Purim and the Power of Unmasking

This Sunday is Purim which, just a week and a half after Mardi Gras this year, is our own masquerade holiday. We celebrate by donning disguises and drinking until identities blur ("until one doesn’t know Mordechai from Haman," goes the traditional injunction). It is the one day of the year where Jewish law officially countenances cross-dressing (suspending a prohibition that would, in my other life, put me out of business).

But I think at the core of this holiday is not the wearing of disguise, but the removal of it. It is a holiday about unmasking, about the dramatic reveal.

Unmasking happens repeatedly in the story of Purim. The Dor Hadash students helped me count some of the instances: conspirators are unmasked by Mordechai; Mordechai’s heroism is unmasked to Haman by Achashverosh; Haman’s evil plot is unmasked to Achashverosh by Esther. But, most famously, Esther – at just the right moment – unmasks herself.

It’s an interesting and odd story for us. We have other biblical stories involving disguise and mistaken identity: Jacob disguised as Esau, garnering his father's blessing; Joseph unrecognizable as an Egyptian overseer, engineering the reunification of his family. But this case is odd, perhaps because it feels so familiar to us. Esther is a precarious insider in a sort-of-assimilated sort-of-anti-Semitic Persian world. Like so many of us, she has a secular name – Esther, for the goddess Ishtar – and a Hebrew name – Hadassah. And like many of us, she can pass.

Esther is the bearer of a powerful secret of identity, a truth that can only be revealed once. She waits for the right moment; perhaps she is uncertain of what is the right moment. But in her people’s great need she finally plays her cards.

I recently had the pleasure of reading another book of Esther – the poet Esther Schor’s beautiful biography of Emma Lazarus. Born to a Sephardic family living in New England since before the American Revolution, Lazarus was as assimilated as a Jew was permitted to be in 19th Century moneyed society. She politely didn’t press her Judaism, and her Judaism was, in turn, politely overlooked. It wasn’t until outbreaks of anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic shook her comfortable world that she unmasked herself – writing poetry and essays on behalf of the Jewish people. And in doing so, she unwittingly drew to herself (and in some cases unmasked) a few of the Hamans of her time.

Her writing as a Jew changed her and changed the world. The Statue of Liberty was given to the US by France during Lazarus’s lifetime as a symbol of friendship and democracy. It was only her poem, The New Colossus, that transformed it into “the Mother of Exiles” – a symbol of refuge and hope to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This was a radical idea, a Jewish idea, reflecting Lazarus’s intense commitment to Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and born of her peculiar vantage point as an outsider, an Israelite, a daughter of exiles.

So perhaps Purim is meant to remind us of our secret truths; the pieces of our blurred identities that don’t always shine through clearly. We are, after all, always masked in some way; who can possibly know all that we are? Perhaps, as midrash suggests, Esther's name is actually from the Hebrew hester, the hidden one. Each of us is hester. Each of us is hidden.

And that makes our truths all the more powerful. Like Esther, like Emma, we will have moments when we can choose to stay silent and masked, or we can unveil ourselves and speak out. In doing so, we have the chance to change the people and institutions around us. To change the world. This Purim, let us all take stock of the masks we wear, and ponder when the time might be right to remove them at last.

Photo: Queen Esther Comes Before Ahasuerus, by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1865;

Difference, Disability and the Song of the Universe

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, February 2010]

How lucky for us to have spent this last weekend tuning our ears to Creation’s own songs of praise! Studying with Rabbi Shefa Gold, we chanted excerpts from Perek Shira – a mind-blowing piece of liturgy in which nearly 100 textual moments of praise, primarily taken from Psalms, are placed in the mouths of plants, animals and the natural phenomena of the planet. The effect was exhilarating and humbling. We are so accustomed to bypassing our own wide world when we offer words of praise! Instead, we conceive of ourselves as being in a private conversation with God. But Perek Shira cracks that unwarranted exclusivity open. Praise emanates from every living being, from every gust of wind, from every spiral galaxy and subatomic particle.

Perek Shira challenges us to imagine that every species and, by extension, every individual, has a song to offer. This is in fact a true challenge of imagination. We live our lives locked in our limited bodies and idiosyncratic minds. Our confinement within our familiar selves makes it hard to identify with others. How can we ever know what it is like to live in someone else’s body, someone else’s mind?

This month is Jewish Disability Awareness Month. It is an invitation to take note that all of us have different strengths and different limitations. Some of us have bodies that can’t keep pace with the activity of our minds or the desires of our hearts. Some of us have thoughts bursting like fireworks in our heads but which cannot find their way out of our mouths in the form of comprehensible speech. Some of our bodies pose staggering challenges for ourselves or for our loved ones. And still, our very existence is a song of praise to God, a Psalm to this Universe.

That is the lesson both of Jewish Disability Awareness Month and of Perek Shira. We share this Universe with each other. The peculiarities of our bodies and our minds might make us feel alien to one other. And yet, as the Rat, that most unlikely messenger, says in Perek Shira:

כל הנשמה תהלל יה

Kol han’shamah t’hallel Yah.
Every soul, every breath, is praise.

If you have ever attended our Celebrations program for children with special needs and their families (and if you haven’t, please join us), you would get it immediately. Our bodies are all different, some slightly, some quite. Our minds are all different too. But still, even so, when you open yourself up to the song of this Universe, every soul, every breath, is praise.

