Itzik's Well

Parashat Vayechi: The End of Myth

2012-01-06T16:15:00.000-08:00

For Congregation Ner Shalom, January 6, 2012

ונהר יצא מעדן

Why is brevity such a challenge for me? When it comes to Torah, to Hebrew, to Kabbalah, to anything Jewish? "Keep it short," my trusted advisors tell me, usually to no avail. What is it about our tradition and our tribe that keeps me gushing like a river? Santorum, the economy, gardening: I can muster a respectable number of sentences on any of those. But give me a topic that's Jewish and watch out.

An inmate at the county jail wrote to me a couple months ago and told me that he's decided that Judaism is the True Faith. I wrote back to him that in my eyes there are many paths that can expand one's experience and bring one closer to God, if you want to call it God. "Although," I did have to allow, "I myself have been Jewish since I was born, and I'm not bored yet."

So what keeps me so enchanted? One piece, I think, is the way in which our tradition, or our special vantage point, imbues every element of the day-to-day with something mythic. That is, we live in the mundane, but we have this awareness that we - and everything else - have a non-mundane origin and a non-mundane edge. We were launched by something great and cosmic.

This week, we Jews, we followers of the True Faith, complete the reading of our great volume of myth, B'reishit, the book of Genesis, which opens Torah and throws wide all of our teaching. It contains the Creation of the Cosmos and that quiet moment just beforehand. It provides all the stage-setting for the world as we know it, or at least the world as our ancestors knew it. It answers core questions of existence: What is light? What is life? What are we made of? Where does death come from? How did animals come to be? And plants? And suffering. How did we come to be separate from God? How did we come to be separate from each other?

The people who figure in Genesis are not just literary characters. They are mythical. They are archetypes, urforms. They aren't there just to move a plot. They are there to be revered. They are nearly deities - embodying elements of nature and of humanity and of the divine. Even their names suggest mythic qualities. Adam and Eve - earth and life. Abraham - great father. Sarah - the queen. Isaac is mirth and Jacob the heel-grabber apparently has something to do with the frustration of following and the deep human desire to overtake. The book of Genesis includes a race memory of ancient migrations, recounted in Abraham's lech lecha journey to Canaan and Jacob's hunger-driven move to Egypt. And it recalls natural disasters of the distant past: the flood story of course, but also the nasty volcanic end met by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. And the many genealogies scattered through the book? An ancient Near Eastern directory of how the tribes and nations of the day were related to each other linguistically, culturally, genetically.

And what about the idea of Eden itself? Could it be a distant memory of pre-agricultural times, before humans either needed or assumed mastery over the garden and the plants and creatures in it? A time when we, like all other animals, survived on what the earth provided us of its own will, and not of ours?

Genesis swirls around like a dream. But at its end, in this week's portion, Vayechi, we reach a turning point. We begin to feel the mythic dissipating; we begin to wake up. Jacob, on the eve of his death, speaks to each of his sons, articulating something of their nature or predicting something about the location, livelihood or cultural character of that son's future descendants, setting the stage for later Israelite history. And launching us into the more recognizable world we live in. The advance of history over mythology; of event over dream.

In fact, Joseph is the turning point. While his ancestors' names had obvious mythic resonance, his own name, Yosef, means "add-on." He's the annex, the bridge to the next thing. And while Jacob dies at the fantastically old age of 147, his son Joseph dies this week at 110 - a rare but not mythical age, as was proven by our friend Elsie Rich, who also died this week, also at 110. Jacob belongs to the world of myth. Joseph, like Elsie, belongs to us.

With Joseph's death we take a deep breath and look across the white stretch of parchment to the book of Exodus, or Shmot. And yes, there is much legendary quality to this book also. A burning bush, plagues, a sea parting and a great hero and prophet, the likes of whom has never been seen again. But I see Exodus as something more like the Odyssey. The story of the human race scraping up against the mythic, navigating paths that lead right past the divine. But nonetheless a human story, with believable human protagonists. And once Moses dies, at the end of Deuteronomy, we are inescapably in the land of history, plain and simple. Where we still live today.

But that makes this world sound awfully unmagical. Isn't this ground holy ground too? Isn't all of Torah holy, even though only some of Torah is mythic. Don't we endeavor to find, and sometimes succeed in finding, a mythical, holy quality to everything? If so, what is the source of all that holiness?

Well, let's look way back to Chapter 2 of Genesis, where it says,

ונהר יצא מעדן להשקות את הגן

"A river is pouring out of Eden to water the garden." In other words, Eden isn't strictly walled off. It leaks! It pours out into the garden, into the world. So what is the nature of this river?

Torah says that this river is the headwaters of four mighty streams*1* and that these four rivers encircle all the known world. So by this beautiful vision the entirety of the world we live in is surrounded by some flow whose origin is paradise.

The mystics go on to connect the four rivers with famous foursomes of our tradition. Not the Marx Brothers or the Beatles or the Golden Girls. But, for instance, the four rabbis who, according to Talmud, entered pardes, entered the orchard of paradise - Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha ben Abuya and Akiva.*2* And the four ways of understanding Torah represented by the acronym pardes or paradise - that is pshat (literally), remez (allegorically), drash (metaphorically) and sod (mystically). And the Four Worlds that stack like a layer cake or surround us like Russian nesting dolls: asiyah (the physical world), yetzirah (the emotional world), beriah (the world of vision), and atzilut (the divine internal).

Through this stream of consciousness, our tradition suggests that the river that flows from Eden comes from a singular source, but then breaks up in order to permeate all our personality types, all our approaches to understanding, and all our experiences of the world.

Then, just when you think you've got a handle on it, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk adds one more twist. He re-reads the Hebrew word, nahar, "river," as the Aramaic word, nahor, "light." It is no longer a river emanating from Eden, but light. Or maybe a river of light. Divine light that nourishes the garden, that nourishes this realm we live in. Primordial light that can illuminate everything we experience in our lives.

I've been noticing the light a lot since I've been home, perhaps because everything that is lit is looking so different from how it did when I left a month ago. I've noticed the light striking the remaining red and orange leaves in our yard. I've noticed that the light is unexpectedly low in the sky and it shines more often in my eyes and makes me sneeze. I've noticed how rapidly the light shifts location and hue.

Noticing the way physical light affects our seeing in this world is a model, a Beta version, for seeing everything in a holy light. Looking at the light in this world is practice for perceiving the supernal light, the Edenic light, the or ganuz - the too-oft hidden light.

But wait, maybe we're getting far afield. We were talking about Jacob and his sons, I believe. What is the relevance of this description of a river all the way back at the opposite end of the book of Genesis?
Jacob is pushing his dozen sons out of the primordial nest into the future, where they will land - thunk - on the hard earth of politics and conquest and law. Out of the realm of magic and myth and into the realm of history. But that realm is not devoid of holiness, of divine light. We know this because the river that flows from Eden still flows. Torah uses the timeless participle yotze, "flowing out," in describing the river, not the past tense, yatza or vayyetze, "flowed out."

And so wherever Jacob's children, the Children of Israel, find themselves; wherever the children of Eden, all of us on this earth - plant and animal, find ourselves, the river of light continues to flow into us.

Jacob's sons are pushed out of the book of Genesis, some with their father's kind words, some with his harsh words, some with hardly any words and nothing like closure. In truth, we have all also been pushed out of the nest by the past with incomplete information and little preparation and nothing like closure. And we all are pushing a future or a dozen possible futures out before us. And we will never be able to give those futures everything possible to give.

But we can trust that there is a light that will shine from Eden. It will break through the dam of the text, pour from the scroll, and surge past us to flood our futures.

With this river of light, the inch of blank parchment between Genesis and Exodus, the division between myth and history, between the distant past and the not so distant future, ceases to be a sharp break. It is all of one flow. The light is still flowing from Eden, from the place of our dreams, from the beginning, from God's first words and it is watering our gardens. And it will continue to nourish the gardens of the future, even when we and everything we've ever known have long become myth.

And so may we ride the wave like the fearless California surfers that we are (or wish we were), floating, flying with our arms outstretched like eagle's wings or like the fins of a manta ray, riding the wave from Eden, awash in holiness, bringing light into the darkest places.

Chazak chazak v'nitchazek. Hang on tight. Exodus is coming.

*1*The Pishon, the Gichon, the Chidekel (i.e. the Tigris) and the Prat (i.e. the Euphrates).
*2*You might remember this parable, that in this paradise one of them instantly died, one went mad, one destroyed the grass, and only Akiva came in peace and departed in peace.

Chayei Sarah - The (3) Lives of Sarah

2011-11-18T23:04:00.000-08:00

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 only 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

2011-11-04T23:46:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2011-10-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-09-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-25T09:02:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-28T14:19:00.000-07:00

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:

Avoid technology.
Connect with loved ones.
Nurture your health.
Get outside.
Avoid commerce.
Light candles.
Drink wine.
Eat bread.
Find silence.
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.

Ekev: Bread, Spirit and Hard Times

2011-08-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, August 19, 2011]

Man does not live by bread alone.

Pop quiz time: where does this old, over-familiar chestnut come from? Anyone know?

It's from this week's parashah, called Ekev, from the Book of Deuteronomy. To recap: Moshe is making his farewell speech, which is really the whole Book of Deuteronomy anyway, and he is reminding the Children of Israel of their wanderings in the desert, their covenant with God and the obligations attendant thereto. Moshe reminds the people that God offers blessings in return for keeping mitzvot and some dire consequences for not.

And most of the rewards and punishments are repeatedly drawn in terms of food.

We are told that if we hold up our end of the bargain with God, we will have grain and wine and plenty of dairy products from happy cows. We are told that our lives in the Promised Land will be marked by abundance of wheat and barley and, as tomorrow's Bat Mitzvah pointed out to me, "just like in Sonoma County," vines and figs and pomegranates and olive oil and honey.

Even the Children of Israel's impending conquest of the Canaanite territory is described in shockingly gastronomic terms:

ואכלת את כל העמים אשר יי אלהיך נתן לך

v'achalta et-kol-ha'amim asher Adonai Eloheycha noten lach.

"You shall eat all the nations that Adonai gives you."

Some later commentators backed off this vivid and violent image by re-reading the sentence not as "you shall eat all the nations" but rather "you shall eat with all the nations," supportable in the Hebrew and reflecting a very, very different vision of a Promised Land. But still with "eating" as the central measure of our success as a people.

So why is food so potent a metaphor? Not that many haven't already theorized on this ad nauseum. But now it's my turn.

Looking within the text, we see that the Children of Israel were nomads. Pre-agricultural. Crop-free. Their diet, like the landscape, was without variety. Without softness or sweetness or abundance or certainty. It was made up of manna - heaven's crumbs. The idea that the Children of Israel could survive for 40 years on the monotony of manna was so inconceivable to later thinkers, that midrash had to attribute to the manna magical qualities. Legend therefore says that manna could taste like whatever the eater most craved. Sort of the "Bertie Bott's Every-Flavour Beans" of the Biblical imagination. But in the p'shat, in the text itself, it wasn't every flavor. It was just crumbs.

And so undoubtedly the Israelites lived inside a certain anxiety about food. Subsistence was always in question and they were helpless to change that. In an odd way, we are, most of us, similarly helpless in the world of food. We are post-agricultural. We have access to variety, to the sweet and savory and colorful and exotic. But we've mostly lost the ability to fend for ourselves; we mostly don't have our own gardens; we mostly don't keep bees. If disaster kept food from our grocery stores long enough, what would any of us do then? (Just thought I'd ask in case you weren't feeling anxious enough.)

Food represents desire for ease but also deep fear about survival. And in this era and economy where we don't grow it, we've shifted our fear of starvation from food to that which entitles us to it: money. Which we still call bread. Or dough. Even our wages are called our salt, our salary. We fear financial loss because money, which we do not eat, has nonetheless become conflated with survival. As markets lurch and drop, so do our stomachs.

So here's where Torah steps in, with the quote we began with. One does not live on bread alone. Torah does not dispute the necessity of bread, but takes issue with it being the sole element upon which our survival hangs. The full quote is this:

ויענך וירעבך ויאכלך את המן אשר לא ידעת ולא ידעו אבתיך למען הודיעך

לא על הלחם לבד יחיה האדם כי על כל מוצא פי יי יחיה האדם

Vay'ancha vyar'ivcha vaya'achilcha et-haman asher lo yada'ta
v'lo yad'u avoteycha lma'an hodi'acha lo al-halechem l'vad
yich'yeh ha'adam ki al-kol-motza' fi-Adonai yich'yeh ha'adam.

"Adonai humbled you, and let you hunger, and fed you with manna, which you'd never seen and neither had your ancestors; so that Adonai might make you understand that you do not live by bread only, but you live by every word that proceeds out of Adonai's mouth."


For some, bread feeds the body and baking it feeds the spirit.*

The Israelites' hunger was a test - a terrible test, intended to teach a lesson - that survival involves two elements. The earthly and the divine; the physical and the metaphysical, bread and spirit. Survival requires both. And even when we face deprivation in this tangible, bankable, edible realm, we still can experience abundance in the realm of the spirit. Our bread may be finite, but what pours forth from Adonai's mouth is not.

And what does pour forth from Adonai's mouth, from Adonai's word? The answer, in our tradition, is: everything. Creation is God's word. Light and dark. Sea and sky. All that is green. All that breathes. All that walks on two legs and the loving communities that we bipeds have created. Wisdom, beauty, delight, compassion, courage. These are all dynamics in the song of Creation. Even when we're not certain that there is a Creator, we have no similar doubts about these qualities.

We need these to live. We need these to support us when we wander in the wilderness, with only crumbs to eat.

I've been thinking about this lately because I've been watching so many people in our community and in my circle of friends face unprecedented challenges and hardships. This is a tough time right now by anyone's standards. But in addition to that: people we all know are losing their businesses. Their jobs. Their homes. Terrible. People are losing reliance on their bodies. Terrible, terrible stuff to face.

And I've watched some people experience these challenges as if it were the utter collapse of their lives. I don't mean to minimize suffering. Suffering is all-consuming. It is in the nature of suffering to be so.

But, Torah says, you do not just live in this physical world. You have dual citizenship. You are part spirit as well. And that piece is half of what sustains you.

The hard stuff that happens is not the collapse of life. It is trouble. Just trouble. It will pass. Or it will be accommodated. Or adjusted to. There might be loss - there will be loss; we will all experience loss. The trouble might cost money. It might mean a new way of living or of being. But it is not the collapse of life, not its disintegration or its unraveling. It is not a referendum on how you live. It is not a punishment. It is trouble. Just trouble. It is not something you deserve. It is not something anyone deserves. It is trouble. Just trouble. In Yiddish we call it tzoris, and it sounds warmer, more domestic, a piece of ungainly furniture awkwardly placed in your house so that it must be walked around. Tzoris. Hard times. Trouble.

So when you count what you have, what sustains you, what arms you against the trouble, you must count more than your bread. More than your money. More than your limbs. You must count all your resources - your humor, your smarts, your compassion. Your love of music or prayer or study. Your love of that smell of fennel in West County or the deep rumble of your cat's purr. You must count your people. Friends if you have them. Loved ones. Family. Even the noodgy family. This holy community. All these things are riches no less than money. They are all in your treasury. But you have to be willing to count them. And use them. Accept help. Accept love. Impose on others when you need to. And let yourself be imposed on down the road.

Keep feeding not just your body but your spirit. And then when you come out on the other end of this trouble you will still be you. You with less money. You with a different home. You with different physical limitations. But still you.

Can we survive hardship? Yes. We can. We can endure. The quality of endurance, of netzach, is in us. We will outlive the trouble and we will turn back and sing in Stephen Foster's words:

Hard times, hard times, come again no more.

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door.

Oh, hard times come again no more.

There's one final quotable in this week's Torah portion that I want to share. Also about food and sustenance:

ואכלת ושבעת וברכת את יי אלהיך

V'achalta v'sava'ta uverachta et Adonai Eloheycha

You shall eat and you shall be satisfied, and you shall bless Adonai. What does this mean? We shall eat until we are satisfied? The verse doesn't say that. You shall eat. And you shall be satisfied. These are separate commandments, separate instructions, separate hopes. We must feed our bodies and pay our dues to this physical realm. But fulfillment, satisfaction, that is a quality of the spirit and we are reminded to strive for that as well.

We endure by having a foot in each of two realms. We endure by sustaining ourselves in both. Ozi v'zimrat Yah, we say in the Book of Exodus, vay'hi li lishua. My strength combined with the Divine music together are my salvation. And maybe that is the secret of endurance: remembering and trusting that there is more to me than this bag of bones. And that "more" is testified to in all of Creation. As our friend Sally Churgel wrote in a haiku just yesterday morning:

Trust that you are held
After all, the sun rises
each day in glory

May we have bread. And may we find satisfaction. And may the sun rise each day in glory.

And let us say, Amen.

* Bread by Zohar Kochavi; Photo by Ilan Schlossberg
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If you are looking for a spot for High Holy Days this year, consider Ner Shalom in Cotati, California. Find out more by clicking here.

Parashat Pinchas - Disillusionment and Demand

2011-07-15T08:16:00.000-07:00

Notes from the Holy Land, Part 2.
Click here to see Part 1.

It was a long climb this morning from the Dead Sea plain up to the summit of Masada. I started ambitiously, passing other groups, trying to demonstrate a brisk pace to the 14-year old. But somewhat later, drenched in sweat and plodding up the Snake Path — step, gasp, step, gasp — it dawned on me that the last time I climbed Masada I was 28. I also did it at 19 and at 16. Now - step - I'm - gasp - 50 - step, gasp. It dawned on me that this would be the last time I'd attempt this. I smiled to myself, despite my body's desire to curl up in a ball right there on the spot. And while (who knows?) if my body remains compliant and the opportunity arises I might not in fact hold to that resolve, I felt a small surge of pleasure. Being here at 50, trying to climb as if I were 20, and not failing completely, I felt like I'd at last earned my future cable car rights.

Climbing, one would pass other groups and later be passed by the same ones, as our comparative levels of fatigue and suffering leapfrogged their way up the mountain. One group of Israeli teens got separated into two with considerable distance between them, and took up the habit of shouting down (or up) to each other, while those of us for whom pre-dawn hikes in the Holy Land have a certain mythic quality winced at the noise and got jarred out of our meditative states. "Geez," I couldn't help thinking, impatient with their loud excitement, "why can't they just use their cell phones like everyone else?" Which shows, I suppose, how hardened one becomes after just two weeks here.

The truth is, there is nothing as disillusioning as a trip to Israel. When I return home, it takes months — no, years — for my romanticism to re-accrete on the skin of my sense of Israel. Like many Americans, like many Jews, I go to Israel seeking. Not seeking anything specific, but seeking some validation of who I am as a Jew. At home I engage in personal and community ritual in which the name of this land and its people of old are uttered again and again and again. I breathe Israel in and out. I imagine it and it grows beautiful. So I imagine it to love me back. But then, in the same way that upon a lover's return after a long absence their face is somehow not exactly as you remembered it, a visit to Israel brings on a certain reckoning and re-recognition.

This always involves loss. For instance, I am forced to acknowledge that who I am as a Jew, how I relate to Judaism, how I practice my Judaism, how I hold the idea of Israel, are all part of a spiritual worldview that is born in America, and bound to its soil and its air and its peculiar dream of liberty and individualism. I think about how I (and we) am (are) constantly at play with our tradition, turning it over lightly and carefully, searching for the intent that feels true, and then, at our best, re-shaping our actions to carry that intent forward in vibrant, creative ways. We do it without rabbinic rulings. We do it with a limited 21st Century American Jewish literacy. What we do would be met in Israel alternately with "no!" and "huh?" and "but why?"

Who I am as a Jew is almost never reflected back at me when I'm in Israel.

But I think it is worth resisting the temptation to feel dispossessed. Judaism is our inheritance too; it is there for us to claim. And in this matter, I feel spurred forward by the heroes of this week's Torah portion, Parashat Pinchas. The parashah contains the unforgettable story of the daughters of Tzelafchad. Their father had died and they had no brothers; this in a culture in which inheritance passed exclusively through the male line. There was no law given at Sinai to address this situation. So the daughters of Tzelafchad sued. Unlike the daughters of Walmart, they got certified for a class action suit and worked their way to the nation's highest authority: God. They won their suit, albeit with some limitations. But their willingness to claim — to demand — what was theirs in the name of justice, in the name of authenticity, was noteworthy enough to grab the attention of the Holy One and correct an inequity that was handed down at Mt. Sinai.

I love that even before the Five Books of Moses have run their course, torah misinai — the divine law — is already emended. And so this is perhaps what we have to learn from the daughters of Tzelafchad — Machlah, Noah, Choglah, Milkah, and Tirtzah. Holding and owning our Jewish spiritual and moral presence earns us our inheritance. We might not be feeding into the single great future of the Jewish people that we have dreamed or imagined, but are instead creating one of the many authentic Jewish futures that lie ahead.

I'm down with that. While it would be awfully nice to be reflected back by all Jews, in Israel and in the Great World, we won't be and we don't need to be. In moving forward with integrity and authenticity in our Jewish lives, we are demanding our inheritance — and Sinai is being rewritten in our names.

We do not need to be loved by the Orthodox men who rule the "mays" and "may nots" at the Western Wall. Nor do we need to justify our love of Jewish ritual and spirit to the Israeli secular world. The inheritance is ours as much as it is theirs. No apologies needed, and 'nuf said.

As I huffed and puffed and kricht up the Snake Path this morning, I turned once to my husband and said, "I'm sorry I'm not at my best today." He looked at me, almost surprised. "But you are at your best. You're climbing Masada. What could be better?"

Parashat Balak - a Tale of Two Cities

2011-07-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

Notes from the Holy Land.

T his week in Torah we read the story of Balaam and his donkey. Recap: he is the seer hired by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the encampment of Israelites crowding the Moabite outskirts. Balaam reluctantly takes the gig, promising to prophesy at the border but with no guarantee of the prophecy's content. Still, his journey is born of the king's wish to do harm and God, acting through angels, interferes with Balaam's progress. His she-ass is thrown off track, and he strikes her, at which point she famously opens her mouth and defends herself in human speech against her rider's maledictions.

So I'm feeling like Balaam a bit. I am back on Israeli shores, an outsider, though not completely so. I am awaiting what my judgment will be, because everyone who visits here is expected to pass judgment. Many Israelis and American Jews would like us to pronounce the place beautiful and redeeming. The Left in America, including the Jewish left, would like to hear our condemnation of Israeli policies. I observe and fear to open my mouth, lest I make an ass out of myself.

Shabbat is drawing close and I am in Tel Aviv, a concrete and steel-sheathed modern city offering a nearly Viennese gemütlichkeit to its population. Cafés and boutiques abound; you have to look hard now to notice the stone memorials listing the names of coffee-sippers of ten or fifteen years ago, blown up with the cafés that hosted them. In the years since, the people of Tel Aviv have persevered. They've endured explosions and sealed rooms and assassinations. A slice of cake and a cappuccino is, for them, not devoid of a certain defiance. They have become more cosmopolitan and, arguably, more snobbish. While their view of most of Israel is not dissimilar to that of a San Franciscan pondering Riverside, their view of Jerusalem contains a particular venom.

For them, Jerusalem has ceased being Israel altogether. While Tel Aviv seems a logical outcome of the Zionist experiment - a bit of fin de siecle Europe rooted and flourishing in sandy soil - Jerusalem is inexplicable. From the start Jerusalem was a city weighed down by history. Every emperor wanted to conquer it, and nearly every emperor did. Jerusalem continues to suffer from an overburden of symbolism. Besides being a holy city for three powerful religions (or two powerful religions and one that perhaps just likes to act that way) it has for millenia signaled ultimate hope: of return, of salvation, of Messianic bliss. No earthly place can or should have to fulfill this level of religious promise.

But it is this very promise that draws so many of us - the curious, the seeker, the Chasid, the Jewish Renewal hippy tourist, the fundamentalist Christian rapturist. Still, despite the wide variety of its petitioners, Jerusalem has chosen its favored child, increasingly nurturing a fiercely non-pluralistic religious population that grows faster than any other segment of Israeli society. The city spreads outward to house its acolytes and devotees, overtaking land that isn't now and wasn't ever empty, pushing Palestinian villagers and farmers and academics and activists back behind a meandering and impenetrable green iron ribbon of fence.

