Treasures, Release & Bucket Lists

Yom Kippur Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, 5775

הודיעני ה' קצי ומדת ימי מה–היא

Hodieni Yah kitzi umidat yamay mah hi.

"Yah," Psalm 39 says, "make my end known to me and the measure of my days."

The measure of our days - if only we could know such a thing! How we might be different, for good and for ill. How the entire emotional landscape of our lives would be altered. What would be our ambition? What would be the source of our calm? What are the things we would rush to do because there's no time to waste? What are the things we'd put off because there is?

But such knowledge is withheld from us. You'd think our cells could figure it out. That our DNA could speak it to our brains. Or that an angel might whisper in our ears who by fire and who by water, and when. But instead we live in this greatest of mysteries with this greatest of anxieties.  The measure of our days. Sometimes it gets us moving in meaningful ways. And sometimes it stops us in our tracks.

I made the mistake of picking up a National Geographic that was sitting in our house the other day. Between the manatees and the mammoth tusks, I found a report on changing average life expectancies in America. And of course, average just means average. As much above as below. But still, the ages colorfully printed on the US map looked like prognoses. No, worse. They looked like destiny.

I tried to make sense of the numbers and I noticed that my mother had outlived the average female life expectancy by four years. "Oh, good for her," I thought, as a parent might kvell over a child bringing home an A on their report card. Then after a moment I melted into bitter resentment that she only outlived the average by four years.

My eyes then, nebech, drifted over to the average life expectancy for men, and I didn't like that very much either. My remaining allotment, for so it felt to me, was far too short to accomplish the things I still want. I'll probably never get to master another new language. My days for rough travel are probably over, certainly if my achey back has anything to say about it. Doubtful I'll ever go to rabbinical school. Oh, and hadn't I intended to work out and get into shape some day? So many things I figured I'd get around to. Now I don't even know if I'll get through my old papers in the shed.

This mortality and this uncertainty about time. They are always the elephant in the room, especially on Yom Kippur. Looking over our shoulders into the prayerbook, pressuring us to make amends, egging us on toward a renewed future, or, frankly, just scaring the shit out of us.

How do we make our lives what we want them to be? Now that we're old enough to feel the finiteness, how do we make our unknown number of days count? In this year of loss, in what felt like the premature loss of my mother - and what loss doesn't feel premature? - my wandering mind wondered whether she got to the things that she wanted to get to in her time. And I've concluded that she did.

One explicit piece of evidence had to do with her bucket list. Now as a disclaimer, I think that this whole bucket list concept that has evolved over these last years is a mixed blessing. It might be good as a values clarification exercise; if it causes you to do something very beautiful or meaningful that you might otherwise not have thought to do, then it's a good thing. If it just dangles before you beautiful and meaningful things that you don't actually have the means to do, then it's just a final, eleventh-hour taunt. If you really want to be Julia Roberts in "Eat, Pray, Love," then you probably needed to have started earlier and to have been, well, Julia Roberts.

But on the subject of my mother's bucket list. Last summer, in 2013, I was back home and Mom and I had shabbos dinner with our friends Dawn and Eitan in Skokie. I don't remember how the topic came up, but my mother announced that she needed to have a bucket list. I had never heard her talk like this; she never acknowledged her mortality. We all leaned closer and asked her what would be on her bucket list. She thought for a moment, and then announced, "Well, I'm not jumping out of a plane." Everyone around the table was agreeable to this. So I asked her again what would be on her bucket list. She thought some more. "Well, I'm certainly not going bungie jumping," she said with a somewhat accusatory tone, as if we were just waiting to slap bungies on her ankles and knock her off a bridge. We sat for a while in silence. After a while I pressed further. "Mom, instead of telling us what's not on your bucket list, why don't you tell us what is." She drew a blank. She couldn't think of anything. In the moment it felt a little bit like failure of imagination: there must be things she wants to do or experience that she hasn't. Then she asked us for suggestions. Exotic travel and going back to school she dismissed out of hand. The suggestions that most appealed to her included hearing music, seeing theatre, and visiting her children in California. All things that she was already doing.

It wasn't failure of imagination. My mother had achieved her ambitions. She was doing just what she wanted to be doing. Her bucket list was actually a description of her life. It seemed the only thing missing was her being able to tell her friends that she had a bucket list. But otherwise, there wasn't really anything significant that she had put off, no loose ends sitting around obviously untied.

I don't know if this kind of outcome is rare. Or as we continue to get older, do our desires scale down to match what is already working well in our lives? Either way, this is something I shamelessly wish for myself and for everyone I know. That our desires should be simple and manageable, and that we should grow into a time, if we haven't already, when we are fulfilling our desires over and over.

Hodieni Yah kitzi, what are the number of our days? The question of how we handle this particular kind of not-knowing is articulated all too clearly on Yom Kippur. The possibility that this year could be our last year, tfu tfu tfu, is mentioned more than once in our liturgy. We sing it, we declaim it, we beat our breasts with it. Yom Kippur intends this face-off with mortality to be a motivator. To impel our cheshbon hanefesh, our accounting for ourselves in the face of God and this world. And it is meant to grease the wheels of resolution in our bumpy relationships, if not making real apology easier, then at least making it pressing enough for us to do it anyway.

But it also leaves us unsettled too, vulnerable in a way that might be good, but is nonetheless alarming. By the end of the Ne'ilah service, I often feel incredible pathos, I hear myself pleading, not fully knowing who I'm pleading with. With God? Let me live, God! Let me get another crack at this! Write me in that Book! Or am I pleading with the Universe? Let me live! Universe, let these cells of mine thrive and fight off disease for a while longer! Or am I pleading with myself? Irwin! Be careful! Be safe! Don't text and drive! Or maybe I'm not pleading with myself for my life but for a change in my life. Change, already, Irwin, change! Be the person you want to be! Embody the values that you insist are important!

Yom Kippur is a hugely important check-in for us, for our people. It's hard not to be affected by it. It's hard not to emerge from it without feeling some kind of bitul hayesh, a breakdown of the ego. (No worries, we'll rebuild our egos in a jiffy.) But for this day, to feel such openness, such vulnerability, is really quite something.

I find that on this holy day there's a lot that bubbles up. Stuff that I've stored away in my cells somewhere, stuff I don't look at even though upon reflection I imagine it's always somewhere in my peripheral vision. Old stuff. Disappointments. Longings. Grudges. Shame. Desires. Experiences. Emotional memorabilia. On Yom Kippur I get a chance to look at these things directly, to turn them over in my hand like rocks from a river - examining their shapes and heft and markings, and then putting them back down again.
I do this every year. But this year, in this shmitah year, this fallow year of the Hebrew calendar, I've determined to look at what I've stored away a little bit differently. I'm going to use a shmitah lens, or two shmitah lenses actually - sort of shmitah bifocals, if you will -  and I'll tell you what I mean by that.

First, just the quickest of refreshers. Shmitah is the sabbatical year - the seventh year in which Torah commands us to give the land a rest, not just a rest but a shabbos. As of 10 days ago, we are now resident in a real live shmitah year. Last week we talked about shmitah as being a kind of being-not-doing boot camp, teaching us to live in the not-knowing, to let go - for some period of time, maybe one seventh of the time - of our need to find out about and tinker with everything in sight.

BTW, anyone make any headway with that this week?

But there are two other elements of shmitah, two lenses that I think are worth using as we look at all of these things we've stored up over time, especially the painful things. The first shmitah lens has to do with looking for sustenance. In the shmitah laws laid out in Torah, God anticipates the people's concern that they will not have enough to eat to make it through the fallow period, the time of not-knowing. So God promises abundance in the 6th year that can carry the people through.

So the first lens that I want to use this year is that. What, of the things that I've sacked away in my spirit actually has the ability to offer me some sustenance? What of my old interests, friendships, skills, delights and longings are still in there somewhere? What are the elements of me that at some point I abandoned, perhaps because they didn't seem useful enough, or they were too time consuming, or they came to feel childish, or maybe other people told me not to value those things and I believed them. What are the things I felt shame about still because I was taught that those things are shameful, that now could offer me some real joy, some new energy, some delight, some strength, some wholeness? These life experiences, even the difficult ones, can be a source, a stockpile, of nourishment during times of uncertainty. Times of uncertainty like the Biblical shmitah year, like Yom Kippur, like, well, always. So with this first lens maybe I can identify what there is to haul out of mothballs. Even what we rejected in our younger years can still become a cornerstone of our future lives. Consider it an inheritance, a gift, a time capsule, from an earlier you.

The second shmitah lens also involves that collection of stuff stored in our psyches. And it connects to another element of the Biblical sabbatical year, and that is the release of debts. Not only do the fields stop being thrall to our will, so do our debtors. Obligations are let go.

