My Yiddish Interview

Eric Edelstein of Yiddishlives.com twisted my arm to do an omnibus life story interview - af Yiddish! My grammar disserves my Grandma. But it was an honor to do this. We discuss Yiddish, the Kinsey Sicks, my rabbi work, my family, Israel, the Old Country and more.

Irwin Keller's Yiddish Interview from YiddishLives on Vimeo.

Kol Haneshamah - Every Living Thing

Something new and beautiful from Ner Shalom. Lorenzo Valensi's new setting of Kol Haneshamah - the final verse of the book of Psalms.

כל הנשמה תהלל יה הללויה

Kol haneshamah tehalel Yah. Haleluyah.

Let every living thing praise Yah. Hallelujah.

It's a fast recording we threw down on Garageband, and a fast video from iMovie. But rough production values aside, I think it's a thing of beauty. Enjoy.

Forgiving the Painful Past: A Queer Read of Joseph

(For Congregation Ner Shalom on Parashat Miketz)

I spoke with a reporter this week from the Press-Democrat, doing a story about the Jewish community of Sonoma County. He asked me what I thought characterized our county's Jews. Of course I'm still pretty new to Sonoma, and the Jews I know here are you. And me.

So I told him that our community of Jews is made up of people who have journeyed. We have covered great distances, geographically or personally or spiritually. We have sought new lives, enlightenment, freedom to be ourselves. We often left behind very powerful pasts. Painful pasts. Including Jewish pasts. And now we wonder how to reengage as Jews when those pasts still return to haunt us, and they still hurt.

This problem of facing the painful past is why the Biblical character of Joseph always holds such fascination for me. This week we read the middle act of a three-parashah opera, all about Joseph. And if you don't mind, I'd like to re-familiarize you with the story.

In Act I (last week's parashah - Vayeshev), young Joseph, his father's favorite, dreams of his brothers bowing down to him. He incurs his brothers' ire and on a fateful day is thrown by them into a pit, to be rescued by Midianites and sold into slavery in Egypt. There's an episode with Potiphar's wife that lands Joseph in prison, where he interprets the dreams of other inmates and makes an impression.

In Act II (this week's parashah - Miketz) Pharaoh dreams about skinny cows and fat cows and Joseph is hauled out of jail to interpret the dreams. He takes charge of the stockpiling of Egypt's provisions during seven years of plenty and is the rationer of those stores during the subsequent years of famine. He becomes powerful - Pharaoh's righthand man.

Then his past catches up with him. His brothers arrive from Canaan in search of food. They do not recognize him, and they bow down before him. Joseph does not reveal himself, but plays an elaborate game of cat and mouse. He gives them the food they ask for, but he tests them. He manipulates them into coming back to Egypt and bringing his younger brother Benjamin. The brothers fear this is at last their come-uppance, their karma return for the abduction of Joseph. Joseph understands their language of course and turns away to cry as they discuss this. They ultimately return with Benjamin. Joseph welcomes them and serves them a meal in his home, and is overcome with emotion. But still playing hide and seek, he engineers a way to keep Benjamin captive. This is the test of the brothers' mettle. Will they repeat the act of abandonment that they had perpetrated on Joseph, this time abandoning Benjamin to his fate?

Act III is next week's parashah - Vayigash. The curtain rises and Judah delivers a lengthy polemic to save Benjamin from captivity. But Joseph can no longer contain himself. He reveals his identity. "I am your brother Joseph," he says, "he whom you sold into Egypt. Now do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you." He has the brothers fetch Jacob his father, and he gives them fertile land to live on in the Egyptian district of Goshen.

Queer Eye?

This whole story fascinates me. Joseph's experiences of alienation, journey, and building a new life are so familiar. We all look at Torah through our own lens, of course, and here's mine. This has always struck me as a queer story. Joseph is the queerest character in Torah. I'm not saying that he's the gayest character or that he's gay at all, although he could be. But his narrative is queer. His biography is queer. He is a transgressor. An outsider. He negotiates a mix of identities. He has secrets.

The rabbis sit uncomfortably with who he is. They make special mention in Midrash of his curling his hair and painting his eyes in the Egyptian style. To an Egyptian this would be innocuous, but to the rabbis it certainly had a whiff of gender transgression to it. Maybe gender was the readiest hook upon which to hang their overall anxiety with who Joseph was.

He's also a gifted child. Gifted in ways that make him hated. He is more colorful than the others -- literalized by that coat his father gave him. He is bullied and punished for his difference.

As an adult he survives. He survives by recreating himself; using his gifts but denying his past. He rises to power by interpreting dreams. He is a bearer and sharer of insight. He becomes a polyglot -- Midrash says the angel Gabriel taught him to speak the world's 70 languages. Just as queers and other transgressives must learn the secret languages of different social settings, the varied cultural codes by which they will survive or perish.