The people of Tel Aviv fear Jerusalem and what it has come to represent. They fear the impending theocracy that has already produced a Jewish state in which marriages and conversions conducted by Reform rabbis are of no legal worth; in which women can't carry a Torah or wear a tallit at our people's holiest site. The Tel Aviv crowd resembles us - they are 1.5-child families. They foresee being overtaken by the religious within 20 years, and you can hear in the back of their minds the click-click of their escape plans forming. The people of Jerusalem long for Jerusalem even now, the long longing of our people. The people of Tel Aviv apply for EU passports.

I had my first view of Jerusalem in seven years yesterday. I'd studied there in my youth and it remains beloved to me. But now I am 30 years older and so is the State that claims it. I stood on the new tayelet - the scenic overlook - in the Talpiot neighborhood, from which I could see the Old City and the Dome of the Rock on my left, and the immense security fence on my right. I had to explain it to the 14-year old I'd brought with me from America, who himself pointed out the repetition of walls in this particular view - a Herodian wall, an Ottoman wall, and now this newest one. I realized that while the Western Wall might for many of us still symbolize longing and hope, the security wall is hopelessness made concrete. It is despair; a great Israeli shrug of the shoulders. A fatigued decision not to solve a problem but to wall it out of existence.

I stood on that height and felt a bit like Balaam, wanting to open my mouth but in the dark about what would come out. Mah tovu ohalecha, said Balaam when his time came. "How good are your tents, O Jacob; your dwelling places, O Israel."

I see the tents too. They are beautiful and they are ugly and then they are beautiful again. The sky is rosy gold, the air warm and dusty, smelling of rosemary and sweat. Shabbat falls. I feel underneath my sadness a deep hope for peace, for rest, even for just one day. I breathe it in deeply - through my nose, letting my mouth stay, for the time being, shut.

"Rachav, Rachav" - Prostitute, Proselyte, Prophet

2011-06-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

For Congregation Ner Shalom -  June 17, 2011

Rahab and the Spies by Marc Chagall

So there I was thinking about what to talk about this week. Our Torah portion is Shlach Lecha, in which the Israelites send a dozen spies into the Promised Land, 83.3% of whom come to believe that the Canaanites are too mighty for them to conquer; that they are as giants to the Israelites' grasshoppers.

Last year I talked about this whole grasshopper thing in connection with the Israeli attack on a flotilla of activists heading to Gaza. Then last Sunday I again drashed this grasshopper story for the Sonoma Pride Interfaith Service, connecting it to the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ rights.

I have gotten so much mileage out of these grasshoppers! And looking toward tonight, I couldn't bear to exploit the little critters yet again. Let them have shabbat off to do whatever grasshoppers do on shabbat, without the heavy burden of symbolism.

So I needed a fresh view. And, well, that's what haftarah is for. So I took a peek at this week's reading: Chapter 2 of the Book of Joshua.

And that's where I first saw her. Our eyes met across the ages and the pages. And I fell in love. Rachav: the prostitute, the proselyte, the prophet.

How had we never met? I'm sure I've heard or seen her name somewhere, but I'd never gotten around to reading her story. And it is a good one. Almost cinematic in its physical intrigue - men hidden on rooftops and climbing out of windows on ropes. I will tell you the whole story and at least try to draw some meaning from it.

It takes place 40 years after this week's Torah portion. The Children of Israel have wandered for four decades in the Wilderness. The slave generation, with just a couple exceptions, has died off. Moses is gone too, succeeded now by Joshua ben Nun, who talks with God with some frequency and who, like his predecessor, can also engineer a parting of the waters when necessary, albeit with the less daunting flow of the Jordan.

The Children of Israel are ready to cross over the river and take the Promised Land. Once again, spies are dispatched — only two of them this time, sent to scout out the City of Jericho. And they come first thing to the house of a zonah, a prostitute, named Rachav, and they "lodge" there, say the translations, although more literally vayishk'vu would mean that they "lay" there, which in Biblical Hebrew is not unlike saying they "got laid" there. So yes, opening scene, two Israelite guys sent on a mission, hit the big city for the first time, and their first stop is the brothel.

Meanwhile the king of Jericho is tipped off that some Israelite spies have found their way to Rachav's house. He sends messengers demanding they be turned over. But she tells them the men left the city gates before nightfall, and if the messengers are quick, they might still be able to catch up with them.

She takes the men and they go gaga. Here I don't mean gaga crazy and I don't mean Gaga the pop diva, but rather hagagah - she takes them "up to the roof." There she hides them under a pile of flax stalks, it being, apparently, flax season, and flax being a source of fibre for rope making, which is about to be relevant. There she confides to them that the men of Jericho are certain they will be Israel's next conquest. Whether she is conveying common knowledge or pillowtalk to which she is especially privy, we don't know. But, she tells them, the citizenry has heard about the Parting of the Red Sea and the people's hearts have melted with terror because, as she says:

כי יי אלהיכם הוא אלהים בשמים ממעל ועל הארץ מתחת

Ki Adonai Eloheychem hu Elohim
bashamayim mim'al v'al ha'aretz mitachat.

"Because Yah, your God, is God in heaven above and on the earth below." (Words we still sing in the Aleynu prayer.)

Rachav offers to help the scouts escape on the condition that when the invasion comes her family be spared. They agree, instructing her to keep her family in her house and to hang in the window a tikvat chut hashani - a cord of crimson thread - so their forces will know which house to spare. She then lowers a rope out her window and the spies climb down and escape... And sure enough, four chapters later, when the conquest comes and the City is laid waste, Rachav and her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews are left alive.

I think Rachav is a fascinating character. She has a pivotal role in the plot, providing crucial intelligence. And she has a literary role too, providing a tikkun - a kind of reversal of the disastrous scouting trip of the previous generation. Instead of leading the Israelites to believe that their success was untenable, she convinces them it is, in fact, inevitable.

She is also complicated. She engages in treasonous conduct seemingly without qualm, lying to her king's messengers and throwing in her lot with her people's enemy. Yet our tradition doesn't treat her as a traitor, but rather as a proselyte. Someone who acts out of love and fear of our God. our Israelite God. And that makes her, in rabbinic eyes, a hero.

I also like the text's disinclination to dance around her profession. While some of the sages try to recast her as an inkeeper, most don't. She is a woman who has, as the Marxists would say, taken charge of the means of production. And she holds obvious importance in her community; enough so that the king's messengers don't storm her house but rather knock on her door, wait for an answer, and believe it. She is unapologetic. She is willing to make deals to protect her family's safety. And whatever position she might make her money in, she thinks on her feet.

The rabbis of the Talmud can't get enough of her; in fact, those bookish men in their musty academies seem just a little over-stimulated by her. One midrash says that Rachav was so completely alluring that a man need only say her name twice - Rachav, Rachav - and he will ejaculate. (Yes, it's right there in Talmud.) Rabbi Nachman (the Talmudic one, not the Chasidic one) objects that he said her name twice and that it didn't happen. Rabbi Yitzchak responds that the phenomenon only applies to those who had actually ever seen her face to face, which was undoubtedly politer than saying, "What are you? Gay?"

The rabbis' excuse for obsessing about Rachav is that she is a person of exceptional virtue. She is a model convert, even more sincere and heralded than Yitro or Ruth. Her acknowledgment that Adonai is God in heaven above and on earth below are her words of conversion, revealing her desire to cleave to the God of Israel, a desire present, say the sages, since she heard rumor of the Crossing of the Red Sea when she was a girl. She becomes a Jew and, according to legend, is later married to Joshua, becoming the foremother of many prophets, among them Jeremiah and Chuldah, one of the several female prophets mentioned in Tanakh.

What's more, the rabbis happily point out that in her new faith she forswears being a prostitute. They say this undoubtedly for two reason: (1) to demonstrate the redeeming nature of Adonai; and (2) to have another opportunity to say the word "prostitute." Of course, forswearing being a prostitute might not be so remarkable; according to midrash she'd been in this profession for 40 years already. And as any dancer or athlete can tell you, when you work in a physically strenuous job, you do need to have a retirement plan.

But what is Rachav's symbolic value to the story and to us? Her name, Rachav, means "wide" or "expansive." And while I don't discount the possibility of this being a sexual joke right in the text, I think there's another way of looking at it. She, Rachav, is the first person we meet in the Promised Land. The "expansiveness" suggested by her name stands in contrast to Mitzrayim - the narrow place the Hebrews escaped from. A hint that some important transformation has taken place. The Children of Israel were not the same as they'd been 40 years earlier; the world was no longer the same. Where all had seemed too narrow even for breath, the horizon had now opened up. Everything was possible.

And Rachav seems to symbolize change. Change was in the air. The Children of Israel were about to come into their own. And in Jericho, regime change was about to take place. Rachav, called a prophet in her own right, foresaw all of it and she acted. Unlike so many of us, who follow our human nature and await change with fear or with denial. She looked ahead and took action in the name of her own survival and that of her loved ones. Maybe she is a reminder that action is available to us; that the shockwave of change might be beyond our control, but how we surf that wave is not. Rachav challenges us. Are we looking ahead with earnestness? Are we taking action on behalf of our own survival? Do we have what it takes to save the planet? To save our people? To save ourselves? Have we even bothered to make our stupid earthquake survival kits?

In the story, we can't easily judge the tenor of Rachav's actions. We are told nothing about the politics of Jericho. We don't if the king was a venerable leader or an evil despot. We don't know if life was sweet or cruel. We don't know if Rachav was a proud businesswoman, or if she was enduring a hated career not of her own choosing and perhaps this was her ticket out. The sages attribute her actions to a love of Adonai, maybe a love of life that was higher and deeper than loyalty to any earthly head of state.

I think her actions were rooted not in fear but in hope. Rachav ushers in change. And as she braces for the blast of the shofarot and the now-famous a-tumbling of the walls, she hangs a tikvat chut shani in her window. A cord of scarlet thread. But, let's do one more twist of that thread. Shani, the word describing the scarlet dye, could be read in Hebrew in connection to shanah, the verb meaning "to change." And tikvah, which here means "cord," or something that is wound or twisted together, can also mean, as many of you know from the Israeli national anthem, "hope." With this multiplicity of meaning in mind, Rachav placed in her window and displayed to the winds of the future, tikvat chut hashani - the hope of a thread of change.

Change is inevitable and continuous. It connects us back to Jericho and to the Big Bang and to God's first thought long before that. And it connects us to all that is yet to be. We all bear witness to change, and we all are part of change. And so may we, like Rachav, bring to that change not trepidation but hope and determination. May our intentions and our actions move us along a thread of change that draws us inexorably from the narrow place, Mitzrayim, to the expanse: Rachav, Rachav.

And let us say, Amen.

Gratitude to "Linda" who commented on my last drash for the nice turn of phrase around witnessing and being part of change.

Parashat Shlach Lecha - "Born this Way"

2011-06-12T21:26:00.000-07:00

For the Sonoma Pride Interfaith Service

June 12, 2011
Note: I was one of three clergy asked to "share words" touching on the theme of Lady Gaga's "Born this Way."

Good evening. I am humbled and excited to be here. I've had the good fortune to stand on stage at many a Pride event, but it's my first time doing it neither as an activist nor as a singing drag queen, but rather as a Jew. Truthfully, I can't even remember the last time I attended a Pride event in pants. And as I'm sure many of you can understand, I'm finding it rather constricting.

But I'm honored to be asked to "Share Words," which seems to be the gentile euphemism for "give a sermon but please keep it short." In the Jewish tradition we call these words a drash, in which you expound upon a traditional text in order to draw meaning and relevance from it. Today I'll treat two texts: one from Torah and one from Gaga.

I'll start with Torah. This week, Jews around the world read and argue over a portion of the Book of Numbers called Shlach Lecha. In this well-known story, the Children of Israel are in the Wilderness, camped just outside the borders of the Promised Land. They send scouts to investigate. The scouts return and report that the land is flowing with milk and honey. "But," they add, "the people there are mighty. They are as giants, and stronger than we...

ונהי בעינינו כחגבים וכן היינו בעיניהם

...and we appeared as grasshoppers in our eyes and in theirs."

    The sages of old discuss this moment and how their history of enslavement colored the Children of Israel's sense of self-worth. They were unable to take their rightful place not because they were weak, but because they believed themselves to be weak. And because of this, they were doomed to wander for forty more years.

    Feel familiar? For those of you who like me are alte kackers, old timers, in the world of queer activism, this should feel very familiar. Because it also describes our pursuit of a place in this world.

    Enter, then, our second text, the Torah of Gaga. In the earliest years of the fight for our rights in this country, our approach was tentative. This was revealed in our political rhetoric, repeatedly explaining that we were "born this way." Not in a Lady Gaga "we don't care what you think" kind of way. Not topped off with a defiant Queer Nation "get over it." We said it very much in a "we do care what you think" way. "We were born this way," we said, "so it is unfair of you to treat us poorly." At the time, in its context, "born this way" was the strongest case we could make for our rights and it was our great statement of identity. And I never liked it.

    It was always a rhetoric of apology. A plea for tolerance, not a demand for anything particularly good and juicy. "We are grasshoppers," we seemed to say, "We were born as grasshoppers. It's not our fault that we're grasshoppers. So please don't step on us as you would step on, say, grasshoppers."

    Besides feeling apologetic, the "born this way" rhetoric also felt to me to be simply untrue. Too restrictive. Too static. And under-appreciative of who we are. Yes, we might have been born that way but we didn't stop there. We might have begun with our particular genes and hormones and whatever else goes into the human cocktail, but we've all kept adding and shaking and stirring. And what we've each concocted with our raw ingredients is nothing short of brilliant and brave and, to my mind, holy.

    Our births didn't define our destinies. After all, couldn't we have lived as heterosexuals? Just entre nous, couldn't we have? Couldn't we have lived in our body's biological sex? Maybe. Probably. Our forebears did. Could we have done it happily? Maybe not. But we might have chosen to make the tradeoff. We might have been willing to remain closeted or quiet or invisible in exchange for, I don't know, a prominent place in religious life or maybe a seat in Congress. I understand people do that.

    All of us who were "born this way" have made choices, from the moment we realized we were different in some way that matters. When to pass. When not to. How to survive. How to leave home. How to create home. How to find community. How to make community where there was none. How to love. How to be brave. How to be fabulous. How to be in this world. Frankly, in a certain way, how any of us here was born is perhaps the least interesting thing about us.

    I know that we Jews contributed to the culture the 6-day Creation story, which sets up the idea that things get created and then get set more or less on a kind of autopilot. In other words, things get made and it's a done deal. Things are as they were born. But this is a tediously static view of the world, and of us. And we are far from a static people.

    So I'd like to introduce you to a different Jewish view of Creation, a mystical idea that only got written down after our traditions had parted ways. According to Jewish mysticism, often known by its drag name, Kabbalah, Creation is not something that happened once at a finite point of time in the past. Instead, Creation is renewed at every single moment. God's thought pours through the universe continuously. And through this outpouring of shefa, this Divine abundance, Creation keeps Creationing; the world continues to flow like milk and honey. Everything in it continues to become.

    This Creation story I like. It moves. We all continue to become -- through our choices, our intentions and our actions. We continue to become by choosing integrity. Honesty. Insight. Compassion. Freedom. Love. Hot deviant sex. Courage. Creativity. Anger and persistence in the face of injustice.

    We might have been born grasshoppers, or we might think we were. But we have become giants. We have wandered for decades in a wilderness of sodomy laws and marriage inequality and Will & Grace reruns and the God-hates-fagmongers of Westboro Baptist. We have had blessings and we have had reversals. We have had our Harry Hays and our Harvey Milks and our Phyllis and Dels. We've had our Radical Faeries and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Queer Nations and ACTUPs — and yes, our Lady Gagas. We have lost Matthew Shepherds at the hands of Amalek. We have lost hundreds of thousands of our dearest ones to plague. We continue to witness intersex children surgically "corrected" in the name of gender normativity and our transgender youth suffer the mistreatment of psychoanalysis. We continue to experience both hope and hardship. But we are making a Promised Land of this wilderness. We have become giants and we will have this land flow with milk and honey.

    Were we born this way? No. We have grown and survived and flourished to become this way. Or, maybe, taking the mystical view, in which God's shefa, God's divine abundance, flows through and renews this reality at every turn, then we might say, "Yes, we are born this way. Not years ago, but right at this very moment. And we will continue to be born, to become more ourselves, in all our fierceness and fearlessness and fabulousness. We will more and more be the giants we have already dared to become.

    And let us say: amen.

A Gaga-based Kabbalistic Formula. Chant, rinse, repeat.

Shechinah and the Holiness of Longing

2011-06-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

Some Mysticism for the Seventh Week of the Omer
For Congregation Ner Shalom, June 3, 2011

This is the 7th week of the Omer, which is the in-between time, the wilderness that stretches from Egypt to Sinai, from Pesach to Shavuot. Our mystical forebears counted each week of the Omer by reference to one of the seven lower seﬁrot of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the Tree of Life being sort of the assembly line of Creation with God's slightest thought at the input end and the world that we know at the output. (The Tree of Life is not as linear or sequential as that of course; it is in constant operation, with all the spiritual elements of existence being added in at every moment.)

So this 7th week of the Omer references the seﬁrah called Malchut. This is the final seﬁrah, and it means "the kingdom." It is this kingdom: the world that we live in, the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears. Not just a place or a time, but an entire reality.

But in the same way that Malchut represents a finite, observable universe housed within a great infinity, so Malchut also reflects a certain schism in the nature of the Divine. On the one hand we have the vast, infinite God, as unknowable as His name is unutterable. We refer to this God as Hakadosh Baruch Hu - Holy One Praised be He - or Eyn Sof - the Infinite - or YHWH or sometimes just plain God.

And on the other hand, we have the Shechinah. The divine takeaway.

Our idea of the Shechinah is grounded textually in our biblical story of building the mishkan - the tabernacle - in the wilderness. "Build it," God says, "so that I may dwell among them," meaning among us. V'shachanti: "I will dwell." And from this idea and this Hebrew root we get shechinah - God's dwelling. Not the place, but the phenomenon. God's hanging out among us - around us and in us. Over the centuries, as our mystical imagination grew, the Shechinah came to be personified as a feminine aspect of God: a divine mother, a Sabbath bride, our advocate before God, a friend.

And the rest is history. Or mythology. Or mysticism. In our 21st Century mysticism, the Shechinah is the part of God that we experience first hand - in the world, in our hearts. When we mutter a "Please God" under our breath, it is the Shechinah we're pleading to. When danger is averted and we instinctively say, "Oh, thank God," it is the Shechinah we're thanking. When we walk through the woods pouring out our sorrows as the disciples of Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav were instructed to do, it is the Shechinah's shoulder we're crying on. When our grandmothers would sigh and say Gotenyu it was the Shechinah's comfort they were seeking. And when our hearts leap up and doors fly open to welcome shabbat, it is the Shechinah's face we are looking for.

So this 7th week of the Omer would be the time for us to especially celebrate the Shechinah and notice her presence in all things. I started trying to do that a bit this week. And for me, it's sometimes easy, because, b"H, there are many blessings in my life. I live somewhere beautiful, under trees. This week I heard rain on my roof and saw a fox at my door. There were some magnificent rainclouds bathed in golden sunset. I noticed my family around me, whom I love and who are almost never completely annoying. So amidst all that beauty and blessing it can be easy - too easy really - to think, "Ah, the Shechinah."

Because beauty and love are not our sole experience of the world. They might not even be our dominant experience of the world. We all cycle through times of sadness, grief, loneliness, defeat, struggle. Our golden times are fleeting. Our bodies begin to fail just as we become wise enough to know how best to use them. Our relationships end. Our desire for love or health or achievement remains unrequited, or differently requited. If the Shechinah really embodies our experience, then we must be able to recognize her in the hard stuff. Because there's just so much hard stuff, and if we are created in God's image, God must be there.

Perhaps this is the special appeal of the idea of the Shechinah. The breaking of the godhead in two reflects our own experience of brokenness, of separation, of isolation. Separation seems to be the special characteristic of this realm of malchut. In our mystical creation story, God starts out as everything. All is one, all is same. But then God makes way for Creation to happen. God scootches over in an act called tzimtzum. And in this holy scootching, multiplicity is invented. There becomes a
here and a there; a now and a then; a me and a you, an us and a God. The infinite invents the finite, and suddenly we have individuality and plurality and relationship and change and longing.

Malchut, the world of separation, is also necessarily the world of longing. In it we observe the gravitational pull between bodies. We experience in us and around us the desire to live. The desire to stay alive in order to connect the past with the future. The desire to love. To be loved. To hang on tight to our loved ones. To aspire. To achieve. To learn. To build. To race. To reach, which like the trees of the forest, we do without even thinking about it, down into the earth and up into the light. While the physical universal of this world is change, the spiritual universal of this world is longing.

Now any Buddhist can tell you that longing, craving, clinging - these bring suffering. The Buddhist responds by trying to reduce suffering by letting go of attachments, and reaching beyond desire. Our way, however, is a bit different. The Kabbalist tells us to seek the holy in the suffering by cultivating an awareness that our longing itself is rooted in God. All this longing is the foreseeable consequence of God's little scootch.

Midrash tells us that when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the Shechinah came into exile with us, and that she longs alongside us. So if God is the source of our longing, the Shechinah is our companion in it. According to the early Chasid, Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, even our longing for God is itself an echo, a reflex, of the Shechinah's longing to be reunited with God.

It is said that when the Temple in Jerusalem was standing, the Shechinah would enter the Holy of Holies on erev shabbat and the Holy One, Hakadosh Baruch Hu, would enter as well, and they would be reunited in marital bliss. The Temple is gone, but through our observance of shabbat, we continue to engineer this yichud, this conjugal visit between God and the Shechinah, although I couldn't say for certain who is the prisoner and who the visitor. But while Kabbalists imagine this reunion as a day-long bliss-filled sexual liaison, I can't quite. How could the fact of separation, the pain of separation, not come with them into the bedchamber? I imagine God and the Shechinah, instead, sitting in the Holy of Holies, maybe at a card table dealing out a game of gin. "So," one of them asks the other, "how's this separation thing working for you?" And it turns out they both hate it. But they know that longing is key to the world they birthed and now they are trapped by their Creation. It is too late or maybe just too early to go back to the great undifferentiated Infinite.

Judy Holliday, Shechinah-like, plays gin in Born Yesterday.

So we are stuck in this world of longing. And here in this 7th week of the Omer, how do we rejoice in the Shechinah, how do we celebrate the divine in all things, when so much of our experience of this world is suffering? How do we find the holiness even where we can't find the happiness?

Here is my suggestion. Begin the way you naturally might if I were to say, "Seek the divine in the world around you." Draw your focus somewhere. The beautiful tree. The gorgeous light. The sound of the rain or of music. But instead of jumping right to the place of trying to see the magic of the divine in that thing, draw your attention instead to your own emotion around it. Find your longing. What is its nature? Ask yourself, what am I longing for? Am I longing for everything to be this beautiful? Am I longing for things to stay this way? Am I longing to return to something I once had? Am I simply longing for the exquisite feeling I get smelling pine needles in the rain?

Then, rather than looking at the thing, look at your longing instead. Recognize it as something naturally occurring in this universe; honor it as something born of God.

Or think of someone you love or whose presence you miss. Then shift your focus to your longing or your desire and find the godliness in it.

Or think of some healing you want. And instead of visualizing the healing, visualize your desire for it and see the holiness in that desire.

For this moment it doesn't matter if your desire is fulfilled or not. Longing itself is the exhale of this life; it is sweet even when there is bitterness too.

So this week, during these remaining days of the in-between, to appreciate the Shechinah, don't look at the world but at the longing the world invokes in you. It is that longing that makes you most human. And it is that longing that makes you divine.

This world, this life, deserves our longing, even if grief or suffering might follow in its wake. As the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet said,

You must grieve for this now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...

May we feel all that this life invites us feel.

May we witness our own longing and see the holiness that is in it.

And may we notice the Shechinah at our side, longing with us, holy.

