D.I.Y. Song of the Sea

This week, the week of Shabbat Shirah, we read the Song of the Sea. (Exodus 15:1-21.)

The Children of Israel stood at the Red Sea; Pharaoh's army closed in. Deep water ahead. Horses, chariots, spears behind. Every Israelite there thought this was the last moment before death. And, after giving up on the possibility of defense or escape, after giving up on the certainty and habit of living, the unexpected, the unexpectable, happened: a miracle. Or a low tide that hadn't been properly forecast. However it happened, the possibility and promise of life came flooding back. They crossed - on dry land or hoisted by angels; it is unclear. On the other side, after the waters surged into place and the pursuing army was destroyed, there was a terrible silence. And then Moshe and the people began to sing a song. The Song of the Sea. It came to all of their lips simultaneously. They sang, and then Miriam and the women took drums and danced. This celebration was necessary before the business of the next journey could begin.

So what is your Song of the Sea? What is the danger that you escaped? The illness you recovered from? The crisis that was resolved or averted? The thing that didn't end well, that stung, but nonetheless you survived? The decision that brought you to where you are, but in retrospect you see it could have gone terribly wrong?

All these things are important. Worth noticing. Worth celebrating.

So here is a Do-It-Yourself Song of the Sea, to help you do just that.


INSTRUCTIONS

• Answer Questions 1 through 5 on a separate screen or sheet of paper.

• Read the subsequent words of celebration, plunking in your answers for Questions 1 through 5 as directed.

• Modify or improvise to make it fit and to make it one degree more honest.

• When you finish reading it, go back and read it again more fluently.

• Add some melody or a sing-song tone of voice that you make up.

• Keep singing the melody, even after you're done with the words.

• Take a drum or a tambourine or a saucepan and wooden spoon and dance around your house, singing and drumming. Throw key words back in if you wish.

• Repeat the whole exercise whenever you escape danger or come through a hard time. At the very least, do this once a year on Shabbat Shirah.

QUESTIONS

1. Describe, in one sentence, a danger you escaped.
      ____________________________________________________________
      ____________________________________________________________

2. Name a personal quality or strength that enabled you to escape this danger.

      ____________________________________________________________

3. Name another personal quality that enabled you to escape this danger.

      ____________________________________________________________

4. Name an ancestor or mentor or favorite great aunt who shared those qualities.

      ____________________________________________________________

5. What is the most surprising part about escaping this danger or coming through this experience?

      ____________________________________________________________


INSERT YOUR ANSWERS HERE, INTO YOUR PERSONAL SONG OF THE SEA:

I sing a song to Adonai the triumphant, for ______1_______.

_____2______ and _____3______ really saved my ass. And I am grateful.

Because those qualities in me didn't come from nowhere. Adonai gifted them to me. Just as Adonai gifted them to _____4______.

_____2______ and _____3______ are two of Adonai's faces. And Yah is Adonai's name.

There was a moment when I feared I was lost. A moment where I thought there was no escape. But despite the odds, _____5______.

I will surely remember this experience. But the pain and fear of it shall be absorbed into the great waters of my life until they are ripples on a gentle sea under a warm and soothing breeze.

This survival is glorious. This survival is holy. Who is like you, Adonai, who holds my head above water?

When I next meet such a danger, it will be different. It will turn tail and flee. Because I am stronger. I have crossed the sea and made it to the other side.

This is my song of gladness. This is my dance of joy. This is my gentle victory lap. These are my humble thanks.

I sing a song to Adonai the triumphant, for ______1_______.

And my journey continues.

From the Valley of the Shadow of Death

On Leadership, Gentile In-Laws & Recovery from Loss
For Congregation Ner Shalom ~ January 17, 2014

A shadowed road. Hampstead, London. Photo: IEK

It's good to be home I think. Although I am suffering from performance anxiety tonight, wondering how to even form words at this moment. Because I am freshly back from shiva, having dusted and vacuumed and locking the door behind me on the house I grew up in, a house only ever lived in by Kellers, standing now without occupant for the first time since 1958. A house that, like me, has undergone a great loss but doesn't yet feel that way.

After the cascade of events of these past 8 weeks, I ought to have something of value to say, or so I suppose people to think. But my head is aswim, and it's not clear to me that I have gained insight. I expect that insight, if it arrives at all, will come only in the long haul.

