Waiting for the Carob to Bloom

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, Summer 2010.]

There's a Talmudic parable about the carob tree. According to the rabbis (who were clearly not botanists), it takes seventy years for a carob to flower. When asked then why he was planting a carob tree when he'd never live to see its fruit, the farmer in the story says that he enjoys the fruit of a carob tree planted for him by his grandfather; similarly he is planting a carob for his grandchildren.

Planting a carob is not one of those highly touted "random acts of kindness." It's rather a deferred one - a blessing that will blossom only later, with no benefit accruing to yourself.

So what are the carob trees that were planted for us? The ocean voyages of long-gone grandparents looking for a better life, if not for themselves, then for those who would come after? The love of learning implanted in our psyches 70 generations back? The desire for community felt by Jews of central Sonoma County twenty-five years ago, many of whom are no longer part of this congregation or this county but whose imprints we still feel? Or the clubhouse built by the dedicated women of the Cotati Ladies' Improvement Club, none of whom we knew and none of whom could have foreseen that this home built to house their vision of a better world would someday nourish this holy community?

And what are the carob trees that we are planting now for our future generations? When we make decisions for our children, are we remembering to think of the future adults they will be and what they will pass on to their children? When we make decisions for our synagogue and our community, are they just about this year's programs and improvements, or are we also setting the stage for future waves that we might never know? When we think about our relationship with the Earth, do we keep in mind our posterity (if not our biological grandchildren, then our spiritual heirs, once or twice removed)?

I always try to notice the carob trees that feed me and shade me. The seeds planted in my youth by parents, teachers, great- grandparents and my groovy lakefront aunties. Some of those seeds have, thanks to this community, had a chance at last to bear some fruit, chewy and unripe though it still might be. I'm grateful for those who planted the seeds without knowing the outcome. And I will try to follow in their footsteps, planting my carob, sowing seeds without certainty, but with certain hope.

And as we begin to move toward the High Holy Day season I leave you to ask yourself: "what are the seeds I am planting?"

Parashat Chukat: Talking to the Rock

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, June 18, 2010]

We’ll start with a quick confession. I talk to trees. I talk to plants. Every day on my way up and down the mountain I certainly greet the cows with a “ladies.” I talk to the cats, but that’s not considered odd. I talk to the goats next door but no one sees me. I might talk to the clouds from time to time, or to a particularly breathtaking landscape. Any object of wonder that takes me by surprise gets a “well, hello there.”

This week we read Parashat Chukat, in which Moses and Aaron are instructed to speak to a rock, and they fail.

But that’s not the first thing to happen in the parashah. We start instead by learning about the ritual of the red heifer – a rite of purification after contact with a dead body.

From there we go on to experience a most painful death. Miriam dies in the wilderness. This is now near the end of the Israelites’ 40 years in the desert. She was no longer a young woman. But her death stings and her absence is immediately felt. In the very next verse the people are thirsty. Quenching thirst was, as you recall, Miriam’s special talent. As Rabbi Shefa Gold says in her Torah Journeys book, “Miriam had a way with water.” There was a magical well that would follow her like a familiar and open at her command or at her request. The mouth of this mysterious well was created on the eve of the seventh day of creation for the sole purpose of slaking the thirst of the Israelites many generations or maybe eons later, or so goes the midrash. Whether there was a magic well, or whether she had a sharp divining skill, or whether Miriam satisfied a kind of spiritual thirst that the people mistook for physical, we don’t know. But when she dies, the people are immediately parched.

The people, in their desperate thirst, rise up against Moses and Aaron, once again asking why they were taken out of Egypt to die in a barren wilderness, the same complaint that has dogged Moses’ footsteps since the Red Sea closed behind them, barring the way to second thoughts. Moses and Aaron go to the tent of meeting and fall on their faces. God makes Gods presence known and tells them to go speak to a stone – an enormous, fixed boulder, a cliff, in full view of the people – and it would give them water.

Moses takes his staff and assembles the people. “Listen up, you rebels,” came Moses’ challenge, “shall we draw water out of the rock for you?” And he strikes the stone, not once, but twice, until water gushes forth, a mighty flow capable of sating all the people.

The next thing that happens surprises us. God is angered at Moses and Aaron. Lo-he’emantem bi l’haqdisheni l’eyney B’nei Yisrael. “You did not believe in Me,” God says, “enough to sanctify Me in the eyes of the Israelites.” You did not believe in Me. God announces a punishment: Moses and Aaron will not lead the people to the Promised Land but will, like the rest of their generation, die in the wilderness.

What was the source of God’s anger? Wasn’t the end result what God wanted – that the people should drink? Rashi says it is because of Moses’ words to the people. Ramban says it is because he struck the stone.

The Chasidic master, Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, says that those two views are not different views at all, since Moses’ speech to the people led inexorably to Moses’ striking the rock. According to Reb Levi Yitzchak, the world was created for the People of Israel. And when the People of Israel become mindful of their connection to the divine, become re-aware that their life force comes from the holy throne, then nature will provide for them of its own accord.

The idea that Creation came into being for our benefit is a central belief in the Chasidic world. Of course we see the world differently. Not created for the People of Israel. Not created for People at all. Still, we are the centers of our own existence, and we insist on living. So we struggle to find a balance between hubris and humility; between asserting our right to survive on the planet and the caution to mind our place. (We are reminded of the insight of the Chasidic rabbi Simcha Bunam, who said everyone should have a piece of paper in his right pocket saying, “For my sake the world was created” and a piece of paper in his left pocket saying, “I am but dust and ashes.”)

