The Mikveh of Elul

This is a piece of a much more involved Chasidic teaching by the B'nai Yissachar, Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov (1783-1841), that I learned from Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg through his Moadim L'Simcha class at Aleph and that I shared at the Selichot Service at Congregation Ner Shalom on September 5, 2015. Thank you to Cynthia Calmenson for insisting I post it.

If we think of all of the ways in which we've missed the mark; the longings that have gone astray; the hurts we've inflicted and the hurts we've absorbed; we see that it all comes from the fact of our lives in this physical world. We were once, the mystics would say, part of a great infinity that is God, the Eyn Sof. We mostly can't remember it. Because when we are born, we become subject to the needs of our bodies - the hungers, the longings, the frailties that drive us. We fall under the illusion that we are all separate from each other. And that we are separate from God. And cut loose like that, we wander through our lives, trying to do the best we can, but getting bruised and bruising others and ourselves all along the way.

This is the time of year when we do teshuvah, when we try to return. So, is there any way to return to the Oneness that we once experienced, the endlessness of God that we were part of? Can we let go, even briefly, of the separateness that is often the source of adventure and delight, but that also can cause us so much loneliness and pain?

There is recipe for dissolving. It is, as any cook can tell you: mix with water. When we immerse ourselves in the mikveh, we dissolve back into a greater Oneness.

But how much water do you need? Too little, and you end up with something lumpy, and that's not what we're looking for. Talmud tells us that a mikveh must have 960 lugin of living water in it. We no longer know exactly how much a log is. But the B'nai Yissachar, a student of the great Seer of Lublin, gives us some mathematics to explain why 960. So now we're going to do some math.

The first piece of the math is this. Talmud tells us that one part in 60 is the proper proportion for something to become nullified. If a drop of milk falls in the meat soup, it lets go of its nature and becomes one with the soup - and kosher! - as long as the soup is at least 60 times the volume of the drop of milk. Sixty-to-one is the ratio of bitul. Of nullification. Of dissolving. Of transforming.

Meanwhile our bodies, our physical human natures, that tug at us and pull us away from our Divine source are made up of 4 elements: fire, water, air and earth. But it's more subtle than that. If that were the full recipe for humanity, we'd be rather simple and rather similar. But we are all different from each other because in each of us the chemistry of elements is different. My fire-element is in itself made up of four elements: mostly of fire, but also some air and water and earth, in a combination that is unique to me. So each of us is made up of four elements, and those are each made up of four elements. And so, the B'nai Yissachar teaches, our earthly selves are composed of 16 elements of This-Worldliness. Those 16 elements are where we live our lives, and what keep us feeling separate.

So if we want, even for a moment, to dissolve back into Divinity, back to our Source, we need to dissolve each of those 16 elements. And by what ratio? Sixty-to-one, like the milk in the soup.

60 x 16 = 960

It takes 960 measures of living water in the mikveh to make our 16 earthy elements dissolve back into the infinite of God, to lose ourselves in the Divine soup.

But wait, there's more. The number 960 now becomes the number forever associated with the mikveh and our shot at re-absorption into God.

Why is that important? We are now in this special, tender period of teshuvah, of reflection and returning. It runs from the beginning of Elul through not just the end of the month, but onward 10 more days through Yom Kippur. A 40-day period of teshuvah. And of course every one of those days has 24 hours. Now wait for it:

40 days x 24 hours = 960

Bingo. The exact number that represents a mikveh.

And that, by the B'nai Issachar's reasoning, makes this period of time, the month of Elul and the Ten Days of Awe, a mikveh in time. We have 960 hours in which to immerse ourselves, in which to dissolve, in which to remember what it was like before we were born, when we were each other, when we were God.

We are 22 days in. We are in the center of the mikveh.

May we immerse; may we dissolve; and may we emerge renewed.

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.

Yom Kippur: Getting To It

For Congregation Ner Shalom, Cotati, CA.

Not long ago I had a run-in with the law. Not a big deal. Not like in the movies. No drugs or bank heists or international espionage. Not even any arrests (although I have in fact been arrested for civil disobedience on more than one occasion).

I was on my way to Ner Shalom’s annual Havdalah with the Horses. I was dressed in my finest faux cowboy gear – boots, jeans, Stetson. I had my guitar in the back seat and I was practicing talking like Chuck Connors in the Rifleman. As I turned onto East Cotati I saw the CHP car sitting on the shoulder and, as I always feel when I see a police car, I thought, “I’m going to get caught.” I think that instinctively, even though I’ve usually not done anything illegal.

