After 28 Years: It is Again Evening, It is Again Morning, the Fourth Day

(For Ner Shalom Malakh, April 2009)

By now, most of you have heard about our impending ritual oddity - Birkat HaChamah, the Blessing of the Sun. This is the most infrequent blessing in all of Jewish tradition. We recite it only every 28 years, when the Sun is said to return to the very spot in the Heavens where it was created. We wait for this event with an anticipation usually reserved for rare astronomical occurrences like eclipses and comets. And while this is a celestial event, it is not exactly astronomical. Where the Sun sits today in the Universe (as we understand it) is not where it was in 1981, and certainly not where it was at its birth 4.5 billion years ago. The timing of this event defies our usual Jewish calendrics. We are a thoroughly lunar people, yet the calculation of the date of Birkat HaChamah is based on a 365.25-day year with the specific placement tethered to the Spring Equinox. Very solar, eh? Yet the number of solar years involved -- 28 -- sounds awfully like the number of days in a lunar month, making the span between blessings kind of a lunar month of solar years. And (I find this part chilling) since the Sun was created on the fourth day of this world, Birkat HaChamah always takes place on the fourth day: a Wednesday.

Like an eclipse or a comet, Birkat HaChamah makes me feel both big and small. Certainly tiny in relation to the Heavens; but somehow large in knowing that I, too, am a naturally-occurring part of all this vastness. The blessing we make is purposely vast. Instead of using our usual morning liturgy in which we bless God for creating the heavenly lights, in this instance we bless God as Oseh Ma'aseh V'reishit -- the catalyst of all Creation. My knees weaken when I think of trying to utter a blessing for this vastness. Perhaps that is the reason we only do it every 28 years: how could we, on a daily or weekly basis, hold the magnitude of that intention? Maybe it takes 28 years just to rev up.

The idea of the Sun returning to the place of its creation is beautiful. What if we could all do that? If we could really return, start again, try it differently. If we could be placed into our lives all over again by the same divine hand (or non-hand) that set the Sun in the sky like a painting on a picture hook. To return to the conditions of our creation and do it all differently. Or even do it all the same.

But of course we can't go back, and measuring our lives in 28-year intervals makes that painfully obvious. Twenty-eight years ago I was in college and somehow missed Birkat HaChamah. Twenty-eight years before that I wasn't on the planet. Whether I am on the planet 28 years from now is not in my hands. No, I can't go back. None of us can. Nor can the planet, which ages every moment and chafes under the mounting pressures we place on it. Nor can the Sun itself, so long-lived, but destined, like us, ultimately to fail.

And yet: this is our moment, our generation's moment. Our chance to grab the Sun by its rays and say, This is our piece of the Infinite. We may look longingly up and down the highways of space and time, but this is us, standing at the intersection of here and now. We hold this spot with joy, knowing we will never be here again, and we commit to making of this intersection what we can, for as long as we can. This is still Creation. We are the seed, and the soil, and the watering-can, and the hand (or non-hand) that holds it.

I'll see you early morning on April 8 (a Wednesday of course) so we may commit to this moment together.

Mishpatim 5769: Saving Your Enemy’s Sorry Ass and Other Gateways to the Divine

(For Congregation Ner Shalom, Feb. 20, 2009.)

No way around it. Law is a big deal for us Jews. We are known as much for our law as for our food or humor or patriarchs. For anti-Semites, our “legalism” ranks right up there with our ownership of Hollywood. The very word "Torah" is translated repeatedly (and inadequately) as “the Law.” And indeed, Torah gives us the bulk of what we lawyers might call “statutory law.” On top of that are piled a few thousand years of case law, called halachah, given over in the Talmud, the Shulchan Aruch, and countless rabbinic commentaries.

Our Jewish relationship with law is complex. Many of the laws in our Torah are designed for a people living autonomously in ancient times and therefore have, for most of the time they’ve existed, been inapplicable or impracticable or preempted by the laws of whatever country we’re living in. And yet we still accord them an odd place of honor in our spiritual life. We walk around judging ourselves to be “bad Jews” when we don’t follow some Jewish law that we’re still somehow conversant in. What is it that makes us feel a little something extra about this body of law?

In this week’s parashah, Mishpatim, we get our first installment of the Hebrew Code of Conduct. Yes, last week's portion included the Ten Commandments. But those are broad principles. This week we get the nitty-gritty. God says to Moshe "v’eyleh hamishpatim asher tasim lifneyhem" – these are the mishpatim - the laws - that you will place before them (meaning us). And bang. We’re off and running.

What is the punishment if you steal, if you murder, if you accidentally hurt someone, if you mistreat your servant, if your ox gores someone or if you borrow something and damage it? The answers are here. This is our own Code of Hammurabi: a lengthy list of crimes and punishments, torts and penalties, designed to let people live side by side and inflict upon each other as little damage as possible.

