Parashat Vayishlach: The Slo-Mo Kiss

For Congregation Ner Shalom

So you know that classic cinematic moment, where you have a couple running through a meadow of tall grasses, careening toward each other, inevitably - in fact compulsorily - running in slomo, likely accompanied by the love theme from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and ending ultimately in an embrace, a kiss, sometimes a lift and a spin.

One wonders where this idea started; was it first literary and then translated to screen? And what is the story of these two lovers anyway? If they're so in love, why are they running from opposite directions? And if it's a rendezvous, how did they happen to arrive at just the right moment to fall into each others arms so flawlessly in the most picturesque spot?

Now, I'm not certain I've ever actually seen this in film or TV¹; what I've seen are the countless spoofs of it, where they come together and something goes wrong. They bounce off each other, or they miss each other, or they slam into each other and get knocked out. This trope is so cheesy it begs to be satirized. As was done in these words by one Jennifer Hart, submitted to a Washington Post bad metaphor contest: "Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 pm traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 pm at a speed of 35 mph."

Though not running through a meadow, this week's Torah portion, Vayishlach, contains a kind of comparable moment. Two people who are deeply connected and long parted, heading toward each other through the open spaces, ending in a kiss. Those two people are Jacob and his twin brother Esau, separated for 20 years after Jacob's theft of birthright and blessing and subsequent flight back to the Old Country. Jacob has gotten older. He has 2 wives and 2 concubines. A dozen kids. Flocks. Wealth. And now, God has instructed him to return to his birthplace, to the land of his ancestors, in an almost exact reversal of God's first command to Abraham, to leave his birthplace and his father's house.

Jacob knows that heading toward his past involves facing his brother and the conflict he has dodged for two decades. He is nervous. He sends messages and gifts ahead - flocks and servants. He learns his brother is approaching with a regimen of 400 men and he quakes with fear. He divides his holdings into two camps, so that if Esau should attack, there is the chance that half his household might escape.

Night falls, and Jacob finds himself in a mysterious wrestling match with a stranger - a stranger or an angel, maybe the Archangel Michael, according to some midrash. Or could it be his brother? Or his own conscience (although rare is the conscience that can dislocate your hip)? Emerging from this struggle, Jacob is given a new name - Yisrael, Israel, the one who wrestles with God.

Dawn comes and Jacob, now Israel, sets forth toward his brother. He punctuates the final run up to the rendezvous, bowing to the ground seven times. They get nearer and nearer until Esau can bear it no more and breaks into a run:

וירץ עשו לקראתו ויפל על–צוארו וישקהו ויבכו

 Esau ran toward him and embraced him and fell on his neck 

and kissed him 

and they wept.

It is perhaps one of the most poignant moments in Torah. Beautiful and unexpected. But there is something else unusual about it, that you only notice if reading from Torah. The word vayishakehu - "and he kissed him" - is written with a dot drawn above each letter, as you can see here:

Photo of text from Ner Shalom's torah scroll, which originated in Sobeslav, Czech Republic.

This is exceedingly rare in Torah, which doesn't actually have any system of dots or diacritics. It is rare, and like everything else in our tradition, of uncertain meaning. Some say that at some point there had been a scribal error or the suspicion of one, and the dots are an indication to take the word with a grain of salt. Others say that the dots indicate that there is cause to look deeper, to look underneath the word.

And so our sages did just that; they looked underneath the word and they decided that Esau's kiss was insincere. That he kissed, but not with a whole heart. Other midrash goes even further. That Esau did not intend to kiss (represented by the root nashak in Hebrew) but rather to bite (represented by the similar root nashakh). And that in the instant that Esau fell on Jacob to bite him True Blood-style, Jacob's neck turned to ivory and Esau's teeth were painfully deflected, causing him, in the next word, to weep.

The distrust of Esau and his motives is captured in the words of the 1st Century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who actually did believe that Esau was sincere in the moment, but that his love was deeply out of character. Bar Yochai says, "It is halachah" - that is, tradition strong enough to be considered law - "that Esau hates Jacob."

So what is this about? Here we have to turn for a moment to our fables surrounding the origins of the nations of the world. We of course see ourselves as B'nei Yisrael - the Children of Israel, i.e. the descendants of Jacob. We see Ishmael as the forebear of the Arab nations. Esau, or as he is renamed, Edom, is imagined to be the forebear of the Gentiles: the Greeks, the Romans and ultimately all Christians and Europeans. These gentile nations were referred to in our rabbinic tradition as Edomites, as the descendants of Esau. And so Esau and Jacob in this moment, in the rabbinic view, are not just individuals in a family drama, but avatars of the Gentile and Jewish worlds. And already in Bar Yochai's time, we see that the hatred leveled at Jews was so old and entrenched that it was beyond custom: it was like law.

In Bar Yochai's time and throughout our history, an awareness of the threat on our doorstep has been part of our people's consciousness. Our oldest prayers, our psalms, for every beautiful transcendent moment they offer, they boast an equal number of requests for God to destroy our enemies. Even our Shabbat psalm, Psalm 92, read on our holy day, and in which we early on sing l'hagid baboker chasdecha - :let us sing your kindness in the morning;" and which we cap off with tzadik katamar yifrach - "the righteous shall blossom like the date palm;" this Shabbat psalm also has a middle section, which Reb Judith Goleman and I confessed to each other this week we both treat as the great flyover; a middle section in which we say that evildoers blossom solely so that they may be utterly destroyed; that our enemies will be brought to nought. Such prayers for real-world military victory over our enemies has always been part of our tradition, which is ironic when you consider how seldom we've ever had real-world military victory. There were the Maccabbees 2200 years ago. And of course the modern State of Israel. And between them? Well, not so much. Most of our history is characterized by being subject to other people's aggression.

Last week we marked the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the "night of shattered glass," the days-long pogrom that swept through Germany and Austria, days of terror and destruction and hiding that are conveniently used to date the beginning of the Holocaust. But of course it wasn't a beginning; but a continuation. The pogroms, the persecutions, the massacres. They've existed in every generation of our people, if not in one place then in another. We have the good fortune to be living in a time and a place where there is respite; where Anti-Semitism isn't violent or overt. I asked our 12-year old if he'd experienced or witnessed Anti-Semitism in his life. Once, he answered, when playing World of Warcraft, a fantasy computer game in which real people around the world play in a virtual landscape, modeled on a kind of folkloric medieval Europe. There are certain activities in the game that can get a player labeled as a Goldfarmer or a Tradespammer. And sure enough, in a spontaneous replication of medieval European values, Ari had witnessed at least one player calling the Goldfarmers and Tradespammers "Jews." To their credit, other players responded strongly.

I'm not trying to raise an alarm about Anti-Semitism. But instead to note the context in which the rabbis voiced their suspicion about Esau and his motives. They had not had a wealth of experience in which the benevolence of the non-Jewish world was wholehearted.

But it's not just the mere identification of Esau with the gentile nations at work. The physical and characterological differences between the brothers also resonate with a certain Jewish anxiety about what we Jews are like. Esau is a hunter, an activity our grandparents might well call goyim naches, the gentile sphere of brawny activity. And Jacob? While he's not clearly a scholar, which was often the Jewish male ideal pitted against the gentile warrior archetype, he is nonetheless a mama's boy. Esau leads with physical action. Jacob cooks. And when Jacob prevails at taking the birthright and the blessing, it is not by confrontation but by cunning. The portrayal of Jacob, as seen through the cultural lens of a European patriarchy, looks like an indictment of Jacob's masculinity and of Jewish masculinity altogether. As Daniel Boyarin writes in his book, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, "The term goyim naches refers to violent physical activity, such as hunting, dueling, or wars -- all of which Jews traditionally depised, for which they in turn were despised -- and to the association of violence with male attractiveness and with sex itself..."

As Jacob approaches his brother, we see the Jewish people addressing the gentile world, aware that they are despised, that the gentile world sees their shunning of violence as a weakness, as an ugliness, as a failure of manhood.