As soon as I rounded the corner, the patrol car began to follow me. And when I stopped at a light, it pulled up alongside and behind, to read my registration sticker – ah yes, the registration sticker that I didn’t have. And as the traffic light turned green, the squad car’s lights burst into color and its siren emitted its nauseating “please pull over” whoop.

In the parking lot where we settled in, Officer Philips told me how out of date my registration was. And I began to tell my story. I couldn’t complete the renewal because there’s a factory recall out on this model, and they can’t smog it without my going to a dealer for the recall first. But the car also needs a new engine. Which we can’t afford. So we were saving to do that and figured we’d get the recall problem fixed at the same time. And now I’d actually made an appointment at the dealer for Tuesday, and here it was Saturday, and I really had the appointment. But anyway, at least we’d paid the renewal; the car was just officially missing the smog certification.

Officer Philips radioed in. “No,” he said, “you’re actually more than a year behind in registration; you didn’t pay anything. We have to impound.” And he called for the tow truck.

Could it be? How had I never dealt with this? The car had almost imperceptibly gone from being transit to being troubled to being overdue to being in need of an unaffordable repair to being mostly a metal box parked on the grass. It happened so gradually that I’d somehow allowed myself to lose track. I’d somehow let myself pretend there was no problem.

The tow truck was on its way. But if the car got impounded, I could only get it back with a completed registration, which I couldn’t get because of the factory recall unless I brought it to a dealer which I couldn’t do on Tuesday if the car was impounded. “Yep,” said Officer Philips, “that sure is a Catch-22.”

I began taking my stuff out of the car. And I began to wonder, how could I let things like this happen? I am, as you know, overextended. But I’m not completely disorganized. I could have seen to the issue of the registration payment or the smog certification or the recall on any of the previous 400 or so days. But I didn’t. And I had no excuse.

So why hadn’t I cleaned up my mess? What is it that makes me wait until some authority catches up with me? What is it that makes me feel like I don’t have the ability to just do what I know I need to do?

Meanwhile Officer Philips kept giving me chances. He would tell the tow truck not to take the car if, say, I could prove that I did have an appointment with the dealer. (I called on my phone; they were closed for the day.) Or if I could pay the registration fee right now on line. (I had Oren at home trying to do this but now the DMV computers were down.)

For some reason, Officer Philips wanted me to succeed in straightening this out. He wanted any basis upon which he could now undo the penalty. He spent a ridiculous amount of time with me – an hour or more – patiently babysitting my predicament, as flexible as his authority allowed, despite my standing there looking for all intents and purposes like a reject from the Village People.

Now this could just be a story about me and my particular flavor of neurosis. But it made me think bigger. About why any of us chooses to put off the actions that would allow us to live more cleanly, to live more honestly.

Last week on Rosh Hashanah, we talked during Storahtelling about what makes humans different from the other species in the Garden. People named many things – awareness, falling in love, laughter. No one mentioned procrastination. (Maybe they meant to say it, but decided to wait for some later time.) But procrastination is distinctly human. I live up on Sonoma Mountain, surrounded by deer and turkeys and squirrels and hummingbirds. And while one could impose many anthropomorphic descriptions on their styles of life, you can’t accuse any of them of procrastination. They know their priorities without having to choose them. Need a new nest? You build it. Need to forage for food? Forage!

But we humans are granted, by our Creator or by nature, free will. We have the ability to choose and we celebrate that ability by making bad choices all the time, choices against our deep interest, choices we know on some level to be the wrong choices for us. At least I do.

We choose not to make peace with the people who matter to us. We choose not to forgive the people who have hurt us. We choose not to give a second chance to people about whom we once had a strong snap judgment. We choose not to apologize. (“Ah, she’s probably forgotten it by now anyway.”) We choose to be other than who we really are or who we really want to be. We choose to wait when we need to act. We choose to ignore when we need to notice. We choose paths that are easier or more enjoyable or less expensive or less of a headache or just closer at hand. It’s natural to do. It’s only human.

And this characteristic of humankind has migrated from the individual to the body politic – our collective willingness to prioritize, or to let our leaders prioritize, the immediate over the inevitable; to put economy ahead of ecology; to fail the cause of peace when war seems more popular or more profitable.

