Guest Drash: Kashrut, Bacon and Higher Values

While I was off performing in Minneapolis last weekend, I asked Shari Brenner and her daughter Nora Brenner-West to leader Shabbat services at Ner Shalom. Below is Shari's beautiful drash on Parashat Shemini. Shari has a Masters in Public Health and has worked in health care, primary HIV prevention and services, for over 25 years.  She is the administrator of a large Community Health Center providing primary care services in the impoverished Latino neighborhood of Southwest Santa Rosa. She is also the recent past president of Congregation Ner Shalom and my good friend.
 

When Irwin asked me and Nora to lead services tonight, of course my response was “absolutely not.” Sure, leading services is just facilitating moving from one part of the service to the next, but the drash is the scary part. I could never live up to Irwin’s standards, could never be so funny, could never do the research he does, could never understand the parsha the way he does; I don’t even really know the rules for HOW to do a drash.  So I asked him how to start, who to read, what the rules were, and he said something like “I don’t read other people’s thoughts because I feel like I’m copying.  I just share my own thoughts, even if it often begins with how I don’t want to talk about what the parsha is about.

Okay, so I read Parshat Shemini, and let’s see how this goes.  This parsha has two major parts to it.  The first part is Aaron’s sons making some sacrifices and offerings, and the second part includes the rules of Kashrut.

The first part: Aaron’s sons. 

Two of Aarons’ sons made several sacrifices and offerings, following the specific directions that God gave them, using the right animals, the right type of fire, the right vessels and the offerings were accepted.  Then, they made an additional offering that God had not told them to make, and they were immediately and fully consumed in the fire of the offering.  This was fairly upsetting, as it doesn’t seem like they did anything wrong, had any mal-intent, or broke any rules.  They just made up a few of their own -- they just embellished a little.

I have no clue what this means, so I won’t talk about this part.

The second part: Kashrut. 

The rest of the parsha outlines the rules of kashrut-what animals, birds, and sea creatures can and cannot be eaten, and God tells us to follow the instructions so that "you shall be holy, for I am holy."

I have lots of thoughts about Kashrut, both about following the rules, and about food itself.  As Jews, these are two very important cultural concepts, right?  So let me share just a little about where I came from.  I grew up in a kosher home, following the rules.  We ate only kosher meat and never mixed milk and meat.  We had five sets of everything: dishes, silverware, sponges, towels, dish drainers.  The five sets were for milchik (dairy), fleishik (meat), milchik for Pesach; fleishik for Pesach, and a set of fine china – fleishik – for when we had company.

Whenever friends came over and tried to help clean up, they were invariably chastised by my mother for putting a knife in the sink, wiping up with the wrong sponge, using the wrong towel, putting the dishes in the wrong place, etc.  In time I learned to warn friends just not to try to help in the kitchen. 

I grew up in a kosher home, and I was very proud of knowing and following the rules.  I’m sure I didn’t give it much thought, they just were the rules and I followed them.  I followed them as my parents changed them a bit, but I followed their logic, so I followed any new rules I learned.

When I was 15, I got a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I learned that a kosher home means only the INSIDE of the home.  When there was chicken left unsold at the end of the night, I would bring it home to my anxiously waiting parents and sisters and we would eat it on the front porch. Okay, but the INSIDE of the house was still kosher, my mother insisted. 

Fast forward through the next 25 years, outside of my parents’ home; making and sharing homes with many roommates, a few partners, Jewish and non-Jewish, each home having different “rules” about food.  During those 25 years, I was acutely aware of every single morsel that passed my lips that was unkosher.  My emotions ranged from the rebellious “see, I can eat this and nothing bad happens” to feelings of loss, sadness, or maybe some guilt?  Perhaps some longing for the certainty, the safety, of knowing and following the rules?

Over the years, I inched closer to vegetarianism, even called myself an almost vegetarian, and got to about 95%, but never quite made the full commitment until Nora was about 3.  We were visiting Martha’s Vineyard, and out of the blue, she asked, “Mama, when you were little and you ate meat, did you kill it with a very sharp knife?” Later on that same trip, we were walking along a lagoon, when a large school of beautiful fish sensed us and hastily swam away.  Nora looked up at me, confused and hurt, and said, “Mama, why did those fish swim away.  Don’t they know we’re vegenetarians?”  Okay, my 95% vegetarian diet became 100% for the next 12 years.  That felt right, and was a relief, as in addition to not killing animals and decreasing my environmental impact, one of the benefits of a vegetarian diet was that I could keep kosher.  No more conflict.  My vegetarian home is a kosher home.  My timing was such that I was the one of the grandchildren who inherited my grandmothers’ dishes, because they were kosher dishes.  Sure, my kids would order meat in restaurants, but that’s no different than Kentucky Fried Chicken on the porch, right? 

Well, actually I was 99.9% vegetarian, not quite 100%.  Sometimes people supersede animals.  When my grandmother put chicken soup down in front of me, I ate it.  When my 85 year old Aunt Ruth served me gefilte fish, I ate it.  I have always been clear that respect for elders, and others’ gifts, is a higher value than vegetarianism, or even kashrut.  But even those rules are clear, easy and comfortable to follow.

Many of you know that my daughter, Cybele, was quite sick last spring, and she spent about 2 weeks on a ventilator, heavily sedated.  With the prayers, support and love of so many of you here, I held only the vision that she would make a complete recovery, which she has.  But during that time, I continually wondered what she would think, what she would say, when the tubes came out and she could talk.  Well, it turned out that she had something very important to say.  She said, “Bacon!”

That single word rocked my world.  My comfort, relief and identity as a vegetarian were challenged by the needs of the daughter that I might have lost.  Well, what’s a Jewish mother to do? I gave her bacon. When we returned to my home, I served her bacon.  And all the meat she wanted.  Clearly her body was telling her, telling me, what it needed.  Who’s to argue with such certainty, such clarity?

Well, if you can’t beat em, join em.  I joined Cybèle, and others in my household, in eating meat.  The world didn’t end.  Some of it even tasted really, really good.  But over time, I found that same old nagging discomfort that I’d had before was growing, and was quite relieved when the date of Jan 1 that I chose to return to vegetarianism came.

So, back to the question of what is a higher value?  Following the rules as we always have, or updating or embellishing them?  Or taking a brief hiaitus from them, so we can really appreciate them?  Following the rules of Kashrut as they are written in the Torah, even with thousands of years of interpretation and re-interpretation, somehow feels right to me.  Making an exception in those rules for gifts from elders and hosts feels right to me.  Making an exception at an exceptional time felt right to me. 

But now I can’t help but thinking about Aaron’s sons.  They did what God told them to do, and then they did a little more.  And it was for that little more that they were punished.  We have no reason to believe that their updating, their embellishing of the rules was anything other than a desire to be even more holy.  A desire to go even further than they were instructed, to add their own value and maybe even their own values to what they were doing.

As Reconstructionist Jews, we are constantly searching for meaning in the rules, replacing the word “rule” with “tradition”; picking and choosing the ones we want to follow; proudly updating them to give them meaning in our lives; constantly searching for new definitions of sacred and holy.  I feel blessed to be a member of this Reconstructionist Jewish community today, where we get to do this.  Where nobody will judge me as a “bad Jew” because I make the choices I make.  I feel blessed to be surrounded by each of you now, as I share from my own experience, as coached by Reb Irwin, and count on support from any of you as I struggle with what makes sense to me.  I feel blessed to be among you, knowing that each of you is struggling with many and varied rules, customs, traditions, questions; searching for value in your own life, and sharing your thoughts and path generously with others.

As we move through this Shabbat, this week, and our lives, may we continue to be surrounded by those who support us, and may we follow only the rules, customs and traditions, and embellish them in any way that gives our lives meaning.  And let us all say . . . amen.