And besides anxiety about content, I have anxiety about topic. Because I have already delivered two drashot and a eulogy about my mother. Who really wants to hear more? Her death is painful  to me, but it doesn't objectively constitute tragedy. She lived a long life full of love, including the love of many people here. She affected people for the good. She died at a reasonably ripe age, even if her youthfulness made it seem oddly premature. No, not tragic. Whereas our community here and my own circle of friends have in fact seen tragic deaths in the past weeks. People dying young, leaving behind spouses, children and parents too. Deaths happening in an order that they should not happen; in a way that I suspect is not strictly necessary in the divine scheme of things, unless it's to teach some lesson about noticing the preciousness of life. But if so, it's an awfully high pricetag for mindfulness.

So instead, I imagine, what I should do is get on with business. The sermon business. And do what is done universally in the Jewish world when at a loss and talk about this week's Torah portion. And it's a good one, culminating in the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.

But it begins with a visit to Moshe by his father-in-law, Yitro, the High Priest of Midyan. Yitro tracks down Moshe and the Children of Israel in the wilderness, where they have just escaped the slavery of Egypt. Yitro praises God by name, a name and worship which some scholars speculate we got from the Midyanites to begin with. Yitro offers gratitude for God's benevolence. And then there follows much hugging, feasting and weeping.

Then the next day dawns and, surprise, it turns out to be "Take Your Father-in-Law to Work" Day. Yitro watches as Moshe spends every waking hour sitting and adjudicating the disputes of the Israelites, and there are many, considering that they are all displaced and disorganized and facing unprecedented difficulties. Moshe sits from dawn till dark and Yitro, his father-in-law, is appalled. He appeals to Moshe, explaining that this locating of leadership within a single individual is not sustainable. Moshe seems to know this but doesn't know how to break the cycle. Yitro presents him with a new system in which there are judges over the tens and appellate judges over the hundreds and then the thousands, with Moshe as the court of last resort, never again to listen to a small claims matter.

Yitro's idea was one that perhaps Moshe could hear because it came from outside. It was new,  not an inherited idea. It didn't come from Moshe's parents or his priestly brother or prophetic sister. It came from his father-in-law. His non-Jewish father-in-law. And perhaps that's the function of the gentile in-law in the Hebrew mythos. They are a source of newness, of freshness. Yitro, like the famed Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth, is not of the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob line. Instead, Yitro and Ruth represent the new idea. And they are beloved - their contributions lead to greatness. Yitro's advice to Moshe immediately precedes the moment of revelation at Sinai; it seems to ignite our people's ability to give (or receive) a system of law, that very Torah that has formed our identity and worldview for millennia. And Ruth, for her part, is depicted as the great-grandmother of King David and is, according to tradition, to be the ancestor of the Messiah. Naomi's gentle, gentile daughter-in-law, with her unexpected fount of kindness, becomes our people's source of future redemption.

In any event, Yitro's teaching to Moshe is about the sharing of leadership. And that, I can guarantee you, is a hot topic on the world's bimahs tonight. And, after all, it's New Member Shabbat here. How could anyone resist making a pitch for new leadership? Because as you might perceive, this community is growing - we have twice as many households as we did five years ago. But our leadership has not doubled. Instead, we largely see the same small group struggling to keep up.

And there are so many things we could be doing! Not just services. Not just classes or religious events. We could be streaming. We could be making a CD of our music. We could be visiting sick community members, fitted with songs and casseroles. We could be doing nice, easy stuff - bike rides or bagel brunches or bowling nights. Chances to just hang out as Jews, or mostly Jews, together.

So let me tell you about how this conversation then goes at our Kavanah Committee, which is our spiritual life planning committee. It is this synagogue's most active and successful committee, because it meets monthly over breakfast, and breakfast makes all the difference. So at the table someone has or relates an idea for something we can do. Something brilliant; and sometimes super easy. Something we really think people would respond to. Then the question arises who can put this together? And we all look at each other, knowing that everyone at the table is spread too thin with their Ner Shalom leadership commitments. Most at the table are already on the Board or on the bimah.

