Parashat Vayechi: Gathered to his People

For Congregation Ner Shalom ~ Jan. 2, 2015

Rembrandt: Jacob Blessing Joseph's Children

I had a chance to be at the ocean last week on a surprisingly bright and warm Dillon Beach day. I stood on the sand and watched the waves. The ocean extended itself out toward the dunes, and then gathered itself back. I had a moment of wondering which of these was the positive space and which the negative. With each expansion of the sea, the earth would contract. And with each contraction of the sea, the earth would seem to expand. There was no net gain or net loss. Instead, always some element to fill the space.

These thoughts came back to me as I read this week's Torah portion, a very beautiful piece of Torah, the last bit of Genesis, in which Jacob bids farewell to his children with prophecies and character assessments and then expires. His death is described poetically. So poetically, in fact, that, as Rabbi David Kasher reminds us in his Parshanut blog this week, there is some mystical uncertainty whether Jacob ever died at all.

The key phrase that jumps out is this:

ויכל יעקב לצות את–בניו ויאסף רגליו אל–המטה ויגוע ויאסף אל–עמיו

Jacob finished instructing his children. And he gathered his feet into the bed, breathed out his last, and was gathered to his people. (Genesis 49:33.)

There is something striking about the repetition of the Hebrew verb asaf, "to gather," within the verse. The first instance of it, Jacob's gathering of his feet into the bed, is a detail that is intimate and physical. Whereas his being gathered to his people is majestic and metaphysical.

But this is Torah, and the repetition of a word means we are supposed to relate the two iterations to each other, equate them in some way. So the two instances rub off on each other. Jacob's intimate drawing of his feet into the bed is lent some extra grandeur and dignity. And the stately moment of his death is imbued with coziness and warmth.

This verb asaf, "to gather" was also used earlier in this same passage of Torah, at the beginning of the scene. It says:

ויקרא יעקב אל–בניו ויאמר האספו

 
Jacob called out to his children and he said "gather yourselves." (Genesis 49:1) Or slightly more literally, "be gathered."

What light does this instance of the verb shine on Jacob's death? There's something about gathering together. That Jacob's death is not just a parting, but a kind of coming together.

My mother's death last year also had a "gathering" quality to it. From the moment of her stroke, loved ones, including many people here and many people far away, came together for her. To witness, to help, to soothe. They gathered in her hospital room until they overflowed into the hallway. They gathered on Facebook, watching for posts like villagers in the square, awaiting the town crier. And when she died, they showed up in Santa Rosa to chant and in Chicago to mourn.

But it's not the attendee count that is significant in this idea of a death being a kind of gathering. Because whether we are a community of 100 or a family of 50 or a household of a scant handful, death has a way of stripping away our differences. We all look more alike in the presence of death. We see beyond and underneath our squabbling to what we share - our mortality, our physicality, our fear, our love of life, our love - period. When Jacob says, "be gathered" to his children, he doesn't just mean that everyone should show up in the room, but that they should allow themselves the closeness that our day-to-day differences sometimes impede.

If we look beyond the book of Genesis, we find other instances of the verb asaf that could color our understanding of Jacob's death. Sometimes it's used in an agricultural sense - gathering grain, collecting fruit. Now imagine Jacob's death in that context. His life had sprouted, grown, flowered and fruited. And at the age of 147 - the ripe old age of 147 - his soul was at last ripe for the plucking. And he was gathered.

Other times asaf is used in the sense of drawing back, or drawing something back that had already been offered or extended. Sometimes it's physical, like when King Saul says to the High Priest,

אסף ידך

Gather your hand, meaning "draw back your hand." (1 Samuel 14:19.) And sometimes it's a more intangible image, for instance in the book of Joel, in a prophecy about the end of days:

לפניו רגזה ארץ רעשו שמים שמש וירכ קדרו וכוכבים אספו נגהם

Before God the earth quakes, the heavens tremble, the sun and moon grow dim and the stars gather - i.e. draw back - their brightness. (Joel 2:10; repeated in 4:15.)