Levi Yitzchak describes two kinds of leadership in his analysis of the punishment God places on Moses and Aaron. Someone who is worthy of leadership will appeal to people’s highest selves. Such a leader will remind those she leads of their loftiness of spirit and the source of their lives in the divine. Her leadership will raise the people’s sights and the level of their actions. It will, in turn, inspire Creation itself to do what it was meant to do – to provide for us – of its own accord.

But when one leads with words of harshness or with shaming, one’s intended followers are not inspired, nor is Creation. The subjects of such a leader must be coerced. And so must nature itself.

For this reason, once Moses spoke harshly and shamingly to the people, his striking of the stone was inevitable, because the stone would not be moved to give. But God didn’t tell Moses to speak to the people or to strike the stone. God told Moses to speak to the stone. Had Moses said to it, "for this you were created, to give water to a parched people in a time of need, a holy people whose source is the same as yours," the stone would have gushed water in a great fountain. But Moses bypassed this opportunity, and the stone gave only because it was coerced.

And so perhaps God’s anger was not that Moshe had disobeyed an order, but because the whole event was meant to be theatre – a demonstration to the people that everything comes from God’s power. That speaking and listening to all of Creation will result in your receiving what you need. (As the other kind of stones, the rolling kind, might have said: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you talk to the rock, you’re gonna find you’ll get what you need.”)

But Moses messed up the theatre. He instead taught that nature may be compelled, bent to our will. And that remains how our culture views the world around us. If you strike the rock hard enough or drill it deep enough, something will gush forth, even if it’s not what or when or how you wanted it.

So perhaps there is a lesson here about who we are in the world and how we might relate to Creation around us. But I think there is something else here also, something hinted at by the fact that the story immediately follows the description of the purification ritual after a death. There is something here about grief and about the return to the flow of life.

The Children of Israel in the story were thirsty not only from the dryness of the desert, but from the loss of their prophet Miriam and all she had come to mean to them. And Moses and Aaron, burdened with leadership, are also in a state of deep grief that may have undermined their natural leadership instincts and destabilized their sense of their place in Creation. Doesn’t grief do that?

Deeply afflicted, having lost in Miriam a prophet, a counselor and a sister, Moses and Aaron were quick to anger. They acted out. I understand this. I remember once, eight months after my father’s death, bursting into anger uncontrollably over some trifle, or maybe not a trifle, I can’t even remember what it was. Anger until I was crying. My grief had destabilized me.

Or maybe it wasn’t exactly blind anger that Moses and Aaron were driven to. Maybe they felt powerless in the wake of Miriam’s loss. Their words: “Listen, rebels, shall we draw water from the rock?” is ambiguous. The word “rebels” is spelled in Biblical Hebrew identically to the name “Miriam.” By re-voweling it, the sentence could just as easily mean, “Listen, are we Miriam that we can draw water from the rock?” They feel their inability. They feel it so deeply that they don’t even recognize that God’s instruction, “talk to the rock” might specifically be a revelation of Miriam's method for drawing water!*

Either way, they are obviously hobbled by grief. So shouldn’t we – shouldn’t God – cut Moses and Aaron some slack?

Maybe not, if the point of the whole exercise was to teach something about responding to grief and loss. After all, God could have had already had the tap running when the Children of Israel arrived. The unnoticed miracle of pre-running water! But instead, the scene is set so that some sort of demonstration has to happen. But instead of a demonstration about water, it is a lesson about grief.

Because grief is a rock. And grief is a deep thirst.

When we grieve, we are dry as stone, heavy, immobile. Maybe God’s intended lesson here was that you can’t overcome grief by hacking at it, by coercing it, by overpowering it. All we can do is talk to it. Hello grief, I know you come from the same holy source as life itself. You are the flipside of my joys. When I look at you, my grief, I see myself. I see who I have become, who I wanted to be, and maybe who I may yet become.

You talk to grief. And then you wait, in a slow plodding of time that feels truly geological. Until the water begins to trickle – when even a trickle had been inconceivable – and then flow and then gush. Your grief was created for you. To hold your sadness and your longing, to mirror your love, and ultimately to become a source of holiness, a source of sweetness to rival even the salt of your tears.

May we all learn to speak to the stone. To speak to nature around us. And speak to our own natures. May we trust that speech. So that all of Creation – every rock, tree, creature and every one of us – may spout forth with holiness.

* I am indebted to Ari Kamiti for this breathtaking and compassionate insight.

Shlach Lecha: On Grasshoppers, Giants & Flotillas

[Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, June 4, 2010.]

I was in Boston early this week for a Bar Mitzvah – the son of my oldest, dearest friend. It was a Monday morning event (which can happen in communities where Torah is read also on weekdays).

I was somewhat of an honored guest it seemed, so they asked me to participate in the service. Being nothing like shy, I of course said yes, offering to sing or improvise something – the kind of thing I would normally do here in our community. But the night before the Bar Mitzvah, my friends told me that they’d slated me in the program to read the Prayer for the State of Israel. It was already in print.

I took a deep breath and thanked them for the honor. Now if I were being asked to create a prayer for the State of Israel, this would have been an easy request. Israel is always in my prayers. But I was being asked to read the words in the Conservative siddur, which step slightly beyond a plea for safety, survival and peace:

Chazek et y’dey m’giney eretz kodshenu

va’ateret nitzachon t’atrem…

“Strengthen the hands of the defenders of our Holy Land and crown them in victory.” Of course, I could understand nitzachon, “victory,” in metaphoric terms, but the prayer doesn't seem to. Victory here is an unqualified absolute, giving the prayer an undeniable military flavor that does not easily roll off my tongue. Nonetheless, this was my assignment in a ritual not of my making.