So up comes the idea of calling the membership and asking who would be willing to take the lead on this idea. After all, we have "new member forms" for everyone - we know your interests and skills. Plus everyone knows when they join, that this community will need a little of their time. So we all smile at the certainty and relief that just the right person (or almost the right person) exists in our midst already. Then someone asks, "Who can make the calls to find someone?" And we all stare at each other, knowing we're all spread too thin to sit and make those calls. The panic slowly rises. A clock somewhere in the restaurant begins to tick loudly, until someone says, "This is why we need a Volunteer Coordinator. To make these kinds of calls." And again we're elated as we all agree that somewhere at Ner Shalom is a Volunteer Coordinator waiting to be plucked like ripe fruit from the tree. Then someone asks who can make the calls to recruit a Volunteer Coordinator. And we stare at each other some more, keenly aware of the spiral of self-pity now in motion, our tears dripping into the remnants of our French toast. Until the Kavanah meeting begins to look like Moshe's reunion with his father-in-law, characterized by hugging, feasting and weeping too.

So on this week of the Yitro visit, this week of the breath of fresh air that says, "Others can lead too," how can I not make a pitch, and say, "Please, share the leadership here with us?" Don't stand on ceremony. Don't wait to be called, because we might just still be stuck at a breakfast table trying to figure out who, if anyone, has time to pick up the phone. Just step up. We need you. Newcomers and old-timers alike. Not hard labor. Just gentle leadership. A single event. A single project. A single idea. Honor us with your wisdom and your sparkling skills. And if you notice it being hard for us to accept your help, forgive us and gently remind us of this night and of Moshe.

So there. A pitch for your leadership was just the right thing to do tonight. Both legitimate and timely. And it got me out of my sermon-writing bind. So that I wouldn't really have to report back on the way that my life is now different, and not different at the same time.

Because it is different and not-different. Surreal. As if I accidentally got sucked into an alternate universe, where everything is the same but my mother does not exist.

You know, over my life I've had thousands of opportunities to recite Psalm 23, the calming psalm, The Lord is My Shepherd, that one. Still waters, green pastures. I recite it almost daily, and I continued to do so at each shiva minyan at my mother's house. But I think I am now understanding in a way I never have, the bit about walking through Gey Tzalmavet, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Gam ki elech b'Gey Tzalmavet lo ira ra. "Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil," says the psalm. I used to think this passage was about the fear of dying or the fear of death. When I'm afraid for my life, God is with me. That's what I was sure the psalmist was aiming for.

But now I'm no longer certain. Because it is now, after my mother's death, not in anticipation of it, that I feel like I am walking in Gey Tzalmavet. I am shadowed by death. Death's shadow obscures the road ahead. It is not an evil road that I'm on. Just a shadowed one. And a strange one, because it makes the routine things seem out of place. If I sent a postcard from Gey Tzalmavet, it would say something like, "Everything here is just like at home, but the people are so perky."

Tzalmavet, the odd Hebrew compound word that means "shadow of death" could also reasonably be voweled and read as tzalmut - and it would then mean something more like "self-image" or "identity". From the root tzelem, that we use when we say that we are made in God's image. Walking the path, after losing parents, as many people in this room know, is a challenge of tzalmut, of identity. Who am I now? What does it mean for me to be me, now that none of being me can be about pleasing my mother or rebelling against her for that matter? Who am I now that I am on the front edge of the generations? Who will I become? How will I change? When I look at my reflection in the mirror, will I see more of her now, or less?

Gam ki elech b'Gey Tzalmut, lo ira ra. But as I walk through the valley of this precarious new identity, I will not fear. Because it is not an evil road. Just a shadowed one, hard to see around the next bend.

So that's the report. When people ask, "How are you," I've begun to simply say, "The jury's out." I'm sad, I'm bewildered, I'm busy. But, lo ira ra. I'm not afraid.

Holy Ground

For Congregation Ner Shalom, and dedicated to the nursing and therapy staff of Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital ICU and Neurology Ward. 

I’ve begun to take off my shoes at the hospital, in Mom’s room. I’ve taken to wearing slip-ons for just this purpose. I’ve gotten comfortable here. It has been three weeks after all, and our departure for the new adventure of a skilled nursing facility is imminent. Here at Memorial, I know at least 40 nurses, doctors, therapists and respiratory techs by name. I know many more by face. I know the other most ardent bedside vigil family. We ask each other in passing about our loved ones’ progress; we answer with noncommittal mutterings about daily improvement – amejorándose cada día, gracias a Diós.