In both these examples, something that was given is being retracted. The priest's hand, the light of stars. Here asaf, to gather, implies a drawing in of something that had already been emanated outward. Jacob's life had been radiated into this world; now it was being pulled back.

The idea of a soul being emanated into this world and drawn back at death is more deeply developed in our Kabbalistic tradition. In that cosmology, the soul is made up of three components (18th Century Rabbi Chayim Luzzato and others say five but we'll keep it simple). The neshamah soul is sourced in God and at the neshamah level, this root level, we are all connected. The ruach soul is the conduit that reaches into this world. And the nefesh soul is the one most identified with our physical being and this physical world. It is our personality; it is what we're referring to when we say, "Oh this Mogen David shpritzer is so good for my soul."

When we die, our mystical story goes, this nefesh soul is cut off from the neshamah and the ruach which are busy retracting into the Oneness of God, like the recoil of a snapped rubber band. The nefesh will follow as well, but it is so identified with the joys and pains of this world, that it lingers for a year. It is, according to our tradition, the presence we sense in a deceased loved one's absence.

I can testify to this as can anyone who has lost a parent or a close loved one. Just this week I emerged from the first year - first solar year - of my mother's death. And for this whole year I have felt her close. She has crowded my thoughts, visited my dreams, sat in a place of honor for holidays and simches. Whether that is her nefesh staying close out of love or disorientation, I couldn't say. Or maybe it was simply me, stuck in the deep, never-before-broken habit of having a mother.

Either way, the truth is that I do feel a little different this week. I have experienced every landmark of the calendar now without her. And I feel somehow lighter or freer or less pained. I noticed it yesterday on a new year's walk. She was in my memory, in my thoughts, in my enjoyment of the day. But in a different way that I can't quite describe.

I'm now in an in-between state. The solar cycle has completed. Yet, because of the caprices of the Hebrew leap year, I am given another two and a half weeks to mourn, to be an avel, with Mom's first yortzayt falling, ironically, on my father's birthday. And there it is: another gathering. Mom and Dad, he'asfu. Be gathered.

I think I now feel Mom more integrated into me. Her memory stirring pleasantly in my own nefesh. Which makes me wonder something else about Jacob's death. Torah says, vaye'asef el amav. "He was gathered to his people." We naturally read the reference as being to his predecessors - Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca. Even his dead wives, Leah and Rachel. But Torah doesn't say "his ancestors," and Torah could have if Torah wanted to. Instead it says "his people," which is a term devoid of chronology. It does not need to refer to the ones who came before him. It could refer to his successors: to us! We call ourselves Am Yisrael, the People of Israel, Israel being Jacob's AKA.

At the moment of his last breath, Jacob was gathered into us. And sure enough, here he is still. We carry him inside us. We tell his story. We reënact his life, with sibling tensions and work struggles and heavenly dreams and love foiled and love found and wrestling matches and tearful reunions and an enduring ambition to scratch out some legacy for a world we can't yet foresee. Jacob is withdrawn from this physical world; he is gathered into us and we continue him. The magic of the gathering is that, like the waves and the shore, it is not a net gain or net loss, but a rearrangement, a reconfiguration. Jacob's death is a contraction. And with it comes an expansion in our souls, as his memory comes to be ours, as he comes to be a person not of this earth but of our spirit. 

And maybe that is true of all our losses; they do not create emptiness, even if they seem to at first. They form space, maybe early on filled with grief, but later, we hope, filled with love and memory and whatever values and stories and jokes our lost loved ones imparted to us, making us the next great souls whose goodies will in turn belong to others.

One more instance of this tricky verb, asaf, relevant to the question of loss. We read this in Psalm 27:

כי–אבי ואמי עזבוני ויי יאספני

My mother and father have left me, and Adonai gathers me in.

