Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of

Rosh Hashanah 5776

I’d like to start tonight by telling you a dream that I had. Not recent. I’ve been sitting on this one for a year and a half, not knowing quite what to do with it.

The dream came to me while I was performing in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It was hot and I went to sleep with the balcony doors open, looking out over the dazzlingly blue Bay of Banderas. It was just a month after my mother’s death; in fact it was my first day out of shloshim, the 30-day mourning period. And in my dream, I walked into some old European sanitarium, and there was a doctor there and my mother too. And the doctor had figured out what was wrong with her and it was an easy fix and he'd just gone ahead and fixed it and she was instantly okay – younger and stronger than I’d ever seen her, and they said there was no longer a reason for her to be there. So I took her and we drove. But not home. We were now driving up a mountain in the middle of a Greek island; climbing, climbing as if up to Olympus itself, with the Mediterranean all around and views to the horizon in every direction.

As we drove, we sat side by side in the car, just as we had at the moment of her stroke. And at this point in the dream my waking memory began to seep in. I realized something was not right. I pulled over and told her that we’d already sat shiva for her and it had been so sad. And I fell on her shoulder and she held me while I cried.

Now that’s pretty much the entirety of the dream. It was beautiful and sad, and not particularly deep. It was clearly venting my grief, helping me let go of the weeks – and actually years – of worry about her health and wellbeing. It was my subconscious giving me a chance to feel some peace.

But it didn’t just feel like my subconscious, whatever that means. It felt messagey, like I know grieving people often experience. It felt like a hello. And a message that she was okay. And its feeling that way was, for me, a problem.

Because first off – and you might not know this – I am a terrible cynic. Despite this work of mine here on this bimah, despite the stories I tell here and the connections I draw between worlds, I feel like I am always holding some amount of it within quotation marks. I soar aloft here and then, thud, I land back in my flightless day-to-day. I’m not sure where I get such cynicism from. My family, on my mother’s side, are all Litvaks. And the Litvak, as you might know, always plays the role of the doubter in all the Chasidic stories, scoffing at the rebbe’s wonders, until he is won over in the end.

In my defense, I’m not alone in that cynicism. It resonates with much of our tradition. Talmud tells us our dreams are 1/60^th part prophecy.[1] (Some of you might remember that 60:1 ratio from Selichot – this is the Jewish dissolution level at which something becomes nullified.) “Don’t count on your dreams for guidance,” imply the rabbis of antiquity. “The prophecy in them is negligible.” But, tantalizingly, negligible is not the same as non-existent. One-sixtieth is tiny but quantifiable. It’s one minute of every hour you sleep. That’s 6, 7, 8 minutes of prophecy a night, which really isn’t so bad. But, frustratingly, Talmud gives no guidance as to how to identify which eight minutes.

There’s more to why I don’t just jump to believe all such mystical moments, and I confess that in rallying Talmud to my defense just now, I was being somewhat disingenuous. Because the truth is I want to believe in mystical experience. I want a world where we are in conversation with God and with angels and who knows how many non-corporeal realms. And I always fear that that desire is just escapism or magical thinking, or that others will think that about me. Or I’m afraid of being associated with preachers who exploit faith for profit.

So although I’m drawn to the mystical, I am quick, I fear, to pooh-pooh the woo-woo, as it were. If I experience something transcendent, I soon douse the experience in a bucket of cold water.

But there are times when the mystical is so pressing, that it’s really hard to explain it away. Which brings me back to the dream about my mother 19 months ago.

I woke up from the dream, and looked out to the blue Mexican water, feeling sad and feeling spoken to. I couldn’t shake that feeling. I got up, dressed, and walked to the market for fruit and vegetables. Coming back, I wandered through town wondering how anyone can ever tell if such an experience is anything more than the heart’s wishful thinking; the brain concocting medicine for a spirit in need of it. I posed this “how can you ever know for sure” question in my head as clearly as one might pose an inquiry to a Magic-8 Ball. And just as this request for a sign formed, I looked up and found myself staring at a sign. I was standing in front of Club Mañana, a former dance club and theatre where my group, the Kinsey Sicks, had performed for several seasons. Mañana was now for sale and I was staring at the En Venta – the For Sale sign. My eyes were drawn down to the large-lettered name of the realtor. Marilyn Newman. And that, as a few of you might know, was my mother’s maiden name.

If I’d seen it in a movie I would have snickered. But I stood there, feeling stupid. That because of my insistent grinchiness, this hello from my mother had to come endorsed with a signature before I would believe it.

So, was this a coincidence? Of course it was. Might I have noticed this gringa realtor’s name, this ersatz Marilyn Newman, on some other “For Sale” sign two years earlier? Of course, I might’ve. I might’ve noticed it and called my mother on the phone and said, “You’ll never guess what I saw today!” I might’ve, but I didn’t. I only saw it in the slightly altered consciousness produced by the dream.

Talmud says that the age of the prophets is over.[2] No one talks to God face to face like Moses did.[3] But does that mean that the whole inter-worldly communication grid is down? Some of us still pray in formal ways. We imagine ourselves on these Days of Awe to be standing in front of a gate, not a wall. More of us pray in unofficial ways. We mutter thanks or please to God or to the Universe or to angels as we go about our business, as we feel our longings, as we escape dangers. We tell ourselves these are figures of speech. But still we use language that suggests that on some level, we see ourselves as residing within a field that is perhaps not supernatural, but somehow infranatural.[4] In other words, the divine courses through us and every corner of the world. And so everything that seems a simple matter of circumstance also carries with it a wink of the divine.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav taught that every blade of grass has a song of its own, a melody that comes from the sweetness of the water and the setting of the pasture.[5] And the song of the grass informs the song of the sheep that eat it, and of the shepherd who spends days lying on it, watching the sheep. Every living thing – no, every thing – has a kind of music that we can hear if we open to it.[6] Meanwhile, Talmud teaches us – and many of you have heard this – that no blade of grass grows without an angel standing there, encouraging it, saying, “Grow! Grow!”[7]

If you imagine both these ideas as having a kind of truth, then everything is talking to everything. The Divine talks, and Creation talks back, in a great, gorgeous cacophony not dissimilar to a Jewish dinner table. And if we are in the right state of consciousness, we might hear some of this crosstalk that we otherwise never would tune into; the crosstalk that sometimes seems to respond to a question in our hearts. Or that calls us to action when we need it. Or calls us to attention at just the right moment. And maybe what we need to hear in the crosstalk of the universe comes to us in the language of coincidence, because it is abundant, and we all understand its grammar. Coincidence is the Esperanto of divine communication.

And sometimes we don’t even need coincidence as a mechanism. We just know. We know what we need to know. It comes to us not like the blast of shofar or the bombast of a “For Sale” sign in a foreign country. It comes to us through silence, through a still, small voice.