Plenty of the rules in Mishpatim seem obvious and unremarkable. Some make us squirm. Here we find the famous "eye for an eye" language, and other surprising harshnesses. We also find a few shocking leniencies.

But then some of the laws come bearing magic. They seem to go beyond mere conduct and get at something deeper or broader or loftier, something that separates them from the Hammurabi kind of fare. Some of these laws reveal a subtle understanding of human nature, and point to a higher ethic floating above the language of the laws.

I’ll give you three examples, involving goats, mobs and your enemy’s sorry ass.

First the goat. The law says: Lo t’vashel g’di b’chalev imo. Do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk – the prohibition that eventually gives rise to most of our laws of kashrut. Why such a rule? The baby goat is presumably dead and beyond being offended; we’ve no proof that the mother goat feels either horror or grief or cares about her unwitting collaboration in enabling the evening meal. Despite that, or maybe because of that, the prohibition seems to about something a little bigger, a little higher. Something about who we are to be, rather than how we are to cook. Something about preventing needless suffering, even if you’re not certain that that suffering is more than your own projection. When engaging with the natural world, this rule seems to say, act with chesed – with the divine quality of lovingkindness. While the rule is about goats, the invitation to act out of chesed is so much bigger.

Second example: Lo tihyeh acharei rabim l’raot. Do not follow the majority to do evil. Here there is no specific act being prohibited at all! Rather, there is acknowledgment that peer pressure, the muscle of the majority, the hot breath of the mob can be very hard to resist. The desire to fit in, the fear of standing out, is very strong. So this rule is not about specific actions but specific values. You must give your conscience greater weight than your desire to be liked. No hiding behind a majority vote. No hiding behind the outcome of a bad referendum. You are responsible for your own actions and you must be strong when you are outnumbered. This is a requirement that we act with the divine quality of gevurah – with principle and with strength of purpose.

And finally a particularly interesting and subtle example, the one you’ve been waiting for:

Ki tir'eh chamor son'acha rovetz tachat masa'o, v'chadalta me'azov lo, azov ta'azov imo.

If you see an ass, i.e. a donkey, that belongs to someone who hates you, collapsed under the weight of its load, and you are inclined not to help, you must nonetheless help your enemy get his sorry ass off the floor. [My translation.]

There are a few fascinating elements to this deceptively simple rule, elements that again demonstrate a deep understanding of human nature and offer a gateway to some larger idea.

1. You’re under obligation as soon as you see the poor animal. No waiting until it's front of your house or until you trip over it. Even if you only see it from a distance, the rule begins to apply. Here again we see the invitation to chesed. Relieving an animal’s suffering is a compassionate act of transcendent importance.
2. The law doesn’t talk about a donkey belonging to someone you hate, but rather belonging to someone who hates you. Why? What’s the difference? Perhaps Torah knows that you are likely to say (and believe) that you don’t hate anyone, even though some people inexplicably hate you. Maybe it’s true; maybe it’s not. But this law applies even if you see yourself as blameless in your conflict with the donkey’s owner. Even if you are blameless, and this person’s hatred is beyond your control, you may not withhold your help. Declining to help your enemies is an indulgence reserved for good times. In hard times that extravagance is not available to you. You must help.
3. Another interesting bit comes at the end of the rule. Azov ta’azov imo. You are required to unload the beast’s burdens with its owner. Not instead of its owner. Some commentators say that this is to prevent the exploitation of good Samaritans. “Hey you, come unsaddle my donkey. Torah says so.” No, that is not allowed. Some say it’s because this is simply a two-person job: if you each lift a saddlebag on opposing sides, the animal will be able to stand up by itself. But there’s another possibility too: that Torah understands something here about human nature. Torah knows that if you face an obstacle with someone, you might discover you don't hate each other quite so much as you thought. Torah commands you to love your neighbor, but it can’t force you to. However, Torah can maneuver you into a position where you might naturally arrive at mutual respect.
4. The last lovely bit of this rule worthy of mention is that it isn’t triggered by simply seeing the suffering animal. It doesn’t say, “If you see your enemy’s ass lying under its burden, raise it up.” Rather it says “If you see your enemy’s ass lying under its burden v’chadalta me’azov lo – and you would hesitate to help, you must in fact raise it up with him.” The law isn’t just “do the right thing.” It’s “overcome the hesitation that keeps you from doing the right thing.” It presumes you already know what the right thing to do is. We are commanded to connect with the divine quality of gevurah, and with that strength of purpose, overcome our ambivalence, our pettiness, our hatred, our hard place, whatever it is, and unleash the justice and the compassion that are already in our hearts.