Adonai gathers me in. Into an embrace? Maybe God exposes the fullness, the God-ness, of the now-vacated space where father and mother once were. Where they had been, like Jacob, plucked from the vine, retracted like starlight in reverse. And where we look to see emptiness, we find some fullness too. After all, God has a soft spot for spaces that look empty but are full. God has created whole universes inside just such places.

And in this shmitah year, which we talked so much about over the High Holy Days, this fallow year, maybe it will become evident to us that the space we create by curbing our compulsive tinkering in the world is not empty space after all. But full of God or love or spirit. It is not a hole but a wholeness that we find.

May we all gather and be gathered. To each other. To our loved ones who are here. To our loved ones who are gone. So that even as we say, when we must, "Goodbye Mom," we know we are saying "Hello Mom" as well.




Dedicated, as always, to Marilyn Keller.

Marriage and Mysticism in a Less-Gendered World

Dedicated to Anne Tamar-Mattis, a hero of equality for all genders, on the occasion of her birthday.

What a week! With the Supreme Court knocking down the Defense of Marriage Act and also confirming the undoing of California's Prop 8. It is a week to celebrate the freedom to marry, and to rethink what marriage means, and perhaps to wonder why this institution has been so inflexible.

I was re-awakened yesterday to the deep assumptions that we all hold around how marriage operates, and the importance of gender dualism in that conception. I was doing some business in town, and I happened to refer to my partner, my spouse, as "my husband." I paused for a moment to savor the deliciousness of a previously forbidden term. The other person, earnestly celebrating with me, asked, as a follow-up question, "So are you also a husband, or do you think of yourself as a wife?"

It took me a moment to realize this person was not being flip or phobic, but was really wondering how one organizes the institution of marriage in this new era. And the question is, in fact, a deep and pertinent one. The terms "husband" and "wife" are obviously gendered, but not neutrally so. That is they represent a composite of competing  and opposite characteristics, each associated with a gender. I know that what follows sounds old-fashioned, but I submit that it is alive and well and is probably the nemesis of many well-meaning modern heterosexual couples. "Husband" has and continues to suggest breadwinner, protector, perhaps even at times philanderer. "Wife," on the other hand, connotes, well, servant. I could say that nicer - something about productive activity in the domestic sphere, but really we all know the the activity of a "wife" is to meet the needs of husband and children. And a marriage traditionally requires (or thinks it requires) both of these opposing elements. The words "husband" and "wife" are loaded - perhaps irremediably so. So while the court says a marriage of two men or two women can exist, it is unclear, culturally, whether a marriage of two "husbands" or two "wives" can.

Now gay people have often used these terms over the years - but mostly with imaginary quotation marks around them. Lots of us used to call our partners "husband," in ironic mimicry of an institution we were not in fact invited to join. And I've known overworked lesbian couples to sigh over a well deserved cocktail and say, "Let's face it. We need a wife."

But this week is a good week for marriage, not just for LGBTQ people, but for everyone, for the institution itself. Because it is now clear that marriage must be able to accommodate relationships that are not built on the idea of the oppositeness of men and women. Because - as my friend Anne finds herself having to point out again and again - men and women are not, in fact, opposites. Still, that's what we learn. Ask a child, "What's the opposite of boy" and they will say, "girl." But boys and girls are far more alike than they are different. I don't know what the opposite of boy is. Nebula? Lunchbox? Whatever it is, it is not "girl".

In fact, there is very little in this cosmos that has an "opposite." Is a positve charge the opposite of a negative charge? Protons and electrons? I don't know if these things are opposites or just different and attracted to each other. Are matter and energy opposites or just different? If darkness is the absence of light, is it really light's opposite? Or is that like the difference between thighs and lap? It's a lap when there's something on it, and thighs when there isn't? That doesn't make lap and thighs opposites. Left and right might be opposites, but only conditionally so - if you're on the North Pole, both left and right are alternative ways to go south. The truth is, much of what we consider the basic elements of cosmos and cognition that oppose each other, don't quite, upon closer inspection.