This phrase, “the still, small voice” comes to us by way of a story of Elijah the prophet, taking refuge in a cave[8]. Elijah is having a crisis of faith, because things have gone terribly and God has not, at that moment, been proving Godself in the great blustery Hollywood ways Elijah desired. And so God causes a great wind to pass by the cave, and then an earthquake, and then a fire. And Elijah perceives that God is not in any of those things. And only after the cataclysms subside is Elijah able to perceive a kol d’mamah dakah, a “still, small voice,” the hush we will reference tomorrow in our Unetaneh Tokef prayer, the quiet reverberation that happens after the blast of the shofar. This is the place where communication happens. This is the quiet where the call lives.[9]

Because a call doesn’t have to be loud to be heard. And because a loud voice can be ignored just as easily – maybe more easily – than a quiet one. And that describes in a nutshell the difficulty of my long-delayed, long-deferred calling to become a rabbi. My desire to be a rabbi was so old, since childhood, that it had become habit. Its constant racket had become white noise. And once relegated to the realm of irrelevance, it stopped being a call altogether, if in fact it had ever been one.

It was only over this last year that I finally began to hear it in the silence. It was the shmitah year, the fallow year. I had shed some of my busy-ness. I’d retired from the Kinsey Sicks. And I no longer had a mother to occupy the sizable psychic space that having – and worrying about – an aging parent thousands of miles away can take up. And so there was a new stillness that I wasn’t used to having. And in that stillness this longing began to murmur again. It came to me in the form of desire, in the form of repeated crazy, uncanny coincidences. It revealed to me that this calling now lived solidly within the realm of possibility. I had the open time that the Kinsey Sicks left in their wake. And I had a family that would make it doable and there was a program that could make it possible. I could study remotely and maintain my commitment to this community. I was so well poised; so lucky, so blessed. And I began to wonder what was left to hold me back? The still, small voice asked me, over and over, “Why not? Really. Why not?”

Until I saw that the impediment was no longer circumstance. It was me. What stopped me from saying hineini, from saying “yes” to being called, was, ultimately, my investment in a particular story. My long-rehearsed, well-polished, coulda-shoulda-woulda life story about wanting to be and not getting to be a rabbi. Of having been too out too early. Of having been distracted by an epidemic. Of having gotten swept into show business and family and a million other compelling things. I realized that this story was precious to me. This story kept me safe; kept me insulated from the risk of failing at actually being a rabbi. Plus it was a compelling story – tragic and quirky. And you know how much I love being a quirky story.

And over months, in the silence, I realized that I could, finally, let that story go. That life was too short to hang onto it. And when the decision finally made itself, I sat and cried – from relief. Because it is hard work refusing a call for so long.

It is hard work refusing a call. I think you know that’s true, because I think we’ve all done it. Many of us are doing it now, laboring to say “no” to something we feel called to do, or to change, or to be: more generous, more engaged, move loving, more learned. Even to repair a long broken relationship. I suspect that if right now I asked you to complete the sentence, “If I could, if there was nothing to hold me back, I would _____,” you would be able to answer instantly. And yet so often we don’t do it. Because of some “can’t” standing in the way. There might be financial barriers or physical barriers of course. But there might be something else too. Some story, some bad experience, some fear, some hurt, someone who told you not to quit your day job, or some deeply conditioned low expectation of yourself, that keeps you from saying hineini, “here I am” when the still small voice calls you. Maybe this year, maybe this season, maybe this day, will be your time to look at that obstacle, at the thing the keeps you from saying yes, and asking yourself why it is so precious to you. Why it is more precious than being who you are called to be. Maybe it is something you can now, finally, let go of.

What more is there to say? Maybe there is no call from the divine. Maybe there is no prophecy in dreams. Maybe coincidences are simply a question of the mathematics of the universe. Maybe all calls, or at least the good ones, come from deep inside, from a place of knowing that sits in our bones and in our kishkes. As they say in the old urban legends, “The call is coming from inside the house.” And that would be okay too. And its being locally sourced doesn’t prohibit us from holding it with the care and honor that we would if it were divine. In holding it that way, it becomes divine.

And if the call is hard to hear, we might be able to cultivate ways to hear it better. Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi z”l said, “There are contemplative tools, such as prayer, meditation and so forth. The more you use those tools, the more attuned you’ll become to intuition.”[10]

So let me bless you, and let me ask you to bless me back.[11] May you be blessed to deepen into your intuitions. May you be blessed to be able to listen deeply. May you be blessed to remove obstacles in your path. May you be blesed to say, when the time is right, “Hineini, yes, here I am.”

Okay, so one final dream about my mother. But I didn’t dream this one. It was dreamt by an acquaintance and Kinsey Sicks fan, who called me urgently one day this spring because my mother had come to him in a dream asking him to warn me about something. I listened and felt the Litvak in me putting up a wall. Really? I thought. I should believe this why? Not to mention my injured vanity: the nerve of someone else to dream about my mother. In lawyerly fashion, I asked him why he thought my mother would’ve come to him with a message when she could’ve come to me directly. He said, “Funny, I asked her that. And she said that you were so busy, she didn’t want to bother you.”

Words my mother had, of course, said to me a million times.

Maybe it’s coincidence.

And maybe, like in the Chasidic stories, the cynical Litvak gets won over.

Thank you to Rabbi Eli Cohen and Reb Eli Herb (my "Go-Two") and Rabbi David Evan Markus for their support on this one. I was also moved by some timely things said by Rabbi Shohama Wiener, Jan Abramovitz and Charles May.

If my deciding to go to rabbinical school is news to you (and it might be) and you'd like to celebrate with me, consider a contribution to Congregation Ner Shalom.

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[1] BT Berachot 57b. Five things are a 60th part of something else: namely, fire, honey, Sabbath, sleep and a dream. Fire is one-sixtieth part of Gehinnom. Honey is one-sixtieth part of manna. Sabbath is one-sixtieth part of the world to come. Sleep is one-sixtieth part of death. A dream is one-sixtieth part of prophecy.

[2] BT Baba Batra 12a

[3] Deuteronomy 34:10

[4] Rabbi David Evan Markus coined this word in response to my request for one meaning just this.

[5] Likutei Moharan, Teaching 63.

[6] You can try this out by glancing outside the window right now, looking at a tree and imagining its song.

[7] Bereishit Rabba 10:6.

[8] Kings I 19:9-13

[9] Leviticus, the third book of Torah, is called in Hebrew Vayikra, meaning, “He called,” because that is the opening word of the book. Vayikra el-Moshe, “He – or it – called to Moses.” The sentence, fascinatingly, doesn’t actually make God the caller. But this word, vayikra, has a very special orthographic feature. Its final letter, aleph, is written half-size. In every Torah scroll in existence. And the reason is not clear. But some say that it is a way of communicating that when one receives a call, it is not necessarily through speech, through a great booming voice. But rather in silence. Aleph is our silent letter. And, at half size in this word, it is taken to represent the kol d’mamah dakah, the “still, small voice” that Elijah perceived. 

[10] The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery, by Sara Davidson (2014 HarperOne).

[11] I’m so grateful to Eli Herb for offering me this formulation, which he learned from Maggid Yitzchak Buxbaum, who learned it from Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.