And let us say: Amen.

The Death of Bin Laden: Rejoicing and Restraint

2011-05-06T15:57:00.000-07:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, May 6, 2011.]

I think the week can't go by without talking about the death of Osama Bin Laden. There is, of course, too much to say. I think we all have a lot of feelings, many conflicting. For me, that described my week. Relief, for sure. And horror. Sadness. Possibly some gladness. Then instant guilt about the gladness.

Many in the US have expressed downright joy. I confess that hearing the news, turning on the TV and seeing revelers doing it up big for the cameras twisted my insides in a nauseating way. The jubilation was too much for me after a decade of bloodshed.

It felt like watching Superbowl celebrations. Or hearing the cheers at the end of some action thriller, where the evil genius gets what he deserves, the audience hoots and hollers, and the credits roll.
But Bin Laden was not a bad guy in a movie. He was a real person and he was a symbol of terror. On a symbolic level, his death brings about a certain closure. But in the real world, we don't yet know what actual effect it will have.

Still, can't we be glad at the symbolic importance of his death? Isn't it right to rejoice, just a little? I spent the week being dour about it, and many friends expressed a similar gloom. Then one cousin posted on my Facebook page, "I'm glad the bastard's dead. He would have killed you and every other Jew if he'd had the chance."

Perhaps that's so. And perhaps I am safer that he's gone. Perhaps we all are. And yet it still doesn't make me happy.

When you save a life, says Talmud, you save the whole world. When you destroy a life, you destroy the whole world. Every life is inherently valuable; every life represents an entire world of possibility. Worlds were destroyed in last weekend's raid.

But of course thousands of worlds were destroyed ten years ago at the World Trade Center and beyond, snuffed out at, we presume, Osama Bin Laden's command. Add onto that the over 1000 US military personnel and the many thousands of Afghanis killed in the subsequent war.

While all life is intrinsically valuable, even Jewish law says you forfeit your claim to it when you kill. Killing, in Torah, earns you a death penalty. One who lays a trap to murder is accountable with his life and may not be harbored. So is that what our tradition has to say to us this week? Is that all it has to say?

I found there to be a surprising silence this week among Jewish sources when it came to reacting to Bin Laden's death. Usually something big happens, and my inbox is flooded with Jewish rightwing stuff and Jewish leftwing stuff. But this week? Tumbleweeds.

At last the story of the Children of Israel at the shores of the sea began to pop up in Facebook posts and private conversations. As you recall from this core story of ours, the Children of Israel flee Egypt and are being pursued by Pharaoh's armies. God parts the sea and the Israelites make it across in the nick of time. The water closes in around the Egyptians and they drown.

Poussin, The Crossing of the Red Sea, 1634

The Children of Israel burst into song: ashira ladonai ki ga'oh ga'ah; sus v'rochvo ramah vayam. I sing unto God because He has prevailed; horse and rider have been thrown into the sea!

So what do you recall happens next?

Nothing. They are not rebuked. We all just popularly think they are. They in fact sing out the song. Moses singing and Miriam dancing. But, according to the famous midrash that appears twice in Talmud, the angels begin to join in the singing and it is they whom God silences, saying, "My creatures are dying, and you sing me songs?"

We've generally used this legend to posit a rule that we should not rejoice in the death of our enemies. But the story is subtler than that. The Children of Israel are allowed to rejoice uninterrupted. The angels are not. Why? Isn't there an undeniable truth here? The Israelites were saved from certain death by miraculous means. How could they not rejoice? The angels, on the other hand, however partisan they might feel toward the Israelites, were not in actual danger. And so their celebration is prohibited.
Perhaps the lesson then is that if you're not directly affected, you are called upon to keep a broader view. Be angels of the world, not just backer of your team. Value all life.

So who gets to celebrate Bin Laden's death? Just the close kin of 9/11 victims? Affected military families? And have they in fact been the ones celebrating?

As one of our teens asked the other night when we were discussing this, "Who's to say we weren't all saved when Bin Laden was killed?" And isn't that true also? Who knows what he was planning next? Just today, news was breaking about planned attacks on US railroads and other civilian targets. It could have been any of us next. Weren't we all saved? Is it wrong to celebrate that?

I have no answer for this. In another age, I might have argued that there's a difference between escaping the imminent danger you know about and being released from a danger that's theoretical. But in an age where attacks can be planned and launched secretly from many thousands of miles away, imminence has far less meaning than it used to.

The book of Proverbs says this: "Rejoice not when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles." But how can we, in this world, in these bodies with all their frailty, not rejoice at the death of one who would harm us, when even the angels on high can barely contain themselves?
Another proverb says, "When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices; and when the wicked perish, there is jubilation." A sombre statement of a simple reality. Not a prescription but a description. On some level it doesn't matter what we intend; when the wicked perish, we, the City, rejoice. It is in our nature.

Personally, I'm not there yet. I'm not sure whether I feel any more or less safe than I did last week. I'm sad at all the senseless deaths, all the worlds destroyed. Reveling might in fact be my right, or at least be excusable. But I might sit still and stay quiet just the same.

When all is said and done, there is much we don't know. About Al Qaeda, about Bin Laden, about the operation that ended his life, and about what could happen next. So we must follow what we do know. We must pursue justice as we understand it to the best of our limited ability. And in our own corner of the world, in our own lives, we must pour out whatever love we are capable of. Justice must be balanced by love. Let us keep saving whole worlds, and loving them as well.

Baruch Atah Adonai, Oseh Hashalom. Blessed be this great and uninterpretable Existence, whose potential for peace is boundless.

By the Waters: Yom Hashoah 2011

2011-05-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

Invocation
Sonoma County Yom Hashoah Commemoration 2011

Good afternoon. Shalom aleichem.

It is again my great honor to offer an invocation for today's observance of Yom Hashoah. We gather today, as we do yearly, to tell and hear our stories. We do our best to honor this testimony by listening, taking in what we can, and finding some hook by which we can remember and share it.

Armed with cameras and computers, we can ensure that future students of the Holocaust and human history will be able to unlock and explore the individual experience of many survivors, and of the survivors' survivors as well.

And yet, as time inevitably wears away at memory, so much specificity will be lost. So much dear specificity has already been lost. But I believe that if our individual stories do give way, they will give way to a big story, a great collective story, as brushstrokes give way to the painting. It will be a story that begins with the Shoah, but doesn't quite end there. A story of loss, yes. But also of courage, resilience and renewal. This story is still being written.

"By the Waters of Babylon" by Evelyn de Morgan (1883)

We do, though, have a model that can instruct us. Over 2500 years ago, Jerusalem was conquered and our Temple destroyed. The Jews who survived were deported to Babylon. It was a calamity beyond any our people had faced. The end of a kingdom, a way of life; the seeming end of a community.

We no longer know the individual suffering or bravery of any particular Jew of the time. But we know the big story, the epic sweep of this event and its aftermath. Because it's not just a story of loss but also of survival and renewal.

The Babylonian Exile set the stage for a new Jewish world in which we read Torah publicly. And in which we pray familiar prayers communally. And in which our thinking is guided by the law and lore of Talmud. The Destruction of the Temple remains a symbol of loss, but also of the grit and genius of our people.

And we remember the Temple of Jerusalem because the story, the big story, has come down to us with song and poetry and practice. Every year we mourn with familiar words. Eychah yashvah vadad ha'ir —"How lonely sits the city that was full of people," we recite from Lamentations, "how she has become like a widow." We honor the suffering of the bereft, displaced Jews. Al naharot Bavel — "By the waters of Babylon," we can still hear them sing in Psalm 137, "we sat down and wept, and we remembered Zion."

So now it is our turn. It is for us, and our students and our children and those who come after them, to write our big story. The story of our People — what we lost, how we mourned and, we pray, how we once again came to flourish. An enduring story of loss and renewal.

And so may we be blessed to write this story with such power and beauty that those who follow in 100 years — or 500 or 2500 — can hold this newest, greatest calamity in their hearts; that they can appreciate how it changed the face of Judaism in ways we can't at this moment even predict; and that they will know how in the aftermath we sat together by the waters of the Mediterranean or the Pacific; in Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires and Miami and Santa Rosa. And we wept. And we remembered.

Sing: Babylon

Much appreciation to Lorenzo Valensi, Anna Belle Kaufman and Alicia Cohen for lending their voices and musical skills to this invocation today.

Seder Tonight? Be a Stack of Matzah

2011-04-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

This holiday of Pesach is a huge exercise in living symbolism. The items on our table, what we consume, how we sit - all these things are linked to a deeper meaning. Sitting on our seder table is matzah - not just one piece, but a stack of three. Some say they represent the three great themes of Jewish thought and prayer: Creation, Revelation and Redemption.

Living in Sonoma County, it's blessedly easy to connect with the throb of life that courses through this world. Just to step outside on a rainy Erev Pesach is to feel the cycle of ongoing Creation - vapor becoming raindrops; trees drinking; flowers blooming; bees buzzing. We perceive, participate and revel in the great flow of shefa - of divine abundance. At Pesach, we bless the renewal of life and sing love songs to Creation.

Being in community with each other is our great mechanism for Revelation - the flow of enlightenment that comes to us through Torah. Not just the written words of our holy texts, but the wisdom we all share with each other; the insights we've drawn from our life experiences, our hard times, our joys. Sharing insight is what seder is about, and it is why we look forward to reclining together in discussion tonight at home or later in the week in community settings. As Rabbi Chananiah said in Pirkei Avot, "When two people sit together and words of Torah are exchanged, the Divine Presence, or Shechinah, rests between them."

The final matzah in the stack is Redemption - our belief that despite all our narrow places, our setbacks, and our hard-earned, self-protective cynicism, change is possible. Does this require a belief in divine intervention? Absolutely -- if we also believe that we are how the Divine acts in this world. When we use our hands and hearts and heads to make more justice, more freedom, more fairness, more compassion, we are Divine intervention. We are the mighty hands and outstretched arms of Redemption.

So let us, this week, reawaken our appreciation of the Creation around and in us.
Let us dare to share our deep and real wisdom with each other.
And let us renew our commitment to making the world a better place.
Let us be the three matzot of the seder plate.

B'ruchah Yah Shechinah, Elateynu Eyn Hachayim, asher kidshatnu b'mitzvoteyha, v'tzivatnu al achilat matzah.
Blessed be the Source of Life that calls us to embody the matzah.

B'teavon. Now eat up.

My Two Egypts

2011-04-14T20:59:00.000-07:00

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, April 2011]

Our tradition ties the Hebrew name for Egypt, Mitzrayim, to the word metzar - a narrow place. Over the millenia we've come to think of Egypt as representing not only a spot on the map but also our own personal narrow places, our struggles and limitations.

But there are famously two Egypts: Upper and Lower. Upper Egypt is, counterintuitively, in the south. It is the higher ground that impels the Nile northward toward its delta. In Arabic, Egypt is called simply Misr. But Hebrew remembers Egypt's twofold nature and gives it the "dual" suffix -ayim. Mitzrayim - the pair of Egypts.

So looking inward, do I see not only a single narrow place, but a pair of them?

I already know about one narrow place. My collection of hard stuff that I've struggled with, complained about or apologized for for years: my shortcomings, bad habits, self-sabotaging patterns. Alas, I know these places well because I'm stuck in them still.

But what is that other Egypt? Every once in a while I discover a narrow place I had not been aware of before. It usually comes in conversation with someone else. Their story causes a light to go on for me suddenly, bright as the lighthouse of Alexandria. Some narrow-minded spot; a prejudice that I'd never noticed or or assumption I'd never questioned before. There it is: my other Egypt. The narrow place I hadn't yet recognized but which constrains me invisibly nonetheless. And in noticing that heretofore unseen personal enslavement, it shifts.

This is one reason community is important to me and why, I think, seder is important. Without discourse, without dialogue, without the test of human engagement, there are parts of ourselves we might never discover. Other people's realities surprise and challenge us. Hearing their personal stories of enslavement and liberation inevitably triggers our compassion and self-recognition, and it breaks the dam that holds so much of our selves back.

It feels like magic sometimes. And rightly so. Isn't freedom always accompanied by odot umoftim - signs and wonders?

So it's that time again, to widen the narrow places and let our waters flow free to the sea. Not just the places you always think need widening, but the narrow places you're about to discover. Clear a passage through both your Egypts. Undam it all.

Have a good, deep seder this year. With family, friends, shul, whatever. Go traditional or try something altogether new (check out my cousins' elegant and tasty Sipping Seder or Storahtelling's Four-Question Seder that will go live any day).

And may we all, between sips of wine or maror martinis or chicken soup or borscht, grab the chance to liberate all of our Egypts - two each.

It's All Happening: Uprisings, Anxiety & the Possibility of Hope

2011-02-19T21:41:00.000-08:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, February 18, 2011]

It's all happening.

Atzilah said this to me the other morning at North Light, as we settled into our cups of coffee. It took me a moment to place where I knew the phrase from. Then it hit me. It's from "Almost Famous," a film about rock 'n' roll groupies, who consistently greet each other with a look of wonderment and this phrase: it's all happening.

Atzilah was describing this particular moment in history, the worldwide hubbub of change. And she's right. "It's all happening" could easily have been the caption for the events of the past month and the slogan for how we all have been experiencing them: it's all happening.

From our remote vantage-point, it seemed to start slowly. Someone, somewhere, armed herself not with a gun but with Twitter. Someone else downloaded a "how to" guide for peaceful self-liberation. Daring changemakers found each other. Then it accelerated. Before we knew it, we saw the ouster of a 23-year autocrat, not Mayor Daley, but Tunisian President Ben Ali, who saw the writing on the wall and hightailed it out of the country. It was not a strictly bloodless revolution - police killed 40 protesters, maybe more. But on the scale by which we measure "regime change," this number is shockingly and blessedly low. We saw the protesters as smart and heroic and, in a certain way, so was the government, electing to give up power rather than take more lives, which it easily could have done.

Then it spread. When it hit Egypt, we all leaned a bit closer to our screens. This is a country that means something special to us. It is populous and powerful. It is the first Arab nation to have reached peace with Israel, a peace that has held for over 30 years. It is a country that is so full of history and mythos that you can't help but feel that anything that happens there will be larger than life.

And it was in fact larger than life. The protests in Madan at-Tahrir, the surprising shift in the soldiers' loyalties, the vain attempts of the ruler to hang on to power as the tide turned against him. It could have been an opera, and might yet be.

And all of us, watching our TVs or listening to our car radios, felt that the drama was a collective event encompassing our lives as well. Because, in these early years of this prematurely aged century, we have become a disillusioned people. Disappointed. Disspirited. We don't even bother anymore with the rhetoric of hope. Or when we do bother articulating it, as President Obama sometimes does, we don't bother believing it.

But now suddenly we were caught up in pandemic of elation. The feeling that we the people have the power to make things better. That an individual can trigger tremendous change. That we can make ourselves better. Many of us were moved to tears to discover the now unfamiliar taste of hope in our mouths.

I, for one, found it hard to admit to how excited I was. After all, our disappointments in this world are too numerous to count. Hope is rewarded with disillusionment. So we hedge: we hasten to identify all the things that could go wrong. A worse despot could step in. Fanatics could rule the country. The violence could increase (as we're now seeing in Bahrain and Libya) and blood could end up flowing in the streets. I reminded myself of these things in order to curb my enthusiasm, fearing the scolding voice of future hindsight: "If you'd only known what was coming, you wouldn't have been cheering so loud, would you?" Reining in my joy, lest in retrospect it look like naivete.

Of course for us Jews who have a familial love/hate relationship with the State of Israel, there was even more at work. The rebellion appealed - narratively, mythically - to our own Jewish history and values: routing Pharaoh, pursuing justice. But it also raised the fear of losing one of Israel's few friends in the region, a fear that steps over our immediate concerns about Israeli policy and cuts right to our worries about Israel's continued existence. It raised the fear of new wave of anti-Semitic sentiment. And I, for one, had selfish moments of relief that although the eyes of the world were fixed on the Middle East, Israel had nothing to do with it. Yesterday at Yiddish Tish, we read a poem by Kadya Molodowsky, in which she implores God to

אל חנון

קלייב אויף אן אנדער פאלק

דערוייל...

קלייב אויף אן אנדער לאנד...

kleyb oyf an ander folk derveyl...kleyb oyf an ander land.

Gracious God,
Choose another people
For a change...
Choose another land.

And watching the Egyptian uprisings unfold, I felt some gratitude, guilty gratitude, that the great spotlight had shifted west across the Suez.

I think it is natural to predict bad outcomes to the uprisings (violence, extremism, placing power in the hands of the military - the military?). Anticipating bad outcomes stems from a longstanding and well-founded Jewish fear of mobs. Face it, we have never done well in big groups.

Even when we are the big group.

In this week's parasha, Ki Tisa (you thought I'd never get to it, didn't you?), hundreds of thousands of Israelites are encamped in the desert while Moshe goes up to the Mountain. In Moshe's absence, the people are, for all intents and purposes, self-ruling for the first time. What happens? Before you can say "idolatry" they're stripping off their jewelry and fashioning a golden calf, around which they dance and sing ecstatically. This episode is considered by Torah to be a great sin and a great shande - a scandal that reveals a communal character flaw and that haunts us for generations.

Now I know it has never been particularly popular to stand on the bima and defend the actions of the Hebrews in the Golden Calf incident. But as you know, when everyone agrees to condemn something, it's always worth another look.

What if the Children of Israel weren't small-minded or stubborn or impatient or any of the things typically attributed to them in this story? What if they were simply intoxicated with liberation, buoyed by their own freedom. They had lived their whole lives powerless, the children of generations of powerless. But now, it was different. They'd escaped Pharaoh. Seas had parted for them. God had spoken to them. They had awakened to discover that they were a people, that they were strong, that they had the ability to shape a future that had always been beyond their control. To express their jubilation, they recreated the markers of power they knew, forging a golden calf. They had witnessed true miracles, and they translated them into the ritual language they knew best, recreating God in an image familiar to them.

We are so used to this being the iconic Jewish story of group action gone wrong that we deny ourselves the chance to identify with the Israelites. But can't we imagine a little of what they felt? Any of us who marched with the Civil Rights Movement or lay down on the street in an ACTUP die-in or joined an anti-war demonstration knows what it feels like to find comrades and discover you're powerful and that you might, just might, be able to upend the existing power structure. So I'd personally like to reclaim at least a little bit of what those Golden Calf people were feeling, because it was new and it was important. It was like what we wanted to feel, even if we tried not to, as we watched events play out in Cairo and Alexandria and Suez.

Something big is happening. The media calls it a shifting of tectonic plates. It is a rebirth of hope. A realization that even when we feel powerless, we might not in fact be. An idea that we can overthrow our own limitations and reach new heights. That each of us can change, can be better than we were.

So how do we rejoice in this even when the outcomes are unknown? Even when we fear that things will not end as we desire?

We turn our fear into commitment. Commitment to making sure that what happens next is better than what happened before. Commitment to non-violence (including not beating ourselves up). And trust. Trust that if freedom isn't won, if that better thing isn't achieved, if a new Pharaoh in fact arises, then someone somewhere, maybe you, will Tweet, and others will hear, and they will meet and organize, and they will download 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action and will take to the streets and to the blogs, and we, whether we're in it or we're watching it, will again well up with possibility. So that in our own lives or in the life of this world, even when our fears ask us to say "no" to hope, we can find the strength and love to say "yes."

Inside. Outside. It's all happening.

_______________
Much gratitude to Atzilah Solot for her many insights that informed this piece.

Parashat Terumah: Details and Dolphin Skins

2011-02-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, February 4, 2011]

Tonight we're going to talk about blueprints and inventories and gifts and unicorns. Because this week we read Parashat Terumah, where all these things figure. In this portion, God announces the plans for the mishkan, the holy tent where the tablets of the law will be kept, and where the people will gather, and where God will speak to Moshe. God puts out a call for gifts, terumot, to be given by the people from the generosity of their hearts. Why all the big plans, you might ask? God says this:

ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם

Make me a mikdash, a holy place, and I will dwell among them.

This is an important theological moment. God does not say "I will dwell in it," but "I will dwell among them." But if God is everywhere, as we always say and teach these days, what does it mean for God to say, "I will dwell among them?" Doesn't God always dwell among us?

I asked this question of our students at Dor Hadash last Sunday, and 10-year old Chaia piped up, saying, "God is always among us, but the mishkan helps us notice."

Reb Chaia's answer reflects one of our deepest human desires: to be able to notice God. Or to be able to connect with something bigger, even if "God" is not the name we use for that sensation. So in the wilderness, we had a mishkan as a reminder, a visual mnemonic. A finger pointing toward God. And having a mishkan necessarily involves building a mishkan.

I think in our generation, here in New Age Sonoma County, we like to skip over the building part. We like the feeling of mindfulness; we joyfully seek awareness of God or of a great cosmic oneness. But we like it direct, without "man-made" items in the middle. We go to the woods or to the ocean. We lose ourselves in nature. Or we pour ourselves into meditation. We use these methods to sail into the vastness of Eyn Sof - of the divine infinite.

But what's exciting about this Torah portion and its instructions for building the mishkan, is that the mindfulness of God's presence seems to come not through contemplating vastness but through attention to minute detail. Because the instructions in Terumah are hugely detailed. For fussy queens like me - and a Virgo no less - who live so much of our lives fixated on, and sometimes trapped in, the details, this parashah comes as a vindication. God is not just in the big picture but, hooray, in the small picture too.

God's instructions for the building the mishkan are thorough and intricate. They set out materials, dimensions and who should be on the design team. They include blueprints for the ark that will hold the commandments and the table for sacrifices and the poles for lugging and the rings that hold the poles and the curtains and the lamps and the curious gold cherubim that will adorn the mishkan and the enclosure that will surround it.

Of course our people have always found holiness in detail. The Talmud and our other rabbinic writings rejoice in the minutia of the law. Our traditions require a detailed awareness of our day-to-day lives in order to suffuse them with holiness. What we wear. How we eat. What foods mix. What blessings we articulate depending on what act we're about to engage in or what phenomenon we just observed. We all agree that there is something beautiful about seeing a rainbow and saying, "Oh wow." But there's a different beauty and holy connection in seeing a rainbow and knowing specific Jewish words to bless it: baruch Atah Adonai, zocher habrit.

But alas for me, the details alone are not enough. The materials are not enough. The ingredients are not enough. They must be married to an intention, a kavanah, a vision, a purpose. There's a story that Gertrude Stein tells in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, about their servant, Helene. Helene one day was feeling put out at the behavior of the painter Henri Matisse who, when asked to stay for a meal, first asked what was being served -- a rudeness which Helene forgave in foreigners but would not abide in a Frenchman. So when she was told that Matisse was staying for dinner, she said, "In that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand."

Butter and eggs can but don't necessarily have to make an omelette. Wood and metal and cloth can but don't necessarily have to make a mishkan. It depends not only on materials but on intent. The omelette requires respect. The mishkan requires that too. And an awareness of a holy purpose.

So it seems we need to hold both the pieces and the whole. Every great painting requires both vision and the painstaking mixing of pigment. Every great poem entails both inspiration and agonizing decisions about meter and rhyme. Vision and detail. Both are needed to move us.

Okay, so God being in the details as much as God is in the vastness. But I also promised unicorns, I believe. For that we turn back to the details of the mishkan, beginning with the list of materials - the gifts God will accept: Gold. Silver. Copper. Three specific colors of yarn. Linen. Goat's hair. Ram's skins. Dolphin skins. Acacia wood. Oil. Spices.

Okay, wait. Let's back it up. Dolphin skins? Did I just say "dolphin skins?" Yes. It's right there in the list and it stops me in my tracks every time I read it. What dolphin skins? What are the Children of Israel doing in the desert with dolphin skins? In Hebrew these are 'orot t'chashim. Skins of the tachash. What is a tachash? It's not what it sounds like. Truthfully, no one knows what it was. The Medieval commentator Rashi said it was a great multi-colored beast. In Talmud it's suggested that it was a beast with one horn. Midrash suggests that the tachash only came into being for the purpose of lending its skin to the construction of the mishkan and after that it ceased to exist. The more modern Anchor Bible notices a similar word in Arabic that means "dolphin," so that's what they chose and that, right or wrong, seems to have stuck in many subsequent translations, including many Jewish ones.