And yet we've really played, or overplayed, the idea of opposites in our understanding of the world. We can't see a duo without inventing a duality, a pair without a polarity. Part of this might in fact be the result of a world in which we perceive much pairing - there is predominant (but not complete) gender dimorphism, there is apparent (but mostly superficial) bilateral symmetry in the body. In any event, it has somehow been convenient in our cultural and intellectual history to divide the world into two, along just about any axis you can name. There are two kinds of people in this world: people who divide the world into two kinds of people and people who don't.

The truth seems to me that we are all complex; our internal makeup, our interactions with each other, are all multifaceted and unique, even if there are generalizations that can be drawn. The question is knowing when to let go of the generalizations. When does dividing the world into men and women make sense? At an exclusively heterosexual mixer? Maybe. At the gynecologist's office? Less than you'd think. In quickly organizing groups for a school activity or a synagogue responsive reading? Never.

Men and women are not opposites, but represent part of a spectrum of variation of the human body. Yes, there seem to also be some differences in behaviors and preferences, at least in the aggregate, but the extent to which those are chemically versus culturally driven continue to be a source of controversy.

In any event we keep deeply wanting to divide the world in two, and for the two sides of the dividing line to stand in opposition to each other. Somehow that conveys both dynamism and stability for us. Then we apply that model of opposition to as many binary distinctions as we can dream up. And because gender has played so great a role in our culture, we tend to gender those oppositions. "Hard/soft, intellectual/emotional, strong/weak" - even though in real life, among our families and peers, we know darn well that those distinctions are often misapplied.

And yet we draw them, we gender them, and we pit them against each other. One of the places where this is done extensively, and with undeniable beauty, is in our Jewish mystical, or kabbalistic, cosmological system, which relies on the 10 sefirot of the Tree of Life. This scheme, which represents the flow of Creation, or perhaps God's internal mechanics, is visualized with a central vertical axis, which holds 4 of the ten sefirot, or elemental or spiritual hubs. Then there are three that sit to the left and three that sit to the right. The ones on the right are associated with maleness; the ones on the left with femaleness. The central column contains elements that represent a balance or synthesis of the two previous opposing sefirot. So, for instance, the right, or male, side includes chesed - compassion and kindness, which are considered externally focused - ways of interacting with the world. Opposing it on the left or female side is gevurah, representing strength and discipline which, even though in Western gender archetypes seems male, is here female, reflecting an internal focus. All human characteristics and tendencies end up lined up on one side of this gender-divided tree or the other.

Now I say this is beautiful, because from inside its own cultural context (a hetero-normative world, in which the cosmos was primarily described and theorized by men), having Creation resemble the meeting of the sexes, making Creation resemble heterosexual intercourse, is both daring and arousing. What drives the world to exist is desire, arousal! The attraction of opposites for each other. The dynamo of Creation is based, for instance, on the desire of power to merge with kindness, wisdom to unite with understanding, the masculine to unite with the feminine.

The metaphor is beautiful and romantic. But it is a metaphor, a souped-up yin-yang, thesis-antithesis. It is a metaphor, and sometimes we forget that. I was once at a kabbalistic study session in a town full of hip Jews, a town I shall not name, but it sits next to Oakland and begins with a B. There I challenged the idea of our having to gender the seemingly opposing forces of the kabbalistic tree of life. I said that for many of us - people who are transgendered, people who love in a same-sex way, maybe some intersex people who choose not to think of themselves in traditional gender terms - the system doesn't have the same fire to it; we can understand it and speak in its language, we can understand how the tension of duality is supposed to work, but it doesn't feel like it's representing some essential truth about gender. The responses I received were surprisingly defensive and angry. I was told that the Tree of Life doesn't represent actual biological sex but rather everyone's internal masculine and feminine.