Joseph survives. He ends up in the big city; the capital of the world -- the San Francisco or New York of its time. He takes on a new identity. A new name. A new role. He creates a life for himself, or allows a new life to unfold for him. And in all those years of being Pharaoh's vizier -- seven years of plenty and the first two years of famine -- he can't find it in himself to send word to his father that he is still alive.

How many of us have made just such decisions? A new place? New life? New name? New social language? How many of us made decisions not to look back? Why didn't Joseph look back? A Boston Globe feature this week on long-term effects of bullying describes how adults, decades later, can fill with terror if they see one of their childhood tormentors. So was Joseph too frightened to risk seeing his brothers? Or even to think about them?

But Joseph, like so many of us, doesn't have this luxury forever. Because the past comes back. The past always comes back. And when it does in the story, Joseph makes some choices.

Rudolph: Hero or Chump?

His first choice is to help his brothers. This is what my husband calls the "Rudolph moment." Since this is the season, we'll take as our haftarah the story of Rudolph, another queer character of literature who, as we know, had a very shiny nose. All of the other reindeer used to laugh. And call him names. They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games but then: one foggy Christmas eve, Santa came to say, "Rudolph! With your nose so bright, won't you . . . whatever?" This is the pivotal moment for Rudolph. He in fact chooses to save Christmas. But some of us who were also laughed at and kept out of games, might have enjoyed this story equally or more if Rudolph had said, "Excuse me? My entire life you've all taunted me and excluded me and now you're asking for my help? What kind of codependent bull is this? Sorry. It will be Christmas again next year."

But he doesn't. And like Rudolph, Joseph resists his anger. He doesn't say "no." He doesn't say, "screw you; maybe next famine." Why? Maybe because his past is complex - it includes not only the bullies, but his father and his little brother. Or because he has become more complex.

He also doesn't use that first meeting to reveal himself. The rabbis make much of this. They say he held back because the brothers were bowing down to him. The prophecy of his childhood dream had in fact come true. If he'd revealed himself at that moment, it would have been as if announcing that he'd won. It would have instilled rancor in their hearts. This is the quality of Joseph that causes him to be referred to repeatedly in Rabbinic literature as tzadik - Joseph the Righteous, the only character in Genesis to be so named.

From the moment of these first decisions -- to welcome the brothers, help them, and not act with triumph or smugness -- Joseph's conduct might be instructive for the many of us who thought we'd escaped our pasts, only to find them knocking on the door again. Using Joseph the Tzadik as a guide, Torah might offer us this checklist:

(1) Open the door. Let your past in.

(2) Let your past bow down. Give it a chance to offer you its humility.

(3) Don't gloat. Even though you've made a new and possibly better life.

(4) Sit down and have a meal with your past. Get reacquainted.

(5) Test your past. Give it a chance to turn out differently. Maybe the past is  not unchangeable. Perhaps some of it can redeem itself after all. Let it reenact with a different choice and a better outcome.

(6) Reveal to it who you are now. And remind it what it did to you then.

(7) Release it from its guilt. Forgive it. You and your past cannot stay locked in eternal pain. This is what Torah commentator Aviva Zornberg calls letting go of the "narrative of shame." Like Joseph, we can acknowledge that it is in part because we were broken that we became the much better, much stronger people we are. Our survival was not mere survival, but a flourishing too. We can afford to forgive. And, finally:

(8) Stay where you are. You'd expect a narrative of reconciliation to culminate in a "going home." But Joseph doesn't. He can't. He's become someone else. But he invites his past to come closer. To dwell in fertile land on the outskirts but within reach.

For some of us the painful past that comes knocking is a Jewish past. If that's true for you, and you're here tonight anyway, then it means this. You've already opened the door. You've let that past bow down and offer some humility. You've resisted gloating. You've sat down and had a meal with it. And now, here, at Ner Shalom with our hippie ways and our new songs and our surprising and touching and insightful community, you're testing it to see if it can turn out differently. We're all testing to see if it can turn out differently. I'm guessing for many of us it already has.

In the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, it is Joseph the Tzaddik who is associated with the sefirah called Yesod. This is the locus of fertility. Because Joseph brought his past to a green land even in a time of famine and triggered a burgeoning. By allowing the past to redeem itself and become once again part of his life, Joseph paved the way for the generations to come. He planted the seeds of growth and liberation and revelation.

So may we welcome, test and forgive our pasts, inviting them into our fertile outskirts, planting the seeds for so much blossoming still ahead.

And let us say Amen.

Idealist * Muddler * Angel

[For the Ner Shalom Malakh, December 2010.]

This time of year I sometimes find myself in a muddle. I said yes to so many things in the fall, rushing in, full of enthusiasm, eager to do and to be! And now here I am slogging through the heap I've made for myself, lost and dispirited.

