It's All Happening: Uprisings, Anxiety & the Possibility of Hope

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, February 18, 2011]


It's all happening.

Atzilah said this to me the other morning at North Light, as we settled into our cups of coffee. It took me a moment to place where I knew the phrase from. Then it hit me. It's from "Almost Famous," a film about rock 'n' roll groupies, who consistently greet each other with a look of wonderment and this phrase: it's all happening.

Atzilah was describing this particular moment in history, the worldwide hubbub of change. And she's right. "It's all happening" could easily have been the caption for the events of the past month and the slogan for how we all have been experiencing them: it's all happening. 

From our remote vantage-point, it seemed to start slowly. Someone, somewhere, armed herself not with a gun but with Twitter. Someone else downloaded a "how to" guide for peaceful self-liberation. Daring changemakers found each other. Then it accelerated. Before we knew it, we saw the ouster of a 23-year autocrat, not Mayor Daley, but Tunisian President Ben Ali, who saw the writing on the wall and hightailed it out of the country. It was not a strictly bloodless revolution - police killed 40 protesters, maybe more. But on the scale by which we measure "regime change," this number is shockingly and blessedly low. We saw the protesters as smart and heroic and, in a certain way, so was the government, electing to give up power rather than take more lives, which it easily could have done. 

Then it spread. When it hit Egypt, we all leaned a bit closer to our screens. This is a country that means something special to us. It is populous and powerful. It is the first Arab nation to have reached peace with Israel, a peace that has held for over 30 years. It is a country that is so full of history and mythos that you can't help but feel that anything that happens there will be larger than life.

And it was in fact larger than life. The protests in Madan at-Tahrir, the surprising shift in the soldiers' loyalties, the vain attempts of the ruler to hang on to power as the tide turned against him. It could have been an opera, and might yet be.

And all of us, watching our TVs or listening to our car radios, felt that the drama was a collective event encompassing our lives as well. Because, in these early years of this prematurely aged century, we have become a disillusioned people. Disappointed. Dispirited. We don't even bother anymore with the rhetoric of hope. Or when we do bother articulating it, as President Obama sometimes does, we don't bother believing it.

But now suddenly we were caught up in a pandemic of elation. The feeling that we the people have the power to make things better. That an individual can trigger tremendous change. That we can make ourselves better. Many of us were moved to tears to discover the now unfamiliar taste of hope in our mouths.

I, for one, found it hard to admit to how excited I was. After all, our disappointments in this world are too numerous to count. Hope is rewarded with disillusionment. So we hedge: we hasten to identify all the things that could go wrong. A worse despot could step in. Fanatics could rule the country. The violence could increase (as we're now seeing in Bahrain and Libya) and blood could end up flowing in the streets. I reminded myself of these things in order to curb my enthusiasm, fearing the scolding voice of future hindsight: "If you'd only known what was coming, you wouldn't have been cheering so loud, would you?" Reining in my joy, lest in retrospect it look like naivete.

Of course for us Jews who have a familial love/hate relationship with the State of Israel, there was even more at work. The rebellion appealed - narratively, mythically - to our own Jewish history and values: routing Pharaoh, pursuing justice. But it also raised the fear of losing one of Israel's few friends in the region, a fear that steps over our immediate concerns about Israeli policy and cuts right to our worries about Israel's continued existence. It raised the fear of new wave of anti-Semitic sentiment. And I, for one, had selfish moments of relief that although the eyes of the world were fixed on the Middle East, Israel had nothing to do with it. Yesterday at Yiddish Tish, we read a poem by Kadya Molodowsky, in which she implores God to

אל חנון

קלייב אויף אן אנדער פאלק 

דערוייל...

קלייב אויף אן אנדער לאנד...

kleyb oyf an ander folk derveyl...kleyb oyf an ander land. 

Gracious God,
Choose another people
For a change...
Choose another land. 

And watching the Egyptian uprisings unfold, I felt some gratitude, guilty gratitude, that the great spotlight had shifted west across the Suez.

I think it is natural to predict bad outcomes to the uprisings (violence, extremism, placing power in the hands of the military - the military?). Anticipating bad outcomes stems from a longstanding and well-founded Jewish fear of mobs. Face it, we have never done well in big groups.

Even when we are the big group.