I tried to think through how this would go in my life. There are indeed donkeys and cattle on the road I live on. None of their owners hate me, presumably because they don’t know me. But how about this:

I’m walking down the street and see a car stalled with a flat tire. The driver steps out. I recognize him from somewhere. I realize with astonishment that it is Rush Limbaugh. In the silence of my shock, I hear a scuffling sound in the car and step up to look inside. There is Rush’s little kitty cat, which had, just 20 minutes earlier, eaten the notes for Rush’s next radio editorial and is now suffering visibly, heaving and gagging from indigestion. “Hey you, change the tire for me, would you? We’ve gotta get to the vet.” I look at Rush and am so very inclined to do nothing at all. “No,” I reply, “I won’t change the tire for you, but let’s change it together.” Then Rush Limbaugh, the villainous right-winger, and I, the quasi-rabbinical singing drag queen hoist the car on its jack and change the tire. I have acted out of chesed, caring for the plight of the poor, choking animal. I have engaged gevurah, resisting my own small-mindedness, overcoming my inclination to walk away and let this man suffer alongside his pet. I have prevented his hate from turning me into someone who would let an innocent creature suffer out of spite. So whether or not it was pleasant; whether or not Rush suddenly turned progressive, I have created a gateway to tiferet – splendor, the balance point of chesed and gevurah. I have opened a door into this sefirah, which is also called emet, truth, and mishpat – justice. Instead of this law constricting me, it has opened me up to a wider place of great justice, instead of petty judgment. A great justice that sits above and outside my likes and dislikes, outside the world of my own wounds. And that justice feels like splendor.

Now imagine the splendor if it were not me and Rush, but, say, Israelis and Palestinians working together, despite all the accumulated hatred, to save their respective asses. Imagine the splendor in that.

For the Kabbalists, this transcendent aspect of the law was not a bi-product, but rather the point. God’s giving of these laws was not about constricting; about controlling human action with an iron hand. But rather about creating a means of envisioning something bigger and more glorious, making a world that was an expression of divine light and expansiveness.

The Ba’al Shem Tov found a way to locate this expansive, transcendent aspect of the law right in the text itself. Buckle your seatbelt. This is bumpy but worth it.

A little further on in this parashah, God says to the Children of Israel:

Hineh Anochi sholeach mal’ach l’faneycha lishmorcha baderech v’lahaviacha el-haMakom asher hachinoti.

Behold I send before you a mal'ach to guard you on your way and to bring you to the makom – the place I have prepared for you.

On its face, the mal'ach – which means either angel or messenger – is Moshe, leading the Children of Israel through the desert on a divine mission. But the language of placing of an angel before the Children of Israel exactly parallels the opening of the parashah: I am setting mishpatim before you. In the Kabbalistic mind, God’s placing of two things before the people in such close textual proximity creates an equivalency between them. The mishpatim and the mal'ach are the same. These laws are my messenger, these laws are my angel. They guard you and they bring you to the makom – to a new place, or to HaMakom – to God.

The Baal Shem Tov’s followers went to even greater lengths to nail down this equivalence. They noted that the letters of the word mal'ach add up to 91. And so do the letters of HaElohim – God. And so do the letters of two special words added together: YHWH, God’s unutterable name, which adds up to 26, and Adonai, what we say instead of saying God’s name, which adds up to 65. YHWH here represents the inconceivable, unknowable, vastness of God, the Eyn Sof. And Adonai, which is often on our lips and in our hearts, represents the Shechinah, the aspect of the divine that is available to us, the presence of God that we feel in our bodies. So 91 represents a yichud – a mystical joining of God and the Shechinah, of God the vast and God the familiar.

SO:

1. Yichud of YHWH (26) + Adonai (65) = 91.
2. HaElohim = 91.
3. Mal'ach = 91.
4. Mal'ach before the people = Mishpatim before the people.
   

THEREFORE:

1. Mishpatim (laws) = Mal'ach = HaElohim = Yichud

The yichud is equal to HaElohim which is equal to mal'ach. Mal'ach is set before the people, making it equivalent to the mishpatim, the laws, which are set before the people. The mishpatim are God made whole.

This series of associations and numerological equivalencies is a Kabbalistic way of expressing this sense: that the mishpatim we’re given, this code of law, is not to be conceived of as a series of restrictions, but rather as invitations, hints, portals to the great wide spaces of compassion, strength of purpose, and splendor. Of God made whole.

Eyleh hamishpatim asher tasim lifneyhem.

These are the gateways to the divine that I place before you. Welcome.

Death, Moses and Late-Breaking Change

(For Ner Shalom Malakh, February 2009)

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. I often do - especially when flying, which I do so very much; or when I'm drifting off to sleep. I am jarred by death's extravagant unpredictability - airplanes ditching into icy rivers without a soul lost; a beloved rabbi dying of heart failure at 65 after a lifetime of meditation, prayer and daily exercise. I do my own secret math, and am now on the losing end of it. No matter how many resolves to exercise more (or even at all), no matter how many hopeful assessments of my genetic heritage, there is indisputably less time ahead than there is behind. Decisions of years ago have hardened into irrevocability, and I now meet the thought of spontaneity with more suspicion than I'd like to admit.