I am proud to be part of a community so full of difference and appreciation of difference. May our doors always be open to every soul. May we always ease each other’s burdens. And may we always hear each other’s songs.

Photo taken in West Marin County last summer.

Parashat Vayechi: Dancing in the Present

[Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, January 1, 2010]

Happy new year, everyone. I love this new year, this "secular" new year. Despite our calling it secular, I always notice that people nearly universally find it a deeply meaningful passage point. Sure, as Jews we have our own High Holy Days; we do all sorts of spiritual work around it. But the world itself, at that time of year, doesn't offer us the same evidence of passage of time that this new year does. Rosh Hashanah Lam'lachim - the New Year of the Kings, this day is called in Talmud. It is the dark time of the year, but now, 10 days after the Solstice, we can finally begin to sense the return of the sun, the growing of the light. It is a New Year that is about this Creation we live in, and I think we all feel it.

On this day and the evening leading to it, we all sense something passing away and we all sense something new approaching. Isn't that why this new month is called January, after the Roman god Janus, the one with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back? Similarly we, completing a year, completing a decade, look back at our lives, our accomplishments, our failings, and we can't help but make resolutions to brace ourselves for the year to come. We might make lists of not easily achievable goals: losing weight, learning Spanish, handling money better, going to shul more. These kinds of resolutions are what Mary Poppins calls "pie crust promises" - easily made, easily broken.

Even if we resist articulating the unachievable, we still think of our lives as being marked by and measured by calendar years, and we wonder: will this be the year that I find love, will this be the year my ship comes in, or chas v'chalilah, will this be a year in which things happen that I don't want to happen. This kind of reflection may be officially secular but it certainly takes place in a spiritual realm. We look back and we look forward, and what we look forward to is closely connected to what we see when we look back.

We're very lucky this year that new years happens during our reading of Parashat Vayechi, the reading that wraps up the Book of Genesis. In it we also look forward and back. We have our last visit with Jacob, after his long life of exile and return, wrestling and reconciliation, renaming, regret, and retirement. Jacob is dying in the land of Goshen, the Egyptian province he and his sons live in by merit of Joseph's high position in the administration. Jacob calls his sons to his side and speaks a sort of prophecy to each of them. He calls out a few of them for their crimes. Others he praises. With some of his sons he predicts success or failure or a special purpose. These are Jacob's parting shots - mysterious, poetic, kind of unpleasant. He goes on to charge his sons with burying him in the Cave of Machpelah, alongside his wife Leah, his parents, Isaac and Rebecca, and his grandparetns, Abraham and Sarah. When he finishes this charge, he is at last done. Torah describes his death this way:

ויאסף רגליו אל־המטה ויגוע ויאסף אל־עמיו

Vaye'esof raglav el-hamitah vayigva vaye'asef el-amav.

And he gathered his feet into the bed, and expired,
and was gathered to his peoples. (Genesis 49:33)

I love this image of Jacob drawing his feet into the bed. His walking days, his travelling days, his footsteps in our people's story are over. And that the Hebrew uses the same verb - le'esof - to assemble, to collect, for Jacob's gathering of his feet into the bed and Jacob's being gathered to his people. At his last moment he collects himself. And then he is collected. A beautiful death, the kind we all might pray for. Calm and, well, collected.

Jacob, in his last words, looks forward and he looks back. His prophecies, his premonitions spoken to his sons, reach well beyond their immediate future. He is prophesying elements of later Israelite history, when the tribes named after these sons live side-by-side, sometimes peaceably, sometimes tensely, in the Land of Israel. His words are not exactly words of blessing, but with these worries and warnings, he is able to let go of the future.

But he also has to let go of the past. He remembers back to where he came from, the Old Country, and he asks his children to carry his bones back there, to the place where his loved ones are buried. Revealed in this request is Jacob's sense of being a stranger. His journey was long and full but it did not bring him home. And so he arranges for his past to be his future, for his bones to rest in the place he came from.

Many of us here in Northern California are also, like Jacob, transplants. We left the droughts of our youth, thirsting maybe not for water, but for acceptance, for adventure, for love, for freedom. We sought our redemption in the farthest end of this country.

Some of us, though, still struggle with conflicting senses of "home". Like Jacob, there is a cemetery plot for me in my Old Country. In Chicago. My parents bought these plots just before my father died, since the plots they already owned didn't have enough room for both their children and our partners. My life is here now. The idea of having a piece of earth for my bones 2600 miles seems silly. On the other hand, my rootedness in Chicago is deep, and I work hard in my life to try to recreate that same feeling of rootedness that I grew up with. Of course, that rootedness is itself an illusion. Two generations earlier, it was Chicago that was the new turf, replacing a tiny Russian shtetl that had become, in Irena Klepfisz's words, "the inhospitable soil."

In Torah, the Book of Genesis is our Old Country, the story of our origins. With this parashah we leave it and move to our story of redemption. What happens next in Torah? We begin the Book of Exodus with a new pharaoh and the enslavement of the Hebrews, culminating with the escape from Egypt and the crossing of the sea.