And yet it is Esau, the hunter, surrounded by a military detail, who falls on his brother's neck and kisses him and weeps. And Bar Yochai says, despite the abiding fact of Esau's hatred of Jacob, Esau kisses him with a whole heart.

This is not the expected end. You expect a duel. My name is Esau son of Isaac. You stole my birthright. Prepare to die. 

If Esau represents the unrelenting brutality of the non-Jewish world, he does not make good on the threat. So did he transform as well? Did he  have his own wrestling match the night before? Or is this change brought about by 20 intervening years, during which his anger at being bamboozled by his brother gave way to sadness at being abandoned by him?

Or is he more complex, more subtle, than Torah's portrayal of him, and than Jewish anxieties about him? Shoshana Fershtman suggested to me that Jacob wrestled not with an angel but with a shadow, the shadow he'd been projecting onto Esau his whole life. With the shadow defeated, Esau was now able to be seen for who he really was - someone who loved and missed his brother.

And so that day, when they approach each other, when in the last moment Esau breaks into a run like the star-crossed lovers in a bad movie, as they fall into each other's arms, Torah puts dots over each letter of their kiss, slowing the reader down, demanding that we pronounce each syllable separately: va - yish - sha - ke - hu. Torah gives us the requisite slow-motion effect so that we have the chance to look into Esau's eyes and see that he isn't exactly the way we thought of him, and that his heart is truly overflowing. And we get the span of six short breaths to whisper to Jacob that yes, this might be real. And as the film frames tick past we can absorb for a moment that despite history, despite everyone's bad patterns and worst instincts, despite our low, low expectations of the other, something better, a moment of forgiveness, of understanding, is possible. We can never know about someone else's transformation, but we can wrestle with our own shadows, with our own fears, with our own projections, and clear the way to receive the open-hearted kiss. And if we can do this enough, then we can make a better world, where hearts will skip beats from eagerness, not from fear; where hiding will only be required in children's games; and where the sound of shattering glass will emanate only from under the wedding chupah.

---

1 I have now been told that this trope originated in the 1967 film "Elvira Madigan." I guess I'll have to Netflix it to see if it's the case; not that I want to. It ends with a dismal double suicide. Oh - spoiler alert. It ends with a dismal double suicide. Goyim naches. See below. 

Bar Mitzvah+40, and God and Abraham Are Still At It

For Congregation Ner Shalom

There's been so much conflict in the air of late. Some personal stuff, but also big stuff -  the long political standoff of the last two weeks most notably. Maybe the big stuff feeds the personal stuff as we all get into moods of hopelessness or unyieldingness. But now there has been softening. Despite everything, the government is back to work and the debt ceiling remains unbreached. Inspectors are dismantling Syria's chemical weapons. Iran is talking about us - Americans and Jews - politely. How does that happen? How are deadlocks broken? How is brinksmanship reeled back in? Is it deadlines? Appearances? Exhaustion? Random bouts of conscience?

One wonders all these things reading this week's epic Torah portion, Parashat Vayera. In it, angels visit Abraham and Sarah; Sodom and Gomorrah are reduced to smoke and ash; Lot's unnamed wife turns famously to salt; Sarah conceives and gives birth; Hagar and Ishmael are exiled; and Isaac is nearly sacrificed on a mountaintop. Epic.

Bar Mitzvah Boy, circa November 1973

This portion also looms large for me because it was my Bar Mitzvah portion, 40 years ago this Hebrew week. Forty years is a long time, a length of time of biblical proportions. Because in Torah, 40 is the formulaic number used to mean "lots and lots." The number of days of rain the Earth endured. The number of years our people wandered in the desert, from the narrow place of enslavement to a Promised Land overflowing with milk and honey. Forty is a number of transformation - the requisite time units required to transform planet or people.

The excerpt I was assigned to read from Parashat Vayera when I was 13 was a short conversation you might remember between Abraham and God. Abraham has just received three visitors - generally thought to be angels, Midrash says they are Michael, Gabriel and Raphael - to whom he shows tremendous hospitality there in the harsh Canaanite heat. There are three angels for three tasks, since tradition says angels cannot multitask. Michael is there to prophesy the birth of Isaac. Raphael is there possibly to heal Abraham from his circumcision, which happened at the end of last week's parashah. And Gabriel's errand? To bring down the city of Sodom.

After welcoming and feasting them, Abraham sees the angels off. Once they're on their way, Abraham pauses to have a talk with God about God's ethics. Abraham, who is 99 and has seen a lot by this point, asks God what I think is The Money Question, the question that is still The Money Question, nagging at our faith right up to this moment. Abraham asks, "Will you destroy the righteous along with the wicked?" Then he gets specific. What if there are 50 innocents in the city of Sodom. Would God still destroy the place? To which God replies that no, he would save the city for the sake of those 50.

I sometimes wonder if Abraham was surprised at this response. After all, living in this world means seeing good people swallowed up as often as the wicked, if not more often. I picture Abraham realizing he was onto something, and trying to maintain his best poker face while deciding whether to push further. He does. What about 45? Could five people short of 50 really make that much of a difference? What about 40? 30? 20? And then finally, what about a minyan of ten decent people? "Yes," says God. "I would save the city for the sake of the ten."

And that's the end of the conversation. God turns his attention to Sodom; Abraham stays put.

I remember as a 13-year old, being thrilled at this portion. I loved Abraham's chutzpah and his flowery diplomacy in this passage, flattering even as he presses. I loved the idea that with enough initiative you could persuade or pester or somehow prevail on God to change course. You could stand up against injustice, even if the unjust institution was Divinity itself. At that age I'd already been exposed to the Civil Rights Movement and I had a natural attraction to feminism. So speaking truth to power, as they say, while it scared me, seemed the noblest thing one could aspire to do. (And not to compare, but while Abraham spent several minutes advocating on behalf of Sodomites, I have done it for nearly four decades. Just saying.)

Anyway, as a kid I loved that Abraham dared. But there was another part of me that was disappointed, perhaps even a little ashamed of Abraham. Because why, I kept wondering, did he stop at ten? Couldn't he have pushed God to five? What was the downside? And why not one? If there was even just one good person in Sodom, should that person have been destroyed along with everyone else?

Then the older me, the one closer to this side of the 40 years goes even further: why not zero? Why are we only counting the righteous people? What if there were only wicked people in Sodom? Weren't they still deserving of life? Weren't they also God's children? And why is God destroying cities anyway?

We don't know exactly what the crime of the people of Sodom was; for all we know their wickedness might in fact have been far-ranging and multi-faceted and infinitely creative. We do know that the townspeople wanted Lot to hand over his guests so that they could "know" them, meaning sexually. And while that stands in contrast to Abraham's lavish welcome of those same guests, it is a little disingenuous to say that the big crime of Sodom was inhospitality, as has at times been suggested, probably to draw more distance from the accusation that the capital crime of the Sodomites was homosexuality. Torah seems to be pretty clearly pointing to a sexual crime here, most undoubtedly a violent one. But still, do they deserve death in return? And if they don't, then how much the moreso if the crime was mere inhospitality?

But even if the crime was violent and sexual and unthinkable, is there no redemption for them? Could they not have repented and changed like the Ninevites in the Jonah story, whose crimes are unspecified but also presumably serious to the point of being a capital offense? Couldn't God have helped them want to change? Yes, yes, the Prime Directive - no messing with humanity's Free Will. But would sending an angel to smite the people with a quick wave of remorse be that much worse than sending an angel to bury them in brimstone?

And what about Lot, Abraham's nephew? To his credit, he doesn't turn his guests over to the mob. But how does he play his Big Hero Moment? He offers his daughters instead. Not himself. His daughters. And for this we are supposed to understand him to be a righteous person, worthy of being saved? In my imagination, it was that moment, not her later equivocation, that turned Lot's wife to salt.

No, the moral knots of this story get more tangled the more you try to untie them. Because eventually we need to turn back and look again at that strange conversation between God and Abraham that was the centerpiece of my Bar Mitzvah.