And then there is the thing itself. The nagging, unfathomable thing. What is the completeness of death? What happens to all we've experienced and learned? Snuffed out like a match? Expelled like a puff of air from a burst balloon? What happens to my memory of loved ones whom no one after me will have known? How unfair that these good people should be forgotten! And what of my giddy love of Hebrew verbs or how I thrill at certain Debussy chords? Where does all that personal intricacy go?

It doesn't strike me as odd that I think about these things. What is odd to me is that the fear doesn’t simply paralyze us all.

In this month's batch of Torah portions, the Children of Israel make a late break for it. They are old in the land - that is, they've been in Mitzrayim for 400 years. Life is misery, but it is also habit. Leaving is a mystery and the outside world seems an oblivion not unlike death.

Moshe, whom we think of as young and impulsive (an accidental vigilante who killed an Egyptian taskmaster) or middle-aged and formidable (on the Barack Obama model perhaps), is actually 80 years old at the time of the Exodus. He has already lived what any of us would consider a good, long life. He grew up in a palace, became a fugitive, and ended up a shepherd in Midian. He had surely already foreseen how the end of his days would go - in peace, he hoped, tending the sheep, amusing his grandchildren, until death found him.

But at age 80, Moshe was transformed and in turn transformed the world around him. He came upon a bush aflame. With the patience of age, he studied the bush long enough to see that it was not being consumed. A young, impulsive Moshe might not have noticed. A young Moshe might not have realized that the fire was a vision and that the ground beneath him was holy.

So how do we, busy counting down our own days, remain alert to the possibility of great transformation, even at this late hour? How do we keep our eyes open to seeing visions and our ears open to hearing a call? How do we maintain our belief in the power of our own actions, even as we understand less how to work our computers? How do we believe in new beginnings even as our work lives, family lives, and personal idiosyncrasies seem so deeply etched in us?

We can start by looking to Moshe and his late-life change. He didn’t start over from scratch. He brought his work life with him. From being a shepherd of sheep he became a shepherd of his people. He brought his family too, and in times of challenge was inevitably flanked by brother, sister, wife, father-in-law or children. He brought his idiosyncrasies also: the entitlement of a prince, the alertness a fugitive, a short fuse, and a fear that he couldn’t speak with the clarity he needed. Moshe didn’t trade in his past. He brought his entire biography with him into his greatest work. He did not change as much as metamorphose. He took what he already had and became greater, more open, more powerful.

Change, growth, transformation. All these are possible at any age. Relinquishing one’s past is not required. To a caterpillar, a butterfly may be an unrecognizable species. But the butterfly knows it carries the caterpillar within it. The change that seems inconceivable to you now will seem natural and inevitable once you’re there.

Let us not give up at any age on being greater, more open and more powerful. May our lives be continual transformation and growth. So that when death does arrive, and may it be a very long time from now, we may meet it proudly, knowing that we spent every moment of our lives, even the evening hours, becoming.

Vayigash 5769 - The Lion and the Bull

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, Jan. 3, 2009.]

This week’s portion – and this week itself – are both about a bull and a lion butting heads.

Our parashah, Vayigash, offers the dramatic conclusion of the Joseph story, in which disguises are dropped, secret identities are revealed, those thought to be dead show up alive, erstwhile thugs are reformed, and a grand, loud, tearful reconciliation takes place.

Here’s the back story in case you weren’t reading Torah all week. As of last week’s parashah, Joseph has become Pharaoh’s vizier. The same famine that Pharaoh foresaw in his dream – and the rationing plan Joseph has developed as a result – have brought Joseph’s brothers down to Egypt where Joseph, unrecognizable to them, has them in his proverbial clutches.

Joseph does not reveal himself to them, but demands that they go back to Canaan and return with their baby brother, Benjamin. Joseph proceeds to frame Benjamin for theft. He tells the brothers that Benjamin must stay with him as a slave and that they should return to Canaan without him.

This is the suspenseful setup, as we move into Act III of the opera. The Playwright, through Joseph, has set everyone up for redemption or for tragedy or both. If the brothers have changed, they now have a chance to prove it, to behave differently this time than the last time, and to refuse to abandon Benjamin. If they haven’t changed, Joseph has cleverly rescued his little brother from the same men who abandoned him in a pit and/or sold him into slavery, depending on which sage’s interpretation you follow. Here, on the verge of redemption or catastrophe, is where this week’s parashah opens.

The curtain rises and Judah, who has become the brothers' chief and spokesmodel, approaches Joseph and delivers an impassioned speech, worthy of any fine orator or propagandist. Our father is old. He will die if we return to him without Benjamin. Benjamin’s brother is also dead. How much sorrow can we heap on a white-haired old man?