We are at the turning of the page between the narrative of our origin and the narrative of our redemption. But aren't we always at that place in our lives? The stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve is perhaps the one moment of the year when we are truly aware of the tiny pinpoint of the present in which we're living! We are always balancing on that scant moment between past and future, between our roots and our redemption, between the journeys of our past and the promised land we still dream for ourselves.

But I'd also venture to say that these are not separate places. The parashah continues just a little longer, with what seems like the epilogue to all of Genesis. Joseph also grows old, old enough to know his great grandchildren, and he also enjoins his family to bring his bones out of Egypt when they at last leave. And he dies. And later, in the Book of Exodus, when Moses and the Children of Israel depart, they indeed carry Joseph's bones with them. They bring the past into the future.

And so do we all. We drag the past with us. We have no choice. Whether we embrace it or reject it, it is part of us. Home is not the Chicago that sits in the Midwest, but the home that is in my heart, that urges me on to create a life that's solid and warm and filled with music. I cannot let go of my past to claim a fresh future. As the ancient rabbi eulogizes at the funeral of Louis's grandmother in Tony Kushner's play, Angels in America:

Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America.... No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes -- because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.

The past is in us. We cannot shake it. We imagine the future before us, but the past is there too. When we stand in this inch of Torah between Genesis and Exodus, between origin and redemption, this inch of parchment with no words, the silent place where we have to make up our own Torah -- which is, in fact, where we live our lives -- at that moment, past and future are all around us, enveloping and embracing us.

We have a tradition when we complete the reading of a book of Torah. We finish our reading and say together the words chazak chazak v'nitchazek. "Be strong, be strong, and together we will be strengthened." As if we know that in these moments of pause, this moment of the present, when when we reflect on our past and brace for our future, that those are our moments of doubt, of vulnerability. The moments when we need, like Jacob, to collect ourselves. And so chazak chazak v'nitchazek. Be strong, be strong, and together we will be strengthened.

It is the new year, the turning of the page. Every moment is the new year, the turning of the page. We balance on the page's edge, we dance in the inch of empty parchment, we kiss our loved ones and replace the calendar on the wall.

Chazak chazak v'nitchazek.

The Torah of Nature

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh - January 2010]

I am essentially a city (or city-ish) boy. I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, a brand new suburb, paved over a cornfield, where the trees were all saplings chosen simultaneously with the color of house paint, and whatever fauna had once frequented the fields had been officially turned out. It was an orderly and safe place, where nature was kept at bay. I remember our excitement when the first rabbits moved in, and then the squirrels; and our dismay at the first opossums, which seemed like science-fiction versions of the rats my parents had left behind in the city.

I now live on Sonoma Mountain which, though far from being Wilderness, has been my first chance to notice Nature's constant voice. I've begun to learn the futility of planting water-guzzling imports instead of California natives. I've begun to appreciate the deer's grace and the jackrabbit's speed and the bobcat's caution. I've witnessed the destructive power of a single branch falling from a tree that was far bigger and older than I. I don't exactly feel like an intruder here, but I definitely feel like a novice.

As Diaspora Jews, we've been forcibly separated from Nature through our history of confinement to shtetlach and laws prohibiting us from working the land. We conceive of Jewish life and Jewish culture as being urban. Our prayers, after all, happen indoors.

But our texts do not require this, and those who go outdoors to pray find new life breathed right into them. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav used to require his Chasidim to take walks in the woods, and to pray their hearts not in Hebrew, but in whatever words naturally came to them as they walked under the branches and leaves.

We have another tradition, often overlooked, that has come down to us, and sits right on Page 704 of the siddurim sitting in our sanctuary. It is called Perek Shira. It is an assemblage of some of our most magnificent nature-based quotes from Psalms, Song of Songs and other Biblical books. But Perek Shira takes the extra, imaginative step of putting those quotes in the mouths of the animals, plants, rivers and mountains themselves, so that we hear all of Creation praising Creation. Our texts are moved out of the four walls of synagogues and yeshivot and are universalized -- as the voice of the Universe. So, for instance, the line from Psalm 96, "Then shall all the forest's trees cry out for you before The One," is re-set like this:

The trees say: "Then shall all the forest's trees cry out for you before The One."

Such a simple addition. "The trees say." But as it shifts the praise-filled voice from us to the trees; it invites us to be smaller -- to be just one voice in an infinite chorus of praise that constitutes the World we live in.

This is the text that Rabbi Shefa Gold will teach us during her weekend here at the end of January. She will bring her musical gifts, which Jewish communities around the globe have relied on for decades now, and her unique way of connecting song and text and Earth and spirit, to give us this teaching which she developed while on a pilgrimage to the Galapagos. We all know from the coverage of last week's Copenhagen conference the delicate balance upon which the Earth turns at this moment, and our own vulnerability when we think of ourselves as apart from or better than the Nature that gave birth to us. Perek Shira is one tool we may use to strengthen our resolve to heal the planet and ourselves.

Let's spend some time this month being aware of the world around us, as we prepare for our weekend with Shefa Gold. I look forward to seeing you there.

Toldot: Visualize and Act

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, November 20, 2009]

Why me?

How often do we ask this question? In turbulent times, confusing times? It's a question that presupposes some sort of destiny, yes? That is, why ask, "why me" if there is no possible answer?

