After the Flood

For Congregation Ner Shalom, May 18, 2012
In honor of Shari Brenner and Cybele and Nora Brenner-West

This week threw me. Cybele's sudden pneumonia and hospitalization - the direness, the savageness of it. The life-changingness of it. It put an end to one planned sermon topic that I decided was just too light for a week of such gravity.

So I figured instead to talk about rainbows. I know rainbows also sound like a light topic. Literally a light topic. Rainbows aren't things of substance and mass. Rainbows are visions; they're only illusions. Any substance we must supply. So we project upon them. We imagine magical kingdoms somewhere over them; or pots of gold at the end of them. We can dream that stuff up without restraint, because there is no over or end of to prove us wrong. They are tricks of light, existing only in our perception.

Rainbows symbolize our dreams. Mostly our unreachable dreams. Or sometimes just beauty itself. But wait, there's more. Thanks to Jesse Jackson, the range of colors in the rainbow came to symbolize the power of human diversity and coalition. Then thanks to Gilbert Baker, the gay Betsy Ross, the rainbow got sewn into a flag and reemerged as the global symbol of gay pride, perhaps the most effective branding of a natural phenomenon since Jesus came up with the little fish for the back of the car.

But there's a good Jewish reason to talk about rainbows - tonight in particular. In Judaism, the rainbow has heavier symbolic import: it is a reminder of, or authentication of, an ancient covenant, a brit, that God made with all the creatures of the earth. The rainbow is the signature on that contract.

As you recall, God, disappointed with humankind, set out to wipe them out with a massive flood, in which the animals of the earth would also perish as collateral damage. So Lord said to Noah, "There's gonna be a floody floody," and you know the rest. And then on this day, the 27th of Iyar, which is the 42nd day of the Omer, Noah and his family and the, well, presumably millions of earth- and air-bound creatures they'd been cooped up with emerged at last from the Ark and, squinting in the sunlight, saw the very first rainbow overhead.

God then explains that never again will life on earth be cut off by the waters of a flood; the rainbow will be the sign of this covenant; whenever God causes a cloud to pass over, the rainbow will appear and remind God not to destroy life on earth. Shari said to me this week that the very idea that we would have a God who needs a reminder not to destroy all life chills her blood.

This rainbow covenant has, in recent years, become a launching point for discussion of Jewish approaches to ecology and planetary stewardship. While in this covenant God promises not to wipe out all life on Earth, humankind makes no such promise in return. So, according to the eco-Jews, the rainbow can become a reminder to us of our responsibility toward the planet. Life won't be destroyed by flood, but we could still destroy it by fire, if we don't act now to change. I think that teaching is very cool and very important and I'm happy to direct you to all sorts of websites and materials exploring Jewish views on sustainability and the honoring of other species.

But ultimately, that's not what interested me this week; this week of all weeks. All I could think about is the horror that Noah and family had experienced, a horror which, in the telling, usually gets downgraded to exciting and benign adventure.

Let's overlook for the moment the challenge of building this enormous ship to begin with and the impracticability of wrangling all the animals into it, and take it from the flood itself. The Noahs witnessed all of humankind die a nasty, nasty death. And the animals. And the birds that ran out of high places to alight. "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died." After those cries petered out, they went on to experience an isolation unknown since the time of Adam. Withstanding 40 days and 40 nights of rain may not be such a big deal; the people of Seattle do it all the time. But this ordeal continued well beyond that. Torah says the water surged for 150 days, not just from the rain but from underground sources that had been set loose. Then God remembered Noah and caused the waters to recede for another 150 days. The Ark came to rest perched on the mountain, but still they didn't emerge. All the sending of ravens and doves that we hear about happened after the Ark was already parked on the mountain top. Even when the dove came back with good news, they stayed put until they received God's instruction to disembark.

Final math: a lunar year plus 10 days on the Ark. In other words, a full solar year floating in a prison with all the living animals of the world. Midrash tells us that during that entire year Noah and his children never slept. Animals had to be fed around the clock.

We tell about Noah et al. emerging and seeing that first rainbow as if it's a happy ending. But I can't really imagine how it can be. How do you start over after a disaster of such magnitude? What are the scars you carry with you? The noises, the smells that haunt you? What are the horrors that visit you in your dreams?

Noah lives for another 350 years, well into Abraham's lifetime. Does life ever feel normal for him? Is he ever again capable of small talk, or does he show up at parties and inevitably blurt out things like, "That reminds me of when I was in the boat with all the animals and everyone in the world died," and people fidget their hors d'oeuvres and change the subject? Do Noah's children pass their terrors on to their children and they to theirs? How many generations are subtly raised to be afraid of water, afraid of beasts, afraid of closed spaces? How many generations get nervous when it starts to drizzle?