Monday morning I woke up to dress for the Bar Mitzvah and learned that during the night Israeli soldiers had boarded a ship headed for Gaza, in international waters. A peace convoy, some would say. A provocation, others would say. Predictably, it had all gone terribly, terribly wrong, leaving nine civilian activists known dead and Israel once again as the focus of the world’s scrutiny.

I tried to collect myself. I was filled with sadness and anger and a feeling of betrayal. How can the Israel that I love – and I do love it even when I am outraged by its actions – let this happen? My anger is understandable to most of you in this room; we are generally progressives in this community, and often critical of Israeli policy. But the internet war had already begun. YouTube videos of uninterpretable scenes were being posted, and emails started arriving in my inbox telling me to wait for all the evidence to be in (which was reasonable) and urging me to defend Israel against those who would slander it – and that “slanderer” part felt, as it always does at such moments, aimed at me.

I tore myself from the news and, heavy hearted, went to the Bar Mitzvah. I sat down in shul and listened to my friend’s son’s fluent chanting of this week’s parashah, Shlach Lecha.

In Shlach Lecha the Israelites are preparing for the conquest of what will become the Land of Israel. God tells Moshe to send margalim – “scouts” - one from each tribe, up into the land to determine if its inhabitants are strong or weak, good or bad, if the cities are open or fortified, if the soil is rich or poor.

The margalim return, famously reporting that the land is flowing with milk and honey. Two of the scouts, Caleb and Joshua, are confident about their military prospects. Caleb, says, “Let us go up and gain possession of the land, for surely we can overcome it.” But the other scouts dissent. “We cannot attack, for the people are stronger than we. The country devours its settlers. The people are giants – and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so must we have looked to them.”

These words spread through the camp and the Israelites lose their nerve. They beg to be brought back to Egypt. God is angered and punishes the people by declaring that the older generation would die in the wilderness. Of all the people assembled, only Caleb and Joshua, with their great confidence in the strength of Israel would be allowed to enter the land.

I sat and listened to the parashah, thinking how we, all these years later, have possession of that very same real estate. So which are we now, I wondered, grasshoppers or giants?

It seemed to me that as possessors and not the dispossessed, it would be easy to cast us in the role of giants. Certainly much of the world paints Israel that way. But I’m beginning to think that after two thousand years of relentless conditioning, however we might be perceived by others, we still don’t know how not to be grasshoppers.

To a grasshopper, every encounter with the greater world involves the risk of being crushed underfoot. And hasn’t this been the Jewish experience over the last two and a half millennia? The risk of annihilation at every turn? We tell our tales of exile and pogroms and close escapes and failed escapes. We pray for peace; we pray to God to confound the counsels of those who would do us harm.

But nothing in our tradition has taught us how to hold power. How to be giants. Instead, we’re left to be giants who think like grasshoppers, or grasshoppers who have grown to gigantic proportions. And it is that constant, deep fear of being crushed underfoot that has informed and, arguably, poisoned so much of our policy in Israel.

I should footnote here that I say “our policy,” not “their policy.” I think it’s important both to say and to let ourselves actually feel the “we.” It is important that even when we oppose Israeli governmental policy – especially when we oppose Israeli governmental policy – we reaffirm our connection as Jews. It is what makes our voice of opposition powerful and meaningful; it is also how we support Israelis who are working for peace. Our inclusion is what we were promised by the Zionist dream when we were young. We were promised that this would be a joint venture. We should not now cede that promise only to those who agree with Israeli military actions. In other words, more than I want to disown Netanyahu, I want Netanyahu to be stuck with the likes of us.

I also need to offer the obvious but very real disclaimers. I do not live in Israel, although I have in the past and many of my loved ones do now. I’ve never had to fear suicide bombers on a daily basis and I’ve not experienced the relief of knowing that a wall currently stands between me and that particular danger. I’ve never had to dodge the bullets; nor have I been required to fire them. I am not a politician or an expert. I cannot speak from the depth of Israeli experience. But that doesn’t mean I have nothing to say.

I also don’t know what happened on that ship. Time will (or won’t) tell who did what to whom first. But I do know that it was a no-win situation, as long as we were in a position where a humanitarian action against us was necessary. Yes, the flotilla was at least as much or more a public relations mission as it was an aid mission, as some people hasten to point out. But so what? Sit-ins at lunch counters in the 1960s south were public relations stunts also. That is how public opinion is swayed, it is how one appeals to the hearts and consciences of the world.

Using deadly force against a public relations mission is the sign, to me, of government by grasshopper. To Israel this flotilla looked like another shoe about to crush us. Everything looks like a shoe about to crush us. Give a grasshopper a gun, and what will it do? It will shoot. If not today, then tomorrow.

A giant, on the other hand, well, giants are perhaps underestimated. A giant who understands and trusts its own power can afford a far greater range of responses to seeming threats. The use of force would only be one possible response among many.

In an Op Ed column on Tuesday, Israeli author and peace activist Amos Oz wrote, “[D]uring Israel’s early years, prime ministers like David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful to use it only as a last resort. But ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been fixated on military force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.”