So maybe it's a dolphin. Maybe a giraffe. Or an okapi. Or with the single horn, a rhino. Or we might as well say a unicorn, seeing as it was an animal that even in antiquity was so exotic as to be downright mythological. No matter what it was, it begs the question: how did this group of escaped slaves come to be wandering the desert with dolphin skins? Or giraffe skins. Or unicorn skins. Every year at Pesach we tell the story of our poverty and oppression in Egypt and our haste in departing. How does that story square with this new detail? "Honey, there's no time to let the bread rise. We've got to just bake it flat. Oh, in the meantime, don't forget to pack the dolphin skins! And precious metals. Oh and why not a few cubits of acacia wood, just in case we want to build."

Or maybe while crossing the Red Sea on dry land. looking from side to side into the wall of water, well, who could resist plucking out a dolphin or two?

This is narishkayt. Silliness. The Israelites having all this stuff with them makes no sense. Modern critics would say that this passage was added to Torah later, inserted here to foreshadow the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. And that might be so, but resolving it that way is not a luxury we Jews have. Our Torah process involves wrestling with the text we've inherited and finding meaning in

So I thought about these poor Children of Israel, nebech, carrying with them not only obviously precious items, but also odd and awkward items, which, at the time they were packed were of no particular use. Hidden gifts shlepped through the wilderness. Or not quite gifts, but gifts in potentia. Bric-a-brac, awaiting the chance to become holy regalia.

We all have gifts. We give so many of them from the generosity of our hearts to make this a holier world. Some here have talents of music or art or words. Some have skills in nurturing or mediating or doctoring. Some have special qualities of patience or kindness or humor. These are our terumot - our contributions. Take a moment right now and think about one of your gifts that you give generously.

These gifts are your gold and silver. Not your precious metal but your precious mettle. But the mishkan wasn't just made with gold and silver. There's also the acacia wood and the unicorn skins that have been lugged around, awaiting an opportunity to be useful. So let me give you a harder task. Close your eyes and think of the gift you have to offer that you haven't offered yet. The one no one knows you carry. The one you might not even have thought of yet as a gift. Close your eyes and identify your hidden gift. The one that's just been waiting.

Notice what that is. And ask yourself when you will offer it. When you will use it to build a mishkan, to make this world holier. They say that as the mishkan was constructed, its twin was constructed in the celestial realm and I pray that is still so.

So kechu terumah kol n'div libo -- give your gifts, give them generously, from your heart, your obvious gifts, and the gifts you haven't yet tried out. With them you can move not only earth but heaven too. With them you can build a mishkan, so we can notice -- so we can invite -- God to dwell among us.

Acacia - Perfect for Mishkan Building

Parashat Yitro: The Speech of Sinai

2011-01-22T20:13:00.000-08:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, January 21, 2011]

I just got back from Los Angeles yesterday, where I spent the early part of the week in a long negotiation with someone who wants to do some business with my other, um, congregation. These were difficult negotiations in some ways. There is possibly a lot at stake, and the person across the table was perhaps more different from me than anyone I've ever had to stare at for 9 hours. He was in many ways a stereotype. That is, there exists a particular stereotype of the tough guy, right out of the Sopranos, and either he fit it perfectly or he played it perfectly. I, of course, am undoubtedly a stereotype in other people's eyes. You know, the singing-drag-queen-slash-rabbi sterotype. But his type is a special challenge for me. I spent my childhood fleeing toughs, and my adulthood building a life in which they do not figure. And yet here he was. I looked at him and he looked at me. And I couldn't figure out how to understand him, so imprisoned was I within the image he was presenting - or that I was projecting.

As I sat there I began to feel sadness over the inability of any of us to really understand each other. After all, what clues are we ever given? Clothes, affect, words. These are such paltry tools. So deficient. How many times a week do we say "that's not what I meant" because the words preceding them were too limited to adequately convey our intent? Even in the mouths of the greatest poets, can words ever communicate someone's wholeness? Or the fullness and complexity of any idea?

Mt. Sinai

The limitation of language is one of the many themes arising out of this week's Torah portion, Yitro. In it we arrive at Mt. Sinai and God reveals Torah to us in the form of Aseret Hadibrot - the series of statements we call the Ten Commandments. The Torah portion is abuzz with sound. The ground rumbles. A shofar blast comes from nowhere. And God speaks - with a kol - a voice. But midrash says it was much more than a human voice. When God utters the first word of the revelation - anochi, "I am," the Children of Israel all hear it, but not through our ears. The deaf and the hearing perceive it equally. We somehow get it direct, without the mediation of our senses or our brains.

This ability to absorb language fully and unmediated is of major interest to the early Chassidic master, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev. He notes the following verse of our parashah:

בחדש השלישי לצאת בני ישראל מארץ מצרים ביום הזה בא מדבר סיני:

On the third month of the Children of Israel's departure from Egypt,

on this day they came to Midbar Sinai.

Midbar Sinai. The Wilderness of Sinai. But Hebrew is a marvelously squirmy thing. Squeeze midbar enough to change the vowels and you can read it that the Children of Israel came not to the Wilderness of Sinai but to the Speech of Sinai. And this is where he begins his inquiry. What is the Speech of Sinai, he asks, and he answers.

The speech of Sinai is language that carries not just the simple and limited meanings of the words but all their possible meanings as well. There is dibbur - the actual words recorded in Torah, and kol - the voice - God's voice, which includes all the associated thoughts about the words, all the Masechot of Talmud discussing the words. In the mouth of another rabbi, this idea could simply be a defense of the holiness of the Talmud. "See? God delivered that too at Sinai."

But Levi Yitzchak is much more expansive. He doesn't limit the content of God's voice to a specific canon. God's voice, rather, is infinite. For Levi Yitzchak, the Speech of Sinai is language in which word and voice, dibbur and kol, are the same. Language through which we hear with fullness, with completeness. No distinctions between surface structure and deep structure, between form and meaning, between pshat, the simple meaning and drash, the interpretation.

And where Talmud requires the tools of scholarship to access it, Levi Yitzchak sees God's kol, the greater meaning, as something available to anyone with the proper mindfulness. He says:

כשאדם מאמין שכל הבלים והדיבורים היוצאים מפיו הם הכל כח וחיות הבורא, ו'רוח ה' דיבר בו', ואז כשמקשר הדיבור בקול, והכל במחשבה בשורש הרוחני וחיות אלהות, אז אף אל פי שאין הדיבור יכול לכלול כמה דיבורים, יכול הוא להיות מכמה ענינים וכמה שכליים והדיבור מתפוצץ לכמה חלקים , כיון שהוא דיבור אלהים.

If you believe that your breath and words draw on the power and vigor of the Creator, such that the Spirit of God speaks through you, you will thereby connect the words and the voice, and if in your thought it all derives from God's spiritual source, then the words give way to multiple thoughts and understandings, and the dibbur, the speech, explodes into multiplicity, for it is the speech of God.

In other words, holding an awareness of their divine source turns the spoken words into something much bigger and deeper and multicolored. Mindfulness of the divine source of everything opens the floodgates of meaning. The word embodies its full meaning; the fragment implies the whole.

La Grande Jatte

Side story. Over the winter holidays, my family set about working on a jigsaw puzzle. Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of la Grande Jatte in 1000 pieces. As is not uncommon, the borders were quickly assembled, constituting by my math about 12.5% of the overall puzzle or 100% of the fun part. Then interest waned. The pieces lingered on the coffee table for a fortnight and were then returned to their box. Monday, at Oakland Airport, after passing through security, I went to put my shoes back on and, not unlike a sleepless princess fidgety from a pea 20 featherbeds down, I noticed some slight topography under my Dr. Scholl's insoles. I slipped my fingers in and found a single jigsaw piece. Blue. With dots. I put it in the outside pocket of my backpack and caught my flight. Two days later my sister and I went hiking in Placerita Canyon outside LA. At the furthest point of our route we sat down to rest. When we got up to head back I happened to look down. There was the blue puzzle piece, fallen out of my backpack. I grabbed it and wondered what would have happened had I missed it. A single puzzle piece, 400 miles from its origin. Who would find it and what would they ever make of it? How could they ever know what it was about or imagine the beauty of the painting it refers to?

The Piece in Question

I think this is how Rabbi Levi Yitzchak sees human language; and perhaps how I see each of us. We are isolated. So far from our origin. Each of us is a clue hinting at a larger picture, the way the puzzle piece implies the puzzle. With an awareness of holiness, of the divine pouring like a fountain through each of us, we become less isolated, less bereft, and we begin to embody the whole of la Grande Jatte or a million other pictures in which we might figure, radiant in blue with dots.

So too in my standoff of stereotypes this week. I can stare at the tough across the table and simply stop there. But opening up to the holiness of our origins, or to some heart space that feels like that, I might perceive a deeper truth. Something about the life experience that drives someone to choose to show toughness rather than vulnerability. And the possibility that on deeper levels we're much more alike than we'd guess.

I may not be accurate in my speculations about this guy, but these intuitions are in themselves holy and, as Levi Yitzchak later suggests, they flow from the divine quality of rachmanut - or rachmones, compassion. The same spot on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life that is placed over the heart and gets to be nicknamed "truth."

If this connection to a greater truth is activated, then maybe it will work not just when I am reading the words or faces of others, but when I speak as well. Maybe it will allow me to convey more than the first impression I make, more than the stereotype I represent, more than the sum of my words. Maybe with it I could speak, even haltingly, like a tourist with a Berlitz, the Speech of Sinai. Maybe with it we could hear in each other a little bit of the kol, of God's voice, even if just for a moment.

May the Speech of Sinai come easily to our lips. So that when we speak to each other, our words lose their skins and dissolve into meaning, explode into possibility and tremble with holiness. And let us say: Amen.

Much gratitude to my chevruta partner, Reb Eli Herb of Durango, who stubborned through this difficult bit of Kedushat Levi with me, and to my sister, Lynn Keller, who made some key connections as we hiked and discussed God's voice.

Parashat Bo: Freeing the Hard Heart

2011-01-08T08:17:00.000-08:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, January 7, 2011]

I've been thinking about freedom lately. I just got back from Washington, DC which, despite all that frustrates us in American politics does, after a couple weeks, leave one feeling steeped in lofty ideals. I went to the Museum of American History and, after the quick gay pilgrimages to the the ruby slippers, Julia Child's kitchen and Carol Burnett's famous Gone with the Wind curtain rod dress, I settled in and got serious. I walked through the dimly lit, humidity-controlled gallery that houses the Star Spangled Banner which is, I'd never realized, enormous. And I confess that, for all my counter-culture rhetoric, I found myself choked up.

I then visited the African American gallery. There I saw physical artifacts of American slavery, including first editions of slave memoirs. I thought, "How am I 50 years old and have never read a slave memoir?" On display was Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. I bought a reprint in the bookstore and read it in a single breath. In elegant prose Jacobs gives over both her painful experience and her sense of moral outrage. She could not threaten military action to end slavery or promise political reform. She could only offer her words. I thought about how much ink was spilled trying to end the institution of slavery on this continent - and how much blood. And how a practice so obviously, deeply wrong could have been defended - to the death! - by the white, slave-owning South.

This week's parashah, which is called Bo looks at the question of the price of freedom, and why that price might in fact be so high. In the story, we, the Children of Israel, are still in bondage in Egypt. God has already inflicted seven plagues to free the Hebrew slaves, and the Egyptians are certainly suffering. Yet Pharaoh has not relented. God says to Moshe:

בא אל פרעה כי אני הכבדתי את לבו ואת לב עבדיו למען שתי אתתי אלה בקר

Bo el Par'oh ki ani hichbadti et libo v'et lev avadav l'ma'an shiti ototai eleh b'kirbi.

Which means: "Come to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants so that I might show my signs among them."

Hichbadti et libo. "I have hardened his heart." This is a troubling bit of Torah that countless generations of Jews have had to contend with. The hardening of Pharaoh's heart is mentioned 19 times in the book of Exodus. In 10 instances, Pharaoh does the hardening; in 9 - nearly half the time! - it is God. What possible purpose is served by God hardening Pharaoh's heart? The text implies, and the sages agree, that it is so that the remainder of the plagues may be inflicted; so that the oppressor comes to have a full appreciation of God's power. Somehow the process of change must be big, and dramatic, and violent. But for whose benefit? So the Egyptians give up and don't chase down the Israelites? If that's the case, the project was a failure; they chased the Israelites down anyway, even after 10 plagues. Or maybe the purpose was to establish a level of violence and suffering compared to which the state of slavelessness would ultimately feel preferable?

Or maybe the end is retribution, plain and simple. That no one should profit by acts of cruelty and oppression. As Lincoln wrote in his Second Inaugural Address, in the middle of the Civil War:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

But of course no matter how much violence we think the theater of social change requires, we're also stuck with a tricky theological problem. According to the p'shat, the simple reading of this verse, God is setting Pharaoh up by hardening his heart. God is nullifying Pharaoh's free will in order to impose punishment. Pharaoh is framed. Not that one needs to feel excessive sympathy toward him; but one might certainly feel some suspicion here about God.

Taking a second look at the phrase hichbad'ti et libo - "I have hardened his heart" - might be fruitful. The root is k-b-d, which in Hebrew doesn't have to do with hardness as much as with heft. Kaved, heavy. Koved, weight. "I have made his heart heavy," could be another way to translate this verse. Said this way, it sounds less like God announcing a strategy than God admitting a sad fact. "I have made Pharaoh's heart too heavy to move, too cumbersome to change."

I think this reading says something about the nature of our hearts and the nature of power. Change is not easy in the best of circumstances. But when one has become accustomed to power, to ease, to privilege and safety, the heart can become so weighty as to be immobile. Under this reading, God is not acting on Pharaoh at all. God is acknowledging, perhaps even lamenting, the human nature that God created. "Yes, Pharaoh's heart is now immobile; and yes, that is the nature of the hearts of tyrants; and yes, I'm responsible for the nature of the hearts of tyrants - and of all people."

Another resonance of this word, hichbadti, is one you might have already guessed at. The same root gives us kavod - "honor." If we project this shade of meaning onto it, you have an even greater resignation on God's part. God says, "I am forced to honor Pharaoh's heart." That is, I made it, I am prevented from changing it; all I can do is show signs and wonders.

"Poor Pharaoh," this reading seems to suggest, stuck in his narrow place with his heavy, unchangeable heart. So burdened with years of power and profit and fear of the unknown that the machinery of his heart has come to a standstill.

I know it might not sit well to look at Pharaoh this way; it feels too sympathetic toward the archvillain of our collective imagination as he holds firm against the inevitable tide of emancipation. But the parashah seems to invite it. After all, it opens with bo el-Par'oh, - "come to Pharaoh," not lech el-Par'oh, "go to Pharaoh." The vantage point is Pharaoh's; he is the fixed point and Moshe - and we - are being invited into his world.

Uncomfortable, certainly. But while sympathy might in fact not be required, looking deeper than the villain archetype is valuable. We know no one is simply evil. That's comic book stuff. Seeing southern slave owners as something other than human; seeing Hitler as a monster and not a person; are both errors. Dangerous errors. It's uncomfortable to sit with the idea that we share anything with these people, let alone the capacity to do terrible things.

But of course we do. We are not just Moshe. We are Pharaoh. We have the capacity to hurt, to kill, to enslave. But we don't. Maybe because we've made our moral choices. Or maybe we haven't; we are simply spared that trial because the opportunity has never arisen.

But our hearts do share something with Pharaoh's. We feel how difficult it is to acknowledge when we're wrong. How difficult it is to change. How difficult to give up power. How difficult to acknowledge the suffering of others, and to see our own complicity in it.

I hope you will forgive me as I point out things we know but which are hearts are hardened against.

We know how our cars and air conditioners poison the environment. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

We know the unspeakable cruelty enacted on animals through factory farming, approved by us every time we choose the cheap meat or eggs at the grocery store. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

We know that many of the cheap tzatzkes we buy are that way because children overseas are making them in conditions of near-slavery. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

Or when we learn new ways that our actions might cause harm that we weren't previously aware of - even how our use of perfume and scented detergents can cause others physical suffering. We could ask ourselves right now, "why don't we stop," And we will have no defense.

Unless the defense in all of these cases is: Adonai hichbid et libi. God hardened my heart. This is our nature. We do not give up power or privilege or habit easily. And we cannot at every moment have our hearts open to the full suffering of this planet.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote thirty years ago regarding the horrors of the Vietnam War:

Most of us prefer to disregard the dreadful deeds we do over there. The atrocities committed in our name are too horrible to be credible. It is beyond our power to react vividly to the ongoing nightmare, day after day, night after night. So we bear graciously other people's suffering...O Lord, we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage.

Yes, we are evolved from the same Creation that gave us Pharaoh and that gave us generations of holders, traders and hunters of slaves on American soil. Our hearts are not identical to theirs, but they are akin.

But buck up. We are also different; or at least we can be. If not in our natures, then in our choices. We can choose to change. We can choose to change now. We do not need to wait for the signs and wonders. We do not need to suffer the plagues or wars or disasters or other retributions that will change us by force. We can jumpstart our immobile hearts and act on what we know, even if it's inconvenient or painful.

And our ability to choose to have less power, less ease, less comfort because there is something else that matters more, well that, thank God, is in our nature too.

So when we sing for the freedom of the slaves - the Hebrew slaves of Egypt, the black slaves of the Americas, or all who are oppressed in the world today - let us also sing for Pharaoh's freedom. For our freedom. That we may not be oppressors. That when a new prophet comes and says, "Let my people go," we may have the strength and wisdom to say, "Yes. It's time. Let us all be free."

My Yiddish Interview

2010-12-27T20:35:00.000-08:00

Eric Edelstein of Yiddishlives.com twisted my arm to do an omnibus life story interview - af Yiddish! My grammar disserves my Grandma. But it was an honor to do this. We discuss Yiddish, the Kinsey Sicks, my rabbi work, my family, Israel, the Old Country and more.

Irwin Keller's Yiddish Interview from YiddishLives on Vimeo.

Kol Haneshamah - Every Living Thing

2010-12-11T20:14:00.000-08:00

Something new and beautiful from Ner Shalom. Lorenzo Valensi's new setting of Kol Haneshamah - the final verse of the book of Psalms.

כל הנשמה תהלל יה הללויה

Kol haneshamah tehalel Yah. Haleluyah.

Let every living thing praise Yah. Hallelujah.

It's a fast recording we threw down on Garageband, and a fast video from iMovie. But rough production values aside, I think it's a thing of beauty. Enjoy.

Forgiving the Painful Past: A Queer Read of Joseph

2010-12-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

(For Congregation Ner Shalom on Parashat Miketz)

I spoke with a reporter this week from the Press-Democrat, doing a story about the Jewish community of Sonoma County. He asked me what I thought characterized our county's Jews. Of course I'm still pretty new to Sonoma, and the Jews I know here are you. And me.

So I told him that our community of Jews is made up of people who have journeyed. We have covered great distances, geographically or personally or spiritually. We have sought new lives, enlightenment, freedom to be ourselves. We often left behind very powerful pasts. Painful pasts. Including Jewish pasts. And now we wonder how to reengage as Jews when those pasts still return to haunt us, and they still hurt.

This problem of facing the painful past is why the Biblical character of Joseph always holds such fascination for me. This week we read the middle act of a three-parashah opera, all about Joseph. And if you don't mind, I'd like to re-familiarize you with the story.

In Act I (last week's parashah - Vayeshev), young Joseph, his father's favorite, dreams of his brothers bowing down to him. He incurs his brothers' ire and on a fateful day is thrown by them into a pit, to be rescued by Midianites and sold into slavery in Egypt. There's an episode with Potiphar's wife that lands Joseph in prison, where he interprets the dreams of other inmates and makes an impression.

In Act II (this week's parashah - Miketz) Pharaoh dreams about skinny cows and fat cows and Joseph is hauled out of jail to interpret the dreams. He takes charge of the stockpiling of Egypt's provisions during seven years of plenty and is the rationer of those stores during the subsequent years of famine. He becomes powerful - Pharaoh's righthand man.

Then his past catches up with him. His brothers arrive from Canaan in search of food. They do not recognize him, and they bow down before him. Joseph does not reveal himself, but plays an elaborate game of cat and mouse. He gives them the food they ask for, but he tests them. He manipulates them into coming back to Egypt and bringing his younger brother Benjamin. The brothers fear this is at last their come-uppance, their karma return for the abduction of Joseph. Joseph understands their language of course and turns away to cry as they discuss this. They ultimately return with Benjamin. Joseph welcomes them and serves them a meal in his home, and is overcome with emotion. But still playing hide and seek, he engineers a way to keep Benjamin captive. This is the test of the brothers' mettle. Will they repeat the act of abandonment that they had perpetrated on Joseph, this time abandoning Benjamin to his fate?

Act III is next week's parashah - Vayigash. The curtain rises and Judah delivers a lengthy polemic to save Benjamin from captivity. But Joseph can no longer contain himself. He reveals his identity. "I am your brother Joseph," he says, "he whom you sold into Egypt. Now do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you." He has the brothers fetch Jacob his father, and he gives them fertile land to live on in the Egyptian district of Goshen.

Queer Eye?

This whole story fascinates me. Joseph's experiences of alienation, journey, and building a new life are so familiar. We all look at Torah through our own lens, of course, and here's mine. This has always struck me as a queer story. Joseph is the queerest character in Torah. I'm not saying that he's the gayest character or that he's gay at all, although he could be. But his narrative is queer. His biography is queer. He is a transgressor. An outsider. He negotiates a mix of identities. He has secrets.

The rabbis sit uncomfortably with who he is. They make special mention in Midrash of his curling his hair and painting his eyes in the Egyptian style. To an Egyptian this would be innocuous, but to the rabbis it certainly had a whiff of gender transgression to it. Maybe gender was the readiest hook upon which to hang their overall anxiety with who Joseph was.

He's also a gifted child. Gifted in ways that make him hated. He is more colorful than the others -- literalized by that coat his father gave him. He is bullied and punished for his difference.

As an adult he survives. He survives by recreating himself; using his gifts but denying his past. He rises to power by interpreting dreams. He is a bearer and sharer of insight. He becomes a polyglot -- Midrash says the angel Gabriel taught him to speak the world's 70 languages. Just as queers and other transgressives must learn the secret languages of different social settings, the varied cultural codes by which they will survive or perish.

Joseph survives. He ends up in the big city; the capital of the world -- the San Francisco or New York of its time. He takes on a new identity. A new name. A new role. He creates a life for himself, or allows a new life to unfold for him. And in all those years of being Pharaoh's vizier -- seven years of plenty and the first two years of famine -- he can't find it in himself to send word to his father that he is still alive.

How many of us have made just such decisions? A new place? New life? New name? New social language? How many of us made decisions not to look back? Why didn't Joseph look back? A Boston Globe feature this week on long-term effects of bullying describes how adults, decades later, can fill with terror if they see one of their childhood tormentors. So was Joseph too frightened to risk seeing his brothers? Or even to think about them?

But Joseph, like so many of us, doesn't have this luxury forever. Because the past comes back. The past always comes back. And when it does in the story, Joseph makes some choices.

Rudolph: Hero or Chump?

His first choice is to help his brothers. This is what my husband calls the "Rudolph moment." Since this is the season, we'll take as our haftarah the story of Rudolph, another queer character of literature who, as we know, had a very shiny nose. All of the other reindeer used to laugh. And call him names. They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games but then: one foggy Christmas eve, Santa came to say, "Rudolph! With your nose so bright, won't you . . . whatever?" This is the pivotal moment for Rudolph. He in fact chooses to save Christmas. But some of us who were also laughed at and kept out of games, might have enjoyed this story equally or more if Rudolph had said, "Excuse me? My entire life you've all taunted me and excluded me and now you're asking for my help? What kind of codependent bull is this? Sorry. It will be Christmas again next year."

But he doesn't. And like Rudolph, Joseph resists his anger. He doesn't say "no." He doesn't say, "screw you; maybe next famine." Why? Maybe because his past is complex - it includes not only the bullies, but his father and his little brother. Or because he has become more complex.