I know the long traverse from bedside to bathroom to lobby to cafeteria. I love the cafeteria food, even though it’s not really any good. I look at the beige, crusted over fettuccini with vegetables, and I think, “Oh, it’s a bad night for the vegetarians.” I think that until my eyes wander over to the tuna casserole and I realize that it’s a bad night for everybody. But the food here is cheap and made with sincerity, geared to feed hungry healers and anxious families, and I can taste that straightforward intention. Less than four bucks later, I’m back in Mom’s room, with a paper bowl of salty beans and rice and another of carrots and, fortified, I can feel the kitchen staff at my back in this great recovery campaign we’re waging.

Mom has by now ended up in a private room. Not really private, just roommate-less. The staff has been deflecting incoming patients to other rooms, because they’ve grown fond of Mom, and her smile, and her laugh, and her family and friends. They know we take up space, what with our books and our guitars and our food baskets and photos and Shabbat candles and smuggled Manischewitz.

This big, half-empty, soon-to-be-abandoned room has been imbued over this short time with a kind of holiness. You can feel the room awash in it. So many people have brought so much love into these four walls. And Mom absorbs it even when it wears her out. We have chanted and read stories and coaxed out of her real pitches and good stabs at pronouncing Gershwin lyrics with her limited inventory of 5 vowels and 3-or-so consonants.

There is a holiness in this room. The simple drama of life and death; the undeniable power of word as demonstrated by its absence; the play of kindness, of chesed, mitigating the otherwise unchecked tyranny of biology – all of this carries a force that feels epic and ancient – and holy. There is a sense of the divine in moments of peril. “No atheists in a foxhole,” they say. But I think what they mean is that you can’t stand on that precipice of life and death and not feel the mix of hope and dread that accompany danger. It may or may not be God, but perching on that threshold of such elevated awareness brings with it an undeniable swell of grandeur.

Mom’s condition indeed has an epic, ancient quality – a biblical resonance. My friends Dawn and Eitan Weiner-Kaplow pointed out to me this week that her left temporal impairment is even described in Psalm 137, the “waters of Babylon” psalm. The passage goes, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning; may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy.”

My mother has never forgotten Jerusalem nor, to my knowledge, taken any vow re same. Still, the context of the psalm – a song about grave loss – is apropos. She has, like the Israelite captives in Babylon, lost her home. She has lost use of the Temple that is her body. How can she sing her old songs in this admat nechar, this foreign soil, both the foreign soil of California and the new, still uncharted normal of her own body? First she must learn to sing again, period.

There is much to lament in her situation. But grief and hope and uncertainty are as holy as joy, and this room is palpably holy, so much so that I have begun to remove my shoes, like Moshe in this week’s Torah portion, Shemot. Moshe, escaped from Egypt and Pharaoh’s wrath, is now a shepherd in Midyan. An angel appears in or as a bush that burns but isn’t consumed. (At Hebrew school I asked the kids what that means. I asked who had a fireplace at home. Many hands went up. One small girl piped up proudly that her family has two fireplaces. I asked her, “So what happens to the wood that you burn in the fireplace?” She responded, “I don’t know. Neither of them works.”)

In the Moshe story, it’s unclear if the bush is meant to be a miracle, or just a mechanism for getting Moshe’s attention. In order to perceive the bush wasn’t turning to ash, he must have not only noticed it but stared at it for some period of time, perhaps hypnotically, perhaps meditatively, or maybe just full of scientific curiosity. In any event he slowed down, drawn into a different kind of time, that holy kind of time that can move very fast or very slow, like Alice getting big and getting small in the rabbit hole, but either way her attention getting drawn to the unusual details around her. Once Moshe slows down to this unusual shrinking and expanding pace, only then is the space around him declared to be admat kodesh, holy ground. And then, at that point, the shoes became superfluous.

I asked the students why they thought there would be a “no shoes” rule in a holy place, since it seems to be somewhat of a universal, whether the holy place is a mosque or my German grandmother’s apartment. Some students were concerned that shoes would mess up the site, leaving unsightly and disrespectful Nike prints. Someone else suggested humility – that in the presence of God we are like paupers before a great monarch; our shoelessness symbolizes that.

But there’s also something else about how our feet, so seldom permitted nakedness, feel. Our hands touch and manipulate the world all the time; they are for fiddling as much as for feeling; their sensitivity is tempered and they are not to be trusted when testing the bathwater. But our feet, so often sheathed in leather and canvas and rubber are, when unleashed, open and guileless. Our feet feel for real; they transmit sensation purely.