This week in Parashat Vayeshev, we observe another mismatch of eagerness and follow-through. Joseph, the dreamer, is a boy. He is the object of his father's affection and his brothers' hatred. Jacob calls him to send him on an errand - the infamous errand that we all know will result in his abduction and eventual rise to power in Egypt. He responds to his father's call by saying hineni -- "here I am" -- the same words Abraham spoke when called by God and by Isaac his son. Hineni suggests complete willingness; eager receptivity to what will come next.

Jacob sends him to check on his brothers and the flocks. But he gets lost. Suddenly the story's point of view shifts and we see him blundering through the fields, through the eyes of an ish - a "man" or "person". This stranger asks Joseph mah t'vakesh -- "what are you seeking?" Or "what would you ask of me?" Joseph tells him he's looking for his brothers, and the ish tells him where they went.

This is an odd side story in Torah. The plot doesn't require Joseph to go astray. But there's something here that adds both suspense and a sense of destiny. But for running into the stranger, the day would have unfolded differently, and so might our history. Rashi and other commentators suggest that the ish is actually the angel Gabriel, sent specifically to steer Joseph toward his appointed future. A part of me likes to imagine the ish instead as somehow being the future Joseph, come back to direct his wide-eyed childhood self with compassion, perhaps intoning a barely audible "it gets better" blessing as he remands Joseph to the brutality and bullying of his brothers.

Or maybe the ish is not a being but a particular kind of insight that each of us possesses. The loving but unruffled part of our hearts that can step aside from our attachments to both the eagerness and the frustration and can instead take the long view. This is the part of me that I always forget exists, so trapped am I inside, alternately, the idealist and the slogger. So in Joseph's honor, I'm going to look in my heart and find my ish, my guide standing in the field, and invite him/her/it for a cup of tea. And when it asks me, mah t'vakesh -- "what are you seeking? what do you ask of me?" -- I wonder what I will say. What would you?

Unravelling Regret

[Erev Yom Kippur Sermon, 5771-2010]

I regret to inform you that tonight we will be discussing regret. Regrets, grudges, and other artifacts that burden us, that impede passage through the corridors of our lives. We will also talk about death and forgiveness and knitting.

So I want to tell you about my Uncle Marvin. He was my only uncle, although I had plenty of great-uncles growing up and, baruch Hashem, have one still. But Uncle Marv was my only "real" plain-old uncle. He and I became especially close over the last decade, after my aunt had died and so had my father, who was my uncle's younger brother. Suddenly alone in the suburbs of Chicago, Uncle Marv moved to Las Vegas to be closer to his son and daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, my touring calendar began to include Las Vegas, and I ended up having many more opportunities to be alone with him than I'd ever had.

Despite his advanced age, he remained active, kinda crotchety and the source of an unflagging stream of jokes. He continued to come up with ideas and inventions. He worked in a grocery store right until he became sick with what was to be his final illness.

When I found out he had been hospitalized, I flew down. I spent two days sitting in his hospital room with him. In his thin and weakened state, he was nearly the spitting image of my father at the end of his life, which gave our time together an unearthly air.

Our first day together was all sweetness. He made jokes. We sang together - the standards: Gershwin, Irving Berlin. I was grateful to be there and he was happy I was there also. I sat and knitted at his bedside, a scarf intended for my sister. It kept my hands busy, and the click-clack of the needles filled the silent stretches with a note of purpose.

The second day was different. He was even weaker, and the joy seemed drained from the room. He still talked, but they were all stories of grudges and regrets: complaints about how his in-laws treated him. Disappointments about his marriage, about his career, about the move out west he should have done, about the businesses he should have started, about the many ways his life could have been better if people hadn't refused to believe in him.

I listened to this outpouring of ancient bitterness. My body tensed up, and as I knitted I felt my stitches getting smaller and tighter and harder to work with.

At some point I tried to change the tenor of the day by asking him to tell me a happy story. He told me briefly about his honeymoon. The birth of his children. Then he was flooded full-on with a childhood memory that clearly animated him. He'd been trying to sell enough newspaper subscriptions to win his first bike and he was one subscription short and finally Aunt Lucy bought a subscription she didn't need, despite the hard yoke of the Depression, so that he should get it, and the bicycle finally arrived, and he assembled it, and a neighbor sent him on his first errand to pick up something at the hardware store on Foster Avenue and when he came out of the hardware store his new bike was gone.

That was the happy story.

In a somewhat naïve, rabbinical student, do-gooder kind of way, I thought about the bedtime shema. We have a tradition, many of you know about it, that one should not die without forgiving and being forgiven. And since we never know when we will die, we recite a short vidui, a short confessional, each night along with our recitation of the shema. It goes, in part, like this:

Ribbono shel Olam! Master of the Universe.
I hereby forgive anyone who has angered or upset me, or who has done me any harm; who has harmed my physical body, my possessions, my honor — anything pertaining to me; whether accidentally or intentionally, by speech or by deed, in this incarnation or any other; any human being. May no one be punished on my account.

