Parashat Shlach Lecha - "Born this Way"

For the Sonoma Pride Interfaith Service

June 12, 2011
Note: I was one of three clergy asked to "share words" touching on the theme of Lady Gaga's "Born this Way."

Good evening. I am humbled and excited to be here. I've had the good fortune to stand on stage at many a Pride event, but it's my first time doing it neither as an activist nor as a singing drag queen, but rather as a Jew. Truthfully, I can't even remember the last time I attended a Pride event in pants. And as I'm sure many of you can understand, I'm finding it rather constricting.

    But I'm honored to be asked to "Share Words," which seems to be the gentile euphemism for "give a sermon but please keep it short." In the Jewish tradition we call these words a drash, in which you expound upon a traditional text in order to draw meaning and relevance from it. Today I'll treat two texts: one from Torah and one from Gaga.

    I'll start with Torah. This week, Jews around the world read and argue over a portion of the Book of Numbers called Shlach Lecha. In this well-known story, the Children of Israel are in the Wilderness, camped just outside the borders of the Promised Land. They send scouts to investigate. The scouts return and report that the land is flowing with milk and honey. "But," they add, "the people there are mighty. They are as giants, and stronger than we...

ונהי בעינינו כחגבים וכן היינו בעיניהם

...and we appeared as grasshoppers in our eyes and in theirs."

    The sages of old discuss this moment and how their history of enslavement colored the Children of Israel's sense of self-worth. They were unable to take their rightful place not because they were weak, but because they believed themselves to be weak. And because of this, they were doomed to wander for forty more years.

    Feel familiar? For those of you who like me are alte kackers, old timers, in the world of queer activism, this should feel very familiar. Because it also describes our pursuit of a place in this world.

    Enter, then, our second text, the Torah of Gaga. In the earliest years of the fight for our rights in this country, our approach was tentative. This was revealed in our political rhetoric, repeatedly explaining that we were "born this way." Not in a Lady Gaga "we don't care what you think" kind of way. Not topped off with a defiant Queer Nation "get over it." We said it very much in a "we do care what you think" way. "We were born this way," we said, "so it is unfair of you to treat us poorly." At the time, in its context, "born this way" was the strongest case we could make for our rights and it was our great statement of identity. And I never liked it.

    It was always a rhetoric of apology. A plea for tolerance, not a demand for anything particularly good and juicy. "We are grasshoppers," we seemed to say, "We were born as grasshoppers. It's not our fault that we're grasshoppers. So please don't step on us as you would step on, say, grasshoppers."

    Besides feeling apologetic, the "born this way" rhetoric also felt to me to be simply untrue. Too restrictive. Too static. And under-appreciative of who we are. Yes, we might have been born that way but we didn't stop there. We might have begun with our particular genes and hormones and whatever else goes into the human cocktail, but we've all kept adding and shaking and stirring. And what we've each concocted with our raw ingredients is nothing short of brilliant and brave and, to my mind, holy.

    Our births didn't define our destinies. After all, couldn't we have lived as heterosexuals? Just entre nous, couldn't we have? Couldn't we have lived in our body's biological sex? Maybe. Probably. Our forebears did. Could we have done it happily? Maybe not. But we might have chosen to make the tradeoff. We might have been willing to remain closeted or quiet or invisible in exchange for, I don't know, a prominent place in religious life or maybe a seat in Congress. I understand people do that.

    All of us who were "born this way" have made choices, from the moment we realized we were different in some way that matters. When to pass. When not to. How to survive. How to leave home. How to create home. How to find community. How to make community where there was none. How to love. How to be brave. How to be fabulous. How to be in this world. Frankly, in a certain way, how any of us here was born is perhaps the least interesting thing about us.

    I know that we Jews contributed to the culture the 6-day Creation story, which sets up the idea that things get created and then get set more or less on a kind of autopilot. In other words, things get made and it's a done deal. Things are as they were born. But this is a tediously static view of the world, and of us. And we are far from a static people.

    So I'd like to introduce you to a different Jewish view of Creation, a mystical idea that only got written down after our traditions had parted ways. According to Jewish mysticism, often known by its drag name, Kabbalah, Creation is not something that happened once at a finite point of time in the past. Instead, Creation is renewed at every single moment. God's thought pours through the universe continuously. And through this outpouring of shefa, this Divine abundance, Creation keeps Creationing; the world continues to flow like milk and honey. Everything in it continues to become.

    This Creation story I like. It moves. We all continue to become -- through our choices, our intentions and our actions. We continue to become by choosing integrity. Honesty. Insight. Compassion. Freedom. Love. Hot deviant sex. Courage. Creativity. Anger and persistence in the face of injustice.

    We might have been born grasshoppers, or we might think we were. But we have become giants. We have wandered for decades in a wilderness of sodomy laws and marriage inequality and Will & Grace reruns and the God-hates-fagmongers of Westboro Baptist. We have had blessings and we have had reversals. We have had our Harry Hays and our Harvey Milks and our Phyllis and Dels. We've had our Radical Faeries and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Queer Nations and ACTUPs — and yes, our Lady Gagas. We have lost Matthew Shepherds at the hands of Amalek. We have lost hundreds of thousands of our dearest ones to plague. We continue to witness intersex children surgically "corrected" in the name of gender normativity and our transgender youth suffer the mistreatment of psychoanalysis. We continue to experience both hope and hardship. But we are making a Promised Land of this wilderness. We have become giants and we will have this land flow with milk and honey.