The rainbow isn't a happy ending. It can't be. Because no one who lives through a profound or prolonged life-changing moment can just put it aside with pretty colors and a promise that it won't happen again. Whether that moment is a natural disaster or a prison term or a tour of duty or a car accident or a divorce or a bankruptcy or a stroke or the surprise pneumonia that lands you in the ICU with sedation and tubes and months of recovery ahead - or that lands your 8-year old there.

What is it like to step off the Ark after that year, that awful, horrible year of seasickness and stench and the cries of drowning people followed by the silence of the rocking waters?

What can you possibly do next? You step off the Ark. Because you can. Because you have to. Because there's no going back. And the air is different. And the landscape is empty. And a message wrapped up in a rainbow tells you to dream again because now anything is possible. And you don't believe it and you don't think about your dreams anyway because you truly can't remember the last time you slept.

But you trudge forward. And even though it doesn't feel like it did before, you plant a vineyard. And you have children. And you build a house and a city and in time a tower.

And maybe you make an altar. Noah did. The very first one mentioned in Torah. You offer something up. Even if you're not certain if it is an offering of gratitude or not. You offer something bigger than yourself because what happened to you was so much bigger than yourself.

And in time when you see the rainbow, you think of it differently. It is no longer a promise that you won't be destroyed. It is an observation that you weren't destroyed, that you won't easily be destroyed. That you are made of tough stuff. Earth and surging water. What you need to survive, to repopulate your world, you have carried with you all along in a wooden box that lurched and tossed but stayed afloat.

That is the covenant that now presents itself to you in its multi-colored glory. You will survive. You can never go back, but you can and will go forward. Stronger. Or weaker. Wiser. Different. This is the covenant.

And you will take this experience, in all its pain and complexity, and you will offer it up on your altar. You will say the blessing of the rainbow: Baruch Atah Adonai, zocher habrit, v'ne'eman biv'rito, v'kayam b'ma'amaro. Blessed is Yah, blessed is all this existence, that remembers the covenant, that testifies every day to your survival.

And then you'll breathe deeply and catch the scent of rain and, unafraid at last, will go back to planting your garden.

Parashat Shemini: Hush, and Love Your Children

For Congregation Ner Shalom, April 20, 2012

It was a quiet week at Ner Shalom, my home shul. The kids shuffled in and out of Hebrew School. Yael and a half dozen others took branches and yarn and worked on their Omer-counting sticks. Another clean dozen came and read Yiddish poems on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. Mitch and Robin climbed up into the attic above the back classrooms and fluffed around in the cotton candy insulation to see what we might make of that space. Our administrator Vicki's husband Robert has been on the mend, and in fact the whole family was able to attend a Civil War reenactment this weekend where they habitually play southerners and Robert's stroke alas did nothing to change that but, as my mother would say to just such a puzzling fact, "to each his own."

I flew to Pittsburgh and back in the last 55 hours. As always, I did the Mensa quiz on the plane and then as always, when I couldn't figure out the answer to question 6, dismissed the whole Mensa business as the basest sort of snobbism.

Earlier in the week I worked on my office a little - having staked out some real estate right up there in the mezzanine, where I hope you'll come visit me. A considerable portion of my library is now installed on the shelves: Aramaic and Yiddish, music and mysticism, and all of my I-never-went-to-rabbinical-school cheat texts within easy reach.

I also spent some quiet time working on a grant proposal this week. Seems the Jewish Community Federation wants to fund our Celebrations Program for another year. So I got a chance to spend some quality time with Mary Ann Malinak, who is the mother of this program for kids with special needs and their families. We're in, I think, our fifth year of operations now. I write this proposal every year, and there are things I always talk about in it. How the families who come have been shushed out of every other Jewish environment they've ever been in. How the Celebrations kids enjoy the food and the music and the gifts our Hebrew school kids make for them and just seeing each other.

But this year I also wrote about some changes that are happening in Celebrations that I think you might want to know about as well. Although many of the kids don't look their age, they are getting older, and a lot of them aren't quite kids anymore. Alex is now 17 and Sarah is 17 and Zac is 19. They're much older and bigger than the other kids in the Hebrew school, and while we used to really enjoy how the Celebrations community was part of the fabric of our school, it's more awkward now; the Celebrations kids stick out in a new way. They are undoubtedly aware that they're surrounded by children. Meanwhile their parents are struggling with mounting challenges as their kids continue to face new health issues or new behavior changes, each one more difficult than the last; and as they start running out of schools to send their kids to; and as they delve more deeply into the question of what their children's adult lives will be like, both in the immediate future and when they are no longer around to care for them or advocate for them.