Zecher Litziat Mitzrayim: Shabbat and the Remembrance of Things Passover

For Congregation Ner Shalom, March 15, 2013

As we planned this musical Shabbat, Lorenzo and I had particular ideas about some Classical Reform hymns of my grandparents' era that we might be able to reclaim and bend a little and present in a fresh way. We began doing our research and found that those anthems, which everyone thinks are really dated, are, in fact, really dated. For the most part, our hopes for a Union Hymnal revival night began crumbling, and we fell back to our default plan of just having a night of beautiful music.

Then Gale Kissin stepped in. Gale's custom is to find music that excites her, rehearse it with the band, and then let me in on it. That gives me the holy challenge of figuring out how the various usually secular, sometimes sad, always beautiful songs, often in Yiddish, can function to prop up a night of Shabbos ritual. Sometimes that's hard to do, although mostly I'm the only one who sees the bumps, since mostly we're awash in the beauty of the music itself more than we are figuring out what prayer thematic it is supposed to relate to.

So this time I asked Gale, "What are you thinking of playing," and she told me that her band, Mama Loshn, was freshly rehearsed and ready to go on a variety of songs related to Pesach and our long-rehearsed story of liberation from bondage in the narrow land of Mitzrayim.

I found myself a little resistant to the idea, as Gale will attest from the whiny emails I sent her about whether this music wouldn't just be better for the Seder. Of course, Gale and I have enough of a relationship for her to know to ignore me; my complaints are the birth pangs of ideas, and all she has to do is sit tight.

So I began to wonder about my own resistance. I shouldn't be resistant. First of all, I find ancient Egypt interesting; I took a semester of Egyptian history in college, plus a full year of Classical Egyptian language, which has, alas, over the intervening decades, eroded into cocktail party chit-chat about hieroglyphics and bad snippets of jokes, such as singing "I got plenty Akhenaten" whenever there's a suitable setup. But that said, ancient Egypt has been an object of interest for me; and you all know how much I love Torah. So why am I resistant to another retelling of our ancient enslavement and flight to freedom?

I realized suddenly that it was a Pesach spillover effect. We tell the Exodus story on Pesach and I've frankly come to have mixed feelings about the holiday. It was once my very favorite. As a child, I loved seder, even though it was done in a kind of rote manner; nonetheless I was with grandparents and great aunties around a table doing a fancy ceremony and I was happy. Then as a young adult I began to appreciate how I could exercise my compulsive Virgo tendencies through the yearly ritual of cleaning and kashering the kitchen. And I loved the special diet, a daily reminder and signal of my Jewishness. I've never been a regular kippah wearer, but during Pesach I was revealed to the world as a Jew by the unmistakable trail of matzah crumbs wherever I went. In my twenties and early thirties I would attend or host seders that would go on until three in the morning, with singing and poetry and debate and the kind of fellowship that you only experience in the middle of the night after hours of group effort and perhaps one or two more than the customary four glasses of wine.

But then came middle age, when life became more complicated. Touring schedules that make it so that you will never have time to kasher your kitchen, at least not the way you want to; and worse, you will often arrive home on the morning of the day of seder, and hopefully you will have cooked and frozen some Pesach food in advance. And in any event, your seder that used to be so stimulating now has to work for the young children and the older children and the enthusiastic adults and the disaffected adults too. Your table will be filled with Jews, and there will no longer be enough non-Jews present to keep the Jews on their best behavior. And there's no more time to prepare yourself spiritually or to prepare a well-crafted seder. In part because now, at least for me, there's a congregational seder to prepare, which inevitably edges out the planning that used to be devoted to what happens at your own table. All in all, Pesach has, I confess, lost a bit of its sparkle.

And with my conflicted feelings about the holiday, so went the story itself. So now, when I hear about Pharaoh, or taskmasters, or plagues, I get sucked into a vortex of overwhelm and frustration and anxiety.

So: that was a big, if tangential, confession.

But in any event, I've concluded that my resistance is a disservice to an important story. The Exodus is a formative story. Right up there with Isaac being bound, or receiving the Torah at Sinai. This story is one so important that we retell it over and over. Not just in our annual Torah-reading cycle, but in our liturgy, for instance in the extended-play version of the V'ahavta, in multiple Psalms and, of course in the Mi Chamocha where every day we celebrate the crossing of the Red Sea. A story so important that we are commanded to tell it to our children, and we do so not at synagogue but around a table every year. It is a story that is supposed to live at home with us and suffuse our domestic spaces like the steam and aroma of Grandma's matzahball soup simmering on the stove.

This is a story that lends itself easily to metaphorical rather than historical readings. Mitzrayim as metaphor: enslavement, narrowness, oppression, injustice, fear. Everything that holds us back as individuals, as a society, as a world. And the Exodus, yetziat Mitzrayim, assures us of our ability, with some amount of chutzpah and some amount of faith, to break through those obstacles into the great wide unknown that awaits us.

But besides being a metaphor for our lives, there's another connection explicitly drawn by our tradition, and that is the relationship between the Exodus and Shabbat. In the Kiddush that we chant on Shabbat evening, the valences of Shabbat are explicitly laid out. We first call Shabbat zikaron l'ma'aseh v'reishit - a memory of the act of Creation. Shabbat is the pause that punctuated and gave final shape to that first week. Then we continue in the Kiddush: ki hu yom t'chilah l'mikraey kodesh. Shabbat is the beginning of holiness. It is the first thing mentioned in Torah that God calls holy. It is not the end product of holiness but rather the first occasion of it; it is what opens the floodgates of holiness into this universe.

Both of those understandings of Shabbat - creation and holiness - make sense to us; intuitive and clear.

Then we continue: Shabbat is a zecher litziat mitzrayim, a remembrance, a souvenir, of the departure from Egypt.

What does that mean? What do Shabbat and the Exodus have to do with each other? Shabbat is other-worldly, primordial. It was God's first thought and last act of Creation. Whereas the Exodus already takes place in another kind of time, within the much smaller scale of human history, or what we imagine to be human history. Shabbat has to do with our cosmology of holiness and time. The Exodus, at least on its surface, is about politics and migration.

How are they connected?

The rabbis would undoubtedly say that God brought us out of Egypt in order to keep Shabbat. They would say that Shabbat, though ancient, couldn't be practiced until there was a people who agreed to practice it, that people being us, in the desert, free at last, beginning our long wanderings.

But there's more to say here, because Shabbat is not just a day on the calendar, but is in itself the breath of freedom. The pause where something that has engaged you and burdened you stops and you perceive the difference. It is the sensation when, after a hard illness, you wake one day feeling better. It is the moment of quiet gratitude after you've fixed dinner and set it on the table and you finally sit down to eat, no longer the maker but the receiver. It is the sensation of relief you feel when you finally close your computer at the end of the day and you notice the cricket call outside replacing the psychic buzz of the Internet. Shabbat is not unlike the chord that continues ringing through the concert hall after the last note of a symphony is released. The moment of sad-happy-fulfilled directionlessness when you close the last page of the novel you've spent the last week with.

And the experience of Shabbat is not unlike the surprise and bewilderment and relief of the Israelites when they realized they were, at last, beyond Pharaoh's reach.

Shabbat is zecher litziat mitzrayim: either a souvenir of the Exodus or a remembrance offered for the Exodus. What I mean is that it's not clear which concept is the reminder and which is the reminded.

We can say that a way to get at the feeling of Shabbat is through the idea of the Exodus. Shabbat is a release from the narrowness of the week, in which we were enslaved to our ambitions, our struggles, our things. But it could work the other way. If you want to understand what the departure from Egypt might have felt like, but let's say you live in a shtetl in a country where you've never been free of persecution, where real freedom is practically unimaginable, then the way to imagine liberation is through the familiar experience of Shabbos.