"Why me" is the simple but fascinating question asked by our mother, Rebecca, in this week's Torah portion, Toldot. Lamah zeh anochi -- "why me" -- she asks when, after 20 years of marriage, she becomes pregnant with twins who twist and turn in her belly like pro wrestlers. These are the first words we hear from her since her marriage to Isaac, and one can't help wondering if her question refers not only to the turmoil in her womb but also to the whole direction her life has taken since leaving her father's house.

Why me? During the 20 years during which she did not have a child, we do not hear her asking lamah zeh anochi? Why me? She does not plead for a child, nor does she offer her husband a surrogate like her mother-in-law before her or her daughters-in-law after her. It is Isaac, not Rebecca, who pleads to God for a child. A part of me wonders if she was just fine the way things were. After all, she had, even as a child, more charisma, more spunk, more direction than most characters in Torah. When Abraham's servant, Eliezer, went back to the Old Country to fetch Isaac a wife, Rebecca watered and fed his camels all by herself, an immense task for one person. When offered a chance to travel to a place she'd never seen to marry a man she'd never met, leaving her father and brother, she reviewed her options and essentially declared, "Fire up the camel; I'm outa here."

Rebecca is a character who seems determined to live her own life. She is, after all, the major mover and shaker in this parashah. "Why me?" she asks God, and God answers. She carries two nations in her womb, she is told, one of which shall be mightier than the other (although we're not told which), and the older shall serve the younger (which is not the same as saying that the younger is the mightier).


This is a big prophecy. It doesn't exactly answer the question "Why me?" But it is a big prophecy nonetheless, and Rebecca takes it as a communication of her destiny.

Esau and Jacob are then born and Torah fast-forwards right to their adulthood, where Jacob buys his brother's birthright for the price of a bowl of stew. We all know this story. This is a first step toward the destiny Rebecca foresees, and it happens privately, between the brothers. But the next step comes when Isaac is old and his sight and his health are failing. He intends to give his deathbed blessing to Esau, and Rebecca helps Jacob trick his father into giving the blessing to him instead. When Esau realizes what happened, he turns homicidal. Rebecca warns Jacob and sends him away to her brother, saying "Let me not lose you both in one day." But she does. She has lost Esau's love and Jacob's companionship; she will not see him again for fifteen years. But she has secured the destiny described by God as she understood it. She has seen the younger son receive both the birthright and the blessing.

History sometimes judges Rebecca's character harshly. She is seen as conniving, even though in Torah's view the outcome is God's will and even though we, the Children of Israel, are the beneficiaries of her actions. Much as the 20th Century Jewish mother was mocked by her sons for the very traits that allowed those sons to succeed.

But Rebecca is a remarkable character. Isaac, let's face it, does not add much to the story of our people. He is the creme filling in the Abraham-Jacob sandwich. It is really Rebecca, not Isaac, who is the key player of that generation. She takes up the matter of our People's destiny and acts on it, just as Abraham did by leaving home, and as Jacob did by returning home. It is Rebecca who links Abraham to Jacob. She is formidable. She speaks to God. And God speaks back. She receives prophecy. And she takes action to make the prophecy come true.

It is this bit that especially interests me. God tells her that she carries two nations and the older shall serve the younger. But God does not give her an assignment in this matter. There is nothing in God's words -- or at least in what we overhear of them -- to suggest that Rebecca is supposed to do anything. The story would still have worked if she'd just shrugged her shoulders in response, and let nature run its course.

But no, she acts. Why?

I think I might have gotten a hint from something I read this week from Pirkei Avot, our first post-Biblical book. I was preparing a discussion for the post-Bar Mitzvah class and culling some quotes from the early sages. A famous one of Rabbi Akiba's jumped out at me. He says this:

הכל צפוי והרשות נתונה

Hakol tzafuy v'har'shut n'tunah.

All is foreseen, yet freedom of choice ("permission") is given.

I was so interested in this paradox that I did what any modern Jew would do. I posted it as my Facebook status this week and watched while my friends (and my "friends") struggled to make sense of their own sense of direction. It turns out the question was as alive for them as it was for Akiba.

Rabbi Akiba, living during Roman antiquity without the benefit of Facebook, Twitter or anything, was struggling with the still-new idea of God's omnipotence. If God is truly all-powerful, then is free will really free? Mustn't our actions be somehow determined by God? If they're not, then don't we have more power than God, at least over the small, personal matters: which hat to wear, whom to marry, which ice cream flavors go best together on one cone? If we are truly freely making those choices, then God is bound not to make them for us.

Akiba seems to offer a middle ground suggesting that both truths co-exist. All is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given. Perhaps Akiba is suggesting that צפוי (tsafuy) doesn't mean "foreseen" as in "predestined." But rather something more like "envisioned." The word comes from the Hebrew root that means "to look ahead" or "to scout out." A mitspeh, from the same root, is a high place from which one can scout ahead, a "lookout." So perhaps your relationship to the future is as if you're on a mountaintop looking to the horizon. You are afforded a certain clarity of vision, at least over the broad landscape, even if you can't make out the details. Everything is envisioned. We visualize a big picture. And then permission is given each of us to control where that vision leads us. What actions we take. The skills, gifts, smarts, connections that we bring to bear on the question of here-to-there.