We as individuals and we as a collective are willing – repeatedly – to subordinate deep needs to superficial ones.

In part I think this happens because our lives are much more complex than that of hummingbirds and deer. Our world is so complex that it is easy to feel helpless.

Face it. We live in a world we cannot explain. Not just the natural world – that has always been mysterious and a source of fear and wonder. But we have created a human world that is beyond our comprehension. Industry and science and politics and law and technology and commerce and medicine and social interaction. None of us can grasp more than a thin slice. What we understand is so outweighed by what we don’t. I don’t know how my car works, let alone my computer. I don’t know where most of my food comes from. I don’t understand ethnic tensions in distant places, and I barely understand them down the block. I understand a portion of what the government says it does, and nothing of what it does without saying.

Of course we feel helpless. Of course we often feel hopeless. No wonder a presidential candidate can say that 47% of Americans feel like victims, and somewhere deep down we think, “Hmm, yes, maybe I do feel like a victim.”

There isn’t a way to stay in charge of all of it. So we tune it out, like white noise, like static. We have to. Call it denial, but it’s a legitimate survival skill in this era. But over time, we tune out so much that we begin to tune out our own hearts as well, our own truth. Animals have no such problem. Neither do children. Ask a kid what she wants with all her heart, and she will know the answer. But we adults live in a great cognitive disconnect between what we know about ourselves and the incongruous choices we make.

Tomorrow we read a passage from the Torah portion, Nitzavim, in which God comments on our ability to follow God’s mitzvah – which I take to be not just God’s law but our deep human wisdom. The passage says, lo niflet hi mimcha v’lo r’chokah hi. “This mitzvah is not too mysterious or too distant for you. It is not in the sky or over the sea that you have to be subject to someone else’s paraphrase of it. Rather,” says the text, karov eylecha hadavar m’od, b’ficha uvil’vavcha la’asoto. “But rather it is close to you, close within you, already in your heart and in your mouth.”

How to live is something we already know, deep down. We know who we want to be, how we want to be. Take a moment right now. Close your eyes. Who do you want to be? Forget all the reasons you can’t. What kind of person do you want to be? Imagine yourself. Now please, hang on to that vision. Not just through this drash but when you get home tonight, and tomorrow, and next week too.

Think of what you just pictured and felt. We know when our actions are at one with that vision. We know when our speech really truly reflects our hearts. And we damn well know when we’re making choices that drag us further from who we want to be.  

Just as I knew my car registration was expired.

So why is it so hard to reboot without fear of some authority figure, whether it’s a cop or whether it’s God?

Our tradition charges us with the task of teshuvah – of returning to our selves; returning to our deepest and highest yearning; remembering who we want to be and realigning our sense of self with that vision. We are assigned the task of fixing our wrongs, cleaning up our messes, putting things right, living from a place of integrity.

These are not Yom Kippur tasks. This is an ongoing assignment. But absent a crisis or a timetable, we don’t do them. So our tradition says do it in the month of Elul. But that month slips by as we watch political conventions and ready our kids to go back to school. So then on Rosh Hashanah we’re reminded that we have ten more days to put things right and return to our deepest sense of self. On your mark, get set, go!

And yet, here we are again. Yom Kippur evening. And who among us has done it? Some yes, many of us not. So Yom Kippur pressures us with its own internal deadline. An image of Heaven’s Gates swinging closed through this holiday until tomorrow night, at the end of our ne’ilah service, when they at last click shut.

Our tradition obviously knows how hard it is to get moving. Taking that first step is so difficult. It is why we have midrash around who first put their toe into the Red Sea. Those legends remind us that you don’t need the courage to part the sea. You only need the pluck to dip your toe. And that small bit of chutzpah will move the oceans.

This holds true for all our deep desires. To be more fair. To be more kind. To be more learned. To be more green. To be someone who gives. To be someone who volunteers or someone who gives tzedakah. To be a music-maker or a vegetarian. To be someone who keeps a little bit of Shabbat. To be someone who gets outdoors. To be someone who flosses! To be someone who just does more. Or to be someone who - finally - does less.

The path of teshuvah, of returning to who we deeply want to be and know ourselves to be, also begins that way. “The journey of 1000 miles starts with one step,” as Lao Tsu said. Or noch tzvei trit, “just two more steps,” as my wise great-grandmother Rose Jacobs would say, when her little daughter, my grandmother, asked, “Are we there yet?”

