Fire, and the Prairie

Parashat Shemini
For Congregation Ner Shalom, April 17, 2015

I was back on the prairie last week, visiting Chicago with the older of our family's two, who is considering going to school there. It was an extravagant couple days at the University of Chicago. Model classes offered to young people and their parents, including linguistics, economics and even one on the work of JRR Tolkien. There were talks by deans, provosts, trustees and even David Axelrod who now, seemingly, has his own department at the University called, um, the Department of Axelrod or something. I hadn't been an undergrad at the University. But I did study there as a graduate student in linguistics and then in the law school. I spent seven years in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. And then bang, there I was last week, in the middle of all of it again.

I was in pig heaven, which is a phrase I don't particularly understand, and which I'm reluctant to use on this week in which Torah first lays out our ancient dietary laws: no pigs, no camels or rabbits; locusts are fine in a pinch.

So instead let's just say I was filled with relentless, overflowing nostalgia. I knew it was a bad idea to communicate the fullness of this to the 18-year old who, in the face of such parental enthusiasm, could end up choosing the other school for no better reason than that. So I strolled the quads with my best-mustered poker face, trying to only intermittently point out where I used to sit with friends over coffee or where I used to study into the night or where we staged our protests.

It was an odd trip in some ways. My first time in Chicago not having a childhood home to stay in, it now being rented - legendary basement and all - to a set of young cousins. So I was feeling a certain displacement, a new uprootedness in my ancestral city, and maybe that's why I dug so fiercely into my connection with the university and its neighborhood. Just to try to feel at home. I strolled past former apartments. Wandered stealthily into the linguistics department office. Noticed the continuity of culture that certain coffeeshops maintained, even though no one working at or sipping tea in them was even born when they were my hangouts. I saw the Hyde Park Herald on the news rack, a neighborhood paper dating back to 1882, and thought fondly about our own Shira Hadditt, who was once its editor.

To top it off, the University's library had a special exhibit up about University of Chicago's queer history. It was startling and stimulating to see faces, names, stories from my old days. To be reunited, through plexiglass, with artifacts that I myself had donated to Chicago's LGBTQ archive years ago, including a cloth banner that I had considered - but decided against - ironing before donating, thinking who's ever going to see it, and there it was, in the display, wrinkled. And my gay pride quickly dissolved into a deep domestic shame.

The 18-year old was seemingly excited about this exhibit, maybe even proud, or I hope so, although overall I had a strong sense that if I began another sentence with "back in my day," this young, self-professed pacifist would have no choice but to slug me.

But this was my world! How could I not want to gift it all to him?

But such desires are of no use, really. It can't be done. This is the inevitable truth about launching a young person into the world. You're going along, thinking you'll get a chance to teach your kid everything you know or at least everything you wish you'd known at that age; you intend to fill them with self-confidence and hope; you expect to transmit some deep values and some street smarts. But when they're little there's so much reading and counting and shoe-tying that who has time and then they turn 13 and stop listening to anything you say anyway and you missed your chance to teach them cooking skills or gin rummy or a second language or whatever while they were still impressionable and then they turn 17 and now they're people and they start listening to you again but by now there's hardly any time left before they leave the nest and don't look back. And that's when you realize you never taught them how to balance a checkbook and you're uncertain if they can actually read an analog clock. And you fill with shock at your own failure. You certainly transmitted a lot to them, but you're just not quite sure what it was you transmitted. And what if you missed that one detail that could spell the difference between swimming and sinking, between contentment and disappointment, between safety and danger?

These thoughts and regrets must have been swimming through the High Priest Aharon's mind in this week's Torah portion, Shemini. It is a portion that contains a harrowing tale of Aharon in his first day on the job, finally beginning the priestly work after so many chapters of instructions. He stands in the presence of God in the Tabernacle doing the difficult, gory, unpleasant, earthy and unearthly work of the sacrifices. Allowing the people, through this crazy alchemy, to have a vision of God's glory on the doorstep of the Tent of Meeting and to then witness a fire coming forth from God, consuming the offerings.