Rebecca had a vision. Given to her by God or perhaps divined from the turbulence in her belly. But it suggested a destiny to her, and then when she had an opportunity to bring about what she had foreseen, she did not hesitate.

Can the same be said of us? When we are in times of distress, the kind that lead us to say, lamah zeh anochi - why me? Does it lead us to new, broader vision? And does that vision lead us to action? We might not all be formidable like Rebecca. But still, does that excuse us for not acting? We all have some ideas about how things might be. For the future of the planet. For the future of Judaism. For the future of gender. We can all imagine so much. But do we take action?

Rabbi Akiba suggests that we must. He goes on to say in the next breath:

ובטוב העולם נדון והכל לפי רוב המעשה

 Uv'tov ha'olam nadon v'hakol l'fi rov hama'aseh.

The world is judged kindly and according to the weight of its actions.

Another seeming paradox. Thank you, Rabbi Akiba. It contains a comforting note and a challenging note. He says to us that when we are judged, by God or by history or by us, it will be done with a kind heart. In other words, all of our efforts, our intentions, really do matter. Our vision, our hope. But, he warns, the world will also be judged by its actions. In other words, our good intentions are good but are not enough. They are not an excuse for inaction.

"Dream," says Rabbi Akiba. "And act." "Envision and do."

Rebecca envisions or foresees something about her son Jacob's legacy. And she acts, at great personal cost. Most of our visions are far less pricey to act on.

We live in hard times. Everyone lives in hard times. We all feel the struggles in our bellies. In our souls. We feel the struggles in our communities. We witness the wrestling of ideas. And sometimes the older, stronger idea is not the one we want to see succeed. We recognize that our future lies with the newer, gentler idea, and that will require our care and our action.

Lamah zeh anochi we might ask at any such time. Why me? 

If there is a "why" then the answer lies somewhere in your ability (our ability) to envision - to see the horizon, the great landscape - and your ability (our ability) to act in the here, the now. Think globally, act locally, says Rabbi Akiba somewhere on a bumper sticker.


May we all see far. May we plot our course in the direction that calls us. May our good intentions fuel but not replace our actions. And when we look back on the path we struck, and judge it, may we be proud.

Vayera: Open Your Eyes. Oy, Open Your Eyes.

[For Congregation Ner Shalom - November 6, 2009]

Tonight we will talk about desperation and hope; about seeing and not seeing. Our Torah portion this week is called Vayera. It is the fourth parashah in Torah, and we know some of its stories quite well. Abraham is visited by men we understand to be angels; Sarah gives birth to a child in her old age; Abraham bargains with God to save the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (unsuccessfully); Lot's wife becomes a pillar of salt. There are great destructions and intimate sufferings.

One of the subplots that most interests me in Vayera is the story of Hagar. You might recall that Hagar had been Sarah's Egyptian slave. When Sarah found she was unable to bear children, she offered Hagar to her husband as a surrogate, so that Abraham's line should not die out. Hagar gave birth to Ishmael. But then in this parashah Sarah miraculously gives birth to Isaac and things change.

At some moment, Sarah sees Ishmael doing something that troubles her. She sees him metzachek - laughing, teasing Isaac, gloating. It's unclear. We don't know what the word metzachek means in this context and we never will. But whatever Sarah saw convinced her that Ishmael's presence in the household was a threat - to safety, to posterity, we don't quite know. She demanded that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael into exile in the desert. Abraham questions this, but God backs Sarah, telling Abraham to follow Sarah's instructions and send away his firstborn.

Hagar journeys into the wilderness. There, wandering, lost, the food and water having run out, she at last gives in to despair. She sees no hope, no possibility of a happy ending, survival or any acceptable outcome. She sets Ishmael down under a bush and walks a bowshot's distance away, declaring that she will not watch her child die, a thoroughly harrowing statement. She sits down herself and bursts into tears.

But God hears the child's cry and sends an angel to Hagar. The angel calls from the heavens and assures her that God has heard the child and will save him, and that Ishmael will be blessed and become a great nation. Then God "opened her eyes" and Hagar saw a well. She filled her bottle and gave water to her child.

This story is packed with far too many troubling issues and surprising plot points to be able to discuss more than a fraction. But to begin with, I'm always fascinated and impressed that our tradition is willing to show our patriarch and matriarch in such an inescapably unfavorable light. We can come up with justifications for their actions, and that has been the project of many generations of rabbis and commentators. But they are nonetheless justifications of something that on paper, on parchment, just looks bad. The willingness to give holy status to a text full of our ancestors' shortcomings says a lot about our tradition's trust that we have the intelligence and patience to sit with difficulty and imperfection, and to understand the world in nuanced ways. This story contains brutal realism. Our ancestors were not gods or saints. Their lives, like ours, contained harshnesses of which they were not only victims but also dealers.

Similarly, I think it's also noteworthy that an angel speaks to Hagar. She is not our foremother. She is not a Hebrew. She is a slave. And she is a woman. You would not expect her moment of revelation, her interaction with the Divine, to be recorded. Even Sarah only overhears the words of angels through a tent flap. But Hagar is spoken to directly, in the depths of her despair. And surprisingly enough, we hear about it.

But besides surprise at the very existence of this story and in the way it is told, what can the story teach us? Because that's what makes Torah Torah. If it can't teach us, then it is not Torah, but merely ink on skin. So what is there here for us to learn?