This is what's going on for our Celebrations families these days. It's more of the same and it's all new. And the anxiety of it can be overwhelming.

Of course all parents live in some degree of anxiety about the children they're unleashing on the world. I know this, I feel it. Even though in my family I am not officially a parent but something else for which there is no decent kinship term so we make do mostly with "uncle," still, I live with this anxiety. Okay, this terror. Because you can't predict. You don't know who they are going to be. I think about a certain eleven-year-old overnight birthday party happening right now as we speak which began with laser tag - kids running around with rifles! - and concludes tomorrow morning with a breakfast which, by the birthday boy's request, will include if not centerpiece bacon and sausage. Who is this person? Who is this oddly familiar half-sized stranger? How did this happen? I know that the Celebrations parents would give an awful lot to have a day where their child-rearing burdens were this trivial. But anxiety. Well, anxiety has a way of expanding to fill the available space, and parental anxiety especially. You just look at your kids and you wonder: how did this happen?

I imagine Aharon the high priest might have asked himself the same thing in this week's Torah portion. It's Parashat Shemini, one of my favorites from among my least favorite Torah portions. Somewhere, sandwiched between priestly instructions and lists of animals we can't eat in a sandwich or at an eleven-year-old's birthday party^*1* comes the story of Aharon's sons, Nadav and Avihu, who go unbidden and unprepared into the Holy of Holies. We don't know exactly what they did - firepans, incense. But it was, apparently, not how Dad would have done it.

Isn't that always the way? You can't make your children be who you want them to be. And for this question, it doesn't even matter if you don't have children. You have brain children. Your ideas and intentions and  plans. These are your children.

As Wordsworth said, "The child is the father of the man." Meaning that we give birth to the lives we have. Our lives are our children. And like children, they don't always go the way we intend. They sometimes refuse to do what we ask them to do or what we think they should do. Sometimes all we can do is sit back and look at these children of ours: our plans, our dreams, our paintings and poems and ingenious schemes. Did those come out of me? How did I end up here? What is this strangely familiar life?

Sometimes all you can do is sit back and look and marvel.

Now I confess the Aharon story has a terrible outcome. Nadav and Avihu offer their "strange fire" unbidden, and the fire consumes them and they die. Moshe says something cryptic and outrageously uncomforting about God being sanctified by those who draw near and in response what does Aharon say? Nothing.

וידם אהרן

Vayidom Aharon.

And Aharon hushed. 

If we read this story literally, we'd have to question what his silence means, what enormity of pain choked his words. But if we think of our own ideas that didn't work, that gave way to the next idea; the turns of event that didn't pan out but maybe paved a path, then maybe we can understand. The truth is that we lose, we let go of, some piece of our old dreams every day. Because the reality of our lives is always different than the dream. Maybe today is not that different from what you'd intended yesterday, but it is very different from what you imagined for yourself 20 years ago. Maybe unrecognizable, like the difference between an adult portrait and a baby picture.

Our lives are full of constant attempts at strange fire, new fire, and sometimes they produces a reyach nichoah, a pleasing aroma, and they stick. And sometimes those attempts go up in smoke. And sometimes all we can do, as the parent of our lives, is pause for a moment and hush. But what is this hush?

In Psalm 131 we find the same hushing word:

אם–לא שויתי ודוממתי נפשי כגמל עלי אמו כגמל עלי נפשי

Im lo shiviti v'domamti nafshi k'gamul aley imo kagamul alay nafshi.

Haven't I made my spirit equanimous and quiet 

like a toddler in its mother's embrace?

So is my spirit within mine.

Aharon's hush is like the way one quiets a tiny child, the hush after the big, loud wail. Aharon carries and quiets his spirit like one would a child.

Perhaps this is a takeaway from this otherwise dreadful story. That there is a quiet that is available to us even as we see our plans go awry or our previous intentions consumed. We have given birth to these lives of ours. And sometimes they get away from us. But they are our children and it is our lifelong job to love them. No matter how demanding or willful or noisy they've become. In the face of the twists and turns and tuml of our lives, these lives that some days run circles around us like over-sugared children, we can - we must - take a moment to breathe - hush - to quiet our souls and hold them like we would an infant.

Your life is not what you expected. It's never what you expected.^*2* But love it as you would a child. Keep teaching it, keep guiding it, and keep learning from it.

Give it a try right now. Just hush. Hush. Look at your life as it is now. Drop your judgments about it and just look at it. See it as your child. What kind of kid is it? Sweet? Challenging? Playful? Pained? Wayward? Willful? In trouble? Whatever kind of child it is, it is your child. Feel your love for it. It's a good kid. And you? You are a fine, fine parent.