Aharon finishes this work for which he has been lengthily prepared. And then, without warning, his eldest children, Nadav and Avihu, try it a different way. They offer something like incense, dropping it on the fire, and something goes terribly wrong. A flame issues from God and consumes them as it had just consumed the ox and the ram. In the moment of shock that follows this, Moshe, Aharon's brother, utters something enigmatic and moralistic and, in one of Torah's most poignant moments, Aharon stands there, mute.*1*

The sages, like most readers of Torah, hate this episode. They struggle long and hard to imagine what these two young people did that was so wrong. Why their deaths were justified. Was it the choice of incense? Was it something wrong with the fire pan? Maybe just that they didn't have God's express permission? Or maybe that they were drunk? Or maybe, as Nachmanides offers, they approached the altar with a youthful infatuation with God's power, God's gevurah, and a youthful indifference to God's kindness, God's chesed. They valued God's might and they were met with God's might. And thus the lesson for us is that whatever you choose to value above all else in the world needs to be something you're willing to risk getting back square in the jaw.

But mostly these explanations fail to satisfy us or to console Aharon. And with this episode, the ritual life of our people launches with the unanticipated sacrifice of the firstborn. An unsettling echo of Egypt.

While this plot is unhappy-making, it is not unlike a million anxiety dreams I've had, in which I am responsible for some harm to my kids, or am unable to save them from danger. Perhaps this story is meant to be like a dream, tapping into all of our fears of loss; our anxieties about the future; our feeling that if we had done better, the future would have come out differently.

In this dream, each of us is Aharon. Each of us serves a kind of priestly function. We are the priests, the Cohanim, of our own lives, orchestrating our offerings and our atonements and our petitions and trying to move our lives from sludgy states to holiness whenever possible.

And like Aharon, we are not just priests. We are parents too, some literally and all metaphorically. We all have a posterity. We have all been trying to convey to the future what we know and what we desire. To transmit what we've learned and how we've managed our journeys and how we've tended our own sacred fires. And we fear that despite our detailed instructions, the future will act in unpredictable ways, ways that could bring disaster.

Besides being Aharon, each of us is also Nadav and Avihu, his sons. Each of us has an imperfect knowledge of what came before us. Each of us longs to tend our own fire in our own way. To choose incense instead of blood or vice versa. None of us can worship at exactly the same altar as our parents or teachers or rabbis or leaders. To do so would be soul-killing. And in fact, we are told two verses later in Torah that Nadav and Avihu's cousins pulled them out of the holy chamber by their tunics, which Rashi takes to mean that their bodies were not physically consumed. The damage was to their souls.

The dream of this parashah is a dream of change. The risk it poses. And also its inevitability. There is no doubt that the future will undermine our best hopes. And it will heal some of our worst mistakes. In equal or unequal measure.

All we can do is do the best we can do. Tend our fires. And hope that when flame bursts forth from the Divine, it is not flame that consumes but flame that blazes a trail. So that the next generation can tend a fire that is different and maybe better.

At some point last week, I gave up hoping the 18-year old would worship at the altar of my Chicago days. I stopped telling my Hyde Park stories. My sentimentality and his youth made a truce. Instead we decided to do something together that neither of us had ever done, something to fuel both our flames.

We drove ten blocks south to the old Oak Woods Cemetery. We looked at its burial mound of Confederate prisoners upon which someone had scornfully (I presume) placed an empty bottle of Southern Comfort. And then we looked for graves of trailblazers who rest there. Ida B. Wells, the radical turn-of-the-century African-American journalist; Jesse Owens, the African-American runner whose prowess shamed Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; and Hyde Park's own Harold Washington*2*, Chicago's first black and first progressive mayor, whose ethos made possible gay rights in that city, and whose election so rocked the world that while I was on a 1983 visit to Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia, the mere mention that I came from Chicago, which would have once produced an Al Capone pantomime, now elicited the amused observation, Ah, Chicago. Negri Burgermeister.

These three, Ida, Jesse and Harold, like Aharon's sons, offered something new and in response they drew fire. More fire than anyone deserves. But to our lasting good fortune, they weren't consumed.

And let that be our prayer for our children and their children and for our students and our cultural heirs. Let them bring the new ideas to make the world better, to fulfill a vision of justice and glory that we can't even yet imagine. Let them draw fire if that's what it takes, but use that fire to blaze paths for those who follow. And in the process, may they bring us one generation closer to Olam Haba, to a world perfected.


*1*For a beautiful review of rabbinic interpretation of Aharon's silence, see Rabbi David Kasher's current post on his blog, ParshaNut.

*2*For a good exploration of Harold Washington and his impact, see Gary Rivlin's biography, Fire on the Prairie.