At the end of the speech, perhaps seeing that his arguments are not winning the day, Judah finally volunteers to take Benjamin’s place as Joseph’s slave so that Benjamin can go free and return to their father.

This is what finally breaks the tension and ends the masquerade. Judah is redeemed. They are all redeemed. Joseph, unable to contain himself any longer, reveals himself and bursts into a wailing that can be heard in the palace. The brothers nivhalu mipanav; they were speechless. Then everyone embraces and cries together. And they begin to get reacquainted. “Father is really still alive?” “Yes, 130 takeh.”

Happy ending. Curtain falls.

There was something, though, that our sages found unpersuasive about this wrap-up. In Midrash, they offer a much more detailed version of the final scene. There, instead of Judah making a speech, Judah and Joseph are having a loud and increasingly hostile argument, accusing and counter-accusing each other, each one articulating his sense of betrayal and hurt. Eventually Judah, in a fury, threatens a massacre, and as we know from the story of Dinah and Shechem, these brothers are capable of massacre. “We will paint Egypt red with blood,” he tells Joseph the vizier. “Ah, but you were already painters in the old days,” counters Joseph, “when you painted your brother’s coat in blood and told your father he’d been devoured by beasts.” It was only then, faced with his own shame and guilt at that horrible act, that Judah offers himself up.

The problem with the Midrash, of course, is that Joseph couldn’t have said all these things to Judah without revealing his true identity. After all, how would Pharaoh’s right-hand man know about these details from the brothers’ shameful past. So the Joseph of the Midrash could not have been the Joseph we know, the Joseph of the Torah narrative. The great scholar Nechama Leibowitz, z"l, suggests that the Joseph in this Midrash is in fact Judah’s own conscience. This whole debate, all this rage and hurt, all the accusations and counter-accusations, take place in Judah’s heart, and they are what lead him finally to give up the fight and offer himself up.*

Midrash also says that when Judah approached Joseph, malachei hasharet – the ministering angels – said to each other, “Let us go down and watch the bull and the lion mitnagchim – butting heads.” Of course the lion is the traditional symbol of Judah (which is why so many of us have ancestors named Yehudah Leyb - Judah the Lion). The bull was sacred in ancient Egypt, and here seems to be the symbolic stand-in for the very assimilated Joseph. The Midrash points out that in the real world, bulls fear lions. But now the bull is facing off against the lion – Joseph has taken the position of power.

But what if this is just an internal struggle that Midrash describes? Would the angels watch? Well, perhaps the bitter fight between Judah the Lion and his own bull-headedness might have been exciting enough spectator sport for the angels all on its own.

So why was this Midrash necessary? I think the sages, living in the real world, did not find self-sacrifice credible, when seemingly offered as a strategy. They needed Judah’s offer, his surrender, to be more than a rhetorical device, and frankly, Torah is ambiguous about whether it is or not.

So they supplied this supplemental narrative so that we could see Judah arrive at his self-sacrifice only after all his anger and hurt were sucked out of him. The sages could not believe in someone who offered to drop their arms as part of a negotiation. They needed it instead to be the outcome of great personal struggle. “I may have plenty of right on my side,” they seem to want Judah to say, “but not enough to continue on this path of hatred and guilt and violence. I offer myself up.”

This has also been a week of hatred and violence in our country-away-from-home, in Israel, and in Gaza, whose inhabitants are also our siblings. The lion and the bull have been going at it, aggressively and cruelly; and at this moment I can’t clearly tell you which is which. Each side is acting out of old hurts and old guilt; each trying to unbalance the other. But instead of the barbs of Joseph and Judah, we have bombs and missiles. Both sides promise to paint the other’s territory red. And yet neither side has publicly wondered, like Judah ultimately did, whether they truly are in a moral position to do so. Alas, both sides have, shamefully, become very, very experienced painters.

So if Joseph in the Midrash was Judah’s conscience, and a deep struggle with conscience is what allowed Judah to let go of his need to win at all costs, then we need to stand up and take on Joseph’s mantle. We must continue to be the conscience that challenges everyone’s right to make it worse, over and over again. We must challenge the State of Israel; we must also challenge Hamas.

And we must imagine, really imagine, what it would be like if both sides reached a conclusion, like Judah did, that it might be better to risk losing than to cause more pain.

Imagine if both sides reached that conclusion. Imagine the stunned silence. Imagine the weeping and the wailing and the embracing. Imagine us all able take off our masks and reveal our true selves to each other. Remember me? I am your brother. Imagine if we could, at last, dwell next to each other in peace and say, hineh mah tov umah naim shevet achim gam yachad – behold how good, how pleasant, how obvious, how overdue it is, to dwell, siblings that we are, together.