Both Shabbat and the Pesach story represent a courtship with God, with the Shechinah. God called on the slaves in Egypt like a beau standing at the door, asking, "May I take you out sometime?" And on Shabbat, every week, the Shechinah arrives at our doors as a bride awaiting us. Both Shabbat and the Exodus mark relationship, even love affair, with the divine.

But I guess if I were to try generalize anything about this connection, I'd say that we are taught by our experience of Shabbat that there is a rhythm to things. Just as a sentence of speech arrives inevitably at a pause and a breath, so too the rhythm of our lives. And the rhythm of our societies. And our biology. And our cosmology. Every tyrant will eventually fall. Freedom will keep happening again and again. The days of our weeks and the years of our lives will succeed and supplant each other like Egyptian dynasties. We will build monuments with our hands and with our words. We will be our own slaves and our own taskmasters until the breath of possibility that we learn from Shabbat reminds us how to remove ourselves from the machinery of our slavery.

And one day our bodies will stop altogether and, we pray, what comes next will be freedom, spaciousness, relief, Shabbos. Forever Shabbos.

So let us sing the songs of our enslavement and our liberation, in all of our languages. Let us feel the rhythms of this life and this world, knowing that at the end of six days comes rest, at the end of pain comes release, at the end of struggle comes delight, at the end of our narrowest places a great and unknown land awaits.

Ki Tisa: Improvisation and Practice

For Congregation Ner Shalom ~ March 1, 2013

It’s spring up on Sonoma Mountain. I’m able to witness this rebirth every day as I drive up and down. The grass is dazzling green. The Sonoma State students are trying out Gravity Hill by day and making out in their cars by night. Much of my route is grazing land and every cow on the Mountain now has a calf at her side. And those calves are fearless – they will stand in the road and stare you down. And they are furry. And frisky. They scamper like lambs. Oren and I saw a calf chasing a snowy egret in a field just to make it fly, like Ari used to do with pigeons when he was little. Chasing birds just for the fun and wonder and power of it. As if saying, “Look! I run like the wind!” These calves on the Mountain are full of frolic even though we know they will end up as heavy-footed ruminators, eventually taking a full day for a single patch of grass or for a single thought; although who knows? Maybe they’re still impulsive and bouncy on the inside.

So yes, calves are delightful.

Unless they are forged of gold and danced around by Israelites.

Because here we are this week, once again reading the old story. About how Moshe goes up the Mountain to receive the law and is gone for 40 days while God gives over not only laws of conduct but instructions for the architecture and appointment of the ark and the tabernacle that will hold it; the mishkan, the holy Tent of Meeting that will be the place, says God, where God and the Children of Israel will meet. But meanwhile, in the valley, the Children of Israel also want to meet the divine and, giving Moshe up for lost, they demand a god now. Aaron asks them for all their gold, maybe thinking that such a high price tag would sober them up. But they are generous; they in fact give it all up, because they want god that badly. They give their most precious things, the very items that capital-G God was busy commanding them to incorporate into the decoration of the mishkan.

The Children of Israel dance around their new creation, and sing, “This is your God, O Israel, who led you out of Egypt.” God is furious. Moshe calms God, but takes his turn to be angry as he descends the Mountain and sees the spectacle. The Children of Israel are punished for their act of idolatry or infidelity.

I never know what to do with this text. I’m not very good with simple right and wrong lessons, especially in matters of the spirit. I don’t like being told there’s a right way and a wrong way, and that the wrong way leads to punishment. This is why I belong to a community like this one and not to communities that are more unyielding in their view of how things should be done.

I can’t help but feel sympathetic to the Israelites, because the wrongness of what they did is not completely obvious, at least not to me. We know from Torah that they will soon be crafting things of great beauty to facilitate the human-divine encounter in the mishkan. Altars of wood and hide, with gold and silver and jewels. And statues of cherubim, too. So it’s not exactly the making of images that’s the problem here, because images are about to be made at God’s own request. We also know from God’s words to Moshe up on the Mountain that there are many skilled people among the Israelites, gifted by God with tremendous creative talent and filled with God’s spirit. Wouldn’t art-making as an approach to the Divine be a natural impulse for them?

I’ll defend them even more. There they were, the Israelites, in the Wilderness, a place with no landmarks, with no certainty. Might it not be a tough time to absorb the idea of a God that is also without landmarks, without physical certainty? They knew from Egypt that you represent gods symbolically through animals; seeing the unknown through the known; they knew the goddess Hathor was commonly rendered in the form of a cow. And for this new god, this upstart who impulsively took them out of slavery? What better image than a calf? Powerful and a future source of nourishment like Hathor, but still young and fierce and nimble like the calves on Sonoma Mountain!

The calf wasn’t a denial of God. At least maybe not. The people were certainly doubting Moshe’s return. But were they really doubting the existence of the God of Israel? They’d seen the Waters part. They’d seen the pillar of smoke by day and column of fire by night. They’d heard the thunder on the Mountain. Their daily diet was manna from heaven. No, I don’t think this was an act of rejection of Adonai, but of worship. They were just using the vocabulary they knew for it. I don’t know about you, but I remain sympathetic.

Their crime, if there was one, was not idolatry, but impatience, impulsiveness. They wanted a fast hit of ecstasy, and they got it. We see it in their euphoric singing and dancing around the calf.

Whereas, in contrast, the kind of worship God was asking for, the instructions for which had not yet actually reached the ears of the Israelites, involved something more time-consuming and deliberate. The Tent of Meeting, that is the tent where God and the people would meet, was something to be constructed with painstaking detail and tended with constant attention. Lights to be lit at proper times. Concocting the right incense, and burning it, and only it, twice a day. Sacrificing the right creatures in the right season; their blood to be sprinkled exactly the same way every time.

In the ritual world God wants, there is no quick fix. There is only practice, repetition, discipline, the consequence of which is, in God’s words, “There I will meet you and there I will speak to you.”

God seems to want closeness, but wants that closeness to come out of deliberateness, mindfulness, practice, actions, even seemingly small actions. But what of the ecstatic moment? Isn’t that remarkable also? Doesn’t it excite us and entice us too? Haven’t we experienced moments like that? Are those, in our tradition, simply valueless?

Maybe not. I recently read a beautiful teaching of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chasidism, and certainly no stranger to euphoric moments and ecstatic practice. In this teaching, the Baal Shem addresses the question of what happens when you have a mind-blowing God experience. Where your consciousness, your sechel, splits open and you have a glimpse of God’s unity and oneness and all-encompassingness, and it inspires you to this great love and devotion, because you’re grokking, really grokking a piece of God’s greatness. And this lasts for a brilliant moment – or a few. And then – poof – it’s gone. Your sechel is closed up again, and you don’t understand any of it. “What is that experience,” asks the Baal Shem.

So he explains by making a comparison to a shopkeeper in the market place. The shopkeeper sells sweets, and he markets them by giving out free samples. Think of See’s Candy or any Cape Cod fudge emporium. This first piece is free. And that first piece is also the last piece that is free. After that, the customer has to pay for it – with money that comes from and represents her labor. So the second encounter, the transaction for the second piece of fudge, is not something for nothing, but is a real exchange of value.

The Baal Shem Tov says that the brief moment of enlightenment, of God-awareness, is a free sample given milam’alah – from above. It is God’s free sample, and it is, in the words of Psalm 19, “sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.”

But after that first taste, we can only re-attain the experience milamatah – from below. Through our own labor: our study, our ritual, our practice.

