist, to do more than opt against death. Torah says we have to choose life if we want to live. That is the blessing. Not just living. But choosing to live. To really live.

The memory of those who died is a great blessing to us. And so are the lives of those who survived. Everyone who survived disease or disaster or who dove back onto the curb as a car sped by. Everyone who survived and who went on to do any one of a million mundane and unglamorous things. Our lives are a blessing.

The Angel has passed by our doorsteps for now. And none of those who have gone before us would begrudge us this life that, for whatever reason, we're still living, or our joy at living it. So why should we begrudge or shortchange it? Instead, it is our job to make this a life that is full and awake and holy.

And so when Rabbi Eliezer says, "Do teshuvah now for tomorrow you may die," I am forced to think he was meaning something a little different. "Do teshuvah now," I think he might really have meant, "for tomorrow you may live."

And so I will do my teshuvah today, for tomorrow I may live. Dying with a clean conscience? Dying with my relationships whole and intact? Yeah, that'd be so nice. But more important: I want to live with a clean conscience. Live with my relationships whole and intact.

So, thank you Rabbi Eliezer, I will do my teshuvah today, I will do my teshuvah everyday, for who knows, tomorrow I may live, and I need to be prepared. I will do my teshuvah with gratitude and joy for this life that I have been inexplicably and undeservedly given, and with gratitude and joy for the blessing of the people around me, any one of whose lives is as unlikely and precious as mine. I will do my teshuvah ambitiously, to make this life as good as it can get, and to leave the world better than I found it. Might I have more chances? More lives after this one? The Buddhists and the Chasidim seem to think so. But this is the only one I can bank on. And so I will choose life. Really choose life. May we all really choose life.

Avinu Malkenu kotvenu b'sefer chayim tovim, our Source, our Guide, inscribe us this year in that book of yours not merely for life, but for a good life. A life that is treasured as the wonder that it is. A life which, even while having a fleeting shadow's brevity, boasts a fleeting shadow's beauty.

Let us do our teshuvah this holiday as the Seer of Lublin imagined it: with abundance and expansiveness and joy. And why not? For tomorrow we may live.


I am grateful to Michele Bonnarens for the insight, the love and the push, and to Eli Cohen for a very helpful dinner at the hot springs.

At the Closing of the Gates

This is a chant that came through for me the other day in ancticipation of the Ne'ilah Service - the metaphorical closing of the gates at the end of Yom Kippur. Some friends have commented that they are uncomfortable with the fourth line, "and you won't turn away," and proposed substitutions of "we won't turn away" and "please don't turn away." For me, the lyrics as written work - as a statement of hope and belief. But a leader could choose a different lyric or vary the words in different iterations, creating a more complex statement of relationship: hope, commitment, anxiety, petition. 

I also think this could be read inwardly - not words to God, or only to God, but to the self one wants to invite in.

The melody seemed to move my cousin Alden Solovy, who composed two prayer poems in response:
Meditation Before Neilah and At the Gates.

Bad Jews. Talkin' 'bout the Bad Jews.

Sermon for Congregation Ner Shalom. Erev Rosh HaShanah, 5772.

Tonight, in the traditional spirit of the Day of Judgment, I am going to skip the niceties and talk about Bad Jews. Don't look around, there might be one sitting right next to you. But so that our evening won't be completely bleak I will try to make up for it by working around to the always stimulating topic of City Planning.

Let me start out with a confession.

Um, not mine. Yours. I'd like to ask all the Bad Jews in the room to raise their hands. If you've ever felt like a Bad Jew raise your hand. If you've ever told someone you were a Bad Jew, raise your hand.

I knew there would be a lot. I knew this because ever since I've had this particular post, people constantly tell me they're bad Jews. Many. And the count is rising.

Now let's get more subtle. Finish this sentence for me. I'm a bad Jew because _______________.

What can I say?

Shame on you. Shame on you all.

Bad Jews. Bad, Bad Jews.

So what do your answers have in common? It feels like there is some standard as to what constitutes a Good Jew. It involves a set of knowledge, observances, beliefs. A good Jew goes to synagogue. Keeps the Sabbath. Reads Hebrew. Believes in God in a particular way.

So then who exactly is the good Jew that you're comparing yourself with? Your parents? Grandparents? The Chasidim up the road?

Most people who tell me they're a Bad Jew recite a litany of things they don't do. It is true that ours is a tradition full of observances. Actions. Rituals. Candles we light, foods we eat or don't eat, things we say or do at specific times.

