Harvesting the Story

If you're looking for my Kinsey Sicks farewell, click here. 

Parashat Vayera, 5775

Haven't we talked about this story enough? About Abraham and Isaac and the mountain and the knife and the stories before and after? We rehearse it year after year. It's a scarring story, situated amidst a series of scarring stories.

But the reason we talk about it every year is because this is the harvest. Every year we harvest the same crops in the same order, arranged according to the seasons. As the days get short and a whiff of winter night penetrates the longing-filled warm days, we go out into the fields of our stories and we harvest Vayera. We pluck Abraham at his tent, welcoming visiting angels, right off the vine. We harvest a bargain with God. Fire, brimstone and a pillar of salt. The miraculous birth of a child named for laughter is now perfectly ripe for us. The exile of a handmaiden and her son to near-certain doom, and their surprise salvation. On the ground, heavy, unwieldy and tangled as a pumpkin is a test of the obedient Abraham proctored by a trickster God; a test with no clear rules and no clear winner, bringing in its wake the death of a mother, the lifelong guilt of a father, and the shattered innocence of a child.

Every year, under this harvest moon, we haul in the same crop. And every year we try to figure out what to do with our mixed bounty. Do we boil till soft or stew till chewy? Do we carve it like a jack-o-lantern, yanking out its innards and leaving just a hollow smile? Do we simmer it on the stove with many, many cups of sugar until it gels? Or this time do we let it sit and rot, thinking to be done with it already, only to see that it nonetheless becomes food for something or other and, tended or not, in-tended or not, its seeds live on to sprout again for the next cycle around.

This year I honored the harvest by making my first marmalade ever. While America imagines its autumn as epitomized by squash and acorns and other earth-tone yield, in my garden the Meyer lemons are bursting into their third or fourth ripeness of the year, the color of a canary and bearing a scent sweet as springtime. I skinned and boiled 10 of them, alongside our synagogue's etrog, to see what it would be like to have jam made of four ingredients: fruit, water, sugar and symbolism. This particular wizened etrog is a tough messenger, a shaliach, from Israel, arriving at our doorstep like the emissary of a false Messiah, announcing to the remnant of Israel the dawn of a new age. It is a symbol of hope, of the longing of our hearts, and it also has an edge of bitterness, like all who dare to hope experience at some point in their lives. It is a bitterness that is the price of the very practice of hope, but not an argument against it. Because maybe even if today's redemptive idea fails, tomorrow's might prevail.

   

So I took spring and fall, hope and bitterness, sweetness and causticity, and let them bubble together in the pot, browning and caramelizing and softening till I had a candied symphony of flavors and intentions. Our world's complexity, spread on toast.

Vayera is also a harvest with some toughness and bitterness. There is some sweetness, but also a taste of sulfur and salt in the middle. This portion is in some ways an anti-acquired taste. Stories we swallowed whole as children become increasingly unpalatable as we get older. The exile of Hagar, the destruction of Sodom, the binding of Isaac. Our forebears and our God don't come off well. Even the seemingly empowering moments - Abraham getting the better of God in a bargain over the lives of Sodom: if there are but ten righteous people the city will be saved - turns to a feeling of cheat when we realize that God the omniscient certainly knows that ten just people cannot be found.

Still, every year we haul in this crop and we peel and slice and chop and stew and stir. Sometimes we look for ways to make it okay. But drawing meaning is not the same as making something "okay." Our texts are challenging and we can be grateful to the rabbis of antiquity and to our long and uncompromising oral history that these texts were not cleaned up, but instead arrived in our scroll with all their beauty and ugliness. They challenge us; they might embarrass us; they could trigger us - and it is hard for a story of a father with a knife not to be triggering. They might resonate with our personal or familial traumas or our political struggles. But we can be grateful these are not the feel-good stories of Disney. And while we can turn to midrash - or create our own - to make the moments of violence or unfairness in the stories seem somehow fairer, maybe that is not always our job. Maybe our task is not to sweeten but to integrate these stories, just like we are required by this life to integrate all of the bad and the beautiful things that happens to us and around us in this world, and to use those experiences as the soil from which the next thing can grow.

Maybe this year the key is not what we collect in our baskets but who we collect them with! After all, you can make marmalade alone, but you can't do the whole harvest by yourself. You need bodies. People walking side by side through the rows, each person carrying and sharing their own experience and their own stories. Maybe this year we want to be listening to each other's stories. After all, I hear the Abraham story every year. But have I heard your story?