He also doesn't use that first meeting to reveal himself. The rabbis make much of this. They say he held back because the brothers were bowing down to him. The prophecy of his childhood dream had in fact come true. If he'd revealed himself at that moment, it would have been as if announcing that he'd won. It would have instilled rancor in their hearts. This is the quality of Joseph that causes him to be referred to repeatedly in Rabbinic literature as tzadik - Joseph the Righteous, the only character in Genesis to be so named.

From the moment of these first decisions -- to welcome the brothers, help them, and not act with triumph or smugness -- Joseph's conduct might be instructive for the many of us who thought we'd escaped our pasts, only to find them knocking on the door again. Using Joseph the Tzadik as a guide, Torah might offer us this checklist:

(1) Open the door. Let your past in.

(2) Let your past bow down. Give it a chance to offer you its humility.

(3) Don't gloat. Even though you've made a new and possibly better life.

(4) Sit down and have a meal with your past. Get reacquainted.

(5) Test your past. Give it a chance to turn out differently. Maybe the past is not unchangeable. Perhaps some of it can redeem itself after all. Let it reenact with a different choice and a better outcome.

(6) Reveal to it who you are now. And remind it what it did to you then.

(7) Release it from its guilt. Forgive it. You and your past cannot stay locked in eternal pain. This is what Torah commentator Aviva Zornberg calls letting go of the "narrative of shame." Like Joseph, we can acknowledge that it is in part because we were broken that we became the much better, much stronger people we are. Our survival was not mere survival, but a flourishing too. We can afford to forgive. And, finally:

(8) Stay where you are. You'd expect a narrative of reconciliation to culminate in a "going home." But Joseph doesn't. He can't. He's become someone else. But he invites his past to come closer. To dwell in fertile land on the outskirts but within reach.

For some of us the painful past that comes knocking is a Jewish past. If that's true for you, and you're here tonight anyway, then it means this. You've already opened the door. You've let that past bow down and offer some humility. You've resisted gloating. You've sat down and had a meal with it. And now, here, at Ner Shalom with our hippie ways and our new songs and our surprising and touching and insightful community, you're testing it to see if it can turn out differently. We're all testing to see if it can turn out differently. I'm guessing for many of us it already has.

In the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, it is Joseph the Tzaddik who is associated with the sefirah called Yesod. This is the locus of fertility. Because Joseph brought his past to a green land even in a time of famine and triggered a burgeoning. By allowing the past to redeem itself and become once again part of his life, Joseph paved the way for the generations to come. He planted the seeds of growth and liberation and revelation.

So may we welcome, test and forgive our pasts, inviting them into our fertile outskirts, planting the seeds for so much blossoming still ahead.

And let us say Amen.

Idealist * Muddler * Angel

2010-11-24T20:57:00.000-08:00

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, December 2010.]

This time of year I sometimes find myself in a muddle. I said yes to so many things in the fall, rushing in, full of enthusiasm, eager to do and to be! And now here I am slogging through the heap I've made for myself, lost and dispirited.

This week in Parashat Vayeshev, we observe another mismatch of eagerness and follow-through. Joseph, the dreamer, is a boy. He is the object of his father's affection and his brothers' hatred. Jacob calls him to send him on an errand - the infamous errand that we all know will result in his abduction and eventual rise to power in Egypt. He responds to his father's call by saying hineni -- "here I am" -- the same words Abraham spoke when called by God and by Isaac his son. Hineni suggests complete willingness; eager receptivity to what will come next.

Jacob sends him to check on his brothers and the flocks. But he gets lost. Suddenly the story's point of view shifts and we see him blundering through the fields, through the eyes of an ish - a "man" or "person". This stranger asks Joseph mah t'vakesh -- "what are you seeking?" Or "what would you ask of me?" Joseph tells him he's looking for his brothers, and the ish tells him where they went.

This is an odd side story in Torah. The plot doesn't require Joseph to go astray. But there's something here that adds both suspense and a sense of destiny. But for running into the stranger, the day would have unfolded differently, and so might our history. Rashi and other commentators suggest that the ish is actually the angel Gabriel, sent specifically to steer Joseph toward his appointed future. A part of me likes to imagine the ish instead as somehow being the future Joseph, come back to direct his wide-eyed childhood self with compassion, perhaps intoning a barely audible "it gets better" blessing as he remands Joseph to the brutality and bullying of his brothers.

Or maybe the ish is not a being but a particular kind of insight that each of us possesses. The loving but unruffled part of our hearts that can step aside from our attachments to both the eagerness and the frustration and can instead take the long view. This is the part of me that I always forget exists, so trapped am I inside, alternately, the idealist and the slogger. So in Joseph's honor, I'm going to look in my heart and find my ish, my guide standing in the field, and invite him/her/it for a cup of tea. And when it asks me, mah t'vakesh -- "what are you seeking? what do you ask of me?" -- I wonder what I will say. What would you?

Unravelling Regret

2010-09-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

[Erev Yom Kippur Sermon, 5771-2010]

I regret to inform you that tonight we will be discussing regret. Regrets, grudges, and other artifacts that burden us, that impede passage through the corridors of our lives. We will also talk about death and forgiveness and knitting.

So I want to tell you about my Uncle Marvin. He was my only uncle, although I had plenty of great-uncles growing up and, baruch Hashem, have one still. But Uncle Marv was my only "real" plain-old uncle. He and I became especially close over the last decade, after my aunt had died and so had my father, who was my uncle's younger brother. Suddenly alone in the suburbs of Chicago, Uncle Marv moved to Las Vegas to be closer to his son and daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, my touring calendar began to include Las Vegas, and I ended up having many more opportunities to be alone with him than I'd ever had.

Despite his advanced age, he remained active, kinda crotchety and the source of an unflagging stream of jokes. He continued to come up with ideas and inventions. He worked in a grocery store right until he became sick with what was to be his final illness.

When I found out he had been hospitalized, I flew down. I spent two days sitting in his hospital room with him. In his thin and weakened state, he was nearly the spitting image of my father at the end of his life, which gave our time together an unearthly air.

Our first day together was all sweetness. He made jokes. We sang together - the standards: Gershwin, Irving Berlin. I was grateful to be there and he was happy I was there also. I sat and knitted at his bedside, a scarf intended for my sister. It kept my hands busy, and the click-clack of the needles filled the silent stretches with a note of purpose.

The second day was different. He was even weaker, and the joy seemed drained from the room. He still talked, but they were all stories of grudges and regrets: complaints about how his in-laws treated him. Disappointments about his marriage, about his career, about the move out west he should have done, about the businesses he should have started, about the many ways his life could have been better if people hadn't refused to believe in him.

I listened to this outpouring of ancient bitterness. My body tensed up, and as I knitted I felt my stitches getting smaller and tighter and harder to work with.

At some point I tried to change the tenor of the day by asking him to tell me a happy story. He told me briefly about his honeymoon. The birth of his children. Then he was flooded full-on with a childhood memory that clearly animated him. He'd been trying to sell enough newspaper subscriptions to win his first bike and he was one subscription short and finally Aunt Lucy bought a subscription she didn't need, despite the hard yoke of the Depression, so that he should get it, and the bicycle finally arrived, and he assembled it, and a neighbor sent him on his first errand to pick up something at the hardware store on Foster Avenue and when he came out of the hardware store his new bike was gone.

That was the happy story.

In a somewhat naïve, rabbinical student, do-gooder kind of way, I thought about the bedtime shema. We have a tradition, many of you know about it, that one should not die without forgiving and being forgiven. And since we never know when we will die, we recite a short vidui, a short confessional, each night along with our recitation of the shema. It goes, in part, like this:

Ribbono shel Olam! Master of the Universe.
I hereby forgive anyone who has angered or upset me, or who has done me any harm; who has harmed my physical body, my possessions, my honor — anything pertaining to me; whether accidentally or intentionally, by speech or by deed, in this incarnation or any other; any human being. May no one be punished on my account.

My uncle, always easily identifiable as Jewish, sometimes picked on for it, always proud of it, was not an observant man. I don't know if he ever said the shema outside of a synagogue. Or inside one for that matter. So instead of offering an explicitly religious practice, I simply asked him, "Do you think it might be time to let go of these grudges, Uncle Marv? Maybe you can forgive these people. Maybe they were only doing their best."

His response, though startling, had the honesty of someone without much time left. "No," he replied, "never."

Jewish tradition has, as you imagine, something to say about this. We are encouraged to forgive. And more. The 16th Century Spanish Rabbi Moshe Cordovero wrote that you are to emulate God in your forgiveness - that is, after you forgive, you must hold that person closer, dearer than you did before the offense occurred. Maybe that is in fact what we do in our most successful relationships. Forgiveness giving way to intimacy. But, as a general pracitce, this really sounds like an impossibly tall order. Think of all old bosses and coworkers you'd still have to be close to.

Somewhere in the course of all of this, and I can't tell you whether it was on the sweet day or the bitter one, I made a serious error in my knitting. I missed a row and reversed the pattern. That is to say, the front side of the scarf became the back, and vice versa. So that the ragged, unfinished elements would be visible no matter how you wore the thing.

I flew home with my mess of scarf, saddened not only at my uncle's impending death, but at the fact that he seemed so burdened, so narrowed, so bitter, and that that would be the emotional and spiritual flavor of his death.

Being in a narrow place, and being released from it, is one of the great narrative tropes of our tradition. Certainly, our great collective story of liberation, the Exodus from Mitzrayim, is that story. Mitzrayim, interpretable in Hebrew as "the narrow places" gave way to a vast wilderness, a midbar, free of landmarks, a big sky country where God's voice could speak to us, midbar meaning not only "wilderness" in Hebrew but also "the place of speech."

Release from the narrow place is not just our collective story but also a reflection of our internal struggles and our desire for expansiveness. In Psalm 118, we famously say:

מן המצר קראתי יה ענני במרחב יה

From the metzar, from the narrow place, I called Yah.

I was answered in Yah's great expanse.

Poor Uncle Marv, I thought in that moment, stuck in the narrow place.

Back in my own home, I looked at the scarf. I couldn't continue with it. The error was too significant. And, looking at the tight stitches I could only think of my uncle's discontents, inscribed right into the wool. It would not be a fitting gift for anyone. I pulled out the needles and began to unravel it row by row. As I did this, I breathed deep and imagined his grudges being released into the wilderness, being offered up into the expanse. At last I was left with a ball of yarn, and lungs filled with good air.

My sister called. It was now her turn to be in Las Vegas at the bedside. I'd forewarned her that he was very bitter. She called to say that she didn't know what I'd seen, but that he was now peaceful and loving, with no sign of bitterness. A couple days later I called him on his cell phone. I didn't expect him to answer but he did. I'd heard he was barely talking at all anymore. But he took the lead. He reminded me of two daytrips he and I had made from Las Vegas - one to Red Rock Canyon, one to Mt. Charleston. Memories of our being in the midbar, in the vast places where God speaks. I told him that from my window at that very moment I could see the Pacific Ocean, entirely wrapped in fog. He said he'd like to see the ocean, and that maybe that could be our next trip together.

My uncle had somehow ended up in merchav Yah. He was in the great expansive place. How did this happen? I have no way of knowing. The pagan in me likes the thought that in unraveling the scarf I released his grudges for him. But in truth, all I know is that in unraveling the scarf I released them for me.

Did he revisit the idea of forgiving, as is done in the bedtime Shema? I couldn't know. But maybe, in the absence of formal words of release, crying out from the narrow place was enough. Maybe his telling me all those things was, in essence, his crying "Yah" from the narrow place. Whether by "Yah" we mean "God" or we mean the keening of a primal pain. Or an exhale of the hard stuff into the ether. Maybe his defiant statement of "no, never" was in fact his call from the narrow place. No. Never. Yah.
And after that, mysteriously, he seemed to have breathed in expansiveness, and with it visions of canyon and mountain and ocean.

Maybe, in fact, calling out is enough. Even without kavanah, without an explicit intent to unburden ourselves of our grudges, our bodies and our spirits eventually know what they must do, despite ourselves. After all, the narrow place is magnetic. We know this. It is cozy and familiar and we do not always give it up easily. But, as the sages said,

יותר משהעגל רוצה לינוק הפרה רוצה להיניק

More than the calf wants to suckle, the cow wants to nurse. In other words, God wants to give us kindness even more than we desire it for ourselves. Or in this case, this Universe wants us to be filled with expansiveness, even more than we want to give up the narrow place. Even when we say we don't want to give up the narrow place at all.

I'll never know exactly what happened for Uncle Marv. I do know, though, what happened for me. I became more convinced that I must always seek out and embrace expansiveness, the merchav Yah. I do not want first to amass 80 years of grudges, or 70, or 50, or 10. I will do my bedtime Shema regularly or irregularly. At bedtime, or when I remember. I will use those exact words or others. Or I will use no words at all, but simply call out Yah from my narrow place. I will say Yah, yeah, yo, You, or simply breathe the hard stuff out. Yah.

Let us do that together. Now. Not on our deathbeds, but now. Let us find the people we're still, year after year, unwilling to forgive. The stories that still pain us so very long after they stopped being fact and became stories. Let us gather those things into our lungs and our throats and let us breathe them out of these narrow places together: Yah. Yah. Yah.

And take a deep breath of merchav Yah - of holy expansiveness.

And let us say: Amen.

And by the way, when the day comes at last that you can't find me, I'll be on the beach with my uncle.

Attuning to Love

2010-09-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

Drash for Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5771

I've been a bit blocked of late. Writer's block for sure. But maybe more. I turn 50 in three days and it's brought up a bit more gunk than I thought it would. More limitations. My body not working the way I want. And, of course, these are just plain hard times to begin with: the economy; the wars; the planet; the new generation of book-burners amassing their piles of Korans. So much to feel angry and helpless about. So I've been feeling blocked, and have come to feel angry and helpless about that too. Even writing a drash for tonight was killer. Last year and the year before they flowed. But not this one.

All year I'd collected thoughts, feelings, phrases. Then when it came time to write, I threw these all at the paper and none of it would stick. Or it stuck, but failed to make a pattern. I turned on myself in a fury. "Aha, beginners' luck has worn off, and now we see the truth," I said to myself, rather cruelly. "You've finally run out of things to say," I said to myself, rather disingenuously. "Everyone will see you're no rabbi," I said, while another part of my mind feebly responded, "Well, they do know that already..."

I decided to spend a day thinking and writing in the woods. It worked great last year. But this year, I sat anxiously under the indifferent redwoods, waiting for inspiration. The last straw came when I looked up out of the anonymity of nature to see a familiar face smiling and saying, "Oh Reb Irwin, I can't wait to hear your sermons this year!"

The rout was complete. I was ruined, my efforts worthless. I felt wrung out - not by my hard work (and I was working hard), but by the exhausting ordeal of self-judgment. Hineh yom hadin - as we say on these holidays: Behold the Day of Judgment.

After all, isn't that what these holidays are about? Judgment? The judgment language is everywhere in the liturgy. We are asked to look inside and take stock, in a process called cheshbon hanefesh - the accounting of the soul. It's hard and it doesn't always feel good. In fact, I had one friend tell me that she wouldn't be attending Yom Kippur at her synagogue this year because she's tired of being asked to feel bad.

Of course self-judgment makes us feel especially bad, because we're really so good at it. Maybe the concept of divine judgment is terrifying because it's another layer on top of the what we've done to ourselves. I know my failures; God knows not only those, but also the ones I'm still in denial about. Who could stand up to that kind of God-like scrutiny?

We've complained about this angst for as long as we've been a people. In Psalm 130, which we recited the other night at Selichot, we ask:

אם–עונות תשמר–יה אדני מי יעמד

"If you keep track of all our transgressions, Adonai, who can stand?" In other words, how can any of us hope to withstand God's judgment?

A more modern text raises the same question. This very Jewish text is a joke my friend Esther Schor told me this summer. It goes like this:

Moses has died and ascends to heaven. God welcomes him. "Moses, are you hungry," asks God. "I could eat," replies Moses. God picks up a can of tuna, opens it, dumps it on a plate, sticks a leaf of iceberg lettuce next to it and puts it in front of Moses. Not wanting to be impolite, Moses nibbles at it, all the while looking down over his shoulder, where he can see clear down to hell. There the people are feasting. Tables full of food like at a Bar Mitzvah. Finally Moses works up the nerve and says, "God, I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I can't help but notice that the people in hell are eating much better." "Listen, Moses," replies God, "for two I don't cook."

Both the Psalm and the joke correctly point out that saintliness is not in our nature; if there were a heaven and hell, and divine judgment determined the outcome, heaven would be empty. And if self-judgment determined the outcome, I don't imagine heaven would be any more populous.

And no wonder. We live lives that are complex. Our efforts to be our best selves are hampered by our need to make money and take care of our families and get out the door to work and a million other things. Moral questions are often gray. And sometimes we do know what's right but we just don't have time, for many good reasons, to do it. And what do we mean anyway by "our best selves?" Are we really split into bad and better selves? Isn't this "best selves" metaphor another "good me/bad me" dichotomy that's just another setup for failure?

That's why I'm going on strike this year. I protest. I have gone through a sincere cheshbon hanefesh, a spiritual inventory, during each of the last 40 or so high holy day seasons. Every year I explore my shortcomings. I try to make my peace with the world. Sometimes I even pray. And the next year the shortcomings look suspiciously similar to the ones the year before. Like going back over and over to look in the fridge. Same stuff inside. But older. And a little more pungent. So while this annual season of introspection can feel cathartic in the moment, I'm skeptical about how much it results in actual change.

So yes. I'm on strike. I say this: if cheshbon hanefesh is a true accounting, then the balance sheet must contain not only liabilities but assets too. I want to spend a little time looking at that side of the ledger. This year I want to make it my project to look for the good. In others, yes. But also in myself. Because I think just underneath or on the flipside of everything we feel bad about, there is something good, something worthy of love, something waiting for a little respect.

I will now model this, using several of my real-life shortcomings.

I feel hopeless and unhappy about the overflowing pile of undone stuff on my desk. The inbox of emails awaiting response like pets pawing at the door to be fed. The boundaries I didn't set. My difficulty saying "no." The way my family suffers for my overcommittedness.

Days of Attunement X-Ray Glasses

Some other year, I'd brood over those things, feel terrible and resolve to try harder. But this year I would like to see deeper. If only I had a pair of Days of Attunement X-Ray Glasses, I take a second look. Wait! I do have a pair! Let's see what we see.

Aha. So behind the overcommittedness there's my desire to be everything for everyone. And also there's my deep love of saying, "yes." Those aren't bad things. They get me in trouble, but they're lovely things, and they deserved to be noticed. Hey.

Let's try another one. My impatience. My seemingly ever-shortening fuse. With my Days of Attunement X-Ray glasses what do I see? Some nasty perfectionism maybe; behind that some insecurity. Behind that I see my need to prove something, to prove what I can do all by myself, and behind that - let me readjust the glasses - ah yes, the desire to be loved. Now I get it. And wait, there's something else. Oh, this one is surprising, for a rabbi-slash-singing-drag-queen. Deep down, there's part of me that's an introvert, who just wants to be able to be alone and doesn't know how to ask for that. Wanting to be loved. Needing solitude. I can honor and appreciate those parts of me, even though the way I've acted on them has obviously gotten me into hot water.

So I'm not trying to wiggle my way out of responsibility; I'm not - despite appearances - looking at myself through rose-colored glasses. I'm not letting myself off the hook for my actions or their consequences. If there is teshuvah to do in the world, I have to do it. But looking lovingly at their source, the simple, human, even beautiful source: that is new and surprising and, I think, good.

So what are these X-Ray Glasses? Here's your mnemonic. You can remember because they form a chet. They are the divine and, thankully, human attribute of chesed. Of love. Of kindness. What a nice change, looking at all I'm ashamed of through a lens of genuine love and kindness.

You don't have to do it this instant, although you're welcome to. But I'd like to invite you this year, when you're beating your chest and rattling off your list of transgressions, to find one that's really present for you, to pause with it and to look deeper behind it using your own built-in Chesed Lenses. What we all might discover is that there are parts of us that are real and are praiseworthy and are in need of attention, and which need to be taken into consideration when we act in this world. Maybe that little bit of good stuff that's in need of attention will help us change more than any great heap of self-condemnation.

The great Chasidic master, Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, commanded his followers to judge with kindness. He taught:

דע כי צריך לדון את כל אדם לכף הזכות

"Know," he said, that you must judge every person on the meritorious side of the scale, on the generous side...

ואפילו מי שהוא רשע גמור, צריך לחפש ולמצוא בו איזה מעט טוב

and even someone who seems completely wicked to you, you must look for and find eyzeh m'at tov - some small bit of good, and by recognizing the small bit that's good, you invite the person to return in teshuvah. For Rebbe Nachman, looking for the good wasn't enough. Finding it was obligatory. In other words, he never doubted - nor should we - that it's there.

But what I propose is that m'at tov - that nugget of goodness - is not sitting alongside our faults. It is part of them. It breathes through them. And the m'at tov is also what makes us care about how we're doing in our lives to begin with.

Rebbe Nachman believed this m'at tov to be utterly transformative. His prooftext (they always use prooftexts) is in Psalm 37:

ועד מעט ואין רשע והתובוננת על–מקומו ואיננו

"Just a little bit and there will be no wicked one; you will look at his place and he will not be there." The traditional reading is that in just a little bit - i.e. very soon - the wicked will be wiped off the face of the earth. But the Rebbe's ingenious reading is utterly different. Find the little bit of good in someone and the next time you look, you will not see a wicked person at all. Just a little bit and there will be no wicked one; you will look at his place and he will not be there. Is this advice any less true when looking at ourselves?

And so may we, on the brink of the new year, during the hard and pressured times that we all experience, do this for each other and for ourselves. When we look inside, let us not stop with the faults. Let us mine deeper for the praiseworthy piece that set it all in motion. The m'at tov - the bit of good that flows even through our failures. And by acknowledging that praiseworthy piece, that m'at tov, may we send it on a better course to its happy fulfillment. May that be our method of change. So that when we look back to the place where we saw, and scolded, our wicked selves, our wicked selves will no longer be there.

I wish all of you a good year, a better year, a year of compassion, a year of attunement to the good in others and in ourselves.

Rosh Hashanah Welcome: Through the Wall

2010-09-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

Chag sameach. Gut yontiff. Welcome.

I want to congratulate you for showing up tonight, for whatever reason you did: because this is your lifelong custom or because it's a new engagement; because it moves you; because you're curious; or because you love someone who wanted to be here. These are all fine reasons. So mazeltov.

I know for many of us the transition into synagogue ritual can be difficult. There are many things about our tradition that are hard to buy into. I recently had the opportunity to pray in a community that was politically progressive but ritually conservative. They used an Orthodox prayerbook, and it was my first time using one in a long time. The entire service was in Hebrew. I know for many of you that would prove an obstacle. My problem was different. I understood all the Hebrew. And the content of what I was reading proved to be the great obstacle. So many things I couldn't buy into: severely gendered imagery, God-as-king, angry-God, judging God. I began to see the words, the Hebrew typeface we call block print, as actual bricks, walling me off and keeping me out. I felt myself fuming. I felt tears welling up.

But as I stared at this wall, my mind wandered to the Greek myth of Pyramus and Thisbe. Next door neighbors, lovers from feuding families. A chink in the wall was how they saw and heard each other, and how they carried on their love affair. The image suddenly allowed me to imagine a chink in the wall of liturgy, to see the space between our inherited words. Through this opening I saw, smiling at me, I don't know what: maybe our tradition, maybe the cosmos, maybe God. But something in the experience smiled back at me like a lover. I chuckled at the secret of our love affair, and felt my tense body relax. As I did, the opening grew and became a great gate and swung open for me at last. Pitchu li sha'arei tzedek as we will sing repeatedly over this holiday. "Open for me, ye gates."

So I invite you to find your own gate this holiday. The one that opens for you, to whatever mystery lies behind it. If your gate is music, may it open for you. If your gate is tradition, may it open for you. If your gate involves ignoring all the words and reflecting quietly or walking outside under the stars, may it open for you. If your gate involves God, may it open for you. If your gate involves replacing the word God with Universe, Being, Existence, Non-existence or Mystery every time it comes up in the book or issues from my mouth, may that gate open for you as well.

