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.

Yitro: Strangers in a Strange Land

For Congregation Ner Shalom, February 1, 2013.

I spent this last month as a stranger in a strange land. I had a two and a half week gig in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with an additional week tacked on in the lovely mountain town of Ajijic. I walked a funny line between belonging and not belonging, between distance and familiarity. We do this Puerto Vallarta gig every year. I know my way around; I know street names and some faces and where to get fresh vegetables. And then there’s always the new and strange; this time, for instance, how to manage sickness and fever and find the larger-than-life Doctor Lupita and her hypodermic full of good mystery drugs.

My Spanish is good; I can declare in the declarative, and speculate in the subjunctive. I speak better than I understand; but still I fared better in Mexico than I did yesterday morning at Friendly Kitchen in Rohnert Park, when a patron glanced at the newspaper and remarked to me, “Those 49ers sure are” followed by 15 or so words that almost certainly had something to do with the Super Bowl; words that I undoubtedly know individually, but which, when fused together in a wave of football jargon, left me utterly bewildered. I didn’t understand his words but his desire for a bond of familiarity with me was clear. “Yeah,” I said, nodding, hoping that that was all that would be required of me. I was home, but still a stranger.

This week’s Torah portion seems to have a lot to say about strangeness and familiarity, distance and proximity. The portion is called Yitro, named after Moshe’s father-in-law. The Children of Israel are in the Wilderness, having escaped from Egypt, familiar turf in which they were treated as strangers. Now they are strangers in an unfamiliar land, led by a prophet who is also a stranger, having never been a slave alongside them, and by a God who does not resemble the Egyptian gods; who doesn’t resemble, well, anything.

At the top of the parashah, Moshe receives his father-in-law, who arrives with Moshe’s wife and two sons. The text then reminds us of the sons’ names and their etymology. The younger son is Eliezer, meaning “my God is my help.” And Gershom, the older, means “a stranger there.” Moshe named him that because, as he famously said, “I was a stranger in a strange land.”

Gershom and Eliezer. “Stranger in a strange land” and “God is my help.” Strangerhood and help. Alienation and embrace. Distance and familiarity. These are the polestars by which the Children of Israel navigated through the wilderness and by which Jews have wandered through an alien world for millennia, so much so that our sense of exile has become a dominant theme in our self-concept; giving rise to Messianism and to Zionism and to puzzlement when my children seem, mysteriously, to fit in just fine. Alienation and embrace: the competing forces that tug on each of our souls – the feeling of being alone; and the desire to feel that we are not.

The themes of strangeness and familiarity continue to haunt the portion. God is about to impart the Aseret Hadibrot, the Ten Commandments. God says, in what sounds like a marriage proposal, “You will be my special treasure, my beloved people.” And the people respond, saying, “Whatever God says, we will do.” But this communication is not direct; Moshe carries the messages up and back like Miles Standish for John and Priscilla.

Then God demands that a distance be established around the revelation. First, a distance of time: three days between now and then, during which the people must prepare, immersing themselves and even their clothes as in a mikveh. Then, a perimeter of space: a boundary around the mountain, the crossing of which by anyone other than Moshe will result in a sentence of death.

Be my love. But not so close. Maybe the enforced separation is specifically to build the tension. Like couples staying apart before their wedding. And marriage is in fact the underlying metaphor here. Immersion in the mikveh; words of oath. And isn’t marriage about transitioning from the idea of Gershom to that of Eliezer, about strangers becoming each other’s familiar support?

So God descends – and Moshe ascends – to the mountaintop. Proximity. God sends Moshe back down to reinforce the perimeter. Distance. And then God gives the Ten Commandments, reciting them like wedding vows under the chupah of cloud and smoke.

Alienation and God’s embrace. I wonder about the tension between these two ideas. They seem so antithetical but so tightly connected. Does one require the other? When God first enters into relationship with Abraham, generations earlier, what was God’s demand? “Leave your home and go to a strange land.” Maybe the journey together into an unfamiliar landscape is what creates or cements a bond, experiencing strangerhood together. God and Abraham, Thelma and Louise, Butch and Sundance. After all, you never know someone as well as you do after a road trip.

Our human experience is a relentless road trip. After you leave your mother’s womb and your parents’ arms, you are on your own, with no map and no spare change for the fast food joints. Even if you live and die in the very house you were born in, you are always walking a wilderness, because time is that kind of road. You can’t see around the next bend. You change. You grow. Your body ages and so does your mind. Your circumstances change, and the people around you, and the world. We are constant strangers. How are we ever to feel safe? How are we ever to feel anything but alone?

Loneliness is a great source of longing and of action. Loneliness must be the reason we invented God; or else it is the reason God invented us. We need this relationship with the great Infinite, whether we ascribe to that infinity a personality or not, to feel familiar. To feel that despite the odds and despite all evidence, it has our back. Intimacy us how we keep ourselves – and God – from being overwhelmed by fear as we journey forward. As the Psalm says, gam ki elech b’gey tzalmavet, lo ira ra ki atah imadi. Though I walk through a valley shadowed by death, I won’t fear if you are with me.

The desire to be cared for is reasonable. So how do we make it happen? How do we bring about God’s care, God’s help, in the face of our sense of aloneness? The mystic, Rabbi Joseph Cordovero, said 500 years ago that by our own actions, acting with chesed – with kindness – toward the suffering of the stranger, we bring down that same quality of kindness in the Divine. Imitate what you want from God and it will manifest for you as well. Or translated into practical terms, kindness begets kindness.

Which then sounds less mystical and downright Reconstructionist. We are God’s hands in bringing about compassion in this world. We know how to care for the stranger. Torah tells us no fewer than 36 times. Empathizing with how a stranger feels can set your compassion in motion. Imagining how the person sitting next to you might feel like a stranger at this moment; that might invoke your protectiveness and your care. Of course, sometimes we can’t find our compassion for the stranger; not every stranger is equally lovable. So we try our best and then offer ourselves some compassion for having felt like a lost wanderer in that effort.

So what else? How else might we experience the closeness of the Divine though we feel like strangers?

The parashah gives us a little clue at the end. After announcing all the Ten Commandments, amidst thunder and smoke and the sound of horns, God and Moshe spirit off for a little post-mortem or, perhaps this weekend, I should say a little Monday morning quarterbacking. God revisits the commandment not to make any graven images, and expands on it. God says, “Tell the Children of Israel not to make any gods of silver or any gods of gold. Instead, make me an altar of earth and sacrifice on it; in every place where I cause my name to be mentioned I will come to you and bless you.”

In other words, I think, don’t go chasing after God; don’t try to tame God by making rigid reductions of Divinity out of gold or silver. How, after all, can you force the great mystery of this Universe into such a limited form, whether made of a precious metal or an unyielding and too-small theology? Instead, don’t try to capture God at all. Keep your altar simple. Made of your own earth, your own life. Offer up your thanks or your wonder or your need. Mention God. And wait. Sit back, and let the Mystery introduce itself to you, so you can be on a first name basis with it.

Gershom and Eliezer might be among the names offered. I am a stranger and will always be. And still, I am held by God. These are my names. These are all of our names. And these are both true.

May we all journey our journeys without fear, without panic. And may we be open to the familiar and comforting touch of the Great Mystery, whenever and however it happens.