Rosh Hashanah 5774: Burning and Longing

For Congregation Ner Shalom.

Gut yontiff.

Welcome again to this new year, to this new beginning. The birthday of the world as we know it.

I'm appreciating the world and its possibilities in a new way this week, having gotten back two days ago from Burning Man, which I attended for my first time, despite my advanced age and a social milieu which would seem to suggest that I'd have gone years ago already.

Photo: Oren Slozberg

Burning Man, if you don't know, is a vast week-long encampment in the Nevada desert, in which people come together from around the world to try out a different way of living. It's a celebration and it's a circus. People make art, splendid and colossal and ephemeral, to be disassembled or burned by week's end. They navigate a tent city with no roads or curbs indicating where you can and cannot go. Bicycles and foot are the transit of choice, unless you catch a ride on a vehicle refurbished to look like an octopus or an airplane or a merry-go-round.

The place feels like another world, this year one populated by 67,000 people, all longing for something different: to be creative, to live simply, to engage generously without the pressures and inequalities of money (which is not allowed to be used in the city), to experience freedom - artistic freedom, body freedom, sexual freedom. By day, Burning Man, in the narrow Nevada desert palette, looked like a refugee camp. And the people living in those beautiful tents - mah tovu ohaleycha - constituted a sort of tribe of refugees from a more complicated and more constricting existence. They had left their narrow places, like our own ancestors leaving Egypt, to become a desert people, and to experience a great expansiveness there.

There are even the rudiments of new religion in this gathering, as the annual rituals become more fixed, particularly the burning of "The Man" - the eponymous effigy that presides over the encampment until he goes up in smoke; and the burning of the Temple, a structure in which people leave notes of farewell to deceased loved ones, or to relationships gone bad, or to elements in their lives they need to let go of. These burdens are purged, kind of like we do at tashlich, when the Temple is set alight on the final night and all those intentions are offered up in fire rather than water, before tens of thousands of silent witnesses.

My experience at Burning Man, like all human experiences, was not without its blemishes. But still, on the whole, it had a flavor of Olam Haba, of the world to come, as was pointed out by the rabbi leading Kabbalat Shabbat services over at the Jewish camp at Burning Man. And in fact the whole week was more shabbos than I've had on any Saturday in memory. And the burning of the effigy of The Man - this year perched on a wooden space ship and done up to recall the robot Klaatu in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" - the burning of The Man, preceded by fire dancers and accompanied by fireworks was declared by my family to be: Best. Havdalah. Ever.

So I tell you all of this not as a "what I did over my summer vacation" report-back. I tell you because I am captivated by the idea that people came to this event full of longing for a new kind of living and a new kind of belonging. And what I noticed - and what particularly startled me - was the lack of impediment between the longing and the fruition. 

Because it's not that way back in this world, which we choose to call the real one. We yearn but the bridge between longing and living is sometimes narrow, or rickety, or sometimes already burned, but without the glorious ceremony.

Certainly each of us desires things. Good things, legitimate things. We want. A nice home. Or a partner. Work. Money. Health. Ease. Time. But these desires ride atop a carrier wave of deeper longing, that we don't always give voice to with the same specificity. I desire work, but what I long for is to be of use, or to belong. I desire money, but I what I long for is to be safe and feel safe. I desire a partner or a sweetheart or that hot guy I saw on the bus. But what I long for is to be held, what I long for is love, what I long for is not to feel so alone. I desire health, but what I long for is to keep living, to live and live and live the way this eternal-feeling soul of mine insists it can do. I desire justice or a better world or children or to leave some kind of a moral legacy. But what I long for is to feel that my time here has had meaning.

Maybe it would be easier for us if we didn't long. The Buddhists say that our longing is the source of our suffering, that disattachment is the path to spiritual happiness. I get that, and I think it can work. But it's obviously not a Jewish path. For better or for worse, ours is officially and full-on a path of longing, even if suffering is the price tag. In our tradition we long for return from exile. We long for the reemergence of an Edenic past. We long for peace. We long for Torah. We long for God. This longing, much of which I'll discuss more on Yom Kippur, is part of us. For better or for worse.

At Burning Man a friend was explaining to Ari, our 12-year old, how the structures that were being burned were designed with that end in mind. Besides being beautiful, certain faults were built in so that as they burned that would look glorious, their parts bursting into flame in the right order, the structure collapsing inward rather than outward. I was caught by this idea of vulnerability being designed right into the architecture. Because that is what longing is for us. It is our architecture, as individuals and as a people. And it is also a vulnerability. Longing impels us to move forward in this world. It is the only thing that does. Our yetzer - our deep impulse to do, to achieve, to live, to love, to experience another day. It is the machinery by which we travel. And it is a built-in weakness too, as we try consciously or unconsciously to fulfill our longing, sometimes in specific and surfacy ways, and we re-learn again and again the frustration at not being able to make our dreams come true.

So enough with the Burners and the Buddhists. What about the Jews? What does Torah say about this, about our longing? If, in Judaism, you want to think about longing, you are required to turn to Shir Hashirim, Song of Songs, our ancient book of erotic poetry that Rabbi Akiva rescued from the discard heap 2000 years ago and elevated to a status above all the other books of Torah, calling it our Holy of Holies. Because, in his view - and in the view of every Jew since - in describing physical desire it gives voice to our ongoing love affair with God. Its words are some of the most memorable in our tradition. Ani l'dodi v'dodi li. "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." Yishakeni min'shikot pihu ki tovim dodeycha miyayin. "Oh that he might kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is sweeter than wine."