I ask your forgiveness in advance if this service turns out not to be exactly what you had wanted. But, as the sages famously said, "You can't always get what you want. No, you can't always get what you want. No, you can't always get what you want."

But if you try to find your own gate, you might just find you get what you need.

It is Rosh Hashanh. A time for turning - turning the calendar, turning a page, maybe turning over a new leaf, turning around, turning back. I am glad we are here together at this moment of turning, looking behind, looking ahead, looking inside.

Ki Tetzei - Consolation for the Desolate

2010-08-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, August 20, 2010.]

I've begun to feel a little desolate of late. First there was the usual stuff. Too much to do. So many responsibilities. So many people to answer to. And money worries. And anxiety about High Holy Days that need to come to life and soar but are still imprisoned in spreadsheets and notebook paper. Then came the unusual stuff. The end of my 40s looming days away. Loved ones experiencing illness or accident, ultimately harmless to the body but unnerving to the spirit. And then the news of three deaths among my friends, two in the last week. Not close friends. More friends of friends. Better than Facebook friends. Not people I would have called up for dinner or a movie. But people who, had I bumped into them on the street, would have merited a good, long chat.

Like all queers of my age, I lost countless friends back in the 80s and early 90s. The best minds of my generation, as Ginsberg might have said. But then the reprieve set in and lulled some of us into a blessed and well-deserved forgetfulness. And now, it seems, is the time for waking up. Because I've now reached the age where the normal bell curve is beginning - the first of my peers dying at disappointing but not quite tragic ages, victims of long Latin names that translate loosely to "natural causes."

So it was with that mood of underlying malaise that I approached this week's Torah morsel, Ki Tetzei. A compendium of laws, many concerning marital conduct, a couple about our stewardship of nature. It was not speaking to me. For every sweet and problematic mitzvah about protecting a mother bird when taking her eggs from the nest, there were ten problematic ones lacking sweetness and I, well, I was in no mood.

I was looking, it seems, for some comfort and it was not there. But, my eyes wandered across the page of chumash to the haftarah portion that keeps Ki Tetzei company. It is from the book of Isaiah, and it opens:

רני עקרה

Roni 'akarah. Sing out, O Barren one.

A hymn of comfort, or supposed comfort, to the City of Jerusalem, after it's been laid waste and its inhabitants killed or marched off to Babylonian captivity.

Isaiah, or someone writing in Isaiah's name, elects to describe the aftermath of this public horror using one of the most popular and painful metaphors of biblical literature - "barrenness."

A popular metaphor because it works. It is an image of ultimate pain, a pain some in our community, some in this room, have experienced firsthand. And even those of us who have not experienced it connect instantly with the ringing pain of wanting and not having children, or with the psychic howl of having children and losing them. We may not actually know what that's like, but the terror of it is great enough to stand in for actual empathy. How much more effective a metaphor in the Biblical world, where self-actualization comes only through progeny, and where the payout of the whole deal with God is that we should be numerous as the stars in the heavens and the sands by the sea?

But it is a painful metaphor, too, because it misleads. The childless in the Bible, unlike in real life, never remain that way. They despair, but are then promised (and in fact get) children. Over and over. Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah. Childlessness in Torah is not a real-life condition but a narrative ploy that sets the stage for some miracle birth -- an unlikely child who goes on to overcome obstacles (such as getting born in the first place) and perform heroic deeds. But in real life, we don't experience that kind of reversal. And the Bible stories nearly taunt us with their heartless happy endings.

So the metaphor works for everyone except, maybe, those who have actually had that experience. It is always tricky when your very personal, very human life becomes someone else's great metaphor. What is left for you then? My very personal relationship with my partner has come to symbolize a threat to families I don't even know, and its validity voted on by the public in pretty much those terms. Or my loved ones who are intersexed, whose naturally atypical bodies become fodder for theories of gender fluidity, but who would simply prefer not to be gawked at or operated on by doctors. Sometimes we'd rather our lives not be symbolic of anything for anyone. Can't a cigar sometimes just be a cigar? Leave me my unique personhood. Don't use my body, my love, my life, my losses, even in your prettiest poetry or your cleverest theory.

So here in Isaiah, the akarah, the barren woman, is once again, alas, a literary trope, not only representing a certain kind of communal pain, but making way once again for a prophecy of reversal. "Roni akarah. Sing out, barren one, burst into song, for your children will be numerous." A standard prophecy that, in fact, proves true. The Jewish people do survive the exile and return from captivity and grow and spread across the world, even unto Cotati, California.

So it's a fine prophecy. But as words of comfort go, "sing out for your children will be numerous" totally sucks. Why tell anyone experiencing grief that things will turn around for them? It may be true, but we don't know it at the time and it can't be promised. They are empty words, far more soothing to the speaker than the recipient.

But, then, just when a seeker of comfort is ready to give up on him, Isaiah delivers what might be some of the best words of comfort our tradition has to offer. A beautiful bit of consolation and advice, more measured and remarkably real, something that works as a great metaphor and as personal consolation. It goes like this:

הרחיבי מקום אהלך ויריעות משכנותיך יטו אל תחשכי
האריכי מיתריך ויתדתיך חזקי

Broaden the place of your tent and stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, stint not.

Lengthen your cords and strengthen your pegs.

Some of you know the opening phrase, harchivi m'kom oholech, "broaden the place of your tent," as a Shefa Gold chant. Isaiah here is ostensibly readying Jerusalem for the future return of the exiles and the promise of new generations. Expand your tent, because you'll need the room.

But this advice, these words of consolation, work as well without a promise of literal reversal. How do we experience loss, especially profound loss or communal loss and not become smaller, narrower, more closed down? Isn't that ultimately the challenge of our grief? How do we not wither from it?

Isaiah says don't shrink. Expand. Spread your tent to catch the wind. Don't tighten your tent cords -- lengthen them! Almost an instruction for hang-gliding. But the advice here is not "catch the wind and fly." It is not "time to move on." Because the last element of this advice is to strengthen the tent pegs. "I know you feel uprooted, like a wanderer in a tent. But dig in. Root deeper. Hold fast." Or as Bette Davis might say, "Fasten your seatbelt. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Hold fast and expand. That's the way to survive. Not the only way. But the best way. Become bigger. Hold the full magnitude of your loss and make room for something else too.

Let your personal tragedies expand your heart rather than narrow it. Let our communal tragedies expand our hearts rather than narrow them. This is not easy, it might not be natural. Expanding makes you more vulnerable. But it gives you air to breathe. It lets new problems feel small.

I cannot help but feel that those whose grief at the tragedy of 9/11 moves them to deny people of conscience the opportunity to pray and do the work of their hearts freely have been shrunk by their terrible experience. That we failed as a nation to expand the place of our tents.

Isaiah's words of comfort do work for me. An invitation not to shut down, or not to shut down forever. I take comfort and try to expand with my losses. I have now reached an age where, if I live long enough, my peers will disappear with increasing frequency. My challenge is to make space to hold that truth. To hold these people in my heart. And to keep my tent large enough and loose enough and rooted enough to contain all the joy and all the pain that is still to come.

Harchivi m'kom oholech. Expand the place of your tent.

And let us say: Amen.

Waiting for the Carob to Bloom

2010-06-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, Summer 2010.]

There's a Talmudic parable about the carob tree. According to the rabbis (who were clearly not botanists), it takes seventy years for a carob to flower. When asked then why he was planting a carob tree when he'd never live to see its fruit, the farmer in the story says that he enjoys the fruit of a carob tree planted for him by his grandfather; similarly he is planting a carob for his grandchildren.

Planting a carob is not one of those highly touted "random acts of kindness." It's rather a deferred one - a blessing that will blossom only later, with no benefit accruing to yourself.

So what are the carob trees that were planted for us? The ocean voyages of long-gone grandparents looking for a better life, if not for themselves, then for those who would come after? The love of learning implanted in our psyches 70 generations back? The desire for community felt by Jews of central Sonoma County twenty-five years ago, many of whom are no longer part of this congregation or this county but whose imprints we still feel? Or the clubhouse built by the dedicated women of the Cotati Ladies' Improvement Club, none of whom we knew and none of whom could have foreseen that this home built to house their vision of a better world would someday nourish this holy community?

And what are the carob trees that we are planting now for our future generations? When we make decisions for our children, are we remembering to think of the future adults they will be and what they will pass on to their children? When we make decisions for our synagogue and our community, are they just about this year's programs and improvements, or are we also setting the stage for future waves that we might never know? When we think about our relationship with the Earth, do we keep in mind our posterity (if not our biological grandchildren, then our spiritual heirs, once or twice removed)?

I always try to notice the carob trees that feed me and shade me. The seeds planted in my youth by parents, teachers, great- grandparents and my groovy lakefront aunties. Some of those seeds have, thanks to this community, had a chance at last to bear some fruit, chewy and unripe though it still might be. I'm grateful for those who planted the seeds without knowing the outcome. And I will try to follow in their footsteps, planting my carob, sowing seeds without certainty, but with certain hope.

And as we begin to move toward the High Holy Day season I leave you to ask yourself: "what are the seeds I am planting?"

Parashat Chukat: Talking to the Rock

2010-06-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, June 18, 2010]

We’ll start with a quick confession. I talk to trees. I talk to plants. Every day on my way up and down the mountain I certainly greet the cows with a “ladies.” I talk to the cats, but that’s not considered odd. I talk to the goats next door but no one sees me. I might talk to the clouds from time to time, or to a particularly breathtaking landscape. Any object of wonder that takes me by surprise gets a “well, hello there.”

This week we read Parashat Chukat, in which Moses and Aaron are instructed to speak to a rock, and they fail.

But that’s not the first thing to happen in the parashah. We start instead by learning about the ritual of the red heifer – a rite of purification after contact with a dead body.

From there we go on to experience a most painful death. Miriam dies in the wilderness. This is now near the end of the Israelites’ 40 years in the desert. She was no longer a young woman. But her death stings and her absence is immediately felt. In the very next verse the people are thirsty. Quenching thirst was, as you recall, Miriam’s special talent. As Rabbi Shefa Gold says in her Torah Journeys book, “Miriam had a way with water.” There was a magical well that would follow her like a familiar and open at her command or at her request. The mouth of this mysterious well was created on the eve of the seventh day of creation for the sole purpose of slaking the thirst of the Israelites many generations or maybe eons later, or so goes the midrash. Whether there was a magic well, or whether she had a sharp divining skill, or whether Miriam satisfied a kind of spiritual thirst that the people mistook for physical, we don’t know. But when she dies, the people are immediately parched.

The people, in their desperate thirst, rise up against Moses and Aaron, once again asking why they were taken out of Egypt to die in a barren wilderness, the same complaint that has dogged Moses’ footsteps since the Red Sea closed behind them, barring the way to second thoughts. Moses and Aaron go to the tent of meeting and fall on their faces. God makes Gods presence known and tells them to go speak to a stone – an enormous, fixed boulder, a cliff, in full view of the people – and it would give them water.

Moses takes his staff and assembles the people. “Listen up, you rebels,” came Moses’ challenge, “shall we draw water out of the rock for you?” And he strikes the stone, not once, but twice, until water gushes forth, a mighty flow capable of sating all the people.

The next thing that happens surprises us. God is angered at Moses and Aaron. Lo-he’emantem bi l’haqdisheni l’eyney B’nei Yisrael. “You did not believe in Me,” God says, “enough to sanctify Me in the eyes of the Israelites.” You did not believe in Me. God announces a punishment: Moses and Aaron will not lead the people to the Promised Land but will, like the rest of their generation, die in the wilderness.

What was the source of God’s anger? Wasn’t the end result what God wanted – that the people should drink? Rashi says it is because of Moses’ words to the people. Ramban says it is because he struck the stone.

The Chasidic master, Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, says that those two views are not different views at all, since Moses’ speech to the people led inexorably to Moses’ striking the rock. According to Reb Levi Yitzchak, the world was created for the People of Israel. And when the People of Israel become mindful of their connection to the divine, become re-aware that their life force comes from the holy throne, then nature will provide for them of its own accord.

The idea that Creation came into being for our benefit is a central belief in the Chasidic world. Of course we see the world differently. Not created for the People of Israel. Not created for People at all. Still, we are the centers of our own existence, and we insist on living. So we struggle to find a balance between hubris and humility; between asserting our right to survive on the planet and the caution to mind our place. (We are reminded of the insight of the Chasidic rabbi Simcha Bunam, who said everyone should have a piece of paper in his right pocket saying, “For my sake the world was created” and a piece of paper in his left pocket saying, “I am but dust and ashes.”)

Levi Yitzchak describes two kinds of leadership in his analysis of the punishment God places on Moses and Aaron. Someone who is worthy of leadership will appeal to people’s highest selves. Such a leader will remind those she leads of their loftiness of spirit and the source of their lives in the divine. Her leadership will raise the people’s sights and the level of their actions. It will, in turn, inspire Creation itself to do what it was meant to do – to provide for us – of its own accord.

But when one leads with words of harshness or with shaming, one’s intended followers are not inspired, nor is Creation. The subjects of such a leader must be coerced. And so must nature itself.

For this reason, once Moses spoke harshly and shamingly to the people, his striking of the stone was inevitable, because the stone would not be moved to give. But God didn’t tell Moses to speak to the people or to strike the stone. God told Moses to speak to the stone. Had Moses said to it, "for this you were created, to give water to a parched people in a time of need, a holy people whose source is the same as yours," the stone would have gushed water in a great fountain. But Moses bypassed this opportunity, and the stone gave only because it was coerced.

And so perhaps God’s anger was not that Moshe had disobeyed an order, but because the whole event was meant to be theatre – a demonstration to the people that everything comes from God’s power. That speaking and listening to all of Creation will result in your receiving what you need. (As the other kind of stones, the rolling kind, might have said: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you talk to the rock, you’re gonna find you’ll get what you need.”)

But Moses messed up the theatre. He instead taught that nature may be compelled, bent to our will. And that remains how our culture views the world around us. If you strike the rock hard enough or drill it deep enough, something will gush forth, even if it’s not what or when or how you wanted it.

So perhaps there is a lesson here about who we are in the world and how we might relate to Creation around us. But I think there is something else here also, something hinted at by the fact that the story immediately follows the description of the purification ritual after a death. There is something here about grief and about the return to the flow of life.

The Children of Israel in the story were thirsty not only from the dryness of the desert, but from the loss of their prophet Miriam and all she had come to mean to them. And Moses and Aaron, burdened with leadership, are also in a state of deep grief that may have undermined their natural leadership instincts and destabilized their sense of their place in Creation. Doesn’t grief do that?

Deeply afflicted, having lost in Miriam a prophet, a counselor and a sister, Moses and Aaron were quick to anger. They acted out. I understand this. I remember once, eight months after my father’s death, bursting into anger uncontrollably over some trifle, or maybe not a trifle, I can’t even remember what it was. Anger until I was crying. My grief had destabilized me.

Or maybe it wasn’t exactly blind anger that Moses and Aaron were driven to. Maybe they felt powerless in the wake of Miriam’s loss. Their words: “Listen, rebels, shall we draw water from the rock?” is ambiguous. The word “rebels” is spelled in Biblical Hebrew identically to the name “Miriam.” By re-voweling it, the sentence could just as easily mean, “Listen, are we Miriam that we can draw water from the rock?” They feel their inability. They feel it so deeply that they don’t even recognize that God’s instruction, “talk to the rock” might specifically be a revelation of Miriam's method for drawing water!*

Either way, they are obviously hobbled by grief. So shouldn’t we – shouldn’t God – cut Moses and Aaron some slack?

Maybe not, if the point of the whole exercise was to teach something about responding to grief and loss. After all, God could have had already had the tap running when the Children of Israel arrived. The unnoticed miracle of pre-running water! But instead, the scene is set so that some sort of demonstration has to happen. But instead of a demonstration about water, it is a lesson about grief.

Because grief is a rock. And grief is a deep thirst.

When we grieve, we are dry as stone, heavy, immobile. Maybe God’s intended lesson here was that you can’t overcome grief by hacking at it, by coercing it, by overpowering it. All we can do is talk to it. Hello grief, I know you come from the same holy source as life itself. You are the flipside of my joys. When I look at you, my grief, I see myself. I see who I have become, who I wanted to be, and maybe who I may yet become.

You talk to grief. And then you wait, in a slow plodding of time that feels truly geological. Until the water begins to trickle – when even a trickle had been inconceivable – and then flow and then gush. Your grief was created for you. To hold your sadness and your longing, to mirror your love, and ultimately to become a source of holiness, a source of sweetness to rival even the salt of your tears.

May we all learn to speak to the stone. To speak to nature around us. And speak to our own natures. May we trust that speech. So that all of Creation – every rock, tree, creature and every one of us – may spout forth with holiness.

* I am indebted to Ari Kamiti for this breathtaking and compassionate insight.

Shlach Lecha: On Grasshoppers, Giants & Flotillas

2010-06-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

[Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, June 4, 2010.]

I was in Boston early this week for a Bar Mitzvah – the son of my oldest, dearest friend. It was a Monday morning event (which can happen in communities where Torah is read also on weekdays).

I was somewhat of an honored guest it seemed, so they asked me to participate in the service. Being nothing like shy, I of course said yes, offering to sing or improvise something – the kind of thing I would normally do here in our community. But the night before the Bar Mitzvah, my friends told me that they’d slated me in the program to read the Prayer for the State of Israel. It was already in print.

I took a deep breath and thanked them for the honor. Now if I were being asked to create a prayer for the State of Israel, this would have been an easy request. Israel is always in my prayers. But I was being asked to read the words in the Conservative siddur, which step slightly beyond a plea for safety, survival and peace:

Chazek et y’dey m’giney eretz kodshenu

va’ateret nitzachon t’atrem…

“Strengthen the hands of the defenders of our Holy Land and crown them in victory.” Of course, I could understand nitzachon, “victory,” in metaphoric terms, but the prayer doesn't seem to. Victory here is an unqualified absolute, giving the prayer an undeniable military flavor that does not easily roll off my tongue. Nonetheless, this was my assignment in a ritual not of my making.

Monday morning I woke up to dress for the Bar Mitzvah and learned that during the night Israeli soldiers had boarded a ship headed for Gaza, in international waters. A peace convoy, some would say. A provocation, others would say. Predictably, it had all gone terribly, terribly wrong, leaving nine civilian activists known dead and Israel once again as the focus of the world’s scrutiny.

I tried to collect myself. I was filled with sadness and anger and a feeling of betrayal. How can the Israel that I love – and I do love it even when I am outraged by its actions – let this happen? My anger is understandable to most of you in this room; we are generally progressives in this community, and often critical of Israeli policy. But the internet war had already begun. YouTube videos of uninterpretable scenes were being posted, and emails started arriving in my inbox telling me to wait for all the evidence to be in (which was reasonable) and urging me to defend Israel against those who would slander it – and that “slanderer” part felt, as it always does at such moments, aimed at me.

I tore myself from the news and, heavy hearted, went to the Bar Mitzvah. I sat down in shul and listened to my friend’s son’s fluent chanting of this week’s parashah, Shlach Lecha.

In Shlach Lecha the Israelites are preparing for the conquest of what will become the Land of Israel. God tells Moshe to send margalim – “scouts” - one from each tribe, up into the land to determine if its inhabitants are strong or weak, good or bad, if the cities are open or fortified, if the soil is rich or poor.

The margalim return, famously reporting that the land is flowing with milk and honey. Two of the scouts, Caleb and Joshua, are confident about their military prospects. Caleb, says, “Let us go up and gain possession of the land, for surely we can overcome it.” But the other scouts dissent. “We cannot attack, for the people are stronger than we. The country devours its settlers. The people are giants – and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so must we have looked to them.”

These words spread through the camp and the Israelites lose their nerve. They beg to be brought back to Egypt. God is angered and punishes the people by declaring that the older generation would die in the wilderness. Of all the people assembled, only Caleb and Joshua, with their great confidence in the strength of Israel would be allowed to enter the land.

I sat and listened to the parashah, thinking how we, all these years later, have possession of that very same real estate. So which are we now, I wondered, grasshoppers or giants?

It seemed to me that as possessors and not the dispossessed, it would be easy to cast us in the role of giants. Certainly much of the world paints Israel that way. But I’m beginning to think that after two thousand years of relentless conditioning, however we might be perceived by others, we still don’t know how not to be grasshoppers.

To a grasshopper, every encounter with the greater world involves the risk of being crushed underfoot. And hasn’t this been the Jewish experience over the last two and a half millennia? The risk of annihilation at every turn? We tell our tales of exile and pogroms and close escapes and failed escapes. We pray for peace; we pray to God to confound the counsels of those who would do us harm.

But nothing in our tradition has taught us how to hold power. How to be giants. Instead, we’re left to be giants who think like grasshoppers, or grasshoppers who have grown to gigantic proportions. And it is that constant, deep fear of being crushed underfoot that has informed and, arguably, poisoned so much of our policy in Israel.

I should footnote here that I say “our policy,” not “their policy.” I think it’s important both to say and to let ourselves actually feel the “we.” It is important that even when we oppose Israeli governmental policy – especially when we oppose Israeli governmental policy – we reaffirm our connection as Jews. It is what makes our voice of opposition powerful and meaningful; it is also how we support Israelis who are working for peace. Our inclusion is what we were promised by the Zionist dream when we were young. We were promised that this would be a joint venture. We should not now cede that promise only to those who agree with Israeli military actions. In other words, more than I want to disown Netanyahu, I want Netanyahu to be stuck with the likes of us.

I also need to offer the obvious but very real disclaimers. I do not live in Israel, although I have in the past and many of my loved ones do now. I’ve never had to fear suicide bombers on a daily basis and I’ve not experienced the relief of knowing that a wall currently stands between me and that particular danger. I’ve never had to dodge the bullets; nor have I been required to fire them. I am not a politician or an expert. I cannot speak from the depth of Israeli experience. But that doesn’t mean I have nothing to say.

I also don’t know what happened on that ship. Time will (or won’t) tell who did what to whom first. But I do know that it was a no-win situation, as long as we were in a position where a humanitarian action against us was necessary. Yes, the flotilla was at least as much or more a public relations mission as it was an aid mission, as some people hasten to point out. But so what? Sit-ins at lunch counters in the 1960s south were public relations stunts also. That is how public opinion is swayed, it is how one appeals to the hearts and consciences of the world.

Using deadly force against a public relations mission is the sign, to me, of government by grasshopper. To Israel this flotilla looked like another shoe about to crush us. Everything looks like a shoe about to crush us. Give a grasshopper a gun, and what will it do? It will shoot. If not today, then tomorrow.

A giant, on the other hand, well, giants are perhaps underestimated. A giant who understands and trusts its own power can afford a far greater range of responses to seeming threats. The use of force would only be one possible response among many.

In an Op Ed column on Tuesday, Israeli author and peace activist Amos Oz wrote, “[D]uring Israel’s early years, prime ministers like David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful to use it only as a last resort. But ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been fixated on military force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.”

Defenders of Israel’s actions this week point to the rise of Hamas in Gaza. This is true and I do not suggest that Hamas is not a danger. But we are also smart enough to know that those whom you besiege do not become your friends. When you starve a people you cultivate a population with nothing to lose. On the other hand, in a prosperous, flourishing Palestine, how sexy would Hamas actually be?

Defenders of Israel’s actions also point to the fact that Gaza has two borders – one with Israel and one with Egypt. And Egypt was not opening its border either. In other words, it is unfair to hold Israel to a higher standard than other nations. Perhaps that’s right. The world does not have the right to hold Israel to a higher standard. But we do. Jews do. We are not accountable for Egypt. But for Israel we are. Again, it’s part of the agreement.

So I seem to be mostly talking about our right, as Jews, as people who want Israel to survive, to dissent. Because that no longer feels obvious. But I’d intended to talk about grasshoppers.

And so, young grasshoppers, courage is required. Not the courage to use force. But the courage not to. The courage to dream up other paths and to actually risk taking them. The courage to engage in peacemaking – real, non-grudging peacemaking – and earn back the world’s trust. The courage to help our neighbors and former enemies prosper. Maybe we can’t put down the guns entirely at this moment. But surely we can move our fingers off the triggers, even if just a little.