So I think there's something here for us to consider on Yom Kippur about release of obligations. It closely parallels much of our Yom Kippur liturgy, including the Kol Nidre prayer, where we ask to be released from vows we made. But I'd like to propose we look at the obligations that we've carried internally, which might now be ready to be let go.

I've been learning a lot this year about letting go. My sister and I have spent weeks already going through our childhood home. It has a basement that has become legendary, carrying 56 years of family history: it is the repository of all the remaining treasures and undiscardables of grandparents, great grandparents, beloved great aunts, and relatives who moved away. It contains wedding cards and condolence cards and even a note from Jackie Kennedy thanking my Grandma Sade for her kind expression of sympathy. It also holds boxes full of my sister's and my childhood report cards, photos, compositions and, especially, art projects, many of which are living proof of the surprising longevity of Elmer's library paste.

Much of that stuff had a quality of being put away in anticipation. Socked away for later. But for what? My sister at last put words to this as she was looking through the umpteenth construction paper masterpiece of her grade school career. She said, "It was like all of this was put away so that it could be looked at and appreciated again. And now that's what we are doing."

And once she said that, it was as if something had been released. Our obligation to these things melted away even while our love for them didn't. They stopped being there for us to store for yet another generation. They were there for us to appreciate and let go of. And that's what we were able to start doing. Appreciate, maybe talk about, maybe even photograph in special cases, and then let go.
Now this happened to be lovely stuff, nostalgic stuff, but I think the same holds true about anything from our pasts that obligates us, that binds us: old disappointments, regrets, grudges, shame. Those things might be deserving of some appreciation too. We can appreciate them for what they say about who we were once; what we longed for, what we dreamed of, even if it didn't come true. We can appreciate them as souvenirs of what we suffered and what we survived. We can offer our appreciation and some forgiveness to those artifacts of difficult times. And we can also consider letting them go.

I know it's easy to just get up and say, "let go of the things that hold you back." It's not like that hasn't occurred to any of us before. It's not like we haven't spent good time and possibly lots of money on therapy trying to do just that. It might not even be doable. But still, on this Yom Kippur, the one that falls during the shmitah year, when we are released from obligations, it might be a good time to revisit this project. To adopt this shmitah view: that this year we are not under any obligation to our old grudges. We are not under any obligation to our hurt feelings. We are not under any obligation to old shame that continues to bully us even at this advanced age. So even though it's difficult, perhaps we can at least make the effort to imagine what it would be like to let go.

Imagining. After all, we're talking about the state of our spirits. It is something in that spiritual world that we wish to shift. And so using our imaginations is a legitimate tool. The Slonimer Rebbe gave the view that a way to enter Shabbat with a true feeling of Shabbat peace, is to imagine that all your work is done. Such an imagining is completely ineffective if your goal is to finish your work. But if your goal is to feel Shabbat, then it's the right prescription. Similarly, imagination can work here, I think. Of course it's difficult to let go of things we've held onto, even destructive things that for whatever reason have become in some way precious to us. But a reasonable first step might be to imagine. Imagine how it would feel if we were released from this bond. What lightness would enter us? What light - what Holy Spark - might we see reflecting in that now emptier mirrored chamber of our soul? Imagine feeling that way right now, as if the work were already done, the hard thing released. Feel it now, and perhaps that in itself will be a big enough step.

Hodieni Yah kitzi. Our time is uncertain, our future is uncertain. We come here for Yom Kippur, year after year, because the future is uncertain. We are ignorant of the measure of our days. We don't know if we will hit the National Geographic averages or, God willing, 30 years beyond them. We don't know whether we will meet sickness or sorrow or have a year in which we are blessedly, blissfully spared. But let us consider carrying these three shmitah lessons with us through this Holy Day and into the year beyond. And they are these:

(1) You have what you need to get through. Your abundant soul has stored away resources for you, resources that can sustain you. Look and see what's there! There might be some lovely stuff that you long ago shelved that could still become the cornerstone of your future self.

(2) You can let go of your obligation to what harms you. If it hobbles you, if it haunts you, if it's not helping you see your Holy Spark, maybe you don't owe it anything anymore. Appreciate what it's meant to you, offer it some love and forgiveness. And then let it go. Or, if that's too much to ask, at least begin imagining how letting go might feel. And finally,

(3) Your bucket list is now. There is no future that is certain. You can only be sure of what you are doing at this moment. So whatever you dream of inviting into your life so you can have greater richness later, you have to begin inviting now. There is a legend you probably know about the two angels that follow you home on Erev Shabbat. One is your defender, one your adversary. If your house is aglow and ready for Shabbat, your defender says, "So may it be next week," and the adversary is obliged to say, "Amen." But if your house is cold and unready for Shabbat, the adversary says, "So may it be next week," and your defender is obliged to say, "Amen." And although it is told in this folkloric way, there is an underlying real-life truth here. What you do now is in fact your practice. If you want Shabbat, you need to be doing Shabbat, not waiting for a time that is better suited, or Shabbat will never be your practice. The same can be said of anything on your bucket list. If you want it in your life, now is the time to invite it in. Resolving to invite it in later is no guarantee of anything. All it means is that today you have a practice of making resolutions about the future.

So that's it. The shmitah lessons. Activate your hidden resources. Release your obligation to what doesn't serve you. And live your bucket list now. Because we don't know how long we have to put it off. And when your angel sees that you are in fact living the life you want, the life you value, it will say, "So be it," and the adversary will be obliged to say, "Amen."


Here is a poetic treatment of these themes by Ner Shalom's Poet Laureate, Sally Churgel: Shmita Year for the Heart.

Some thoughts here were impelled by two chant settings by Rabbi Shefa Gold: "Inviting Our Future Selves" and "The Cornerstone."  Gratitude to Ellen Atzilah Solot for always making me think.

The Year of Not Doing (Quite So Much)

Rosh Hashanah Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, 5775

I want to start by wishing you all a shanah tovah — a good year. In the American fashion people will sometimes say "happy new year," like you do on New Year's Eve, the way you might say "happy birthday." But of course it is more realistic to wish someone a happy birthday — a 24-hour stretch is easier to fill with happy-making activities that produce short-turnaround happy outcomes. But a year? A year is a long time to stretch out happy.

And so the Jewish way is a little less ambitious. Not a happy year. We wish each other a shanah tovah. A good year. Gut yor. We know that every year will carry with it its sorrows, its achievements, its disappointments. Happiness will not be waiting at every turn. Yet we hope that in the aggregate it will turn out to be a year that was good.

And who's to measure? Who's to say one year is better than another? Some years might be more exciting. More marked by big events. But in the simple day to day, how easy is it to make a comparison?

That said, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this last year was terrible. It was a terrible year. Terrible in many ways for many people. There were garden variety sorrows—I know I'm not the only person in this room who lost a parent or loved one over the year. But there were also public sadnesses that we all shared together. Violence in the world — kidnappings, murders, lost planes, suicides, trouble in Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and Gaza and our precious and difficult Israel. It was a terrible year and I am not sorry to see it go.

Despair is hanging in the air, at least that's what I perceive, and I blame this last year for it. 

As Jews we have a mixed relationship with bad times. We have a longstanding fatalistic streak, well justified. Anything bad that can happen, will happen, and often to us. There's an old Yiddish joke about the bear that escapes from the circus and the police give orders to shoot it on sight. A Jew starts packing his bags to get out of town. His neighbor asks, "Wait, why are you leaving?" The Jew says, "You know how it goes. They shoot first, and only afterward sort out whether it was a bear or a Jew."

Jewish fatalism. I see my grandmother shaking her head and saying gornisht helfn. "Beyond help."

But I think Jewish fatalism is only skin-deep. Because more often we respond to the deeply human compulsion to do something. We are, after all, a species characterized by being toolmakers. We are tinkerers, interveners, doers.

And all the more so as Jews I think. Torah contains 248 mitzvot aseh, i.e. commandments to affirmatively do something. Light candles, wash your hands, make sacrifices, give to the poor, pursue justice. We Jews are an action-oriented people. For many of us, action in the world is our way of being Jewish, which is why in the Western world there is barely a political movement or cultural phenomenon that is not statistically overpopulated with our people.

We don't just do to stay busy. We do because alongside our fatalism, we incongruously believe that the world can be a better place. That it is fixable—by us. Our mythos of Tikkun Olam, of the shattered world that can be repaired and redeemed, courses through us. We are cosmic fixers.