What if we were to hold Vayera in our consciousness while discussing each other's experiences of violence or of trial? If we were to think of Abraham while hearing each other's stories of being tested? If we were to feel Hagar in our bones while hearing each other's stories of exile and estrangement? If we were to hold Sarah in our hearts while we talk about trying to parent in a world that is unlike the world we grew up in, not knowing when to create a safe space by being soft and when to clear it by being savage? If we were to imagine the destruction of Sodom while learning about people's desperate and creative work to avert environmental disaster? If were to hold Isaac before our eyes while we listen to people's stories of personal survival. If we were to do these things, if we were to hear each other's Torah this year, how might the Torah we've received on parchment come alive in a different way and spur us on to new connections and insights and energy?

We don't hear enough of each other's stories. We are used to hearing "stories" that are obviously rhetorical devices, told by every politician running for office. We are used to seeing "stories" on TV or film that are inventions, that make the challenges ahead of us seem more benign, more amusing or more hopeless than they need to be. Visionary activist Caroline Casey would call these toxic mimics of story.

But real stories. Stories told by people who are not like you. When was the last time you heard those? Stories that are hard to hear? Stories that feel shameful to tell? How might we grow beyond our expectations if our roots can reach out that far?

So this year, how about we harvest each other's stories as well. And let's cook 'em all up together: the bitter and the salty and the sweet too, and let's see if they can sustain us. Let's see if they can fuel us to a better future than the one we're careening toward right now, than the one we're experiencing now.

It seems we are not just heading toward disaster; we are in active disaster - for our species, for the rest of the species on earth, for the earth that birthed us. But as Caroline Casey reminds us, "some seeds only sprout after cataclysm, flood, fire, ordeal." Just because there is hard stuff ahead doesn't mean there isn't something better coming.

I'm tired of feeling frightened of the future. I'm tired of hopelessness. The game isn't over yet.  There's a new generation already arriving, ready to get down to work. So let's start talking.

And who knows? Next year's harvest might be different for us all. And it might be delicious.

Shabbat shalom.


I am grateful to Michael Lerner, Oren Slozberg and the gorgeously dedicated and creative people at the Commonweal Fall Gathering for trying to make me think bigger this week. It's a start.

Guest Drash: Kashrut, Bacon and Higher Values

While I was off performing in Minneapolis last weekend, I asked Shari Brenner and her daughter Nora Brenner-West to leader Shabbat services at Ner Shalom. Below is Shari's beautiful drash on Parashat Shemini. Shari has a Masters in Public Health and has worked in health care, primary HIV prevention and services, for over 25 years.  She is the administrator of a large Community Health Center providing primary care services in the impoverished Latino neighborhood of Southwest Santa Rosa. She is also the recent past president of Congregation Ner Shalom and my good friend.
 

When Irwin asked me and Nora to lead services tonight, of course my response was “absolutely not.” Sure, leading services is just facilitating moving from one part of the service to the next, but the drash is the scary part. I could never live up to Irwin’s standards, could never be so funny, could never do the research he does, could never understand the parsha the way he does; I don’t even really know the rules for HOW to do a drash.  So I asked him how to start, who to read, what the rules were, and he said something like “I don’t read other people’s thoughts because I feel like I’m copying.  I just share my own thoughts, even if it often begins with how I don’t want to talk about what the parsha is about.

Okay, so I read Parshat Shemini, and let’s see how this goes.  This parsha has two major parts to it.  The first part is Aaron’s sons making some sacrifices and offerings, and the second part includes the rules of Kashrut.

The first part: Aaron’s sons. 

Two of Aarons’ sons made several sacrifices and offerings, following the specific directions that God gave them, using the right animals, the right type of fire, the right vessels and the offerings were accepted.  Then, they made an additional offering that God had not told them to make, and they were immediately and fully consumed in the fire of the offering.  This was fairly upsetting, as it doesn’t seem like they did anything wrong, had any mal-intent, or broke any rules.  They just made up a few of their own -- they just embellished a little.

I have no clue what this means, so I won’t talk about this part.

The second part: Kashrut. 

The rest of the parsha outlines the rules of kashrut-what animals, birds, and sea creatures can and cannot be eaten, and God tells us to follow the instructions so that "you shall be holy, for I am holy."