It will take more courage not to use force than it does to use it. It will take greatness. And I still believe we are capable of greatness; of the greatness of giants. We are already giants in military might. Let us soon be giants in wisdom and compassion and vision and patience.

You may wonder what I did about reciting the prayer for the State of Israel on Monday. I thought of some language I could add, like I might naturally do here at Ner Shalom. I was asked to deliver it in Hebrew so I thought, well, who will notice? I got up on the bimah and began the prayer. But this was a community where everyone prays in Hebrew. With my first word they joined me and recited with me, every word. I was walked down the path of this text, accompanied on all sides, with no chance for a detour. Which is exactly how it should have been at that moment.

But now I’d like to return the Prayer for the State of Israel, not how it was written in that siddur but how I wish it were written.

Avinu Shebashamayim,
Rock and Redeemer of the People Israel;

Bless the State of Israel.

Enrich it with Your love;
spread over it the shelter of Your peace.

Guide its leaders and advisors
with Your light and Your truth.

Help them with Your good counsel.

Strengthen our hearts and hands,
so that we may not be devoured by the land;

so that we may not be devoured by fear.

Crown us with courage
so that we may be giants of wisdom and compassion.

Bless us with vision, so that through us
and all who are touched by your spirit,

there may be lasting peace and joy in the land
and throughout the world.

And let us say: Amen.

Behar-Bechukotai: Of Oil Spills and Old Covenants

2010-05-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

[Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, May 7, 2010.]

This Shabbat, it seems, is meant to be a Shabbat all about the Earth. We have a confluence of several factors that make me say that. First we have a double Torah portion this week - Behar and Bechukotai, both having to do with our responsibilities toward the Earth. The second item is that Sunday is Mother's Day, and don't we always say the Earth is our mother? And the third, well, I'll tell you about the third item later.

First, the Torah portions. These are the last two of the book of Leviticus. Behar lays out the rules of the shmitah year, the seventh year in which the fields must be left fallow. The text says:

The land must be given a rest period, a sabbath to God. For six years you may plant your fields, prune your vineyards, and harvest your crops, but the seventh year is a sabbath of sabbaths - shabbat shabbaton - for the land.

The land deserves a rest. This is remarkable. In the same way that we are granted the holiness of Shabbat every seventh day, the Earth is entitled to take its own sweet Shabbat every seventh year.

While modern commentators have made hay, as it were, of the view that leaving fields fallow is simply sound agricultural practice, nowhere does Torah say that this is the reason for the shmitah year. Instead, it is simply shabbat for the land. It is for the land's sake, not for ours. It is a year in which we may not exert mastery over it. And we, as a by-product, are forced to live a different kind of life. Less ambitious, slower perhaps, a year of some uncertainty, a year without extravagance. A pre-agricultural year, like in the days of Eden. A year where Earth is our companion, not our servant. A year in which we are reminded that the earth deserves -- well, the Earth simply deserves.

It's appealing to me that this portion falls on the eve of Mother's Day. Just a nice little modern coincidence, since we so enjoy articulating the metaphor of Earth as Mother. "Earth as mother" is, of course, an old metaphor, both widespread and apt. Gaia gave birth to us and we owe her the honor we owe our mothers.

Kabed it avicha v'et imecha -- "honor your father and your mother," says the Ten Commandments. "Love your Mother," says the bumper sticker.

But I wonder sometimes if the mother-child metaphor is problematic also. We are, after all, not a species that does so well with the mother-honoring business. Maybe if we were another kind of creature - say, the Pando tree of Utah - 47,000 aspen stems flourishing in seeming independence above ground, but growing from one root stock as one enormous and continuous organism. But no. Instead we belong to a species where children are born of their mothers, are nurtured by them, but then, if we're successful, are compelled to individuate. Differentiating from our parents is our genetic and cultural imperative. In fact we spend much of our adolescence pushing mom away, and sometimes spend the rest of our lives going around and around that internal conflict. No wonder Torah has to command us to honor our parents. If it came naturally, who'd need a commandment?

Maybe this flawed mother-child metaphor in fact describes our relationship with the Earth accurately. She gave us life and yet we feel compelled to push her away. We differentiate. Like eye-rolling teenagers, we don't see the Earth as our mother, but merely as our address.

All of this bubbles up for me this week as we witness the devastation that has been unleashed on the Gulf Coast and take stock of the newest batch of creatures and habitats that we've handed over to oblivion. How could this happen? Certainly not for lack of knowledge of the risks of offshore drilling or any of the other aggressive environment-changing activities carried on in our name.

Perhaps the answer is connected with the third element of our confluence of factors this weekend. This coming Monday, the 27th of Iyar, is the date Torah gives for when Noah and his family and all the animals were finally able to leave the ark. And on that day, God made a brit - a covenant that never again would God destroy all life because of the evil acts of humans. And the rainbow appears as God's signature on the dotted line.

But despite God's promise, aren't we moving toward destruction?Aren't we slowly (or not so slowly) creating a desolation in which, using the language of Bechukotai, the second of this week's twin portions, the skies will be like iron and the land like brass? How can this be happening?

There is a clue, I think, in midrash surrounding the Noah story. Something about human nature. I was visiting a cousin this week who asked me a kind of fun-fact Bible question. He asked me why the people didn't believe Noah when he told them that it would rain until they were destroyed by flood. (After all, according to our sages, Noah took 120 years to build the ark, giving the people around him plenty of time to repent. But they scoffed at him.) My cousin answered the question, saying it was because they had never seen rain, since rain isn't mentioned in Torah before this point. And so they had no reason to believe a cockamamie story about water falling from the sky. This is a revealing insight. We don't believe in danger that we haven't personally experienced.

We don't even need such an extreme reading of the Noah story to answer to my cousin's riddle. Perhaps they in fact knew rain as well as any of us does; they'd seen it all their lives. But they'd never seen rain kill. And so, once again, they had no reason to believe a dire warning that lay outside of their experience. And when the great rain started, it was undoubtedly just a drizzle.

Like the old chestnut about boiling the frog. If the water heats up slowly enough, the popular wisdom (although perhaps not the science) goes, the frog doesn't react to the change of temperature and doesn't act to save itself. And so with offshore drilling. So with climate change. We know a tremendous amount, both collectively and individually, about the changes taking place in the environment and the dangers they pose. But we, as a culture, don't react. It is gradual - too gradual to kick our adrenaline into gear. If it hasn't killed us yet, why suppose it will? When will we feel instinctively that we must act? And by that time, will we already be poached frog?

My teacher Rabbi David Seidenberg pointed out this week that although God promised not to destroy all life, God never said that we couldn't.

Our willingness to let life on Earth unravel is a function of disbelief; a function of the nearly imperceptible pace of climate change; a function of the brevity of our own lives; a function of our ardent and adolescent differentiation from Earth our Mother; and a function of our stubborn, lurking and unfounded belief that there is, somewhere out there, a God who will step in, father-like, and save us from ourselves.

I'm aware that I'm preaching to the choir. But maybe not, because if there is a choir, I'm not in it. I know all these things. I read newspapers. I care. But I don't really do. I have only been affected intellectually. Global warming has not touched my experience. If the price of Gulf of Mexico oysters goes up this year, I can tell you with certainty I will not notice. In the meantime, I have chosen to live in a location where there is no option of public transportation or bicycle transit. I've eliminated many of my own best ways to reduce my carbon footprint. So how do I change? Is there a Jewish understanding we can use to help us step up?

Perhaps there is something in our understanding of God and how God acts in this world. Here, in what the Kabbalists would call Malchut - the kingdom, the majesty, the physical reality in which we live and the only world we can ever really know, God acts, if God acts at all, through us. In Reconstructionist lingo we talk about locating God in our shared impulse to do justice. When we act out of our best impulses, there is God.

But we neglect to mention the flipside. What of our combined worst impulses? Greed, apathy, willing ignorance, closing our eyes to injustice. Alas, God is there too. Not the God who comforts and provides, but the angry God of Bechukotai - the one promising environmental desolation in exchange for our misdeeds. Or the angry God of the Noah story, willing to let human faults justify the destruction of all life.

This is a terrifying thought to me. That we, through our actions, bring about that angry, biblical God, that one that as modern Jews we try so hard to distance ourselves from. It's hard to accept the amount of destructive power we actually wield. To misquote Walt Kelly in his Pogo comic strip written for Earth Day 39 years ago, "We have met the vengeful God, and He is us."

But owning our godliness in this respect also gives me hope. If by our actions we are God - for good and for ill - then we are the ones bound by the brit, bound by the covenant of the rainbow made after the flood. We signed onto an oath, not as the human parties, but as God's proxy. And so there is no loophole for us. No way to say "not me, not us." We have made a covenant with all life: "every living soul - the birds, the cattle and every beast of the earth." And so we are oath-bound to protect the air and the water, to protest exploitation of limited resources, to sing out for sustainability, to rethink, to remediate, to live more simply.

We do not have a choice. We are oath-bound, covenant-bound to do this. We do not do it [merely] out of mother love, honor, or self-interest. We do it out of deep, uncompromising obligation.

And so whenever we have a decision to make that has an impact on this Earth, in our lives or our work or our community institutions, whenever we are deciding whether to speak out on an environmental issue or not, let us stop, take a deep breath, and say the traditional blessing that is recited upon seeing a rainbow:

ברוך אתה יי זוכר הברית

Baruch Atah Yah, zocher habrit.

Blessed are You, Yah, who remembers the Covenant.

And blessed may We be, that we may remember the Covenant.

And blessed will all Existence be when the Covenant is kept.

ברוך אתה יי זוכר הברית

Baruch Atah Yah, zocher habrit.

World Word Cloud

2010-04-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

This is a doodley graphic representation of my Erev Rosh Hashanah drash created through the very clever program, Wordle. If this graphic makes you want to review the drash itself, you can just click here.

The Immensity of Absence

2010-04-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

Invocation for the Sonoma County
Community-wide Yom HaShoah Commemoration
April 11, 2010

I'm honored and humbled to be asked to offer the invocation for today's commemoration. I am myself from a family of mameshdikeh Yankees: some of my forebears on this soil as early as the 1850s, the last straggler here by 1905. So that I stand here with an unprecedented century of safety behind me.

There were, of course, people in my family lost in the Shoah. But research was required to find their names.

And so I sometimes feel unequal to the task, when the task is to remember. How shall I remember? What shall I remember? How do I conjure up for myself a depth of pain that some in this room could not possibly conjure away, even if they wanted to?

The answer for me and many of my generation is, I think, to learn to see the invisible. I travelled to Poland three years ago. I was prepared to see the camps, and I was moved when I saw them. But weighing much more heavily on me, and staying with me even to this moment, was the immensity of what I didn't see.

Like looking at a picture where your eye suddenly sees the negative space jump to the front, we must train ourselves to appreciate what should be - but is not - there.

The actions never completed and dreams never realized.
The prayers never offered.
The poems left unpenned and the symphonies uncomposed.
The ideas not sparked and inventions never imagined.
The eyes that didn't meet and romances that didn't blossom.
The generations not born.
The cousins we should have had.
Seven decades of challahs not baked for Shabbos.
Uncountable tzedakah not given.
Old age never reached.
Peaceful deaths denied and honorable burials not granted.
The trivial moments that never even had the opportunity to be taken for granted.

This is an immensity of absence. As Jews, as citizens of the 21st Century, we live in it every day.
It is an emptiness the size of Europe.

So how do we not despair?

We blossom anew even in the midst of this desert.
We live. We dream.
We pen poems and compose symphonies.
Meet eyes, hold hands, make love.
We bake and we build.
We act justly.
We honor lost lives by living our own. With ferocity. With gusto.
We feel the sap coursing through us and, without guilt, we open our petals to the sky.

So that our lives are memory.
So that our lives are a tikkun.
So that we may be worthy to be alive.

We live, and through our lives, through our love, through our creativity and our compassion, we remember.

And we make sure that that memory becomes - for us, for others, and for this entire beautiful, terrible, undeserving and desperately needy world - a true blessing.

Ken y'hi ratzon. May it be so.

Everything I Needed to Know About Passover I Learned from Knitting

2010-03-31T10:48:00.000-07:00

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, April-May 2010]

I've been trying to do more knitting of late. This is a great challenge for me, because it doesn't come naturally. Often I'm struggling against the tangle of shmateh hanging from my needles, determined yet inept, my own mistakes and miscounts coming at me as if out of the blue, like unforeseeable misfortune. But then at other times I'm in the zone. My needles sail, their clatter almost a prayer, my spirit disembodied from the action of my fingers. And I knit my thoughts and intentions right into the row.

Until recently, all I ever knitted were rectangles. Scarves. Stitch after stitch like stringing beads. But the good stuff, the non-rectangles, require ins and outs that are much more like life itself. You lurch forward, you double back, sometimes you are connected, sometimes you leave an emptiness in your wake. When you're in the row you can't see the meaning. Only after you've knitted enough and hold it away from your eyes can you see that there is, in fact, a pattern. The holes make sense; there are previously unperceived connections between this and that; there is grace in what turns out to be lace.

I've recently learned that "passover" is not only the name of our Festival of Matzot and our description of the Angel of Death's detour when approaching an Israelite home in Egypt. It is also a knitting instruction. Abbreviated passo, It involves several minute actions. You make a stitch. You follow this with another stitch. Then you reach back and grab the earlier one. You pass it over and around the more recent stitch, pull it off the needle and let it go. Then you keep knitting.

In a way, our lives and our history are like the passover stitch. We are part of a garment, that is for sure. We are connected front and back to past and future. We are linked side to side with each other and with this particular reality in which we live. But despite exhortations to "stay in the moment" or to "live in the present," we can't. Cut off the past and the present unravels. So how do we engage the past and still move forward? We use the passo - the passover stitch. We reach back, take hold of the past and let it briefly embrace the present. What perspective does it offer us? What flavor? What insight? Can we accept the generosity of its offer without being bound and tied to its specifics?

It seems to me that only by engaging the past in this way can we let it go honorably, knowing that we will carry an element of it into the future. A lesson, a custom, a considered rejection of a custom, a reshaping of a custom. We are not large enough to remember every story, every ritual, every event of our past. But we can remember that there was a story, a ritual, an event. We can catch and carry some element of its spirit. And then, like the passo, we can let go of it, let it gently slip off the needle, as we continue to knit the garment of our lives.

The Talmudic word for knitting or interlacing, serug, is also used to refer to broken lines in Torah. That is, lines of text written not in rectangles like a scarf, but rather like lace, with gaps and continuations. This style of writing is reserved especially for the great moments of poetry in Torah, for instance the Song of the Sea, sung by the Children of Israel after the parting and rejoining of the waves. The poetic climax of the Passover story, written to look like undulating waves, written to look like a knitted garment.

And so let us make lace this Passover. Let us take this old yarn of ours, this story of enslavement and liberation, of eagerness and doubt, of triumph and regret, and draw it for a moment around our own lives to see what insight it offers us. Are we free? Are we content? What must we do next? How do we celebrate our freedoms while regretting pain we've caused others in achieving it? Let us let the past pass over and around us and teach us its lessons. And then we can, at least for this year, let it go, knowing that with time and perspective, we will see the pattern that it helped shape.

Parashat Vayikra: Reclaiming Jewish Guilt

2010-03-21T18:06:00.000-07:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, March 19, 2010.]

• Raise your hand if you’ve never felt guilt about anything.

• Raise your hand if you often feel guilty about something.

• Raise your hand if you feel guilty about something right now.

I ask these questions because this week’s parashah, Vayikra, the opening section of the Book of Leviticus, is, in the part we read in this year’s cycle, a bit of a self-help manual for people who experience guilt. The portion describes the sin offerings to be made by those who are guilty of an offense against God. The required offerings differ, depending on who you are. Leadership pays higher than rank and file. So the priest, who represents the people before God, pays more dearly than a tribal chief, who pays more than a peasant. It’s a kind of progressive guilt tax. In each instance, the resolution of the guilt comes through an animal sacrifice. The person who is guilty lays his hands on the head of the animal for a moment before the sacrifice happens, in an interestingly intimate and compassionate gesture. And unlike other types of sacrificial offerings, no one gets to benefit from the animal. Everything edible or usable in some way is burned. Through this ritual the sin is purged and the guilt-ridden person is released from his burden.

If someone sins against another person, committing what we might term an ethical violation, he still does the sacrifice, but first makes good with the person who was wronged. In fact, he pays restitution plus a penalty; in other words he must restore things to a state better than he found them.

In the Torah, the obligation to engage in these rituals arises when a person is ashem – “guilty.” Interestingly, this is not guilt as decided by a judge or a court. Instead, the requirement is triggered when one becomes aware of one’s own guilt or when it’s pointed out. It presumes that you have a desire to do good, and when you err, you own it.

But “guilt” in English, in American, and particularly among Jews, has come to mean something very different. In some way, it has come to mean almost the opposite of how it is used in Torah. Not an error you are first to acknowledge, but one you are last to acknowledge, or don’t want to acknowledge, or that you claim you didn’t commit anyway.

I had a lot of conversations about guilt this week, starting with my Facebook page. I asked people their thoughts about guilt and accountability and the responses were remarkable. Almost no one had a kind word to say about guilt. The very word brought up anger and indignation and, often, specifics about relationships – especially relationships with mothers.

My friends described guilt not as an emotion or impulse generated by you, but as a state imposed on you by someone else. They experienced guilt as being punished for someone else’s projection. They talked about being “guilt-tripped.” In other words, manipulated through some clever, sneaky blow to the soft core of your good nature. Where conscience might be your internal moral compass, guilt was seen as useless hardware originating outside of you. One is elevated by conscience, but victimized by guilt.

So why do I care? Well, like everyone, I walk around feeling guilty and hate it. So this is not a purely academic topic.

I found myself this week wanting to reclaim guilt; to rehabilitate it somehow. If for no other reason than the fact that in my experience, anything universally despised is definitely worth a second look.

One thing I noticed right off was that people’s words and tone when describing guilt virtually throbbed with resentment of authority. We don’t mind being answerable to our own conscience. But we hate being answerable to someone else. Whether it is teacher, or boss, or God, or tradition, or Shabbat, or workload, or mother, we resent authority. And Mom, alas, was the figure who came up the most in the conversations. Why is this? Is resentment of authority an outgrowth of the parent-child relationship to begin with?

Our parents, often especially our mothers, are where we learn right and wrong; where we are scolded or corrected or schooled in some way when we hit or steal or lie (or, hypothetically, pour a full bottle of Bullwinkle bubble bath on the wall-to-wall carpeting). Our parents are also where we learn compassion and empathy. Where we are taught that our actions have consequences not only for ourselves but for others. In some ways, learning that we can hurt our mothers is the foundation upon which we build compassion and restraint and, perhaps, our susceptibility to guilt.

But in each person’s development comes the time that we separate from our parents. By our teen years we don’t want Mom and Dad or Mom and Mom or Dad and Dad telling us right from wrong. “Leave me alone! Let me decide!” We reject of our parents’ moral voice. This is a normal part of our growth. But sometimes, even when we’re grown, we don’t know how to shake the reflex to reject our parents’ moral authority out of hand.

The impulse to discredit Mom’s moral voice found a comfy home in the mid-20th Century American invention of the Jewish mother. This stereotype doesn’t really exist among Jews from other countries, nor did it exist in previous generations. One can speculate about how it arose. Perhaps Jewish Old World communalism was being replaced by the American mythos of rugged individualism – an individualism that, of course, was always only valued in men. And Jewish men, who were close to their mothers, and whose success was often commensurate with their mothers’ sacrifices, felt especially compelled to demonstrate to America their independence from the maternal through a whole genre of anti-Semitic jokes at their mothers’ expense. Guilt was a central theme.

A typical joke goes something like this: A Jewish mother bought her son two ties for Chanukah. He tried one on to show her. She said, “what’s the matter, you didn’t like the other one?”

This is a depiction of guilt as a form of entrapment. There is no justice here, no moral authority in her; no issue of right or wrong being raised – nonetheless the son is judged. The joke defines guilt as harsh judgment without any remotely legitimate grounds.

This is what I’d like to challenge. And I think we can reclaim our Jewish mothers as we reclaim guilt. Might it have been a plea for appreciation? Might it have been a request for chesed, for compassion, cloaked in words of gevurah, of judgment?

For sure I’ll admit that there are times that we experience something as guilt – or experience “being guilted” – when there isn’t a particularly strong moral claim involved.

But what’s often so frustrating about the guilt someone gives us, including our mothers, is that it’s exactly on point. It is the message we don’t want to hear. As my mother said to me today, “you don’t get mileage from a guilt trip if there isn’t a grain of truth in it.”

And I think that’s true. If I turned to you right now and asked, “How dare you invade Poland,” you wouldn’t feel guilty. You’d just presume I’d taken leave of my senses. It wouldn’t have anything to do with you, and you wouldn’t be bothered. Which is why I think guilt can’t be solely about them. It has to be, in small or large part, about you.

So we could say that one difference between conscience and guilt is that in the case of conscience, you were the one to realize how you messed up. With guilt, someone else points it out first. And that can be infuriating.

I asked my mother what her thoughts were about guilt. She said, “I try not to do guilt anymore.” I asked her for an example. She said, “For instance, I don’t say, ‘You could call more often.’”

And there it was, the grain of truth, the right hook to my soft spot. A thing I feel guilty about, whether she actually says it to me or not. Why? Because I know I could do better. And hearing her tell me this, I felt sad that she’d internalized this pop idea of guilt so deeply that she felt unjustified asking me for something legitimate.

Which leads to another famous trope of the Jewish mother joke. How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? “It's okay, I’ll sit in the dark.”

We all know the story. Guilt here takes the form of a test in which we are asked to figure out someone else’s needs before they articulate them, and we fail. But the punchline of this joke presumes that we are not required to have compassion for our mothers. In other words, the joke is only funny if her expectation that her children might change the light bulb for her were laughably unjustified.

But we know that’s not so. What would Torah say if Torah were asked? Probably something like this:

If thy mother’s bulb burns out, and she sitteth in the dark, thou shalt not suffer her to climb the rickety stepladder with a flashlight, but verily thou shalt change the light bulb for her, yea, even without having to be asked.

Isn’t that what kabed et avicha v’et imecha – honor thy father and mother – would require of us? Isn’t that what simple compassion would require of us?

And empathy also has something important to say about this joke. To work, the joke requires us not to have any real empathy for our Jewish mother. If we did, we might wonder why she felt she couldn’t just ask? What experience did she have with her parents or with the world or with her children to feel so powerless to ask for this most minimal piece of assistance?

I’m sorry if I’ve ruined this joke for you. But not too sorry.

The truth is, the Jewish mother jokes, largely, are not about the failings of Jewish mothers. They are about the failings of her children – our failings – and our resistance to owning them. We feel guilty about Mom sitting in the dark, because we knew we should have changed the damn bulb and we didn’t.

So instead of looking at that guilt as a spiritual punishment, perhaps we might see it as something else. An incomplete act of compassion. A moment of empathy waiting to be born. Conscience thwarted, hopefully only temporarily. Guilt is an invitation. Not an invitation to feel bad. But an invitation to learn, to grow, to be a better person.

When we feel guilty, what would happen if we took that moment to ask, “what about this makes me so crazy? If I take away the fact of who said it to me and the tone of voice in which it was said, is there something left here that I need to know or already knew?”

In the Torah portion, someone who was guilty did not just say “sorry,” shrug and walk away. They engaged in a ritual act of transformation. They offered a sacrifice. They came out of it unburdened, un-guilty.

So how can we transform our guilt into un-guilt? How can we offer it up as a sacrifice, burn away the part that is painful or just plain aggravating, and unlike the guilt offering of Leviticus, keep and digest the part that is of value. How do we transform ourselves in the process? Is there a ritual act available to us too?

As we all know, the Temple sacrifices of antiquity are over. They were replaced in Judaism by prayer; prayer, in which we offer our words and lift our voices and move our bodies in a way designed to open our hearts. So I suggest we let our words, our voices, our bodies, be the vehicle for offering up and transforming guilt.