What the hell is going on in that conversation? What kind of theological mess is it? Is God that pliable? Do we want God to be a pushover? Maybe. Or maybe we'd prefer a God that doesn't entertain lobbyists.

On the other hand, looking closely at the passage, is God actually bending at all? Abraham does seem to win an important rhetorical victory. But Sodom still goes up in smoke. How exactly does anything end up different? Isn't the all-knowing God fully aware of exactly how many righteous people are in the city? But he lets Abraham prattle on about honor and fairness and justice anyway. Is God just patronizing Abraham? Agreeing to terms that he knows will not bind him. Couldn't God have said at the outset, "Listen Abe, I know where you're going with this. Save your breath. These people are toast. Gornisht helfen."
 
In the words of Aretha Franklin, "who's zooming who?"

My study partner in Boston believes that the idea that there is persuasion going on here is wrong. God and Abraham were not bargaining. Abraham fully expected the destruction of Sodom. But as our patriarch, as the one building a relationship with a previously unannounced deity, he wanted to know as much as he could about how this new god operates. So Abraham's questions are not about getting God to change his position. They are to flesh out God's ethical framework.

This makes sense to me too. If God is going to destroy an entire people, Abraham might want to know a bit more about how God makes the decision to do so. After all, the Great Flood was just ten generations earlier - recent enough to be not just legend but an inherited and visceral terror. Noah himself, according to the math of Torah, was still alive in Abraham's time, and the sight of this survivor, enduring so many extra years of unshakable nightmares, could not have been a pretty one. So yes, Abraham might have wanted to know the exact point of no return, where life sentence tips over into death sentence, not for the sake of the people of Sodom at all, but for his own people and those who would come after him. So that they - so that we - could know and steer clear and survive.

But maybe the youthful assessment that God is pliable is not completely wrong either. Maybe things aren't entirely as they seem. In the portion, right before Abraham turns and addresses God, we have the rare privilege of eavesdropping on a divine thought bubble. God says,

Shall I hide from Abraham this thing which I will do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed through him? For I know he will command his children after him to keep my ways.

God has a qualm. Seemingly not a qualm about the blow he will deliver in Sodom, but an uncertainty about the effect of that act on others in whom he is invested. God is uncertain whether honesty is the best policy or whether he should just keep working in mysterious ways. Somehow Abraham, I think, correctly perceives God's hesitation. God here is not only invisible, but transparent also. And Abraham generously launches the discussion without God ever having to decide whether to tell him or not.

There is something I like about this moment of God's uncertainty. Even if God is being an unyielding force of cause and effect - Sodom does X, the predestined response is Y - still, it seems God worries whether all of this was such a good idea.

I like the greater complexity, the subtlety. That the power you rail against is perhaps not monolithic. If that is the case with God, how much more so the authority we experience in our earthly lives. We might portray institutions that oppress us as inflexible, we might paint them as evil. But earthly institutions are made up of real people with hopes and dreams and fears and relationships. And that should be a hopeful thing. Because individuals can change, and their institutions inevitably change with them. Forty years ago I would not have foreseen same-sex marriage, or thirty years ago or twenty. But people do change, in part because of the kind of intimate conversation we see in Vayera, in which someone dares to challenge a loved one's moral stance. The Abraham-like advocate has a role, and that Abraham-like advocate is each one of us.

So maybe the world is not as unyielding as it looks. If God is present in our actions, as the Kotzker Rebbe suggested when he said that God is present wherever you let God in; if our combined actions are God, as Mordecai Kaplan suggests in his Reconstructionist rethinking of Judaism, then of course God is a God who puzzles. Because we do. We drey about what path to take. Sometimes we can't influence the outcome; sometimes we can; sometimes our influence will only be felt 3 or 4 or 40 outcomes from now.

So I think there are a couple possible truths here. We are the heirs of Abraham. Arguing with God is our legacy, as it was for the very same Kotzker Rebbe who, when seeing the violence enacted upon the Jews around him, demanded that God be bound by God's own laws. Quiet obedience has never been our strong suit. And the other truth is that we are also made b'tzelem Elohim, in God's image. We each sometimes wield authority, individually or in community; we do so sometimes like veritable forces of nature. But we have the ability to slow down, to question, to wonder and, most important, to listen. There is nothing that we do that is unstoppable, that is unbendable, that is irremediable. No government standoff - or any other kind - is permanent.

Forty years I've lived with this story. Journeyed with it. Only to discover that in the end I'm transformed and not transformed, coming to rest not far from where I started: still proud of the Abraham in all of us, daring to speak some truth; and still believing that the world, despite everything, can change.



__________
Thanks to Reb Eli Herb, who first suggested that God and Abraham were not sparring at all. And of course to Rabbi Mark Shapiro, who assigned me the portion, and who is always present somewhere in all of these drashot.

Six Degrees of Inspiration (An Introduction to Shoftim)

(I was asked to introduce Parashat Shoftim at the San Francisco launch party for the new Reboot book, Unscrolled: 54 Artists and Writers Wrestle with the Torah. I was charged with setting the stage for David Katznelson, author of the entry for Parashat Shoftim. David wrote about Otha Turner, a fife-and-drum blues performer from Mississippi, who has been an inspiration to David and who is, to David’s mind, a modern-day prophet. I was allotted one minute.)

At the Unscrolled launch, surrounded by the unrolled scroll.

Now we careen toward the end of the Torah scroll, where Moshe will breathe his last breath. In that moment, Torah tells us there would never again arise in Israel a prophet like Moshe, who spoke to God face to face.

Torah also tells us God spoke to Moshe mouth to mouth. Not mouth to ear, as you might expect. But rather God’s non-corporeal, metaphysical mouth pressed to Moshe’s waiting lips, in a great Hollywood kiss of prophecy.

But post-Moshe, what are we left with? Prophecy now comes in a flash, in visions and dreams.

Talmud says our dreams are 1/60 part prophecy. One sixtieth: a tiny but not insignificant bit. After all, one-sixtieth part treyf spoils the whole pot of soup. One sixtieth is small but mighty.

In an hour of our dreaming, there is a full minute of prophecy. In the 360 degrees in which we envision our lives, there are six degrees of inspiration.

But how do we know which six degrees?

Shoftim tells us right here: if a prophet speaks words of prophecy and the words come true then it is true prophecy but if a prophet speaks words of prophecy and the words don’t come true then it was never prophecy to begin with. Kind of circular, but also kind of wise. We may have a gut feeling, but time will tell. Time will tell.

And who can be a prophet? It does not need to be a monarch or a celestial being or a Messiah or an extra-terrestrial. But instead Shoftim says it will be someone mikerev acheyhem – someone of the people, of the community. Someone kamocha – like you. Yes, you. Really. You.

Meaning, I think, that prophecy will come to us, if it does, each in our own language and our own medium.

So the scholar might receive her prophecy as a flash of insight; and the preacher as a sudden, inspiring rhetorical flourish. The painter in the studied but still impulsive brush stroke. The storyteller in an improvised and heartbreaking twist of plot. And the blues singer in the poetry of the lament and the discipline of the fife and drum.

And how will we ready ourselves to be prophets? We will live the full 360 degrees of our lives. And dream the hours of our dreams. We will do our best work, each of us in our own language and our own medium. We will keep our ears open – or maybe our lips. And then time will tell. Time will tell.

 

A 140-character reduction of this introduction was also tweeted as part of a Reboot project to crowd-source Torah thought, portion by portion. Check it out and join the conversation using hashtag #Torahin140.

Yom Kippur 5774: Three Longings

For Congregation Ner Shalom

The Chasidim who, like me, love to toy with words, re-sorting letters to see what new can be found, have an interesting teaching about this day, Yom Kippur, which is called in Hebrew, Yom Hakippurim. They mess with the vowels just a little and point out that the name of this holy day could be read as yom k'purim. A day like Purim.

