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.

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.

Parashat Tzav: Peace Porridge

(For Congregation Ner Shalom)

Anyone hungry? This week’s Torah portion, Tzav, gives us a very valuable recipe: a recipe for healing and peace.

That sounds like a tall order, I know. And it’s not exactly a recipe. And like my great grandmother's best recipes, there are no quantities listed, and like my recipes, the results are not guaranteed. But Torah’s suggestion of what some essential ingredients of peace might be – peace both personal and political – cannot be disregarded.

The recipe comes in the course of instructions for, yes, ritual sacrifices. This is the kind of detailed and grisly subject matter that typically keeps the book of Leviticus far away from our pile of bedside reading.

But in this parashah, we get special instructions for “Peace Offerings.”

Now understand that at the time of the Temple, we didn’t have a system of communal prayer, and if there was any tradition of personal prayer or meditation, its neither mandated in Torah nor documented there. So making offerings of livestock and food was the primary ritual way that Jews made supplication to God – for forgiveness, for permission, for healing. In our generation we are used to contemplative practices that are private and quiet. Or communal prayer and song which, even if rowdy, take place in enclosed, orderly spaces. To us the idea of thousands of people hauling their livestock to a Temple, in the heat, with the smells and the flies and the noise, seems, well, less than conducive to a spiritual experience. Can you imagine any of us there? “Excuse me, could you keep that cow quiet? I’m having a personal breakthrough. Thanks. Catch you at oneg.” But even though it feels alien to us, this was a profound personal experience for the Jews at the time and is the parallel of so much of the soul-searching work that we now do internally or in community.

So, the section begins:

וזאת תורת זבח השלמים אשר יקריבו ל־ה

"This is the teaching about the shlamim offering which shall be offered up to Adonai." Shlamim is a beautifully ambiguous word. It is wither a form of shalom, meaning "peace", or shalem, meaning "wholeness" or "completeness" or "health" or maybe "integrity." So these are the Peace - or Wholeness - Offerings. Or as a recipe, this might be called the Peace Porridge.

Torah then gives ingredients. Three types of offerings that fall into the Peace offering rubric. They are: neder, nedavah, and todah.

Neder means "vow" - we recognize this word from our Yom Kippur evening prayer, Kol Nidre - All our Vows. The second type is nedavah, meaning something like "willingness" or "generosity", from the same root as the word nadiv in the chant we sang tonight. And the third, and trickiest type is todah, meaning gratitude.

These are three main ingredients for making peace, or for achieving personal or even global healing or integration. Not the only ingredients. But perhaps the ones that require a reminder.

Let's start with neder: vow. What is a vow? I think a vow has two elements. One is the desire to change some circumstance in the world ("I'll never be hungry again!"). The other element is accountability to a powerful witness ("As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."). If there was no circumstance you wanted changed, there would be no reason to make a vow. And by making a vow instead of merely intending to do something, you are accepting responsibility for the change actually taking place. So intead of "vow", let's call this element something more in our vocabulary, like "commitment". So one piece of making peace in the world involves identifying that peace would be a desirable change, and committing to it. Becoming personally responsible for it. You cannot be like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's new Defense Minister, who said yesterday that the last year of peace negotiations have no relevance because they were not adopted by Knesset. You have to do the opposite of Lieberman. Even though the efforts haven't been ratified, nonetheless we are committed. Commitment is different than and precedes method. That is the element of neder that builds peace. Your personal healing also requires your commitment even if you don't yet know the means.

The second ingredient of Peace Porridge is nedavah: I will translate this as generosity. Not generosity as a character trait, but generosity as a practice. If you want peace - in a personal relationship or on a global scale, you must be willing to give, to give more than you wanted to give. To surrender sometimes - not in the military sense, but to let go of your need not to budge. Nedavah says "act generously, give more than you thought you would." And in your personal healing, try being generous toward, instead of angry at, what stands in your way, even (and especially) if what stands in your way is you.

So ingredient #1 is neder, commitment. Ingredient #2 is nedavah, generosity. And finally, the most difficult ingredient, of unreliable consistency and highly perishable - is todah: gratitude. Why might gratitude be an essential ingredient in creating peace?

Gratitude is a kind of breath or breeze that clears the mist from your eyes and lets you look at things differently. When we're in conflict with others - friends, lovers, bosses or nations - and in general in much of how we live our lives, we are very aware of what we don't have. We act so often out of a place of need. "If only I had..." "I'm going to get..." "I need a better house, job, lover." "I need more affection from you." "I need appreciation." "I need your resources, your power, your land." "I need more respect."

Gratitude doesn't change any of the facts. But it fundamentally changes how we look at those facts and the value we assign to them. I, for instance, have a lot. We all do. And I know that all of what I have is an accident of birth, and a gift of privilege, and the consequence of a series of coincidences too numerous to count. I don't deserve what I have, and if I earned it, I did so only in the most superficial of ways. So when I feel gratitude I feel how precious and how precarious all of what I have is. My focus moves from "need" to "have"; from desire to dayenu - it is enough. Or if it's not enough, it's still a lot. Or, in Jewish terms, things could always be worse.

So how does gratitude make peace? If you approach peace from a place that isn't just unmitigated need, then there is a chance that an option will arise that might actually satisfy you. Or satisfy you well enough. Gratitude paves the way for compromise.

Interestingly, in the parashah, the gratitude offering is handled differently from the other two kinds of Peace Offerings. There is special fuss involved - including an elaborate bread hors d'oeuvre that must be prepared, with a recipe rivaling anything in Martha Stewart. And then the entire gratitude offering must be eaten - by the priests together with the person offering gratitude - that night. You can eat the neder offering and the nedavah offering the next day and even the next. But not todah. Not gratitude.

Why is this? In Torah it's never explained. But I think gratitude is different than commitment and generosity. You can make a commitment and can carry it out even if your heart isn't always in it. If you decide to act generously, you can do so, even if it's not making you happy at that moment when you have to act. (We all know that it sometimes feels different to make your pledge to tzedakah than it does to actually write the check a couple weeks later.) Commitment and generosity are like brisket. Frankly, the leftovers serve just as well.

But while commitment and generosity focus on our actions. gratitude is an emotion and comes from the heart. If it is indeed gratitude, and not pretend, then it must be sincere in the moment in which it is experienced or expressed. Gratitude is a dish that must be served hot. It is not brisket. It is a souffle. When you feel gratitude you must down it and digest it right then, because tomorrow it might be gone.

So healing the world, healing our relationships, healing ourselves. Like all healing, it's better with soup. And as the parashah teaches us, Peace Porridge needs these ingredients, so offer them up! Commitment, generosity, and gratitude. The quantities are up to you. The results? Not guaranteed. But oh, it would taste so good, how can you not try?

Bon appetit.