But of course, that doesn't answer anything; it just begs the question, at least for me. Moving the male-female divide from the social world into one's internal world is no less problematic. People who are used to being strongly gender-identified will be expected to naturally identify with that "side" of their personality, even if they are supposed to imagine containing both sides somewhere internally. Telling a man to access his feminine side reinforces the gendering of certain qualities; if he wants to access his nurturing nature (in the broad social scheme) or his sense of gevurah (in Kabbalah), he still needs to cross a metaphorical gender divide; he needs to pass through an internal mechitzah. In other words, instead of seeing himself as a beautiful mix of human (and/or divine) qualities, he instead is being asked to see himself as a person with easy access to Quality Set A (the "male" qualities), and so more effortful access to a suppressed, or remote, or hidden Quality Set B (the "female" qualities). And the only reason Quality Set B is presumed to be hard to access is because he is male. So even if this male/female quality divide is conceived of as internal rather than social, it still reinforces the idea of a divide, and that he belongs on a specific side of it. For someone like me, who has always felt rather like a Switzerland in this presumed "war between the sexes," the metaphor holds no power, and the clear divide of qualities that is supposed to exist inside of me feels untrue, unnecessary, and puzzling.

I do think the Kabbalistic imagination is beautiful and brave. On Shabbat eve it is the custom, originating with the mystics, but now universal among Jews, to open the door and greet Shabbat, imagined as a bride. Most people hear the song that embodies this image, Lecha Dodi, and they imagine us as her bridegroom. But that's not the case. Shabbat is associated with Shechinah, the female-personified, experiential, immanent aspect of God, and also with Yisrael, the People of Israel. Us. We are the bride, on the way to consummate our marriage to the Eyn Sof, the masculine-gendered, remote and unknowable God of the Cosmos. The thought of all these bearded mystics, all men, in their male-only academies, imagining themselves to be God's bride - well, that just pleases me in all sorts of ways. They were able to see the gendering of the system as a metaphor not tied to biological sex or lived gender perhaps more than we can. Whether or not that made a difference in the lives of their real-life wives is unknown. But still, they used their male privilege to imagine themselves not-male. And that's worth something in my book.

But for me, the important thing is that seeing the world as a series or system of dualities is artificial. It might be based on some observations of the world, but it is a tremendous metaphorical leap from some very select elements of existence. Why pairs? There are other elementals that come in other numbers. There are three primary colors. What if our mystical concept of the world involved threes. Everything was either of the blue sort or the red sort or the yellow sort - every emotion, every behavior. Or the four archetypal elements - water, fire, earth and air? Or the directions? "Ah, strength, well that is very north. Mix it with passion, which is very west, and you get bravery, at center-left." Couldn't we imagine a system like that? Or what if we wanted a system that accounts for predominance of certain types or phenomena, without denying the legitimacy of the less frequent? How about a mystical system based on prime numbers? Each one is equally unique. But they are not equally prevalent. The number 1 is ubiquitous, 2 is associated with half the universe of whole numbers; 3 with a third of them. And then there are some of us who are a 17 or a 71 or a 457. We are all similar to each other, we are all magnetic poles of some sort, each with a similar pull, but exerted in all directions. We are all similar, but some fit into more common types, and some don't. And wouldn't that make a better metaphor for Creation and for the flow of shefa from the Eyn Sof into our world? A mix of infinite unique elements, in unequal proportions?

So back to marriage. I'll stop short today of wondering about whether pair-bonding at all makes sense in the world that we live in. I'll stop short of wondering if community, intimacy, childrearing and legacy are best served by a pairing of two people, as opposed to loosely associated and mutually supportive single people, or even a more closely bonded kibbutz-like group, such as my own remarkable family. I'll stop short because why rob this week's marriage victories of their sweetness by wondering if marriage is still relevant. And I'll stop short because I'm part of it too. I understand the romance of finding someone who feels like your bashert, even though I don't actually believe that any of us are specifically destined for each other. I understand the pull and feel the romance, and I've benefited from them for sure.