The Mikveh of Elul

This is a piece of a much more involved Chasidic teaching by the B'nai Yissachar, Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov (1783-1841), that I learned from Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg through his Moadim L'Simcha class at Aleph and that I shared at the Selichot Service at Congregation Ner Shalom on September 5, 2015. Thank you to Cynthia Calmenson for insisting I post it.

If we think of all of the ways in which we've missed the mark; the longings that have gone astray; the hurts we've inflicted and the hurts we've absorbed; we see that it all comes from the fact of our lives in this physical world. We were once, the mystics would say, part of a great infinity that is God, the Eyn Sof. We mostly can't remember it. Because when we are born, we become subject to the needs of our bodies - the hungers, the longings, the frailties that drive us. We fall under the illusion that we are all separate from each other. And that we are separate from God. And cut loose like that, we wander through our lives, trying to do the best we can, but getting bruised and bruising others and ourselves all along the way.

This is the time of year when we do teshuvah, when we try to return. So, is there any way to return to the Oneness that we once experienced, the endlessness of God that we were part of? Can we let go, even briefly, of the separateness that is often the source of adventure and delight, but that also can cause us so much loneliness and pain?

There is recipe for dissolving. It is, as any cook can tell you: mix with water. When we immerse ourselves in the mikveh, we dissolve back into a greater Oneness.

But how much water do you need? Too little, and you end up with something lumpy, and that's not what we're looking for. Talmud tells us that a mikveh must have 960 lugin of living water in it. We no longer know exactly how much a log is. But the B'nai Yissachar, a student of the great Seer of Lublin, gives us some mathematics to explain why 960. So now we're going to do some math.

The first piece of the math is this. Talmud tells us that one part in 60 is the proper proportion for something to become nullified. If a drop of milk falls in the meat soup, it lets go of its nature and becomes one with the soup - and kosher! - as long as the soup is at least 60 times the volume of the drop of milk. Sixty-to-one is the ratio of bitul. Of nullification. Of dissolving. Of transforming.

Meanwhile our bodies, our physical human natures, that tug at us and pull us away from our Divine source are made up of 4 elements: fire, water, air and earth. But it's more subtle than that. If that were the full recipe for humanity, we'd be rather simple and rather similar. But we are all different from each other because in each of us the chemistry of elements is different. My fire-element is in itself made up of four elements: mostly of fire, but also some air and water and earth, in a combination that is unique to me. So each of us is made up of four elements, and those are each made up of four elements. And so, the B'nai Yissachar teaches, our earthly selves are composed of 16 elements of This-Worldliness. Those 16 elements are where we live our lives, and what keep us feeling separate.

So if we want, even for a moment, to dissolve back into Divinity, back to our Source, we need to dissolve each of those 16 elements. And by what ratio? Sixty-to-one, like the milk in the soup.

60 x 16 = 960

It takes 960 measures of living water in the mikveh to make our 16 earthy elements dissolve back into the infinite of God, to lose ourselves in the Divine soup.

But wait, there's more. The number 960 now becomes the number forever associated with the mikveh and our shot at re-absorption into God.

Why is that important? We are now in this special, tender period of teshuvah, of reflection and returning. It runs from the beginning of Elul through not just the end of the month, but onward 10 more days through Yom Kippur. A 40-day period of teshuvah. And of course every one of those days has 24 hours. Now wait for it:

40 days x 24 hours = 960

Bingo. The exact number that represents a mikveh.

And that, by the B'nai Issachar's reasoning, makes this period of time, the month of Elul and the Ten Days of Awe, a mikveh in time. We have 960 hours in which to immerse ourselves, in which to dissolve, in which to remember what it was like before we were born, when we were each other, when we were God.

We are 22 days in. We are in the center of the mikveh.

May we immerse; may we dissolve; and may we emerge renewed.

At the Rebbe's Gay Tish

If this were a Chassidic tale, it might begin with a journey. Maybe a great rabbi in disguise as a pauper, visiting poor households and offering miraculous blessings. Or perhaps someone traveling to a great city to arrange a marriage or find a cure or sell an old wagon. And on the journey there might be an unexpected obstacle – a horse goes lame, a river floods, or Shabbes falls early.

My story begins with a journey in early August, from Manhattan to Albany, on my way to the foothills of the Berkshires for Nehirim Camp, a sorta-real, sorta-mock summer camp experience for gay Jewish men. My accidental seatmate on the train was an Orthodox Jewish guy, with a tractate of Talmud on his tray table. I asked what he was studying. “Talmud,” he answered.

“I know, but which volume?”

His eyes darted around nervously. “Niddah,” he whispered. This is the tractate about women’s purity and menstruation. His face reddened. “I never had the chance to study this when I was young,” he added, looking like he’d been caught with his hands in his mother’s dresser drawers.

If this were a Chassidic tale, the unexpected traveling companion would maybe be a supernatural figure, posing as flesh and blood. Maybe an angel, maybe a demon. And when I get caught up in conversation with someone who is Orthodox, I confess that I’m open to the angel, but tend to expect the demon. I expect that as he gets to know me, I will be judged and condemned, the naked-headed gay guy who talks Torah but drives on Shabbes. I would be his demon.

But I was feeling happy that morning, maybe more expansive than usual. So I took the risk of conversation, and soon we were, to my surprise, studying together, not Niddah, which stayed resolutely shut, but a project of mine. An hour in, he asked me where I was heading. “To a gay Jewish retreat,” I answered.

Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Our hearts marked time while our eyes remained riveted to the back of the seats in front of us, the Hudson Valley flying past the window.

“So you’re gay?” he asked.

“Yup.”

And I braced myself for an as-yet unformulated unpleasantness. Instead, he dropped his head, sighed and said, “It’s terrible what happened in Jerusalem last week.” Meaning the murder of a 16-year old girl by a crazed Orthodox man at the Jerusalem pride parade. I was caught off guard by his compassion and his sad tone, as if he were apologizing for both the incident and his own helplessness. My surprise was not unlike the surprise of so many Chasidim in so many stories, when the rebbe reveals unexpected magical knowledge of a joy or a tragedy that his disciples had not perceived.

“Yes. Terrible,” I replied. We sat in silence for some minutes, and then resumed our study.

Eventually I arrived at the Easton Mountain retreat center in Greenwich (“Green-Witch”) – not Greenwich (“Grennitch”) – New York. And green Greenwich certainly was. Coming from our thirsty state, the expanses of soft grass and the array of ponds and lakes seemed immodest almost to the point of vulgarity.

Once there I met the week’s other faculty members, including a rabbi, a cantor, a yoga guy, a nature-and-creativity guy, and a porn actor. We reviewed the schedule and got to work. My docket included teaching a class every day of the retreat, leading the Friday night service, and holding a late night tish, modeled on the Rebbe’s Tish of old, where I would tell stories and lead niggunim.

And then the participants began to roll in. Like Chasidim would pour into Bratzlav or Berditchev or Lublin, to spend the Jewish holiday at the shtibl and table of their favorite rebbe. Instead of Yisroels and Motls and Shmuels, we instead had Davids and Steves and Marks and Sams – several of each, in fact. Instead of gabardines and shtreimls we had shorts and tank tops and, by the pool, nothing at all.