And we don't stop with the world around us. We fix us too. If the world is inherently broken, then aren't we inherently broken too? Don't we also need tikkun? Aren't these Days of Awe, with their chest-beating and confession, an enterprise based on the need to fix our brokenness? Heck, we don't even need a Jewish-driven reason. We have a consumer culture that tells us every day that we're not good enough; that there is always something we can do to make our lives better, our bodies sexier, our children smarter, our investments more profitable, our spirits more enlivened. And all those things can be gotten for the low low price of . . . , well, whatever the market will bear.

The constant striving to make ourselves, to make our lives better, to make the world better, is exhausting. And when our hopes for our lives or for the world don't come about, or don't come about as desired, we can only understand it as failure. This is why our helplessness over the  summer, over this last year, hit us so very hard.

So here's where, I think, I hope, our tradition offers us a bit of medicine: shmitah.

Now for some of you, this word might be new. So let me first tell you what shmitah is not. It is not a disparaging Yiddish term for ragged clothing or bad fashion, as in Did you see that shmitah that Meryl Streep wore at the Oscars?

And shmitah is not a nonsense rhyming word that you might blurt out defiantly, such as, PETA shmitah, I'm gonna wear the fur anyway.

Instead, shmitah is the Biblical sabbatical year. (See? Sabbatical sounds nice, doesn't it?) This is the  year in which Torah says let your fields go fallow. No tilling. No plowing. No planting. No monkeying around. Just let the field be already. Give it a little shabbes.

Okay, I hear you thinking, we don't own fields. So how is this medicine?

It's medicine because shmitah is more than about farming. Sure, on its face, it looks like an antiquated system to keep fields productive. But of course, if the mitzvah of shmitah were just for that purpose, Torah could have done it better. It could have created a crop rotation system in which each field gets its time off every seven years, but not all at the same time. Having every field in the Israelite economy go fallow simultaneously? That's shocking! Asking a whole population to sit on their hands and hope there will be enough food is a stunning demand for Torah to make; a demand that clearly is meant to be about more than agricultural productivity. It is meant to teach a lesson as well.

The 18th Century Rabbi Chaim Luzzato, in his masterwork Derech Hashem, the Way of God, suggests that every mitzvah has two purposes. One is simple obedience. You do the thing because God says do the thing. But the second purpose is to help perfect some quality in us, not in the world, but in us, the doers of the mitzvah. So what is the quality in us that is perfected by laying off of the plow for a year? Maybe we are perfecting our ability to sit. To sit still. Not to do those extra ten things you could've done. Maybe shmitah teaches us to be okay with uncertainty. Wait. Listen. Breathe. To remember what it's like just to be when there is nothing you are required to do. To let go of control. To be vulnerable. To allow things to unfold. To have trust that somehow we will be okay; that deep down we are already okay.

Patience. Trust. These qualities of patience and trust are very challenging. For me at least. I am not naturally a sit-and-wait kind of guy. I spend my life in a whirlwind of doing. I find it hard to maintain any single contemplative practice over a long stretch. I once did a 10-day silent meditation retreat, at the end of which I should have been calm and equanimous, but instead I was ready to smack the next yuppy Buddhist offering me soup and an enlightened smile. But Torah, through the shmitah laws, takes the Buddhist position. Torah wants you to know that you cannot control it all. Shmitah helps you absorb this hugely important information. That you are not the boss. Learn this, Torah is saying, or you are in for some significant suffering.

Shmitah reminds us to be humble in the world. It reminds us that the land doesn't belong to us. It may be yours to farm for six years; but every seventh you need to let it go back to its rightful owner, and that is not you.

Yet, I have to say, our sense of the land being here for our exclusive benefit is deep in our culture and our bones and very hard to shake. A few weeks ago I took a walk near my house on Sonoma Mountain. Along the road I came upon a large blackberry patch where, seeing that no one was looking, I proceeded to gorge myself - a childish and pitiable display.  That is, it was a beautiful nature experience. And I looked up, beyond this patch, and saw a vast bed of blackberries — maybe an acre of them. They were a distance off the road, through impassable brush, and at the foot of a steep incline. It was clear that no one could actually get to them. I remember looking at them and thinking, "Well, that's a stupid waste of blackberries." I heard this thought in my head and was shocked. As if the blackberry didn't have its own life whose purpose was not to feed me. I looked at my purple fingers and felt shame.

As much as I unconsciously think that the blackberry should be of use, I think that about me too. I judge myself by my own utility. Always so busy. Always doing. And if I ask the question, who is there underneath all this utility, I can't say for certain that I always know.

So I think this is my shmitah challenge. Can I — not all the time, but in this shmitah year, in this special shabbes-like year — step back? Make some room? Breathe? Get a little more comfortable with the me who's not so busy trying to do and fix and please?

After all, isn't that the highest possible act of teshuvah? Returning to the you that is there underneath all the shoulds, underneath the plans and expectations. Returning to your integrity. To your longing. Returning to your neshamah, that deepest and holiest part of you. To arrive there with love and forgiveness, and to say, in Abraham's words in the traditional Rosh Hashanah Torah portion, hineini — here I am. Ah, here I am.

Perhaps revelation is waiting. Perhaps shmitah will reveal you to yourself.

Maybe we all give this a try over these Days of Awe.

And in suggesting that, I should probably make a disclaimer. While shmitah as a guide for farming demands an entire year of disengagement, shmitah as a spiritual practice doesn't. So don't worry, no one here is suggesting you lay off of all your doing for the next year. No one is suggesting that you stop engaging with the world or working for justice or scheduling your kid's soccer practice. But the shmitah law does offer a sense of proportion, a recipe to help your field regenerate. One in seven. Just like shabbat. One in seven. If you can take every seventh day, or hour, or minute, to let go of control and notice and honor who you are inside, I suspect you will be better equipped the other 6/7 of the time. And you will be a better instrument of change when you go back on Tikkun Olam duty.

So let us pray that in this coming year we can allow more shmitah consciousness into our lives. That in that consciousness we may find balance between doing (doing, doing, doing) and being. That we give our ambitious and perfectionist selves a sabbatical. That we sit better with what we can't change. That we open up to all the beautiful surprises that could grow in our own gardens if we backed off and let  them. After all, as far as we know, Eden didn't need so much tilling, did it?

May shmitah give us the tools to make this new year, even if not always a happy one, a good year; a good, good year.

Shanah Tovah.


The lovely thought and turn of phrase of something "revealing you to yourself" emerged from my old friend, the wise Ezra Cole.

Quick Kaddish in a Dreadful Summer

For Congregation Ner Shalom, August 15, 2014

A couple weeks ago I wrote an essay in my blog about going through my mother's basement back in Niles, Illinois, and the stories and sadness that were emerging for me from those long sealed, dusty boxes. I shared the essay with a new friend, a rabbi friend, that I've only known for a couple months. He emailed me back and said, "I didn't realize you were an avel.  I wish you constant comfort and strength through this year of mourning."

Those words hit me hard. Avel. The Hebrew meaning "a mourner." A word that signifies a special status that one maintains for a full year following the death of a next of kin. I felt myself choking up, feeling "seen" in a way that I hadn't been. And feeling "seen" made me feel the loss all over again. I wasn't used to being visible as a mourner. After all, in our culture, we don't have good words for people who are in mourning. If you lose a spouse, you're a widow or widower, and you stay that way. And while in Hebrew a yatom, an orphan, can be of any age (I choked up similarly a few months ago when a friend called me yatom sheli - my orphan), in English the word "orphan" applies to a child, and pretty much a child only. An adult who loses parents and says aloud, "I'm an orphan" is judged as self-pitying or overly theatrical. An orphan child who grows up will, at some point, gently morph from saying "I am an orphan" to "I was an orphan."

In our culture, "mourner" is an ephemeral state, situationally dictated. A mourner is someone at a funeral. Mourners can even be hired for the day. And then, after that funeral, you have no status. And you become invisible. But in Hebrew, avel is an attribute that sticks beyond that difficult day. It allows you, even requires you, to be seen. This designation reminds those around you to judge your actions and your moods not in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of loss. Not just at some moment where you are publicly singled out as a mourner. But in your day-to-day life, when you're running errands with jaw-clenched stoicism, or when you're having a private moment of crazy grief that can take any surprising form, even screaming obscenities at inanimate objects. For instance last night, driving home, trying to send a text message in a compliant and safely hands-free manner:

Me:	Siri, send a text to Anne and Suegee.
Siri:	Do you mean Anna Bell Kaufman or Anna Mollow?
Me:	Neither.
Siri:	I'm sorry. I don't understand what you mean by "neither." Do you mean Anna Belle Kaufman or Anna Mollow?
Me:	Neither one.
Siri:	I'm sorry. I don't understand what you mean by "neither one." Do you mean Anna Belle Kaufman or Anna Mollow?
Me:	I mean somebody else entirely.
Siri:	I'm sorry. I don't understand what you mean by "somebody else entirely." Anna Belle Kaufman or  --

At which point, crazy with rage, I hurled an uncharacteristically graphic expletive at Siri. To which she replied, "I'm sorry. I don't understand what you mean by," and then managed to repeat the profanity with absolute precision.