_________________________
* I am indebted to my friend Rabbi Eli Cohen for pointing out that Judah’s first words to Joseph in the portion, bi adoni, could be understood as “you, my lord, are inside me,” supporting Professor Leibowitz’s view that this Midrash represents an internal dialogue.

Reb Suegee's Curried Sweet Potato Soup

There's nothing particularly Jewish about this crazy delicious soup. But Suegee invented it for Ner Shalom's Chanukah potluck, and people wanted the recipe, and so there. The Holy Curried Sweet Potato Soup.

It's vegan by the way.

Ingredients:
4 or 5 moderate size sweet potatoes
1 onion
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 tsp ginger powdered or 1 tbs fresh grated
1 can coconut milk (unsweetened)
3 cups vegetable stock
salt to taste

1. Preheat oven to 450
2. Scrub sweet potatoes and prick skin with fork
3. Place sweet potatoes on a cookie sheet into oven and bake for 40 minutes or until soft
4. Remove from oven and cool
5. Chop onion and saute in several tablespoons of coconut milk until translucent
6. Add curry powder and ginger to onions and saute stirring frequently until very aromatic, about 1 minute, then add rest of coconut milk
7. Peel sweet potatoes and and to soup
8. Add vegetable broth to soup and simmer for about 5 or 10 minutes
9. Puree soup in batches and return to heat, you may need to add a bit of water until you get the desired texture
10. Salt to taste, serve with fresh roasted and ground cumin sprinkled over each bowl

Suegee dedicates this recipe to Karen Finley.

Vayeshev 5769 - Dreams are Not to be Messed With

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, Dec. 19, 2008.]

Dreams are not to be messed with.

They are big – larger than life. Or smaller than life – sometimes a single moment in time magnified as through a microscope.

Dreams are like angels: fleeting, hard to pin down, demanding to be wrestled with. They fill us with emotion and purpose. They can impel us to act. We wake up and call a loved one to make sure they’re okay. Or we wake up and resolve to try something new or to shy away from something else.

We use the same word – dream, חלום – to mean both the imagery of our sleeptime and our most deeply held desires.

Of course, some dreams are exactly lifesized. For instance, Ari, our 7-year-old. On Tuesday he, along with our babysitter Amy, took out the compost. Then Tuesday night he had a dream. In his dream, he, along with our babysitter Amy, took out the compost.

Some dreams do not look like your life, but are instead a portrait of your emotional state. My own dreams are moody and full of emotional content, typically anxiety. If I had been Jacob in the Parashat Vayetzei, which we talked about two weeks ago, it would have gone like this:

1. And Irwin took one of the stones of the place and put it under his head, and lay down to sleep. And he dreamed and behold there was a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven; and the angels of God were going up and down upon it. And Irwin looked down and realized he was severely underdressed for the occasion. And behold, the Lord stood beside him and spoke to him, while Irwin furtively looked around trying to figure out where he'd put his nice clothes. This thought led Irwin to realize that he also had no idea where he had left the children. And Irwin chewed on this worry, and as he chewed he became aware that most of his teeth were loose.

That’s how it would have gone. Yes, it’s self-involved. But Joseph’s dreams were no less self-involved. Do you remember what his dreams were? He and his brothers collecting sheaves of wheat and the brothers’ sheaves bowing down to Joseph’s. Then a second dream: the sun, moon and eleven stars bowing before him. These dreams are so superficial, even his family understood them. His brothers already hated him, and now were thoroughly outraged. Even Jacob disapproved of Joseph revealing these self-serving fantasies.

Now: were these dreams prophecies?

Talmud says dreams are one sixtieth part prophecy. This sounds discouraging – don’t even bother listening to your dreams, Talmud seems to say. Perhaps this was an effort to prevent Jews from seeking out interpreters of dreams – say, astrologers and psychiatrists – instead of relying on God.

On the other hand, one sixtieth, though tiny, is not nothing. One sixtieth is a formulaic number in our tradition, sort of like 40 days and 40 nights. It suggests something which, although infinitesimal, is nonetheless meaningful. For instance, under Jewish law, if one sixtieth part of a dish is unkosher, the whole dish is rendered treyf. So one sixtieth means something. One sixtieth can affect things. One sixtieth of your dream is meaningful prophecy. But how do you know which is the right sixtieth?

Unlike the rest of us, the reliability of whose dreams is officially limited to one sixtieth, Joseph seems to get a perfect score. All his dreams came true. So did they come true because they were prophecies? Or were they desires that Joseph made come true?

That is how I like to think of Joseph. Torah presents him as the spoiled favorite. But on the credit side of the ledger is that he had ten older brothers who hated him so deeply they would actually plot to kill him, so one must cut him some slack. He was the clever kid, the talented one, the gifted child, in what Torah really does describe as a family of brutes. Yes, he was vain, but having that much self-esteem while living among those who hate you might be considered a kind of resistance, no?