In this week's parasha, Ki Tisa (you thought I'd never get to it, didn't you?), hundreds of thousands of Israelites are encamped in the desert while Moshe goes up to the Mountain. In Moshe's absence, the people are, for all intents and purposes, self-ruling for the first time. What happens? Before you can say "idolatry" they're stripping off their jewelry and fashioning a golden calf, around which they dance and sing ecstatically. This episode is considered by Torah to be a great sin and a great shande - a scandal that reveals a communal character flaw and that haunts us for generations.

Now I know it has never been particularly popular to stand on the bima and defend the actions of the Hebrews in the Golden Calf incident. But as you know, when everyone agrees to condemn something, it's always worth another look.

What if the Children of Israel weren't small-minded or stubborn or impatient or any of the things typically attributed to them in this story? What if they were simply intoxicated with liberation, buoyed by their own freedom. They had lived their whole lives powerless, the children of generations of powerless. But now, it was different. They'd escaped Pharaoh. Seas had parted for them. God had spoken to them. They had awakened to discover that they were a people, that they were strong, that they had the ability to shape a future that had always been beyond their control. To express their jubilation, they recreated the markers of power they knew, forging a golden calf. They had witnessed true miracles, and they translated them into the ritual language they knew best, recreating God in an image familiar to them.

We are so used to this being the iconic Jewish story of group action gone wrong that we deny ourselves the chance to identify with the Israelites. But can't we imagine a little of what they felt? Any of us who marched with the Civil Rights Movement or lay down on the street in an ACTUP die-in or joined an anti-war demonstration knows what it feels like to find comrades and discover you're powerful and that you might, just might, be able to upend the existing power structure. So I'd personally like to reclaim at least a little bit of what those Golden Calf people were feeling, because it was new and it was important. It was like what we wanted to feel, even if we tried not to, as we watched events play out in Cairo and Alexandria and Suez.

Something big is happening. The media calls it a shifting of tectonic plates. It is a rebirth of hope. A realization that even when we feel powerless, we might not in fact be. An idea that we can overthrow our own limitations and reach new heights. That each of us can change, can be better than we were.

So how do we rejoice in this even when the outcomes are unknown? Even when we fear that things will not end as we desire?

We turn our fear into commitment. Commitment to making sure that what happens next is better than what happened before. Commitment to non-violence (including not beating ourselves up). And trust. Trust that if freedom isn't won, if that better thing isn't achieved, if a new Pharaoh in fact arises, then someone somewhere, maybe you, will Tweet, and others will hear, and they will meet and organize, and they will download 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action and will take to the streets and to the blogs, and we, whether we're in it or we're watching it, will again well up with possibility. So that in our own lives or in the life of this world, even when our fears ask us to say "no" to hope, we can find the strength and love to say "yes."

Inside. Outside. It's all happening.

_______________
Much gratitude to Atzilah Solot for her many insights that informed this piece.

Parashat Terumah: Details and Dolphin Skins

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, February 4, 2011]

Tonight we're going to talk about blueprints and inventories and gifts and unicorns. Because this week we read Parashat Terumah, where all these things figure. In this portion, God announces the plans for the mishkan, the holy tent where the tablets of the law will be kept, and where the people will gather, and where God will speak to Moshe. God puts out a call for gifts, terumot, to be given by the people from the generosity of their hearts. Why all the big plans, you might ask? God says this:

ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם

Make me a mikdash, a holy place, and I will dwell among them.

This is an important theological moment. God does not say "I will dwell in it," but "I will dwell among them." But if God is everywhere, as we always say and teach these days, what does it mean for God to say, "I will dwell among them?" Doesn't God always dwell among us? 

I asked this question of our students at Dor Hadash last Sunday, and 10-year old Chaia piped up, saying, "God is always among us, but the mishkan helps us notice."

Reb Chaia's answer reflects one of our deepest human desires: to be able to notice God. Or to be able to connect with something bigger, even if "God" is not the name we use for that sensation. So in the wilderness, we had a mishkan as a reminder, a visual mnemonic. A finger pointing toward God. And having a mishkan necessarily involves building a mishkan.

I think in our generation, here in New Age Sonoma County, we like to skip over the building part. We like the feeling of mindfulness; we joyfully seek awareness of God or of a great cosmic oneness. But we like it direct, without "man-made" items in the middle. We go to the woods or to the ocean. We lose ourselves in nature. Or we pour ourselves into meditation. We use these methods to sail into the vastness of Eyn Sof - of the divine infinite.