But strict adherence to a prescribed list of "does" and "don'ts" is not Judaism's only path, and maybe Judaism's great failure is not having let you on that little secret during the two hours a week we once had you in Hebrew School. Yes, there are acts, but there are values bigger than those acts.

A couple thousand years ago, Rabbi Shimon the Tzadik said some famous words: al shloshah devarim haolam omed. The world's existence - eternity's existence - depends upon three things: Torah, Avodah and G'milut Chasadim. That is, Torah, Worship and Acts of Kindness. But those English words are a very narrow translation.

Torah is our Torah, for sure, this scroll and the stories and laws it in it. But it is more. It is the act of learning and teaching, exploring received wisdom and giving birth to the new. It is that love of learning - even secular learning - that remains so prominent among Jews.

Avodah is not just worship, not just recitation of Hebrew prayers. It is moving through life with devotion, with awe, with gratitude, like so many people in this room have learned to do through their exploration of other traditions.

And g'milut chasadim is not just Boy Scout-style good deeds but all of our right actions, our acts of kindness and justice, our real-life engagement with the world in ways that build it, repair it, make it better, fairer, safer, kinder.

Torah, Avodah, G'milut Chasadim. Head, Heart, Hands. The world requires of us, eternity requires of us, our tradition requires of us, the best of our heads, hearts and hands. Regardless of whether what you do takes place in the Jewish world or not; regardless of whether what you do was just invented by you; regardless of whether you know a Hebrew word for it.

Judaism as we know it is the product not just of thousands of years of tradition, but of thousands of years of deviation and innovation. We have a long tradition of inventing it as we go along. Torah itself was an invention; the reading of a shared narrative took the place of animal sacrifice at just the right moment, changing Judaism forever. The Talmud invented the idea of authority coming not directly from God or king but from a process of lively and perhaps divinely inspired debate. Moses Maimonides, known as the Rambam, reinvented how we understand God and the Cosmos so that it could harmonize with the observations of science. And the Kabbalists re-reinvented how we understand God and the Cosmos so that it could harmonize with the deep stirrings of our hearts.

Judaism evolves. It recreates itself in every generation. We in 2011 do not live lives that permit strict observance of all the mitzvot. Can't be done. Our values have changed, our style has changed, and that's not a bad thing. Our evolving perception of who we are and what our purpose is in this mess of a universe can't anymore be easily expressed through a traditional Jewish life. In other words, traditional Judaism might no longer be the answer to the questions we Jews are asking, to the questions we are living.

Now this is where I'd like to pause and at last discuss our promised topic: City Planning. Last month I was in New York City and took a brilliant blue afternoon to walk on the High Line. Now, who here has been on the High Line in New York? Let me explain it.

The High Line

Manhattan is famous for its subway. An intricate network of trains running underground. But there used to be a line, called the High Line, that was an elevated train, like the El in Chicago. In time, the train stopped running, its usefulness to city and citizens eroded, leaving miles of elevated track abandoned and unrequited. The tracks were fenced off as weeds started to sprout between the rails. To some, the fossilized skeleton of the High Line was an eyesore. To others it was an adventure, a wild place for young people to hop fences, get a view and hang out.

In the late 1990s, two guys got an idea: to turn the High Line into a park. Initially frowned on, they slowly won over converts, until the idea had the momentum of a train, gathering passengers, donors, politicians, and gardeners as it went. And so there I stood on the High Line - a garden, sixteen blocks long and thirty feet above the ground, with grass and trees and herbs and flowers and fountains and benches and food vendors and street musicians. It has become one of New York's most popular and beautiful destinations. It was crowded with people smiling, holding hands, kissing, just being happy.

What a success! I walked the length of it to the uptown end, where it is fenced and locked and the tracks ahead are still disheveled and unattended. People stood at the chain link fence looking forward, imagining what this next segment will look like as time moves on. I did not perceive anyone wishing that the train were back.

So let's hit the emergency brake and come back to the question of you Bad Jews. What I learned from the High Line that day is that different times have different needs. The test of our Judaism isn't going to be how to keep people on the train. It will be how we can take the tracks, built over time with great skill and care, and turn them into a garden.

It is too late for us to stay on the train. We've been off the train for decades, maybe centuries. Or maybe there never was a train. Just these sturdy tracks that we've been moving along. It is too late for us to stay on the train and there is no shame in that. There is only shame in our declining to make a garden.