My uncle, always easily identifiable as Jewish, sometimes picked on for it, always proud of it, was not an observant man. I don't know if he ever said the shema outside of a synagogue. Or inside one for that matter. So instead of offering an explicitly religious practice, I simply asked him, "Do you think it might be time to let go of these grudges, Uncle Marv? Maybe you can forgive these people. Maybe they were only doing their best."

His response, though startling, had the honesty of someone without much time left. "No," he replied, "never."

Jewish tradition has, as you imagine, something to say about this. We are encouraged to forgive. And more. The 16th Century Spanish Rabbi Moshe Cordovero wrote that you are to emulate God in your forgiveness - that is, after you forgive, you must hold that person closer, dearer than you did before the offense occurred. Maybe that is in fact what we do in our most successful relationships. Forgiveness giving way to intimacy. But, as a general pracitce, this really sounds like an impossibly tall order. Think of all old bosses and coworkers you'd still have to be close to.

Somewhere in the course of all of this, and I can't tell you whether it was on the sweet day or the bitter one, I made a serious error in my knitting. I missed a row and reversed the pattern. That is to say, the front side of the scarf became the back, and vice versa. So that the ragged, unfinished elements would be visible no matter how you wore the thing.

I flew home with my mess of scarf, saddened not only at my uncle's impending death, but at the fact that he seemed so burdened, so narrowed, so bitter, and that that would be the emotional and spiritual flavor of his death.

Being in a narrow place, and being released from it, is one of the great narrative tropes of our tradition. Certainly, our great collective story of liberation, the Exodus from Mitzrayim, is that story. Mitzrayim, interpretable in Hebrew as "the narrow places" gave way to a vast wilderness, a midbar, free of landmarks, a big sky country where God's voice could speak to us, midbar meaning not only "wilderness" in Hebrew but also "the place of speech."

Release from the narrow place is not just our collective story but also a reflection of our internal struggles and our desire for expansiveness. In Psalm 118, we famously say:

מן המצר קראתי יה ענני במרחב יה

From the metzar, from the narrow place, I called Yah.

I was answered in Yah's great expanse.

Poor Uncle Marv, I thought in that moment, stuck in the narrow place.

Back in my own home, I looked at the scarf. I couldn't continue with it. The error was too significant. And, looking at the tight stitches I could only think of my uncle's discontents, inscribed right into the wool. It would not be a fitting gift for anyone. I pulled out the needles and began to unravel it row by row. As I did this, I breathed deep and imagined his grudges being released into the wilderness, being offered up into the expanse. At last I was left with a ball of yarn, and lungs filled with good air.

My sister called. It was now her turn to be in Las Vegas at the bedside. I'd forewarned her that he was very bitter. She called to say that she didn't know what I'd seen, but that he was now peaceful and loving, with no sign of bitterness. A couple days later I called him on his cell phone. I didn't expect him to answer but he did. I'd heard he was barely talking at all anymore. But he took the lead. He reminded me of two daytrips he and I had made from Las Vegas - one to Red Rock Canyon, one to Mt. Charleston. Memories of our being in the midbar, in the vast places where God speaks. I told him that from my window at that very moment I could see the Pacific Ocean, entirely wrapped in fog. He said he'd like to see the ocean, and that maybe that could be our next trip together.

My uncle had somehow ended up in merchav Yah. He was in the great expansive place. How did this happen? I have no way of knowing. The pagan in me likes the thought that in unraveling the scarf I released his grudges for him. But in truth, all I know is that in unraveling the scarf I released them for me.

Did he revisit the idea of forgiving, as is done in the bedtime Shema? I couldn't know. But maybe, in the absence of formal words of release, crying out from the narrow place was enough. Maybe his telling me all those things was, in essence, his crying "Yah" from the narrow place. Whether by "Yah" we mean "God" or we mean the keening of a primal pain. Or an exhale of the hard stuff into the ether. Maybe his defiant statement of "no, never" was in fact his call from the narrow place. No. Never. Yah.
And after that, mysteriously, he seemed to have breathed in expansiveness, and with it visions of canyon and mountain and ocean.

Maybe, in fact, calling out is enough. Even without kavanah, without an explicit intent to unburden ourselves of our grudges, our bodies and our spirits eventually know what they must do, despite ourselves. After all, the narrow place is magnetic. We know this. It is cozy and familiar and we do not always give it up easily. But, as the sages said,

יותר משהעגל רוצה לינוק הפרה רוצה להיניק

More than the calf wants to suckle, the cow wants to nurse. In other words, God wants to give us kindness even more than we desire it for ourselves. Or in this case, this Universe wants us to be filled with expansiveness, even more than we want to give up the narrow place. Even when we say we don't want to give up the narrow place at all.