“No pain, no gain,” says the Baal Shem Tov. When someone has attained their enlightenment through yegi’ah, or long, hard labor, their insights deserve to be believed. Just as we’d believe the insights of a longtime practicing Buddhist over an enthusiast just back from their first Vipassana retreat. Because we know the longtime practitioner has gone and meditated over years of cold mornings when she would have preferred to stay in bed. When she says this is worthwhile, it carries weight.

So the message seems to be that the God-hit is delicious, but it’s just a sample. From there it’s up to us. To establish a practice, maybe (hopefully) a Jewish practice, whatever that might be. I’d suggest it should be something inconvenient. Something tied to time. Unplugging your computer for Shabbat. Coming to chant circle not once in a while but every month. Committing to learning, as many Ner Shalomers have been doing through our Hebrew class or the countywide Introduction to Judaism class. Or committing to deepening your understanding of our forms of worship, as many Ner Shalomers have done by stepping up to lead services when I’m on the road. Or committing to an adult Bar or Bat Mitzvah track, as more than a half-dozen people in this congregation have just done. Or even committing to a regular personal practice of mindfulness and gratitude, maybe through learning Hebrew blessings for every occasion.

The Baal Shem Tov says, and I fear it’s true, that there is no substitute for hard work. There is no shortcut to the enlightenment, no matter how much pot you smoke or Ayahuasca you ingest. Sensing your Oneness with the Universe, meeting God at the Tent of Meeting, comes from experience, not accident. It comes with practice, not chance.

This isn’t an argument against improvising, chas v’chalilah. Improvisation is one of the things we do so well here at Ner Shalom. And, as you know, in my other life, my performing life, my skill as an improviser has specific value. But my best improvisations may come in the moment, but they draw from years of experience. I may blurt them out quickly, but I generally already know that they’re going to work. And the best improvisations? I repeat them, and they become tradition.

There are many ways – new, improvised ways as well as the age-old paths – to reach the mishkan, the holy place. But if you ask the question, “How do I get there,” the answer will likely be, as in the old joke, “Practice.”

So let us keep practicing and keep improvising – as a community and as individuals. May our improvisations come from an ever-deepening understanding of our lives and our tradition. May our learning be regular and may it fuel our creativity. And may the gold that is in our spirits adorn the place where we and God meet.

Yitro: Strangers in a Strange Land

For Congregation Ner Shalom, February 1, 2013.

I spent this last month as a stranger in a strange land. I had a two and a half week gig in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with an additional week tacked on in the lovely mountain town of Ajijic. I walked a funny line between belonging and not belonging, between distance and familiarity. We do this Puerto Vallarta gig every year. I know my way around; I know street names and some faces and where to get fresh vegetables. And then there’s always the new and strange; this time, for instance, how to manage sickness and fever and find the larger-than-life Doctor Lupita and her hypodermic full of good mystery drugs.

My Spanish is good; I can declare in the declarative, and speculate in the subjunctive. I speak better than I understand; but still I fared better in Mexico than I did yesterday morning at Friendly Kitchen in Rohnert Park, when a patron glanced at the newspaper and remarked to me, “Those 49ers sure are” followed by 15 or so words that almost certainly had something to do with the Super Bowl; words that I undoubtedly know individually, but which, when fused together in a wave of football jargon, left me utterly bewildered. I didn’t understand his words but his desire for a bond of familiarity with me was clear. “Yeah,” I said, nodding, hoping that that was all that would be required of me. I was home, but still a stranger.

This week’s Torah portion seems to have a lot to say about strangeness and familiarity, distance and proximity. The portion is called Yitro, named after Moshe’s father-in-law. The Children of Israel are in the Wilderness, having escaped from Egypt, familiar turf in which they were treated as strangers. Now they are strangers in an unfamiliar land, led by a prophet who is also a stranger, having never been a slave alongside them, and by a God who does not resemble the Egyptian gods; who doesn’t resemble, well, anything.

At the top of the parashah, Moshe receives his father-in-law, who arrives with Moshe’s wife and two sons. The text then reminds us of the sons’ names and their etymology. The younger son is Eliezer, meaning “my God is my help.” And Gershom, the older, means “a stranger there.” Moshe named him that because, as he famously said, “I was a stranger in a strange land.”

Gershom and Eliezer. “Stranger in a strange land” and “God is my help.” Strangerhood and help. Alienation and embrace. Distance and familiarity. These are the polestars by which the Children of Israel navigated through the wilderness and by which Jews have wandered through an alien world for millennia, so much so that our sense of exile has become a dominant theme in our self-concept; giving rise to Messianism and to Zionism and to puzzlement when my children seem, mysteriously, to fit in just fine. Alienation and embrace: the competing forces that tug on each of our souls – the feeling of being alone; and the desire to feel that we are not.

The themes of strangeness and familiarity continue to haunt the portion. God is about to impart the Aseret Hadibrot, the Ten Commandments. God says, in what sounds like a marriage proposal, “You will be my special treasure, my beloved people.” And the people respond, saying, “Whatever God says, we will do.” But this communication is not direct; Moshe carries the messages up and back like Miles Standish for John and Priscilla.

Then God demands that a distance be established around the revelation. First, a distance of time: three days between now and then, during which the people must prepare, immersing themselves and even their clothes as in a mikveh. Then, a perimeter of space: a boundary around the mountain, the crossing of which by anyone other than Moshe will result in a sentence of death.

Be my love. But not so close. Maybe the enforced separation is specifically to build the tension. Like couples staying apart before their wedding. And marriage is in fact the underlying metaphor here. Immersion in the mikveh; words of oath. And isn’t marriage about transitioning from the idea of Gershom to that of Eliezer, about strangers becoming each other’s familiar support?

So God descends – and Moshe ascends – to the mountaintop. Proximity. God sends Moshe back down to reinforce the perimeter. Distance. And then God gives the Ten Commandments, reciting them like wedding vows under the chupah of cloud and smoke.

Alienation and God’s embrace. I wonder about the tension between these two ideas. They seem so antithetical but so tightly connected. Does one require the other? When God first enters into relationship with Abraham, generations earlier, what was God’s demand? “Leave your home and go to a strange land.” Maybe the journey together into an unfamiliar landscape is what creates or cements a bond, experiencing strangerhood together. God and Abraham, Thelma and Louise, Butch and Sundance. After all, you never know someone as well as you do after a road trip.

Our human experience is a relentless road trip. After you leave your mother’s womb and your parents’ arms, you are on your own, with no map and no spare change for the fast food joints. Even if you live and die in the very house you were born in, you are always walking a wilderness, because time is that kind of road. You can’t see around the next bend. You change. You grow. Your body ages and so does your mind. Your circumstances change, and the people around you, and the world. We are constant strangers. How are we ever to feel safe? How are we ever to feel anything but alone?

Loneliness is a great source of longing and of action. Loneliness must be the reason we invented God; or else it is the reason God invented us. We need this relationship with the great Infinite, whether we ascribe to that infinity a personality or not, to feel familiar. To feel that despite the odds and despite all evidence, it has our back. Intimacy us how we keep ourselves – and God – from being overwhelmed by fear as we journey forward. As the Psalm says, gam ki elech b’gey tzalmavet, lo ira ra ki atah imadi. Though I walk through a valley shadowed by death, I won’t fear if you are with me.

The desire to be cared for is reasonable. So how do we make it happen? How do we bring about God’s care, God’s help, in the face of our sense of aloneness? The mystic, Rabbi Joseph Cordovero, said 500 years ago that by our own actions, acting with chesed – with kindness – toward the suffering of the stranger, we bring down that same quality of kindness in the Divine. Imitate what you want from God and it will manifest for you as well. Or translated into practical terms, kindness begets kindness.