I have lots of thoughts about Kashrut, both about following the rules, and about food itself.  As Jews, these are two very important cultural concepts, right?  So let me share just a little about where I came from.  I grew up in a kosher home, following the rules.  We ate only kosher meat and never mixed milk and meat.  We had five sets of everything: dishes, silverware, sponges, towels, dish drainers.  The five sets were for milchik (dairy), fleishik (meat), milchik for Pesach; fleishik for Pesach, and a set of fine china – fleishik – for when we had company.

Whenever friends came over and tried to help clean up, they were invariably chastised by my mother for putting a knife in the sink, wiping up with the wrong sponge, using the wrong towel, putting the dishes in the wrong place, etc.  In time I learned to warn friends just not to try to help in the kitchen. 

I grew up in a kosher home, and I was very proud of knowing and following the rules.  I’m sure I didn’t give it much thought, they just were the rules and I followed them.  I followed them as my parents changed them a bit, but I followed their logic, so I followed any new rules I learned.

When I was 15, I got a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I learned that a kosher home means only the INSIDE of the home.  When there was chicken left unsold at the end of the night, I would bring it home to my anxiously waiting parents and sisters and we would eat it on the front porch. Okay, but the INSIDE of the house was still kosher, my mother insisted. 

Fast forward through the next 25 years, outside of my parents’ home; making and sharing homes with many roommates, a few partners, Jewish and non-Jewish, each home having different “rules” about food.  During those 25 years, I was acutely aware of every single morsel that passed my lips that was unkosher.  My emotions ranged from the rebellious “see, I can eat this and nothing bad happens” to feelings of loss, sadness, or maybe some guilt?  Perhaps some longing for the certainty, the safety, of knowing and following the rules?

Over the years, I inched closer to vegetarianism, even called myself an almost vegetarian, and got to about 95%, but never quite made the full commitment until Nora was about 3.  We were visiting Martha’s Vineyard, and out of the blue, she asked, “Mama, when you were little and you ate meat, did you kill it with a very sharp knife?” Later on that same trip, we were walking along a lagoon, when a large school of beautiful fish sensed us and hastily swam away.  Nora looked up at me, confused and hurt, and said, “Mama, why did those fish swim away.  Don’t they know we’re vegenetarians?”  Okay, my 95% vegetarian diet became 100% for the next 12 years.  That felt right, and was a relief, as in addition to not killing animals and decreasing my environmental impact, one of the benefits of a vegetarian diet was that I could keep kosher.  No more conflict.  My vegetarian home is a kosher home.  My timing was such that I was the one of the grandchildren who inherited my grandmothers’ dishes, because they were kosher dishes.  Sure, my kids would order meat in restaurants, but that’s no different than Kentucky Fried Chicken on the porch, right? 

Well, actually I was 99.9% vegetarian, not quite 100%.  Sometimes people supersede animals.  When my grandmother put chicken soup down in front of me, I ate it.  When my 85 year old Aunt Ruth served me gefilte fish, I ate it.  I have always been clear that respect for elders, and others’ gifts, is a higher value than vegetarianism, or even kashrut.  But even those rules are clear, easy and comfortable to follow.

Many of you know that my daughter, Cybele, was quite sick last spring, and she spent about 2 weeks on a ventilator, heavily sedated.  With the prayers, support and love of so many of you here, I held only the vision that she would make a complete recovery, which she has.  But during that time, I continually wondered what she would think, what she would say, when the tubes came out and she could talk.  Well, it turned out that she had something very important to say.  She said, “Bacon!”

That single word rocked my world.  My comfort, relief and identity as a vegetarian were challenged by the needs of the daughter that I might have lost.  Well, what’s a Jewish mother to do? I gave her bacon. When we returned to my home, I served her bacon.  And all the meat she wanted.  Clearly her body was telling her, telling me, what it needed.  Who’s to argue with such certainty, such clarity?

Well, if you can’t beat em, join em.  I joined Cybèle, and others in my household, in eating meat.  The world didn’t end.  Some of it even tasted really, really good.  But over time, I found that same old nagging discomfort that I’d had before was growing, and was quite relieved when the date of Jan 1 that I chose to return to vegetarianism came.