I'll never know exactly what happened for Uncle Marv. I do know, though, what happened for me. I became more convinced that I must always seek out and embrace expansiveness, the merchav Yah. I do not want first to amass 80 years of grudges, or 70, or 50, or 10. I will do my bedtime Shema regularly or irregularly. At bedtime, or when I remember. I will use those exact words or others. Or I will use no words at all, but simply call out Yah from my narrow place. I will say Yah, yeah, yo, You, or simply breathe the hard stuff out. Yah.

Let us do that together. Now. Not on our deathbeds, but now. Let us find the people we're still, year after year, unwilling to forgive. The stories that still pain us so very long after they stopped being fact and became stories. Let us gather those things into our lungs and our throats and let us breathe them out of these narrow places together: Yah. Yah. Yah.

And take a deep breath of merchav Yah - of holy expansiveness.

And let us say: Amen.

And by the way, when the day comes at last that you can't find me, I'll be on the beach with my uncle.

Attuning to Love

Drash for Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5771

I've been a bit blocked of late. Writer's block for sure. But maybe more. I turn 50 in three days and it's brought up a bit more gunk than I thought it would. More limitations. My body not working the way I want. And, of course, these are just plain hard times to begin with: the economy; the wars; the planet; the new generation of book-burners amassing their piles of Korans. So much to feel angry and helpless about. So I've been feeling blocked, and have come to feel angry and helpless about that too. Even writing a drash for tonight was killer. Last year and the year before they flowed. But not this one.

All year I'd collected thoughts, feelings, phrases. Then when it came time to write, I threw these all at the paper and none of it would stick. Or it stuck, but failed to make a pattern. I turned on myself in a fury. "Aha, beginners' luck has worn off, and now we see the truth," I said to myself, rather cruelly. "You've finally run out of things to say," I said to myself, rather disingenuously. "Everyone will see you're no rabbi," I said, while another part of my mind feebly responded, "Well, they do know that already..."

I decided to spend a day thinking and writing in the woods. It worked great last year. But this year, I sat anxiously under the indifferent redwoods, waiting for inspiration. The last straw came when I looked up out of the anonymity of nature to see a familiar face smiling and saying, "Oh Reb Irwin, I can't wait to hear your sermons this year!"

The rout was complete. I was ruined, my efforts worthless. I felt wrung out - not by my hard work (and I was working hard), but by the exhausting ordeal of self-judgment. Hineh yom hadin - as we say on these holidays: Behold the Day of Judgment.

After all, isn't that what these holidays are about? Judgment? The judgment language is everywhere in the liturgy. We are asked to look inside and take stock, in a process called cheshbon hanefesh - the accounting of the soul. It's hard and it doesn't always feel good. In fact, I had one friend tell me that she wouldn't be attending Yom Kippur at her synagogue this year because she's tired of being asked to feel bad.

Of course self-judgment makes us feel especially bad, because we're really so good at it. Maybe the concept of divine judgment is terrifying because it's another layer on top of the what we've done to ourselves. I know my failures; God knows not only those, but also the ones I'm still in denial about. Who could stand up to that kind of God-like scrutiny?

We've complained about this angst for as long as we've been a people. In Psalm 130, which we recited the other night at Selichot, we ask:

אם–עונות תשמר–יה אדני מי יעמד

"If you keep track of all our transgressions, Adonai, who can stand?" In other words, how can any of us hope to withstand God's judgment?

A more modern text raises the same question. This very Jewish text is a joke my friend Esther Schor told me this summer. It goes like this:

Moses has died and ascends to heaven. God welcomes him. "Moses, are you hungry," asks God. "I could eat," replies Moses. God picks up a can of tuna, opens it, dumps it on a plate, sticks a leaf of iceberg lettuce next to it and puts it in front of Moses. Not wanting to be impolite, Moses nibbles at it, all the while looking down over his shoulder, where he can see clear down to hell. There the people are feasting. Tables full of food like at a Bar Mitzvah. Finally Moses works up the nerve and says, "God, I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I can't help but notice that the people in hell are eating much better." "Listen, Moses," replies God, "for two I don't cook."

Both the Psalm and the joke correctly point out that saintliness is not in our nature; if there were a heaven and hell, and divine judgment determined the outcome, heaven would be empty. And if self-judgment determined the outcome, I don't imagine heaven would be any more populous.

And no wonder. We live lives that are complex. Our efforts to be our best selves are hampered by our need to make money and take care of our families and get out the door to work and a million other things. Moral questions are often gray. And sometimes we do know what's right but we just don't have time, for many good reasons, to do it. And what do we mean anyway by "our best selves?" Are we really split into bad and better selves? Isn't this "best selves" metaphor another "good me/bad me" dichotomy that's just another setup for failure?