Now the story of Joseph being sold into slavery is confounding. First the brothers want to kill him. Then instead they put him in a pit to sell him to the Ishmaelites. Then they take a lunch break. They come back and find Joseph gone. We know he was taken by Midianites to be sold into slavery in Egypt. Arguably the brothers don’t know this. They actually do think he’s dead at the hand of some beast. One of our sages points out that the traders would not have taken Joseph if he or anyone else had voiced opposition. If there were relatives who would come after him, the merchants couldn’t have counted on having free and clear title to their new property, and would not be able to resell him with a credible warranty. So why didn’t Joseph object? And of course, if he’d put up a loud fight when being nabbed by the Midianites, you’d expect his brothers to have heard it at their picnic. But no. So Joseph didn’t object and he didn’t scream.

I think Joseph had many more dreams than Torah tells us. Whether actual prophecy or pure desire, they were dreams that said get out. Get away. Get free. Did it ever occur to any of us that perhaps on some level Joseph staged his own abduction? When Jacob gave him the errand that took him to his brothers, he immediately said hineni – here I am – just like Abraham in the story of the Binding of Isaac. It is an expression of total willingness, almost eagerness, even though we know from Torah that nothing good seems to come from jumping up and saying hineni.

“Get free,” said Joseph’s dreams. Find an exit. Start over. New land. New language. New customs. Get out. And he did.

Did Joseph tell his brothers his dreams because he was clueless? Or did he realize that the very act of telling of those dreams would set their fulfillment in motion; it would trigger a chain of events resulting in his own exile and his own liberation?

Yes, this is a very romantic idea. The story is a fine one as written. But I’ve always felt bad about Joseph, and haven’t liked to hear him talked about as arrogant or to watch him suffer. So this year I’m telling myself the story this way. Joseph staged it. Joseph escaped. Joseph did have dreams, but he took action to make sure they came true.

Perhaps dreams are what you make of them. Perhaps that is the nature of prophecy. Prophecy is not the gift of seeing the future, but the ability to recognize possibility in the present. And then it is up to each of us to seize the day, seize the dream, and act. What are your dreams? Have you seized them? Have you acted on them? Is it really too late?

“What will become of his dreams now,” his brothers snicker. Little did they know that dreams are far more powerful than plots. Dreams are not to be messed with.

And so, knowing this, מה יהיו חלומותיך,what will become of your dreams?

Vayishlach 5769 - Demanding Blessing

[Written for Congregation Ner Shalom Malakh Newsletter, December 2008]

This month's batch of Torah portions furthers the tale of our patriarch Jacob, whose life seems riddled with difficult dualities. He is a twin -- the younger one who, by law, will receive neither property nor blessing. But he suckers his brother out of the birthright and engages in an elaborate ploy to nab the paternal blessing that might have been his by Divine intent, but certainly wasn't his by custom. After reversing the balance of that sibling duality, he flees his furious brother and comes to his uncle's house where he's presented with another duality -- the sisters Leah and Rachel. Here he tries, and fails, to upset the expected order. He wants the younger, he gets the elder, and has to pay dearly to change this. The price tag on this reversal -- ultimately 14 years of labor -- perhaps exceeds even the exile and estrangement (and lentil stew) that the first reversal cost him.

But one more struggle of duality awaits Jacob. On the eve of his reunion with his estranged brother, Jacob is accosted by an ish (איש) - a man - who wrestles with him. Our sages understood the ish to be an angel, and in fact some saw it as the Archangel Michael. Michael, in Midrash, declares his jealousy: the angels are God's firstborn, yet humans are God's favorite. Michael is God's first priest, but Jacob-come-lately is God's special one.

This time Jacob fights back. After all the injustice of having to struggle and steal and toil to achieve what he understood to be God's will, to gain what God could simply have granted, he demands God's blessing. He pins the angel and won't let go until he gets it. He is blessed and renamed Israel -- the God-wrestler.

Perhaps this is in some way a parable, or an ancient memory, about change itself. The new idea does not peaceably inherit from the old idea. It struggles, it fights, it hangs on for dear life. And, ultimately, it wrenches away the blessing. So for us too, with our new ideas -- about God, about love, about how to live, about how to save the Earth -- all these require struggle. But our struggles can unleash untold blessing. As we do our work in this world, let us balance persistence (Gevurah in our mystical tradition) with love (Hesed) so that we may arrive at Tiferet -- the splendor of resolution and integration that our tradition ultimately associates with Jacob...and all Israel.

Vayetzei 5769: A Two-Way Ladder

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, Cotati, CA, December 5, 2008]

Parashat Vayetzei opens with one of the most potent and memorable images that Torah gives us. It is oddly stuck into the middle of a melodramatic plot line. Jacob is fleeing his brother's wrath after having stolen the blessing that their father, Isaac, had reserved for him. Jacob pauses for the night on his way from Beer Sheva to Charan and this is what Torah says happens:

1. He came to a familiar place and spent the night there because the sun had already set. Taking some stones, he placed them at his head and lay down to sleep there. He had a dream. A ladder was standing on the ground and its top reached up toward heaven. God's angels were going up and down on it. And behold he saw God standing over him.