    Were we born this way? No. We have grown and survived and flourished to become this way. Or, maybe, taking the mystical view, in which God's shefa, God's divine abundance, flows through and renews this reality at every turn, then we might say, "Yes, we are born this way. Not years ago, but right at this very moment. And we will continue to be born, to become more ourselves, in all our fierceness and fearlessness and fabulousness. We will more and more be the giants we have already dared to become.

    And let us say: amen.

A Gaga-based Kabbalistic Formula. Chant, rinse, repeat.

Shechinah and the Holiness of Longing

Some Mysticism for the Seventh Week of the Omer
For Congregation Ner Shalom, June 3, 2011

This is the 7th week of the Omer, which is the in-between time, the wilderness that stretches from Egypt to Sinai, from Pesach to Shavuot. Our mystical forebears counted each week of the Omer by reference to one of the seven lower sefirot of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the Tree of Life being sort of the assembly line of Creation with God's slightest thought at the input end and the world that we know at the output. (The Tree of Life is not as linear or sequential as that of course; it is in constant operation, with all the spiritual elements of existence being added in at every moment.)

So this 7th week of the Omer references the sefirah called Malchut. This is the final sefirah, and it means "the kingdom." It is this kingdom: the world that we live in, the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears. Not just a place or a time, but an entire reality.

But in the same way that Malchut represents a finite, observable universe housed within a great infinity, so Malchut also reflects a certain schism in the nature of the Divine. On the one hand we have the vast, infinite God, as unknowable as His name is unutterable. We refer to this God as Hakadosh Baruch Hu - Holy One Praised be He - or Eyn Sof - the Infinite - or YHWH or sometimes just plain God.

And on the other hand, we have the Shechinah. The divine takeaway.

Our idea of the Shechinah is grounded textually in our biblical story of building the mishkan - the tabernacle - in the wilderness. "Build it," God says, "so that I may dwell among them," meaning among us. V'shachanti: "I will dwell." And from this idea and this Hebrew root we get shechinah - God's dwelling. Not the place, but the phenomenon. God's hanging out among us - around us and in us. Over the centuries, as our mystical imagination grew, the Shechinah came to be personified as a feminine aspect of God: a divine mother, a Sabbath bride, our advocate before God, a friend.

And the rest is history. Or mythology. Or mysticism. In our 21st Century mysticism, the Shechinah is the part of God that we experience first hand - in the world, in our hearts. When we mutter a "Please God" under our breath, it is the Shechinah we're pleading to. When danger is averted and we instinctively say, "Oh, thank God," it is the Shechinah we're thanking. When we walk through the woods pouring out our sorrows as the disciples of Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav were instructed to do, it is the Shechinah's shoulder we're crying on. When our grandmothers would sigh and say Gotenyu it was the Shechinah's comfort they were seeking. And when our hearts leap up and doors fly open to welcome shabbat, it is the Shechinah's face we are looking for.

So this 7th week of the Omer would be the time for us to especially celebrate the Shechinah and notice her presence in all things. I started trying to do that a bit this week. And for me, it's sometimes easy, because, b"H, there are many blessings in my life. I live somewhere beautiful, under trees. This week I heard rain on my roof and saw a fox at my door. There were some magnificent rainclouds bathed in golden sunset. I noticed my family around me, whom I love and who are almost never completely annoying. So amidst all that beauty and blessing it can be easy - too easy really - to think, "Ah, the Shechinah."

Because beauty and love are not our sole experience of the world. They might not even be our dominant experience of the world. We all cycle through times of sadness, grief, loneliness, defeat, struggle. Our golden times are fleeting. Our bodies begin to fail just as we become wise enough to know how best to use them. Our relationships end. Our desire for love or health or achievement remains unrequited, or differently requited. If the Shechinah really embodies our experience, then we must be able to recognize her in the hard stuff. Because there's just so much hard stuff, and if we are created in God's image, God must be there.

Perhaps this is the special appeal of the idea of the Shechinah. The breaking of the godhead in two reflects our own experience of brokenness, of separation, of isolation. Separation seems to be the special characteristic of this realm of malchut. In our mystical creation story, God starts out as everything. All is one, all is same. But then God makes way for Creation to happen. God scootches over in an act called tzimtzum. And in this holy scootching, multiplicity is invented. There becomes a
here and a there; a now and a then; a me and a you, an us and a God. The infinite invents the finite, and suddenly we have individuality and plurality and relationship and change and longing.

Malchut, the world of separation, is also necessarily the world of longing. In it we observe the gravitational pull between bodies. We experience in us and around us the desire to live. The desire to stay alive in order to connect the past with the future. The desire to love. To be loved. To hang on tight to our loved ones. To aspire. To achieve. To learn. To build. To race. To reach, which like the trees of the forest, we do without even thinking about it, down into the earth  and up into the light. While the physical universal of this world is change, the spiritual universal of this world is longing.