That's why I'm going  on strike this year. I protest. I have gone through a sincere cheshbon hanefesh, a spiritual inventory, during each of the last 40 or so high holy day seasons. Every year I explore my shortcomings. I try to make my peace with the world. Sometimes I even pray. And the next year the shortcomings look suspiciously similar to the ones the year before. Like going back over and over to look in the fridge. Same stuff inside. But older. And a little more pungent. So while this annual season of introspection can feel cathartic in the moment, I'm skeptical about how much it results in actual change.

So yes. I'm on strike. I say this: if cheshbon hanefesh is a true accounting, then the balance sheet must contain not only liabilities but assets too. I want to spend a little time looking at that side of the ledger. This year I want to make it my project to look for the good. In others, yes. But also in myself. Because I think just underneath or on the flipside of everything we feel bad about, there is something good, something worthy of love, something waiting for a little respect.

I will now model this, using several of my real-life shortcomings.

I feel hopeless and unhappy about the overflowing pile of undone stuff on my desk. The inbox of emails awaiting response like pets pawing at the door to be fed. The boundaries I didn't set. My difficulty saying "no." The way my family suffers for my overcommittedness.

Days of Attunement X-Ray Glasses

Some other year, I'd brood over those things, feel terrible and resolve to try harder. But this year I would like to see deeper. If only I had a pair of Days of Attunement X-Ray Glasses, I take a second look. Wait! I do have a pair! Let's see what we see.

Aha. So behind the overcommittedness there's my desire to be everything for everyone. And also there's my deep love of saying, "yes." Those aren't bad things. They get me in trouble, but they're lovely things, and they deserved to be noticed. Hey.

Let's try another one. My impatience. My seemingly ever-shortening fuse. With my Days of Attunement X-Ray glasses what do I see? Some nasty perfectionism maybe; behind that some insecurity. Behind that I see my need to prove something, to prove what I can do all by myself, and behind that - let me readjust the glasses - ah yes, the desire to be loved. Now I get it. And wait, there's something else. Oh, this one is surprising, for a rabbi-slash-singing-drag-queen. Deep down, there's part of me that's an introvert, who just wants to be able to be alone and doesn't know how to ask for that. Wanting to be loved. Needing solitude. I can honor and appreciate those parts of me, even though the way I've acted on them has obviously gotten me into hot water.

So I'm not trying to wiggle my way out of responsibility; I'm not - despite appearances - looking at myself through rose-colored glasses. I'm not letting myself off the hook for my actions or their consequences. If there is teshuvah to do in the world, I have to do it. But looking lovingly at their source, the simple, human, even beautiful source: that is new and surprising and, I think, good.

So what are these X-Ray Glasses? Here's your mnemonic. You can remember because they form a chet. They are the divine and, thankully, human attribute of chesed. Of love. Of kindness. What a nice change, looking at all I'm ashamed of through a lens of genuine love and kindness.

You don't have to do it this instant, although you're welcome to. But I'd like to invite you this year, when you're beating your chest and rattling off your list of transgressions, to find one that's really present for you, to pause with it and to look deeper behind it using your own built-in Chesed Lenses. What we all might discover is that there are parts of us that are real and are praiseworthy and are in need of attention, and which need to be taken into consideration when we act in this world. Maybe that little bit of good stuff that's in need of attention will help us change more than any great heap of self-condemnation.

The great Chasidic master, Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, commanded his followers to judge with kindness. He taught:

דע כי צריך לדון את כל אדם לכף הזכות

"Know," he said, that you must judge every person on the meritorious side of the scale, on the generous side...

ואפילו מי שהוא רשע גמור, צריך לחפש  ולמצוא בו איזה מעט טוב

and even someone who seems completely wicked to you, you must look for and find eyzeh m'at tov - some small bit of good, and by recognizing the small bit that's good, you invite the person to return in teshuvah. For Rebbe Nachman, looking for the good wasn't enough. Finding it was obligatory. In other words, he never doubted - nor should we - that it's there.

But what I propose is that m'at tov - that nugget of goodness - is not sitting alongside our faults. It is part of them. It breathes through them. And the m'at tov is also what makes us care about how we're doing in our lives to begin with.

Rebbe Nachman believed this m'at tov to be utterly transformative. His prooftext (they always use prooftexts) is in Psalm 37:

ועד מעט ואין רשע והתובוננת על–מקומו ואיננו

"Just a little bit and there will be no wicked one; you will look at his place and he will not be there." The traditional reading is that in just a little bit - i.e. very soon - the wicked will be wiped off the face of the earth. But the Rebbe's ingenious reading is utterly different. Find the little bit of good in someone and the next time you look, you will not see a wicked person at all. Just a little bit and there will be no wicked one; you will look at his place and he will not be there. Is this advice any less true when looking at ourselves?