So, back to the question of what is a higher value?  Following the rules as we always have, or updating or embellishing them?  Or taking a brief hiaitus from them, so we can really appreciate them?  Following the rules of Kashrut as they are written in the Torah, even with thousands of years of interpretation and re-interpretation, somehow feels right to me.  Making an exception in those rules for gifts from elders and hosts feels right to me.  Making an exception at an exceptional time felt right to me. 

But now I can’t help but thinking about Aaron’s sons.  They did what God told them to do, and then they did a little more.  And it was for that little more that they were punished.  We have no reason to believe that their updating, their embellishing of the rules was anything other than a desire to be even more holy.  A desire to go even further than they were instructed, to add their own value and maybe even their own values to what they were doing.

As Reconstructionist Jews, we are constantly searching for meaning in the rules, replacing the word “rule” with “tradition”; picking and choosing the ones we want to follow; proudly updating them to give them meaning in our lives; constantly searching for new definitions of sacred and holy.  I feel blessed to be a member of this Reconstructionist Jewish community today, where we get to do this.  Where nobody will judge me as a “bad Jew” because I make the choices I make.  I feel blessed to be surrounded by each of you now, as I share from my own experience, as coached by Reb Irwin, and count on support from any of you as I struggle with what makes sense to me.  I feel blessed to be among you, knowing that each of you is struggling with many and varied rules, customs, traditions, questions; searching for value in your own life, and sharing your thoughts and path generously with others.

As we move through this Shabbat, this week, and our lives, may we continue to be surrounded by those who support us, and may we follow only the rules, customs and traditions, and embellish them in any way that gives our lives meaning.  And let us all say . . . amen.

Killing Your Darlings

It is Shabbat in New York City. I'm about to go out and scare up a shul. It's my father's yortzeit and though I could say Kaddish alone, our age-old custom is to do it in community instead. And over the years, with my travel schedule, it's given me an annual chance to wander into Jewish communities I never would've visited otherwise.

So I began googling Jewish communities near where I'm staying. And I stumbled onto the Sim Shalom Universalist Chavurah. For someone who plays as fast and loose with our tradition as I do, I am remarkably suspicious of other Jews' innovations. Are they crypto-Christians? Stealth Messianics? I guess that flavor of suspicion itself is rather Jewish, as we struggle to withstand the arrival of the next new thing, as we've survived Christianity, Islam, Sabbateanism, Franckism, the Enlightenment, Chasidism, Reform Judaism, and every other new idea that we now see as an innovation or a deviation, depending on the outcome.

One of the primary notions of the Sim Shalom folks, not unlike Mordecai Kaplan's framing of Reconstructionism, is the rejection of the idea of "chosen-ness." There are many paths to enlightenment and, using the language on Sim Shalom's website, "We reject the concept of a God that would choose a favorite child."

It was a funny statement to stumble on during this Shabbat Breishit where, among so many other things, we read the story of Kayin and Hevel - Cain and Abel. This story, in which God accepts the offering of the younger but not the older, is one of our many narratives that dwell in the anxiety about the seemingly unfair affection and attraction felt for the next new thing. We see it again and again: Isaac becomes Abraham's principal heir over Ishmael. Jacob swipes the birthright and the blessing from Esau. Rachel is the beloved over her sister Leah. Although Torah doesn't explore this dimension of it, it's worth noting that Moses himself is little brother to both Miriam and Aaron. Even King David, though not a set up as a sibling, is still posed as the young and more attractive alternative to King Saul. David is the upstart whose charmed and charming ascendancy drives the failing leader mad.

Torah over and over presents versions of this, of the younger being justified in taking what should belong to the older. Why such anxiety? Were we, as newcomers to the Promised Land, as builders of a kingdom not on empty soil but on the turf of an older resident civilization, insecure about our position? Is Torah's message that the new supplanting the old is the order of things? In Greek mythology the younger gods defeat the older gods; children supplant their parents, suggesting that change happens in a generational way. The Torah version, invoking our innate sibling rivalry, is subtler and trickier. It involves the painful conflict of ideas that are more or less contemporaneous.

In his mind-bending book Ishmael, Daniel Quinn paints the Cain-Abel conflict as an allegory representing the defeat of the old nomadic lifestyle, represented by Abel the shepherd of sheep, by the newer, settlement-based agrarian culture, represented by Cain. The murder of Abel by Cain exemplifies the agrarian revolution of about 10,000 years ago. Interestingly, in this reading of the myth, the newer idea - agrarianism - is embodied in the older sibling, and the older hunter-gatherer-herdsman lifestyle is embodied in the younger.