And that's the news from Ner Shalom, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children - including these lives we've made - are, well, pretty fabulous.



I'm grateful to Mary Ann Malinak, Reb Shifrah Tobacman and Mitch Genser for their helpful insights this week. 

*1*For those who are deeply concerned, turkey bacon and turkey sausage were ultimately served, since the actual request was non-specific on that front, and the birthday boy hasn't had enough of the other stuff to really know the difference.
*2*Mitch Genser said to me this week, "Where you are supposed to be is exactly where you are right now." I'm still thinking that over, to figure out if I think it's so. But in any event where you are right now is certainly worthy of your love.

When Max Janowski Sang Me to Sleep

Based on a drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, March 2012.

At a recent Jewish Music Shabbat at my synagogue, I sang the famous Bialik poem, Shabbat Hamalkah. You know: hachamah merosh ha'ilanot etc. But instead of the well-worn familiar melody, I used a setting by Max Janowski.

You surely know the name. Composer. One of the greats. Truly prolific, although now known almost exclusively for his Avinu Malkenu, which was eventually yanked out of the synagogue and recorded by no less than Barbra Streisand herself, with a big, soupy orchestral arrangement and simplified chording by Marvin Hamlisch. I chose that setting of Shabbat Hamalkah for the same reason I watch developments like the Streisanding of Avinu Malkenu with interest. It is because I feel a proprietariness about Max Janowski's music. Because, you see, when I was little, Max Janowski used to sing me to sleep.

Well, not personally. And not every night. Just Tuesdays.

It started when I was four or five. My parents had joined a brand new congregation, called Beth Elohim, in Chicago's north suburbs. Although it wasn't a New Age, Unitarianish, Renewalish collection of hippy-dippy fringe people like the Sonoma County synagogue I now attend, it did in fact have a genuine freshness. Its families were all starting out, with Baby Boom optimism, building tiny ranch houses on what had been Illinois prairie, amid budding schools and parks and shopping centers. The earth had been upturned and sheathed in asphalt and cement. Saplings, held erect with tent ropes, bobbled on the brand new lawns. The land seemed a blank slate, any memory of Native American settlement now mere myth. For these young urban expats, everything was possible. Including how to be Jewish.

In 1965, the families of Beth Elohim were offered the opportunity to merge with a much older synagogue, the seventy-plus year old B'nai Jehoshua, which resided in a magnificent but rapidly emptying building on Chicago's west side. B'nai Jehoshua's membership had been moving out to the suburbs, and the synagogue risked death by dispersal if it didn't establish a new anchor further north. The merger happened, the beloved building was sold, and thus began the nomadic life of B'nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim that I grew up with.

Kabbalat Shabbat was at Niles Community Church, blocks from my house. Oh, how I loved that church: the pews, the organ, the strangely non-Jewish orderliness. I loved sneaking away with my mother after the rabbi's sermon to set up the oneg. I used to make the punch - a block of ice, Hawaiian Punch, ginger ale and rainbow sherbet, served up in soon-soggy Dixie Cups. Religious school took place at local public schools and the temple office was above a bowling alley. It sounds awkward or inconvenient, but it wasn't. It was thriving and exciting and new.

My father, Jerry Keller, was a popular bandleader in Chicago - a singer and sax man. The newly merged congregation might not have had much cash, but they knew their assets and they sent emissaries to the house to recruit him to be BJBE's first choir director. Dad had never directed a choir. What's more, he had grown up in a classical Reform synagogue where confirmation was offered instead of bar mitzvah, where Shabbat conveniently fell on Sunday, and where the officiant was called minister. His Jewish literacy was truly limited, despite being the great grandson of a rabbi who had served at Berlin's monumental Oranienstrasse synagogue in the 1870s, during the residency of the great composer Louis Lewandowski as the musical director - Lewandowski, whose Lecha Dodi and Tzadik Katamar are still on the musical menu at a wide range of synagogues and whose Kiddush remains a staple 130 years later. But my father could read Hebrew in transliteration as well as anyone and he was good with people and he was a fine musician and he said yes.

And that's when the choir moved into our house. A mismatched gaggle of 16 or so voices. They would ring the doorbell every Tuesday night and spill into the house like a reversal of the stateroom scene from "A Night at the Opera." My mother would sing alto and set up the percolator. The men in the choir were largely amateurs, well-meaning non-musicians. But the women, somehow, all had what seemed to be gorgeous voices. Big, vibrato-filled, operatic voices. I've never stopped to question how that happened, how this particular confluence of gifted women ended up in the north suburbs at the same moment in the same synagogue. But the biggest voice of all belonged to our cantor, Harold Freeman. His Hebrew was jumbled and his music reading inexact. But there was something compelling, something of the Old World chazzan in him, a certain cry in his voice that carried within it all the suffering and longing of exile.