But what's exciting about this Torah portion and its instructions for building the mishkan, is that the mindfulness of God's presence seems to come not through contemplating vastness but through attention to minute detail. Because the instructions in Terumah are hugely detailed. For fussy queens like me - and a Virgo no less - who live so much of our lives fixated on, and sometimes trapped in, the details, this parashah comes as a vindication. God is not just in the big picture but, hooray, in the small picture too.

God's instructions for the building the mishkan are thorough and intricate. They set out materials, dimensions and who should be on the design team. They include blueprints for the ark that will hold the commandments and the table for sacrifices and the poles for lugging and the rings that hold the poles and the curtains and the lamps and the curious gold cherubim that will adorn the mishkan and the enclosure that will surround it.

Of course our people have always found holiness in detail. The Talmud and our other rabbinic writings rejoice in the minutia of the law. Our traditions require a detailed awareness of our day-to-day lives in order to suffuse them with holiness. What we wear. How we eat. What foods mix. What blessings we articulate depending on what act we're about to engage in or what phenomenon we just observed. We all agree that there is something beautiful about seeing a rainbow and saying, "Oh wow." But there's a different beauty and holy connection in seeing a rainbow and knowing specific Jewish words to bless it: baruch Atah Adonai, zocher habrit. 

But alas for me, the details alone are not enough. The materials are not enough. The ingredients are not enough. They must be married to an intention, a kavanah, a vision, a purpose. There's a story that Gertrude Stein tells in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, about their servant, Helene. Helene  one day was feeling put out at the behavior of the painter Henri Matisse who, when asked to stay for a meal, first asked what was being served -- a rudeness which Helene forgave in foreigners but would not abide in a Frenchman. So when she was told that Matisse was staying for dinner, she said, "In that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand."

Butter and eggs can but don't necessarily have to make an omelette. Wood and metal and cloth can but don't necessarily have to make a mishkan. It depends not only on materials but on intent. The omelette requires respect. The mishkan requires that too. And an awareness of a holy purpose.

So it seems we need to hold both the pieces and the whole. Every great painting requires both vision and the painstaking mixing of pigment. Every great poem entails both inspiration and agonizing decisions about meter and rhyme. Vision and detail. Both are needed to move us.

Okay, so God being in the details as much as God is in the vastness. But I also promised unicorns, I believe. For that we turn back to the details of the mishkan, beginning with the list of materials - the gifts God will accept: Gold. Silver. Copper. Three specific colors of yarn. Linen. Goat's hair. Ram's skins. Dolphin skins. Acacia wood. Oil. Spices.

Okay, wait. Let's back it up. Dolphin skins? Did I just say "dolphin skins?" Yes. It's right there in the list and it stops me in my tracks every time I read it. What dolphin skins? What are the Children of Israel doing in the desert with dolphin skins? In Hebrew these are 'orot t'chashim. Skins of the tachash. What is a tachash? It's not what it sounds like. Truthfully, no one knows what it was. The Medieval commentator Rashi said it was a great multi-colored beast. In Talmud it's suggested that it was a beast with one horn. Midrash suggests that the tachash only came into being for the purpose of lending its skin to the construction of the mishkan and after that it ceased to exist. The more modern Anchor Bible notices a similar word in Arabic that means "dolphin," so that's what they chose and that, right or wrong, seems to have stuck in many subsequent translations, including many Jewish ones.

So maybe it's a dolphin. Maybe a giraffe. Or an okapi. Or with the single horn, a rhino. Or we might as well say a unicorn, seeing as it was an animal that even in antiquity was so exotic as to be downright mythological. No matter what it was, it begs the question: how did this group of escaped slaves come to be wandering the desert with dolphin skins? Or giraffe skins. Or unicorn skins. Every year at Pesach we tell the story of our poverty and oppression in Egypt and our haste in departing. How does that story square with this new detail? "Honey, there's no time to let the bread rise. We've got to just bake it flat. Oh, in the meantime, don't forget to pack the dolphin skins! And precious metals. Oh and why not a few cubits of acacia wood, just in case we want to build."

Or maybe while crossing the Red Sea on dry land. looking from side to side into the wall of water, well, who could resist plucking out a dolphin or two?