These were guys who had all experienced struggle and exclusion in the world broadly and in the Jewish world specifically, because they were gay, and mostly of a certain generation, and they were here to do some reclaiming of Jewish turf together. Some of them live very active Jewish lives; some were returning to Judaism after long absences. Many had been instrumental in forming gay synagogues on the east coast, where they defiantly re-created the more conservative observance of their childhoods. And so I was struck at how in a group of 50 Jewish gay men, I still felt at the fringe in terms of Jewish ritual and Jewish thinking. Although I am pleased to note that I was not the only one who spent Shabbes in a skirt.

I co-led Kabbalat Shabbat with an old friend who is now a cantor and composer. As soon as I began speaking I became aware that how I do it, commonplace for us here at Ner Shalom, was completely new for most of them. I could see their surprise at the visualizations, and the punch lines, and the sexy talk, and the use of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” as our Ma’ariv Aravim prayer. I was afraid my methods might provoke resistance. Instead, hearts seemed to open up and the night got higher and higher.

And it kept getting higher and higher. After Shabbes dinner we settled in for the tish. For an hour or more, in a small room of dinner tables and folding chairs, we sang niggunim and I told stories, two from the Chassidic world and one from the trusty Chelm repertoire. One of the two Chassidic stories was about women. There are not as many of those stories, but they do exist. They are usually about rebbetzins, the wives of well-known rebbes. They typically have to do with either her generosity or her cooking, both of which are taken in this literature as expressions of piety and closeness to God, and are set out as an example for women and men alike. Beautiful, sweet, non-revolutionary stories.

I brought a rebbetzin story in because in this male-only space, in this somewhat but not completely tongue-in-cheek reenactment of a Chassidic court, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable in my chair and in my body.

I confess that I love the ecstatic singing and storytelling of the Chasidim. And as a man (well, as a man who can pass as straight) (well, as a man who can pass as straight with some considerable effort), loving that stuff is a privilege I have access too. But in my non-nostalgic waking life, it’s not so easy. I am not able or willing to pray or celebrate somewhere in which women are kept out of leadership and out of the room; in which women’s voices are considered treyf, and in which my life and my family would be considered treyf also if anyone bothered to ask about it. So I no longer pray with Chabad, for instance, no matter how good a party they throw, and no matter how much I need to say kaddish. And while it’s fine for the men and women who opt for that life to do what works for them, my participation in it would be, for me, hypocritical.

And caught between these two truths, that sometimes men-only space might be healing and sometimes it might be a danger sign, there we were, a room full of men, just men, singing.

And the singing was celestial. Because these were not just random Jewish men. These were four dozen gay Jewish men. “Artsy” men, as so many of us had been referred to euphemistically by our great aunts. Some of them were fine professional musicians; some were vocally trained. I’d guess 80% of them had been in all their high school musicals, and a good number of those have kept their chops up at piano bars up and down the eastern seaboard. These guys could sing. And they could harmonize. And the walls of the room trembled with the splendor of it. They were a heavenly choir of first and second tenors, baritones and basses. Melodies poured out; tables were pounded. And I couldn’t help but have the overwhelming sense that we were some European yeshivah, or some lively rabbinic court, the way they are described in the stories.

Now if this were a Chassidic story, there would now be a twist. The triumph of some underdog. God accepting the prayer of an outcast over the objection of the rebbe’s disciples. Or maybe the Prophet Elijah would be revealed at a key moment, in the form of a beggar at the door, and the behavior of the characters would be evaluated in a different light. I awaited the twist, the tikkun.

We sat and sang and the room rocked, and it felt impossible that fewer than 50 men could make music this big. And I suddenly had a vision of other souls fluttering into the room. Yeshivah bokhers of centuries past. The ones who spent their youths in love with their study partners. For whom the subtext of love was supplanted by the text of Talmud. For whom desire was requited only by debate. The ones for whom there was no path of fulfillment that included both spirit and body, and who did the best they could to play the roles expected of them, riddled though they might have been by despair. Or for whom, perhaps, it was enough, but for whom today, it would not be.

I felt these souls fluttering into the room to join us, a trace of worn leather and musty books in the air. I felt them taking their places on the few empty folding chairs; or perching on tables or shoulders or the very rafters. I imagined I heard their voices singing out as loudly as we were singing. And we, who had struggled to reclaim a piece of Judaism, had managed to create, for a moment, a safe place for them.

I’m not sure anyone saw this other than me, although it might be that everyone did. But in that moment, the voices of the yoga guy and the porn guy and the nature guy, the voices of men in pastel polos and men in white Shabbes shirts and men in skirts too, rose up, with the counterpoint of skilled musicians and a cry of deep longing, eventually causing the roof to crack right open, and, carrying an unspoken prayer for a more loving world, the music of all these men flew up, like a pillar of flame, straight to heaven.  

Sending much gratitude to Nehirim, Rabbi David Dunn Bauer and all the wonderful men who staffed and attended Nehirim Camp this year.

Journeys, Symbolism and Stomach Distress

Parashat Mas'ei, 5775

Temple at Delphi

Tonight I promised to reflect on my recent trip to Greece and Israel. I advertised this in the blurb for tonight's service in order to force myself to deliver something. But while I anticipated that I would return full of insight from the journey, my biggest insight is that insight is hard to find. Certainly in the moment, in the day-to-day of travel. Things happen. You notice things that invite symbolic interpretation. But then it's immediately subsumed in the dust and grit of the travel itself.

So where could I look for guidance? Why, to this week's Torah portion, of course. It is called Mas'ei and it contains the first piece of travel writing in Jewish history. It is a recap of the 42 marches of the Israelites through the wilderness, beginning with the Exodus from Egypt and ending on the brink of Deuteronomy, at the edge of the Promised Land. And the author of this recap? Well, it turns out that Moshe is not only a prince, a prophet and a shepherd, but a travel writer also. Torah says Moshe wrote this, and this is in fact the first mention of writing that appears in Torah.

But Moshe is no writer of fluff. He does not do it up like a Hemispheres Magazine feature, "Forty Perfect Years in the Desert," complete with romantic spots and clever recipes for manna. Instead, he sticks to the facts, and refrains from romanticizing them:

The Israelites set out from R'amses and encamped at Sukot. They set out from Sukot and encamped at Etam. They set out from Etam and turned toward Pi-Hachirot, and encamped at Migdol.

Moshe's account is so dry, so matter-of-fact that some wonder why he bothered at all. The commentator Rashi deduces that it is for the sole purpose of demonstrating that it wasn't as bad for the Children of Israel as we might think. It wasn't 40 years of constant wandering, but rather 42 distinct journeys, many clustered together in the first year, so that there were often long years settled in one spot.

But Moshe himself offers no evaluation, no symbolism, even though we all know that journeys have a symbolic quality.

And similarly, I know that my journeys over the last six weeks are ripe for meaning-making. I even knew it at the time. But reflection is a luxury, and the journeys of our lives rarely afford us the time to indulge in it.