Which makes our feet sensational organs for perceiving holiness. Whether the ground is soft or hard, dry or moist, carpeted or tiled, when we slow our tempo, like Moshe did studying the flame, we can feel so much from our feet. We can divine energy emanating from the earth’s core, pouring up through our bodies, northward like the Nile, and overflowing like the proverbial cup of Psalm 23. From earth into body into spirit, with our feet as key synapses. This is the energetic conduit that runs from sole to soul.

I was listening to “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” on NPR the other night. It was an episode called “Religion in a Secular Age.” They played comments from callers about religion and one caller said, “Every day when my feet hit the floor I experience the divine.” By which he seemed to mean that he felt the divine from the moment he got up in the morning. But the metaphor, in which his feet closed the circuit, really struck me.

I think how my own favorite moments of the High Holy Days have come during ne’ilah, the closing of Yom Kippur, when I give up any pretense of keeping shoes on, and stand before the closing gates in my white Hanes athletic socks, trying to suck the holiness of the moment right out of the ground.

Being without shoes also allows me to climb into Mom’s hospital bed once in a while to comfort her through a bad dream or some troubled breathing. My stocking feet let me make the move from chair to bed smoothly, without it having to be a conscious decision about care management or propriety. My feet simply lead, and I follow.

We have a long road ahead. My sister and I are hunkering down. Mom is improving, and the doctors have retracted their direst speculations about the cause of her hemorrhage. If she continues this way, God willing, we will at some point step off this elevated threshold, step back from the precipice. Will our feet feel the holiness even then?

In the Torah portion, after Moshe’s shoes are off, after he and the bush have some important chitchat about slavery and freedom etc., Moshe asks the name of the holiness that surrounds him. God does not reply, “I am El Shadai, the God of the Mountain.” Nor “I am Haborei, the Creator of the World.” Not even “I am Hamakom, the World Itself.” But instead something much vaguer, at once both a brilliant circularity and an outrageous copout: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. “I am what I am.”

Which I choose to take as an invitation to notice the divine at any time in any circumstance. “I am what I am,” “I am where I am,” “I am when I am.” Holy ground is not a specified place to which one must make pilgrimage. And with all due respect to Shabbat, holy ground is not limited to one day a week. Yes, you might feel it extra on Shabbat, or in Jerusalem or Mecca or Rome or at the lighthouse at Point Reyes. You might feel it extra in times of great danger, in life-changing times. But it is also there in the ehyeh asher ehyeh experience – in the “whatever” moments.

As we move off this precipice and on to the next phase of Mom’s recovery, I am going to look for holy ground in the skilled nursing facility, in the rehab gym, in the first swallows, in the words of slowly increasing intelligibility and even in the frustration and tears when they don’t come. I look forward to Mom’s – and all of our – admat nechar, foreign soil, becoming admat kodesh, holy ground.

To do this I will try to remember to take off my shoes. Not my literal ones. But to remove whatever barriers stand between me and the holiness of this existence. Whether the barrier is leather or crepe; whether the barrier is work or worry. I will do my best to remove the barriers that sheath my soul, so that I can feel the holy ground beneath my feet. Whether that holy ground is a hospital room or a cafeteria or a  sidewalk or workplace or hiking trail. Or sitting in the car with an unexpectedly dead battery on an inconvenient day or some other stupid predicament.

After all, Moshe found holy ground on the roadside himself, chasing a lamb that got away from him. Inconvenient. Unexpected. He probably felt stupid. And even so, he ended up on holy ground. He just slowed to the flow, staring at that bizarrely intact bush defying the laws of thermodynamics. And I too will try to see through those inconvenient, unexpected, stupid moments to spy what lies beyond them. And maybe I’ll keep wearing slip-ons too, just in case.

Six Degrees of Inspiration (An Introduction to Shoftim)

(I was asked to introduce Parashat Shoftim at the San Francisco launch party for the new Reboot book, Unscrolled: 54 Artists and Writers Wrestle with the Torah. I was charged with setting the stage for David Katznelson, author of the entry for Parashat Shoftim. David wrote about Otha Turner, a fife-and-drum blues performer from Mississippi, who has been an inspiration to David and who is, to David’s mind, a modern-day prophet. I was allotted one minute.)

At the Unscrolled launch, surrounded by the unrolled scroll.