Defenders of Israel’s actions this week point to the rise of Hamas in Gaza. This is true and I do not suggest that Hamas is not a danger. But we are also smart enough to know that those whom you besiege do not become your friends. When you starve a people you cultivate a population with nothing to lose. On the other hand, in a prosperous, flourishing Palestine, how sexy would Hamas actually be?

Defenders of Israel’s actions also point to the fact that Gaza has two borders – one with Israel and one with Egypt. And Egypt was not opening its border either. In other words, it is unfair to hold Israel to a higher standard than other nations. Perhaps that’s right. The world does not have the right to hold Israel to a higher standard. But we do. Jews do. We are not accountable for Egypt. But for Israel we are. Again, it’s part of the agreement.

So I seem to be mostly talking about our right, as Jews, as people who want Israel to survive, to dissent. Because that no longer feels obvious. But I’d intended to talk about grasshoppers.

And so, young grasshoppers, courage is required. Not the courage to use force. But the courage not to. The courage to dream up other paths and to actually risk taking them. The courage to engage in peacemaking – real, non-grudging peacemaking – and earn back the world’s trust. The courage to help our neighbors and former enemies prosper. Maybe we can’t put down the guns entirely at this moment. But surely we can move our fingers off the triggers, even if just a little.

It will take more courage not to use force than it does to use it. It will take greatness. And I still believe we are capable of greatness; of the greatness of giants. We are already giants in military might. Let us soon be giants in wisdom and compassion and vision and patience.

You may wonder what I did about reciting the prayer for the State of Israel on Monday. I thought of some language I could add, like I might naturally do here at Ner Shalom. I was asked to deliver it in Hebrew so I thought, well, who will notice? I got up on the bimah and began the prayer. But this was a community where everyone prays in Hebrew. With my first word they joined me and recited with me, every word. I was walked down the path of this text, accompanied on all sides, with no chance for a detour. Which is exactly how it should have been at that moment.

But now I’d like to return the Prayer for the State of Israel, not how it was written in that siddur but how I wish it were written.

Avinu Shebashamayim,
Rock and Redeemer of the People Israel; 

Bless the State of Israel. 

Enrich it with Your love;
spread over it the shelter of Your peace. 

Guide its leaders and advisors
with Your light and Your truth. 

Help them with Your good counsel. 

Strengthen our hearts and hands,
so that we may not be devoured by the land; 

so that we may not be devoured by fear. 

Crown us with courage
so that we may be giants of wisdom and compassion. 

Bless us with vision, so that through us
and all who are touched by your spirit, 

there may be lasting peace and joy in the land
and throughout the world. 

And let us say: Amen.

Behar-Bechukotai: Of Oil Spills and Old Covenants

[Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, May 7, 2010.]

This Shabbat, it seems, is meant to be a Shabbat all about the Earth. We have a confluence of several factors that make me say that. First we have a double Torah portion this week - Behar and Bechukotai, both having to do with our responsibilities toward the Earth. The second item is that Sunday is Mother's Day, and don't we always say the Earth is our mother? And the third, well, I'll tell you about the third item later.

First, the Torah portions. These are the last two of the book of Leviticus. Behar lays out the rules of the shmitah year, the seventh year in which the fields must be left fallow. The text says:

The land must be given a rest period, a sabbath to God. For six years you may plant your fields, prune your vineyards, and harvest your crops, but the seventh year is a sabbath of sabbaths - shabbat shabbaton - for the land.

The land deserves a rest. This is remarkable. In the same way that we are granted the holiness of Shabbat every seventh day, the Earth is entitled to take its own sweet Shabbat every seventh year.

While modern commentators have made hay, as it were, of the view that leaving fields fallow is simply sound agricultural practice, nowhere does Torah say that this is the reason for the shmitah year. Instead, it is simply shabbat for the land. It is for the land's sake, not for ours. It is a year in which we may not exert mastery over it. And we, as a by-product, are forced to live a different kind of life. Less ambitious, slower perhaps, a year of some uncertainty, a year without extravagance. A pre-agricultural year, like in the days of Eden. A year where Earth is our companion, not our servant. A year in which we are reminded that the earth deserves -- well, the Earth simply deserves.

It's appealing to me that this portion falls on the eve of Mother's Day. Just a nice little modern coincidence, since we so enjoy articulating the metaphor of Earth as Mother. "Earth as mother" is, of course, an old metaphor, both widespread and apt. Gaia gave birth to us and we owe her the honor we owe our mothers.

Kabed it avicha v'et imecha -- "honor your father and your mother," says the Ten Commandments. "Love your Mother," says the bumper sticker.

But I wonder sometimes if the mother-child metaphor is problematic also. We are, after all, not a species that does so well with the mother-honoring business. Maybe if we were another kind of creature - say, the Pando tree of Utah - 47,000 aspen stems flourishing in seeming independence above ground, but growing from one root stock as one enormous and continuous organism.  But no. Instead we belong to a species where children are born of their mothers, are nurtured by them, but then, if we're successful, are compelled to individuate. Differentiating from our parents is our genetic and cultural imperative. In fact we spend much of our adolescence pushing mom away, and sometimes spend the rest of our lives going around and around that internal conflict. No wonder Torah has to command us to honor our parents. If it came naturally, who'd need a commandment?

Maybe this flawed mother-child metaphor in fact describes our relationship with the Earth accurately. She gave us life and yet we feel compelled to push her away. We differentiate. Like eye-rolling teenagers, we don't see the Earth as our mother, but merely as our address.