Still, you're here, and I can't cop out on my promise. So I'll tell you what I can, and offer as much meaning as I was able to develop in the moment.

We were first in Greece. At this point there were 8 of us - the four adults of my household, the two kids, and each of their best friends. In Athens, Elefsina, Delphi we looked at antiquities. Sites dedicated to Athena, to Poseidon, to Demeter, to Apollo, gods whose stories remain alive in our culture, even while their temples stand in ruins. Gods who could bring abundance or chaos at their whim. And while we toured these dusty portals to the past, Athenians were withdrawing their Euros from bank machines, shoring up what they could before disaster strikes. I began to wonder about the paroxysms of good and bad fortune that constitute individual lives and the life of a nation, and how every moment is a piece of history being lived, and how hard we work to create a world view that makes some sense of the senselessness of one's fortune. I was about to draw a conclusion from this, that maybe I could share with you tonight, but it was a hot day, and as we walked from the Acropolis to the Temple of Dionysus, we realized we'd taken a wrong turn, and had to retrace our steps, and our legs were tired already, and my thoughts flattened under the weight of backpack and jet lag.

Only half of our group went on to Israel: Oren and I, our 14-year old and his best friend. We four arrived in Tel Aviv and almost immediately it was Shabbat. We strolled. We took the kids to a park where they climbed a rock wall and played on bungies and trampolines. It wasn't a day of traditional shabbos. No prayers, no study, no songs around a table. Still, we rested. Tel Aviv rested. It was a day different from other days, filled with friends and fresh air and recreation. And I appreciated how Shabbat managed to disguise herself in this secular way. Shabbat, our ingenious bride, was not in her usual wedding dress but in sweats and a headband, jogging through Yarkon Park, rejoicing to be with us nonetheless. I was about to register a thought about this, but right then we saw this hilarious sign telling people to clean up after their dogs. It offered doggy cleanup bags, which it memorably called in Hebrew, sakei kaka. We laughed our heads off and whatever fancy idea I'd had about Shabbat dissolved in our Saturday afternoon mirth.

The next day we drove from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea. We spontaneously decided to stop off in Jerusalem to visit Yad Vashem, the museum that is the mothership of Holocaust memory. An awareness of the Shoah's shadow is important for understanding Israeli history and character, so Oren and I decided that the kids' seeing it early in the trip made sense. While there, I walked into a chilling room they call the Hall of Names. It is multi-storied and cylindrical, containing not only projected pictures and names, but also floor-to-ceiling shelves holding binders filled with Witness Sheets, which are forms filled out by survivors naming everyone they knew who perished. I entered and there was a group already there being given a tour. A teenager looked up and met my eyes. We stared for an uncomfortable moment before I realized this was someone I knew, someone from the Chicago suburbs, whose mother had been my camper and whose grandmother was my mother's best friend. We hugged in this bizarre moment of uncanniness, and I asked what kind of group he was here with. A BJBE group, he answered. That is, my childhood synagogue. And with that, the rabbi walked up to greet me and there, in this place of loss and memory, she told me how affected she'd been by my mother's death. My mind spun. How all three of us, tied to each other by memory and by our shared Old Country ended up in the same moment in this shrine to memory and to a lost Old Country. I drifted to the supernatural - what intuition brought me here today, of all days, only to stumble upon my own roots? I became lost in this thought, but suddenly we were in the Yad Vashem cafeteria, and I had to figure out if vegetarian food was available on the fleishik side so that I could sit and eat with my voraciously carnivorous 14-year old, and I got caught up in a conversation with the chef about his meatless shnitzel, and by then thoughts of kismet and divine intervention were crumbs swept away.

Ancient Synagogue, Kfar Nachum

The following week, we spent a day in the Galilee, a place with water and green fields and a history of Jewish study and mysticism. We visited the grave of Maimonides and also that of Yochanan Ben Zakkai, the Roman-era sage who got smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin in order to try to appease the Roman general who was besieging the city. He failed to prevent the destruction of the Temple. But Vespasian allowed him to set up an academy in Yavneh. And there, Ben Zakkai dreamed up portable Judaism - substituting prayers for animal sacrifice as our path to God. It was a time of national calamity, yet he invented the means for keeping Jewish belief and Jewish people alive in exile.

We went on to an ancient synagogue in Kfar Nachum, where Jesus is reported to have preached. And we finished by washing off the dust of antiquity in the Kineret, the harp-shaped, freshwater Sea of Galilee.

As we began our drive back to my in-laws' home in Haifa we took a wrong turn. We ended up in a cul-de-sac in the town of Yavne'el. This place is a Bratslaver Chasidic enclave, 400 families, all followers of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, who was famous for many things including comparing the world to a narrow bridge and also his beautiful if hard-to-follow watchwords: It is a great mitzvah to be happy always. And his followers do seem ecstatic much of the time, in ways that sometimes feel aggravating to the rest of us shleppers. As we circled the cul-de-sac an older man in a Bratzlaver white shirt and kippah stepped in front of the car and motioned for us to stop. I opened my window not knowing if I'd be scolded or proselytized. Instead he asked what we were looking for. The road to Afula, I answered. And he gave us directions, plain and simple, and his round, bearded face was simply radiant. I was suddenly reminded of Joseph, sent by Jacob to his brothers in the field, and getting lost. There he meets a man, in Hebrew an ish, who directs him to his brothers and to his fate, because his brothers that very day sell him into slavery whence he ultimately becomes an Egyptian vizier and the savior of his family. The sages say the ish, the man who appears for no reason but to point someone on a path, is inevitably an angel. I looked at this man outside the car window and wanted to call him tzaddik, O saint, but instead I thanked him simply and drove away, wondering what destiny this angel was pointing us toward. I was nearly certain that if I spun around the circle one more time, he'd be gone. I was filled with expectation, with a sense of fate, and magic, and a bit of contact high of Bratzlaver joy. I would have made something of this; I would have written about it for you. But then outside Afula I saw Kibbutz Mizra, famous for making pork products, and I started telling the kids about my childhood friend Ken who traveled all the way to Israel to live for six months on kibbutz and ended up assigned here, making hamburger on a Hollymatic industrial meatgrinder, ironically manufactured in his home town on the south side of Chicago. And by the time I was done with this story, the Bratslaver had, in fact, disappeared from my head.

Scrabble Shark (r.)

We had many adventures, many travels. I learned many things. I learned that 14-year olds can make dust angels on the floors of ancient chalk caves, and still have to be told to wear different clothes the next day. I learned that my role when playing Scrabble with my champion-level mother-in-law is not to try to win, which would be futile, but to provide good cheer as she reduces the rest of the players to rubble. I had many dreams, and I learned how easily the prosaic sits beside the magical within them; how in an anxiety dream about being on stage with the Kinsey Sicks, and the audience misconstruing a pause as the end of the show and beginning to file toward the exits, I still, in the dream, had the lucidity to say, "Don't forget to tip your server." Dreams come alive in Israel, and I would've made something of that fact, something beautiful, but each day, my morning cup of coffee would drive the dream from my memory.