And Bad Jews are capable of making a garden. Bad Jews always have. Every innovation in our history has been some Bad Jew or other. Whether it was Maimonides's rationalism or Mendelsohn's Reform Judaism or the Baal Shem Tov' Chasidism. Mordechai Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi were all outsiders, at the beginning.

Bad Jews rule. King David couldn't manage to keep the commandments, yet he was devoted to God, and beauty and poetry poured out with each breath. Queen Esther, non-observant, passed as a gentile -- a shiksa -- until her people needed her and she stepped in heroically.

    I have seen Bad Jews cure disease.

         And I have seen Bad Jews discover the origins of the universe.

    I have seen Bad Jews write literature to carry the mind aloft.

         And I have seen Bad Jews make music to make the angels cry.

    I have seen Bad Jews hit grand slam homeruns.

         And I have seen Bad Jews deliver perfectly timed punchlines.

    I have seen Bad Jews engage in incredible acts of devotion,
         in selfless acts of bravery,
         in tireless acts of justice,
         in mind-numbing feats of community organizing.

Maimonides: Bad Jew

I have seen the cavalcade of Bernsteins and Einsteins and Feinsteins. The Marxes - both Karl and Groucho. The Emmas - both Lazarus and Goldman. Bad Jews all. But all standing right there on the rusty tracks with us planting seeds in this new garden of ours.

Might we fail? Might our new ways of being Jewish, of doing Jewish, end up with no Jews at all? Of course we fear that. That has been the alarm sounded at every crossroads in Jewish history. And maybe this time the scoffers' direst predictions will come true. Our descendants will cease being Jewish and only the descendants of the Ultra-Orthodox will be. But if that's so, I can assure you they will not remain unevolving. Their grandchildren will want their freedom; the girls will want to be rabbis and leaders; the gay kids will keep turning up gay; until finally, in a couple generations, they will invent their own Reform or Reconstructionist or Renewal Judaism, suiting their times, and looking like a garden. And they will draw inspiration and wisdom from our efforts.

Emma Goldman: Bad Jew

But buck up, Bad Jews. That future is not a given by any means. We are still cultivating our garden, and you are equal to the task. Being citizens of the bigger world is what you were meant for. You are Hebrews - ivrim - made to move across boundaries. And you are Israel - Yisrael - meant not to follow like sheep but to struggle with God and everything else you've ever held holy. And, lastly, you are Jews, the people of Judah - Yehudah - embodiers of gratitude, whose ambition, whose thrill of discovery, whose delight in learning and dreaming and doing good works are embedded within an awareness, a mindfulness, a gratefulness for this life that we are given, for the engineering behind us and and the garden before us, and for the seeds and the watering cans in our hands.

Mordecai Kaplan: Bad Jew

Buck up, Bad Jews. Take your place in this world, wherever, whatever that place is. But this I ask of you. Take that place, unashamed, and call it Jewish. Teach your children your values, and call it Jewish. Do your good work, and call it Jewish. Feel some awe and some gratitude every day, whether or not you use or even know the words modeh ani, and call it Jewish. Make your ripples on into eternity, and call it Jewish.

It is a new year. So resolve to be the beautiful Jews you are (even you non-Jews), without the Bad Jew apology, without the Bad Jew shame. Activate fully and proudly the yiddishe kop, yiddishe hartz, and yiddishe hent that were given you. And may you be blessing for all of us.

Shanah tovah.


I am indebted to Rabbi Eli Cohen for his insights about the Shloshah D'varim and about the names of Israel, and to Adam Birnbaum for introducing me to the High Line.

A World of Teshuvah Ticklers

For Congregation Ner Shalom
Selichot, September 24, 2011

We think of teshuvah as an activity of limited duration - like an NPR pledge drive or a back-to-school sale, lasting from the beginning of the month of Elul through Yom Kippur. But our tradition teaches us that teshuvah can be done any day, any hour, any moment. Our introspection and return to our better selves will be accepted by God, if you will, or will be successful and transformative, as long as it is done wholeheartedly. Or brokenheartedly. Just not half-heartedly.

Healing relationships, fixing what we've broken through our actions, committing to try not to keep repeating the same mistakes - these are worth our attention any day, any hour, any moment. But the trick is to remember to do it.