But I will say this: that same-sex marriage does hold the possibility of destroying traditional marriage, in ways that will accrue to the benefit of all partnered people, straight or gay. Because we bring to marriage an idea of complementarity without polarity. Marriage can no longer rest on assumptions of how each partner will be, based on the dictates of their sex. Every marriage will have to be seen fresh, and assessed on the basis of each person's gifts and each person's needs without regard to gender. Just as racial integration has benefited every institution that opened itself up to it, so marriage will now be enriched. Spouses, partners, maridos, can now be a team that does not require husbandness and wifeness in order to flourish. We can at last exorcise the antiquated dybbuk of gender roles from the body of marriage. Modern heterosexual couples have been trying to do this for a long time; now they do it with the added support of a surge of thousands of new married couples for whom organizing their relationships without reference to traditional gender roles is not just a progressive anti-sexist step, but an utter and definitional necessity.

A friend said to me today, "marriage is never equal." Meaning that at any moment, in any sphere, one partner is demanding and one deferring. Compromise, negotiation, respect, complementarity. Those will always be part of marriage and of the flow of this Creation. And we don't need oppositeness to make it happen.

Shabbat shalom.

PS. I'm available for weddings. My husband handles my bookings.

Very important insights in this essay flowed from conversations with Eli Herb, Janet Shifrah Tobacman, and Anne Tamar-Mattis (with whom my conversation is constant and delicious). I am also grateful to Yael Raff Peskin, who helped me fix a rather glaring error which, now that it's fixed, I'm too embarrassed to identify!

Releasing Our Angels (Thinking About Steve Norwick)

What do we say, what do we do, when the unthinkable happens? When we imagine "the unthinkable" in the abstract, there is always some actual, specific picture. It is inevitably a thinkable picture that we conjure up, perhaps so that we can plan for it, or so we can steel ourselves against its possibility. Maybe we imagine the unthinkable because it is simply in our human nature to do so, the way one scratches an itch until it hurts, because it feels so much better then when you stop.

But the unthinkable, by definition, never happens in the way it does in our troubled daydreams. It is always plainer, and more physical. It is bigger than we imagined and smaller too. It doesn't come with a swelling soundtrack telling us when it's okay to cry. It happens fast enough to make our heads spin and then its protracted consequences unfold with nauseating sluggishness.

So it has been this week for all of us in the Ner Shalom community, the Sonoma State community, the biking community and the Norwick family. We are still trying to wrap our brains around the reality of what happened to Steve last Friday. It was real, more horrible and more matter-of-fact than anything our wandering minds could have come up with in our unguarded hours.

The actual moment of the accident is no longer important; the road, the bike, the driver, the drift into the shoulder. At five days out, these details are long gone. Yet our minds return to that moment again and again and again in disbelief and anger and despair. We re-conjure the horror of it because we don't know what else to do. Steve remains unconscious and cannot be visited. The family is well tended at the moment. So we, Steve's many friends and relatives and colleagues and students and former students have constituted a sort of community of people who are simply waiting, when our instincts tell us to act.

The thoughts of some turn to the driver and his behavior - not stopping, continuing with his workday, etc. - and then race quickly to a place of pressing, persistent anger. "Justice," our minds cry, without really knowing what justice is in this case. For who among us has not been behind the wheel of a car that has drifted into another lane? Or done some other stupid or absent-minded thing that was more dangerous than we knew. And while we all fear being hit by a vehicle, the dread of hitting a living person is even more terrifying. At least it is for me.

Did the driver have a stroke? Is his seeming mental impairment a charade? Could he have been drunk? These are things we don't know, at least not yet. The answers to these questions will not make anything better, and may just compound the sense of senseless tragedy we're already facing.

So "justice," we cry, because there is nothing else to do. Stephen remains in a coma. There is no smiling Steve to receive and acknowledge our wishes for healing. We pray for his healing, but also fear that we might be saying goodbye and that our goodbye will not be the full, open-hearted mutual leavetaking we all hope for in our relationships.