Which then sounds less mystical and downright Reconstructionist. We are God’s hands in bringing about compassion in this world. We know how to care for the stranger. Torah tells us no fewer than 36 times. Empathizing with how a stranger feels can set your compassion in motion. Imagining how the person sitting next to you might feel like a stranger at this moment; that might invoke your protectiveness and your care. Of course, sometimes we can’t find our compassion for the stranger; not every stranger is equally lovable. So we try our best and then offer ourselves some compassion for having felt like a lost wanderer in that effort.

So what else? How else might we experience the closeness of the Divine though we feel like strangers?

The parashah gives us a little clue at the end. After announcing all the Ten Commandments, amidst thunder and smoke and the sound of horns, God and Moshe spirit off for a little post-mortem or, perhaps this weekend, I should say a little Monday morning quarterbacking. God revisits the commandment not to make any graven images, and expands on it. God says, “Tell the Children of Israel not to make any gods of silver or any gods of gold. Instead, make me an altar of earth and sacrifice on it; in every place where I cause my name to be mentioned I will come to you and bless you.”

In other words, I think, don’t go chasing after God; don’t try to tame God by making rigid reductions of Divinity out of gold or silver. How, after all, can you force the great mystery of this Universe into such a limited form, whether made of a precious metal or an unyielding and too-small theology? Instead, don’t try to capture God at all. Keep your altar simple. Made of your own earth, your own life. Offer up your thanks or your wonder or your need. Mention God. And wait. Sit back, and let the Mystery introduce itself to you, so you can be on a first name basis with it.

Gershom and Eliezer might be among the names offered. I am a stranger and will always be. And still, I am held by God. These are my names. These are all of our names. And these are both true.

May we all journey our journeys without fear, without panic. And may we be open to the familiar and comforting touch of the Great Mystery, whenever and however it happens.

Solstice 2012: The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

For Congregation Ner Shalom, Submitted in Absentia 
 

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. That’s how the song goes. And I was looking forward to this most wonderful, ecumenical evening that we share each December: the chanting and the chill air and the connection with spirited people representing a range of traditions, whether they were born into them or arrived at them later in life.

I had some things in mind that I had wanted to talk about tonight, having to do with the darkness of Solstice; the long night that is like the end of the world. Because really, when the sunlight gets so short, and shorter every day, how can you be so certain it will ever come back? That certainty is a kind of faith. Based in experience, yes. But not so very different from the faith many of us feel that the light will return when we find ourselves in metaphorical darkness. No wonder it is so important to mark this longest night, and to celebrate it with light. The Christians got it right when they assigned the birth of God-in-human-form to this week. And we get it more or less right with our festival of lights, snuggling as close to Solstice as we can given the limitations of our lunar way of doing things. It is darkness giving way to hope.

This time of year feels like an end; we’ve reflected that in our secular but still ancient calendar. And this year many people are taking literally the endy-ness of it, as we observe the expiration of the Mayan calendar. And I, not knowing when today the end of the world was scheduled to take place, was not entirely certain how much effort to put into a drash.

Still, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. America is on the move, and my mother and I, like thousands of others, find ourselves stranded at an airport instead of at shul with you. The entire US military is on holiday furlough, and they are all sitting in O’Hare Airport’s food court, eating their Manchu-Wok rations as they head home to families scattered across the country.

One such young man was sitting next to us this morning at a communal table. I use the term “man” advisedly. Had he not been in his Navy uniform, I’d have guessed him to be 16 at best. But he seemed curious about us and struck up a little small talk with my mother who, as many of you know, is a small-talk magnet in public places. He is stationed in Hawai’i. He is heading to Connecticut to his father and stepmother. New Haven. Christmas. “Do you celebrate Christmas?” he asked us.

“No, we’re Jewish,” I said. “Our winter holiday is already over. We’re just looking forward to the quiet time.”

“Ah,” he said, looking momentarily at a loss. “When I was little I didn’t care about Christmas. Just about the presents. But then I began appreciating Jesus and would say, ‘Thank you Jesus for being born.’ And now I’ve let Jesus into my life.”

“Ah,” I said, my mind already racing with how to handle where this was obviously going.

“I hope you’ll think about letting Jesus into your life,” he concluded.

“Well,” I said, not wanting to completely dash his innocent hopes for my salvation, “we’ll give it thought. Thanks.” And I began dealing cards to my mother in hopes that our game of double solitaire would neatly sew up the situation. But he continued to chat.

“So where do you live? Where are you going?” he asked.

“Well, my mother lives here in Chicago. I live in California with my husband and children, and she’s coming home with me to visit her grandchildren.” I offered this information because in my experience there’s no better response to the suggestion of letting Jesus into your life than flinging back the revelation of your same-sex marriage. Maybe the blessing of homosexuality could serve, where double solitaire couldn’t, to put an end to this moment of increasingly awkward interfaith relations.

But no such luck. Our sailor continued. “Well, I hope you’ll read some of what Jesus wrote and let him into your life.” And he looked at me eagerly, at the edge of his seat, waiting for my moment of enlightenment.

I was dealing out the next hand now, my oft-persecuted Jewish blood pumping defensively through my veins. I briefly entertained the possibility that this stranger was Elijah the prophet, showing up, as always, in disguise to test my compassion. But then I reasoned that Elijah probably wouldn’t require me to go as far as accepting Jesus as my personal savior as an act of tzedakah. So I made the decision – perhaps not the best one – to address this head on.

“So listen,” I said, “I appreciate how much finding Jesus has meant to you. I’ve read plenty of Jesus’ words myself, and I think he had some fantastic and radical things to say. But I don’t believe he is God or the son of God.” This is where I wish I had said, “I don’t believe he is the child of God any differently than we all are.” Instead I continued, figuring one’s got to learn this at some time or other, “it’s really not polite to push your religious beliefs on others.”

“Well, I’m not trying to force it on you,” he said, “I was just offering this as a suggestion.”

“We’re strangers,” I said. “You don’t know us. You don’t know if we have religion in our lives or how we find meaning. It was fine for you to offer it once, but then you have to stop. I’m happy for you, and I wish you safety and many blessings. But you have to stop now. It's not polite.” (It is perhaps the depth of feeling we have about our spiritual lives, the sensations that are so hard to articulate, and the beliefs that are completely impossible to defend rationally that make us retreat to the position of religious talk being "impolite." It's not impolite really. It's just too difficult.)

He instantly became despondent, worrying that he'd offended us, and I felt like I’d just kicked a puppy. Plus he’s in the Navy and I’d violated our strict American rules of deference and decorum toward service members. I tried to defuse his anxiety and my own prickliness by changing topics and explaining to him how to play double solitaire, all the time worrying that he would now think Jews care more about playing cards than about either salvation or the national defense.

So how do we live in a pluralistic society? Is such a thing possible? How do we make it okay for people to believe different things, and draw meaning from different sources? We shouldn’t have to just shut up, should we? Should I have just shut up? Should he? We should each be able to speak our own truth, with enthusiasm and excitement and somewhere in the middle our words should be able to meet.

But let’s say I have a special investment in how I think God talked to Moses – or Jesus or Mohammad or Joseph Smith for that matter – how do I express my enthusiasm without implying that my way is better? Or worse – if my beliefs dictate that your actions are wrong, how do I stay silent? If I really believe Jesus is the only path to salvation, how do I stand idly by while my neighbor in the food court says, “No, thank you, I’m busy playing cards.” In a worldview in which the darkness could come and swallow us up at any moment, and this time for good, how do I not offer the hand of hope to a stranger?

There is no answer for this. The dilemma holds true whether you’re a born-again Christian, or born-again Muslim, or a born-once-and-for-always Chasid. How do you tone it down when your God tells you you’re right?