Anyway, the point is that being in grief means that sometimes you're just bonkers. And when your loss, your avelut, is invisible to others, no one knows or remembers why you keep sliding off the deep end.

But Jewish tradition does in fact encourage us to to be visible as mourners, to show up publicly as avelim. The custom is, as we know, for mourners to recite the Kaddish prayer, and to do so, when possible, publicly, in a minyan, a community of at least ten people. As I remind us whenever we're together, the words of Kaddish, in the Aramaic that was once our everyday tongue, are words of praise. In the face of loss, sometimes because of loss, we are called to express wonder; we acknowledge that the workings of this Creation are bigger, deeper, higher than we can possibly imagine or understand. But now that Aramaic is more remote for us even than Hebrew, it is not the lofty sentiment that speaks to us. Rather it is the heartbeat-like rhythm of this prayer - yitbabam v'yitbabam v'yitbabam - that hits us most profoundly, and that we associate not with death itself, but with the Jewish experience of death. I just finished reading Philip Roth's The Human Stain, and this little insight about Kaddish jumped out at me:

Most people in America, including myself . . . don’t know what these words mean, but nearly everyone recognizes the sobering message they bring: a Jew is dead. Another Jew is dead. As though death were not a consequence of life but a consequence of having been a Jew.

The traditional way of reciting the Mourners' Kaddish, in which only the avelim, the mourners, rise, was another way to make sure that you, the mourner, were seen. And in that moment of being seen, you would inevitably see your own altered state. The modern progressive custom of the whole room standing, either in support of the mourners or in the name of the 6 million, is beautiful also and well intentioned. But it inadvertently neutralizes loss and renders individual grief invisible. Standing as a mourner among a bunch of non-mourners has the perverse effect of making me, at least, feel more alone than I felt starting out.

That said, I do think there are times in which we are all in fact, and not just symbolically, avelim together. And I think right now is one of those moments. There is a pervading mood of loss and desolation that everyone I know has been experiencing for many weeks now, and that has only been deepening with each new turn of events. We're all feeling Robin Williams' loss this week with a surprising keenness. Because we were already primed for it by the grief we feel about the war in Israel and Gaza and all the senseless deaths there. But of course that grief itself was an explosive extension of the grief we already felt about three murdered Yeshivah bochurs and one cruelly killed Palestinian boy. And those shocking acts came on the heels of or intertwined with other things: the downing of a passenger plane over Ukraine; the still inconceivable kidnapping of some 300 schoolgirls in Nigeria. And even grief about ISIS overrunning far-away Iraq, which brought with it the death of many members of ethnic minorities there, and the death of any lingering hope we might have had that despite our bungling invasion of that country we might somehow have left it better than it had been.

It's been a season of tremendous grief. It courses through all of us. What we are feeling this summer is not polite sympathy, such as we expect from those who obligingly stand to say Kaddish alongside the mourners. But real personal grief. We feel it and we act on it without naming it. Not just Jews. The country. The world for all I know. We feel it, our children feel it through us. Our pets probably feel it. Our tempers are short, our misunderstandings are frequent, our ability to find the right words eludes us.

This is because we are impaired. Impaired by grief. Traumatized might or might not be overstatement, but impaired is not. We are impaired like any avel is impaired. We can't always trust our reactions, we can't always trust our better selves. We don't know when we might start screaming at Siri.

But maybe there is some comfort available. This is the season for it, after all. After Tisha B'Av, after our holiday marking the destruction of the holy Temple, where the ruined Jerusalem is described as a widow; after this holiday of desolation comes a season of comfort, of slow, step-by-step emergence from our broken state, culminating with the last blast of the shofar at the ne'ilah service at the end of Yom Kippur, when we are, once again, we hope, whole. During this time in between, our tradition hands us weekly haftarah portions of comfort.

This week's haftarah, from Isaiah, offers repeated and insistent declarations that we are not forgotten, that we are engraved on God's hands like a divine tattoo, that our children carried off to captivity are bound to return, that our desolate city will once again be alive and bustling.

These prophecies might have been comforting to our conquered and exiled ancestors. But we are cynical moderns. We know that on the global scale there are rhythms of loss and regeneration. We know that destroyed cities fill up again. But we also know they don't fill up with the people who were lost in the conquest. The hope offered by Isaiah is pretty, but pretty hard to accept.

Still, Isaiah has some advice that might speak to us. He says:

Look to the rock you were hewn from,
To the quarry you were dug from.
Look back to Abraham your father
And to Sarah who brought you forth.
(Isaiah 51:1-2)

And there is something here. Which is, when you are without landmarks, and it feels like there is nothing to steer by, look back to your roots. When the path ahead is dim or unimaginable, turn around and look back at the path where you came from. If nothing else, it will be familiar. Re-orient yourself with what you know. When you see yourself plowing ahead in a panic, stop. Breathe. Inhale some of the good stuff at your source. Is there guidance there? How to handle loss? How to mourn?

Yes, there is. Our rock, that Jewish rock that we were hewn from, gives us some guidance. It says there is a name to this experience and if you name it then you can see it and you can be seen. Avel. That is the name. You are a mourner. We are all mourners. And seeing each other that way, seeing ourselves that way in these hard times, allows us to give each other some extra space. It allows us to give ourselves some extra space. To look at others with compassion, to look at ourselves with compassion. To care for ourselves the way we'd care for a dear friend who has suffered a loss. What might we say to our bereaved selves? Take time to breathe. Eat ice cream. Take a walk. If we are still going to have something to say or something to do to make this world better, we need to be careful and cared for so we can play our part and play it well. So, avel, take some special care of yourself.

And, one other piece of guidance. That quarry, that Jewish quarry we were dug from, that old tradition that seems to go back to Sarah herself, suggests that when we are in mourning, we say Kaddish. When we feel the pain of loss - the death of loved ones or a respected icon or innocent people far away or even the death of a long cherished hope or belief - we honor that loss with a Kaddish.

So in this summer of grief, say Kaddish. Not a symbolic Kaddish but a real one. Even if you don't know what the words mean. Even if you don't know the words at all. Think how this Creation is bigger than all of us. And notice that through all this loss, you are not gone yet. You are still here and that is your heart that is beating and beating.

Yitbabam. V'yitbabam. V'yitbabam. V'yitbabam.




Thank you to Ellen Atzilah Solot for pushing the point this week that it's not just me.

My Mother's Words (and Stuff)

 

It's seven months today since my mother died. Her death, and this passage of time, are always on my mind. I replay her stroke over and over in my head, and the weeks after. Some of the intensity of these memories has dulled in the intervening months, as you might expect, even though I don't want them dulled. Then this month my sister and I began the arduous task of revisiting our mother's home, our childhood home, and beginning to sort through the things that are all that's left now that Mom is gone.

When our father died 14 years ago, the loss was tremendous, but not structural. That is, the house and the family remained intact. There was a chunk missing, but nothing crumbled. But losing a second parent disintegrates the family system. The family I came from is gone. My sister and I are close; we are linked to each other horizontally along the family tree. But there's nothing above us. And where there once was something, there's now only stories and stuff. A house full of stuff.

I've been cautious about writing too much about this. We all have losses; and terrible things are happening in the world right now demanding our attention and compassion. No one needs to listen to my droning on about my mother. But still, this week seemed right to yield a bit to the temptation. Because this week we begin reading the fifth book of Torah: Deuteronomy, in Hebrew called D'varim. It begins, Eyleh had'varim asher diber Moshe el B'nei Yisrael... "These are the d'varim that Moshe spoke to the Children of Israel."

This book is made up of the d'varim, (which we will, for now, translate as "words") that Moshe spoke. It is a great and lengthy speech given to the people on more or less the eve of the prophet's death. In it he recounts the people's journeys and struggles and the laws they were given, as well as offering a generous helping of advice of his own. This book being titled as the "words of Moshe" is in its way ironic, since all the words of Torah are, in our tradition, those of Moshe. Or those of God given through Moshe. And even here, Moshe is, in our imagination, doing the overall transmission, as he does for the rest of Torah. So in D'varim, as if in an iterative loop, he is now telling the story of his telling the story.

So why this second telling? In Greek it's called Deuteronomy, the second law. But it's not a different law or even just a recap of the law given in earlier books. It's a rerun of all the travels and traumas, a final summary, a postcard from the wilderness sent into the future. Is Moshe modeling something about how you make sense of a journey? You retell it, using d'varim?