Now we careen toward the end of the Torah scroll, where Moshe will breathe his last breath. In that moment, Torah tells us there would never again arise in Israel a prophet like Moshe, who spoke to God face to face.

Torah also tells us God spoke to Moshe mouth to mouth. Not mouth to ear, as you might expect. But rather God’s non-corporeal, metaphysical mouth pressed to Moshe’s waiting lips, in a great Hollywood kiss of prophecy.

But post-Moshe, what are we left with? Prophecy now comes in a flash, in visions and dreams.

Talmud says our dreams are 1/60 part prophecy. One sixtieth: a tiny but not insignificant bit. After all, one-sixtieth part treyf spoils the whole pot of soup. One sixtieth is small but mighty.

In an hour of our dreaming, there is a full minute of prophecy. In the 360 degrees in which we envision our lives, there are six degrees of inspiration.

But how do we know which six degrees?

Shoftim tells us right here: if a prophet speaks words of prophecy and the words come true then it is true prophecy but if a prophet speaks words of prophecy and the words don’t come true then it was never prophecy to begin with. Kind of circular, but also kind of wise. We may have a gut feeling, but time will tell. Time will tell.

And who can be a prophet? It does not need to be a monarch or a celestial being or a Messiah or an extra-terrestrial. But instead Shoftim says it will be someone mikerev acheyhem – someone of the people, of the community. Someone kamocha – like you. Yes, you. Really. You.

Meaning, I think, that prophecy will come to us, if it does, each in our own language and our own medium.

So the scholar might receive her prophecy as a flash of insight; and the preacher as a sudden, inspiring rhetorical flourish. The painter in the studied but still impulsive brush stroke. The storyteller in an improvised and heartbreaking twist of plot. And the blues singer in the poetry of the lament and the discipline of the fife and drum.

And how will we ready ourselves to be prophets? We will live the full 360 degrees of our lives. And dream the hours of our dreams. We will do our best work, each of us in our own language and our own medium. We will keep our ears open – or maybe our lips. And then time will tell. Time will tell.

 

A 140-character reduction of this introduction was also tweeted as part of a Reboot project to crowd-source Torah thought, portion by portion. Check it out and join the conversation using hashtag #Torahin140.

Founders' Syndrome and the Ethical Will

For Congregation Ner Shalom

So when I read the Book of Deuteronomy, I confess I get kind of bummed out. Don't get me wrong, I also get plenty bummed out in Leviticus. But for different reasons. Leviticus, with its baroque elaboration of laws: impartiality and impurity and sacrifice and sex, some of it beautiful and universal, some of it punitive and painful; Leviticus, with its repeated refrains of "I am Adonai your God," presents itself as God's word, as direct as we can get it, despite the lurking presence of unnamed and invisible editors. I read Leviticus, and know that I am stuck with this difficult text, which is a very Jewish predicament; and I struggle with it, which is a very Jewish privilege.

But in Deuteronomy, I get bummed out for Moshe Rabenu, Moses our teacher, our great prophet and liberator, making his final speeches to the Children of Israel before they pass into the Promised Land which, Moshe obviously grasps, he will not be doing with them. We are still in the wilderness, but only barely. It is year 40 of the Great Wandering: the 40th year, 11th month, 1st day. Just one moon away from leaving behind nomadic life and becoming instead conquerors, occupiers, settlers and farmers. The life of Israel is about to be unrecognizable. With fewer exceptions than you can count on one hand, there is no one left in this mass of humanity who remembers the slavery in Egypt or the Parting of the Sea. In fact, there's no one who can even remember receiving the law at Sinai except perhaps in a vague and unsettling childhood memory.

This is the final chapter of Moshe's story and the fulfillment of his great work. In partnership with God he changed history, he changed the world. But unlike his Partner, Moshe is about to be left behind. At his death, a few chapters from now, Torah will say that there never arose in Israel another prophet like Moshe. And I suspect Moshe foresees this. He and God had something special, for sure, seeing each other face to face like they did. There would never again be anyone who could know God's will with such certainty or could relay God's word with such credibility.

But there's also something amiss in what should be Moshe's triumphant moment. As he redelivers God's laws, he does so with an extra punch. In this week's portion, Parashat R'eh, he places blessing and curse before the people, offering reward for obedience to God's mitzvot, threatening punishment and death for those who transgress or who worship other gods on the sly. This stuff coming from God in Leviticus might be problematic, but the problem is theological. This stuff coming from Moshe in Deuteronomy is somehow personal and somehow tragic. One hears in it Moshe's sadness and anger and fear at his own mortality.