There is a lesson here, I think, about seeing and not seeing. After the angel speaks words of comfort and promise about Ishmael's future, God, perhaps through the angel, opens Hagar's eyes and she sees the well. There is no indication that this is a miraculous well. It is not Miriam's well that legend tells us appeared in times of need. In fact, there is no indication that the well "appears" at all. It is already there, and Hagar simply "sees" it. Much as Abraham, one chapter later, holding a knife over the bound body of his second son, "sees" a ram caught in a thicket, that he hadn't seen a moment earlier, and offers it as a sacrifice instead. Two children, each saved by sudden sight. In each case, no new thing appeared, unless that new thing was openness to a new possibility.

In Hagar's case, despair had closed her eyes. And can't we all see ourselves in that? When we feel pained and unsupported in our pain, how many times have we let go of hope, or been tempted to? How many times has our suffering stopped us from recognizing help even when it is at our doorstep? How many times have we failed to perceive the deep wells of holy energy that can sustain us? There was no miracle in this story. Hagar is either told, or encouraged, or helped, by a Divine Being or maybe just by an instinct deeper and stronger than despair, to open her eyes. Help is there. But you have to open your eyes to see it. Use your sight. Use your insight. The well, deep and soothing and sweet, is waiting.

Good lesson, eh? And I think it's true, at least on a certain spiritual level. But, on the other hand, this reading isn't completely satisfying either. Too optimistic. It doesn't comport with our experience of the world. This is not the best of all possible worlds, and all we have to do is be awake to it. Sometimes no matter how awake we are, what we see is not good.

Tonight, as you know, we are remembering the lost Jewish community of Sobeslav, whose Torah scroll sits in our aron kodesh. The hundreds of Jews who lived in this Southern Bohemian town - butchers, carpenters, rabbis, healers, tradespeople, mothers, fathers, grandchildren - were forced, not in Biblical times but in our own lifetimes or our parents' lifetimes, into a situation of unspeakable desperation. The jaws of the Shoah closed in on them until there was no escape. They were dragged from their homes. They perished under circumstances that I'm both sad and happy to say none of us can even imagine. It would be false and insulting to say that help would have been there if they had simply opened their eyes and known where to look. Because I'm sure they looked. The kind of help that would have let them survive was not there or was not within reach. And it is foolish and wrong to think it was merely overlooked.

So, in light of the Holocaust and so many other calamities we can name, what lesson can we draw, if any, from Hagar's story? Maybe her story was a fluke, the rare happy ending. If so, then what about all the other Hagars whose stories we don't know but can so easily imagine? The displaced, the disowned, the despairing. How many of them didn't make it? Is the lesson then that there is always a divine source - or personal source - of strength and hope, but it might not always actually save you? Or there is a divine source of strength and hope, but it is conditional - conditioned upon certain factors which we don't understand or know how to predict? After all, what, if anything, made Hagar more deserving of hope and survival than the other Hagars, or than the Jews of Sobeslav and six million others like them?

Maybe we have to look at the story from another angle. We must ask, "Who are we in this story?" And then we must ask, "Are we certain of that?" We all naturally identify with Hagar. We identify with her suffering and her despair. But maybe that's not the only way to see it. Maybe the Jews of Sobeslav, for instance, are not Hagar in the story, even though they certainly rivaled her in displacement and desperation. Maybe they are not even the helpless crying child. What if those who suffer in the world, like the Jews of Sobeslav, are, in this story, represented by the angel?

After all, isn't it our belief, feeble though it may seem in the most brutal of times, that God suffers with us when we suffer? The Shechinah weeps with us. Or looking at it differently, if God is somehow a shared impulse, isn't God also our shared suffering? Perhaps the appearance of an angel in extreme times is a spiritual reflex of our own deep human suffering. It is our suffering's divine counterpart.

Haven't we all experienced moments when God feels more real and more intimate when we are in pain than when we are not? Don't our prayers feel especially real, especially grounded, and sometimes especially heard in those times? Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi teaches that If you want to make a prayer - any prayer - feel deeper, more real, more personal, insert one additional syllable: Oy.

Sim shalom. Grant us peace. Oy, grant us peace. Modeh ani l'faneycha. I'm grateful to be alive this morning. Oy, I'm grateful to be alive. Yitgadal v'yitkadash. Oy. May God name be exalted and sanctified. Oy.

So yes, maybe the people of Sobeslav were not the suffering Hagar, and not the crying child, but the angel, the messenger. They, like the millions of Jews and Roma and Queers stood, and their memory still stands, before the rest of the despairing, unseeing world, saying, "Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Open your eyes."

Sadly, unlike Hagar, it seems the world didn't, and hasn't yet. But maybe the angel is still speaking. We are the heirs of the Jews of Sobeslav and others like them. We hold their Torah scroll, but are we also ready to assume their mantle? To be the angel? To continue saying to the world, "Open your eyes. Open your eyes. There is a well of hope and healing. It is within reach. It can save you. It can save us all. But you must open your eyes to find it."

The angel is the messenger, but not the guarantor of the result. In Hagar's story the angel was successful. Maybe in the stories of others like Hagar, the angel was not. But in this world where God is a non-interventionist, we can't count on the outcome. But even so, we are not free to refuse the mission. As it says in Pirkei Avot: lo aleycha hamlachah ligmor v'lo atah ben-chorin l'hibatel mimenah. It is not your responsibility to complete the task, but neither are you free to abstain from beginning it.