Now any Buddhist can tell you that longing, craving, clinging - these bring suffering. The Buddhist responds by trying to reduce suffering by letting go of attachments, and reaching beyond desire. Our way, however, is a bit different. The Kabbalist tells us to seek the holy in the suffering by cultivating an awareness that our longing itself is rooted in God. All this longing is the foreseeable consequence of God's little scootch.

Midrash tells us that when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the Shechinah came into exile with us, and that she longs alongside us. So if God is the source of our longing, the Shechinah is our companion in it. According to the early Chasid, Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, even our longing for God is itself an echo, a reflex, of the Shechinah's longing to be reunited with God.

It is said that when the Temple in Jerusalem was standing, the Shechinah would enter the Holy of Holies on erev shabbat and the Holy One, Hakadosh Baruch Hu, would enter as well, and they would be reunited in marital bliss. The Temple is gone, but through our observance of shabbat, we continue to engineer this yichud, this conjugal visit between God and the Shechinah, although I couldn't say for certain who is the prisoner and who the visitor. But while Kabbalists imagine this reunion as a day-long bliss-filled sexual liaison, I can't quite. How could the fact of separation, the pain of separation, not come with them into the bedchamber? I imagine God and the Shechinah, instead, sitting in the Holy of Holies, maybe at a card table dealing out a game of gin. "So," one of them asks the other, "how's this separation thing working for you?" And it turns out they both hate it. But they know that longing is key to the world they birthed and now they are trapped by their Creation. It is too late or maybe just too early to go back to the great undifferentiated Infinite.

Judy Holliday, Shechinah-like, plays gin in Born Yesterday.

So we are stuck in this world of longing. And here in this 7th week of the Omer, how do we rejoice in the Shechinah, how do we celebrate the divine in all things, when so much of our experience of this world is suffering? How do we find the holiness even where we can't find the happiness?

Here is my suggestion. Begin the way you naturally might if I were to say, "Seek the divine in the world around you." Draw your focus somewhere. The beautiful tree. The gorgeous light.  The sound of the rain or of music. But instead of jumping right to the place of trying to see the magic of the divine in that thing, draw your attention instead to your own emotion around it. Find your longing. What is its nature? Ask yourself, what am I longing for? Am I longing for everything to be this beautiful? Am I longing for things to stay this way? Am I longing to return to something I once had? Am I simply longing for the exquisite feeling I get smelling pine needles in the rain?

Then, rather than looking at the thing, look at your longing instead. Recognize it as something naturally occurring in this universe; honor it as something born of God.

Or think of someone you love or whose presence you miss. Then shift your focus to your longing or your desire and find the godliness in it.

Or think of some healing you want. And instead of visualizing the healing, visualize your desire for it and see the holiness in that desire.

For this moment it doesn't matter if your desire is fulfilled or not. Longing itself is the exhale of this life; it is sweet even when there is bitterness too.

So this week, during these remaining days of the in-between, to appreciate the Shechinah, don't look at the world but at the longing the world invokes in you. It is that longing that makes you most  human. And it is that longing that makes you divine.

This world, this life, deserves our longing, even if grief or suffering might follow in its wake. As the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet said,

You must grieve for this now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much

if you're going to say "I lived" ...

May we feel all that this life invites us feel.

May we witness our own longing and see the holiness that is in it.

And may we notice the Shechinah at our side, longing with us, holy.

And let us say: Amen.

The Death of Bin Laden: Rejoicing and Restraint

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, May 6, 2011.]

I think the week can't go by without talking about the death of Osama Bin Laden. There is, of course, too much to say. I think we all have a lot of feelings, many conflicting. For me, that described my week. Relief, for sure. And horror. Sadness. Possibly some gladness. Then instant guilt about the gladness.

Many in the US have expressed downright joy. I confess that hearing the news, turning on the TV and seeing revelers doing it up big for the cameras twisted my insides in a nauseating way. The jubilation was too much for me after a decade of bloodshed.

It felt like watching Superbowl celebrations. Or hearing the cheers at the end of some action thriller, where the evil genius gets what he deserves, the audience hoots and hollers, and the credits roll.
But Bin Laden was not a bad guy in a movie. He was a real person and he was a symbol of terror. On a symbolic level, his death brings about a certain closure. But in the real world, we don't yet know what actual effect it will have.

Still, can't we be glad at the symbolic importance of his death? Isn't it right to rejoice, just a little? I spent the week being dour about it, and many friends expressed a similar gloom. Then one cousin posted on my Facebook page, "I'm glad the bastard's dead. He would have killed you and every other Jew if he'd had the chance."

Perhaps that's so. And perhaps I am safer that he's gone. Perhaps we all are. And yet it still doesn't make me happy.

When you save a life, says Talmud, you save the whole world. When you destroy a life, you destroy the whole world. Every life is inherently valuable; every life represents an entire world of possibility. Worlds were destroyed in last weekend's raid.

But of course thousands of worlds were destroyed ten years ago at the World Trade Center and beyond, snuffed out at, we presume, Osama Bin Laden's command. Add onto that the over 1000 US military personnel and the many thousands of Afghanis killed in the subsequent war.