Last week, Yael Raff Peskin led a truly beautiful tashlich ritual at the creek in Sebastopol. This is the ritual where we toss birdseed in the water, representing our guilt, our flaws, the things that hold us back from being who we know ourselves to be.

At this particular tashlich we stood on a floating bridge, some forty or fifty people. The bridge was not only the narrow bridge Rebbe Nachman talks about when he says kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar m’od – the whole world is a narrow bridge and the key thing is not to fear. It was also a wobbling bridge. There was no easy way to just stand firm and fling our faults into the flowing water. Because try as you might to stand firm, the surface under you would certainly give way.

We all live wobbly lives, despite childhood expectations of safety and certainty. It is easy to say, “I will make things better when the wobbling stops.” “I will take care of this relationship after the work crisis is over.” “I will take time in nature after I figure out how to handle this money problem.” But the time will never be right. The ground rocks under our feet. And the key, humans, is to do it anyway. Not to be afraid, but to do it anyway. We can. And what each of us needs to do is in our hearts and on our lips already.

So the lesson of the wobbly bridge is, I guess, to do it now. The lesson of the Heavenly Gates is to do it now. The lesson of the sudden untimely deaths of friends and loved ones is to do it now. There is no moment to act but this one.

The Gerer Rebbe, one Yom Kippur, commented on Rabbi Hillel’s famous words, “If not now, when?” He said:

The present moment, which was never here before, will never be here again…. And every moment has a different [purpose]…. How can we atone for the wasted present moment? The next moment cannot atone for this moment.

We only have now. It is all we can count on. So do it today, on Yom Kippur. Do it before the gates shut. Remember who you want to be. And then choose at every possible moment to act according to that instinct.

God is waiting – or perhaps your better self, the human you most want to be, is waiting – patiently, while you run through your tales of complications and impediments and factory recalls. You are waiting, waiting for you to finally get to it.

Ben adam, mahlecha nirdam, says the Sephardic poem I chanted last week. “Human being, why do you sleep? Wake up now, and call out.”

And so human, wake up. Call out. To your deepest self. You already know what to do and what to say. For it is close to you, closer than your skin, b’ficha uvilvavcha la’asoto, in your heart and on your lips, that you may do it.

Will it be a difficult road? Could be.

Will you know the way? Torah says so.

Is it worth it? Oh, yes.

Is it far to get there? No. Noch tzvei trit. Just two more steps.

Wishing a happy, healthy year to all who pass by this post.

Din, Chesed & the Harsh Decree

[Yom Kippur Eve sermon for Congregation Ner Shalom]

Close your books.

Last week, on Rosh Hashanah, we talked about the creation of the world – of all the worlds. Yom Kippur is different. It is about the aftermath of creation – the world as it has unfolded, as it continues to unfold, and the role we play in that unfolding.

But when I listen to a sermon, sure, I like hearing ideas. But I especially like hearing a story too. So I will start with one. It goes like this:

•

Many years ago, in a tiny village somewhere in one of the countries that our ancestors liked to come from, there was a baker. She had an only child. The baker had little money or learning, as you would expect in this kind of story. But she did have a particular touch when she baked; a certain way the palms of her hands would press the bread dough while her fingertips coaxed the dough’s surface to life. She could tell from the temperature and the moisture in the air whether her customers would want their challah sweetened with a touch of honey this Shabbat or made savory with the slightest dusting of salt under the sesame seeds.

When her child was still young, the unthinkable happened. The baker began to show symptoms of one of the diseases that used to stalk and still stalk people, a dreaded disease that consumes its bearer, quickly and unkindly, and whose name is, by custom, only whispered. The doctor confirmed the baker’s fears.

This was just around the time of the New Year, and the baker’s child – what shall we call him? [The congregation chose Isaac.] – who had studied the aleph-bet and knew many prayers – went to synagogue seeking guidance. He heard the chazzan chanting the Unetaneh Tokef prayer. Tears welled up in him as the cantor intoned the question, Who will live and who will die? Itzik felt a knife in his heart, for certainly God had decreed that his mother would die. The doctor already had.

But Itzik then heard the refrain that closes the prayer:

ותשובה ותפילה וצדקה מעבירין את רוע הגזרה

Uteshuvah utefilah utzedakah ma’avirin et roa hagzerah.