Of course what's always challenging and reassuring about Torah is that it doesn't lend itself to easy allegorical readings. Is Abel a new idea or an old idea? Is Abel the loss of the past or anxiety about the present and future? Or is this story not about ideas at all? Maybe it's about competition between tribes or nations. Or maybe this tale of sibling rivalry is just about sibling rivalry. After all, the murderous rage that many children feel at the arrival of the darling interloper is a deep current in many lives. It informs personalities and outlooks from cradle to grave.

I myself am a younger child. So are, when I think about it, most of my friends. How much of my general optimism comes from never having been challenged by a darling newcomer? And how much of that optimism would look to anyone else like plain old naivete?

Was Abel naive? When God accepted his offering but not Cain's, did he not see what was coming next? The outcome, though not foreseeable to the character, was utterly foreseeable to the narrative itself. Abel is named Hevel, the word that comes up over and over in Ecclesiastes, which we read last week over Sukkot before Simchat Torah boomeranged us back to the Beginning. It means breath. Vanity. Fleetingness. Impermanence. Unlike for his brother in the preceding verse, Torah gives no explanation as to how Hevel got this name. Almost as if it was less a name than an attribute. He was, in fact, impermanent. It could not have been his parents. After all, who would name their kid Temp?

Maybe Torah instead is saying something about our individual, internal struggles. We have competing needs, ideas. Sometimes the more attractive idea has to go. As the advice to writers goes, "Kill your darlings." But when you do, it is okay to mourn, and the idea that survives must be held accountable. When it asks, "Am I my brother's keeper," the answer - in the world of ideas as much as the world of action - should be a resounding "yes."

Or maybe this story of the first crime of passion is not meant to teach anything other than impermanence itself, its tone less akin to the mythology of Genesis than to the fatalism of Ecclesiastes. Maybe Kohelet, Ecclesiastes' author, uses this term - hevel - over and over in order to send us right back to this core narrative about unpredictability and impermanence. We grow, we tend, we offer up. Sometimes the world accepts our offerings. Sometimes it doesn't and we don't know why. Sometimes we are punished for our success. Sometimes we punish ourselves. It is all hevel. Yet we have no choice but to keep growing, keep tending and keep offering up.

This sentiment is beautifully captured in an unattributed poem that became a song by Maggy and Suzzy Roche:

     People are often unreasonable, illogical,

     and self-centered;

     Forgive them anyway.

     If you are kind, People may accuse you

     of selfish, ulterior motives;

     Be kind anyway.

     If you are successful, you will win some

     false friends and some true enemies;

     Succeed anyway.

     If you are honest and frank,

     people may cheat you;

     Be honest and frank anyway.

     What you spend years building, someone

     could destroy overnight;

     Build anyway.

     If you find serenity and happiness,

     they may be jealous;

     Be happy anyway.

     The good you do today,

     people will often forget tomorrow;

     Do good anyway.

     Give the world the best you have,

     and it may never be enough;

     Give the world the best you've got anyway.

     You see, in the final analysis,

     it is between you and God;

     It was never between you and them anyway.

Ki Tetze: Confessions of a Cross-Dressing Rabbi*

Whoa! Put me out of business, Torah, why don’t you?

This thought always crosses my mind as we collide with this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tetze. It’s one of those Torah speedbumps. You’re cruising along through the portion, enjoying good, sound, compassionate dictates about helping your neighbor and caring for life and then, bang:

Lo yihyeh chli gever al ishah v’lo yilbash gever simlat ishah.

No male article shall be on a woman, nor shall a man wear a woman’s garment.

And the reason for this prohibition?

Ki to’avat Adonai Eloheycha kol oseh eleh.

Whoever does this is abhorrent to Adonai, your God.

(Which is not even a reason, frankly. It’s like saying, “It’s so bad we don’t even need to give you a reason!”)

I’m sure some people have been waiting a long time for me to take up the issue of this prohibition since, by my own estimate, I spend upwards of 80 nights a year soundly planted inside a skirt and heels, as Winnie of the Kinsey Sicks.

When I was younger I naïvely imagined that by the time I had reached middle age, this prohibition would be academic. The distinction between men’s garb and women’s would have shrunk to a mere matter of size and fit. That as women claimed a place of power in the culture, the age-old cultural imperative for women to dress for men, to gussy themselves up in prescribed ways that we unquestioningly consider appealing and always consider sexual, would have fallen away.