While all life is intrinsically valuable, even Jewish law says you forfeit your claim to it when you kill. Killing, in Torah, earns you a death penalty. One who lays a trap to murder is accountable with his life and may not be harbored. So is that what our tradition has to say to us this week? Is that all it has to say?

I found there to be a surprising silence this week among Jewish sources when it came to reacting to Bin Laden's death. Usually something big happens, and my inbox is flooded with Jewish rightwing stuff and Jewish leftwing stuff. But this week? Tumbleweeds.

At last the story of the Children of Israel at the shores of the sea began to pop up in Facebook posts and private conversations. As you recall from this core story of ours, the Children of Israel flee Egypt and are being pursued by Pharaoh's armies. God parts the sea and the Israelites make it across in the nick of time. The water closes in around the Egyptians and they drown.

Poussin, The Crossing of the Red Sea, 1634

The Children of Israel burst into song: ashira ladonai ki ga'oh ga'ah; sus v'rochvo ramah vayam. I sing unto God because He has prevailed; horse and rider have been thrown into the sea!

So what do you recall happens next?

Nothing. They are not rebuked. We all just popularly think they are. They in fact sing out the song. Moses singing and Miriam dancing. But, according to the famous midrash that appears twice in Talmud, the angels begin to join in the singing and it is they whom God silences, saying, "My creatures are dying, and you sing me songs?"

We've generally used this legend to posit a rule that we should not rejoice in the death of our enemies. But the story is subtler than that. The Children of Israel are allowed to rejoice uninterrupted. The angels are not. Why? Isn't there an undeniable truth here? The Israelites were saved from certain death by miraculous means. How could they not rejoice? The angels, on the other hand, however partisan they might feel toward the Israelites, were not in actual danger. And so their celebration is prohibited.
Perhaps the lesson then is that if you're not directly affected, you are called upon to keep a broader view. Be angels of the world, not just backer of your team. Value all life.

So who gets to celebrate Bin Laden's death? Just the close kin of 9/11 victims? Affected military families? And have they in fact been the ones celebrating?

As one of our teens asked the other night when we were discussing this, "Who's to say we weren't all saved when Bin Laden was killed?" And isn't that true also? Who knows what he was planning next? Just today, news was breaking about planned attacks on US railroads and other civilian targets. It could have been any of us next. Weren't we all saved? Is it wrong to celebrate that?

I have no answer for this. In another age, I might have argued that there's a difference between escaping the imminent danger you know about and being released from a danger that's theoretical. But in an age where attacks can be planned and launched secretly from many thousands of miles away, imminence has far less meaning than it used to.

The book of Proverbs says this: "Rejoice not when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles." But how can we, in this world, in these bodies with all their frailty, not rejoice at the death of one who would harm us, when even the angels on high can barely contain themselves?
Another proverb says, "When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices; and when the wicked perish, there is jubilation." A sombre statement of a simple reality. Not a prescription but a description. On some level it doesn't matter what we intend; when the wicked perish, we, the City, rejoice. It is in our nature.

Personally, I'm not there yet. I'm not sure whether I feel any more or less safe than I did last week. I'm sad at all the senseless deaths, all the worlds destroyed. Reveling might in fact be my right, or at least be excusable. But I might sit still and stay quiet just the same.

When all is said and done, there is much we don't know. About Al Qaeda, about Bin Laden, about the operation that ended his life, and about what could happen next. So we must follow what we do know. We must pursue justice as we understand it to the best of our limited ability. And in our own corner of the world, in our own lives, we must pour out whatever love we are capable of. Justice must be balanced by love. Let us keep saving whole worlds, and loving them as well.

Baruch Atah Adonai, Oseh Hashalom. Blessed be this great and uninterpretable Existence, whose potential for peace is boundless.

By the Waters: Yom Hashoah 2011

Invocation
Sonoma County Yom Hashoah Commemoration 2011


Good afternoon. Shalom aleichem.

It is again my great honor to offer an invocation for today's observance of Yom Hashoah. We gather today, as we do yearly, to tell and hear our stories. We do our best to honor this testimony by listening, taking in what we can, and finding some hook by which we can remember and share it.

Armed with cameras and computers, we can ensure that future students of the Holocaust and human history will be able to unlock and explore the individual experience of many survivors, and of the survivors' survivors as well.

And yet, as time inevitably wears away at memory, so much specificity will be lost. So much dear specificity has already been lost. But I believe that if our individual stories do give way, they will give way to a big story, a great collective story, as brushstrokes give way to the painting. It will be a story that begins with the Shoah, but doesn't quite end there. A story of loss, yes. But also of courage, resilience and renewal. This story is still being written.

"By the Waters of Babylon" by Evelyn de Morgan (1883)

We do, though, have a model that can instruct us. Over 2500 years ago, Jerusalem was conquered and our Temple destroyed. The Jews who survived were deported to Babylon. It was a calamity beyond any our people had faced. The end of a kingdom, a way of life; the seeming end of a community.

We no longer know the individual suffering or bravery of any particular Jew of the time. But we know the big story, the epic sweep of this event and its aftermath. Because it's not just a story of loss but also of survival and renewal.