All of this bubbles up for me this week as we witness the devastation that has been unleashed on the Gulf Coast and take stock of the newest batch of creatures and habitats that we've handed over to oblivion. How could this happen? Certainly not for lack of knowledge of the risks of offshore drilling or any of the other aggressive environment-changing activities carried on in our name.

Perhaps the answer is connected with the third element of our confluence of factors this weekend. This coming Monday, the 27th of Iyar, is the date Torah gives for when Noah and his family and all the animals were finally able to leave the ark. And on that day, God made a brit - a covenant that never again would God destroy all life because of the evil acts of humans. And the rainbow appears as God's signature on the dotted line.

But despite God's promise, aren't we moving toward destruction?Aren't we slowly (or not so slowly) creating a desolation in which, using the language of Bechukotai, the second of this week's twin portions, the skies will be like iron and the land like brass? How can this be happening?

There is a clue, I think, in midrash surrounding the Noah story. Something about human nature. I was visiting a cousin this week who asked me a kind of fun-fact Bible question. He asked me why the people didn't believe Noah when he told them that it would rain until they were destroyed by flood. (After all, according to our sages, Noah took 120 years to build the ark, giving the people around him plenty of time to repent. But they scoffed at him.) My cousin answered the question, saying it was because they had never seen rain, since rain isn't mentioned in Torah before this point. And so they had no reason to believe a cockamamie story about water falling from the sky. This is a revealing insight. We don't believe in danger that we haven't personally experienced.  

We don't even need such an extreme reading of the Noah story to answer to my cousin's riddle. Perhaps they in fact knew rain as well as any of us does; they'd seen it all their lives. But they'd never seen rain kill. And so, once again, they had no reason to believe a dire warning that lay outside of their experience. And when the great rain started, it was undoubtedly just a drizzle.

Like the old chestnut about boiling the frog. If the water heats up slowly enough, the popular wisdom (although perhaps not the science) goes, the frog doesn't react to the change of temperature and doesn't act to save itself. And so with offshore drilling. So with climate change. We know a tremendous amount, both collectively and individually, about the changes taking place in the environment and the dangers they pose. But we, as a culture, don't react. It is gradual - too gradual to kick our adrenaline into gear. If it hasn't killed us yet, why suppose it will? When will we feel instinctively that we must act? And by that time, will we already be poached frog?

My teacher Rabbi David Seidenberg pointed out this week that although God promised not to destroy all life, God never said that we couldn't.

Our willingness to let life on Earth unravel is a function of disbelief; a function of the nearly imperceptible pace of climate change; a function of the brevity of our own lives; a function of our ardent and adolescent differentiation from Earth our Mother; and a function of our stubborn, lurking and unfounded belief that there is, somewhere out there, a God who will step in, father-like, and save us from ourselves.

I'm aware that I'm preaching to the choir. But maybe not, because if there is a choir, I'm not in it. I know all these things. I read newspapers. I care. But I don't really do. I have only been affected intellectually. Global warming has not touched my experience. If the price of Gulf of Mexico oysters goes up this year, I can tell you with certainty I will not notice. In the meantime, I have chosen to live in a location where there is no option of public transportation or bicycle transit. I've eliminated many of my own best ways to reduce my carbon footprint. So how do I change? Is there a Jewish understanding we can use to help us step up?

Perhaps there is something in our understanding of God and how God acts in this world. Here, in what the Kabbalists would call Malchut - the kingdom, the majesty, the physical reality in which we live and the only world we can ever really know, God acts, if God acts at all, through us. In Reconstructionist lingo we talk about locating God in our shared impulse to do justice. When we act out of our best impulses, there is God.

But we neglect to mention the flipside. What of our combined worst impulses? Greed, apathy, willing ignorance, closing our eyes to injustice. Alas, God is there too. Not the God who comforts and provides, but the angry God of Bechukotai  - the one promising environmental desolation in exchange for our misdeeds. Or the angry God of the Noah story, willing to let human faults justify the destruction of all life.

This is a terrifying thought to me. That we, through our actions, bring about that angry, biblical God, that one that as modern Jews we try so hard to distance ourselves from. It's hard to accept the amount of destructive power we actually wield. To misquote Walt Kelly in his Pogo comic strip written for Earth Day 39 years ago, "We have met the vengeful God, and He is us."

But owning our godliness in this respect also gives me hope. If by our actions we are God - for good and for ill - then we are the ones bound by the brit, bound by the covenant of the rainbow made after the flood. We signed onto an oath, not as the human parties, but as God's proxy. And so there is no loophole for us. No way to say "not me, not us." We have made a covenant with all life: "every living soul - the birds, the cattle and every beast of the earth." And so we are oath-bound to protect the air and the water, to protest exploitation of limited resources, to sing out for sustainability, to rethink, to remediate, to live more simply.

We do not have a choice. We are oath-bound, covenant-bound to do this. We do not do it [merely] out of mother love, honor, or self-interest. We do it out of deep, uncompromising obligation.

And so whenever we have a decision to make that has an impact on this Earth, in our lives or our work or our community institutions, whenever we are deciding whether to speak out on an environmental issue or not, let us stop, take a deep breath, and say the traditional blessing that is recited upon seeing a rainbow:

ברוך אתה יי זוכר הברית

Baruch Atah Yah, zocher habrit.

Blessed are You, Yah, who remembers the Covenant.

And blessed may We be, that we may remember the Covenant.

And blessed will all Existence be when the Covenant is kept.

ברוך אתה יי זוכר הברית

Baruch Atah Yah, zocher habrit.