But d'varim is a squishy and surprising word in Hebrew. It's root, d-b-r, as a verb typically means "to speak." As a noun, davar (plural: d'varim) means variously, and with fairly equal distribution, "word" and "thing." What is the connection between a "word" and a "thing?"

When I was an undergraduate in linguistics, we were taught a theory, unpopular at the time or at least unprovable, called the Whorf Hypothesis. Benjamin Whorf, in his work on what was termed "linguistic relativism," made an argument that language was essential and precedent to thought. That we cannot think about things for which we have no words. Language defines the categories through which we perceive, well, everything. The academic world, protective of its ability to think above all else, frowned on this idea. Sure, language helped you express ideas cleverly, clearly, but ideas were primary, and not dependent on having language to name them.

But there's been a resurgence in this kind of understanding as we grasp more about the brain through neurology and neuro-linguistics. The prevailing science now suggests that language itself builds brain pathways, forges connections between disparate islands of understanding within the brain. When language is lost, so are things. The ability to connect observations into complex thoughts; the ability to see oneself as separate from the whole are wiped away. Things lose their thinginess. Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor writes about the stroke she suffered 18 years ago, in which a left hemisphere brain bleed left her languageless. And in her language-free state, she was like an infant, without distinction between her world and the world. Without thoughts to trouble her, without thought even as to the passage of time.

So as far as perception and meaning are concerned, words and things turn out to be intimately tied up with each other. Words are the stuff of things.

My mother died without words. Like Bolte Taylor, hers was a left hemisphere bleed, depriving her of useful speech for the last five weeks of her life. She did not seem to lose her receptive language, or not all of it. She revealed an awareness of her surroundings, a recognition of people. She could respond appropriately with facial expressions to stories being told or greetings being relayed. She would roll her eyes at the mention of someone whose mention would normally have brought about the rolling of eyes. She would laugh at jokes, not just as a reflex to tone of voice and other social cues (as some of the more cynical doctors suggested), but even at subtle jokes delivered in impenetrable deadpan. For this reason she didn't seem as far gone as Bolte Taylor initially was; she wasn't in some pre-lingual state of Oneness with the vast universe.

Mom was present. She seemed to understand. But she couldn't create language. She could, in a garbled way, provide a missing lyric to a Gershwin standard; she could sort of speak along with the shema. She could give forth words when the giving forth of words was a rote act. But she couldn't use those utterances to communicate. It was as if understanding was on one island in her brain and language was on another, and there was no bridge between them. So while she might squeeze your hand lovingly, if you asked her to squeeze your hand to signify yes or no, her ability to squeeze your hand instantly left her.

Before her stroke, my mother was rarely at a loss for words. She read, she wrote emails, she mastered Facebook at age 80. She learned to read Hebrew over and over beginning in late middle age, never satisfied with her progress. Nonetheless at 79 she chanted Torah for the first time on Yom Kippur in Cotati, California; a beautiful piece of Parashat Nitzavim that I'd assigned her, saving the closest-to-home thought for her, ki hamitzvah hazot - "this mitzvah is not too wondrous or remote for you." She was frequently on the phone with her friends, or her cousins, or her cousins' children, or her grand nieces. She lived in the telling. Her primary way of relaying information was through the story of how she received the information, reenacting the dialogs involved in that process.

She, like me, was full of words. Kind words, as a rule. But words.

She was also not at a loss for things. And this part sometimes distressed her.

In 1958 my parents masterminded a move out of the city of Chicago. They would become suburbanites, transplanting to the Village of Niles which, though it abutted Chicago's northwest side, was still "the country." Otzinplotz.

The developers offered three home layouts. My parents chose the ranch house with the full basement. They chose the brick color and the window size too. They chose the paint and the flagstone and the trees.

The basement of the house in Niles soon became a "thing." It stopped being invisible architecture and asserted itself. First off, it was a dozen steps below ground and, it seems, situated below the actual water table, or at least the water table on stormy Chicago summer nights, when too many inches of rain in too few minutes would cause the Village sewer pipes to fill and overflow and back up into any structure stupid enough to live at that depth. My childhood, my parents' empty nest life, and my mother's old age were all punctuated by basement floods, wiping out whatever was unlucky or unimportant enough to be caught on a low shelf.

The natural rhythm of floodwater was, in fact, just about the only culling system ever deployed in that basement, whose vast holdings of untouched items continued to grow over time. I think of Bellatrix Lestrange's violently self-replicating vault contents in Harry Potter. Or another generation could think of Fibber McGee.

My parents were very central in both their families. They were beloved and trustworthy, and they were the people with the big unfinished basement. What this meant was that as generations died, whatever of those people's things remained unclaimed would end up in our basement. Silverware. Photo albums. Fur coats. Scrapbooks. Financial records. Sheet music. Never absorbed into use, but held in suspension. An additional burial. A genizah. And not just the personal effects of the dead. Relatives who moved out of state would consign to my parents' basement whatever keepsakes they didn't have room for in the moving truck, only to "forget" them there permanently. Meanwhile, my mother, who hated to entertain, whose anxiety dreams always involved company coming over unannounced or not having enough food to serve on Thanksgiving; my mother would receive gifts over time - wedding, anniversary, business gifts. Trays, punchbowls, coffee service, chip-dip sets. Beautiful items that would mostly stay in their original boxes in the basement, in the hope that there would never be enough guests in the house to actually necessitate their use.

Over time, my sister's and my childhood things took up residence down there as we went on to college and our adult lives. Papers, drawings, scout projects, school assignments from kindergarten through high school. Bicycles, furniture, board games and enough papier-maché to keep you fed for a good post-apocalyptic month. Add to this my parents' business records. And my grandparents'. And my great grandparents'. And then the items of pure sentiment - cards. Birthday cards, anniversary cards, Jewish new year, Christmas, get well and, the hardest to part with, condolence cards and memorial books for a variety of relatives. All these found their way into boxes and onto shelves.

My mother became helpless thrall to this sea of stuff. She was a museum guard, entrusted with keys but no instructions, then abandoned indefinitely by the rest of the staff. My mother saw the burgeoning basement as her failure. If she were a stronger or better or different kind of person, the past would never have accreted in such an aggressively physical form.

But it wasn't her fault. It was too great a responsibility for any one person. She was the vault keeper for over a century of family history. Nothing could be discarded guiltlessly; everything demanded a curator's eye or a historian's. Not for economic value, although certainly there were and are many collectibles sitting there still. But for some other kind of value. For the lives that these things represent; for the stories these things still have to tell.

Mom was not incapable of throwing things away; she just couldn't throw away stories, especially other people's stories, her loved ones' stories. And the basement became the repository, the library of all of those stories. All the words from those now-silent voices. And so, in her helplessness, if once in a while she unconsciously shelved a box or three too low and - surprise! - they were wiped out in the next flood, who could truly blame her?

Over the years my sister and I begged Mom to move to California. But she didn't want to give up her life in Chicago, her friends, her house. Of course if she moved west, she could have flown back and seen her friends with the same frequency with which she now saw her children and grandchildren. But I think the house held her; particularly the basement. She was someone who enjoyed the active retelling of the past, and I think she could not imagine its erasure, which is how I believe she saw the task of clearing the basement out.

Since she's died, there are no more words from her. And she didn't get her final chance to recap her story, like Moshe did. Not yet, at least. But even without words, there are the things, oh the things!

The basement full of memories - her memories, our memories, and the memories of other people long gone - memories about which we can now only speculate. In beginning the ambitious work, my sister and I have morphed from being liquidators to being curators. Every item has its story, every thing is a word. Our job is to release the story from the prison of physical form; to let it return to its existence in the world of word. We call each other over from opposite sides of the basement. "Look at this." "Remember this?" "Was this Aunt Hattie's? Aunt Anne's? Whose?"

Where we don't know the story, we guess. And in some cases we can only shrug.

My sister commented on the childhood papers and the greeting cards. She said, "You put these away thinking that some day you'll revisit them. And now that's what we're doing." On Mom's behalf, on Dad's, on our grandmothers' and grandfathers' and great aunts' behalves, we are revisiting them and trying, through the din of silence and years, to hear their voices one more time. Some of those voices might make it to this page. And others, well, if they just make it once more to my ears and my heart, that will be have to be enough.

Eyleh had'varim. These are the words. These are the things.

Revenge, Anger and the End of Wisdom

Thinking about Parashat Mattot - July 17, 2014   

Revenge and more revenge.