The Babylonian Exile set the stage for a new Jewish world in which we read Torah publicly. And in which we pray familiar prayers communally. And in which our thinking is guided by the law and lore of Talmud. The Destruction of the Temple remains a symbol of loss, but also of the grit and genius of our people.

And we remember the Temple of Jerusalem because the story, the big story, has come down to us with song and poetry and practice. Every year we mourn with familiar words. Eychah yashvah vadad ha'ir —"How lonely sits the city that was full of people," we recite from Lamentations, "how she has become like a widow." We honor the suffering of the bereft, displaced Jews. Al naharot Bavel — "By the waters of Babylon," we can still hear them sing in Psalm 137, "we sat down and wept, and we remembered Zion."

So now it is our turn. It is for us, and our students and our children and those who come after them, to write our big story. The story of our People — what we lost, how we mourned and, we pray, how we once again came to flourish. An enduring story of loss and renewal. 

And so may we be blessed to write this story with such power and beauty that those who follow in 100 years — or 500 or 2500 — can hold this newest, greatest calamity in their hearts; that they can appreciate how it changed the face of Judaism in ways we can't at this moment even predict; and that they will know how in the aftermath we sat together by the waters of the Mediterranean or the Pacific; in Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires and Miami and Santa Rosa. And we wept. And we remembered.

Sing: Babylon

Much appreciation to Lorenzo Valensi, Anna Belle Kaufman and Alicia Cohen for lending their voices and musical skills to this invocation today.

Seder Tonight? Be a Stack of Matzah

This holiday of Pesach is a huge exercise in living symbolism. The items on our table, what we consume, how we sit - all these things are linked to a deeper meaning. Sitting on our seder table is matzah - not just one piece, but a stack of three. Some say they represent the three great themes of Jewish thought and prayer: Creation, Revelation and Redemption.

Living in Sonoma County, it's blessedly easy to connect with the throb of life that courses through this world. Just to step outside on a rainy Erev Pesach is to feel the cycle of ongoing Creation - vapor becoming raindrops; trees drinking; flowers blooming; bees buzzing. We perceive, participate and revel in the great flow of shefa - of divine abundance. At Pesach, we bless the renewal of life and sing love songs to Creation.

Being in community with each other is our great mechanism for Revelation - the flow of enlightenment that comes to us through Torah. Not just the written words of our holy texts, but the wisdom we all share with each other; the insights we've drawn from our life experiences, our hard times, our joys. Sharing insight is what seder is about, and it is why we look forward to reclining together in discussion tonight at home or later in the week in community settings. As Rabbi Chananiah said in Pirkei Avot, "When two people sit together and words of Torah are exchanged, the Divine Presence, or Shechinah, rests between them."

The final matzah in the stack is Redemption - our belief that despite all our narrow places, our setbacks, and our hard-earned, self-protective cynicism, change is possible. Does this require a belief in divine intervention? Absolutely -- if we also believe that we are how the Divine acts in this world. When we use our hands and hearts and heads to make more justice, more freedom, more fairness, more compassion, we are Divine intervention. We are the mighty hands and outstretched arms of Redemption.

So let us, this week, reawaken our appreciation of the Creation around and in us.
Let us dare to share our deep and real wisdom with each other.
And let us renew our commitment to making the world a better place.
Let us be the three matzot of the seder plate.

B'ruchah Yah Shechinah, Elateynu Eyn Hachayim, asher kidshatnu b'mitzvoteyha, v'tzivatnu al achilat matzah.
Blessed be the Source of Life that calls us to embody the matzah.

B'teavon. Now eat up.

My Two Egypts

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, April 2011]

Our tradition ties the Hebrew name for Egypt, Mitzrayim, to the word metzar - a narrow place. Over the millenia we've come to think of Egypt as representing not only a spot on the map but also our own personal narrow places, our struggles and limitations.

But there are famously two Egypts: Upper and Lower. Upper Egypt is, counterintuitively, in the south. It is the higher ground that impels the Nile northward toward its delta. In Arabic, Egypt is called simply Misr. But Hebrew remembers Egypt's twofold nature and gives it the "dual" suffix -ayim. Mitzrayim - the pair of Egypts.

So looking inward, do I see not only a single narrow place, but a pair of them?

I already know about one narrow place. My collection of hard stuff that I've struggled with, complained about or apologized for for years: my shortcomings, bad habits, self-sabotaging patterns. Alas, I know these places well because I'm stuck in them still.

But what is that other Egypt? Every once in a while I discover a narrow place I had not been aware of before. It usually comes in conversation with someone else. Their story causes a light to go on for me suddenly, bright as the lighthouse of Alexandria. Some narrow-minded spot; a prejudice that I'd never noticed or or assumption I'd never questioned before. There it is: my other Egypt. The narrow place I hadn't yet recognized but which constrains me invisibly nonetheless. And in noticing that heretofore unseen personal enslavement, it shifts.

This is one reason community is important to me and why, I think, seder is important. Without discourse, without dialogue, without the test of human engagement, there are parts of ourselves we might never discover. Other people's realities surprise and challenge us. Hearing their personal stories of enslavement and liberation inevitably triggers our compassion and self-recognition, and it breaks the dam that holds so much of our selves back.