And then all of us who choose the pluralistic position – that all these paths have validity, all are sacred – well, don’t we just get a little tired of being thought of as everybody's lost sheep?

How can we all delight in each other’s inspiration, like we do here on this night at Ner Shalom, without anyone having to come out on top?

As I dealt the cards, I explained to my young interlocutor how one plays multiple solitaire. “There are mixed goals,” I told him. “Yes, you want to win, you want to play more cards than anyone else. But you can only do that if everyone has a good game. It’s both competitive and collaborative, and you have to hold both of those intentions as you play. That’s what makes it sometimes confusing and that’s what makes it fun.”

Only now do I realize that the game was conveniently offering itself up in that very moment as a suggestion for how we might live together in this world, even if we have strong beliefs. Of course you must be committed to your own hand; you must have hope for your own hand; that is natural. But the game is more satisfying for you – and everyone – when you can accept the integrity of other players’ hands, and root – even just a little bit – for their success as well.

We’re ready to board now. The terminal is packed. Babies are crying. People are spilling their salads and talking on their cell phones. It is a great cacophony of voices and experiences and outlooks. This is a crowded world, so crowded, and everyone is just trying to get home.

May we all find our paths, whether they’re non-stop flights or circuitous routing from stop to stop. And may a light, of whatever shape or hue, be waiting in the window for us at journey’s end. I wish you all a beautiful Solstice, and joy in all your holidays, and a peaceful Shabbat which is, I think, the most wonderful time of the year. But I’m biased.

Parashat Toldot: Brothers, Birthrights and Blessing

For Congregation Ner Shalom and B'nai Israel Jewish Center

Hineh mah tov u-mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad.

These words, set to one melody or other, are among the basic sound bytes of Judaism that we all got in Hebrew school; for many this is one of the few phrases that stuck with us on the long road from childhood. Hineh mah tov u-mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad. How good and how pleasant it is to sit, side by side, like brothers," says the text.

The older I get, the more I grasp why these words, which constitute the opening verse of Psalm 133, are so very catchy and compelling. When you’re young, they sound like a platitude. But as you get older, you realize that they point to the difficult problem of siblinghood. It is good and pleasant to sit together as siblings not because it is easy or natural or always fun. It is good to sit together as siblings precisely because it is not easy. The sibling relationship is complex. The pushme-pullyou of it: the inevitable jealousy and competition. But also the natural intimacy. You are tethered to each other by a common history, heritage and upbringing; by shared relatives, playthings and hated living room furniture. No one will ever know you as well or, God willing, as long as your sibling. And no one else – not even your spouse – is stuck with you in quite the same way. A married couple can divorce. We might think it’s terrible, but we know it happens and we sigh, “Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.” But when siblings break up, it somehow goes against the nature of things.

Exhibit A: Brothers

I had a chance to closely observe and appreciate the ties of siblinghood – especially the bonds of brothers – over this past week. I went with my husband and his brother, and my mother- and father-in-law, to their ancestral homeland of Vancouver, British Columbia. There we visited my father-in-law’s cousins – a band of three brothers, who are the sons of one of my father-in-law’s several uncles. They had children and grandchildren in tow, more sets of brothers among them. My father-in-law himself had two brothers who are no longer living. I watched these generations, as I would waves on the beach. Repeated incursions of brothers, some at hand in the room, some whose presence could only be felt by inference.

My father-in-law hadn’t visited the Vancouver family in some six years; my husband hadn’t in maybe twenty. And I’d never met them at all. Since my in-laws live in Israel, the route of our family visits has always traversed the Atlantic but never the 49th parallel. And because my father-in-law had made aliyah to Israel at a young age, he was more myth than fact to the younger Vancouver generations. So here we were, like visiting nobility. A great party was thrown in honor of the return of the Slozbergs from exile. Children, grandchildren, siblings, nephews, nieces, cousins – all here in abundance. And I loved it. I moved easily from family group to family group, learning names, memorizing relationships, asking for family stories. It was easy for me to experience this as hineh mah tov umah na’im, as good and pleasant. Because I didn’t know them. I knew no back-stories. I had no grudges and I was not charged with maintaining anyone else’s. In fact, it took days more to discover that there had been any.

Torah makes much of the tensions and grudges of siblinghood, perhaps because they’re universal, and because they can be read on both micro- and macro- levels: literal siblings and figurative siblings, individuals and nations. But Torah almost never treats the subject more intensely than in this week’s parashah, Toldot. This is the helping of Torah that brings us from Jacob and Esau struggling already within Rebecca’s womb, to a hungry Esau selling his birthright to Jacob in exchange for a bowl of soup, and finally to Jacob masquerading as his minutes-older brother in order to abscond with their father’s blessing.

We all know this story and our reactions to it are, I would guess, mixed. One can, and generations have, argued that Jacob was chosen by God, and in this story he does what he must in order to claim his destiny. One can argue it, but it’s hard to feel good about it. Jacob is one of our avot, one of the patriarchs. Here he steals what is understood to be our inheritance, making our own heritage hot property. It’s hard not to feel a little shame.

And as a story, it’s just plain sad to see it go this way. We know what siblings can accomplish together at their best. Think of Orville and Wilbur. George and Ira. The Brontes. Venus and Serena. Click & Clack.

But we also know how it can go so very bad. The famous fraternal feuds. Adi and Rudi Dassler, the founders of Adidas and Puma, respectively. Anne Landers and Dear Abby. AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble. Cain and Abel.

Often these breakdowns are over insignificant things; small jealousies and misunderstandings that snowball. And sometimes they’re based on very significant things. The items of controversy in this story are two: a birthright, or bechorah in Hebrew, and a blessing, or berachah.

The first of these, the bechorah, the birthright, Esau, tired and hungry, agrees to sell to Jacob rather than have to make his own dinner. The bechorah is about property rights – the larger share of land and livestock that the eldest son was entitled to inherit. The sages have questioned whether the sale of an inheritance that had not yet been received was even valid, but the story itself doesn’t questions it. It might have been poor form to sell your birthright, like refusing to go into the family business, but it wasn’t illegal. And, as for one who would squander a birthright on a bowl of lentils, you might apply the axiom, caveat venditor. Let the seller beware. No sympathy here.

But the blessing – the berachah – distinct in Hebrew from the bechorah by the mere reversal of two letters, as if they are flipsides of each other – the blessing seems another matter. This is the juicy bit. It cannot be bought and sold. It is bigger than the inheritance, and deeper too. It carries intention. It exists not in the legal realm but the spiritual one. Blessing engages our hopes and even our fears. Blessing implies something transcendent, something bigger, maybe something divine. The bechorah, the birthright, speaks to the wallet. The berachah speaks to the heart. By analogy, I’d say the institution of the civil union is an example of bechorah. But marriage is about berachah, which is why it is so desired by those who can’t have it, and defended so fiercely by some who can.

So if the bechorah here was land and livestock – conveyable property – what was the berachah? What was the blessing that was so desirable that Jacob drew it from Isaac by cunning and guile? It was this: the dew of heaven; the fat of the earth; grain; wine. Prominence over nations and precedence over brothers. This was the father’s blessing. Were they in fact Isaac’s to give? Are the words prediction or prophecy or magic to bring it about?

Esau, when he discovers the fraud, also begs for a blessing. His rapidly failing father cannot refuse, but is unable to offer a blessing to undo the one he’d given Jacob. That blessing was already uncorked and released into the world. But he nonetheless offers what he can: again the dew of heaven and the earth’s produce; plus the means to survive oppression and ultimately overcome it. This is the blessing given to Esau, that by all rights should have been given to Jacob – and inherited by us. And, given our history, it would have been a useful one.

But it was not the blessing Esau wanted. And who among us gets the blessing we want? In Deuteronomy, God says, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose blessing. Choose life.”