The widening spiral of pain, anger and retribution broke new ground today, as a passenger plane holding 295 travelers was shot down over Ukrainian airspace by a country or faction still to be identified. The downed flight, covered on the TV news as luridly as one would expect, was instantly triggering for me, as I imagine it was for many of us - transporting us back to our 9/11 horror, watching repeating footage of explosion, irresistibly pressing us to imagine a horrible death, in an act of terror, at altitude. All this getting mixed up with actual sorrow for actual people who actually lost their lives today.

The attack against the plane was the latest volley in a long history of Ukrainian-Russian tension that bores straight back through the Soviet Union and out the other end, for hundreds of years preceding.

If this had been the only new, violent escalation, dayenu, it would have been more than enough. But as we watch this out of one eye, the other remains fixed upon Israel, and the dance of revenge playing out in there. Today Israeli forces are launching ground attacks along the borders of Gaza, in response, of course, to the Palestinian missiles flying toward Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, those in retaliation for offensives that were themselves in response to the murder of three Jewish boys. Which, in someone's mind, was revenge for something before that, which was itself revenge, and back and back and back. Ping pong ping pong ping.

The failure of diplomacy to be of any meaning in either of these conflicts launches me, personally, into a state of despair I haven't felt in a while.


Of course I was also primed for it. Just last weekend, the husband and I rented and watched, by poorly timed recommendation, the chilling Cold War drama, Fail-Safe, starring Henry Fonda as the President of the United States, in a bunker, on the hotline with the Soviet premier, trying to keep the world from coming apart as an American military jet inadvertently and irretrievably heads to Moscow to drop its nuclear payload. The hopelessness and powerlessness seared into the celluloid of this film, and the image of a world where not even good intentions can save the day, much less bad ones, have haunted my sleep for days, before any actual plane got shot out of the sky. Not that I need fiction to enhance my experience of these very real events, but learning that the plane crash was revealed to Putin while he was on the phone with Obama felt like a bit of mocking deja vu.

So I did what I do. I turned to this week's Torah, which often serves for me as a kind of Tarot - what is the insight that this week's cards can bring to the silently articulated question of escalation, revenge, and hopelessness?

Alas, it is a really bad week for this exercise. Our Torah portion, Mattot, is itself about revenge. God commands Moshe to exact a full revenge on the Midianites for having participated with the Moabites in luring the Israelites into sexual misconduct and idolatry. This is meant to be Moshe's last task before he can at long last be gathered to his ancestors. The Israelite soldiers - our soldiers - go and deliver the Midianites a complete defeat. They kill the five Midianite kings, who are specifically named, much as the five daughters of Tzelafchad were repeatedly named in last week's portion and again later in the Book of Joshua.

The kings are killed at swordpoint, and so is Bil'am ben Be'or. You might recall him as the donkey guy, the prophet through whom came the beautiful paean to the Children of Israel, Mah tovu ohaleycha Ya'akov, mishk'noteycha Yisrael: how goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel. He delivered that blessing, but apparently only as a puppet for the ventriloquist God of Israel. Because those words do not seem to mitigate what is considered by Torah and by rabbinic literature to be his irredeemable wickedness - the whole seduction/idolatry thing seems to have been Bil'am's idea. Torah makes a point of saying Bil'am was killed by the sword. Rashi explains that Israel and the other nations swapped strategies in this; while other nations lived by the sword, Israel lived by the word - prayer and praise. When Bil'am gave his mah tovu blessing, he had intended words of curse, and was willing to use the Israelite toolbox - words of power - to do so. And so in punishing him, Israel used the toolbox of his nation, exacting vengeance with the sword's sharp edge.

In any event, the Israelite soldiers get back to the camp having killed every last Midianite man under the rule of the five kings, and bringing back as prisoners the women and children. Moshe, accompanied by Elazar the High Priest, goes out to meet the returning warriors. Moshe is incensed that the soldiers left the women alive, particularly since seduction of Israelite men by Midianite women was the mechanism by which Israel was led astray, according to the story, having brought both moral compromise and outbreak of some disease into the Israelite camp. And while I'd prefer to stop the retelling right here, with Moshe's anger, where really it's bad enough, it did not stop here. Moshe cajoles the soldiers into killing the women, as well as their sons and many of their daughters.

Now, you and I were not there. Sinai maybe, but this moment no. I have not lived in a war zone. I have not been the victim of military attacks. I'm not a Holocaust survivor nor the child of survivors. My inability to imagine what such a complete desire for revenge feels like is a blessing, it truly is, and, alas, a rare privilege on this earth. But still, even we lucky ones might have some wisdom to impart to those who are spinning in the gyre of hatred and revenge. But what?

At last, a breath of air is provided by Rabbi Yehudah Löwe in his Torah commentary, Netivot Olam. Löwe is the Maharal of Prague, the 16th Century commentator known folklorically for creating a golem to protect the Jews. He is no stranger to the threat of violence. Here he retells a piece of midrash to explain why, Moshe having scolded the returning soldiers and pressing them to complete the revenge, it is Elazar the priest, not Moshe, who then begins to articulate Torah to the soldiers regarding how to divide spoils of war and how to purify themselves after having engaged in warfare. This is puzzling to the sages, because it is Moshe who is the archetypal lawgiver, the primary conduit for Torah.

The midrash brought by the Maharal is that in his anger, Moshe is able to give commands of destruction, of violence. But he is unable to articulate law, or wisdom, or prophecy. The Maharal quotes the words of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish in Talmud (Pesachim 66b):

Resh Lakish said: As to every man who becomes angry, if he is a Sage, his wisdom departs from him; if he is a prophet, his prophecy departs from him. If he is a Sage, his wisdom departs from him: [we learn this] from Moses. For it is written, And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host etc. (Numbers 31:14); and it is written, And Eleazar the Priest said unto the men of war that went to the battle: This is the statute of the law which the Lord hath commanded Moses etc. (Numbers 31:21), whence it follows that [the wisdom/laws] had been forgotten by Moses.

There is nothing surprising or new here. But it is nice to have it articulated not just as world wisdom, not just as common sense, but as Torah. In anger, the wise lose their wisdom, prophets lose their vision. We all know this and are grateful to Talmud, and then Rabbi Löwe, for articulating it. This is the price of anger, even if the anger feels justified.

And this is what we are seeing all around us. Anger begetting anger, revenge begetting revenge. So that wisdom and vision are displaced.

I am not a politician. Or a historian. Or a diplomat. I can't stop wars or reduce tensions, nor can anyone that I know. But we can all feel supported by our own tradition, including even the bloodiest moments of Torah, when we say to leaders on all sides, that revenge is revenge. You may choose to engage in it or, we pray you may choose not to. But do not try to pass it off as wisdom. Do not try to pass it off as prophecy. It is neither.

A Prayer for Healing

For Ner Shalom Shabbat of Healing, June 20, 2014

Dear God, heal our bodies. Heal our spirits. Heal us.

God, we ask this, not always knowing what healing means. We ask this, often - usually - confusing healing with cure. We want cures. We understand cures better. Even though we know that cures can hurt us too. Sometimes we still need healing long after the cure has worked. And sometimes we can be healed even when we're not cured. But in any event, God, we will just ask for refuah, for healing, and leave it to you to fill in the details.

Dear God, help us to feel that we are divine sparks, even when we are tired and dragging. Help us to feel like we are created in your image, even as our bodies become sick or frail or otherwise hint that they might not have your particular staying power.

Dear God, you have made these bodies of ours so complicated, and sometimes we wonder if that was so necessary. N'kavim n'kavim, chalulim chalulim, we say each morning. Channels and orifices. That is what we're made of. We know that if what is supposed to flow freely gets stopped up or if what is supposed to be contained springs a leak, we are in trouble. You have made our bodies as complicated as the cosmos. And we are grateful for every moment we have in them. Especially the moments when we feel so good, so normal, that we don't even notice their complexity at all. Give us more of those moments, God, please, more of those.

God, you have made our minds, our spirits, equally complex and easily damaged, even though we can't see that kind of frailty on an X-ray. It might have been nicer just to make us all happy and functional, God, but that obviously was not quite the plan. Maybe it has something to do with that free will thing. We each have our own obstacles to overcome. We each have to find our own path to wholeness, to you. Maybe we have to earn our happiness somehow, although I daresay there are many people who deserve happiness and don't have it. And, when put to it, I can't really think of anyone who doesn't deserve happiness, so there goes that idea altogether. Maybe we just have to create our own meaning for it all as we go, even if the good and the bad are unequally distributed, which frankly kinda stinks. Or maybe I shouldn't be dwelling in these details; maybe life is a test, and you just haven't yet sent the angel who will say Avraham, Avraham and call it all off.