The Ba'al Shem Tov had a practice. He would use the conduct of others as his invitation to engage in teshuvah. So, for instance, when he saw someone around him being angry without cause, or impatient with a loved one, or dishonest with a friend, instead of responding with anger or judgment, he would ask himself, "When have I been angry without cause, or impatient with a loved one, or dishonest with a friend." Usually, he wasn't at a loss for an instance of exactly that behavior. And he would use the opportunity to make teshuvah. Instead of adding to the pain of the world, he would take the moment to take from the pain of the world.

As some of you remember from a High Holy Day sermon a few years ago, I've tried to adopt a similar practice in the privacy of my car. I always think that driving a car is one of our purest tests of teshuvah. We interact with other drivers, but we are isolated and anonymous - a combination not necessarily designed to bring out our best. So when someone cuts us off carelessly or drives slowly because they're lost and trying to read the street signs, we experience greater to freedom to steam or curse or use our hands in extra creative ways. So I try to take the moment to remember the last time I did something stupid or even careless in the car, or was lost and trying to read street signs as traffic piled up behind me. My moments of car-teshuvah calm me and draw from me qualities of empathy rather than anger - which I'm happy about. The roads are paved with enough anger already.

Other Chasidic masters found other ways to remember the task of teshuvah. They looked for messages, for reminders, embedded within the day-to-day.

A cobbler - channeling divine hints?

For instance, Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, it is said, was standing in his home, looking out at the street one year on the 1st of Elul. A shoe repairman came up to the window and asked him, "Don't you have something to fix?" The Rebbe immediately began to weep. "The Day of Judgment is approaching," he said, "and I still haven't fixed myself." And he moved into teshuvah.

Rebbe Simcha Bunim of Pshischa went to the market and wanted to buy something a farmer was selling. The rebbe and the farmer haggled, but they couldn't come to terms. Then the farmer looked the rebbe in the eyes and said to him in Polish: "do better," by which he meant "offer a better price." But when the rebbe returned home he thought to himself that "do better" meant something else: even the farmer was encouraging him to better himself and his deeds, or God's demand was coming to him through the guise of the farmer, and that the time had come for teshuvah.

Once you start looking for these messages, you'll find them everywhere. Like today on my airplane coming back from Boston. We hit a nasty pocket of turbulence just at the moment the flight attendant announced, "This will be your last chance to throw away any garbage." And as my heart beat in fear - I know planes don't fall out of the sky because of turbulence, but it always feels like they will - she repeated, "This will be your last chance to throw away any garbage." And I turned to a moment of teshuvah because, I thought,  you never do know when your last chance will be. There is never a reason to wait.

This is the conclusion of another Chasidic story about the famous brothers, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk and Rabbi Zusia of Hanipol, who would travel together incognito to better learn the needs of the people. One night they asked for hospitality at a small house. The balabosteh, the lady of the house, fed them and found them a place to sleep, explaining that her husband was away working until very late. The brothers went to sleep but woke up near midnight when they heard her husband come in quietly. He sat down at the table in the candlelight to sew up a hole that had torn in his coat so he could wear it again in the morning. His wife whispered to him, "Repair it quickly, while the candle is still burning."

The two brothers heard in this a holy insight: you must fix what needs fixing during this life. There is no other time to do it. Do your teshuvah now, before the candle goes out. Because teshuvah is available every day, every hour, every moment. We just have to remember.

Teshuvah can be a joyous engagement. We can enter with gratitude - that we have better selves to aspire to be, that we have relationships worth repairing, that we care about who we are in this world. So let us do our teshuvah with joy, with gratitude, with or without traditional language or Hebrew words, so that our presence on this planet will be a blessing.

This piece draws strongly from the wonderful material in Yitzchak Buxbaum's Jewish Spiritual Practices.

Teshuvah, Gratitude and First Fruits

For Congregation Ner Shalom
September 16, 2011

This month of Elul is a fascinating time. We describe it as "contemplative" since it's already high teshuvah season, "atonement" season for lack of a better word. We are engaged, or encouraged to be engaged, in chesbon hanefesh - our own personal moral reckonings. And to heal rifts with others - our loved ones and sometimes our not-so-loved ones.

Teshuvah is a process that feels very private and contained. The sound of teshuvah is a kind of hush. It has an inward focus, a deep interiority, even when it involves others. In fact that's one of the things that makes teshuvah such a hard task, because it calls on us to build a bridge from our own interiority to the interiority of someone else. Not a meeting of the minds, but an uncharacteristic, often very engineered meeting of the hearts.