But a friend recently pointed out to me something about this book that I'd never noticed.  That at no point in Song of Songs is this love actually consummated. It is a book about anticipation, about longing, about looking forward. The lovers don't actually ever touch, despite their heightened awareness of each other.

Kol dodi hineh zeh ba m'daleg al heharim m'kapetz al hag'vaot.
My lover's voice comes to me skipping over the mountains
And jumping over the hills.

They see each other in their dreams.

Ani y'shenah v'libi er; kol dodi dofek pitchi li achoti.
I am asleep, but my heart is wide awake;
My lover's voice knocks, saying open up for me, sister.

The lovers describe each other's beauty; they anticipate a rendezvous; they go to the garden to meet. But we never see the meeting. The most contact we witness is a glance:

Hineh zeh omed achar kotleynu
Mashgiach min hachalonot matzitz min hacharakim.Look! It is my beloved, standing behind the walls,
Observing from the window, peering out from the curtains.

That image! A lovesick youth, watching for the beloved to appear at the window, the way so many of us in our youth could, embarrassingly, be found pacing outside a dormitory or lurking at a cafe waiting for the object of our desire to walk by.

That is the closest the lovers actually come to each other in Shir Hashirim. A glance. Our great text of longing in Judaism celebrates not the fruition but the anticipation. It glorifies the suspense and honors the not-knowing.

And what a lesson this is for us. That we consider judging ourselves by the quality and flavor of our deeper longing, and not by whether or how our longings come true. We seem to be instructed to find the juice in the longing itself.

And in suggesting this, Torah is wise. Because we so often do not get what we want. And being created full of desire for stuff or people or a life you mostly you can't have is otherwise rather a cruel trick of nature. No, you can't always get what you want. Life unfolds in unpredictable ways. The physical world places limitations on what we can do and achieve. The culture places limitations on who we might meet and how we might interact and what futures we might concoct together. And other people's actions limit us too, because they also have longings that they're trying to work out in their own imperfect ways. But, suggests Torah, holiness is not in achieving the thing, it is not in having the most toys at the end of the game. Instead holiness is in the near Godlike longing inherent in each of us, even if the expression of it is flawed.

Now Torah is not, I think, saying don't want - don't want the house, don't want the job, don't want the lover, although the commandment of al tachmod, "do not covet," does sound a cautionary note about watching where your longing ends up. No, Torah is not saying don't want. But perhaps Torah is decoupling longing from acquiring. And by doing so it is suggesting that "not getting" is not the same as "failing." And for that matter, getting is not the same as succeeding and having is not the same as deserving.

But we are only human. We spend so much of our time and energy judging ourselves and others by these surfacey things; we become frustrated and unkind when we sense that we're not getting something that we desire, whether it's love or respect or safety or just the feeling that we belong. We judge ourselves as unworthy when love does not manifest in the way we'd imagined. Or, we make questionable decisions. Fueled by our longing for connection, say, we end up trying to make it happen with the wrong person, under infelicitous circumstances, in the last 10 minutes before the bar closes. Or we stay in a bad relationship because our longing for love is stronger than our longing for wholeness or our sense of already being loved. And over and over, we behave in ways we later regret because we have acted out of longings that we pretend, that we convince ourselves, we don't even have.

But not today. Not on this new year. Tik'u bachodesh shofar bakeseh l'yom chagenu. "Blast the shofar," says Torah, "on this day where there moon is hidden." In other words, for me, this is the moment, the annual moment, to break the silence and wake up to the longing that we have obscured, that longing that each of us has concealed from ourselves.

Teshuvah is what is required of us. Not atonement for sin. But a Returning to the deeper parts of ourselves. To dig through all this shmutz that comes from the misdirection of our longing or the frustration of some of its supposed goodies. And to honor instead the longing itself. Our yearning for love and closeness and safety and life; to feel the depth and loftiness and wonder of our eternal and insatiable yearning. And to forgive ourselves for so often getting it messed up in the translation. Letting go, as the Buddhists would certainly have us do, of some of the superficial cravings and attachments, and to look instead at what our deepest longings are and to honor what they say about us.

Take a moment right now, and look inside. Find something you've done that you're not proud of. And then go down one story to find the longing that was underneath that act. Notice the beauty of that longing, and go ahead and forgive yourself for the stupid thing that sprang out of it. And then think, if we were to give these longings some fresh oxygen, and relieve them of the burden of our judgments, who among us knows where they might go? How they might fly? Where any of us might find ourselves? What, inside of us, or in each other, or in this glorious Creation, might be speaking to our longing at this very moment, saying, "Come, come to the garden." What voice that we didn't hear until the shofar of this great and new day made us shut up and listen.

Longing is certainly a vulnerability in our architecture; it can weaken the joints of our lives and it so often proves flammable. But it is the noble stuff we are made of. And, unencumbered by judgments of success and failure, of should and shouldn't, of better and worse, who knows where that longing might bring us, and what beautiful, if temporary, art we might still make out of these lives we have been given.

Shanah tovah.


I am grateful for the insights of Rabbi Eli Cohen, Sasha O'Malley, my family, and the people of Burning Man.

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.