Let us offer up our guilt and transform it into conscience, empathy and compassion. When my mother told me she no longer tells me she wishes I’d call more, I was able to say, “I’m sorry. I know I need to call more.” And just that moment was transformative between us. Guilt was transformed into understanding and responsibility and concern. Two adults communicating forthrightly about their needs and desires. And the next step will be in the world of action, using my body, my speed-dial finger, to make the necessary course correction toward my being a better person.

And sure, we all feel bad about many things; we can’t respond to everyone’s needs. Some people might have desires of us that are not reasonable. But maybe giving clear and loving voice to our limitations, our boundaries, can help transform guilt into healthy, unsticky, untangled communication.

The Hebrew word ashem, “guilty,” could be re-vowelled as i-shem, “without a name,” a “non-name.” In our tradition, your name equates to your moral stature, your reputation, the faith others can place in you. Guilt, as my friends described it all week, compromised them, weakened them, undermined their moral standing.

May we instead, at the moment that we feel ashem, guilty, i-shem, losing our name, may we at that moment make an offering. May we find the kernel of deep truth in our wave of guilt, and may we use our words, our bodies and our generous hearts to transform it into wisdom, into a lesson, into guidance, into a map, a blueprint, an instruction for a next step. In the process, may we make things even better than they were when we began. May we all have a good name in our families and communities. Priests, chieftains, peasants, mothers of children and children of mothers, we are all wise enough - we are all bighearted enough - to do this.

Photo 1: Aaron and sons lay their hands on the head of the bullock for the guilt offering.
Photo 2: A Jewish Mother (mine)
Photo 3: A working light bulb.

Purim and the Power of Unmasking

2010-02-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

This Sunday is Purim which, just a week and a half after Mardi Gras this year, is our own masquerade holiday. We celebrate by donning disguises and drinking until identities blur ("until one doesn’t know Mordechai from Haman," goes the traditional injunction). It is the one day of the year where Jewish law officially countenances cross-dressing (suspending a prohibition that would, in my other life, put me out of business).

But I think at the core of this holiday is not the wearing of disguise, but the removal of it. It is a holiday about unmasking, about the dramatic reveal.

Unmasking happens repeatedly in the story of Purim. The Dor Hadash students helped me count some of the instances: conspirators are unmasked by Mordechai; Mordechai’s heroism is unmasked to Haman by Achashverosh; Haman’s evil plot is unmasked to Achashverosh by Esther. But, most famously, Esther – at just the right moment – unmasks herself.

It’s an interesting and odd story for us. We have other biblical stories involving disguise and mistaken identity: Jacob disguised as Esau, garnering his father's blessing; Joseph unrecognizable as an Egyptian overseer, engineering the reunification of his family. But this case is odd, perhaps because it feels so familiar to us. Esther is a precarious insider in a sort-of-assimilated sort-of-anti-Semitic Persian world. Like so many of us, she has a secular name – Esther, for the goddess Ishtar – and a Hebrew name – Hadassah. And like many of us, she can pass.

Esther is the bearer of a powerful secret of identity, a truth that can only be revealed once. She waits for the right moment; perhaps she is uncertain of what is the right moment. But in her people’s great need she finally plays her cards.

I recently had the pleasure of reading another book of Esther – the poet Esther Schor’s beautiful biography of Emma Lazarus. Born to a Sephardic family living in New England since before the American Revolution, Lazarus was as assimilated as a Jew was permitted to be in 19th Century moneyed society. She politely didn’t press her Judaism, and her Judaism was, in turn, politely overlooked. It wasn’t until outbreaks of anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic shook her comfortable world that she unmasked herself – writing poetry and essays on behalf of the Jewish people. And in doing so, she unwittingly drew to herself (and in some cases unmasked) a few of the Hamans of her time.

Her writing as a Jew changed her and changed the world. The Statue of Liberty was given to the US by France during Lazarus’s lifetime as a symbol of friendship and democracy. It was only her poem, The New Colossus, that transformed it into “the Mother of Exiles” – a symbol of refuge and hope to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This was a radical idea, a Jewish idea, reflecting Lazarus’s intense commitment to Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and born of her peculiar vantage point as an outsider, an Israelite, a daughter of exiles.

So perhaps Purim is meant to remind us of our secret truths; the pieces of our blurred identities that don’t always shine through clearly. We are, after all, always masked in some way; who can possibly know all that we are? Perhaps, as midrash suggests, Esther's name is actually from the Hebrew hester, the hidden one. Each of us is hester. Each of us is hidden.

And that makes our truths all the more powerful. Like Esther, like Emma, we will have moments when we can choose to stay silent and masked, or we can unveil ourselves and speak out. In doing so, we have the chance to change the people and institutions around us. To change the world. This Purim, let us all take stock of the masks we wear, and ponder when the time might be right to remove them at last.

Photo: Queen Esther Comes Before Ahasuerus, by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1865;

Difference, Disability and the Song of the Universe

2010-02-03T09:39:00.000-08:00

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, February 2010]

How lucky for us to have spent this last weekend tuning our ears to Creation’s own songs of praise! Studying with Rabbi Shefa Gold, we chanted excerpts from Perek Shira – a mind-blowing piece of liturgy in which nearly 100 textual moments of praise, primarily taken from Psalms, are placed in the mouths of plants, animals and the natural phenomena of the planet. The effect was exhilarating and humbling. We are so accustomed to bypassing our own wide world when we offer words of praise! Instead, we conceive of ourselves as being in a private conversation with God. But Perek Shira cracks that unwarranted exclusivity open. Praise emanates from every living being, from every gust of wind, from every spiral galaxy and subatomic particle.

Perek Shira challenges us to imagine that every species and, by extension, every individual, has a song to offer. This is in fact a true challenge of imagination. We live our lives locked in our limited bodies and idiosyncratic minds. Our confinement within our familiar selves makes it hard to identify with others. How can we ever know what it is like to live in someone else’s body, someone else’s mind?

This month is Jewish Disability Awareness Month. It is an invitation to take note that all of us have different strengths and different limitations. Some of us have bodies that can’t keep pace with the activity of our minds or the desires of our hearts. Some of us have thoughts bursting like fireworks in our heads but which cannot find their way out of our mouths in the form of comprehensible speech. Some of our bodies pose staggering challenges for ourselves or for our loved ones. And still, our very existence is a song of praise to God, a Psalm to this Universe.

That is the lesson both of Jewish Disability Awareness Month and of Perek Shira. We share this Universe with each other. The peculiarities of our bodies and our minds might make us feel alien to one other. And yet, as the Rat, that most unlikely messenger, says in Perek Shira:

כל הנשמה תהלל יה

Kol han’shamah t’hallel Yah.
Every soul, every breath, is praise.

If you have ever attended our Celebrations program for children with special needs and their families (and if you haven’t, please join us), you would get it immediately. Our bodies are all different, some slightly, some quite. Our minds are all different too. But still, even so, when you open yourself up to the song of this Universe, every soul, every breath, is praise.

I am proud to be part of a community so full of difference and appreciation of difference. May our doors always be open to every soul. May we always ease each other’s burdens. And may we always hear each other’s songs.

Photo taken in West Marin County last summer.

Parashat Vayechi: Dancing in the Present

2010-01-01T16:37:00.000-08:00

[Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, January 1, 2010]

Happy new year, everyone. I love this new year, this "secular" new year. Despite our calling it secular, I always notice that people nearly universally find it a deeply meaningful passage point. Sure, as Jews we have our own High Holy Days; we do all sorts of spiritual work around it. But the world itself, at that time of year, doesn't offer us the same evidence of passage of time that this new year does. Rosh Hashanah Lam'lachim - the New Year of the Kings, this day is called in Talmud. It is the dark time of the year, but now, 10 days after the Solstice, we can finally begin to sense the return of the sun, the growing of the light. It is a New Year that is about this Creation we live in, and I think we all feel it.

On this day and the evening leading to it, we all sense something passing away and we all sense something new approaching. Isn't that why this new month is called January, after the Roman god Janus, the one with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back? Similarly we, completing a year, completing a decade, look back at our lives, our accomplishments, our failings, and we can't help but make resolutions to brace ourselves for the year to come. We might make lists of not easily achievable goals: losing weight, learning Spanish, handling money better, going to shul more. These kinds of resolutions are what Mary Poppins calls "pie crust promises" - easily made, easily broken.

Even if we resist articulating the unachievable, we still think of our lives as being marked by and measured by calendar years, and we wonder: will this be the year that I find love, will this be the year my ship comes in, or chas v'chalilah, will this be a year in which things happen that I don't want to happen. This kind of reflection may be officially secular but it certainly takes place in a spiritual realm. We look back and we look forward, and what we look forward to is closely connected to what we see when we look back.

We're very lucky this year that new years happens during our reading of Parashat Vayechi, the reading that wraps up the Book of Genesis. In it we also look forward and back. We have our last visit with Jacob, after his long life of exile and return, wrestling and reconciliation, renaming, regret, and retirement. Jacob is dying in the land of Goshen, the Egyptian province he and his sons live in by merit of Joseph's high position in the administration. Jacob calls his sons to his side and speaks a sort of prophecy to each of them. He calls out a few of them for their crimes. Others he praises. With some of his sons he predicts success or failure or a special purpose. These are Jacob's parting shots - mysterious, poetic, kind of unpleasant. He goes on to charge his sons with burying him in the Cave of Machpelah, alongside his wife Leah, his parents, Isaac and Rebecca, and his grandparetns, Abraham and Sarah. When he finishes this charge, he is at last done. Torah describes his death this way:

ויאסף רגליו אל־המטה ויגוע ויאסף אל־עמיו

Vaye'esof raglav el-hamitah vayigva vaye'asef el-amav.

And he gathered his feet into the bed, and expired,
and was gathered to his peoples. (Genesis 49:33)

I love this image of Jacob drawing his feet into the bed. His walking days, his travelling days, his footsteps in our people's story are over. And that the Hebrew uses the same verb - le'esof - to assemble, to collect, for Jacob's gathering of his feet into the bed and Jacob's being gathered to his people. At his last moment he collects himself. And then he is collected. A beautiful death, the kind we all might pray for. Calm and, well, collected.

Jacob, in his last words, looks forward and he looks back. His prophecies, his premonitions spoken to his sons, reach well beyond their immediate future. He is prophesying elements of later Israelite history, when the tribes named after these sons live side-by-side, sometimes peaceably, sometimes tensely, in the Land of Israel. His words are not exactly words of blessing, but with these worries and warnings, he is able to let go of the future.

But he also has to let go of the past. He remembers back to where he came from, the Old Country, and he asks his children to carry his bones back there, to the place where his loved ones are buried. Revealed in this request is Jacob's sense of being a stranger. His journey was long and full but it did not bring him home. And so he arranges for his past to be his future, for his bones to rest in the place he came from.

Many of us here in Northern California are also, like Jacob, transplants. We left the droughts of our youth, thirsting maybe not for water, but for acceptance, for adventure, for love, for freedom. We sought our redemption in the farthest end of this country.

Some of us, though, still struggle with conflicting senses of "home". Like Jacob, there is a cemetery plot for me in my Old Country. In Chicago. My parents bought these plots just before my father died, since the plots they already owned didn't have enough room for both their children and our partners. My life is here now. The idea of having a piece of earth for my bones 2600 miles seems silly. On the other hand, my rootedness in Chicago is deep, and I work hard in my life to try to recreate that same feeling of rootedness that I grew up with. Of course, that rootedness is itself an illusion. Two generations earlier, it was Chicago that was the new turf, replacing a tiny Russian shtetl that had become, in Irena Klepfisz's words, "the inhospitable soil."

In Torah, the Book of Genesis is our Old Country, the story of our origins. With this parashah we leave it and move to our story of redemption. What happens next in Torah? We begin the Book of Exodus with a new pharaoh and the enslavement of the Hebrews, culminating with the escape from Egypt and the crossing of the sea.

We are at the turning of the page between the narrative of our origin and the narrative of our redemption. But aren't we always at that place in our lives? The stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve is perhaps the one moment of the year when we are truly aware of the tiny pinpoint of the present in which we're living! We are always balancing on that scant moment between past and future, between our roots and our redemption, between the journeys of our past and the promised land we still dream for ourselves.

But I'd also venture to say that these are not separate places. The parashah continues just a little longer, with what seems like the epilogue to all of Genesis. Joseph also grows old, old enough to know his great grandchildren, and he also enjoins his family to bring his bones out of Egypt when they at last leave. And he dies. And later, in the Book of Exodus, when Moses and the Children of Israel depart, they indeed carry Joseph's bones with them. They bring the past into the future.

And so do we all. We drag the past with us. We have no choice. Whether we embrace it or reject it, it is part of us. Home is not the Chicago that sits in the Midwest, but the home that is in my heart, that urges me on to create a life that's solid and warm and filled with music. I cannot let go of my past to claim a fresh future. As the ancient rabbi eulogizes at the funeral of Louis's grandmother in Tony Kushner's play, Angels in America:

Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America.... No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes -- because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.

The past is in us. We cannot shake it. We imagine the future before us, but the past is there too. When we stand in this inch of Torah between Genesis and Exodus, between origin and redemption, this inch of parchment with no words, the silent place where we have to make up our own Torah -- which is, in fact, where we live our lives -- at that moment, past and future are all around us, enveloping and embracing us.

We have a tradition when we complete the reading of a book of Torah. We finish our reading and say together the words chazak chazak v'nitchazek. "Be strong, be strong, and together we will be strengthened." As if we know that in these moments of pause, this moment of the present, when when we reflect on our past and brace for our future, that those are our moments of doubt, of vulnerability. The moments when we need, like Jacob, to collect ourselves. And so chazak chazak v'nitchazek. Be strong, be strong, and together we will be strengthened.

It is the new year, the turning of the page. Every moment is the new year, the turning of the page. We balance on the page's edge, we dance in the inch of empty parchment, we kiss our loved ones and replace the calendar on the wall.

Chazak chazak v'nitchazek.

The Torah of Nature

2009-12-31T15:54:00.000-08:00

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh - January 2010]

I am essentially a city (or city-ish) boy. I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, a brand new suburb, paved over a cornfield, where the trees were all saplings chosen simultaneously with the color of house paint, and whatever fauna had once frequented the fields had been officially turned out. It was an orderly and safe place, where nature was kept at bay. I remember our excitement when the first rabbits moved in, and then the squirrels; and our dismay at the first opossums, which seemed like science-fiction versions of the rats my parents had left behind in the city.

I now live on Sonoma Mountain which, though far from being Wilderness, has been my first chance to notice Nature's constant voice. I've begun to learn the futility of planting water-guzzling imports instead of California natives. I've begun to appreciate the deer's grace and the jackrabbit's speed and the bobcat's caution. I've witnessed the destructive power of a single branch falling from a tree that was far bigger and older than I. I don't exactly feel like an intruder here, but I definitely feel like a novice.

As Diaspora Jews, we've been forcibly separated from Nature through our history of confinement to shtetlach and laws prohibiting us from working the land. We conceive of Jewish life and Jewish culture as being urban. Our prayers, after all, happen indoors.

But our texts do not require this, and those who go outdoors to pray find new life breathed right into them. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav used to require his Chasidim to take walks in the woods, and to pray their hearts not in Hebrew, but in whatever words naturally came to them as they walked under the branches and leaves.

We have another tradition, often overlooked, that has come down to us, and sits right on Page 704 of the siddurim sitting in our sanctuary. It is called Perek Shira. It is an assemblage of some of our most magnificent nature-based quotes from Psalms, Song of Songs and other Biblical books. But Perek Shira takes the extra, imaginative step of putting those quotes in the mouths of the animals, plants, rivers and mountains themselves, so that we hear all of Creation praising Creation. Our texts are moved out of the four walls of synagogues and yeshivot and are universalized -- as the voice of the Universe. So, for instance, the line from Psalm 96, "Then shall all the forest's trees cry out for you before The One," is re-set like this:

The trees say: "Then shall all the forest's trees cry out for you before The One."

Such a simple addition. "The trees say." But as it shifts the praise-filled voice from us to the trees; it invites us to be smaller -- to be just one voice in an infinite chorus of praise that constitutes the World we live in.

This is the text that Rabbi Shefa Gold will teach us during her weekend here at the end of January. She will bring her musical gifts, which Jewish communities around the globe have relied on for decades now, and her unique way of connecting song and text and Earth and spirit, to give us this teaching which she developed while on a pilgrimage to the Galapagos. We all know from the coverage of last week's Copenhagen conference the delicate balance upon which the Earth turns at this moment, and our own vulnerability when we think of ourselves as apart from or better than the Nature that gave birth to us. Perek Shira is one tool we may use to strengthen our resolve to heal the planet and ourselves.

Let's spend some time this month being aware of the world around us, as we prepare for our weekend with Shefa Gold. I look forward to seeing you there.

Toldot: Visualize and Act

2009-11-24T16:59:00.000-08:00

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, November 20, 2009]

Why me?

How often do we ask this question? In turbulent times, confusing times? It's a question that presupposes some sort of destiny, yes? That is, why ask, "why me" if there is no possible answer?

"Why me" is the simple but fascinating question asked by our mother, Rebecca, in this week's Torah portion, Toldot. Lamah zeh anochi -- "why me" -- she asks when, after 20 years of marriage, she becomes pregnant with twins who twist and turn in her belly like pro wrestlers. These are the first words we hear from her since her marriage to Isaac, and one can't help wondering if her question refers not only to the turmoil in her womb but also to the whole direction her life has taken since leaving her father's house.

Why me? During the 20 years during which she did not have a child, we do not hear her asking lamah zeh anochi? Why me? She does not plead for a child, nor does she offer her husband a surrogate like her mother-in-law before her or her daughters-in-law after her. It is Isaac, not Rebecca, who pleads to God for a child. A part of me wonders if she was just fine the way things were. After all, she had, even as a child, more charisma, more spunk, more direction than most characters in Torah. When Abraham's servant, Eliezer, went back to the Old Country to fetch Isaac a wife, Rebecca watered and fed his camels all by herself, an immense task for one person. When offered a chance to travel to a place she'd never seen to marry a man she'd never met, leaving her father and brother, she reviewed her options and essentially declared, "Fire up the camel; I'm outa here."

Rebecca is a character who seems determined to live her own life. She is, after all, the major mover and shaker in this parashah. "Why me?" she asks God, and God answers. She carries two nations in her womb, she is told, one of which shall be mightier than the other (although we're not told which), and the older shall serve the younger (which is not the same as saying that the younger is the mightier).

This is a big prophecy. It doesn't exactly answer the question "Why me?" But it is a big prophecy nonetheless, and Rebecca takes it as a communication of her destiny.

Esau and Jacob are then born and Torah fast-forwards right to their adulthood, where Jacob buys his brother's birthright for the price of a bowl of stew. We all know this story. This is a first step toward the destiny Rebecca foresees, and it happens privately, between the brothers. But the next step comes when Isaac is old and his sight and his health are failing. He intends to give his deathbed blessing to Esau, and Rebecca helps Jacob trick his father into giving the blessing to him instead. When Esau realizes what happened, he turns homicidal. Rebecca warns Jacob and sends him away to her brother, saying "Let me not lose you both in one day." But she does. She has lost Esau's love and Jacob's companionship; she will not see him again for fifteen years. But she has secured the destiny described by God as she understood it. She has seen the younger son receive both the birthright and the blessing.

History sometimes judges Rebecca's character harshly. She is seen as conniving, even though in Torah's view the outcome is God's will and even though we, the Children of Israel, are the beneficiaries of her actions. Much as the 20th Century Jewish mother was mocked by her sons for the very traits that allowed those sons to succeed.

But Rebecca is a remarkable character. Isaac, let's face it, does not add much to the story of our people. He is the creme filling in the Abraham-Jacob sandwich. It is really Rebecca, not Isaac, who is the key player of that generation. She takes up the matter of our People's destiny and acts on it, just as Abraham did by leaving home, and as Jacob did by returning home. It is Rebecca who links Abraham to Jacob. She is formidable. She speaks to God. And God speaks back. She receives prophecy. And she takes action to make the prophecy come true.

It is this bit that especially interests me. God tells her that she carries two nations and the older shall serve the younger. But God does not give her an assignment in this matter. There is nothing in God's words -- or at least in what we overhear of them -- to suggest that Rebecca is supposed to do anything. The story would still have worked if she'd just shrugged her shoulders in response, and let nature run its course.

But no, she acts. Why?

I think I might have gotten a hint from something I read this week from Pirkei Avot, our first post-Biblical book. I was preparing a discussion for the post-Bar Mitzvah class and culling some quotes from the early sages. A famous one of Rabbi Akiba's jumped out at me. He says this:

הכל צפוי והרשות נתונה

Hakol tzafuy v'har'shut n'tunah.

All is foreseen, yet freedom of choice ("permission") is given.

I was so interested in this paradox that I did what any modern Jew would do. I posted it as my Facebook status this week and watched while my friends (and my "friends") struggled to make sense of their own sense of direction. It turns out the question was as alive for them as it was for Akiba.

Rabbi Akiba, living during Roman antiquity without the benefit of Facebook, Twitter or anything, was struggling with the still-new idea of God's omnipotence. If God is truly all-powerful, then is free will really free? Mustn't our actions be somehow determined by God? If they're not, then don't we have more power than God, at least over the small, personal matters: which hat to wear, whom to marry, which ice cream flavors go best together on one cone? If we are truly freely making those choices, then God is bound not to make them for us.

Akiba seems to offer a middle ground suggesting that both truths co-exist. All is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given. Perhaps Akiba is suggesting that צפוי (tsafuy) doesn't mean "foreseen" as in "predestined." But rather something more like "envisioned." The word comes from the Hebrew root that means "to look ahead" or "to scout out." A mitspeh, from the same root, is a high place from which one can scout ahead, a "lookout." So perhaps your relationship to the future is as if you're on a mountaintop looking to the horizon. You are afforded a certain clarity of vision, at least over the broad landscape, even if you can't make out the details. Everything is envisioned. We visualize a big picture. And then permission is given each of us to control where that vision leads us. What actions we take. The skills, gifts, smarts, connections that we bring to bear on the question of here-to-there.

Rebecca had a vision. Given to her by God or perhaps divined from the turbulence in her belly. But it suggested a destiny to her, and then when she had an opportunity to bring about what she had foreseen, she did not hesitate.

Can the same be said of us? When we are in times of distress, the kind that lead us to say, lamah zeh anochi - why me? Does it lead us to new, broader vision? And does that vision lead us to action? We might not all be formidable like Rebecca. But still, does that excuse us for not acting? We all have some ideas about how things might be. For the future of the planet. For the future of Judaism. For the future of gender. We can all imagine so much. But do we take action?

Rabbi Akiba suggests that we must. He goes on to say in the next breath:

ובטוב העולם נדון והכל לפי רוב המעשה

Uv'tov ha'olam nadon v'hakol l'fi rov hama'aseh.

The world is judged kindly and according to the weight of its actions.

Another seeming paradox. Thank you, Rabbi Akiba. It contains a comforting note and a challenging note. He says to us that when we are judged, by God or by history or by us, it will be done with a kind heart. In other words, all of our efforts, our intentions, really do matter. Our vision, our hope. But, he warns, the world will also be judged by its actions. In other words, our good intentions are good but are not enough. They are not an excuse for inaction.

"Dream," says Rabbi Akiba. "And act." "Envision and do."

Rebecca envisions or foresees something about her son Jacob's legacy. And she acts, at great personal cost. Most of our visions are far less pricey to act on.

We live in hard times. Everyone lives in hard times. We all feel the struggles in our bellies. In our souls. We feel the struggles in our communities. We witness the wrestling of ideas. And sometimes the older, stronger idea is not the one we want to see succeed. We recognize that our future lies with the newer, gentler idea, and that will require our care and our action.

Lamah zeh anochi we might ask at any such time. Why me?

If there is a "why" then the answer lies somewhere in your ability (our ability) to envision - to see the horizon, the great landscape - and your ability (our ability) to act in the here, the now. Think globally, act locally, says Rabbi Akiba somewhere on a bumper sticker.

May we all see far. May we plot our course in the direction that calls us. May our good intentions fuel but not replace our actions. And when we look back on the path we struck, and judge it, may we be proud.