Every Tuesday night there they'd be. On the sofa and the folding chairs. Gossiping more than singing, much to my father's frustration. And yet they loved him and eventually would sing beautifully, perhaps just to please him.

And the repertoire? Well, the repertoire was almost entirely the work of Max Janowski.

Max was a Berliner as well, who emigrated to Japan and eventually Chicago on the eve of the War. He was a formidable musician (eventually writing over 500 pieces of music) and a larger-than-life personality. I can't quite explain his widespread popularity in American Reform synagogues; I'll let the musicologists figure out his place in the canon. His pieces were often difficult - hard to sing, sometimes overwhelming to listen to, and I understand he took a certain pride in that. But, especially when simpler, his music was stunningly beautiful. As an heir to the German Jewish composers, he had no allergy to choirs and pipe organs. But while he came from the same tradition as Lewandowski and of Austrian composer and Schubert buddy Salomon Sulzer, whose choir and pipe-organ setting of the Shema is now so universal that people imagine it to be ancient and Orthodox, Max's compositions had a - dare I say it? - less churchy ring. They weren't about the glorious space of the cathedral or even the great synagogue; they came from someplace internal, the product of the deep and abiding sorrow and bitterness and yearning of the Jews. Even his sweetest and simplest and most intimate pieces, like Shabbat Hamalkah, feel like a stolen moment of sweetness in a hostile world.

This year is Max's centennial and some concerts to memorialize him are now popping up. When I was a teenager, I sang in a choir under his baton; later I taught Hebrew school at the South Side synagogue where he was the musical director. I realize now he was barely in his 60s. But to me, with his thinning hair, buttoned-up manner and German accent, he already seemed 100.

Our next cantor was a whippersnapper. Just 10 years older than me, with a tremendous voice and incredible musical precision, Cory Winter was himself a Max Janowski protege. He had sung for Max since he was a boy soprano, and Max treated him much as his musical heir. Later, Cory would become - and still is - my own friend and mentor. Which, I sometimes like to think to myself, makes Max Janowski my grandmentor.

But I've gotten afield. Tuesday nights, as a child, the choir would sit in our living room with their sheet music and their coffee and they would sing. And I would get sent to bed, where I would fall asleep to the lullaby of their chatter and their dirty jokes and Max Janowski's triumphant and tearjerking chord progressions. These would seep into my slumber and my cells, these chords, both modern and ancient, deep and soaring, heartening and heartrending. They would enter my body like a transfusion. So that by the time High Holy Days rolled around, I would sit with the adults and not with the other kids, expectant, waiting for the choir to stand and sing not Max Janowski's music, but mine.

On the bimah, like in my Tuesday night dreams, they would petition God to be heard. Shema Koleynu, they would sing. "Hear our voice!"


Shema Koleynu


They would call out for peace.

Sim Shalom


And although capable of such grandeur, they would humble themselves. "Avinu Malkenu, we have sinned. But hear us anyway."

Avinu Malkenu

Max's melodies, Max's modalities, would enfold me like a blanket on the Tuesday nights of my childhood, and they would make my house Jewish, and the world Jewish. They would seep out of the double-paned windows and dance under the suburban stars, treading lightly on the new sod, where the crickets had only just begun to sing.

Shabbat Zachor - Forgetting, Remembering, Acting

For Congregation Ner Shalom, March 2, 2012

This Shabbat is called Shabbat Zachor. Zachor is Hebrew for "remember." And in fact it seems that this week in the Jewish year, Purim week, is very much about the memorable people you wish you could forget, and a little bit about the forgotten part of you that maybe it's time to remember.

On Shabbat Zachor we read an extra bit of Torah out of order, a snippet of Deuteronomy in which we're told to remember what the tribe of Amalek did to us in the desert. Quick refresher: Amalek was a tribe that attacked the Israelites soon after the Exodus from Egypt. They are hated in Jewish memory for both their character (they attacked from behind, going for the weak and infirm) and for their effect (they made it seem okay for other tribes to attack us).

So our lore condemns them as the worst of fiends, far worse than the very Egyptians who had been our enslavers. Subsequent Jew-haters of note were always lightly or not so lightly considered the descendants of the Amalekites: Cmielnicki, Hitler and, of course, Haman, who is the reason we specially read the Amalekite bit this week. "Blot out their memory from under the heavens," says this portion, finishing with the ironic button, "Don't forget."