Poor Moshe. Who am I, nebuch, to pity him, yet I do. Moshe was great, but also tragic. And while other tragic figures like King Lear overtrust the future, Moshe undertrusts it. And so, with nothing short of desperation, he tries to control what will happen next by promising and lecturing and threatening and cajoling. All that we have are his words, which can be interpreted in various ways. But if Deuteronomy were a movie, there would be reaction shots of Israelites listening to him, and we'd know a bit more by seeing whether they were filled with the fear of God, or impatience at Moshe's long speech, or a mix of love and sadness for this lonely 120-year-old man, now in his dotage.

Moshe seems to have a case of what, in the non-profit world, we might call "Founder's Syndrome." He founded the Israelite people as we know them; he did the immense, unimaginable task of leading them - perhaps hundreds of thousands of them - out of slavery and away from their homes and the only life they'd ever known, to reconstitute them with new identity and vision and ambition.  But now Moshe digs the heels of his sandals in deep because he knows change is coming. He doesn't think there is a successor equal to the task of leadership. And he doesn't see the possibility of the people as a whole exerting authority, even though the people who will experience this new life are, arguably, more qualified to step up and lead than Moshe, who can only guess at what the future might bring.

Moshe responds to his not knowing by trying all the harder to control. A calmer, saner Moshe could not possibly have thought that a law that says, "neither add to nor take away from my commandments" could ever be workable. With all due respect to Justice Scalia, one cannot legislate the principle of "no change ever." Yet Moshe makes this very demand as he stands before the people, fiercely protecting what he brought into the world while, my heart imagines, envying, even begrudging the people the future that they will enjoy. Moshe, our Founder, insists that it must happen his way; he can only imagine disaster if it doesn't. 

Of course what also makes Moshe's desperate clinging to his work product tragic is that there but for the grace of God goes any one of us. We all like things to go our way. We all want our contributions appreciated and remembered; we all want legacy; we all want our thumbprint on the future. It is in our nature; perhaps because our spirits feel eternal to us, despite the mortality of our bodies. It seems natural to want to be part of whatever happens next.

But we are all mortal. We all stand at the brink of death, whether that brink is a day or a decade or, God willing, much wider. And most of us realize that we can't orchestrate the doings of things and people that will outlive us. Change will happen, change has to happen. Our successors will do things differently; they will have to. And certainly Moshe knew this. In fact there is a famous midrash that when Moshe ascended the mountain to receive the law, God temporarily transported him to the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, living millennia later, where Moshe Rabenu sat in the eighth row and didn't understand any of the Torah that Akiva taught, despite Akiva calling it Torat Moshe, the Torah of Moses.

Who knows, maybe it was that very vision of a strange and unintelligible universe that made Moshe clutch the Torah that he knew all the tighter.

So in an ever-changing world, what thumbprint can we hope to have on the future? Perhaps the best any of us can do is embodied in the Jewish custom of the ethical will. A message to the future that embodies our values without coercing adherence to them. I have had cause, sadly, to hear the reading of some truly beautiful ethical wills. Full of advice and humor and encouragement and vision. Revealing what moved the writer's soul, written with the hope that it might move the reader's as well.
I think that is the best we can hope for. To provide an ethical legacy, in writing or through our deeds, communicating the great principles that inspired us.

Maybe the Book of Deuteronomy is in fact Moshe's ethical will, albeit a flawed one. And if so, then I think that perhaps the great principle that drove him was kedushah, the holiness that he breathed in when he saw God face to face. This is what inspired him and what he wanted for us. But, growing up in the palace of Pharaoh, his toolbox for constructing kedushah on earth contained more law than poetry. How different might it all have been if Moshe had grown up not in the home of a monarch, but of a musician or a midwife or a mystic? Perhaps the ethical lesson he would have taught would have been closer to one shared in a 14th Century ethical will written by one Asher ben Yechiel who wrote the very opposite of what Moshe expresses in this week's portion. Instead of saying, "I have set before you blessing and curse," Reb Asher writes to those who survive him, "Do not obey the law for reward, nor avoid sin from fear of punishment, but serve God from love."