Atonement and prayer and righteous deeds can alter the evil decree.

Itzik determined in that moment that he would save his mother and avert the evil decree. He hurried home and began the work of teshuvah. He told his mother he was sorry about the times he had been disobedient. How he had dragged his heels to help her sweep the flour off the floor. How he had wished sometimes for two parents. How he’d daydreamed about a nicer house that wasn’t always hot and smelling of yeast. He told her how he had at times wondered what it might feel like to be an orphan, and how he was afraid that he’d brought on her illness with his wandering mind. He told her all his bitternesses, and she held him and forgave him and she too told him all that she was sorry for.

Itzik then added tefilah to his daily regimen. Every morning upon getting out of bed and every night before getting into bed, he’d recite all the prayers he knew best. He remembered hearing a story in which a child prayed the aleph-bet and let God assemble the prayers out of the letters. So Itzik began to add a sing-through of all his letters, in case his words had not been enough. He worked to empty his heart and his mind of distracting thoughts and to truly imagine peace when he would pray for peace, and truly imagine healing when he would pray for healing.

But his mother’s condition worsened, and she had to spend many hours each day in her bed. At last the child turned to tzedakah. At first he wasn’t certain how to help those around him in need. He didn’t have money to give. He had no jobs to offer. No skill in building homes for the homeless. As he sat wondering, he heard his mother coughing at the hearth in the center of their house. He went to see if she was okay, and there he saw, as if for the first time, the sacks of flour and bowls of yeast; the jars full of sesame and caraway and poppy seeds. He realized that he could feed the hungry, because he was, after all, the son of a baker. He began to pour flour and oil into a bowl, and his mother laughed at his clumsiness. “No, dearest, like this,” she said, and she struggled to the breadboard to show him.

Every day they stood side by side, baking bread for the poor. They talked and told their stories, little stories of things they had seen and heard and remembered. When his mother was too tired to stand, she would lie back on an old stuffed chair and continue to offer instruction.

After a time Itzik began to have a certain way that the palms of his hands would press the bread dough while his fingertips coaxed the dough’s surface to life. He noticed he could tell from the temperature and the moisture in the air whether challot sweetened with a touch of honey or made savory with the slightest dusting of salt under the sesame seeds would be most pleasing to the tongues of those he would feed.

At last one night the boy had a dream. In it a voice came to him and said, “God has seen your heart and heard your prayers and knows your deeds. The harsh decree shall be commuted.” The boy awoke filled with joy, and rushed to tell his mother the news. He found her in bed, smiling, the breath having departed her body.

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Ah, not the ending you expected? Certainly not a satisfying ending, wouldn’t you say? We hate endings like this, because we want our stories to be different from the lives we actually lead. We want them to be better. We want atonement and prayer and tzedokeh to save our loved ones from suffering, to save us from suffering. And in fact the opposite is our experience. Despite our soul searching and our meditation and our acts of justice, bad things happen. Sadly, this is not a magical universe. Or, at least, that is not the nature of this universe’s magic.

Instead, what we know best is the harshness of the laws of the universe. We are finite, our bodies fragile. Death is inevitable, whether we are righteous or wicked. Death comes too early, no matter what age we live to. We think we are special, but at second look we are but one species competing with millions of other evolving species on the planet, including the dreaded microbes that are also children of this creation.

The harsh reality of this universe is what I think our tradition has in mind when we talk about the divine attribute of din (דין). This word is translated in our prayer books as “judgment” as if it describes a quality or action relating to the merits of particular individuals. But I think is more like “law”: God’s law, Creation’s law, the great unstoppable momentum and imperative of this Universe. And the universe has momentum, doesn’t it? Are we not still surfing the wave of God’s first word? The Big Bang that to our ears sounded like the word yehi: “let there be…” This is all din.

From the word din in Hebrew we get the word dayyan (דיין), meaning “judge.” Upon hearing of a death Jews recite the blessing Baruch Dayyan Emet (ברוך דיין אמת) – blessed is the true judge. But if we believe that God actually doles out life and death based on merits that we can’t see or understand, or according to a plan that has not been shared with us, well, that might be a God one can believe in, but it is not a God one can love. On the other hand, if dayyan means not judge, but the din-maker, the one who breathed life into nature’s imperative, well then, in saying baruch dayyan emet we are instead acknowledging the inescapable laws of Creation by which we have no choice but to abide. We acknowledge that death is the inevitable price tag for having lived.