The paradox of being instructed to remember to blot out a memory could be the premise of any one of a number of Jewish jokes. In fact, you could easily imagine a Chelm story built on just this premise. Yankel is brokenhearted when Rayzl leaves him. The sages tell him to forget her. But he keeps remembering. So he goes back to the sages who determine that his problem is that he has simply forgotten to forget her and so they have him tie a string around his finger, so that every time he notices it, he can remember to forget her. (In a Chelm story there probably would have to be some additional circular kicker - e.g. that he keeps forgetting to tie the string around his finger and so they hire Rayzl to tie it for him every morning.)

Anyway, on Purim we try to blot out the memory of Haman, the supposed Amalekite. When one mentions his name, the custom is to say yimach shmo - may his name be erased, a custom guaranteed to pretty much do the opposite. Then we drown out his name with noisemakers as we read the story of Esther, as if that could blot out his memory rather than draw more attention to it. And even if there were a chance of forgetting him for a moment, we know that his name will be read 53 times in the megillah next year, and 53 times the year after that. Maybe that is the reason that our custom is to get so drunk on Purim that we can't discern the difference between Haman and Mordecai. If we can't blot out a memory, maybe at least we can blur it.

Because it is, in fact, so hard to let go of the memory of someone you're determined to forget!

My old law school friend Ken Cmiel, whose memory is in fact a blessing, was preoccupied with three guys in our first year class that he called his "hate brothers." I asked him what he meant by that. He explained that he was completely offended by their vile politics and their not-much-better personalities, and that he therefore felt compelled to watch them and their careers over the years to see what they were doing and, perhaps, keep an eye on what harm they were causing. "But what do you mean by 'hate brothers,'" I asked him. "Oh," he replied, "people that you hate so much they're almost family."

And there's truth to that. Trying to forget someone puts you in very powerful and intimate relationship with them. Think of the friend or relative you no longer speak to. Think of how much more psychic space that person takes up in your life than many of the people with whom you're on fine terms!
Similarly, Haman stays at the forefront of our thoughts. He is our hate brother and has become family. We know him. Everything he says. All his motivations. He has moved in and taken a permanent foothold in the Jewish imagination. Jewish children who don't know Aharon know Haman. So much for blotting out his memory. So how do you handle the Haman who won't go away?

A couple weeks ago, after one of my performances in Washingon, DC, I had the opportunity to do a post-show Q&A with the audience. On stage were the members of my troupe and our special guest, Candace Gingrich-Jones, the openly lesbian, openly progressive sister of Newt Gingrich. I asked her what it's like to be siblings with someone who stands for so much that is antithetical to your life and values. And she reflected on how opposites often exist inside of families. There's always the person that you can't have a peaceful political discussion with. It's just that not every family has a presidential candidate in it or television cameras outside.

Candace reflected on how she's given up fighting with her brother about the things that matter to her. Instead, the best she can do is be herself, be honest about her life, and persuade, she hopes, through example rather than rhetoric.

This advice of hers strikes me as especially relevant for Shabbat Zachor. After all, we are not always in a position to blot out our enemies. If Amalek represents the anti-Semitic world, or the hate-mongering world in general, how are we to overcome them? Warfare isn't the option it was 3000 years ago. How are we, then, to respond to Amalek?

The Chasidic masters, perhaps uncomfortable with the venom in these verses, point us inward, to our own hearts. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev says that each person is an entire small world. And Amalek finds expression in each person's power to do wrong. That part of us that will take advantage of another's weakness, that will attack from behind, that will be the first to act dishonorably - or the second or third. The part that, like Amalek, is lacking in yir'at Adonai, fear of God. In other words, the part of us that acts in that very 21st Century way that suggests we're not actually accountable for our actions.

But is it any easier to blot out an internal Amalek? Doesn't the very effort to blot it out turn it into our hate brother? Maybe, as Candace suggests, the best we can do is not to battle it, but to gently educate it until it softens and bends, God willing. Rebbe Levi Yitzchak suggests that the strength we have over our internal Amalek is in the power of the word - our Torah and our prayers. Which I might translate as being our ideas and our ideals. If we stay rooted in love of Torah and prayer, or belief in our ideas and ideals there will be no room for Amalek to control our hearts.

Okay, but what about the real haters out there? Even if the ultimate redemption of humankind could come from all of us cleaning up our hearts, there are living, breathing Amalekites in the world today. There are aggressors and oppressors. Don't we need to act, even if our hearts are still imperfect?

The megillah, the story of Esther, says yes.

Whether or not she was a historical figure, Esther is a marvelous literary one. Why? Because she is like us and can represent us. Physical and flawed. She desires a better life. She conceals inconvenient truths. Her heroism is reluctant. But when destiny calls her, she answers as we hope she would - as we hope we would. Through her beauty, skills and poise she ends up poised to make a difference and save her people from destruction at the hands of the Amalekites of her generation.