Ultimately, if we are going to be of service to the future, we must leave a legacy of love and of hope and possibility. Nelson Mandela, right now only 25 years Moshe's junior, will, when he goes, leave a legacy not about how to govern a people but about the possibility of freedom and equality and love. And it will then be other people's jobs to find the right vessels for those values.

We can't see all paths; we certainly can't control them. Still, we owe the future our best efforts - our love and care, even without knowing what the specifics will be. None of us is timeless. Moshe was the leader for his time. We must be the leaders for ours. And we must let future generations lead in theirs. If we are to be prophets, let us be prophets who reassure those who come after that there is always the possibility of making this world better. As it says in the book of Isaiah, mah navu al heharim raglei m'vaser mashmia shalom. How pleasant the footfalls of those who, climbing to the peaks, peek into the world ahead, bearing messages of peace!

Death, Moses and Late-Breaking Change

(For Ner Shalom Malakh, February 2009)

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. I often do - especially when flying, which I do so very much; or when I'm drifting off to sleep. I am jarred by death's extravagant unpredictability - airplanes ditching into icy rivers without a soul lost; a beloved rabbi dying of heart failure at 65 after a lifetime of meditation, prayer and daily exercise. I do my own secret math, and am now on the losing end of it. No matter how many resolves to exercise more (or even at all), no matter how many hopeful assessments of my genetic heritage, there is indisputably less time ahead than there is behind. Decisions of years ago have hardened into irrevocability, and I now meet the thought of spontaneity with more suspicion than I'd like to admit.

And then there is the thing itself. The nagging, unfathomable thing. What is the completeness of death? What happens to all we've experienced and learned? Snuffed out like a match? Expelled like a puff of air from a burst balloon? What happens to my memory of loved ones whom no one after me will have known? How unfair that these good people should be forgotten! And what of my giddy love of Hebrew verbs or how I thrill at certain Debussy chords? Where does all that personal intricacy go?

It doesn't strike me as odd that I think about these things. What is odd to me is that the fear doesn’t simply paralyze us all.

In this month's batch of Torah portions, the Children of Israel make a late break for it. They are old in the land - that is, they've been in Mitzrayim for 400 years. Life is misery, but it is also habit. Leaving is a mystery and the outside world seems an oblivion not unlike death.

Moshe, whom we think of as young and impulsive (an accidental vigilante who killed an Egyptian taskmaster) or middle-aged and formidable (on the Barack Obama model perhaps), is actually 80 years old at the time of the Exodus. He has already lived what any of us would consider a good, long life. He grew up in a palace, became a fugitive, and ended up a shepherd in Midian. He had surely already foreseen how the end of his days would go - in peace, he hoped, tending the sheep, amusing his grandchildren, until death found him.

But at age 80, Moshe was transformed and in turn transformed the world around him. He came upon a bush aflame. With the patience of age, he studied the bush long enough to see that it was not being consumed. A young, impulsive Moshe might not have noticed. A young Moshe might not have realized that the fire was a vision and that the ground beneath him was holy.

So how do we, busy counting down our own days, remain alert to the possibility of great transformation, even at this late hour? How do we keep our eyes open to seeing visions and our ears open to hearing a call? How do we maintain our belief in the power of our own actions, even as we understand less how to work our computers? How do we believe in new beginnings even as our work lives, family lives, and personal idiosyncrasies seem so deeply etched in us?

We can start by looking to Moshe and his late-life change. He didn’t start over from scratch. He brought his work life with him. From being a shepherd of sheep he became a shepherd of his people. He brought his family too, and in times of challenge was inevitably flanked by brother, sister, wife, father-in-law or children. He brought his idiosyncrasies also: the entitlement of a prince, the alertness a fugitive, a short fuse, and a fear that he couldn’t speak with the clarity he needed. Moshe didn’t trade in his past. He brought his entire biography with him into his greatest work. He did not change as much as metamorphose. He took what he already had and became greater, more open, more powerful.

Change, growth, transformation. All these are possible at any age. Relinquishing one’s past is not required. To a caterpillar, a butterfly may be an unrecognizable species. But the butterfly knows it carries the caterpillar within it. The change that seems inconceivable to you now will seem natural and inevitable once you’re there.

Let us not give up at any age on being greater, more open and more powerful. May our lives be continual transformation and growth. So that when death does arrive, and may it be a very long time from now, we may meet it proudly, knowing that we spent every moment of our lives, even the evening hours, becoming.