Teshuvah is a hard, sometimes painful task. It always feels like the right thing to do, but it does not have a high desirability quotient. We avoid it, or we force ourselves to do it, sometimes at the very last moment, only when push comes teshuvah.

So imagine my surprise recently when I stumbled on a quote from the early Chassidic master, Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz, the famed "Seer of Lublin." He gave this instruction:

When you pray about teshuvah and you express your hopes, you should say that you want to repent out of joy and expansiveness and amidst bounty, not from sadness and stress and in need and poverty.

I thought, how can this be? Asking for our teshuvah to come from a place of joy and expansiveness and bounty? Because for me teshuvah is all about getting smaller. Contrition feels like contraction. Atonement is about becoming "one" again after some spiritual scatteredness. The word teshuvah describes the act of returning - to the core, to the center of one's being, after wandering. We know how humbling the act of apology is, and taking account of our shortcomings inevitably makes us feel small.

But here the the Seer is suggesting that our goal is to do our teshuvah from a place of expansiveness and abundance. How is this possible to do?

So for guidance I did as I often do and checked out the week's Torah and Haftarah portions, to see what light they would shed. Now these are not pieces of Torah that are about teshuvah or about Elul. In fact, the Torah portion contains the instructions for observing the pilgrimage holiday of Shavuot, a holiday that we left behind over three months ago. And it is certainly odd that we end up reading about Shavuot not during Shavuot but on the eve of the New Year, just the way we read about the Exodus not during Pesach but midwinter. Such is our cycle of Torah reading. But this mashup of two moments - a lived moment and a narrative moment - has been ratified by thousands of years of cyclical Torah-reading. So by this point, looking at how Shavuot ritual and Elul intention dance together is certainly justified.

So I looked at our Torah portion, Ki Tavo and I looked at our Haftarah portion, from Isaiah. And there they were - both surprisingly beautiful and uplifting and full of light and hope.

I'll tell you first about Ki Tavo and its instructions for Shavuot. In Biblical times, Shavuot was a chag, or hajj. A pilgrimage festival, meaning that a pilgrimage was required. To Jerusalem, so that one could walk up to the Holy Temple itself, the heart of our people, the heart of holiness, and offer the first fruits.

Bikkurim (first fruits) by Estair Kaufman.

So I'll let you imagine it. It would go something like this.

As the first fruits of your field begin to sprout in early spring, you would tie a piece of papyrus around the stem so that you'd remember which were first to emerge. When ripe, you'd picked them. You'd pack them up carefully and head to Jerusalem, which would be full of people from all over the land.

On the day of Shavuot, you would bring those first fruits to the Temple -- not in your arms or in a sack but in a big basket that you wove for the occasion out of willow twigs. You'd probably arrange the fruit and vegetables beautifully, decoratively, in the basket, with an Alice Waters or Ariana Elster-like level of care. No animals, no meat. Your offerings are vegetarian and violence-free.

You'd approach the Temple with your basket of fruit.

You'd place the basket on your shoulder, or maybe on your head, making you look like a somwhat more modest Carmen Miranda, and you'd walk to the steps of the Temple, amidst crowds of people there for the same purpose, all wishing each other chag sameach - happy pilgrimage. Lutes and lyres would be playing and there would be dancing and talking and poetry. Or maybe it would be solemn and the procession would move in a hushed, dignified way, like Catholics awaiting communion.

When it was your turn, the priest on duty would greet you and you'd say, "Today I am affirming to Adonai, your God, that I have come to the land that Adonai promised to our ancestors."

The priest would take the basket from you and place it before the altar or maybe wave it in the altar's direction and place it elsewhere or maybe put it back in your hands for the moment.

And then would be your time to recite a memorized speech, in Hebrew, over which you undoubtedly would have butterflies because your Hebrew is probably rudimentary and this is an important moment. You would take a deep breath and recite words beginning with:

ארמי  אבד אבי

Arami oved avi...

 My father was a wandering Aramean...

You probably remember this speech from the Passover seder. It continues:

He went down to Egypt as an immigrant with just a small number of people; but there they became great and populous. The Egyptians were cruel to us, humiliating us and imposing harsh labor. We cried out to Adonai, the God of our ancestors, who heard our voice and saw our suffering... and brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand... and brought us to this place, this land, flowing with milk and honey. And now I bring the first fruits of the land that Adonai gave me.