Now here's something you might find interesting. On our final day, heading to Tel Aviv for the evening, I noticed an empty, overgrown field along the freeway with a sign on it saying, Anachnu shomrei shmitah, "we are observing the shmitah." That is, the sabbatical year, the fallow year. The owners of this field were advertising that they had not temporarily sold their field to an Arab family as a loophole around the ancient law. Instead, they were letting the field be - not tilling, not pruning, not harvesting - and trusting that it would be okay. And I wondered about this year that I've had, that I began on this bimah, suggesting that we all consider doing less, trying less hard to control everything in our environments, that in the spirit of shmitah, we let things be, just a little bit. And I noticed that I did not in fact do that this year. That my fingers remained busily engaged in every corner of my life, and the respite I'd promised myself I had failed to deliver. I wondered if it was too late to commit to letting go, at least between now and Rosh Hashanah. I began to feel that yes, this would be possible and I would have made some resolutions around it. But just then we reached Tel Aviv, and if you've ever tried to park around Dizengoff Square on a summer night, you know how fully occupying that is. The resolutions remained unresolved.

At last we were on the plane coming home. I was alone with the two boys. I looked at them next to me and I knew in that instant just how fortunate I was. To be able to have this experience. To have enough money to travel and to be able-bodied enough to do so. To be able to show my kid the Israel that I know and love. To have seen him pretend not to learn any Hebrew at all until the last night when I overheard him calling a waiter by saying, selichah. I felt myself steeped deep in blessing. I might have written a poem on the flight. I might have written a prayer. But at some point the special meal I had ordered proved more special than anticipated, and as I threw up for the fourth time in the airplane bathroom, my sense of gratitude became harder to connect to. And yet, as they rolled me off the plane in a wheelchair, through the barely open slits of my eyes I saw the two 14-year olds heroically handling our passports and customs forms and getting us through immigration and out of the airport. And I felt proud and heartened that the sullenness of teenagers turns out to be camouflage masking generous and capable people who will one day emerge like sun through a break in the clouds.

This trip was hard work. All the journeys in our lives are hard work. There are sore feet and blisters. Blazing sun and cold rain. Useless maps and cranky negotiations and food poisoning and good companions and kind strangers. Our journeys are filled with metaphor. But in the course of them, and in their immediate aftermath, our feet and sometimes our stomachs are too sore for symbolism. And in those instances, maybe reciting the map of our travels is all we can reasonably do. And so I will reel back to Moshe's very real level of detail when I tell you this: We went to Greece. From there to Israel. And now, at journey's end, I'm glad to be home.



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Okay, I did reflect a little while there. For my reflections on Jerusalem, click here: City of Stone and Flowers.

City of Stone and Flowers

A Postcard from Jerusalem.

It's less like other cities in Israel, and more like Burning Man, I explained to our 14-year old as we headed to Jerusalem on Wednesday. We had stopped for a nosh in Herzliya at a branch of a sophisticated Israeli coffee chain, our last swig of stainless-steel modernity before beginning the climb to bewilderment that the Old Jerusalem Road has come to represent.

What I mean by it being like Burning Man, I explained (since for him Burning Man is a reasonable and friendly point of reference) is that everything in Jerusalem is notched up one. People who visit here are tourists-plus. People who live here are residents-plus. Plus what? They're Seekers. Or Pilgrims. Or Professional Jews. Or Chasidim. Or Artists. Or Poets. Or Peace Workers. Or Little Old Ladies who Immigrated Against All Odds. Like at Burning Man, everything - necessarily - has intentionality. There is nothing casual. Even trying to live normally requires a romantic idea and considerable effort. A seemingly simple life in an orderly Rechavia apartment, taking the bus to concerts and sipping ice coffee in a corner cafe, is a normalcy that must be fashioned. Not making a statement here is itself a statement. See? I live in Jerusalem, and I'm not a crackpot like those others.

This city mystifies me. I arrive here each time and fail to find my way around. I lived here for a full year in college. I've had 7 other occasions to spend time in and out of Jerusalem. But each time, when I roll in, the streets rearrange themselves so that I'm always walking the long way when the most direct route is right where I'd been standing to begin with. Something I'd remembered as next door turns out to be many blocks away; something I'd remembered as prohibitively remote suddenly looms in front of me. Finally today I gave up altogether and left the map in my pocket, letting the 14-year old's best friend do the navigating, quite efficiently, using the impressive internal compass he's somehow developed in just two days.

I'm always at a loss for where I stand in Jerusalem, and not just geographically. I don't know how to represent myself. I'm an American Jewish tourist, but I mostly shy away from American Jewish tourists for internalized Anti-Semitic reasons that I have yet to fully own. My Hebrew is fluent and I have a smattering of Arabic, so I prefer to be taken for an unidentifiable foreigner when possible, an international secret agent rather than someone for whom Israel was the next logical step after summer camp.

But this is a city where people clearly represent themselves. Everyone has a specific role in the social disorder, and they wear associated uniforms so as to be easily identifiable to others and to each other. The height of the hat. The pattern on the scarf. Long coat. Short coat. Wig. White kippah. Leggings. My friend Amichai has stood with me in Jerusalem, identifying branch of Chasid, city of origin in the Old Country and specific Yeshivah based entirely on the particulars of the costume. I am not so expert, and the 14-year-olds are complete novices. I pointed out two dark-robed, bearded men to them in the Old City, and they cycled through every flavor of Chasid they'd heard of before realizing that they were actually Russian Orthodox priests.

I would like to wear a kippah here. I have a gut desire to somehow convey that like others of louder costuming, I take my place in Judaism seriously. But I don't understand the ideological iconography of kippot well enough to know and control what statement I may or may not be making in the process. (See this essay by my cousin Alden Solovy for a sense of why.)

Like many of the people in this city, I engage with Torah. But I don't know how to engage with them about Torah. I don't know the rules here and I'm afraid of being proselytized or patronized or even - my deepest unspoken fear - bullied. So, for instance, the Chasid next to me on the bus today coming from the Western Wall (long black coat, brimmed hat, pants-not-stockings), who kept dozing off and falling into me, was at first trying to study this week's Torah portion - Balak (as I could see by covertly eying his reading material). I wanted to strike up a conversation. I wanted to say, I think Balaam knew all along he was going to bless the Children of Israel; he just had some personal process and political wrinkles to work out, don't you think? Maybe he would have been surprised and delighted. But I was afraid of scorn. So despite Pirkei Avot telling us that where two people exchange words of Torah, the Divine Presence rests, I kept silent and left a restless God hovering somewhere outside of the bus, breathing exhaust.

Maybe if I could be here longer, more than a few days every few years, I could find an entry point, a crack in the stone. This is a city of stone, after all: Jerusalem stone. An off-white limestone that every building, by custom and law, is made of, giving the city a silvery glow at night and its famed "Jerusalem of Gold" radiance by day. And out of the cracks grow scrubby, flowering things. Lantana, bougainvillea, sage. Stone and flower are how this city looks, dust and rosemary its smells.