Of course on the surface, that seems ridiculous. These holidays are nothing like each other. On Purim we celebrate with indulgence. It is an ecstatic and intemperate holiday of costumes and merriment. So very unlike this solemn day of fasting and introspection. And yet the Chasidic masters are insistent that we notice that these two moments are linked. To my mind, the strongest bond between Purim and Yom Kippur has to do with hiding and revealing. Each holiday involves an unmasking of sorts.

At Purim we wear disguises, in deference to Queen Esther herself who, disguised as a gentile queen, is forced by circumstance to muster her inner resources and lower the mask, own up to who she is, and take responsibility for her fate and that of her people.

And here we are on this Yom K'purim, this Purim-like day, struggling to muster our inner resources and lower our own masks, to reveal to ourselves, and each other, and the Universe, and God perhaps, who we really are. What's in our hearts. What we're made of. And what we long for.

This does in fact take some unmasking. Because so many of our longings are invisible even to us, even though they inform so much of our lives. Our longings sit below the surface, like rules of grammar that indiscernibly conjugate our verbs and line up our words before issuing them from our mouths. The grammar of longing informs our values and arranges our choices. Our longing is the deep structure of our lives. And much of that longing plays its part without our even noticing it.

But tonight I'd like us to notice. I'd like us to take up three longings that I think we as a community struggle with and that we, as individuals, have often sent into exile as being, somehow, wrong or undesirable. Three longings which, I believe, deserve our attention and some honor and maybe even some forgiveness. These three longings I will refer to, for short, as House, Home and Whom.

HOUSE

We'll start with House, by which I mean the House of Israel. Being a Jew. The longing to be a Jew, to be a good Jew. 

Now I know that I was the one standing here two years ago reclaiming and praising the Bad Jew. But my point then is still my point now even though this time I'm using "good Jew" language around it. The idea is this: that wanting to be a good Jew is not something to be ashamed of. It can inform what you do in this world. It does not have to mean coming to shul every week, although you are certainly invited to do so (and you already have a name tag). It doesn't mean being orthodox or looking that way, although tzitzis on radical Jews and tefillin on women is always a bit of a subversive turn-on.

But what I'm suggesting is this. We all openly aspire to be good people; but maybe that's not quite enough. Wanting to be a good person is easy; it's a popular want. But owning the Jewish part of that is harder. The Jewish part that says "repair the world" or "feed the hungry" or "stop gossiping" or "have compassion" or "learn learn learn." That is what we've abandoned, the understanding that those ideas, clearly of universal application, originate - for us at least - in our own Yiddishkeit, in our own Jewyness.

Yes, those values drive us in beautifully universal ways. But it is always of note to me that the leaders of every modern Utopian movement, the visioners of anything designed to make the world better -- whether it's environmentalists or communists or feminists or unionists or Esperantists or even, I would suggest, early Hollywood folks dreaming up a world better than the one we live in -- every social exercise intended to make a better world has been seeded and populated by Jews. And then, almost simultaneously, the Jewishness has gotten erased right out of it. Erased, in large part, by Jews. As if being associated with Jewishness delegitimizes. That is what centuries of Anti-Semitism has done to us. We are driven to accomplish and to better and to be ashamed of where that spark came from.

So I ask, like I did two years ago when talking about Bad Jews, that we bring the Jew back into our jewbilation and rejewvenation and jewrisprudence and all the jewcy things we do. That we let our longing to be good Jews guide us in the world and we call it what it is. That we go ahead and fight for peace. For justice. For the Earth. That we strive and struggle and heal and learn at every turn. Not just because this is what humans should do, but because this is what being a Jew requires of us. That we let our beautiful universal values and accomplishments retain something of our fine specificity, of the flavor and temperature of the Jewish tables we grew up at. 

HOME

The second longing that I suspect many of us have abandoned is the longing for Home. And by Home I mean homeland, I mean Israel. This is a tricky subject, as you know by how you are tensing up right now.

But this land is the long longing of our people. Since the Babylonian conquest 2600 years ago, the sense of being in exile, displaced, deported, has been part of our psychological makeup and our spiritual essence and our cultural production. We sing Psalms about  our longing. Im eshkachech Yerushalayim, tishkach yemini. "If I forget thee Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning." Centuries of poets have poured out their yearning. Libi b'mizrach va'anochi b'sof ma'arav; eych et'amah et asher ochal. "My heart is in the East and I in the uttermost West; how shall I find savor in food?" We conclude every year's seder saying, l'shanah haba'ah birushalayim. "Next year in Jerusalem." And then we hurry to explain, to apologize, that by Jerusalem we mean something metaphysical.

But Jerusalem is a place. Physical. In a physical country that we are for better or for worse deeply connected to. Now those of us of a certain age grew up at a time when the dream of Zionism -- of a present-day, non-Messianic, non-mystical return to the land -- when the dream of Zionism was still unmarred; when Zionism embodied huge and important values - the safety of our people, the end of exile, a halt to our long persecution, a brighter future than we'd had since the Golden Age of Spain, and our first crack at Jewish autonomy in millenia. Those of us of a certain age grew up with a powerful, deep, incessant longing for Israel, for Modern Israel, not the mythical place. An Israel of blooming deserts and Nobel Prizes and medical advances and folk dances. We longed to go, to live, to visit, to breathe it in. To see a new era and to be its emissaries.

But the problem now, of course, is that 65 years of history have intervened. Real life, on-the-ground, difficult history. Because we planted our dream in a land that was and wasn't ours. And our hope, over time, has given rise, and given way, to such suffering and such bitterness. We have learned things that were hidden from us as youngsters. We have learned about things done that should not have been done. The present-day leaders of the State have, in the name of survival, abandoned our great vision of a land of harmony and renewal. Those Jews who remain the staunchest supporters of the State of Israel have been forced to abandon the dream of peaceful co-existence and religious pluralism. Forced to go along with ghetto walls enclosing our supposed enemies; and forced to turn a blind eye to the Orthodox male stranglehold on religious life in Israel, including who is and is not allowed to pray at our holiest sites or to be called a Jew anywhere in the land still, tenaciously, called holy. So much longing abandoned in order not to abandon the State.

Meanwhile those of us who see ourselves on the Left, who articulate our criticisms of Israeli policy, we who are quick to see Israel's flaws, have also lost touch with something, and that is our deep love and longing for this place. A longing and a love that are still in our bones. A love that we have sent into exile out of disappointment or sadness or shame, but which, if reclaimed, would give us greater, not less, legitimacy when we say, "No, no, Israel. Not that way, this way."

What Jews on both sides of the debate have given up, it seems to me, is a longing for an Israel that is as great and holy and just as we can imagine it. And it is up to us to bring that longing back and let it inform our words and actions. We owe it to our people's past and to our people's future. 

WHOM?

The third and last longing I'd like to call in tonight is what I will call Whom. And what I mean by that is the longing for whom? For God.

Because I think this longing is in us, in each of us. Not belief, not faith, but longing. It is deeply rooted in our human experience. It is a longing that grows out of the disconnectedness of our psyches and the fenced in nature of our bodies. Our spirits, or the parts of ourselves we identify as spirit, tell us that we are capable of full and deep and complete connectedness. Perhaps it's a sense memory of the womb. Or else it's just imagination. But we long for a connectedness greater, deeper, more intimate and perfect than anything a lover or parent or friend could give us. We long for God to take that place. God, as confidante, as personal coach, as yedid nefesh -- the companion of the soul, always always present with us. I'm not certain any of us ever longs for a Creator God, or an angry God or a law-giving or justice-doling God. But this personal, immanent presence, this Shechinah, is something we yearn for, even while we might rationally deny any such emotion.