Dear God, keep me from ingratitude. Because despite all my complaints, life is precious, and the delicacy of these bodies we live in makes it only more so. And if I feel the difficulty of it sometimes more than I feel the wonder of it, well, we are creatures of earth and our clay concerns us. But really, I am - we are - so grateful to be here in these bodies that have been really much trustier than not. I am grateful for lungs that have breathed through this day, and for this heart that has beaten so many times a minute, over a thousand minutes a day, nearly 20,000 days of my life and counting. I have owned cars both American and foreign, and have seen many finely made appliances and Apple products too and nothing made by man or machine can compare to what you set in motion on this planet.

Dear God, our Torah calls you the rofei. The healer. You healed Miriam at Moshe's request. You healed the women of Avimelech's kingdom at Avraham's. We are aware that it doesn't work quite that way anymore. You are still rofei kol basar umafli la'asot - the wondrous healer of the body. But we know that for a bunch of years now, you have pulled back from the retail end of the healing business. Thankfully, you have allowed our human intuition and compassion and curiosity to give rise to healers, responding to your call, doing your work. Nurses, doctors, chiropractors, Reiki practitioners, therapists - every manner of professional channeling the regenerative power of this universe through their hands and heads and hearts.

So Dear God, about these human healers. Please give them confidence in their abilities. And along with that, give them humility as well. Let them harden themselves as much as they need in order to be around so much suffering all the time, because we need them to be able to be there. And still, keep them vulnerable enough that they can still hear your voice in their instincts, and so they can still feel compassion for their patients, even at the end of a long day, even after a 48-hour shift, even if the patient is difficult, even if the prognosis is not good.

Dear God, take good care of our healers. May they be nimble and perceptive and loving. May they be well taken care of by their partners and friends, even if it means that said partners and friends have to hear a few too many emergency room stories for their tastes. It is the least we can do.

Dear God, help us to see illness not as our enemy, but as an inevitable element of life in these vessels. Help us celebrate our lives in these bodies and on this planet. Let us all be Psalmists singing your praise with every breath, and every heartbeat, and with every ache and pain too, for as long as we can, and may it be long, and may it end gently.

And dear God, Gotenyu, I think that's kinda at the heart of what we all want, and we're sometimes too unclear or maybe superstitious even to say it. It has to do with death. We're not fond of it. Of death. It's freaky and it scares us and we know it's natural but we can't see beyond it and that's really your fault more than ours, I have to say. But in any event we want to live. We want to live a long time. And then we want it to end gently. Sometimes we might be willing to suffer in order to be here longer. And sometimes we might be willing to let go a little earlier if suffering is the price of life. So God, it's hard to know specifically what to ask for here, but let's just say this: if it's possible, let us make those decisions, each of us for ourselves. No pressure, but I think as a rule, all other things being equal, it would be our preference.

El na r'fa no lah. God send healing. R'fa'enu Adonai v'nirapei. Heal us and we will, gratefully, be healed. Hin'ni noteh eleyha k'nahar shalom. May we be open to you like a riverbed, and may your peace, your wholeness, your healing, pour in like a river.

Dear God, heal our bodies. Heal our spirits. Heal us.


I'm grateful to my friend, Rabbi Dorothy Richman, and to my husband, Oren Slozberg, for some important insights that helped me along on this. And to Dezi Gallegos and his performance of "God Fights the Plague" for lots of recent inspiration, including some particulars of wording, content, rhythm and pacing, that are clearly part of this.

Parashat Kedoshim: Generation Sandwich

For Congregation Ner Shalom, in anticipation of Ari's Bar Mitzvah tomorrow.

I am speaking to you tonight from behind a fog of giddiness and fatigue. Excited about Ari's Bar Mitzvah tomorrow; exhausted from the run-up to it.

My husband said to me the other day, "I'll bet now you'll have a lot more empathy for the Bar Mitzvah parents you deal with." I immediately defended my ongoing and admirably high level of empathy, and re-asserted how cool and on top of things I was. Unlike others I have witnessed, whom I shall not name, I was relaxed, breezy. Big picture all the way. Keeping it simple and meaningful. Then, once I'd made my point and was convinced that my reputation was safe, I turned back to the important tasks at hand: badgering Ari to practice his Torah one more time and impatiently micromanaging other people's contributions to tomorrow's blessed event.

Exhibit A: Modern Bar Mitzvah Boy

Yes, I confess, I was becoming the bridezilla of Bar Mitzvah parents, or so I feared. And yes, I now have much more empathy about the emotional tenor of this rite of passage. And I don't mean Ari's rite of passage. I mean ours.

Of course I knew that Bar Mitzvah was important to parents. But mostly, I thought, as a requisite achievement for their children. And it is a tremendous achievement! It is hard work, and a great growing moment. There is thinking and interpreting and writing and showmanship involved. But what I hadn't appreciated was Bar Mitzvah's organic importance for the parents. Our young person might be stepping into the shoes of an adult, but we are becoming the parents of an adult, and, with all due respect to the 13-year-olds of our people, that is a very, very big deal.

It is a moment of reckoning where we assess how we've been doing. And it comes at a moment of great change. At this age our children are an uneven mix of the child they've been and the adult they're becoming. And the adult they're becoming is like a new and sometimes problematic house guest. Odd habits. Unexpected opinions. Refusal to leave.

Beloved strangers, our growing young people are. I explained this to my teen class recently. I said that when you're born, you obviously can't express who you are. You are helpless and wordless. And so it is your parents' job to project onto you, so that they can make good guesses at your needs. So we project our ideas and our beliefs and our fantasies. We have to. It's survival. And then, I told them, it is your job to provide the contradictory data, chipping away at our image of you bit by bit. And here I have to pause and remark on what an evolutionary stroke of luck it is that we are exposed to who our children really are so very gradually! Because if they popped out with fully formed personalities, full of opinions and criticism of our parenting, would any of us ever have fed them?

But no. Luckily they arrive just cute and then go about the business of becoming. And we, re-meeting them over and over as the constant strangers that they are, scramble to keep up, always running some number of steps behind. It often feels like a lost cause. Ari's mom, Anne, sometimes remarks that the best we can hope to do is just to see our children safely to adulthood, or at least to an age where they can be tried as adults.

But still, despite our fears of futility, we struggle to be of use; to guide, to teach. (The Hebrew word for parent and teacher, and Torah for that matter, all come from the same root.) You youngins, we try to help you develop good habits, deep compassion, impeccable manners. And true, we don't always know when to stop. We don't always know the difference between you and a developmental stage. (And, I hasten to add, neither do you.) So all we can do is give it our best shot; give you our best advice; hope we can spare you some of the mistakes we made (as if any of us ever managed to avoid our parents' mistakes, and as if somehow we actually could keep you from all harm).

So have pity on your parents, kids. Your becoming you might just be easier for you than it is for us, even if it is a blessed and holy and inevitable process for everyone. Have pity on your parents.

This is not just a plea, it's a requirement. This week's Torah portion, Kedoshim, which we'll read tomorrow, says:

איש אמו ואביו תיראו ואת שבתתי תשמרו אני יי אלהיכם

Ish imo v'aviv tira'u v'et shabtotai tishmoru ani Adonai eloheychem.

Hold your parents in awe and keep Shabbat. I am Adonai your God. 

Respect both parents and Shabbat. Both are your inheritance. Both are gifts to you. Even though it might take some perspective to appreciate that.

I have been very aware of the gift that a parent can be as this weekend has drawn near. Aware that Bar Mitzvah usually comes at a time in our lives when we, the parents, are a generation sandwiched between two other generations. When we feel astonished at our changing parenting role; when we feel relief or even surprise at our successes and frustration at our failures, we can look back over our shoulders and there is someone there to give us insight, someone into whom we can now have deeper insight as well. 

Certainly if my mother were here, I would be plying her for some idea of what it was like for her to parent teenagers, twice. I'd be asking her for some new stories I hadn't heard before and I'd be looking for the encouragement that might come from them. And of course that very impulse saddens me; my mother should by all rights have been here, she so looked forward to it, knowing, I think, what it would mean for all the generations involved. Instead, she's gone and my own generational sandwich is unexpectedly open faced.

Her absence is one of the great facts of this weekend of celebration; at the forefront of everyone's minds. I have had my moments of misery over it. In anticipation of this weekend, people have rightly used the word "bittersweet." But here's the good thing about bittersweet. It's still chocolate. Sweet, rich, packing a good buzz. Ari, our family, this community, this Bar Mitzvah and the celebration around it are all chocolate, artisan chocolate, as far as I'm concerned.

But while Kedoshim talks explicitly about honoring parents, I think turning that back around is called for. After all, as Wordsworth said, "The child is the father of the man." Our children are parents too, beautifully, brutally, bafflingly raising their future selves. And, as is suggested by the Torah portion, we should hold them in awe.