But when asked to do this, her answer is not an immediate "yes."

Mordecai begs her to intercede with the king on behalf of the Jews. She objects. The king hasn't called for her in over 30 days, and the penalty for entering his chambers unbidden is death. But Mordecai calls her out in strong terms, saying:

Do not think that in the king's palace you shall escape any more than all the Jews. For if you remain silent at this time, then the Jews will be delivered by some other means, but you and your father's house shall be destroyed. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for just such a time as this?

This is quite a message for us and for our time. Because we all have good intentions. We all hate injustice. We all object to so much that is happening in the world. Genocide in Darfur. Oppression in Syria. Economic injustice. Ecological indifference. The erosion of women's hard-won rights. Amalek is out there in many forms. And if we don't speak up? Yes, others might. But will we be saved by leaving the struggle to them? And who knows, maybe we have come to the kingdom for just such a time as this?

Maybe that is the thing that we have forgotten that now we need to remember. We are not here by accident. Either God set us here or we ended up here despite the incredible odds of ever being conceived and born. Either way, in either view, our lives are precious and worthy of purpose. Failing to speak out does dishonor to these lives we've been given.

So let us root hatred out of our hearts; let us root hatred out of this world. Let us fight it with words - with Torah and prayer, with ideas and ideals. Let us persuade it with our good examples of honesty and passion and compassion. Maybe we will prevail. For who knows what any of us is capable of? And maybe that is, in fact, why we have come into the kingdom. And perhaps that is the fact of our existence that we most need to remember, this week and always. So remember. Zachor. Don't forget.

Parashat Terumah - Loneliness, Holiness & Fuss

For Congregation Ner Shalom, on the occasion of hosting the Kadima Women's Torah, 
February 25, 2012

We are now moving into the Torah service - rightfully our centerpiece on a day where we have such an illustrious Torah scroll as our guest. And I was asked to say a few words about the parashah to prep us for this journey. An easy job, you'd think, considering that the portion is Terumah, in which God instructs all whose hearts are generous to build a holy place, a mikdash, using the finest of precious metals and wood and skins and blue, purple and crimson dyes. A very rich portion. There is so much that one could say - on this day in particular - about coming together as a community for the purpose of creating holiness. So much one might say about how participation in the building of this mikdash was a function of generosity, not gender.

But, as always, I got tripped up. You see, as usual, I made the mistake of actually reading the portion. And I stalled briefly on God's famous words that you will hear Reb Shifrah chant shortly, which go:

V'asu li mikdash v'shachanti b'tocham.

They will make a mikdash, a holy place, for me and I will dwell among them. 

This verse has always excited and puzzled me. Why did the people need God dwelling among them? Hadn't God already been plenty present, in the most shamelessly showy of ways - flinging plagues and parting the Sea and leading the Israelites as a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night? Rashi, perhaps inadvertently, offers an answer. He glossed the Hebrew word li - "for me" - as meaning lishmi - "for my sake." In other words, we, those who are generous of heart, are instructed to build a holy place for God to dwell among us not for our sake but for God's.

And that made me sad. You see, in the beginning - no, before the beginning, our mystical tradition has it that there was only God. God was all, all was God. But when God considered creating the Universe it all changed. Once God conceived of an Other - something not God, or not seeming to be God - then Other existed. In that moment, in that thought, God contracted and separateness was born. And with it loneliness.

For what else could this really be but loneliness? God's immeasurable loneliness. The painful pricetag of Creation.

And in this parashah we see God maneuvering to be closer, to bridge the distance, to be more intimate. To dwell b'tocham - not just among us but in us.

"Invite me in," God seems to say. "Make a fuss over me. Do it up nice. Invite me to dinner. Make your best dish. Do it fancy. Use the good silverware. And the gold and the silver and the crimson cloth and the acacia wood. And in return v'shachanti b'tocham - I'll live among and in you.

        I want 2 be your Shechinah baby
        Maybe U could be mine
        U just leave it all up to me
        It's mishkan time."

It's a little romantic and a little desperate and a lot familiar. Because we all endure loneliness in this vast world. We desire love. We want to be wanted. We want someone to make a fuss and use the good silverware and make their best dish.

"Open up," God is saying to those whose hearts are, or might be, willing. "Invite me to move in, invite me real nice, and you know I'll say yes."

That offer still stands. When we create a holy place as a community, like we're doing today, we're saying, "Yes, come in." When we give care to making this whole world a holy place, we're saying, "Yes, come in." And when we pay attention to the beauty of our willing hearts, the multi-colored tent, the holy temple that sits inside of us, the gold and silver and blue and crimson finery that adorn our souls if we'd only take the moment to look, we're saying, "Yes, come in."