It feels like magic sometimes. And rightly so. Isn't freedom always accompanied by otot umoftim - signs and wonders?

So it's that time again, to widen the narrow places and let our waters flow free to the sea. Not just the places you always think need widening, but the narrow places you're about to discover. Clear a passage through both your Egypts. Undam it all.

Have a good, deep seder this year. With family, friends, shul, whatever. Go traditional or try something altogether new (check out my cousins' elegant and tasty Sipping Seder or Storahtelling's Four-Question Seder that will go live any day).

And may we all, between sips of wine or maror martinis or chicken soup or borscht, grab the chance to liberate all of our Egypts - two each.

It's All Happening: Uprisings, Anxiety & the Possibility of Hope

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, February 18, 2011]


It's all happening.

Atzilah said this to me the other morning at North Light, as we settled into our cups of coffee. It took me a moment to place where I knew the phrase from. Then it hit me. It's from "Almost Famous," a film about rock 'n' roll groupies, who consistently greet each other with a look of wonderment and this phrase: it's all happening.

Atzilah was describing this particular moment in history, the worldwide hubbub of change. And she's right. "It's all happening" could easily have been the caption for the events of the past month and the slogan for how we all have been experiencing them: it's all happening. 

From our remote vantage-point, it seemed to start slowly. Someone, somewhere, armed herself not with a gun but with Twitter. Someone else downloaded a "how to" guide for peaceful self-liberation. Daring changemakers found each other. Then it accelerated. Before we knew it, we saw the ouster of a 23-year autocrat, not Mayor Daley, but Tunisian President Ben Ali, who saw the writing on the wall and hightailed it out of the country. It was not a strictly bloodless revolution - police killed 40 protesters, maybe more. But on the scale by which we measure "regime change," this number is shockingly and blessedly low. We saw the protesters as smart and heroic and, in a certain way, so was the government, electing to give up power rather than take more lives, which it easily could have done. 

Then it spread. When it hit Egypt, we all leaned a bit closer to our screens. This is a country that means something special to us. It is populous and powerful. It is the first Arab nation to have reached peace with Israel, a peace that has held for over 30 years. It is a country that is so full of history and mythos that you can't help but feel that anything that happens there will be larger than life.

And it was in fact larger than life. The protests in Madan at-Tahrir, the surprising shift in the soldiers' loyalties, the vain attempts of the ruler to hang on to power as the tide turned against him. It could have been an opera, and might yet be.

And all of us, watching our TVs or listening to our car radios, felt that the drama was a collective event encompassing our lives as well. Because, in these early years of this prematurely aged century, we have become a disillusioned people. Disappointed. Dispirited. We don't even bother anymore with the rhetoric of hope. Or when we do bother articulating it, as President Obama sometimes does, we don't bother believing it.

But now suddenly we were caught up in a pandemic of elation. The feeling that we the people have the power to make things better. That an individual can trigger tremendous change. That we can make ourselves better. Many of us were moved to tears to discover the now unfamiliar taste of hope in our mouths.

I, for one, found it hard to admit to how excited I was. After all, our disappointments in this world are too numerous to count. Hope is rewarded with disillusionment. So we hedge: we hasten to identify all the things that could go wrong. A worse despot could step in. Fanatics could rule the country. The violence could increase (as we're now seeing in Bahrain and Libya) and blood could end up flowing in the streets. I reminded myself of these things in order to curb my enthusiasm, fearing the scolding voice of future hindsight: "If you'd only known what was coming, you wouldn't have been cheering so loud, would you?" Reining in my joy, lest in retrospect it look like naivete.

Of course for us Jews who have a familial love/hate relationship with the State of Israel, there was even more at work. The rebellion appealed - narratively, mythically - to our own Jewish history and values: routing Pharaoh, pursuing justice. But it also raised the fear of losing one of Israel's few friends in the region, a fear that steps over our immediate concerns about Israeli policy and cuts right to our worries about Israel's continued existence. It raised the fear of new wave of anti-Semitic sentiment. And I, for one, had selfish moments of relief that although the eyes of the world were fixed on the Middle East, Israel had nothing to do with it. Yesterday at Yiddish Tish, we read a poem by Kadya Molodowsky, in which she implores God to

אל חנון

קלייב אויף אן אנדער פאלק 

דערוייל...

קלייב אויף אן אנדער לאנד...

kleyb oyf an ander folk derveyl...kleyb oyf an ander land. 

Gracious God,
Choose another people
For a change...
Choose another land. 

And watching the Egyptian uprisings unfold, I felt some gratitude, guilty gratitude, that the great spotlight had shifted west across the Suez.

I think it is natural to predict bad outcomes to the uprisings (violence, extremism, placing power in the hands of the military - the military?). Anticipating bad outcomes stems from a longstanding and well-founded Jewish fear of mobs. Face it, we have never done well in big groups.

Even when we are the big group.