God then goes on and gives Jacob a similar blessing to the one that God gave Abraham and Isaac.What jumps out at you as odd here? Because our sages love the odd. If all in Torah were straightforward, we’d have no commentary, no Midrash, no Talmud. What here troubles or interests you?

Here are three among many items that are worthy of comment:

1. Jacob uses a rock as a pillow.
2. God speaks to Jacob in a dream instead of directly. Why?
   
3. The angels go up and down, not down and up.

Addressing the second question first, God certainly didn’t need to give Jacob this vision at all. God could have spoken directly and blessed directly. Somehow this particular image, though, must be important for Jacob - and for us who read Torah. There is something to be learned from it that we wouldn’t have gotten from the blessing alone.

So why “up and down” not “down and up”?

The rabbis went crazy with this one. They understood "up and down" to be sequential, and they struggled to figure out why angels would originate on earth and not in heaven. Shouldn't they start above? Some of their answers were practical. The angels, like police officers or newspaper boys, had regular beats. At the end of your land, your accompanying angel loses jurisdiction. So your angel ascends again to heaven. Who descends? The angel who will accompany you on the next leg of your journey.

Some answers were more political. The angels here are the collective avatar or embodiment of different nations. They might all rise and have their heyday, but then they will all fall again. In Roman times, when the end of the Roman empire was not in sight, this was an expression of a hope that change would come and Roman oppression would end.

I like to think of this instead as a model, a road map, for our relationship with the Divine. It’s a two way street. But the traffic starts from right here. Right now. It involves our dispatching our angels, our messengers, out into the Divine realm first. In other words, we don’t wait for God’s angels or words or revelation or even inspiration to come to us. We don’t wait for the Divine message. We instead must open ourselves up to it by starting the climb. Sending out our feelers. Looking for the Divine. Acting in accordance with our sense of the Divine. We send the first email, and God hits reply.

As is the case with all Jewish ideas one can think of, this is not a new idea. There is a longheld element of our theology that our actions force the hand of God. Can you think of examples? Some see prayer that way. Some see acting for justice that way. It becomes imbued with blessing as we engage in it. Have you ever had that experience? Doing something that is right, standing up for something that is right, and by the time you’re done, it feels like you were acting out God’s will.

There’s a story that we’ll get to in a few weeks that when Pharoah decreed that all male Hebrew children should be drowned, the Israelite men refused to sleep with their wives, so that there would not be new babies to suffer this. The women, however, according to Midrash, realized that by doing this, the men were punishing the female babies along with the male babies, by preventing any of them by being born. So the women, in an act of resistance to Pharoah’s decree, seduced their husbands. And that seduction was what aroused God to resist as well, and to begin the act of redemption.

Our Kabbalistic tradition is full of theurgy – ways to force the hand of God through elevated consciousness.

But even without elevated consciousness, I think this particular vision is telling us that if we start the communication, the Divine will come. If we act in ways that are Godlike the Divine will come. If we open ourselves up to the possibility of the Divine all around us, then we will see it.

So why a rock under the head?

Because a rock under your head is uncomfortable. When we reach out to be open to the Divine, the transcendent, the magical, we have to do it from where we actually sit. You can’t and shouldn’t wait for the ideal moment and perfect surroundings to speak to the Divine in the world. Jacob was in the desert, not in a garden. His head was on a rock, not a meditation pillow. He wasn’t at an ashram, or in a temple or in a lotus position next to a babbling fountain. He was in an uncomfortable, probably painful, probably cold, place.

At the end of the blessing Jacob wakes up with a start and says:

1. God is truly in this place but I did not know it. How awesome is this place! It must be God's temple. It is the gate to heaven.
   

If it looked like Eden, he might not have been so surprised to have met God there.

So we seem to be instructed not to hold out for the perfect corner in the perfect temple with the right didjeridoo music in the background. It is in our lives – our uncomfortable, sharp-edged, ugly, noisy, busy, rocky, coarse lives – that we must set up our ladders. We must practice looking around when we’re doing laundry and when reading a book and when boarding the bus, smelling its diesel fumes. When we lie down, when we rise up. Etc. It can be anywhere, any time. Including in the 100 year old Cotati Women’s Club. In joy, in sorrow, and in the particularly challenging realm of the trivial.

Wherever you are, consider a practice of taking a moment to stop and say to yourself, God is here and I didn’t even realize it. This is all a miracle and I didn’t notice. מה נורא המקום הזה - Mah nora hamakom hazeh. How awesome is this place. Send out your angels there and then. And angels will be sent back to you.