It is also a place of blazing white heat. Not just solar heat but political heat. Ethnic heat. Religious heat. I went with the kids today to the Western Wall to tour the tunnels underneath. This excavation reveals the full western side of the Roman-era Temple Mount, of which the Western Wall where Jews pray constitutes only one eighth or so.

To do this we breezed past the compact women's prayer section and the much more spacious men's section, aware that while before the State of Israel men and women mingled freely at this holiest of spots, the division of the sexes is now zealously enforced by a politically empowered religious authority, with the bulk of rights and privileges denied to women altogether. We descended into the Jewishly characterized tunnels, which were mined under the 1400-year old Muslim Quarter, and it belatedly dawned on me how this very excavation is meant, at least in part, to undermine Muslim authority in this much too holy, much too earthly place.

You see, every stone here is claimed, and every  claim is refuted. And so it has been since Jerusalem's earliest history. Jebusites, Israelites, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Mamluks, Crusaders, Ottomans, British and Jews again. We tend to imagine clean lines of ownership, like a chart in a textbook looking like a layer cake. But the struggle for Jerusalem has always been stone by stone, street by street, tunnel by tunnel. Small aggressions only occasionally punctuated by outright conquest.

At the end of the tour we reversed course and retraced the entire route to the Jewish-run and heavily policed Western Wall plaza. There would be no exit today through the Muslim Quarter. The Old City was to be closed to tourists at noon, because it is the one-year anniversary of Jewish hoodlums kidnapping and killing an Arab boy in retaliation for the abduction and murder of three Jewish Yeshivah boys, and it was feared tensions would be high.

Conflict hangs in the Jerusalem air like pollen, like dust, like humidity. You feel like you are complicit in something by breathing it, but breathe you must.

But here's the thing: I still love this place. With all its intensity, with its beyond-cliche contradictions. It is a place where uncanny things happen to me. Where on my first night here, at age 16, I unexpectedly bump into my home rabbi at the Western Wall. And today, at age 54, I bump into him again at virtually the same spot. A place where I once decided to seek out the grave of the Maiden of Ludmir on the Mount of Olives and - would you ever believe me if I told you? - a bird led me to it. This place is thick with uncanny, living unremarkably alongside the prosaic: dust and noise and soldiers and vendors and bus drivers and shouting children. I can't explain how this happens. Do the overlapping dreams that thousands of people bring here somehow congeal to form some mystical field? Magic happens everywhere, perhaps. But here, like at Burning Man, everyone is looking for it all at once.

Clearly, life is simpler anywhere else than here. When I leave Jerusalem, I always feel a mixture of sadness and relief.

But right now I'm here. Welcoming Shabbat with the music-making hip Jews, both Israeli and American, down at the old train station. Walking neighborhoods that are probably quieter in my mind than they are in actuality. At some point tonight, despite a fumbled rendezvous and a botched picnic and the 14-year olds, with no real knowledge of Hebrew, managing to organize neighborhood children into what is undoubtedly a junior crime ring; at some point, this city indeed got quieter and gentler, snippets of zmirot poured out of windows, laughter could be heard, calm could be felt; at some point the Shechinah, earlier kicked off a crowded bus, now robed in purple night, settled at last on a city of flowers and stone.

Pagan Day (Postcard from Greece)

On Mt. Parnassus.

There are some ideas that are best expressed in the language that gave rise to them: cognoscenti, joie de vivre, farklempt.

And once in a while, there’s a spiritual impulse that just wants to be expressed in a pagan idiom, no matter how dyed-in-the-wool a monotheist you happen to be.

And such was the progression of things for me this week, taking off for the family trip to Greece (Israel next week), reciting a tefilat haderech, the traditional travel prayer, and slowly experiencing my trusty religious touchstones falling away.

At first I didn’t see it. I’d been to Athens more than once before, so climbing the Acropolis was mostly to show this wonder to my family. And it is a wonder, somehow still managing to move and impress, despite the attention-grabbing behavior of scaffolding, cranes and thousands of tourists with selfie-sticks. Still, I was there as a tourist, not an acolyte, and my touristic needs were more than met.

But on Friday morning the feel of this ancient and densely historied place began to change. Our Athenian friend and host brought us to his hometown of Elefsina, the historical Eleusis where, as we all undoubtedly recall, Hades emerged from the Underworld to abduct the unsuspecting Persephone. Elefsina still contains the ruins of a large temple compound. Not a single pillar is standing. But the footprint is so well preserved that you can easily imagine the temple’s grandeur and the dignified movement of pilgrims and priestesses in its courtyard. It is dedicated to Demeter, goddess of the harvest and mother of Persephone. In ancient times devotees would walk from the Acropolis in Athens all the way to Eleusis with gifts of grain and cakes. Now, above the ruins, there is a tiny Orthodox church. Visitors leave offerings of loaves of bread.

Elsewhere in the compound is a rock where legend places Demeter, sitting and weeping for her lost daughter, not yet having heard of her abduction to the underworld or the whole sorry pomegranate seed business. At the mouth of a shallow cave several feet away there is the foundation of a small temple of Hades, marking the spot where the cave opened up just long enough for god of the underworld’s quick incursion into the land of the living. While Demeter sat and wept, the crops refused to grow. A shrine to Hades so close to the source of what is remembered as worldwide famine is hardly surprising. It is only we who carry the illusion that somehow there will always be enough.

Our Athenian host grew up just outside the fence of the compound. While many people complain about where their upbringings, he is the only one I know who could, with some legitimacy, claim to have grown up at the Gates of Hell. But in actuality he has great fondness for this ground that was the scene of such an archetypal story. The ruins were his playground; the gods his friends. As we left I saw that in a crack at the back of the cave someone had left a pomegranate.

We took our leave of Demeter and returned to Athens. That evening, the college boy (and best friend of our 18-year old) who is traveling with us, and who has not been out of the country before, staged a coup. Waking us all from our late afternoon jetlag-induced naps, he proposed a visit to the Poseidon temple in Sounion, south of Athens, for sunset. Bleary-eyed and heavy-limbed, we agreed. By the time we got in the mini-van we knew we’d never make it by sunset, let alone by temple closing time. But somehow, once Poseidon was invoked, we didn’t want to let him down. We drove south, and when Apollo’s fiery chariot closed in on the horizon, we scrambled down to a rocky beach and watched the turquoise water darken and the sky grow golden over it.

It was now Erev Shabbat. As I sometimes do when I’m traveling on a Friday night, I imagined the Shechinah approaching in her Shabbos bride drag. But somehow she couldn’t quite compete in that moment over Poseidon, in his native land, trident gently, incessantly, stirring the opalescent waves.