In this week's parasha, Ki Tisa (you thought I'd never get to it, didn't you?), hundreds of thousands of Israelites are encamped in the desert while Moshe goes up to the Mountain. In Moshe's absence, the people are, for all intents and purposes, self-ruling for the first time. What happens? Before you can say "idolatry" they're stripping off their jewelry and fashioning a golden calf, around which they dance and sing ecstatically. This episode is considered by Torah to be a great sin and a great shande - a scandal that reveals a communal character flaw and that haunts us for generations.

Now I know it has never been particularly popular to stand on the bima and defend the actions of the Hebrews in the Golden Calf incident. But as you know, when everyone agrees to condemn something, it's always worth another look.

What if the Children of Israel weren't small-minded or stubborn or impatient or any of the things typically attributed to them in this story? What if they were simply intoxicated with liberation, buoyed by their own freedom. They had lived their whole lives powerless, the children of generations of powerless. But now, it was different. They'd escaped Pharaoh. Seas had parted for them. God had spoken to them. They had awakened to discover that they were a people, that they were strong, that they had the ability to shape a future that had always been beyond their control. To express their jubilation, they recreated the markers of power they knew, forging a golden calf. They had witnessed true miracles, and they translated them into the ritual language they knew best, recreating God in an image familiar to them.

We are so used to this being the iconic Jewish story of group action gone wrong that we deny ourselves the chance to identify with the Israelites. But can't we imagine a little of what they felt? Any of us who marched with the Civil Rights Movement or lay down on the street in an ACTUP die-in or joined an anti-war demonstration knows what it feels like to find comrades and discover you're powerful and that you might, just might, be able to upend the existing power structure. So I'd personally like to reclaim at least a little bit of what those Golden Calf people were feeling, because it was new and it was important. It was like what we wanted to feel, even if we tried not to, as we watched events play out in Cairo and Alexandria and Suez.

Something big is happening. The media calls it a shifting of tectonic plates. It is a rebirth of hope. A realization that even when we feel powerless, we might not in fact be. An idea that we can overthrow our own limitations and reach new heights. That each of us can change, can be better than we were.

So how do we rejoice in this even when the outcomes are unknown? Even when we fear that things will not end as we desire?

We turn our fear into commitment. Commitment to making sure that what happens next is better than what happened before. Commitment to non-violence (including not beating ourselves up). And trust. Trust that if freedom isn't won, if that better thing isn't achieved, if a new Pharaoh in fact arises, then someone somewhere, maybe you, will Tweet, and others will hear, and they will meet and organize, and they will download 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action and will take to the streets and to the blogs, and we, whether we're in it or we're watching it, will again well up with possibility. So that in our own lives or in the life of this world, even when our fears ask us to say "no" to hope, we can find the strength and love to say "yes."

Inside. Outside. It's all happening.

_______________
Much gratitude to Atzilah Solot for her many insights that informed this piece.

Parashat Terumah: Details and Dolphin Skins

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, February 4, 2011]

Tonight we're going to talk about blueprints and inventories and gifts and unicorns. Because this week we read Parashat Terumah, where all these things figure. In this portion, God announces the plans for the mishkan, the holy tent where the tablets of the law will be kept, and where the people will gather, and where God will speak to Moshe. God puts out a call for gifts, terumot, to be given by the people from the generosity of their hearts. Why all the big plans, you might ask? God says this:

ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם

Make me a mikdash, a holy place, and I will dwell among them.

This is an important theological moment. God does not say "I will dwell in it," but "I will dwell among them." But if God is everywhere, as we always say and teach these days, what does it mean for God to say, "I will dwell among them?" Doesn't God always dwell among us? 

I asked this question of our students at Dor Hadash last Sunday, and 10-year old Chaia piped up, saying, "God is always among us, but the mishkan helps us notice."

Reb Chaia's answer reflects one of our deepest human desires: to be able to notice God. Or to be able to connect with something bigger, even if "God" is not the name we use for that sensation. So in the wilderness, we had a mishkan as a reminder, a visual mnemonic. A finger pointing toward God. And having a mishkan necessarily involves building a mishkan.

I think in our generation, here in New Age Sonoma County, we like to skip over the building part. We like the feeling of mindfulness; we joyfully seek awareness of God or of a great cosmic oneness. But we like it direct, without "man-made" items in the middle. We go to the woods or to the ocean. We lose ourselves in nature. Or we pour ourselves into meditation. We use these methods to sail into the vastness of Eyn Sof - of the divine infinite.

But what's exciting about this Torah portion and its instructions for building the mishkan, is that the mindfulness of God's presence seems to come not through contemplating vastness but through attention to minute detail. Because the instructions in Terumah are hugely detailed. For fussy queens like me - and a Virgo no less - who live so much of our lives fixated on, and sometimes trapped in, the details, this parashah comes as a vindication. God is not just in the big picture but, hooray, in the small picture too.

God's instructions for the building the mishkan are thorough and intricate. They set out materials, dimensions and who should be on the design team. They include blueprints for the ark that will hold the commandments and the table for sacrifices and the poles for lugging and the rings that hold the poles and the curtains and the lamps and the curious gold cherubim that will adorn the mishkan and the enclosure that will surround it.