Or perhaps our longing isn't for that intimate embrace but for transcendence. To be able to experience something beyond the walls of our human existence. Beyond the limitations of our bodies and intellects. We do seek out such moments of transcendence in our lives, mystical moments, by walking in the woods or on the beach or hearing Beethoven performed or seeing some powerful piece of theatre. Or by dropping acid or marching in a protest or sometimes even by going to shul. We feel that transcendence in a flash; or sometimes it is like a deep glow inside, what Rabbi Art Green might call the n'kudat p'nimiyut, the internality of the God experience. Not a reaching out or up to touch the Divine, but a reaching and recognizing deep within.

Or maybe it's not connection or transcendence but life itself that we long for, the denial of which our finite physical bodies cannot comprehend or accept. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, said, "God may not in any way resemble or correspond to the idea we form of him [sic], but he is present in the very will-to-live, the reality of which we experience in every fiber of our being."

I think it is fair to give in to this longing, even without having any certainty about believing. I think it is fair to long, even while living in the not-knowing. More than fair. Because it is a fire burning within us. And it can inspire us to new paths, great actions, deep love, readier compassion. It can cause us to return on Yom Kippur to who we want to be, and how we want to be accountable.

But how do we notice and consciously stay in touch with that longing? We can't count on transcendent moments. Rebbe Elimelech of Lizensk characterized that flash of transcendence, of opening up, of revelation as God's free sample. Like the Sample Shack at Trader Joe. You get one piece of deliciousness for free. And after that you have to pay for it. Rebbe Elimelech instructs that our payment, our slow recapturing of the goodies, comes through practice: prayer and mitzvot and, above all, d'vekut.

What is d'vekut? There is no appealing English word for it. It means something like "clinging" or "attaching," both words carrying rather unattractive connotations of the relationships we had in our twenties. But d'vekut suggests attaching oneself to the idea or possibility of God in all things. Not just when in prayer or meditation or study or moments of ecstacy. But in the day to day. Holding a mindfulness of the godliness, the divine, the qi that runs through all things, even things we barely notice or consider insignificant. Expanding our consciousness until we can perceive the divine in the glorious and in the painful and in the mundane.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav described d'vekut as imagining oneself in the presence of the Shechinah. For Rebbe Nachman, this practice was a way to accustom oneself to being in the World to Come. And Rebbe Meshullam Feibush of Zabrizha said that the way to always notice the divine in the world is simply always to be aware of one's longing for God.

The truth is that we don't know. When I have moments of feeling God's presence, I can't tell you if I'm perceiving or projecting. I can't tell you if I'm looking outward or inward or if that makes a difference. I sometimes wish I had the certainty that some believers express, although I suspect that none of us is truly without doubt. If God is there, then God makes it difficult. Playing hide and seek with us all the time. And getting characterized by religion so severely and narrowly that it is almost always easier to say "no" to the idea than to say "yes."

But still, I'm okay with not knowing. I'm okay with spelling God with a question mark in the middle. I'm okay with God creating the universe, or God being a synonym for the universe. I'm okay with God being nothing like we've ever conceived and this cosmos being really good glamour-drag. I'm even okay with God being the ayin, the great emptiness. I don't know. And in this not-knowing, I will stay attuned to my longing; I will continue to look for God in the hidden places and let that affect how I see you and me and the dog and the tree and the rock and the sky and the microbe. And the joy and the loss.

As Medieval poet Yehudah HaLevi wrote, Yah ana emtza'acha, m'komcha na'alah v'ne'elam. Adonai, where shall I find Thee? Hid is Thy lofty place. V'ana lo emtz'acha, k'vodcha malei olam. And where shall I not find Thee? Whose glory fills all space.

Our universe, our reality, is like the Book of Esther; it is a place where God is never mentioned by name, and can only be found by inference. It is a place where God, if there is a God, is masked.

But this is Yom K'Purim. It is a day is like Purim. Where masks are lowered and the hidden is revealed. So on this Purim-like day, let us recommit to the longings that we've kept masked. Longings for House, Home and Whom. Let us strive, openly, to be better Jews as well as better people. Let us feel, without shame, our love for the land and let that guide us toward fashioning a fairer, kinder Israel that is truly a light to the nations. And let us revel in our longing for God, living it everywhere, locating it in our hearts and in the world, so that, whether God's mask ever gets lowered or not, we at least may be drawn to give our best to this creation and to each other and to our selves.

And let us say, Amen.


_____________
I wish a shanah tovah, a happy, healthy year to all my loved ones.
I am grateful to my study partner, Reb Eli Herb, for some lovely insights that made their way into this drash.



 

Rosh Hashanah 5774: Burning and Longing

For Congregation Ner Shalom.

Gut yontiff.

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

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

Photo: Oren Slozberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They see each other in their dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shanah tovah.


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

Founders' Syndrome and the Ethical Will

For Congregation Ner Shalom

So when I read the Book of Deuteronomy, I confess I get kind of bummed out. Don't get me wrong, I also get plenty bummed out in Leviticus. But for different reasons. Leviticus, with its baroque elaboration of laws: impartiality and impurity and sacrifice and sex, some of it beautiful and universal, some of it punitive and painful; Leviticus, with its repeated refrains of "I am Adonai your God," presents itself as God's word, as direct as we can get it, despite the lurking presence of unnamed and invisible editors. I read Leviticus, and know that I am stuck with this difficult text, which is a very Jewish predicament; and I struggle with it, which is a very Jewish privilege.

But in Deuteronomy, I get bummed out for Moshe Rabenu, Moses our teacher, our great prophet and liberator, making his final speeches to the Children of Israel before they pass into the Promised Land which, Moshe obviously grasps, he will not be doing with them. We are still in the wilderness, but only barely. It is year 40 of the Great Wandering: the 40th year, 11th month, 1st day. Just one moon away from leaving behind nomadic life and becoming instead conquerors, occupiers, settlers and farmers. The life of Israel is about to be unrecognizable. With fewer exceptions than you can count on one hand, there is no one left in this mass of humanity who remembers the slavery in Egypt or the Parting of the Sea. In fact, there's no one who can even remember receiving the law at Sinai except perhaps in a vague and unsettling childhood memory.

This is the final chapter of Moshe's story and the fulfillment of his great work. In partnership with God he changed history, he changed the world. But unlike his Partner, Moshe is about to be left behind. At his death, a few chapters from now, Torah will say that there never arose in Israel another prophet like Moshe. And I suspect Moshe foresees this. He and God had something special, for sure, seeing each other face to face like they did. There would never again be anyone who could know God's will with such certainty or could relay God's word with such credibility.

But there's also something amiss in what should be Moshe's triumphant moment. As he redelivers God's laws, he does so with an extra punch. In this week's portion, Parashat R'eh, he places blessing and curse before the people, offering reward for obedience to God's mitzvot, threatening punishment and death for those who transgress or who worship other gods on the sly. This stuff coming from God in Leviticus might be problematic, but the problem is theological. This stuff coming from Moshe in Deuteronomy is somehow personal and somehow tragic. One hears in it Moshe's sadness and anger and fear at his own mortality.

Poor Moshe. Who am I, nebuch, to pity him, yet I do. Moshe was great, but also tragic. And while other tragic figures like King Lear overtrust the future, Moshe undertrusts it. And so, with nothing short of desperation, he tries to control what will happen next by promising and lecturing and threatening and cajoling. All that we have are his words, which can be interpreted in various ways. But if Deuteronomy were a movie, there would be reaction shots of Israelites listening to him, and we'd know a bit more by seeing whether they were filled with the fear of God, or impatience at Moshe's long speech, or a mix of love and sadness for this lonely 120-year-old man, now in his dotage.

Moshe seems to have a case of what, in the non-profit world, we might call "Founder's Syndrome." He founded the Israelite people as we know them; he did the immense, unimaginable task of leading them - perhaps hundreds of thousands of them - out of slavery and away from their homes and the only life they'd ever known, to reconstitute them with new identity and vision and ambition.  But now Moshe digs the heels of his sandals in deep because he knows change is coming. He doesn't think there is a successor equal to the task of leadership. And he doesn't see the possibility of the people as a whole exerting authority, even though the people who will experience this new life are, arguably, more qualified to step up and lead than Moshe, who can only guess at what the future might bring.