The next morning we left Athens and headed west. We had a date to keep with the oracle at Delphi, and this would be our travel day to get there. It was an easy day – we drove, settled in, hung out in the sleepy village of Aráchova. Then the college boy got a second wind. We had spent time on the drive reading through entries in the goldmine that is the 2-volume Pelican Greek Mythology by Robert Graves. In it he not only retells the myths we learned as children, but every variant version, every tangent, every increasingly horrifying detail that had been politely omitted in school. The college boy and I speculated about the strata of history reflected in the mythology: underlying migrations, conquests, advancements and terrors. We wondered about the religious life of the ancient Greeks. We commented on how well their pantheism suited the experience of life’s random brutality. Because so much of Greek mythology is about the tension between randomness and fate. You couldn’t predict what would happen. And you could predict it all. You could, if you bothered to read the texts, foresee that no matter how many babies you left to die on hillsides or swallowed whole, they would invariably come back and cause your ruination. No matter how humble a life you led, your one moment of smugness would cause some offended deity to turn you into something ironic, and you would go from being an average Joe to a smirk-worthy example for generations to come. Even as we drove in the car I found myself starting to watch my words, lest I piss off some Olympian still haunting this epic landscape, lurking behind one of the petrol stations or unfinished housing developments that Homer could not have foreseen. I didn’t actually believe they were there, but hedging my bets felt prudent.

So as I said, the college boy was again on fire. There was a cave between our lodging and Delphi that was vaguely connected to the Delphian rite – it was the weekend time-share of the oracle or something. It was also home to Pan, the half-man, half-goat demigod of revelry, mischief, licentiousness. The cave is not far, reachable by car and a short, 500m hike. Can we go? Right now?

Yes. Of course yes.

As it turned out, the short hike was not. It lasted over an hour in the heat, up a steep mountainside rising out of a valley that was itself high up on Mount Parnassus. It was a hot evening; my lungs strained against the thin air and my t-shirt filled with sweat. The only sound accompanying us were bells worn by goats in the valley below us, goats that suddenly and mysteriously appeared on and around our path, watching us, like Pan’s vanguard.

Did you know that Pan was also the god of terror? Considered the source of unidentifiable woodland noises, his name gives us the word panic. I tried not to panic at the quivering of my muscles or the angle of the climb. I veered off course more than once (you’d think the culture that invented geometry would not use isosceles triangles as direction markers); got caught in thickets of razor-sharp holly. At last I gave up and told the others to go on without me. But as always, my husband allowed me my moment and then gently urged me on.

And then we were there. The cave opened before us. We stepped in and the temperature dropped 20 degrees. We couldn’t yet see the ceiling or walls. But we could see our breath. The cave was big as an auditorium and, the college boy and I estimated, at least 60 feet tall. Small votives burned in various crevices, with roses and cherries and olives around them. Someone had made a stone circle on the dark ground. Were these things placed, were the candles lit, by Dodekatheists – modern pagans honoring the Olympian gods? Or were there others who maintained an unbroken tradition of caring for the place, dating back so many thousands of years? Like Sephardic crypto-Jews in the Americas lighting candles on Friday nights to stay true to a religion they no longer had a name for?

Pan's Cave, from the back, looking through and out.

The site was simple. There was no temple. There were no ruins. Just a dark wet cave. The college boy pointed out that it was, by definition, the most intact shrine we had or would visit. He was right. It was whole and in perfect working order.

I was nervous being there. Pan is a tricky god to like; he represents what are considered in our culture to be shadow elements in us, sexuality not the least of them. Whatever vestige of a hoofed deity existed in Judaism was already, by Torah times, a spotty memory – Azazel, a goatlike creature in the wilderness who would receive the annual offering of our sins, sent by unlikely messenger – a goat. Our folklore over the centuries went on to recast the hoofed deity as demon or imp. The Christians put the ribbon on the package by imagining Satan as Pan, all grown up.

But a part of me felt happy too. What fun to be able to reclaim one’s mischievous, irreverent, naughty nature as divinely inspired! Because in a world in which the divine is made up of uncountable gods and demigods, each with different characteristics, you can always, no matter how unusual you are, find yourself reflected somewhere in the pantheon. The pagan cosmos is refracted into infinite variety. There is male and female and fluidity between. There is warlike and peaceful. Randy and chaste. Strong, swift, studious and differently abled. If I am different from you, I can express that theologically. I can say, for example, that Apollo is my patron, with an undercurrent of Athena and Hermes, and some Pan on the side. I would visit their shrines and leave offerings.

Trying to conjure up the Pan part of me in my Jewish view of God is a taller order. And that is a built-in systemic difficulty in a one-size-fits-all view of God. In order to feel ourselves, in all our variety, as tzelem Elohim, as being in the image of God, we resort to imagining God’s many “aspects.” But the more specific we get about those aspects, the more idolatrous it feels. Maimonides denied the existence of aspects; he liked God singular, undifferentiated. Which leaves an amorphous, blobby sort of God, in which we’re all included in a kind of abstract and not-always-satisfying way.

And, I often feel, just when we’re trying to reclaim or reframe something about God in order to be personally connected, our old texts step in and mess it up. If God remained an All-Is-One singularity, one could maybe work with it with some ease. But once the One God gives a law, a hierarchy is inherently created. Some human traits are honored and others delegitimized. The places where the law speaks to you poorly or not at all because you are a woman or you are intersex or queer or disabled or intermarried – these make it hard to see yourself included in God rather than judged or dismissed by same. And so many Jews, full of Athena-like wisdom and Apollo-like talent and Pan-like mischief walk away and find their fulfillment elsewhere.

Monotheism might be our collective Jewish instinct. It might be a good one. It might offer a hope of cosmic intention that we deeply hunger for. But it also disappoints whenever we suffer. In the Greek world suffering happened because the gods were sometimes nasty pieces of work – impulsive, vindictive, unpredictable. And no one expected any better of them. But in a cosmology in which there is only one God, a God who is loving, all knowing, all powerful, but who allows the same awful stuff to happen and sometimes calls it punishment for our moral failings, there is a disconnect. This is not divinity, this is dysfunction.

So we look for our ways to work around the systemic problems of monotheism because we love our tradition, or we love God, or for some other reason we're willing to live in the mystery and the struggle. We scour our texts for ways to feel better embraced. We adopt the Shechinah as our face of God because she feels like a she and that already eases some of the tension, in a way that’s not dissimilar to many Catholics’ devotion to Mary as a more loving, compassionate portal to the godhead.

But you know? All this work to reclaim God for those of us the tradition leaves out is just that: work. Holy work, for sure. But work. And sometimes you just want a day off. And here it was: shabbos! My grandmother never, in her whole life, wrote on Shabbos. And on this one day, I decided not to do so also. I would put down my pen, and take a break from writing myself into our tradition.

So there I was, in a cave on Mt. Parnassus, smelling of moss and incense. I thought about my own panic qualities. I knew with effort, in days to come, I could find ways to describe those Jewishly. But for this moment, I allowed myself to let it sit in its native tongue.

I climbed up to one of the small Pan shrines in the back of the cave. A small votive, like a yahrzeit candle, burned there. I looked at the fruit and flower offerings left around it. I hadn’t brought an offering, not having planned on idolatry when I left the house. But being here in this sacred place, noticing my own easy affinity for this god, it felt wrong to turn and walk out ungenerously. I fished around in my backpack until I found a Ricola throat lozenge. I placed it next to the votive. I figured after a long night of reveling, it was something Pan might be able to use. And with that thought, this situational pagan once again felt very Jewish.