This is narishkayt. Silliness. The Israelites having all this stuff with them makes no sense. Modern critics would say that this passage was added to Torah later, inserted here to foreshadow the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. And that might be so, but resolving it that way is not a luxury we Jews have. Our Torah process involves wrestling with the text we've inherited and finding meaning in it.

So I thought about these poor Children of Israel, nebech, carrying with them not only obviously precious items, but also odd and awkward items, which, at the time they were packed were of no particular use. Hidden gifts shlepped through the wilderness. Or not quite gifts, but gifts in potentia. Bric-a-brac, awaiting the chance to become holy regalia.

We all have gifts. We give so many of them from the generosity of our hearts to make this a holier world. Some here have talents of music or art or words. Some have skills in nurturing or mediating or doctoring. Some have special qualities of patience or kindness or humor. These are our terumot - our contributions. Take a moment right now and think about one of your gifts that you give generously.

These gifts are your gold and silver. Not your precious metal but your precious mettle. But the mishkan wasn't just made with gold and silver. There's also the acacia wood and the unicorn skins that have been lugged around, awaiting an opportunity to be useful. So let me give you a harder task. Close your eyes and think of the gift you have to offer that you haven't offered yet. The one no one knows you carry. The one you might not even have thought of yet as a gift. Close your eyes and identify your hidden gift. The one that's just been waiting.

Notice what that is. And ask yourself when you will offer it. When you will use it to build a mishkan, to make this world holier. They say that as the mishkan was constructed, its twin was constructed in the celestial realm and I pray that is still so.

So kechu terumah kol n'div libo -- give your gifts, give them generously, from your heart, your obvious gifts, and the gifts you haven't yet tried out. With them you can move not only earth but heaven too. With them you can build a mishkan, so we can notice -- so we can invite -- God to dwell among us.

Acacia - Perfect for Mishkan Building

Parashat Yitro: The Speech of Sinai

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, January 21, 2011]

I just got back from Los Angeles yesterday, where I spent the early part of the week in a long negotiation with someone who wants to do some business with my other, um, congregation. These were difficult negotiations in some ways. There is possibly a lot at stake, and the person across the table was perhaps more different from me than anyone I've ever had to stare at for 9 hours. He was in many ways a stereotype. That is, there exists a particular stereotype of the tough guy, right out of the Sopranos, and either he fit it perfectly or he played it perfectly. I, of course, am undoubtedly a stereotype in other people's eyes. You know, the singing-drag-queen-slash-rabbi sterotype. But his type is a special challenge for me. I spent my childhood fleeing toughs, and my adulthood building a life in which they do not figure. And yet here he was. I looked at him and he looked at me. And I couldn't figure out how to understand him, so imprisoned was I within the image he was presenting - or that I was projecting.

As I sat there I began to feel sadness over the inability of any of us to really understand each other. After all, what clues are we ever given? Clothes, affect, words. These are such paltry tools. So deficient. How many times a week do we say "that's not what I meant" because the words preceding them were too limited to adequately convey our intent? Even in the mouths of the greatest poets, can words ever communicate someone's wholeness? Or the fullness and complexity of any idea?

Mt. Sinai

The limitation of language is one of the many themes arising out of this week's Torah portion, Yitro. In it we arrive at Mt. Sinai and God reveals Torah to us in the form of Aseret Hadibrot - the series of statements we call the Ten Commandments. The Torah portion is abuzz with sound. The ground rumbles. A shofar blast comes from nowhere. And God speaks - with a kol - a voice. But midrash says it was much more than a human voice. When God utters the first word of the revelation - anochi, "I am," the Children of Israel all hear it, but not through our ears. The deaf and the hearing perceive it equally. We somehow get it direct, without the mediation of our senses or our brains.

This ability to absorb language fully and unmediated is of major interest to the early Chassidic master, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev. He notes the following verse of our parashah:

בחדש השלישי לצאת בני ישראל מארץ מצרים ביום הזה בא מדבר סיני:

On the third month of the Children of Israel's departure from Egypt,

on this day they came to Midbar Sinai.

Midbar Sinai. The Wilderness of Sinai. But Hebrew is a marvelously squirmy thing. Squeeze midbar enough to change the vowels and you can read it that the Children of Israel came not to the Wilderness of Sinai but to the Speech of Sinai. And this is where he begins his inquiry. What is the Speech of Sinai, he asks, and he answers.