And that would complete your offering. These words constitute a statement of national history and identity, articulated as family history, and personal identity. My father was a homeless wanderer. Even those who had converted to Judaism said those words, because they were considered to be the spiritual descendants, even if not the genetic ones, of Abraham and Sarah. My father was a wanderer, and then we were slaves, and now we are free.

Missing are the 40 years of wandering in the desert and the receiving of Torah. Instead the focus of this ritual is redemption from despair and arrival at a new beginning. The sweep, the arc is from suffering to offering. I went from suffering to safety, you say to the priest, and here is my offering, here is my gratitude. Over and over, every year.

Suffering to offering.

Oy, what I went through you wouldn't believe. Here, have a piece fruit.
 
Suffering to offering. Gratitude made physical, made gastronomic. Even today, three thousand years later, we all know that nothing says thank you like a basket of fruit.

Now let me tell you about this week's haftarah. It is from the Book of Isaiah, set in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and it begins:

קומי אורי כי בא אורך וכבוד ה' עליך זרח

 Kumi ori ki va orech uch'vod Adonai alayich zarach.

Arise, shine, for your light has come. Adonai's glory is shining upon you. Darkness may cover the earth...but Adonai will shine on you. You will reflect Adonai's glory. Nations will be drawn to your light, and kings to the brightness of your radiance.

It is a haftarah of hope. It reads like a thesaurus entry; there are probably 8 Hebrew synonyms for the word light within the first three verses. When things seem bleak, Isaiah seems to say, there is not just a light at the end of the tunnel. There is light here, right now, bathing you. Bright, glowing. You just have to believe it; you just have to open your eyes and squint in the brightness.

So what is the lesson then for this time of year? How do these two moments of text reflect on our lived moment of self-examination, self-criticism, and atonement?

I propose a couple ways. One is prescriptive; one is descriptive. That is, one suggests a practice and the other its effect.

So here's the practice. In the discipline of teshuvah, "I'm sorry" cannot be the only mantra. It must somehow be paired with "thank you." Atonement and gratitude need to walk hand and hand. How can we do this?

We might look to feel grateful for the opportunity to become whole again each year. Or we might try to be grateful that we are walking this planet even while we are aware of our missteps. Or maybe we look inside and see we haven't at every moment been our best selves, but we are grateful that we have a best self, a clear image of who we might be that impels us to do better.¹

Maybe the practice of gratitude has its best use in our teshuvah work with others. When you ask a loved one for mechilah, for forgiveness, maybe supplement with gratitude. I'm sorry if I've done anything to hurt you; and I'm so grateful to have you in my life. Or lead with gratitude: I'm so blessed that you're in my life; it makes me so sorry that I've hurt you.

This is useful. Because plain old apology has a tendency to hit the brakes on a relationship. It may be completely sincere and necessary and the apology accepted, but it can be followed by awkwardness and sometimes, alas, a hardening, a shell of self-protection against future hurt. But gratitude can soften that hardness. Gratitude can move us forward once again.

And don't stop at words of gratitude. Offer your first fruits, whatever those are. Your creativity. Your wit. Your love. Your help. Your care. Your shoulder. Offer something of the best of yourself to help pave the road ahead. 

And that is, perhaps, why teshuvah is a kind of contraction. Not to make us feel small. But to make room for a new beginning, for our better selves. Teshuvah is not a shrinking but a kind of tzimtzum - a contraction that creates space, like God's first act of tzimtzum, making way for Creation, making way for the first words, yehi or - let there be light.

Your expansive teshuvah - atonement paired with gratitude, will make you radiant. Your expansive teshuvah will pull back the curtains and let the light in or let your light out. As Isaiah told us, Kumi, ori, ki va orech. Rise and shine because your light has arrived.

And so may we do our teshuvah differently this year. May we express our gratitude for each other and for our lives and for our best selves. May we offer our best to those around us. May we learn to say, "I'm so grateful for having you in my life; for having the chance to clear the air. I offer you my best. This is my teshuvah." And may that teshuvah let the light shine in all our lives.

And let us say, Amen.

(And then would it hurt to send a basket of fruit?)


1.  I am grateful to Rabbi George Gittleman for this particular insight.

Good Night Irene, You Shabbos Queen

Reporting in from Manhattan.