World Word Cloud

This is a doodley graphic representation of my Erev Rosh Hashanah drash created through the very clever program, Wordle. If this graphic makes you want to review the drash itself, you can just click here.

The Immensity of Absence

Invocation for the Sonoma County
Community-wide Yom HaShoah Commemoration
April 11, 2010


I'm honored and humbled to be asked to offer the invocation for today's commemoration. I am myself from a family of mameshdikeh Yankees: some of my forebears on this soil as early as the 1850s, the last straggler here by 1905. So that I stand here with an unprecedented century of safety behind me.

There were, of course, people in my family lost in the Shoah. But research was required to find their names.

And so I sometimes feel unequal to the task, when the task is to remember. How shall I remember? What shall I remember? How do I conjure up for myself a depth of pain that some in this room could not possibly conjure away, even if they wanted to?

The answer for me and many of my generation is, I think, to learn to see the invisible. I travelled to Poland three years ago. I was prepared to see the camps, and I was moved when I saw them. But weighing much more heavily on me, and staying with me even to this moment, was the immensity of what I didn't see.

Like looking at a picture where your eye suddenly sees the negative space jump to the front, we must train ourselves to appreciate what should be - but is not - there.

The actions never completed and dreams never realized.
The prayers never offered.
The poems left unpenned and the symphonies uncomposed.
The ideas not sparked and inventions never imagined.
The eyes that didn't meet and romances that didn't blossom.
The generations not born.
The cousins we should have had.
Seven decades of challahs not baked for Shabbos.
Uncountable tzedakah not given.
Old age never reached.
Peaceful deaths denied and honorable burials not granted.
The trivial moments that never even had the opportunity to be taken for granted.

This is an immensity of absence. As Jews, as citizens of the 21st Century, we live in it every day.
It is an emptiness the size of Europe.

So how do we not despair?

We blossom anew even in the midst of this desert.
We live. We dream.
We pen poems and compose symphonies.
Meet eyes, hold hands, make love.
We bake and we build.
We act justly.
We honor lost lives by living our own. With ferocity. With gusto.
We feel the sap coursing through us and, without guilt, we open our petals to the sky. 

So that our lives are memory.
So that our lives are a tikkun.
So that we may be worthy to be alive.

We live, and through our lives, through our love, through our creativity and our compassion, we remember.

And we make sure that that memory becomes - for us, for others, and for this entire beautiful, terrible, undeserving and desperately needy world - a true blessing.

Ken y'hi ratzon. May it be so.

Everything I Needed to Know About Passover I Learned from Knitting

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, April-May 2010]

I've been trying to do more knitting of late. This is a great challenge for me, because it doesn't come naturally. Often I'm struggling against the tangle of shmateh hanging from my needles, determined yet inept, my own mistakes and miscounts coming at me as if out of the blue, like unforeseeable misfortune. But then at other times I'm in the zone. My needles sail, their clatter almost a prayer, my spirit disembodied from the action of my fingers. And I knit my thoughts and intentions right into the row.

Until recently, all I ever knitted were rectangles. Scarves. Stitch after stitch like stringing beads. But the good stuff, the non-rectangles, require ins and outs that are much more like life itself. You lurch forward, you double back, sometimes you are connected, sometimes you leave an emptiness in your wake. When you're in the row you can't see the meaning. Only after you've knitted enough and hold it away from your eyes can you see that there is, in fact, a pattern. The holes make sense; there are previously unperceived connections between this and that; there is grace in what turns out to be lace.

I've recently learned that "passover" is not only the name of our Festival of Matzot and our description of the Angel of Death's detour when approaching an Israelite home in Egypt. It is also a knitting instruction. Abbreviated passo, It involves several minute actions. You make a stitch. You follow this with another stitch. Then you reach back and grab the earlier one. You pass it over and around the more recent stitch, pull it off the needle and let it go. Then you keep knitting.

In a way, our lives and our history are like the passover stitch. We are part of a garment, that is for sure. We are connected front and back to past and future. We are linked side to side with each other and with this particular reality in which we live. But despite exhortations to "stay in the moment" or to "live in the present," we can't. Cut off the past and the present unravels. So how do we engage the past and still move forward? We use the passo - the passover stitch. We reach back, take hold of the past and let it briefly embrace the present. What perspective does it offer us? What flavor? What insight? Can we accept the generosity of its offer without being bound and tied to its specifics?

It seems to me that only by engaging the past in this way can we let it go honorably, knowing that we will carry an element of it into the future. A lesson, a custom, a considered rejection of a custom, a reshaping of a custom. We are not large enough to remember every story, every ritual, every event of our past. But we can remember that there was a story, a ritual, an event. We can catch and carry some element of its spirit. And then, like the passo, we can let go of it, let it gently slip off the needle, as we continue to knit the garment of our lives.

The Talmudic word for knitting or interlacing, serug, is also used to refer to broken lines in Torah. That is, lines of text written not in rectangles like a scarf, but rather like lace, with gaps and continuations. This style of writing is reserved especially for the great moments of poetry in Torah, for instance the Song of the Sea, sung by the Children of Israel after the parting and rejoining of the waves. The poetic climax of the Passover story, written to look like undulating waves, written to look like a knitted garment.

And so let us make lace this Passover. Let us take this old yarn of ours, this story of enslavement and liberation, of eagerness and doubt, of triumph and regret, and draw it for a moment around our own lives to see what insight it offers us. Are we free? Are we content? What must we do next? How do we celebrate our freedoms while regretting pain we've caused others in achieving it? Let us let the past pass over and around us and teach us its lessons. And then we can, at least for this year, let it go, knowing that with time and perspective, we will see the pattern that it helped shape.