We are instructed to choose life, to choose blessing, but with no real guarantee about its content. It might be our lot to rule; it might be our lot to be ruled. It might be our lot to throw off the yoke of oppression. We must say yes, without knowing which it will be. But in any case, we can still be blessed, as both Jacob and Esau were, with the dew that flows down from the heavens, as the ancients believed, dew that flows just like the Kabbalists imagined blessing itself to flow, downward from source to us.

Psalm 133, hineh mah tov, “how good and pleasant it is to sit together as siblings” continues for three more verses:

Kashemen hatov al harosh yored al hazakan, z'kan Aharon sheyored al pi midotav.
K’tal Chermon sheyored al har’rey Tziyon
Ki sham tzivah Adonai et habrachah – chayim ad-ha’olam.

Like the good oil on the head,
Streaming down onto the beard of Aaron.
Like the dew of Hermon that trickles down
To the Mountains of Zion;
Where Adonai commanded this blessing: life, always.

Sitting together as brothers and sisters is not just good and pleasant: it is blessing embodied. It is like the oil of anointment flowing down, onto the priestly beard of Aaron, himself an older brother who stands in the shadow of a younger brother and a sister too. It is like dew, like shefa, the divine trickle-down, whose flow sweeps us back to the place where we are reminded that we must choose life and we must live it, with all its inequalities and sorrows and joys and possibilities.

Being together like brothers and sisters – ultimately coming together despite grudges and hurts - that is the blessing. Isn’t that the case in this story? These bought birthrights and stolen blessings seem like nothing but trouble until twenty years and five chapters later when Esau and Jacob finally fall on each other’s necks and weep. Weep for the time lost and the fears outlived and the differences not fully resolvable and the future never quite knowable. But they weep together, as brothers, and they sit together, like brothers. Hineh mah tov u-mah na’im.

Isn’t that blessing? And if Esau and Jacob can do it, then why not Isaac and Ishmael? Why not us, their descendants still caught in the shock wave of their brotherly grudge, playing it out this very week with missiles aimed at houses, each side claiming the bechorah, the rights of the firstborn, when really what each of us wants is the berachah, the chance to be blessed?

The image of Jacob and Esau, reunited even if not fully reconciled, holding each other, sitting together in the soothing light of evening – this is the blessing we must choose, that we must seek, that we must create, that we must steal if necessary. In Yiddish, to cross a border is called ganeven di grenetz. You “steal” the border. You don’t wait for passage to be offered to you. Instead you tiptoe up, you do a little dance, like a snake charmer, and you charm that border until it is yours. It is what Jacob failed to do when he clumsily drew verses of Torah from his unwitting father. And it is what Jacob and Esau succeeded in doing so very elegantly and naturally when they strode past the border of their fear and into an embrace.

So let us be, like Jacob and Esau, stealers of blessing. Let us ganeven di grenetz, let us face borders, or oceans, or parallels, or fences. Let us approach the borders and use all our charms, all our wiles, all our hearts, to draw down blessing. So that we might know the goodness, the pleasantness, the berachah, of sitting, at long last, as brothers and sisters together.

Hineh mah tov u-mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad.

May it be so.

Killing Your Darlings

It is Shabbat in New York City. I'm about to go out and scare up a shul. It's my father's yortzeit and though I could say Kaddish alone, our age-old custom is to do it in community instead. And over the years, with my travel schedule, it's given me an annual chance to wander into Jewish communities I never would've visited otherwise.

So I began googling Jewish communities near where I'm staying. And I stumbled onto the Sim Shalom Universalist Chavurah. For someone who plays as fast and loose with our tradition as I do, I am remarkably suspicious of other Jews' innovations. Are they crypto-Christians? Stealth Messianics? I guess that flavor of suspicion itself is rather Jewish, as we struggle to withstand the arrival of the next new thing, as we've survived Christianity, Islam, Sabbateanism, Franckism, the Enlightenment, Chasidism, Reform Judaism, and every other new idea that we now see as an innovation or a deviation, depending on the outcome.

One of the primary notions of the Sim Shalom folks, not unlike Mordecai Kaplan's framing of Reconstructionism, is the rejection of the idea of "chosen-ness." There are many paths to enlightenment and, using the language on Sim Shalom's website, "We reject the concept of a God that would choose a favorite child."

It was a funny statement to stumble on during this Shabbat Breishit where, among so many other things, we read the story of Kayin and Hevel - Cain and Abel. This story, in which God accepts the offering of the younger but not the older, is one of our many narratives that dwell in the anxiety about the seemingly unfair affection and attraction felt for the next new thing. We see it again and again: Isaac becomes Abraham's principal heir over Ishmael. Jacob swipes the birthright and the blessing from Esau. Rachel is the beloved over her sister Leah. Although Torah doesn't explore this dimension of it, it's worth noting that Moses himself is little brother to both Miriam and Aaron. Even King David, though not a set up as a sibling, is still posed as the young and more attractive alternative to King Saul. David is the upstart whose charmed and charming ascendancy drives the failing leader mad.

Torah over and over presents versions of this, of the younger being justified in taking what should belong to the older. Why such anxiety? Were we, as newcomers to the Promised Land, as builders of a kingdom not on empty soil but on the turf of an older resident civilization, insecure about our position? Is Torah's message that the new supplanting the old is the order of things? In Greek mythology the younger gods defeat the older gods; children supplant their parents, suggesting that change happens in a generational way. The Torah version, invoking our innate sibling rivalry, is subtler and trickier. It involves the painful conflict of ideas that are more or less contemporaneous.

In his mind-bending book Ishmael, Daniel Quinn paints the Cain-Abel conflict as an allegory representing the defeat of the old nomadic lifestyle, represented by Abel the shepherd of sheep, by the newer, settlement-based agrarian culture, represented by Cain. The murder of Abel by Cain exemplifies the agrarian revolution of about 10,000 years ago. Interestingly, in this reading of the myth, the newer idea - agrarianism - is embodied in the older sibling, and the older hunter-gatherer-herdsman lifestyle is embodied in the younger.

Of course what's always challenging and reassuring about Torah is that it doesn't lend itself to easy allegorical readings. Is Abel a new idea or an old idea? Is Abel the loss of the past or anxiety about the present and future? Or is this story not about ideas at all? Maybe it's about competition between tribes or nations. Or maybe this tale of sibling rivalry is just about sibling rivalry. After all, the murderous rage that many children feel at the arrival of the darling interloper is a deep current in many lives. It informs personalities and outlooks from cradle to grave.

I myself am a younger child. So are, when I think about it, most of my friends. How much of my general optimism comes from never having been challenged by a darling newcomer? And how much of that optimism would look to anyone else like plain old naivete?

Was Abel naive? When God accepted his offering but not Cain's, did he not see what was coming next? The outcome, though not foreseeable to the character, was utterly foreseeable to the narrative itself. Abel is named Hevel, the word that comes up over and over in Ecclesiastes, which we read last week over Sukkot before Simchat Torah boomeranged us back to the Beginning. It means breath. Vanity. Fleetingness. Impermanence. Unlike for his brother in the preceding verse, Torah gives no explanation as to how Hevel got this name. Almost as if it was less a name than an attribute. He was, in fact, impermanent. It could not have been his parents. After all, who would name their kid Temp?

Maybe Torah instead is saying something about our individual, internal struggles. We have competing needs, ideas. Sometimes the more attractive idea has to go. As the advice to writers goes, "Kill your darlings." But when you do, it is okay to mourn, and the idea that survives must be held accountable. When it asks, "Am I my brother's keeper," the answer - in the world of ideas as much as the world of action - should be a resounding "yes."