Moshe responds to his not knowing by trying all the harder to control. A calmer, saner Moshe could not possibly have thought that a law that says, "neither add to nor take away from my commandments" could ever be workable. With all due respect to Justice Scalia, one cannot legislate the principle of "no change ever." Yet Moshe makes this very demand as he stands before the people, fiercely protecting what he brought into the world while, my heart imagines, envying, even begrudging the people the future that they will enjoy. Moshe, our Founder, insists that it must happen his way; he can only imagine disaster if it doesn't. 

Of course what also makes Moshe's desperate clinging to his work product tragic is that there but for the grace of God goes any one of us. We all like things to go our way. We all want our contributions appreciated and remembered; we all want legacy; we all want our thumbprint on the future. It is in our nature; perhaps because our spirits feel eternal to us, despite the mortality of our bodies. It seems natural to want to be part of whatever happens next.

But we are all mortal. We all stand at the brink of death, whether that brink is a day or a decade or, God willing, much wider. And most of us realize that we can't orchestrate the doings of things and people that will outlive us. Change will happen, change has to happen. Our successors will do things differently; they will have to. And certainly Moshe knew this. In fact there is a famous midrash that when Moshe ascended the mountain to receive the law, God temporarily transported him to the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, living millennia later, where Moshe Rabenu sat in the eighth row and didn't understand any of the Torah that Akiva taught, despite Akiva calling it Torat Moshe, the Torah of Moses.

Who knows, maybe it was that very vision of a strange and unintelligible universe that made Moshe clutch the Torah that he knew all the tighter.

So in an ever-changing world, what thumbprint can we hope to have on the future? Perhaps the best any of us can do is embodied in the Jewish custom of the ethical will. A message to the future that embodies our values without coercing adherence to them. I have had cause, sadly, to hear the reading of some truly beautiful ethical wills. Full of advice and humor and encouragement and vision. Revealing what moved the writer's soul, written with the hope that it might move the reader's as well.
I think that is the best we can hope for. To provide an ethical legacy, in writing or through our deeds, communicating the great principles that inspired us.

Maybe the Book of Deuteronomy is in fact Moshe's ethical will, albeit a flawed one. And if so, then I think that perhaps the great principle that drove him was kedushah, the holiness that he breathed in when he saw God face to face. This is what inspired him and what he wanted for us. But, growing up in the palace of Pharaoh, his toolbox for constructing kedushah on earth contained more law than poetry. How different might it all have been if Moshe had grown up not in the home of a monarch, but of a musician or a midwife or a mystic? Perhaps the ethical lesson he would have taught would have been closer to one shared in a 14th Century ethical will written by one Asher ben Yechiel who wrote the very opposite of what Moshe expresses in this week's portion. Instead of saying, "I have set before you blessing and curse," Reb Asher writes to those who survive him, "Do not obey the law for reward, nor avoid sin from fear of punishment, but serve God from love."

Ultimately, if we are going to be of service to the future, we must leave a legacy of love and of hope and possibility. Nelson Mandela, right now only 25 years Moshe's junior, will, when he goes, leave a legacy not about how to govern a people but about the possibility of freedom and equality and love. And it will then be other people's jobs to find the right vessels for those values.

We can't see all paths; we certainly can't control them. Still, we owe the future our best efforts - our love and care, even without knowing what the specifics will be. None of us is timeless. Moshe was the leader for his time. We must be the leaders for ours. And we must let future generations lead in theirs. If we are to be prophets, let us be prophets who reassure those who come after that there is always the possibility of making this world better. As it says in the book of Isaiah, mah navu al heharim raglei m'vaser mashmia shalom. How pleasant the footfalls of those who, climbing to the peaks, peek into the world ahead, bearing messages of peace!

Nachamu: Fly Thought, on Golden Wings

For Congregation Ner Shalom ~ July 19, 2013

Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves at the Lviv Opera

I didn't want to write a drash this week. Didn't have it in me. I was away last week having an adventure for my husband's birthday, and came back to pull together the last details of our community-wide Tisha B'Av commemoration. Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av, marks the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. And also the destruction of Temple v.2.0 by the Romans in 70 CE. And then every expulsion and exile and massacre and catastrophe enacted upon our people since then. On Tisha B'Av, we read Eychah, the book of Lamentations, and we imagine ourselves sitting in the ruins of the proud city of Jerusalem, and we weep.

So the commemoration happened but it took a lot out of me. The evening didn't go exactly how I'd envisioned, and I experienced angst about that during. And beforehand. And after. And the next morning. But on the whole, it seemed to work for many people, myself included in large part. During the ceremony, as attendees got in touch with the losses they were still lamenting, both current grief and old grief that still haunts footsteps and decisions and relationships, I also rediscovered grief that I hadn't noticed and articulated in a long time, and I did so, and I was exhausted by it.

So as the holiday ended, I found myself sitting in the ashes, not of Jerusalem, but of Tisha B'Av itself, my creative spirit shell-shocked and my imagination immobile. I did my day-to-day things: meetings, more meetings, and then more meetings. I could do things. What was hard to do was to open up and feel and let my thoughts take flight again. I felt like I had no more lift left in me.

The Book of Lamentations doesn't give us guidance in this matter. It is not a "how to get over grief" self-help book. It is a book of full-on despair. In your independent bookstore you will find it in the Desolation section. Read it and weep. It is Lamentations, not the Inferno, that should open with Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

There is no comfort in Eychah. And at the time it was written - in the wake of that first unimaginable national Destruction - perhaps no comfort was available. As Rabbi Shimon says in Pirkei Avot, "Do not comfort your friend while his dead lay before him." In other words, in grief that is fresh and unchecked, there is no meaningful comfort to be offered. One must be ready to be comforted for comfort to be of use.

Psalm 137, like Lamentations, also describes the people's grief for the loss of the Temple, but from the perspective of the Jews carried off into exile, rather than those left behind in Jerusalem:

By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept as we remembered Zion. On the willows we hung our harps, for our captors required of us song and our tormentors mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." But how can we sing Adonai's song in a foreign land?

This is another beautiful and lifelike depiction of sadness and despair. How can we entertain when we grieve? How can we be creative, how can we be happy, ever again?

It's true, our grief marks us for a very long time. We carry scars on our psyches that are decades old. And our suffering draws our attention more than our joy does. Our suffering is long lasting; our joy is quick to be dismissed. What does Joni sing with Psalm-like rhythm? Pleasure moves on too early and trouble is too slow. 

This is for a couple reasons. Trouble lasts longer and draws more attention because trouble tends to complicate our lives. Going into exile uproots you. Re-learning to live alone is a tremendous and ongoing struggle. Even just filing an insurance claim for the fender bender is time consuming and frustrating. Waiting for justice that doesn't come can imprison our attention solidly for long sentences of time. Dwelling in our suffering is natural and par for the course.

Not only that, but letting go of our grief is, on some levels, undesirable. It can feel like a betrayal of whatever it was that we loved and lost. We want to hold on to our pain as a demonstration of our loyalty. How can I, sitting on the banks of the Euphrates, sing Adonai's song, even though it is Adonai's song, without it being a betrayal of Jerusalem?

Jews are teased about - and we tease ourselves about - our attachment to our suffering, about its inevitable mundaneness. We joke about one Jew asking another, "How are you?" And the other saying, "Terrible, thank God." But we all know, it is not just Jews who suffer or who can be trapped by suffering.

So what is the way out of this bind? Must we be stuck? Is there no comfort allowed us ever?

This week's Shabbat, immediately following Tisha B'Av, is called Shabbat Nachamu. The Shabbat of Comfort. It is named after the opening words of the week's haftarah portion, from the Book of Isaiah, which goes like this: Nachamu, nachamu ami. "Take comfort, take comfort my people, speak tenderly to Jerusalem and declare to her that her term of service is over." (Isaiah 40:1)

So here at last are words of instruction. Take comfort by speaking fondly, lovingly, to what has been lost. This is a beautiful idea. So that we don't harden into statues of grief and anger, we continue to express our love to what we loved and lost, even if our longing for it can no longer be fulfilled. "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem."