But, thankfully, din is not the end of the story; it is not the entirety of our reality. In our tradition, din is balanced or mitigated or given perspective by the quality of rachamim (רחמים). Mercy.

The Kabbalists called these two parallel streams of divinity by different names. Din is called gevurah (גבורה) – the attribute having to do with strength, located around here, the left shoulder, on the Tree of Life, when it is mapped on the body. Across from it, counterbalancing it, is rachamim’s parent: chesed (חסד). Love. Kindness. Gevurah and chesed are not opposites (remember last week I said, “reject forced oppositions?”). They are rather complements. In other words, in our tradition, the answer to, or partner of, the severity of nature’s law is: love.

Rachamim, chesed. Mercy, love, kindness. These will not prevent hardship, disease or death. They will not calm earthquake or hold back flood. But they soften the blow. They mitigate the effects. They promote survival by giving us tools with which to make life livable and worth living, even in the hardest of times.

We have no control over din. Nature will unfold whether we approve or not. But rachamim, chesed: these are a choice.

Surely humans don’t always respond to din with chesed or kindness. Every day we hear about, or sometimes, God forbid, we come face to face with those who choose violence or who choose war instead. Ugly human mimicries of din itself and mockeries of the suffering the force of din can cause.

But our tradition seems to tell us not to respond to severity with severity. Instead, to respond to hardship with love. Love each other. Care for each other. Apologize. Sympathize. Empathize. Listen. Really listen. Really listen. Help. Show up. Visit the sick. Make food. Give hugs. Give money. Give a job. Make community. Learn together. Sing together. Decide to be someone who acts out of chesed, out of kindness and love, and then be that person. That is the best of what it means to be human, no? As Pirkei Avot says:

במקום שאין אנשים השתדל להיות איש

Bamakom she’eyn anashim hishtadel lihyot ish.

In a place where there are no people, try to be a person. Be a mentsch.

In his book, The Thirteen Petalled Rose, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz wrote a famous essay about teshuvah, this process of atoning or returning to the person we want to be which we actively engage in this time of year. In it, Rabbi Steinsaltz makes a marvelous claim for teshuvah not just as something that makes the difficult world easier to bear, but as something that actually changes the difficult world.

How? Rabbi Steinsaltz points out that like the universe itself, our lives are driven by cause and effect.

So, for instance, let’s say I lose my temper at another person. She feels misunderstood or mistreated and feels anger also. Her anger in turn gets unleashed on some other poor schmuck. Or, perhaps worse, she internalizes my unkind words and feels less about herself, which will have its own set of unforeseeable consequences. A butterfly effect of woe.

Rabbi Steinsaltz argues, though, that teshuvah has power over the chain of cause and effect. While it can’t undo an action that has already taken place in the past, it can change that action’s meaning and significance in the present and the future.

So if I engage in the work of teshuvah, offering apology, non-defensive explanation, acts of kindness in recompense and beyond, it won’t erase my actions, but it gives me some hope of rendering them harmless, of curbing the damage, of halting the chain of cause and effect, of restoring the world to what it might have been had I acted from a place of chesed in the first place.

This is a wonderful idea, that teshuvah doesn’t merely lighten the burden of din, but can also have an actual effect on the unfolding of this World. It can make the world a better place. It is our way of participating, being partners, in the continuing act of Creation.

So imagine if we engaged in teshuvah not one day or one season a year, but every day.

A couple weeks ago, at our joint Selichot-Ramadan event, Imam Siddiqui of the Islamic Center of Petaluma gave a beautiful teaching about fasting. How fasting is a great leveler: it’s hard to hate someone else when you are both fasting and feeling the frailty of your body. Then he asked us to consider what it would be like if we could get our governments to fast!

Similarly, imagine what it might be like if we took teshuvah global! If it went viral. If we engaged readily, easily, in teshuvah not only as individuals, but as communities. As businesses. As nations. Apology. Accountability. Humility. What if teshuvah were part of everyone’s mission statement and everyone’s business plan? Every country’s Constitution? What would that world look like? Can we even imagine it? Take a moment right now to think: what are the environments to which you could bring the spirit of teshuvah?

So perhaps let’s think of our teshuvah this Yom Kippur not as an annual activity but as an annual refresher. To remind us how to do teshuvah every day, whenever needed, wherever needed, until healing hurt is as easy as causing it. None of us is so good at this stuff, but that’s why we practice.