Spirograph, Leviticus, and the Cycles of our Lives

For Congregation Ner Shalom, Parashat Vayikra

New moon, new year, equinox, eclipse, junk in a basement. 

The possibilities are endless.

Today is a day when all the cycles collide. It's evening, the denouement of another day on this planet. It's Shabbos, the settling out of another week of struggle and effort. It's a new Hebrew month, the launch of a new lunar cycle. It's the 1st of Nisan, which is one of our people's four new years. (This one is declared in Torah, in the book of Exodus, but historically it relates not to Egypt but to the Babylonian calendar that we adopted in exile, which is why tonight is also Nowruz - the Persian new year.) Meanwhile this particular new moon, thin as a pencil line, traces the underside of a supermoon that is brushing close to us, closer than it has in months. Today was the equinox and the beginning of spring. And to top it off, overnight was a solar eclipse, dazzling the Scandinavians while we were sound asleep. It's like there's a big celestial party going on. All these cycles - 24 hours, 7 days, 28 days, 1 year, 14 months - all of them intersecting and overlapping like the whirling designs we used to make with our Spirograph sets when we were kids.

Do you remember Spirograph? I had a set. So did my sister. Over the last month, they resurfaced in the cycle of chaos and order that over the last year has characterized my mother's basement in Niles, Illinois. As you know from previous drashot, this basement is a magical treasure chest, a never-ending cornucopia of objects from every era of our family's history in this country. From immigration through junk peddling, political scandals, business ventures, cousins clubs and deaths; the basement is littered with diplomas, ketubos, NRA badges, meeting minutes, sheet music and an awesome collection of childhood games. Lynn and I looked at our Spirograph sets side by side. Hers had all the pieces, each one carefully put back in its proper slot after its last use some time in the 1970s. Mine was a mess, many of the translucent plastic disks cracked or chipped; none of them in the right place; the little pins that held pieces and paper to the cardboard backing were all over the place, threatening to prick whoever would reach into the dusty box heedlessly.

My sister decided to keep hers, and it took its place in her takeaway stack, perched atop Candyland and Mystery Date. I let mine go. It's hard for me to let anything go. But I decided to make a clean breast of it. A fresh start. I couldn't see myself at this point in my life sitting and drawing crazy psychedelic spirals anyway, and a half-ruined childhood game seemed a waste of my otherwise prodigious powers of sentimentality.

So I took a fresh start on that one, even while other items cycled back into my "reconsider" pile. See, the thing about cycles is that they're always giving fresh starts and second chances. What I mean is this: we all know that today is just a continuation of time. It is not qualitatively or empirically different from yesterday, other than the fact that it is later; the world is older. But today can feel like a completely different thing. What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours. A new month, a new year, all of these arbitrary markers signal possibility. Rebirth. Reset. Reboot.

Of course, sometimes the desired reboot doesn't happen. We get stuck in a rut, a needle in the groove of an old LP. Whether it's a habit or a grudge or an Israeli election, we don't know how to think, do or try something differently. How to clear the way for a new chance. Sometimes we need something extra, something a little more juiced up, to break the inertia. But what?

One possible answer comes from this week's Torah portion. This week boasts another new beginning, this one in our cycle of Torah reading, which stretches from Genesis to Deuteronomy and from Simchat Torah to Simchat Torah. This week we orbit back into the Book of Leviticus, our great and ancient ritual manual. It details a system of offerings that themselves mark time and mark cycles of human experience. Our failings, our leaders' failings, our brushes with death and illness, our communal festivals, our personal joys - all of these end up marked in Leviticus as part of a cycle, marked with ritual offerings. We move from tamei to tahor - from states that are pervaded by everydayness to states that feel radiant with holiness. And back again. In English we call the states described in Leviticus "purity" and "impurity", which is unfortunate. Because they don't refer to physical states of contamination, but to a range of emotional states, spiritual states. Think of the way you feel after you break a promise. Or the way you feel after experiencing a loss. These are psychological states that Leviticus addresses, by prescribing the kind of repair you can do in your world to release it, or the kind of offering you can give to God in order to make a shift and experience, even if briefly, a new start.

In our culture, we don't recognize these fluctuating states in any open, community-supported way. Our emotional ups and downs belong to each of us individually. We hold them privately, even secretly. We are told they are aberrations from what we should be; they are disorders, rather than the emotional landscape of living. We do therapy and we are sold medication. We hide our messy states and pretend we're fine. And we move forward as if we weren't ever in a state of spiritual disarray, when actually we probably are most of the time.