The speech of Sinai is language that carries not just the simple and limited meanings of the words but all their possible meanings as well. There is dibbur - the actual words recorded in Torah, and kol - the voice - God's voice, which includes all the associated thoughts about the words, all the Masechot of Talmud discussing the words. In the mouth of another rabbi, this idea could simply be a defense of the holiness of the Talmud. "See? God delivered that too at Sinai."

But Levi Yitzchak is much more expansive. He doesn't limit the content of God's voice to a specific canon. God's voice, rather, is infinite. For Levi Yitzchak, the Speech of Sinai is language in which word and voice, dibbur and kol, are the same. Language through which we hear with fullness, with completeness. No distinctions between surface structure and deep structure, between form and meaning, between pshat, the simple meaning and drash, the interpretation.

And where Talmud requires the tools of scholarship to access it, Levi Yitzchak sees God's kol, the greater meaning, as something available to anyone with the proper mindfulness. He says:

כשאדם מאמין שכל הבלים והדיבורים היוצאים מפיו הם הכל כח וחיות הבורא, ו'רוח ה' דיבר בו', ואז כשמקשר הדיבור בקול, והכל במחשבה בשורש הרוחני  וחיות אלהות, אז אף אל פי שאין הדיבור יכול לכלול כמה דיבורים, יכול הוא להיות מכמה ענינים  וכמה שכליים והדיבור מתפוצץ לכמה חלקים , כיון שהוא דיבור אלהים.

If you believe that your breath and words draw on the power and vigor of the Creator, such that the Spirit of God speaks through you, you will thereby connect the words and the voice, and if in your thought it all derives from God's spiritual source, then the words give way to multiple thoughts and understandings, and the dibbur, the speech, explodes into multiplicity, for it is the speech of God.

In other words, holding an awareness of their divine source turns the spoken words into something much bigger and deeper and multicolored. Mindfulness of the divine source of everything opens the floodgates of meaning. The word embodies its full meaning; the fragment implies the whole.

La Grande Jatte

Side story. Over the winter holidays, my family set about working on a jigsaw puzzle. Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of la Grande Jatte in 1000 pieces. As is not uncommon, the borders were quickly assembled, constituting by my math about 12.5% of the overall puzzle or 100% of the fun part. Then interest waned. The pieces lingered on the coffee table for a fortnight and were then returned to their box. Monday, at Oakland Airport, after passing through security, I went to put my shoes back on and, not unlike a sleepless princess fidgety from a pea 20 featherbeds down, I noticed some slight topography under my Dr. Scholl's insoles. I slipped my fingers in and found a single jigsaw piece. Blue. With dots. I put it in the outside pocket of my backpack and caught my flight. Two days later my sister and I went hiking in Placerita Canyon outside LA. At the furthest point of our route we sat down to rest. When we got up to head back I happened to look down. There was the blue puzzle piece, fallen out of my backpack. I grabbed it and wondered what would have happened had I missed it. A single puzzle piece, 400 miles from its origin. Who would find it and what would they ever make of it? How could they ever know what it was about or imagine the beauty of the painting it refers to?

The Piece in Question

I think this is how Rabbi Levi Yitzchak sees human language; and perhaps how I see each of us. We are isolated. So far from our origin. Each of us is a clue hinting at a larger picture, the way the puzzle piece implies the puzzle. With an awareness of holiness, of the divine pouring  like a fountain through each of us, we become less isolated, less bereft, and we begin to embody the whole of la Grande Jatte or a million other pictures in which we might figure, radiant in blue with dots.

So too in my standoff of stereotypes this week. I can stare at the tough across the table and simply stop there. But opening up to the holiness of our origins, or to some heart space that feels like that, I might perceive a deeper truth. Something about the life experience that drives someone to choose to show toughness rather than vulnerability. And the possibility that on deeper levels we're much more alike than we'd guess.

I may not be accurate in my speculations about this guy, but these intuitions are in themselves holy and, as Levi Yitzchak later suggests, they flow from the divine quality of rachmanut - or rachmones, compassion. The same spot on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life that is placed over the heart and gets to be nicknamed "truth."