And so may we, on the brink of the new year, during the hard and pressured times that we all experience, do this for each other and for ourselves. When we look inside, let us not stop with the faults. Let us mine deeper for the praiseworthy piece that set it all in motion. The m'at tov - the bit of good that flows even through our failures. And by acknowledging that praiseworthy piece, that m'at tov, may we send it on a better course to its happy fulfillment. May that be our method of change. So that when we look back to the place where we saw, and scolded, our wicked selves, our wicked selves will no longer be there.

I wish all of you a good year, a better year, a year of compassion, a year of attunement to the good in others and in ourselves.

Rosh Hashanah Welcome: Through the Wall

Chag sameach. Gut yontiff. Welcome.

I want to congratulate you for showing up tonight, for whatever reason you did: because this is your lifelong custom or because it's a new engagement; because it moves you; because you're curious; or because you love someone who wanted to be here. These are all fine reasons. So mazeltov.

I know for many of us the transition into synagogue ritual can be difficult. There are many things about our tradition that are hard to buy into. I recently had the opportunity to pray in a community that was politically progressive but ritually conservative. They used an Orthodox prayerbook, and it was my first time using one in a long time. The entire service was in Hebrew. I know for many of you that would prove an obstacle. My problem was different. I understood all the Hebrew. And the content of what I was reading proved to be the great obstacle. So many things I couldn't buy into: severely gendered imagery, God-as-king, angry-God, judging God. I began to see the words, the Hebrew typeface we call block print, as actual bricks, walling me off and keeping me out. I felt myself fuming. I felt tears welling up.

But as I stared at this wall, my mind wandered to the Greek myth of Pyramus and Thisbe. Next door neighbors, lovers from feuding families. A chink in the wall was how they saw and heard each other, and how they carried on their love affair. The image suddenly allowed me to imagine a chink in the wall of liturgy, to see the space between our inherited words. Through this opening I saw, smiling at me, I don't know what: maybe our tradition, maybe the cosmos, maybe God. But something in the experience smiled back at me like a lover. I chuckled at the secret of our love affair, and felt my tense body relax. As I did, the opening grew and became a great gate and swung open for me at last. Pitchu li sha'arei tzedek as we will sing repeatedly over this holiday. "Open for me, ye gates."

So I invite you to find your own gate this holiday. The one that opens for you, to whatever mystery lies behind it. If your gate is music, may it open for you. If your gate is tradition, may it open for you. If your gate involves ignoring all the words and reflecting quietly or walking outside under the stars, may it open for you. If your gate involves God, may it open for you. If your gate involves replacing the word God with Universe, Being, Existence, Non-existence or Mystery every time it comes up in the book or issues from my mouth, may that gate open for you as well.

I ask your forgiveness in advance if this service turns out not to be exactly what you had wanted. But, as the sages famously said, "You can't always get what you want. No, you can't always get what you want. No, you can't always get what you want."

But if you try to find your own gate, you might just find you get what you need.

It is Rosh Hashanh. A time for turning - turning the calendar, turning a page, maybe turning over a new leaf, turning around, turning back. I am glad we are here together at this moment of turning, looking behind, looking ahead, looking inside.

Ki Tetzei - Consolation for the Desolate

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, August 20, 2010.]

I've begun to feel a little desolate of late. First there was the usual stuff. Too much to do. So many responsibilities. So many people to answer to. And money worries. And anxiety about High Holy Days that need to come to life and soar but are still imprisoned in spreadsheets and notebook paper. Then came the unusual stuff. The end of my 40s looming days away. Loved ones experiencing illness or accident, ultimately harmless to the body but unnerving to the spirit. And then the news of three deaths among my friends, two in the last week. Not close friends. More friends of friends. Better than Facebook friends. Not people I would have called up for dinner or a movie. But people who, had I bumped into them on the street, would have merited a good, long chat.

Like all queers of my age, I lost countless friends back in the 80s and early 90s. The best minds of my generation, as Ginsberg might have said. But then the reprieve set in and lulled some of us into a blessed and well-deserved forgetfulness. And now, it seems, is the time for waking up. Because I've now reached the age where the normal bell curve is beginning - the first of my peers dying at disappointing but not quite tragic ages, victims of long Latin names that translate loosely to "natural causes."

So it was with that mood of underlying malaise that I approached this week's Torah morsel, Ki Tetzei. A compendium of laws, many concerning marital conduct, a couple about our stewardship of nature. It was not speaking to me. For every sweet and problematic mitzvah about protecting a mother bird when taking her eggs from the nest, there were ten problematic ones lacking sweetness and I, well, I was in no mood.

I was looking, it seems, for some comfort and it was not there. But, my eyes wandered across the page of chumash to the haftarah portion that keeps Ki Tetzei company. It is from the book of Isaiah, and it opens:

רני עקרה

Roni 'akarah. Sing out, O Barren one.

A hymn of comfort, or supposed comfort, to the City of Jerusalem, after it's been laid waste and its inhabitants killed or marched off to Babylonian captivity.