In the opera Nabucco, Giuseppe Verdi gives voice to the Hebrew exiles standing on the shore in Babylon. They deliver what has become the most famous choral piece in the operatic repertoire, the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. They sing:

Va pensiero sull'ali d'orate
Va, ti posa, sui clivi, sui colli,
Ove olezzano tepide e molli
L'aure dolci del suolo natal.

"Fly, thought, on wings of gold; go settle on the slopes and the hills, where, soft and mild, the sweet airs of our native land smell fragrant."

The exiles in Verdi, unlike the exiles in Psalm 137, don't refuse to sing. They actively engage their thoughts of Jerusalem. They imagine it in its beauty; they send their thoughts there with love. Their comfort, if there is to be comfort, does not come from silence but from song. They even protest to the very harps that the Psalm portrays as hanging, untouched:

Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati,


Perché muta dal salice pendi?

Le memorie nel petto raccendi,
ci favella del tempo che fu! 

"Golden harp of the prophets, why do you hang mute from the willows? Rekindle the memories in our hearts and speak to us of times gone by."

Verdi's Hebrew slaves are dwelling inside the loss but not squarely inside the suffering. They establish loving memory as the key response to loss. And, as is suggested by this week's haftarah, Nachamu, they speak tenderly to Jerusalem.

One more thought on moving on from destruction. This week's Torah portion, V'Etchanan, includes Moshe's repetition of the Ten Commandments, followed shortly thereafter by the Shema - Moshe's voice saying "Hear O Israel" - and then, significantly, the V'ahavta.

V'ahavta. "You will love." In this very week where we feel the Destruction most deeply, we are advised to love. Advised, not commanded. V'ahavta doesn't mean "love!" in an imperative sense. It means "you will love." Is this a prophecy? A prediction? Or is it a reassurance, that out of the places of suffering comes deeper and deeper love. "You will love again." V'ahavta.

The Ten Commandments sit there in the portion, sticking out awkwardly, at least to my mind. It is a terrible week to be reminded of them, this week of lamentation and suffering. These are in fact commandments, given in the imperative. "Honor your father and mother." "Don't murder." "Don't steal." "Don't covet." But these are commandments habitually honored in the breach. How much of our civilization is built on greed and theft and murder? Leading in turn to new destructions both great and small. I don't think we can be expected to read the Ten Commandments this week without feeling despair.

But v'ahavta. Not a command. Not a demand. An outcome. "You will love." If you can survive the loss, you will do so by loving. You will love what you lost. And you will love what remains. You will love this creation and maybe, sometimes, the Creator implied by it. You will love your joy, without feeling guilty doing so, because joy is a gift and is ephemeral and it deserves your attention as much as your sadness does. In your suffering you will find new depths that will become available for love. You will love all of this: with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. This will happen. V'ahavta.

We are scarred by Destructions, each of us. The ones that sent us into Babylon and into Europe and to America. We are scarred by the injuries of our childhoods. By the loss of loved ones too young. By love that didn't work out. By longing that wasn't quite realized. We are all justified and allowed to weep. And - we are encouraged, once more, when it seems unlikely or futile or beside the point, to love again. Love, our loving, is not meant to replace the loss. But it is comfort nonetheless.

Nachamu, nachamu ami. Be comforted, be comforted my people. V'ahavta. And you will love.


_______________________________
I am always indebted to Rabbi Eli Cohen for always knowing what in a parashah will interest me!

Marriage and Mysticism in a Less-Gendered World

Dedicated to Anne Tamar-Mattis, a hero of equality for all genders, on the occasion of her birthday.

What a week! With the Supreme Court knocking down the Defense of Marriage Act and also confirming the undoing of California's Prop 8. It is a week to celebrate the freedom to marry, and to rethink what marriage means, and perhaps to wonder why this institution has been so inflexible.

I was re-awakened yesterday to the deep assumptions that we all hold around how marriage operates, and the importance of gender dualism in that conception. I was doing some business in town, and I happened to refer to my partner, my spouse, as "my husband." I paused for a moment to savor the deliciousness of a previously forbidden term. The other person, earnestly celebrating with me, asked, as a follow-up question, "So are you also a husband, or do you think of yourself as a wife?"

It took me a moment to realize this person was not being flip or phobic, but was really wondering how one organizes the institution of marriage in this new era. And the question is, in fact, a deep and pertinent one. The terms "husband" and "wife" are obviously gendered, but not neutrally so. That is they represent a composite of competing  and opposite characteristics, each associated with a gender. I know that what follows sounds old-fashioned, but I submit that it is alive and well and is probably the nemesis of many well-meaning modern heterosexual couples. "Husband" has and continues to suggest breadwinner, protector, perhaps even at times philanderer. "Wife," on the other hand, connotes, well, servant. I could say that nicer - something about productive activity in the domestic sphere, but really we all know the the activity of a "wife" is to meet the needs of husband and children. And a marriage traditionally requires (or thinks it requires) both of these opposing elements. The words "husband" and "wife" are loaded - perhaps irremediably so. So while the court says a marriage of two men or two women can exist, it is unclear, culturally, whether a marriage of two "husbands" or two "wives" can.

Now gay people have often used these terms over the years - but mostly with imaginary quotation marks around them. Lots of us used to call our partners "husband," in ironic mimicry of an institution we were not in fact invited to join. And I've known overworked lesbian couples to sigh over a well deserved cocktail and say, "Let's face it. We need a wife."

But this week is a good week for marriage, not just for LGBTQ people, but for everyone, for the institution itself. Because it is now clear that marriage must be able to accommodate relationships that are not built on the idea of the oppositeness of men and women. Because - as my friend Anne finds herself having to point out again and again - men and women are not, in fact, opposites. Still, that's what we learn. Ask a child, "What's the opposite of boy" and they will say, "girl." But boys and girls are far more alike than they are different. I don't know what the opposite of boy is. Nebula? Lunchbox? Whatever it is, it is not "girl".

In fact, there is very little in this cosmos that has an "opposite." Is a positve charge the opposite of a negative charge? Protons and electrons? I don't know if these things are opposites or just different and attracted to each other. Are matter and energy opposites or just different? If darkness is the absence of light, is it really light's opposite? Or is that like the difference between thighs and lap? It's a lap when there's something on it, and thighs when there isn't? That doesn't make lap and thighs opposites. Left and right might be opposites, but only conditionally so - if you're on the North Pole, both left and right are alternative ways to go south. The truth is, much of what we consider the basic elements of cosmos and cognition that oppose each other, don't quite, upon closer inspection.

And yet we've really played, or overplayed, the idea of opposites in our understanding of the world. We can't see a duo without inventing a duality, a pair without a polarity. Part of this might in fact be the result of a world in which we perceive much pairing - there is predominant (but not complete) gender dimorphism, there is apparent (but mostly superficial) bilateral symmetry in the body. In any event, it has somehow been convenient in our cultural and intellectual history to divide the world into two, along just about any axis you can name. There are two kinds of people in this world: people who divide the world into two kinds of people and people who don't.

The truth seems to me that we are all complex; our internal makeup, our interactions with each other, are all multifaceted and unique, even if there are generalizations that can be drawn. The question is knowing when to let go of the generalizations. When does dividing the world into men and women make sense? At an exclusively heterosexual mixer? Maybe. At the gynecologist's office? Less than you'd think. In quickly organizing groups for a school activity or a synagogue responsive reading? Never.

Men and women are not opposites, but represent part of a spectrum of variation of the human body. Yes, there seem to also be some differences in behaviors and preferences, at least in the aggregate, but the extent to which those are chemically versus culturally driven continue to be a source of controversy.