But this is clearly not the case. Our secretary of state, indisputably the most powerful woman in this country, is still asked by reporters what designer she’s wearing and is criticized for appearing in public without applying paint to her face. George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, I’m sure, were never treated in this way. And the fact that this very thought brings a chuckle is a good clue that there’s a real problem here.

The pressure on women to look a certain deeply conventional but deeply unnatural way is astounding. Anyone who has taken a walk through the girls’ department of Target can see that we continue to train our daughters, with great gusto, that the price of being on this planet is their showing their skin: legs, shoulders, arms, midriffs. Our awkwardly adolescing sons are allowed to make themselves invisible in baggy pants and hoodies. Our daughters, though, are told that no matter how awkward or self-conscious their young age makes them, they are not permitted invisibility. They must put themselves on display for judgment by the male-driven culture. They can opt for baggy pants and hoodies, but I’d wager that most girls who do, feel like they’ve already failed in the marketplace of the flesh to which we subject them.

Winnie & cohorts. Photo: C. Stanley.

When I dress as Winnie on stage, I like to feel like I am pointing a finger at these inequities; demonstrating the artificiality of what we call femininity. Winnie, in her gawkiness, with skirt and heels and high-piled hair, with her secretly non-conforming body, is no more comfortable or natural in her getup than many or most women for whom dressing this way is the inescapable key to worth and self-worth.

We say we’ve reached a kind of gender equality in this country, which may be true in the law books but is not remotely the case on the ground. The fact that a man in a dress is either laughed at, stared at, or gushingly admired in the international press for his bravery (if he’s straight and European and doing it in solidarity with his 5-year old dress-wearing son) is a clear signal that men and women are not equal. If they were, why would it matter what he wears? Why would it be considered campy if he’s gay or brave if he’s not? Does anyone consider the bravery of a woman who is forced every single day to live with her physical appearance being the first and primary axis on which she is judged? And who, in response, lives a life in clothes that are too binding or too revealing for her own comfort? Who, for the sake of social acceptance, consents to wear shoes that make it impossible for her ever to flee an attacker?

That’s not to say women don’t succeed in this country far beyond any time in history. Of course things have changed! But women have to reckon with how they are seen in ways that men never do. They may choose on any given day or week or year whether to put on the dress and the makeup or just the jeans and the face that Nature gave them. But nonetheless, they must choose, and unlike for men, the choice is never a neutral one.

In Torah times, the notion of gender equality would have been an alien one. There were all sorts of codified social inequities. There was slavery, and indentured servitude. Women were property of fathers and husbands; they had no legal standing; except in rare cases they could not own land. In a system that relies on such distinctions in status, it becomes extremely important to know who is who. Status blur upsets the system. In a similar way to how mixed-race marriage was outlawed in the American south. If there are people whose natural role and purpose is to be oppressed, you must be able to confidently identify who they are.

The deep preoccupation people feel when they encounter someone and are uncertain how to read their gender is very revealing about how central - unnecessarily central, stupidly central - gender is to our culture. It seems someone’s gender is the most important thing we can know about them. When a baby is born, their sex is the first thing we ask, before we even ask about their health. We don’t know how to begin thinking about a baby without a proper pronoun, and an appropriate set of colors, toys and aspirations to go with it. (Even if the aspiration is that the baby should defy the limitations placed on their gender.)

There are people working hard to think about what it might be like to live in a society not so deeply marked by gender dualism. What it might be like for every binary opposition we dream up (hard/soft; loud/quiet; tough/compassionate) not to be painted onto gender. What it might be like for gender not to be revealed in pronouns. What it might be like really not to know the gender of people you hear about or hire or even meet. But people thinking or talking aloud about such questions remain on the fringe, because really thinking through and past gender conventions continues to be one of the most transgressive, outrageous things one can do.

In a world of extreme gender inequality, Torah, in this verse, in this prohibition, seems to be concerned with truth in advertising.

I, personally, would rather see other kinds of truth in advertising. I think plutocrats masquerading as populists are a much bigger problem this year. Haters of women dressing themselves as protectors of children. Racists garbed in ideas of meritocracy. Haters of the poor pretending to be proponents of economic tough love. That, my friends, is cross-dressing. And that is abhorrent.