Or maybe this story of the first crime of passion is not meant to teach anything other than impermanence itself, its tone less akin to the mythology of Genesis than to the fatalism of Ecclesiastes. Maybe Kohelet, Ecclesiastes' author, uses this term - hevel - over and over in order to send us right back to this core narrative about unpredictability and impermanence. We grow, we tend, we offer up. Sometimes the world accepts our offerings. Sometimes it doesn't and we don't know why. Sometimes we are punished for our success. Sometimes we punish ourselves. It is all hevel. Yet we have no choice but to keep growing, keep tending and keep offering up.

This sentiment is beautifully captured in an unattributed poem that became a song by Maggy and Suzzy Roche:

     People are often unreasonable, illogical,

     and self-centered;

     Forgive them anyway.

     If you are kind, People may accuse you

     of selfish, ulterior motives;

     Be kind anyway.

     If you are successful, you will win some

     false friends and some true enemies;

     Succeed anyway.

     If you are honest and frank,

     people may cheat you;

     Be honest and frank anyway.

     What you spend years building, someone

     could destroy overnight;

     Build anyway.

     If you find serenity and happiness,

     they may be jealous;

     Be happy anyway.

     The good you do today,

     people will often forget tomorrow;

     Do good anyway.

     Give the world the best you have,

     and it may never be enough;

     Give the world the best you've got anyway.

     You see, in the final analysis,

     it is between you and God;

     It was never between you and them anyway.

Kohelet: All is Impermanent; There is a Time for Everything

For Congregation Ner Shalom, October 5, 2012

It isn’t easy being king. After all, one’s best efforts come to naught; they are mere vanity, like chasing the wind.

So go the words of Kohelet son of David, king in Jerusalem, writer and star of the book called Kohelet, or Ecclesiastes, which serves as the companion text for the holiday of Sukkot. Our tradition says that Kohelet, the writer and supposed king, was actually King Solomon, but there’s no non-midrashic evidence of that, just as there is, in fact, no extrinsic evidence that King Solomon ever existed. But just going with our stories, King Solomon seems very unlike this Kohelet person. Solomon is kind of solid and wise and unfazed. Whereas Kohelet is at first blush more like Solomon’s father, David: impulsive, full of mood and seemingly young. His words sound like they could be spoken by some undergraduate philosophy major, perhaps wearing a black turtleneck and smoking a cigarette.

Havel havalim, Kohelet says. It is all vanity. Vanity of vanities. He is king and yet he sees that no matter what he builds, no matter what he succeeds at, it doesn’t last. The world goes on, generation upon generation. The streams flow into the oceans and the oceans never fill. The winds blow and then circle around and blow again. What was is what will be. What was done is what will be done, v’eyn kol chadash tachat hashemesh – there is nothing new under the sun.

Kohelet represents a kind of world-weariness; a jadedness expressed by the character Prior Walter in “Angels in America” when he says, “It’s something you learn after your second theme party: It’s All Been Done Before.”

Hakol havel. It is all vanity. Wow. How honest. To be a king and see your own insignificance? That’s got to hurt. The disillusionment in the field of high politics must be immense. And that disillusionment is never copped to, even though it’s not well hidden from us, the king’s subjects, either. Watching the first presidential debate, didn’t we all recognize it? The too-thin veil of principle draped carelessly over the jagged edges of desire, greed and futility? Seeing moral truths get brushed aside as the debate goes to the best jawline and biggest smirk? Watching the candidates, it’s hard to know who is more disillusioned – them or us. Do we even want to be aware of this? As Kohelet says,

Ki b’rov chochmah rav ka’as, v’yosif da’at yosif mach’ov.

The more you know, the more painful it is. Ignorance, even back then, was bliss.

But how do you escape disillusionment? With food, wine, earthly entertainments? Kohelet tried those and they didn’t work. What then? Build? Design? Gather wisdom? Kohelet, ever the life of the party, reminds us that the wise person dies even as surely as the fool.

Disillusionment is everywhere. “Why should I vote? Why should I care,” ask many young people. And many not-young people. Why should I bother to act at all?

Kohelet strikes a chord with all of us; he is not a prophet hurling God’s words at an unhearing public. He speaks for the people. Whoever he actually was, his nom de plume, Kohelet means “one of the kahal” - a member of the congregation, the voice of the community. He speaks in all our names. We all reign as kings of our own lives. And yet all or so many of our efforts to govern are futile.

But maybe bleakness is an incomplete reading of Kohelet. Maybe there’s an element of angst, but also an element of acceptance. Perhaps he is a kind of Buddhist. Our earliest Israelite Buddhist. Hevel havalim – vanity of vanities. Not a lament as much as a mantra: Kohelet’s way of saying what in Sanskrit is called anitcha. Impermanence. All is impermanent. Like a Buddhist he is aware that suffering comes from not accepting the impermanence of all things; that trying to cling to what we’re attached to is r’ut ruach – like grasping at the wind.

Is Kohelet a lesson in disattachment? Disattachment as a way of life scares me even more than disillusionment. How can I embrace disattachment when so much action is needed in this world? There are terrible people doing terrible things. There are good people doing terrible things too! How can I stand idly by when there is so much at stake?

The answer is undoubtedly that this is not an “either/or” question. Kohelet doesn’t say, “do nothing.” He – or she because really who knows? – says, “Look at the big picture also.” Everything is temporary. Our gains are temporary. So are our setbacks. Life unfolds in ways that are bigger than us and that disregard us. “So,” Kohelet seems to say, “let go of the constant need to control it all.” Instead, find the richness in your life, the richness in this very transient moment. Do not let your happiness hinge entirely upon your success in controlling your conditions.

There are cycles bigger than us and we will cycle through all of them. As Kohelet goes on to say, to everything there is a season:

A time to be born, a time to die.

A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.

A time to weep, a time to laugh.

A time to mourn, a time to dance.

A time to seek, a time to lose.

A time to keep, a time to cast away.

Kohelet casts away his need to control. Kohelet makes room for the possible futility of his efforts in the human world. And he comes to this conclusion: We cannot understand God’s plan, and so all that is left to do is lismoach v’la’asot tov b’chayav. To be happy and to do good in our lives. These are not the words of someone who has given up, but the words of someone who has opened up.

My last question tonight about this odd and wonderful book is this: why on Sukkot? The other pairings seem to make sense. On Pesach, in the spring, we read of love in Song of Songs. On Shavuot, when marking our covenant with God, we read about Ruth and her covenant with Naomi. But this? Kohelet on Sukkot?

Maybe it is about the harvest. You go into the fields and you realize that neither your careful tending nor your gross negligence had so very much effect on the crop. The rain and the sun were beyond your control. We don’t always know what we will harvest in our lives. So be careful of the level of your attachment to the outcome.

Or maybe it’s this. On Sukkot we live in a structure that is, by design, impermanent. Anitcha turned architecture. We eat and sleep and pray in it. And this structure, like our lives, is blown by winds much stronger than it. It is exposed to rain and cold. We have no choice but to live with its uncertainty, even as we reinforce the ropes and the knots and the fronds lying on top.

But the sukkah also affords us a grand opportunity to peer up from our lives and see the stars. They are changing too, but so slowly as to seem unchanging. They are distant from us but not irrelevant to us. There is space – makom – that binds us to them. We are tethered to them by light years of ayin, of nothingness.

This malchut, this kingdom, is much bigger than we are. Our world is like the wind that blows in its season and comes back around to blow again; our lives are the palm fronds rustling in that wind; and all this against the glittering and ancient backdrop of stars that, for all intents and purposes, have always been and will always be there.

That is the perspective provided by Sukkot and set to words by Kohelet. All is impermanent. There is a time for everything. And it’s all been done before.

And sometimes, even if briefly, that can come as a great relief.