If this connection to a greater truth is activated, then maybe it will work not just when I am reading the words or faces of others, but when I speak as well. Maybe it will allow me to convey more than the first impression I make, more than the stereotype I represent, more than the sum of my words. Maybe with it I could speak, even haltingly, like a tourist with a Berlitz, the Speech of Sinai. Maybe with it we could hear in each other a little bit of the kol, of God's voice, even if just for a moment.

May the Speech of Sinai come easily to our lips. So that when we speak to each other, our words lose their skins and dissolve into meaning, explode into possibility and tremble with holiness. And let us say: Amen.

Much gratitude to my chevruta partner, Reb Eli Herb of Durango, who stubborned through this difficult bit of Kedushat Levi with me, and to my sister, Lynn Keller, who made some key connections as we hiked and discussed God's voice.

Parashat Bo: Freeing the Hard Heart

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, January 7, 2011]

I've been thinking about freedom lately. I just got back from Washington, DC which, despite all that frustrates us in American politics does, after a couple weeks, leave one feeling steeped in lofty ideals. I went to the Museum of American History and, after the quick gay pilgrimages to the the ruby slippers, Julia Child's kitchen and Carol Burnett's famous Gone with the Wind curtain rod dress, I settled in and got serious. I walked through the dimly lit, humidity-controlled gallery that houses the Star Spangled Banner which is, I'd never realized, enormous. And I confess that, for all my counter-culture rhetoric, I found myself choked up.

I then visited the African American gallery. There I saw physical artifacts of American slavery, including first editions of slave memoirs. I thought, "How am I 50 years old and have never read a slave memoir?" On display was Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. I bought a reprint in the bookstore and read it in a single breath. In elegant prose Jacobs gives over both her painful experience and her sense of moral outrage. She could not threaten military action to end slavery or promise political reform. She could only offer her words. I thought about how much ink was spilled trying to end the institution of slavery on this continent - and how much blood. And how a practice so obviously, deeply wrong could have been defended - to the death! - by the white, slave-owning South.

This week's parashah, which is called Bo looks at the question of the price of freedom, and why that price might in fact be so high. In the story, we, the Children of Israel, are still in bondage in Egypt. God has already inflicted seven plagues to free the Hebrew slaves, and the Egyptians are certainly suffering. Yet Pharaoh has not relented. God says to Moshe:

בא אל פרעה כי אני הכבדתי את לבו ואת לב עבדיו למען שתי אתתי אלה בקר

Bo el Par'oh ki ani hichbadti et libo v'et lev avadav l'ma'an shiti ototai eleh b'kirbi.

Which means: "Come to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants so that I might show my signs among them."

Hichbadti et libo. "I have hardened his heart." This is a troubling bit of Torah that countless generations of Jews have had to contend with. The hardening of Pharaoh's heart is mentioned 19 times in the book of Exodus. In 10 instances, Pharaoh does the hardening; in 9 - nearly half the time! - it is God. What possible purpose is served by God hardening Pharaoh's heart? The text implies, and the sages agree, that it is so that the remainder of the plagues may be inflicted; so that the oppressor comes to have a full appreciation of God's power. Somehow the process of change must be big, and dramatic, and violent. But for whose benefit? So the Egyptians give up and don't chase down the Israelites? If that's the case, the project was a failure; they chased the Israelites down anyway, even after 10 plagues. Or maybe the purpose was to establish a level of violence and suffering compared to which the state of slavelessness would ultimately feel preferable?

Or maybe the end is retribution, plain and simple. That no one should profit by acts of cruelty and oppression. As Lincoln wrote in his Second Inaugural Address, in the middle of the Civil War:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

But of course no matter how much violence we think the theater of social change requires, we're also stuck with a tricky theological problem. According to the p'shat, the simple reading of this verse, God is setting Pharaoh up by hardening his heart. God is nullifying Pharaoh's free will in order to impose punishment. Pharaoh is framed. Not that one needs to feel excessive sympathy toward him; but one might certainly feel some suspicion here about God.

Taking a second look at the phrase hichbad'ti et libo - "I have hardened his heart" - might be fruitful. The root is k-b-d, which in Hebrew doesn't have to do with hardness as much as with heft. Kaved, heavy. Koved, weight. "I have made his heart heavy," could be another way to translate this verse. Said this way, it sounds less like God announcing a strategy than God admitting a sad fact. "I have made Pharaoh's heart too heavy to move, too cumbersome to change."