Yes, an unthinkable thing has happened for which there is no course of action and no consolation that is even remotely satisfying.

So we go about our lives and do the things we do. Work, eat, study. So I studied this week, which I do regularly with a partner in Boston. We've been reading the teachings of the early Chassidic master, Rebbe Elimelech of Lizhensk. Elimelech seemed to have made a project of looking at Torah not as story but as a source of encrypted insights. For him the words, not the plot, were the vehicles that carried messages about what mattered most to him: tzidkut, being a tzaddik, being a righteous person, an enlightened person, a fair person in this world. And so when considering the opening words of this week's Torah portion, Shlach Lecha, which go:

שלח לך אנשים ויתרו את ארץ כנען

Shlach lekha anashim v'yaturu et eretz K'na'an... 

"Send out people and they will journey the land of Canaan," Elimelech exhibited no interest in the story of Moses and the scouts he was told to send into the Promised Land. Instead he wondered what those specific words meant as a teaching about tzidkut - about living a righteous life.

Rebbe Elimelech knew very well that in Torah, angels are often referred to as anashim, "people." (With our modern eye we might instead say that there are people who act in ways that cause us to ascribe them the title "angel.") For example, the angels who visit Abraham and Sarah to announce the conception and birth of Isaac are never called "angels" (malakhim) in the text; they are merely called "people" (anashim). This gives rise to a free-floating suspicion in reading Torah that any "person" or "people" mentioned as such could be angels in disguise or somehow divinely directed.

So Elimelech explores what it might mean to "send out angels." There is teaching in Judaism that every mitzvah you engage in - that is, every commandment or perhaps every act of justice or kindness - creates an angel. Is this meant literally or metaphorically? In the mystical mind that distinction is not a clear one; we exist in physical and metaphysical worlds all at once. But whether this belief is literal doesn't really matter; the result is the same.

Our deeds have effect. They transform the world around us in perceptible or imperceptible ways. Our acts of kindness, our acts of compassion release ripples of consequence.

Rebbe Elimelech goes further. He says angels are born not just of our righteous acts, but of our words themselves. Or at least our words when we are acting with true tzidkut, with great righteousness. He says:

אנשים הם הדיבורים של הצדיקים אשר נבראו מלאכים מכל דבור
Anashim hem hadiburim shel hatzadikim asher nivre'u malakhim mikol dibur...

"People are the words of the tzaddikim (the righteous); from each word angels are created." He goes on to parse the rest of the sentence from Torah - the bit about the "people" being sent to journey the land of Canaan - to suggest that our words-turned-angels go out and do work, that they travel on and do something to the terrain itself. He suggests they subdue some of its harshness, taking advantage of a linguistic similarity between "Canaan" (kna'an) and "subduing" (hakhni'an).

Our right action and right speech, as the Buddhists would term them, give birth to angels. And those angels journey the land, changing things. There's no mystery to this. We know it in our lives. We see the effects of our fair and kind actions versus those of our angry actions. This is why I love that Stephen's family, instead of asking the community to demand justice (in the revenge-y sense of the word), they have asked people to engage in just acts. In a recent post, Steve's daughter Sara said:

If you are thinking of my father today, you could do something Steve-like: pick up a piece of garbage, bring cloth bags to the grocery store, leave the car at home, read a poem, go on a hike, have a teaching moment, refill your reusable water bottle or, of course, put on your helmet and go for a ride.

There is so much at this moment that we don't know. So much we fear and so much we yearn for. So much that still has to play out. But in Steve's honor, let us follow both Sara's and Rebbe Elimelech's advice. Let us make angels of litter-clearing and angels of resource renewal and angels of diminished carbon footprint and angels of teaching moments and, yes, angels of the swift freedom of the bicycle. In Steve's name, let us unleash all our healing angels upon the world.