Parashat Vayikra: Reclaiming Jewish Guilt

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, March 19, 2010.]

• Raise your hand if you’ve never felt guilt about anything.

• Raise your hand if you often feel guilty about something.

• Raise your hand if you feel guilty about something right now.

I ask these questions because this week’s parashah, Vayikra, the opening section of the Book of Leviticus, is, in the part we read in this year’s cycle, a bit of a self-help manual for people who experience guilt. The portion describes the sin offerings to be made by those who are guilty of an offense against God. The required offerings differ, depending on who you are. Leadership pays higher than rank and file. So the priest, who represents the people before God, pays more dearly than a tribal chief, who pays more than a peasant. It’s a kind of progressive guilt tax. In each instance, the resolution of the guilt comes through an animal sacrifice. The person who is guilty lays his hands on the head of the animal for a moment before the sacrifice happens, in an interestingly intimate and compassionate gesture. And unlike other types of sacrificial offerings, no one gets to benefit from the animal. Everything edible or usable in some way is burned. Through this ritual the sin is purged and the guilt-ridden person is released from his burden. 

If someone sins against another person, committing what we might term an ethical violation, he still does the sacrifice, but first makes good with the person who was wronged. In fact, he pays restitution plus a penalty; in other words he must restore things to a state better than he found them.

In the Torah, the obligation to engage in these rituals arises when a person is ashem – “guilty.” Interestingly, this is not guilt as decided by a judge or a court. Instead, the requirement is triggered when one becomes aware of one’s own guilt or when it’s pointed out. It presumes that you have a desire to do good, and when you err, you own it.

But “guilt” in English, in American, and particularly among Jews, has come to mean something very different. In some way, it has come to mean almost the opposite of how it is used in Torah. Not an error you are first to acknowledge, but one you are last to acknowledge, or don’t want to acknowledge, or that you claim you didn’t commit anyway.

I had a lot of conversations about guilt this week, starting with my Facebook page. I asked people their thoughts about guilt and accountability and the responses were remarkable. Almost no one had a kind word to say about guilt. The very word brought up anger and indignation and, often, specifics about relationships – especially relationships with mothers.

My friends described guilt not as an emotion or impulse generated by you, but as a state imposed on you by someone else. They experienced guilt as being punished for someone else’s projection. They talked about being “guilt-tripped.” In other words, manipulated through some clever, sneaky blow to the soft core of your good nature. Where conscience might be your internal moral compass, guilt was seen as useless hardware originating outside of you. One is elevated by conscience, but victimized by guilt.

So why do I care? Well, like everyone, I walk around feeling guilty and hate it. So this is not a purely academic topic.

I found myself this week wanting to reclaim guilt; to rehabilitate it somehow. If for no other reason than the fact that in my experience, anything universally despised is definitely worth a second look.

One thing I noticed right off was that people’s words and tone when describing guilt virtually throbbed with resentment of authority. We don’t mind being answerable to our own conscience. But we hate being answerable to someone else. Whether it is teacher, or boss, or God, or tradition, or Shabbat, or workload, or mother, we resent authority. And Mom, alas, was the figure who came up the most in the conversations. Why is this? Is resentment of authority an outgrowth of the parent-child relationship to begin with?

Our parents, often especially our mothers, are where we learn right and wrong; where we are scolded or corrected or schooled in some way when we hit or steal or lie (or, hypothetically, pour a full bottle of Bullwinkle bubble bath on the wall-to-wall carpeting). Our parents are also where we learn compassion and empathy. Where we are taught that our actions have consequences not only for ourselves but for others. In some ways, learning that we can hurt our mothers is the foundation upon which we build compassion and restraint and, perhaps, our susceptibility to guilt.

But in each person’s development comes the time that we separate from our parents. By our teen years we don’t want Mom and Dad or Mom and Mom or Dad and Dad telling us right from wrong. “Leave me alone! Let me decide!” We reject of our parents’ moral voice. This is a normal part of our growth. But sometimes, even when we’re grown, we don’t know how to shake the reflex to reject our parents’ moral authority out of hand.

The impulse to discredit Mom’s moral voice found a comfy home in the mid-20th Century American invention of the Jewish mother. This stereotype doesn’t really exist among Jews from other countries, nor did it exist in previous generations. One can speculate about how it arose. Perhaps Jewish Old World communalism was being replaced by the American mythos of rugged individualism – an individualism that, of course, was always only valued in men. And Jewish men, who were close to their mothers, and whose success was often commensurate with their mothers’ sacrifices, felt especially compelled to demonstrate to America their independence from the maternal through a whole genre of anti-Semitic jokes at their mothers’ expense. Guilt was a central theme.

A typical joke goes something like this: A Jewish mother bought her son two ties for Chanukah. He tried one on to show her. She said, “what’s the matter, you didn’t like the other one?”

This is a depiction of guilt as a form of entrapment. There is no justice here, no moral authority in her; no issue of right or wrong being raised – nonetheless the son is judged. The joke defines guilt as harsh judgment without any remotely legitimate grounds.

This is what I’d like to challenge. And I think we can reclaim our Jewish mothers as we reclaim guilt. Might it have been a plea for appreciation? Might it have been a request for chesed, for compassion, cloaked in words of gevurah, of judgment?