I think this reading says something about the nature of our hearts and the nature of power. Change is not easy in the best of circumstances. But when one has become accustomed to power, to ease, to privilege and safety, the heart can become so weighty as to be immobile. Under this reading, God is not acting on Pharaoh at all. God is acknowledging, perhaps even lamenting, the human nature that God created. "Yes, Pharaoh's heart is now immobile; and yes, that is the nature of the hearts of tyrants; and yes, I'm responsible for the nature of the hearts of tyrants - and of all people."

Another resonance of this word, hichbadti, is one you might have already guessed at. The same root gives us kavod - "honor." If we project this shade of meaning onto it, you have an even greater resignation on God's part. God says, "I am forced to honor Pharaoh's heart." That is, I made it, I am prevented from changing it; all I can do is show signs and wonders.

"Poor Pharaoh," this reading seems to suggest, stuck in his narrow place with his heavy, unchangeable heart. So burdened with years of power and profit and fear of the unknown that the machinery of his heart has come to a standstill.

I know it might not sit well to look at Pharaoh this way; it feels too sympathetic toward the archvillain of our collective imagination as he holds firm against the inevitable tide of emancipation. But the parashah seems to invite it. After all, it opens with bo el-Par'oh, - "come to Pharaoh," not lech el-Par'oh, "go to Pharaoh." The vantage point is Pharaoh's; he is the fixed point and Moshe - and we - are being invited into his world.

Uncomfortable, certainly. But while sympathy might in fact not be required, looking deeper than the villain archetype is valuable. We know no one is simply evil. That's comic book stuff. Seeing southern slave owners as something other than human; seeing Hitler as a monster and not a person; are both errors. Dangerous errors. It's uncomfortable to sit with the idea that we share anything with these people, let alone the capacity to do terrible things.

But of course we do. We are not just Moshe. We are Pharaoh. We have the capacity to hurt, to kill, to enslave. But we don't. Maybe because we've made our moral choices. Or maybe we haven't; we are simply spared that trial because the opportunity has never arisen.

But our hearts do share something with Pharaoh's. We feel how difficult it is to acknowledge when we're wrong. How difficult it is to change. How difficult to give up power. How difficult to acknowledge the suffering of others, and to see our own complicity in it.

I hope you will forgive me as I point out things we know but which are hearts are hardened against.

We know how our cars and air conditioners poison the environment. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

We know the unspeakable cruelty enacted on animals through factory farming, approved by us every time we choose the cheap meat or eggs at the grocery store. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

We know that many of the cheap tzatzkes we buy are that way because children overseas are making them in conditions of near-slavery. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

Or when we learn new ways that our actions might cause harm that we weren't previously aware of - even how our use of perfume and scented detergents can cause others physical suffering. We could ask ourselves right now, "why don't we stop," And we will have no defense.

Unless the defense in all of these cases is: Adonai hichbid et libi. God hardened my heart. This is our nature. We do not give up power or privilege or habit easily. And we cannot at every moment have our hearts open to the full suffering of this planet.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote thirty years ago regarding the horrors of the Vietnam War:

Most of us prefer to disregard the dreadful deeds we do over there. The atrocities committed in our name are too horrible to be credible. It is beyond our power to react vividly to the ongoing nightmare, day after day, night after night. So we bear graciously other people's suffering...O Lord, we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage.

Yes, we are evolved from the same Creation that gave us Pharaoh and that gave us generations of holders, traders and hunters of slaves on American soil. Our hearts are not identical to theirs, but they are akin.

But buck up. We are also different; or at least we can be. If not in our natures, then in our choices. We can choose to change. We can choose to change now. We do not need to wait for the signs and wonders. We do not need to suffer the plagues or wars or disasters or other retributions that will change us by force. We can jumpstart our immobile hearts and act on what we know, even if it's inconvenient or painful.

And our ability to choose to have less power, less ease, less comfort because there is something else that matters more, well that, thank God, is in our nature too.

So when we sing for the freedom of the slaves - the Hebrew slaves of Egypt, the black slaves of the Americas, or all who are oppressed in the world today - let us also sing for Pharaoh's freedom. For our freedom. That we may not be oppressors. That when a new prophet comes and says, "Let my people go," we may have the strength and wisdom to say, "Yes. It's time. Let us all be free."

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?