The Hudson Before the Storm

There is much to be grateful for today in New York City, where I happen to be for a week-long, ultimately called-on-account-of-weather Storahtelling training. The hurricane was called Irene, a name much more suited to the sweet love object of the famous Leadbelly ballad than the personification of a deadly storm the size of California. But Irene proved more bluster than bluster as she passed through New York City last night as a "mere" tropical storm or perhaps less. The damage in Manhattan is minimal. Businesses are pumping out their cellars, but had enough warning to clear out those cellars in advance. Fallen branches share tight parking spaces with the compact cars of the West Village. Fallen awnings punctuate Chinatown. No broken glass is in evidence.

Still, Irene was significant. She ushered in a shabbat like I haven't had in years. On Friday, New Yorkers of all religions, classes and ethnicities left their jobs early to shop so they would have food in their homes to last the weekend. They bought candles and flashlight batteries, anticipating hours or days without electricity. They bought bread and fruit and wine. They envisioned a weekend without internet or cell phone service. They planned for home; they planned for cozy.

All subways closed Saturday at noon.

Friday afternoon Mayor Bloomberg announced the closure of all public transit as of noon on Saturday. And so on Saturday New York simply didn't travel. No one came into Manhattan to work; no one left Manhattan to work. All but a handful of restaurants were closed, but it was okay. People didn't need restaurants; they had thought and planned and prepared their own food, simple or fancy, in their own kitchens.

Saturday became a day of suspended time. Anticipation more than fear was in the air. And unexpected leisure. For a change, no one - really, no one - was expected to work. No one felt like they had to be attached to their cell phones for fear of missing a call from a client or colleague or boss. Everyone was excused from everything. Phone calls were for checking in on loved ones rather than for participating in commerce or scheduling carpools. Undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of people sat inside watching the Weather Channel. But many instead left their computer screens be - perhaps to make sure they remained fully charged. Or maybe, aware that they might be shut up for 24 or 48 hours in their tiny Manhattan apartments, they wanted to delay their confinement as long as possible.

New Yorkers passing the time in Washington Square on Shabbat afternoon before the storm.

And so when I took a Saturday afternoon walk I found a city filled with shabbat. Families strolling. No special place to be, or at least no place more special than this one. No one straying too far from home. No work. No expectations. Connectivity radically reduced if not eliminated altogether. Parents appreciating their children, playing with them in Washington Square fountain. Friends talking intimately. Strangers talking kindly. Neighbors double-checking that the familiar homeless of their street had found shelter, or that neighborhood shopkeepers who were keeping their stores open had places of safety to go to.

New York was being treated, we were all being treated, to shabbat as it's meant to be, doing what it is meant to do. Not shabbat as a series of prohibitions and not shabbat as a potentially problematic and all-too-often tedious synagogue ritual. It was shabbat as we need it in the 21st Century; at least as I need it. A day of being "unplugged." A day of complete release from the burden of ambition. A day of being with loved ones, checking in on loved ones. A day of noticeable quiet. A day without reliance on technology. A day of enjoying a home that has been prepared in anticipation. A day in which religion is optional but holiness is not.

Why can't I do this at home, I wondered. Does it really take such an unlikely circumstance?

On this trip to New York, I happened to learn about the very creative Sabbath Manifesto project, and ten principles they've developed to encourage us all to find quiet in our lives, using shabbat as the occasion to do so. The principles are these:

1. Avoid technology.
2. Connect with loved ones.
3. Nurture your health.
4. Get outside.
5. Avoid commerce.
6. Light candles.
7. Drink wine.
8. Eat bread.
9. Find silence.
10. Give back.

I did all those things. I did them because that is what we all did yesterday in New York. (Okay, I forgot the wine.)

The day was a beautiful one. It made me crave a shabbat-honoring community. Not a community that enforces prohibitions, builds eruvim or hurls stones at drivers of cars. But a community that supports each other in choosing to disconnect [at least] one day a week; a community that values having some time when one doesn't have to check emails or voicemails. Yes, unplug, baby, unplug, I thought to myself. It's so completely possible. After all, most New Yorkers weren't even aware it was shabbat. Still, we rested.*

So this is my new year's resolution for 5772. More shabbos. More shabbos. And for this overdue lesson, I have only Irene to thank. Goodnight Irene, you Shabbos Queen. I'll see you in my dreams.


* See Irena Klepfisz's poem, Mayn Mamens Shabbosim.