Let us continue to speak to this despairing world. Let us be the messenger, the angel, with the memory of the people of Sobeslav and the millions like them as the wind under our wings, keeping us aloft, and on our path. Let us continue to speak to the world, to speak to history, and say, "Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Open your eyes."

Oy.

Birthing the Unexpected

[Ner Shalom Malakh, November 2009]

The month of November opens this year with Parashat Vayera - a busy bit of Torah that includes Abraham hosting angels, Sodom being destroyed, Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt, Sarah giving birth, Hagar being exiled, and Isaac being offered on an altar. (This was my Bar Mitzvah portion 36 years ago.)

This year I'm struck by the complex portrayal of Sarah in the story. Abraham, not Sarah, names their son Yitzchak - my own Hebrew name, from the root tzachak, meaning "laughter." While Abraham might have been filled with joyous laughter, Sarah was not. Instead, she laughs in disbelief when told she would bear a child. And she explicitly fears being laughed at when it is learned that she bore a child. She even accuses God of making her a laughingstock.

Sarah is self-conscious, fearful, even peevish. We understand this. She was, after all, 92 years old, far beyond childbearing age. No one expected her ever to have a child. By one Talmudic account, Sarah was also a tumtum - i.e. she was intersex, meaning that she had an ambiguous sexual anatomy that in her case wouldn't have permitted procreation, even when she was young. Sarah overcame (or undermined) the constraints of both age and anatomy. She gave birth to the unexpected, the impossibly unexpected, in a world that she feared would hold her to her limitations.

I always identify with Sarah when I read her story. Don't we all have the unexpected in us? How often do we hold back from letting it out for fear of ridicule? "What will people think" trumping "what am I called to do?" And then how we bristle and steam at our self-made shackles!

Our own community is made up of people with many seeming limitations - those of age, physical ability, money, education. But creativity is not among our lacks. So perhaps we help heal Sarah also when we overcome our fears and unleash our unexpected creativity.

There is another Midrash that although Sarah felt alone in her story, she wasn't. At the moment that God thought of her, making her fertile, other barren women conceived, sick people were healed, deaf people heard, among other Biblical-style miracles. Perhaps this is our tradition's way of saying that blessing comes in waves. When you step beyond others' expectations of you and your own expectations of yourself, others will follow. And the blessing will touch us all.

Gods, Monsters and the Big Disappointment

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, October 16, 2009]

How many people here tonight had imaginary friends when they were little? How many of you imagined having magical powers? How many of you do have magical powers? How many of you are disappointed you don't?

This week we're back once again at Parashat Breishit - the first portion of the book of Genesis. But you might know we read Torah on a triennial cycle. So this year we read the end of the portion. Not the glamorous "In the Beginning" and "Let there be Light" opening. None of the first 7 days of Creation - Sun, Moon, Stars, Birds, Crawly Things. We skip right over the honeymoon years, with Adam and Eve romping through the garden, watering the plants, sharing papayas, and tossing around baby names. (Of course Torah skips that too.) We bypass whatever moment of mundane beauty human existence offers, and go right for the big drama. Expulsion from the garden. Cain killing Abel. Humankind multiplying in number and in evil. Prohibited mating of celestial and earthly beings. Discontent, jealousy, anger, murder, deceit, culminating in Chapter 6:

And it happened as humankind began to multiply over the earth and daughters were born to them, that the B'nei Ha-Elohim [sons of God?] saw that the daughters of man were comely, and they took themselves wives howsoever they chose. And the Lord said, "My breath shall not abide in the human forever, for he is but flesh. Let his days be a hundred and twenty years." The Nefilim [giants? fallen ones?] were then on the earth, and afterward as well, the B'nei Ha'Elohim having come to bed with the daughters of man who bore them children: they are the heroes of yore, the men of renown.

And the Lord saw that the evil of the human creature was great upon the earth and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only perpetually evil. And the Lord regretted having made the human on earth and was grieved to the heart. And the Lord said, "I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth, from human to cattle to crawling thing to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

That is perhaps hardest to read: God's disappointment. "I wish I had never created them," says the all-forgiving, all-knowing God about us. And God shuts off the tap of eternal life, like a bartender cutting off a messy drunk. "Sorry, mister," God seems to say, "but 120 years are enough." And then the heave-ho, courtesy of the Angel of Death - that most accomplished of bouncers.

But does the bartender truly have a right to complain about drunkenness of his customers? Who was serving the drinks? In other words, what exactly is God's right to disappointment? I once heard a comic tell a joke about seeing a fortune teller's shop with a sign on the window saying "Out of Business." The comic locks the audience's gaze and says, "You'd think she would have known!" So what is implied here? God couldn't see any of this coming? God had no control over the content of His creatures' characters? (And I say He here, because this image of God is such a sexist cliche of a disappointed father, pained by how his children turned out while accepting no culpability for it. If it were Greek polytheism, we'd be seeing Chronos complaining to Gaia, "Dear, look what your children have done.") Yes, an aggravating bit of Torah.

So how shall we examine it?