If deep down, Torah is trying to say, “show your true colors,” then it is time for all of us to do just that. Whatever our true colors are; whatever our true colors tell us to wear. We owe this broken world that much. We owe our broken ideas of gender that much. We owe it to our mothers who weren’t allowed to just be. And even to our fathers who were never allowed the dress. We owe them that much. So let us show our true colors. To do anything less is abhorrent.

* Note: Irwin Keller readily admits to being a drag queen but vehemently denies being a rabbi.

Parashat Balak: Some Tents, Some People and Some Wonder

For Congregation Ner Shalom, July 6, 2012

So the big news of the week: the Higgs boson. How can anyone even think to offer a drash today without talking about the Higgs boson? For those of you who spent the week in hiding, the Higgs boson seems to be the elusive particle that was somewhat misleadingly dubbed "the God particle" because of its role in creating mass from nothing. It is the result of a particle traveling through a "Higgs field," which is described as something like a universally omnipresent molasses. And as it passes through the field, this particle, for an almost immeasurably small instant, goes from having no mass to having mass, and then decays into other kinds of particles we already knew existed. This is a heyday for physicists who, through direct observation, are witnessing a piece of how this universe came into being and continues to come into being at every moment.

Sassoon v'simchah

The science around the Higgs is utterly unintelligible to me. A phenomenon both infinitesimally small and as large as the cosmos. It has implications, say the scientists, for theories around symmetry and even Supersymmetry. I have no idea what supersymmetry even means, although it sounds a bit to my ears like a comic book hero whose special power is the ability to instantly undo any Vidal Sassoon haircut. 

Mostly I love this news because it has added the quality of wonder to this week, a week that was otherwise all about tasks and anxieties. A week where most of the rest of the news was disheartening or annoying in some way. Is it a tax? Is it a penalty? Is it a tax? Is it a penalty? Does anyone care?

No, a good dose of wonder is what we all needed. It's what I needed. And that's what Bil'am got, in this week's Torah portion. He got, unexpectedly, a big dose of wonder. It kicked him right out of his plans and fears and schemes and drove him into a moment of pure admiration that had a quality of surrender to it; a flow of speech that was reminiscent of speechlessness.

Mah Tovu: Past Tents

As you might recall, the story goes like this. Our people are camped on the outskirts of Moab. The king is unhappy and engages the seer Bil'am as a sort of a metaphysical hitman, to curse us. What follows is a jumble of backstage bickering, sniping between king and prophet, anxiety dreams in which God speaks, and a slow struggle forward despite the opposition of invisible armed angels and an unlikely talking donkey that had been waiting a long time to say its piece.

But in the moment, in that moment overlooking the vast encampment of Israelite tents, what comes out of Bil'am is nothing he had planned. It is wonder:

Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov. How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob,

Mishkenotecha Yisrael. Your dwellings, O Israel.

Like winding brooks, like gardens by the river's side,

As aloes which Adonai has planted, like cedar trees beside the waters.

Bil'am experiences a letting go of intentions and preconceptions and by choice or not, he gives way to the wondrous. It is almost a shrug of the shoulders, a shrugging off of the shmutz, and an opening to loveliness or vastness or minuteness or overwhelmingness. It is bowing before what is beyond us.

Of course it is not the tents themselves that stop Bil'am's curses before they can be uttered. Tents alone, however pretty, are tents; they are empty. They are only given mass, given meaning by their people. In fact, historically, there is some blur between the tents and those who inhabit them. Our Hebrew word for tent, ohel, shares a root - alef, heh, lamed - with the Arabic word 'ahl, as in the greeting 'ahlan wasahlan. In Arabic this root doesn't mean tent but rather "people" or "kinfolk" or "family." And sure enough, looking deeper into the Hebrew, it appears that tents came to be called ohel because they were symbolic of people, of families, the way in English we might use the word "banner" or "crest," if we came from an ethnic group that had things like banners and crests. Or in the way we use "house" to mean "family," as in the House of David or Windsor or Usher. Or the way we might even use the word household. In that way, a settlement was made up of ohalim - comprising both tents and people.

Mah tovu ohalecha, how beautiful these people. Like brooks, like gardens, like trees.