Ari has awed me through this process. He has made himself known to me in new ways. Demonstrating mastery in some areas where I expected it and some areas where I didn't. Having strong opinions about content, about interpretation. I feel a new kind of naches, a pride not just in what I always saw in him, but in what I didn't see coming at all. Ari is busy raising a great adult.

"The child is the father of the man." Some of us have parented children; some of us have taught young people or been mentors. But all of us have parented ourselves and produced remarkable and surprising children. So I'd like to ask each of you to honor the you that made you you. Feel some real gratitude to your younger self for taking care of you and getting you this far. And I want to invite you to experience some parental naches over the you that has emerged and continues to emerge. The you that is still forming, trying new things, and making you proud even when she won't take your advice.

Thank you all for joining our family for this weekend of celebration. I hold you all in awe.

Parashat Shemini: Now, Yes, Now

For Congregation Ner Shalom, March 21, 2014
[Sorry for the long delay in posting.] 

There is a moment in this week's parashah that caught my attention this year for the first time. It has to do with Aharon, whom we really don't speak very much about. Moshe is the star of our desert epic and religion-formation narrative, of course, and Miriam has been reclaimed and placed centrally by many of us in order to slake our desperate thirst for female leadership in Torah.

But Aharon? Who is he? We don't get much sense. His character is wooden. He is usually doing or saying something with Moshe or with Miriam. We don't get much of him alone. He is also a prophet, by all standards. He gets spoken to by God, but it's not like the love affair God has with Moshe. When God speaks to Aharon, it is business talk. Aharon is the High Priest Elect, and Moshe's second in command. But still, somehow, he manages to be both central and peripheral. Face it, people used to write songs about Moshe. Now people write songs about Miriam. But no one sings about Aharon.

But now, in the Book of Leviticus, the Priestly Code, is when Aharon comes into his own. He becomes ritually relevant. He is no longer just a spare Moses; he begins his priestly work.

Over the past two weeks, since the launching of Leviticus, we have covered 8 full chapters of ritual instructions. Instructions for the priests, all about accepting offerings, doing sacrifices, managing the public matters of sin, guilt, forgiveness, and worship. This is the job of the priests, of the High Priest in particular. And if it is all done correctly, then God will appear right there, in the Tent of Meeting. If it is not done correctly, terrible things could happen, as in fact they do just a few verses down the road.

But here in Parashat Shemini, shemini meaning "the eighth," it being the eighth day of Aharon's consecration as a priest along with his family; and the completion of the eighth chapter of instructions, now at last the priestly practice is ready to begin. Moshe tells Aharon & Sons to gather their bulls and goats and rams and meal and oil and all the items and ingredients that had been laid out by God through Moshe, so that they can atone for their own sins and begin their holy service for the people. The Cohanim collect all these things and they, and the entire people, draw near to the Tent of Meeting.

And then, although Torah doesn't say it explicitly, you know that all eyes turn to Aharon. A silence falls, punctuated only by bleats of sheep. This is the moment when the Children of Israel will move at last from theory to practice. From being a people receiving the law to a people fulfilling the law. This is a moment where preparation and action are in equipoise, like two sides of teeter-tauter. And no one moves.

Moshe then says - krav: go, approach.

קרב על המזבח ועשה את חטאתך ואת עולתך וכפר בעדך ובעד העם 

ועשה את קרבן העם וכפר בעדם כאשר צוה יי

"Go, draw near to the altar and do your sin offering and your olah-offering and make atonement for yourself and for the people; make the people's sacrifice and provide atonement for them as Adonai commands."

These words are the Cohen's job description. Which Aharon knew. He'd been there also for the delivery of all of the laws and rituals. So why did Moshe need to say it? Perhaps the words are formulaic, for the sake of ceremony. Aharon takes on the mantle of priesthood in this moment, and the prophet articulates his duty. "Go now," says the Prophet, "and be the Priest. Do these things for yourself and for the people, as God commands."

Ceremonial rhetoric, like oaths spoken at an inauguration. Because sure enough, as soon as he says them, the text reports, vayikrav Aharon el hamizbeach, Aharon approached the altar.

But even though it sounds like it could be official language, it's not clear that it is. Rashi, the great Medieval French commentator, thinks that Moshe needed to say this in fact to get Aharon moving. Rashi imagines Aharon to be in discomfort. He says, shehayah Aharon bosh v'yarei lageshet - Aharon was embarrassed and afraid to approach. Yarei, afraid, perhaps in the sense of plain fear, perhaps in the sense of awe and overwhelm. Rashi then imagines a conversation right there between the brothers, just out of the people's hearing. Moshe asks, "Why are you embarrassed? This is what you were selected for."

In Rashi's fantasy, Moshe makes an argument for destiny. Of course Aharon can do his appointed task; he was chosen for just this purpose. The very fact is testimony enough. And how reminiscent that is of the the story of Esther that we read this week (the two stories only collide on Jewish leap years like this). Esther hesitates when called upon to act on behalf of the people. Mordecai says to her, "Who knows if you didn't come to the throne for just such a moment as this?" And, reassured that great wheels of destiny are in motion, she acts.

In any event, Rashi's midrash arises out of this puzzling moment of pause between the completion of the instructions, and Aharon moving to follow them, a pause that could have lasted into infinity if Moshe had not said, "Krav, go, approach..."

Now, I'm not a big believer in destiny, as you all know. But I do believe that we're all better prepared to handle what comes next than we think. Aharon was ready, not necessarily because God selected him, but because he prepared as if God had.

Two weeks ago I talked about the idea that we each have inside of us a pintele Kohen, a tiny priest, that manages those great personal priestly functions - atonement, forgiveness, praise, remembering, honoring, redeeming, reclaiming, caring, soothing. All of our priestly functions that perhaps no one else even sees.

But thinking about Aharon in this verse makes me wonder if sometimes, despite knowing what we have to do, despite knowing that we are fully prepared to do it, we just need someone to say to us, "Now, start."

Yael Raff Peskin and I got together last week. We got into one of those conversations that people who have lost their parents get into. The "so how's your grieving going?" kinds of conversations that would sound shocking to others but are sometimes a big relief to have. She asked how my kaddishing was going. And I reported back that when my father died 14 years ago, I found a minyan every week, even while I was on the road, so that I could say kaddish publicly. But that this time it feels so different, and I haven't really been able to say kaddish, even in private.

And even though she wasn't telling me to do anything in particular, Yael's words had the effect that Moshe's words to Aharon did. They gave me permission to start enacting my duty; to start doing the thing that I'd wanted to do, but somehow couldn't start without a voice saying, "Yes, now, it's okay to start now." Her words empowered me in some ways to start grieving, a kind of grieving I couldn't quite start without someone saying, "Yes, now, it's okay to start now."

How many of our priestly functions - whether it's doing some mitzvot or repairing a relationship or just taking care of ourselves - are we holding back on, knowing what we need to do, but still too embarrassed or overwhelmed or frightened to start. In which case maybe Aharon's story here can serve as the voice that says, "krav, approach the altar, yes, now, start now."

I can't talk about Aharon's moment of hesitation without pointing out one last thing about the Hebrew. Moshe doesn't say to him bo, come, or lech, go. He says krav, approach. Draw near. The word krav shares the same roots as the word korban, which appears later in the very same verse. Korban is translated as "sacrifice" or "offering" but it literally means "drawing near." The offerings to Adonai are for the purpose of our drawing close to something of the Divine. It is a drawing near through sacrifice. Through giving something up of this world. And Aharon knows this. There is something he sacrifices in taking on the kehunah, the priesthood. Perhaps what he gives up is his ability to only represent himself, to just be a guy called Aharon. He lets go of his freedom not to feel responsible for the people and for the world. He accepts a limitation on his ego, he takes on his shoulders the weight of the need of the Children of Israel. He might oversee the offering of the sheep and cattle and unleavened cakes. But he foresees in this moment that he is offering up himself as well, offering up the Aharon that could've been.

And so who can blame him for his moment of hesitation, a moment on the other side of which nothing will ever be quite the same?

And - who can blame any of us for our hesitations? This life, this journey, this wilderness. Who knows where it will lead us? Who knows which choices are reversible and which are not? Who knows the ramifications of anything that our inner priest demands of us?

But still, we're prepared for kehunah, for priesthood. We have received, we have discerned, we have written the instructions. As God said back at Mt. Sinai, "you are a nation of priests." We are prepared. Even prepared to make some sacrifices for the sake of our own holiness and that of our world. We stand in the moment of pause, listening for the voice that will say, krav, draw near, now, yes, now.