In any event we keep deeply wanting to divide the world in two, and for the two sides of the dividing line to stand in opposition to each other. Somehow that conveys both dynamism and stability for us. Then we apply that model of opposition to as many binary distinctions as we can dream up. And because gender has played so great a role in our culture, we tend to gender those oppositions. "Hard/soft, intellectual/emotional, strong/weak" - even though in real life, among our families and peers, we know darn well that those distinctions are often misapplied.

And yet we draw them, we gender them, and we pit them against each other. One of the places where this is done extensively, and with undeniable beauty, is in our Jewish mystical, or kabbalistic, cosmological system, which relies on the 10 sefirot of the Tree of Life. This scheme, which represents the flow of Creation, or perhaps God's internal mechanics, is visualized with a central vertical axis, which holds 4 of the ten sefirot, or elemental or spiritual hubs. Then there are three that sit to the left and three that sit to the right. The ones on the right are associated with maleness; the ones on the left with femaleness. The central column contains elements that represent a balance or synthesis of the two previous opposing sefirot. So, for instance, the right, or male, side includes chesed - compassion and kindness, which are considered externally focused - ways of interacting with the world. Opposing it on the left or female side is gevurah, representing strength and discipline which, even though in Western gender archetypes seems male, is here female, reflecting an internal focus. All human characteristics and tendencies end up lined up on one side of this gender-divided tree or the other.

Now I say this is beautiful, because from inside its own cultural context (a hetero-normative world, in which the cosmos was primarily described and theorized by men), having Creation resemble the meeting of the sexes, making Creation resemble heterosexual intercourse, is both daring and arousing. What drives the world to exist is desire, arousal! The attraction of opposites for each other. The dynamo of Creation is based, for instance, on the desire of power to merge with kindness, wisdom to unite with understanding, the masculine to unite with the feminine.

The metaphor is beautiful and romantic. But it is a metaphor, a souped-up yin-yang, thesis-antithesis. It is a metaphor, and sometimes we forget that. I was once at a kabbalistic study session in a town full of hip Jews, a town I shall not name, but it sits next to Oakland and begins with a B. There I challenged the idea of our having to gender the seemingly opposing forces of the kabbalistic tree of life. I said that for many of us - people who are transgendered, people who love in a same-sex way, maybe some intersex people who choose not to think of themselves in traditional gender terms - the system doesn't have the same fire to it; we can understand it and speak in its language, we can understand how the tension of duality is supposed to work, but it doesn't feel like it's representing some essential truth about gender. The responses I received were surprisingly defensive and angry. I was told that the Tree of Life doesn't represent actual biological sex but rather everyone's internal masculine and feminine.

But of course, that doesn't answer anything; it just begs the question, at least for me. Moving the male-female divide from the social world into one's internal world is no less problematic. People who are used to being strongly gender-identified will be expected to naturally identify with that "side" of their personality, even if they are supposed to imagine containing both sides somewhere internally. Telling a man to access his feminine side reinforces the gendering of certain qualities; if he wants to access his nurturing nature (in the broad social scheme) or his sense of gevurah (in Kabbalah), he still needs to cross a metaphorical gender divide; he needs to pass through an internal mechitzah. In other words, instead of seeing himself as a beautiful mix of human (and/or divine) qualities, he instead is being asked to see himself as a person with easy access to Quality Set A (the "male" qualities), and so more effortful access to a suppressed, or remote, or hidden Quality Set B (the "female" qualities). And the only reason Quality Set B is presumed to be hard to access is because he is male. So even if this male/female quality divide is conceived of as internal rather than social, it still reinforces the idea of a divide, and that he belongs on a specific side of it. For someone like me, who has always felt rather like a Switzerland in this presumed "war between the sexes," the metaphor holds no power, and the clear divide of qualities that is supposed to exist inside of me feels untrue, unnecessary, and puzzling.

I do think the Kabbalistic imagination is beautiful and brave. On Shabbat eve it is the custom, originating with the mystics, but now universal among Jews, to open the door and greet Shabbat, imagined as a bride. Most people hear the song that embodies this image, Lecha Dodi, and they imagine us as her bridegroom. But that's not the case. Shabbat is associated with Shechinah, the female-personified, experiential, immanent aspect of God, and also with Yisrael, the People of Israel. Us. We are the bride, on the way to consummate our marriage to the Eyn Sof, the masculine-gendered, remote and unknowable God of the Cosmos. The thought of all these bearded mystics, all men, in their male-only academies, imagining themselves to be God's bride - well, that just pleases me in all sorts of ways. They were able to see the gendering of the system as a metaphor not tied to biological sex or lived gender perhaps more than we can. Whether or not that made a difference in the lives of their real-life wives is unknown. But still, they used their male privilege to imagine themselves not-male. And that's worth something in my book.

But for me, the important thing is that seeing the world as a series or system of dualities is artificial. It might be based on some observations of the world, but it is a tremendous metaphorical leap from some very select elements of existence. Why pairs? There are other elementals that come in other numbers. There are three primary colors. What if our mystical concept of the world involved threes. Everything was either of the blue sort or the red sort or the yellow sort - every emotion, every behavior. Or the four archetypal elements - water, fire, earth and air? Or the directions? "Ah, strength, well that is very north. Mix it with passion, which is very west, and you get bravery, at center-left." Couldn't we imagine a system like that? Or what if we wanted a system that accounts for predominance of certain types or phenomena, without denying the legitimacy of the less frequent? How about a mystical system based on prime numbers? Each one is equally unique. But they are not equally prevalent. The number 1 is ubiquitous, 2 is associated with half the universe of whole numbers; 3 with a third of them. And then there are some of us who are a 17 or a 71 or a 457. We are all similar to each other, we are all magnetic poles of some sort, each with a similar pull, but exerted in all directions. We are all similar, but some fit into more common types, and some don't. And wouldn't that make a better metaphor for Creation and for the flow of shefa from the Eyn Sof into our world? A mix of infinite unique elements, in unequal proportions?

So back to marriage. I'll stop short today of wondering about whether pair-bonding at all makes sense in the world that we live in. I'll stop short of wondering if community, intimacy, childrearing and legacy are best served by a pairing of two people, as opposed to loosely associated and mutually supportive single people, or even a more closely bonded kibbutz-like group, such as my own remarkable family. I'll stop short because why rob this week's marriage victories of their sweetness by wondering if marriage is still relevant. And I'll stop short because I'm part of it too. I understand the romance of finding someone who feels like your bashert, even though I don't actually believe that any of us are specifically destined for each other. I understand the pull and feel the romance, and I've benefited from them for sure.

But I will say this: that same-sex marriage does hold the possibility of destroying traditional marriage, in ways that will accrue to the benefit of all partnered people, straight or gay. Because we bring to marriage an idea of complementarity without polarity. Marriage can no longer rest on assumptions of how each partner will be, based on the dictates of their sex. Every marriage will have to be seen fresh, and assessed on the basis of each person's gifts and each person's needs without regard to gender. Just as racial integration has benefited every institution that opened itself up to it, so marriage will now be enriched. Spouses, partners, maridos, can now be a team that does not require husbandness and wifeness in order to flourish. We can at last exorcise the antiquated dybbuk of gender roles from the body of marriage. Modern heterosexual couples have been trying to do this for a long time; now they do it with the added support of a surge of thousands of new married couples for whom organizing their relationships without reference to traditional gender roles is not just a progressive anti-sexist step, but an utter and definitional necessity.

A friend said to me today, "marriage is never equal." Meaning that at any moment, in any sphere, one partner is demanding and one deferring. Compromise, negotiation, respect, complementarity. Those will always be part of marriage and of the flow of this Creation. And we don't need oppositeness to make it happen.

Shabbat shalom.

PS. I'm available for weddings. My husband handles my bookings.

Very important insights in this essay flowed from conversations with Eli Herb, Janet Shifrah Tobacman, and Anne Tamar-Mattis (with whom my conversation is constant and delicious). I am also grateful to Yael Raff Peskin, who helped me fix a rather glaring error which, now that it's fixed, I'm too embarrassed to identify!