I've been wanting some Bil'am moments this week. Moments where I'm torn out of the pettiness of my daily life and my attention drawn instead to beauty; to the beauty of people, to the beauty of their tents. I notice that my anxiety is idling really high; I'm reacting strongly to the ugly stuff in the world and to the small stuff in my life. I feel nervous about my responsibilities for the High Holy Days; apprehensive about all the touring I've got between now and then. And I confess that I haven't quite gotten my game back since the death of Steve Norwick. It's a loss that has a lingering quality to it. So I've been needing some of the medicine of this wonder; wonder that can knock the other stuff out of my system.

And some of those moments of wonder have been pushing their way into my life despite my resistance.

My husband has a birthday on Sunday. Two nights ago I awoke with a start about this. I have repeatedly resigned myself to the fact that I am not young anymore. But I hadn't quite gathered that neither is he. I was startled by the thought. Because while I'm willing to spend the years of my one life on him, it suddenly surprised me that he would be willing to spend the years of his one life on the far-more-difficult me. And I felt wonder. Mah tovu ohalecha. What a beautiful tent. What a wondrous person.

After dinner one night last weekend, our eleven-year old repeated what has become a meme for the next generation in my household, which is that since he's an atheist, he's therefore not Jewish. We grownups, for the umpteenth time, told him that you can't turn it off like a switch. We're a tribe, we're descended from, blah blah blah. But I could tell it made no impression, and of course in our queer tent, we've placed a much higher value on spiritual inheritance than on the accident of DNA, so an argument of Jewish genetics shouldn't make such an impression. He wandered off. The adults remained at the table, full of sadness. Then I heard my voice calling him back to his chair to sit with the grownups, and I began giving the speech I'd always shunned, the speech too cliche to even admit to. I gave the Jewish suffering speech. How our forebears suffered because they were Jewish and suffered in order to be Jewish. The Jewish suffering that gave rise to a hope for something better. The story of my great-grandfather who pushed a junk cart through Chicago streets; and my grandfather who was a salesman; and my parents who started a business, so that my sister and I could be the first to go to college. And the stories began to include not just my grandparents, but all of our grandparents. How the generations expressed their values by working for the future, struggling so that he, the 11-year old, could feel that safety was the natural state of things and that education and success were his due.

Yes, I gave the Jewish suffering speech. Shamelessly. And as I gave it, I felt such a pride in my ancestors and in my people. Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov, what good people. And I felt so proud of the adults around the table, including the non-Jewish adult who cares so much that her children should honor the past that made them, Mah tovu ohalecha, what good people. And through this whole speech, the 11-year old listened, and asked questions, and looked in our eyes, and didn't make a single wisecrack. How he received this transmission was altogether something new. I looked at him and felt proud. Mah tovu ohalecha. What good people.

We are remarkable, human beings are. Capable of so much. We have spoiled the planet beyond the tipping point, they now say. Our leaders act out the most self-serving of dramas on the political stage. We allow our culture to create weaknesses in people and allow corporations to profit from those weaknesses.

But I can't quite despair. I can't yet feel hopeless. Because there are times that I look at people. I hear about people acting in the most beautiful and generous of ways. This is the 25th Anniversary of the Names Project AIDS Quilt. On the radio yesterday a caller told the story of an IRS agent who processed the estate return of a young man who'd died of AIDS. This young man had had no one. There were no family or friends taking care of his affairs. His burial was court-ordered and court-administered. The IRS agent went on to make a quilt panel in honor him, because he felt how wrong it would be for no one to remember. I heard this story and I thought, mah tovu ohalecha. How beautiful these tents. How wondrous these people.

Wonder. Appreciation. Letting down our resistance to seeing the good even in our adversaries - and there is so much good in all of our adversaries. This is the gift of mah tovu, the gift of Bil'am's blessing. That we might let ourselves look around at our loved ones, and our friends, and our heroes, and our favorite co-workers and our least favorite co-workers, and those who help us when we're sick and those who listen to us when we're in pain and those who do generous things quietly and those who try their best to raise their children and those who try their best to preserve the world and those who try to change the world and those who preach love and those who preach other things because they're afraid and those who dream and draw and make things and those who build supercolliders so that one day they can tell us more about how things came to be things to begin with. The people of the past who put us here, the people of the present who are trying so hard, and the people of the future that we want to be. We can look at all these things and give way to some well-deserved wonder, and say mah tovu ohalecha. How beautiful these tents. How wondrous these people.  Like winding brooks, like gardens by the river's side, as aloes which Adonai has planted, like cedar trees beside the waters.