Of course our people have always found holiness in detail. The Talmud and our other rabbinic writings rejoice in the minutia of the law. Our traditions require a detailed awareness of our day-to-day lives in order to suffuse them with holiness. What we wear. How we eat. What foods mix. What blessings we articulate depending on what act we're about to engage in or what phenomenon we just observed. We all agree that there is something beautiful about seeing a rainbow and saying, "Oh wow." But there's a different beauty and holy connection in seeing a rainbow and knowing specific Jewish words to bless it: baruch Atah Adonai, zocher habrit. 

But alas for me, the details alone are not enough. The materials are not enough. The ingredients are not enough. They must be married to an intention, a kavanah, a vision, a purpose. There's a story that Gertrude Stein tells in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, about their servant, Helene. Helene  one day was feeling put out at the behavior of the painter Henri Matisse who, when asked to stay for a meal, first asked what was being served -- a rudeness which Helene forgave in foreigners but would not abide in a Frenchman. So when she was told that Matisse was staying for dinner, she said, "In that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand."

Butter and eggs can but don't necessarily have to make an omelette. Wood and metal and cloth can but don't necessarily have to make a mishkan. It depends not only on materials but on intent. The omelette requires respect. The mishkan requires that too. And an awareness of a holy purpose.

So it seems we need to hold both the pieces and the whole. Every great painting requires both vision and the painstaking mixing of pigment. Every great poem entails both inspiration and agonizing decisions about meter and rhyme. Vision and detail. Both are needed to move us.

Okay, so God being in the details as much as God is in the vastness. But I also promised unicorns, I believe. For that we turn back to the details of the mishkan, beginning with the list of materials - the gifts God will accept: Gold. Silver. Copper. Three specific colors of yarn. Linen. Goat's hair. Ram's skins. Dolphin skins. Acacia wood. Oil. Spices.

Okay, wait. Let's back it up. Dolphin skins? Did I just say "dolphin skins?" Yes. It's right there in the list and it stops me in my tracks every time I read it. What dolphin skins? What are the Children of Israel doing in the desert with dolphin skins? In Hebrew these are 'orot t'chashim. Skins of the tachash. What is a tachash? It's not what it sounds like. Truthfully, no one knows what it was. The Medieval commentator Rashi said it was a great multi-colored beast. In Talmud it's suggested that it was a beast with one horn. Midrash suggests that the tachash only came into being for the purpose of lending its skin to the construction of the mishkan and after that it ceased to exist. The more modern Anchor Bible notices a similar word in Arabic that means "dolphin," so that's what they chose and that, right or wrong, seems to have stuck in many subsequent translations, including many Jewish ones.

So maybe it's a dolphin. Maybe a giraffe. Or an okapi. Or with the single horn, a rhino. Or we might as well say a unicorn, seeing as it was an animal that even in antiquity was so exotic as to be downright mythological. No matter what it was, it begs the question: how did this group of escaped slaves come to be wandering the desert with dolphin skins? Or giraffe skins. Or unicorn skins. Every year at Pesach we tell the story of our poverty and oppression in Egypt and our haste in departing. How does that story square with this new detail? "Honey, there's no time to let the bread rise. We've got to just bake it flat. Oh, in the meantime, don't forget to pack the dolphin skins! And precious metals. Oh and why not a few cubits of acacia wood, just in case we want to build."

Or maybe while crossing the Red Sea on dry land. looking from side to side into the wall of water, well, who could resist plucking out a dolphin or two?

This is narishkayt. Silliness. The Israelites having all this stuff with them makes no sense. Modern critics would say that this passage was added to Torah later, inserted here to foreshadow the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. And that might be so, but resolving it that way is not a luxury we Jews have. Our Torah process involves wrestling with the text we've inherited and finding meaning in it.

So I thought about these poor Children of Israel, nebech, carrying with them not only obviously precious items, but also odd and awkward items, which, at the time they were packed were of no particular use. Hidden gifts shlepped through the wilderness. Or not quite gifts, but gifts in potentia. Bric-a-brac, awaiting the chance to become holy regalia.

We all have gifts. We give so many of them from the generosity of our hearts to make this a holier world. Some here have talents of music or art or words. Some have skills in nurturing or mediating or doctoring. Some have special qualities of patience or kindness or humor. These are our terumot - our contributions. Take a moment right now and think about one of your gifts that you give generously.

These gifts are your gold and silver. Not your precious metal but your precious mettle. But the mishkan wasn't just made with gold and silver. There's also the acacia wood and the unicorn skins that have been lugged around, awaiting an opportunity to be useful. So let me give you a harder task. Close your eyes and think of the gift you have to offer that you haven't offered yet. The one no one knows you carry. The one you might not even have thought of yet as a gift. Close your eyes and identify your hidden gift. The one that's just been waiting.

Notice what that is. And ask yourself when you will offer it. When you will use it to build a mishkan, to make this world holier. They say that as the mishkan was constructed, its twin was constructed in the celestial realm and I pray that is still so.

So kechu terumah kol n'div libo -- give your gifts, give them generously, from your heart, your obvious gifts, and the gifts you haven't yet tried out. With them you can move not only earth but heaven too. With them you can build a mishkan, so we can notice -- so we can invite -- God to dwell among us.

Acacia - Perfect for Mishkan Building