Isaiah, or someone writing in Isaiah's name, elects to describe the aftermath of this public horror using one of the most popular and painful metaphors of biblical literature - "barrenness."

A popular metaphor because it works. It is an image of ultimate pain, a pain some in our community, some in this room, have experienced firsthand. And even those of us who have not experienced it connect instantly with the ringing pain of wanting and not having children, or with the psychic howl of having children and losing them. We may not actually know what that's like, but the terror of it is great enough to stand in for actual empathy. How much more effective a metaphor in the Biblical world, where self-actualization comes only through progeny, and where the payout of the whole deal with God is that we should be numerous as the stars in the heavens and the sands by the sea?

But it is a painful metaphor, too, because it misleads. The childless in the Bible, unlike in real life, never remain that way. They despair, but are then promised (and in fact get) children. Over and over. Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah. Childlessness in Torah is not a real-life condition but a narrative ploy that sets the stage for some miracle birth -- an unlikely child who goes on to overcome obstacles (such as getting born in the first place) and perform heroic deeds. But in real life, we don't experience that kind of reversal. And the Bible stories nearly taunt us with their heartless happy endings.

So the metaphor works for everyone except, maybe, those who have actually had that experience. It is always tricky when your very personal, very human life becomes someone else's great metaphor. What is left for you then? My very personal relationship with my partner has come to symbolize a threat to families I don't even know, and its validity voted on by the public in pretty much those terms. Or my loved ones who are intersexed, whose naturally atypical bodies become fodder for theories of gender fluidity, but who would simply prefer not to be gawked at or operated on by doctors. Sometimes we'd rather our lives not be symbolic of anything for anyone. Can't a cigar sometimes just be a cigar? Leave me my unique personhood. Don't use my body, my love, my life, my losses, even in your prettiest poetry or your cleverest theory.

So here in Isaiah, the akarah, the barren woman, is once again, alas, a literary trope, not only representing a certain kind of communal pain, but making way once again for a prophecy of reversal. "Roni akarah. Sing out, barren one, burst into song, for your children will be numerous." A standard prophecy that, in fact, proves true. The Jewish people do survive the exile and return from captivity and grow and spread across the world, even unto Cotati, California.

So it's a fine prophecy. But as words of comfort go, "sing out for your children will be numerous" totally sucks. Why tell anyone experiencing grief that things will turn around for them? It may be true, but we don't know it at the time and it can't be promised. They are empty words, far more soothing to the speaker than the recipient.

But, then, just when a seeker of comfort is ready to give up on him, Isaiah delivers what might be some of the best words of comfort our tradition has to offer. A beautiful bit of consolation and advice, more measured and remarkably real, something that works as a great metaphor and as personal consolation. It goes like this:

הרחיבי מקום אהלך ויריעות משכנותיך יטו אל תחשכי
האריכי מיתריך ויתדתיך חזקי

Broaden the place of your tent and stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, stint not.

Lengthen your cords and strengthen your pegs.

Some of you know the opening phrase, harchivi m'kom oholech, "broaden the place of your tent," as a Shefa Gold chant. Isaiah here is ostensibly readying Jerusalem for the future return of the exiles and the promise of new generations. Expand your tent, because you'll need the room.

But this advice, these words of consolation, work as well without a promise of literal reversal. How do we experience loss, especially profound loss or communal loss and not become smaller, narrower, more closed down? Isn't that ultimately the challenge of our grief? How do we not wither from it?

Isaiah says don't shrink. Expand. Spread your tent to catch the wind. Don't tighten your tent cords -- lengthen them! Almost an instruction for hang-gliding. But the advice here is not "catch the wind and fly." It is not "time to move on." Because the last element of this advice is to strengthen the tent pegs. "I know you feel uprooted, like a wanderer in a tent. But dig in. Root deeper. Hold fast." Or as Bette Davis might say, "Fasten your seatbelt. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Hold fast and expand. That's the way to survive. Not the only way. But the best way. Become bigger. Hold the full magnitude of your loss and make room for something else too.

Let your personal tragedies expand your heart rather than narrow it. Let our communal tragedies expand our hearts rather than narrow them. This is not easy, it might not be natural. Expanding makes you more vulnerable. But it gives you air to breathe. It lets new problems feel small.

I cannot help but feel that those whose grief at the tragedy of 9/11 moves them to deny people of conscience the opportunity to pray and do the work of their hearts freely have been shrunk by their terrible experience. That we failed as a nation to expand the place of our tents.

Isaiah's words of comfort do work for me. An invitation not to shut down, or not to shut down forever. I take comfort and try to expand with my losses. I have now reached an age where, if I live long enough, my peers will disappear with increasing frequency. My challenge is to make space to hold that truth. To hold these people in my heart. And to keep my tent large enough and loose enough and rooted enough to contain all the joy and all the pain that is still to come.

Harchivi m'kom oholech. Expand the place of your tent.

And let us say: Amen.