As most of you know, in my other life I sing in a quartet. In drag, of course. We’ve been doing this act for fifteen years, and we are not a group made up of people who naturally get along. We spent much time hurting each other’s feelings and after about eight or nine years, after we went full time, we realized that we needed help or the group simply couldn’t continue. We could barely be in a room together.

We went about seeking a therapist from among the array of therapists catering to the a cappella community. And there are, in fact, quite a number of them. We went for pedigree, choosing Chanticleer’s shrink right off the bat. We went in for our first sessions, and although I try to do teshuvah and let go every year around Yom Kippur, it became clear that I was holding in my body nearly a decade of unresolved resentments. The muscles of my consciousness were sore with seething.

In our sessions we learned tools that now, looking at them from this perspective, I can only describe as a practice of everyday teshuvah. We learned and we continue to practice how to apologize in a way that actually shifts something. How to ask for meaningful apology. How to forgive shortcomings. We learned how an apology like “I’m sorry I got angry at your being such an ass” is not only ineffective, but is not teshuvah at all, but rather a next step in the chain of harmful cause and effect, most likely responded to with something like, "Yes, and I'm sorry I was such an ass, it was only because you were such a shmuck." We learned how to take accountability even if you’re not, strictly speaking, to blame.

In the process of practicing this, we began to notice quickly when our own words are hurtful, so that we can apologize and curb the harm without the other person having to sit with bad feeling and having to ask for apology. With practice, we’ve learned to do what Steinsaltz talks about, curbing or nullifying emotional harm.

We’re not always good at it, but we’ve gotten better and better because we’ve created a culture among the four of us where there is language and support for speaking this way. It’s telling that in our world, we can all find the words to be cruel to each other with no effort whatsoever. But seeking words of teshuvah, we often come up empty.

But we can figure it out. That’s what practice is for. As tomorrow’s Torah portion tells us specifically about the mitzvah of teshuvah:

לא נפלאת היא ממך ולא רחוקה היא ... כי קרוב אליך הדבר מאד בפיך ובלבבך לעשותו

Lo niflet hi mimcha v’lo r’chokah hi . . .
ki karov eylecha hadavar m’od, b’ficha uvil’vav’cha la’asoto.

Which means, more or less: This mitzvah, this making good, this power to transform experience into something good: there is nothing supernatural about it; it is not rocket science. It is already in your mouth and in your heart. Your heart will tell you when it has to happen (and if your heart is on the fence about whether teshuvah is required in a specific situation, then undoubtedly it is your heart telling you that teshuvah is in fact required, and it is some other part of your anatomy saying it would prefer not to make the effort). And when your heart says it is time, your mouth will find the words to say. They won’t always be the right words the first time out. But maybe the second time, or the seventh, or the twenty-seventh.

So, teshuvah: it’s not just for Yom Kippur anymore. It’s for every day. To heal relationships. To heal the world. To heal God. To heal our hard hearts. To turn us into the people we want to be. To soften the severity of the world we live in.

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So a quick epilogue. You might be wondering what happened to the boy in the story, yes? This is how I’d like to think it went on:

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At first, seeing his mother’s lifeless body, Itzik was at a loss. He had done what he thought God asked of him. He had engaged in teshuvah and tefilah and tzedakah. And he had been told his prayers were accepted. Yet his mother had died anyway. Heaven had betrayed him. He questioned God, or perhaps stopped believing in God altogether.

Relatives took him in -- kind people, but they weren’t his mother. He felt alone, even though now he was in a much larger, bustling household. One Friday morning, he saw his cousin kneading the challah dough. “No,” he said. “Like this.” And he began to bake, pressing the dough just so.

He became a baker. He was well loved and when impatience or an uncharacteristic show of temper overcame him, he found he knew words to ask forgiveness, and he knew how to forgive in return. In the morning and the evening at the times when, as a boy, he would pray, he could still close his eyes and imagine what peace might feel like or what healing might feel like or what justice might feel like, and it would inspire him. And when he would bake challah, he would set 10 loaves aside for the poor. And as he massaged the dough, he would remember the stories his mother told him as they kneaded the challah side by side, and he would smile, in love for her, and in the slow recognition that the harsh sentence – not his mother’s but his own – had indeed been averted.