For sure I’ll admit that there are times that we experience something as guilt – or experience “being guilted” – when there isn’t a particularly strong moral claim involved.

But what’s often so frustrating about the guilt someone gives us, including our mothers, is that it’s exactly on point. It is the message we don’t want to hear. As my mother said to me today, “you don’t get mileage from a guilt trip if there isn’t a grain of truth in it.”

And I think that’s true. If I turned to you right now and asked, “How dare you invade Poland,” you wouldn’t feel guilty. You’d just presume I’d taken leave of my senses. It wouldn’t have anything to do with you, and you wouldn’t be bothered. Which is why I think guilt can’t be solely about them. It has to be, in small or large part, about you.

So we could say that one difference between conscience and guilt is that in the case of conscience, you were the one to realize how you messed up. With guilt, someone else points it out first. And that can be infuriating.

I asked my mother what her thoughts were about guilt. She said, “I try not to do guilt anymore.” I asked her for an example. She said, “For instance, I don’t say, ‘You could call more often.’”

And there it was, the grain of truth, the right hook to my soft spot. A thing I feel guilty about, whether she actually says it to me or not. Why? Because I know I could do better. And hearing her tell me this, I felt sad that she’d internalized this pop idea of guilt so deeply that she felt unjustified asking me for something legitimate.


Which leads to another famous trope of the Jewish mother joke. How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? “It's okay, I’ll sit in the dark.”

We all know the story. Guilt here takes the form of a test in which we are asked to figure out someone else’s needs before they articulate them, and we fail. But the punchline of this joke presumes that we are not required to have compassion for our mothers. In other words, the joke is only funny if her expectation that her children might change the light bulb for her were laughably unjustified. 

But we know that’s not so. What would Torah say if Torah were asked? Probably something like this:

If thy mother’s bulb burns out, and she sitteth in the dark, thou shalt not suffer her to climb the rickety stepladder with a flashlight, but verily thou shalt change the light bulb for her, yea, even without having to be asked.

Isn’t that what kabed et avicha v’et imecha – honor thy father and mother – would require of us? Isn’t that what simple compassion would require of us?

And empathy also has something important to say about this joke. To work, the joke requires us not to have any real empathy for our Jewish mother. If we did, we might wonder why she felt she couldn’t just ask? What experience did she have with her parents or with the world or with her children to feel so powerless to ask for this most minimal piece of assistance?

I’m sorry if I’ve ruined this joke for you. But not too sorry.

The truth is, the Jewish mother jokes, largely, are not about the failings of Jewish mothers. They are about the failings of her children – our failings – and our resistance to owning them. We feel guilty about Mom sitting in the dark, because we knew we should have changed the damn bulb and we didn’t.

So instead of looking at that guilt as a spiritual punishment, perhaps we might see it as something else. An incomplete act of compassion. A moment of empathy waiting to be born. Conscience thwarted, hopefully only temporarily. Guilt is an invitation. Not an invitation to feel bad. But an invitation to learn, to grow, to be a better person.

When we feel guilty, what would happen if we took that moment to ask, “what about this makes me so crazy? If I take away the fact of who said it to me and the tone of voice in which it was said, is there something left here that I need to know or already knew?”

In the Torah portion, someone who was guilty did not just say “sorry,” shrug and walk away. They engaged in a ritual act of transformation. They offered a sacrifice. They came out of it unburdened, un-guilty.

So how can we transform our guilt into un-guilt? How can we offer it up as a sacrifice, burn away the part that is painful or just plain aggravating, and unlike the guilt offering of Leviticus, keep and digest the part that is of value. How do we transform ourselves in the process? Is there a ritual act available to us too?

As we all know, the Temple sacrifices of antiquity are over. They were replaced in Judaism by prayer; prayer, in which we offer our words and lift our voices and move our bodies in a way designed to open our hearts. So I suggest we let our words, our voices, our bodies, be the vehicle for offering up and transforming guilt.

Let us offer up our guilt and transform it into conscience, empathy and compassion. When my mother told me she no longer tells me she wishes I’d call more, I was able to say, “I’m sorry. I know I need to call more.” And just that moment was transformative between us. Guilt was transformed into understanding and responsibility and concern. Two adults communicating forthrightly about their needs and desires. And the next step will be in the world of action, using my body, my speed-dial finger, to make the necessary course correction toward my being a better person.

And sure, we all feel bad about many things; we can’t respond to everyone’s needs. Some people might have desires of us that are not reasonable. But maybe giving clear and loving voice to our limitations, our boundaries, can help transform guilt into healthy, unsticky, untangled communication.

The Hebrew word ashem, “guilty,” could be re-vowelled as i-shem, “without a name,” a “non-name.” In our tradition, your name equates to your moral stature, your reputation, the faith others can place in you. Guilt, as my friends described it all week, compromised them, weakened them, undermined their moral standing.

May we instead, at the moment that we feel ashem, guilty, i-shem, losing our name, may we at that moment make an offering. May we find the kernel of deep truth in our wave of guilt, and may we use our words, our bodies and our generous hearts to transform it into wisdom, into a lesson, into guidance, into a map, a blueprint, an instruction for a next step. In the process, may we make things even better than they were when we began. May we all have a good name in our families and communities. Priests, chieftains, peasants, mothers of children and children of mothers, we are all wise enough - we are all bighearted enough - to do this.

Photo 1: Aaron and sons lay their hands on the head of the bullock for the guilt offering.
Photo 2: A Jewish Mother (mine)
Photo 3: A working light bulb.