The system in Leviticus, though it seems archaic and, in the case of animal sacrifice, barbaric, was far more accepting of the emotional topography of life than we are. It was assumed that you experienced the full range of life's gifts and sadnesses, fulfillments and foibles. And that you could mark those those by an interaction with the divine that would allow you to transition from one state to another; to let go of one part of the cycle and move forward into another.

In the Levitical code, there's always a new beginning available for you whenever you need it. And the prescription for that new beginning is usually an offering.

So I wonder what we can offer up to help us move from state to state, or to be mindful when we do?

When Lynn and I work in the Chicago basement, it doesn't clearly feel like a cycle, but more often like one, unending difficult state. A jumble of reverence and frustration and ambition and despair. We look at all the holy relics with which my mother was entrusted and ultimately burdened. We sit inside of it and wish it had a cyclical quality. After all, even Sisyphus has his "up" moments. Where are ours?

But then, unforeseen, came some change, through a ritual of offering. We had already been giving furniture and housewares to cousins and friends right and left. But one morning last week I opened a dry cleaner's paper garment bag to discover my father's army uniforms - two dress uniforms and one set of fatigues. They were clean and pressed. His overseas hats folded flat and pinned to the lapels. They had been in this garment bag since, I assume, 1946. They were in pristine condition and their discovery led to a quandary. What do we do with these? They suddenly were symbolic of our father. Not just his service in the army, but the gentle meticulousness that was so part of who he was. How could they be thrown out? We were stuck in a humbling and hobbling reverence for him and needed ritual to move from that state to a different one.

It was my sister's partner who saved the day. Sue said, "Call a theater." And we did. Lynn called Steppenwolf, Chicago's premiere theater, the one that produced Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Laurie Metcalf - performers whom my mother referred to never as "actors" but rather as "Chicago actors," as if that signified something obvious about their skill and their talent and their loyalty to the city of her birth. Over the past 20 years my mother frequently ushered at Steppenwolf. She would call us after a performance and tell us the storyline, mixing into it tangents about the other ushers and the very nice house managers, all of whose stories were as interesting to her as the plot of the play. Steppenwolf said they'd be happy to take the uniforms. Lynn inquired further. Would they take our grandmothers' and great aunts' fur-collared 1940s and 1950s coats? Yes, they said. And we collected them all up and we lay them on the back seat of the car like sleeping children, and we drove into the city. Laurel, the wardrobe mistress, accepted these with the gentleness and regard that one would hope was shown by the Levites as they accepted the offerings of the Israelites on the steps of the Temple. She examined them to see if they were in fact without blemish. She complimented them. She remarked to us about their uncanny state of preservation. As we left the uniforms and the coats on the costume shop cutting table, the altar of alterations, we felt a burden lifted. This was not like giving coffeepots to cousins. This was an offering, in a near-Biblical sense. We were offering up these objects of love to the greater universe. To the gods of creativity and catharsis. So that someone on stage one day in a diminutively sized seargent's uniform might make an audience member cry or laugh and rethink something in their life and be released from some state that they were trapped in so that they too could have a fresh start.

These clothes, held in suspended animation for seven decades, had now reëntered the cycle of things; they were recycled, upcycled. And we moved from our stone-heavy state to one of elation. Even knowing that the next day we might once again feel buried under the weight of our earthly responsibility. For today, it was new beginnings all around.

So new beginnings. From an outsider's view, every day on this earth just looks like a continuation of the previous day's developments. As Ecclesiastes would say, eyn chadash tachat hashemesh, there is nothing new under the sun. But from the inside, from inside our cycles, new beginnings are possible all the time. A new year, a new month, a new day, a new chance. Just offer up what you need to offer up - your regret, your love, your gratitude, your hope. Let the regret burn away. Let the gratitude feed the gods. And then you can descend the Temple steps, into your new beginning, the place where possibility lives.


I am grateful to Suzanne Shanbaum who, when I was at a loss, said, "Write about new beginnings." And to Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan, who teaches the class I'm taking called, "Learning to Love Leviticus." Thanks to her and my classmates, I am.

Note: This drash is powered by Congregation Ner Shalom. If they ever speak to you enough to be so moved, you are always invited to make a contribution to Ner Shalom by clicking here. (Please notate it with Itzik's Well so I know.]

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.