From an Asiyah point of view - that is looking at the text but not into it - it is a smash-up of variant mythological traditions. Male deities having sex with human females is an old trope in the Ancient World, explaining both the existence of heroes and monsters. (To be fair, our own body of midrashic literature also references Adam as having had sex with Lilith, a female demon or deity, and that union giving rise to spirits and goblins and demons.)

Oh, and I love this reference to the heroes of yore. What heroes of yore? If there were heroes of yore in our tradition, between the time of Adam & Eve and the time of Noah, wouldn't Torah have told us? Isn't the Torah, by our own tradition, all the news that's fit to print?

So it seems we are the inheritors of a vast pre-Israelite mythology about which we are told almost nothing. This chapter is one of several references to other cosmologies that we find in Torah. But it's not just a reference to our mythological pre-history. On top of it is an overlay of monotheism that fits horribly, and we all feel it. If our primordial story consisted of conflicts between jealous gods, as we see in the other mythologies of the ancient world, we could accept the idea of humankind getting caught in the crossfire because, frankly, that's a lot of what life feels like!

But this is different. We don't have any quarreling deities. We have a world created by God in a way that, face it, invites the worst possible behavior. Don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge? What kind of cockamamy prohibition is that? It's like in the Simpsons, where Springfield Police Chief Wigham tries to keep his stash of guns out of his son's reach by saying: "Ralphy, don't go into Daddy's Forbidden Closet of Mystery!"

The whole thing is a setup. Cain and Abel too. Accepting one sacrifice and not the other. What, God couldn't foresee the outcome of that? If it were a movie, we, limited beings as we are, would be rolling our eyes at the predictability of that plot line.

But somehow we are asked to believe that God's actions are blameless, and that the ugliness resides exclusively in the free will and actions of the humans who misbehave. Even the B'nei Elohim -- the angels or deities who take human wives -- get off scott-free. Yes, things have gone to pot on Earth, and this chapter tells us that we were at fault for it. God is ready to wash his hands of us, in floodwaters no less.

Bad story. Bad plot. An unfortunate way to understand ancient floods and monstrous fossil records. But it is what it is. And it is ours.

So let's move out of Asiyah, out of this world of textual criticism and move to the world of Yetzirah - the world of emotion and deep impulse. What might this story mean simply as an expression of an emotional truth, since as cosmology and history it's such a terrible mess?

Here's one thought. Think of the first couple chapters of Torah as a collective early childhood memory. Unclear, confused, dreamlike. But full of wonder also.

How many of us have early childhood memories that include imagining supernatural figures? Angels or fairies? Deities talking to us? God talking to us? I imagine I had a stronger sense of dialogue with God at age five than I do now. And scary stuff too? Monsters under the bed. My monsters were, not ironically, in the closet. How many of us imagined that our parents weren't really our parents? That our real parents were gods or heroes or monsters or space aliens?

The world was alive with magic, both wondrous and terrifying. The line between imagination and earthly reality was thin at best. Maybe that was part of our early training for a spiritual life. We might not believe in fairies now, but we continue to feel, on some or many levels, that this can't be all there is.

If the description of deities and giants in this chapter is a kind of echo of our early childhood imaginings, then perhaps the problems introduced by later historic monotheism parallel the problems introduced by our own adulthoods. Disappointment in how it all turned out, when it started with such magic - well, that is a very human, very adult sentiment. While we might on one level think God's disappointment to be grossly unfair, we can, in another way, easily identify with it. We've all been Creators. We've all to some extent created our own lives, our own worlds. In them we've tried to mix the heavenly with the earthly. We've been moved by our dreams and driven by our terrors and have fashioned our existences using the clay that was given us. We've done so without foreseeing all consequences, even the obvious ones. Our life spans are short - and if we all actually lived to 120 that also would seem too short. Regret is the inevitable consequence of creating, of living, of having free will.

So how do we not fall into the despair that we see God experience in this parashah? That's a trick question. I don't think God actually falls into despair. If God had, then God would have destroyed Creation utterly, like some of our midrashim tell us God did with earlier worlds. But God doesn't destroy Creation utterly. Why?

Because He notices Noah, the righteous. Perhaps Noah was the only righteous person of his generation. Or maybe he was just the only one who caught God's eye. But whenever we feel that nearly godlike depth of disappointment, of regret, that is the time for us to look for our own Noahs. Our reason to keep going. The thing to hang on to when we let go of the painful stuff that didn't work out.

חן ~ נח

The Rabbis make much of the fact that Noah's name, spelled nun-chet, when written backwards is the word chen - grace. There is always something of grace in our lives when we look up from our regrets. It is there. And when we feel the urge to jettison all of it, we have to look for our Noah, our chen, that bit of grace, that one piece that does feel right. Because when you save it, you don't save it alone. It brings with it a whole boatload of new possibility. New life waiting to be born and to fill what only yesterday felt like desolation.

So there is an emotional truth in this piece of parashah. We are not just the misunderstood creatures of this world. We are creators too, each one of us. Torah asks us, at least in this dreamlike world of Yetzirah, not to be stuck in the role of humankind, but to identify with God as well. The disappointment born of desire to create in a world whose rules don't oblige everything to turn out as planned. Torah says before you wash it all away, find the righteousness, find the grace, find your Noah. Because there is always something worth saving.