And that, my friends, is how you shack up with the Shechinah. First you move into a one-room tent in the wilderness, then upgrade to a Temple in a Holy City and, before you know it, you've moved out to the celestial suburbs and and are receiving your mail at God's house. Ashrei yoshvei veytecha, says the Psalm, happy are all those who live in your house. Here [the sanctuary]. Here [the wide world]. And here [the heart].

So let's go ahead and build it. Make some space in our lives for the Shechinah. And make that space nice. Haul our best out of mothballs. Offer our gifts. And maybe God's presence will assuage some of our age-old loneliness, and we, in turn, just might assuage some of God's.

Mishkan/Mikdash created at Ner Shalom to receive the Women's Torah  by Yael Raff Peskin, Atzilah Solot, Shoshana Fershtman and Janet Rae Jorgensen.

Parashat Vayechi: The End of Myth

For Congregation Ner Shalom, January 6, 2012

ונהר יצא מעדן

Why is brevity such a challenge for me? When it comes to Torah, to Hebrew, to Kabbalah, to anything Jewish? "Keep it short," my trusted advisors tell me, usually to no avail. What is it about our tradition and our tribe that keeps me gushing like a river? Santorum, the economy, gardening: I can muster a respectable number of sentences on any of those. But give me a topic that's Jewish and watch out.

An inmate at the county jail wrote to me a couple months ago and told me that he's decided that Judaism is the True Faith. I wrote back to him that in my eyes there are many paths that can expand one's experience and bring one closer to God, if you want to call it God. "Although," I did have to allow, "I myself have been Jewish since I was born, and I'm not bored yet."

So what keeps me so enchanted? One piece, I think, is the way in which our tradition, or our special vantage point, imbues every element of the day-to-day with something mythic. That is, we live in the mundane, but we have this awareness that we - and everything else - have a non-mundane origin and a non-mundane edge. We were launched by something great and cosmic.

This week, we Jews, we followers of the True Faith, complete the reading of our great volume of myth, B'reishit, the book of Genesis, which opens Torah and throws wide all of our teaching. It contains the Creation of the Cosmos and that quiet moment just beforehand. It provides all the stage-setting for the world as we know it, or at least the world as our ancestors knew it. It answers core questions of existence: What is light? What is life? What are we made of? Where does death come from? How did animals come to be? And plants? And suffering. How did we come to be separate from God? How did we come to be separate from each other?

The people who figure in Genesis are not just literary characters. They are mythical. They are archetypes, urforms. They aren't there just to move a plot. They are there to be revered. They are nearly deities - embodying elements of nature and of humanity and of the divine. Even their names suggest mythic qualities. Adam and Eve - earth and life. Abraham - great father. Sarah - the queen. Isaac is mirth and Jacob the heel-grabber apparently has something to do with the frustration of following and the deep human desire to overtake. The book of Genesis includes a race memory of ancient migrations, recounted in Abraham's lech lecha journey to Canaan and Jacob's hunger-driven move to Egypt. And it recalls natural disasters of the distant past: the flood story of course, but also the nasty volcanic end met by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. And the many genealogies scattered through the book? An ancient Near Eastern directory of how the tribes and nations of the day were related to each other linguistically, culturally, genetically.

And what about the idea of Eden itself? Could it be a distant memory of pre-agricultural times, before humans either needed or assumed mastery over the garden and the plants and creatures in it? A time when we, like all other animals, survived on what the earth provided us of its own will, and not of ours?

Genesis swirls around like a dream. But at its end, in this week's portion, Vayechi, we reach a turning point. We begin to feel the mythic dissipating; we begin to wake up. Jacob, on the eve of his death, speaks to each of his sons, articulating something of their nature or predicting something about the location, livelihood or cultural character of that son's future descendants, setting the stage for later Israelite history. And launching us into the more recognizable world we live in. The advance of history over mythology; of event over dream.

In fact, Joseph is the turning point. While his ancestors' names had obvious mythic resonance, his own name, Yosef, means "add-on." He's the annex, the bridge to the next thing. And while Jacob dies at the fantastically old age of 147, his son Joseph dies this week at 110 - a rare but not mythical age, as was proven by our friend Elsie Rich, who also died this week, also at 110. Jacob belongs to the world of myth. Joseph, like Elsie, belongs to us.

With Joseph's death we take a deep breath and look across the white stretch of parchment to the book of Exodus, or Shmot. And yes, there is much legendary quality to this book also. A burning bush, plagues, a sea parting and a great hero and prophet, the likes of whom has never been seen again. But I see Exodus as something more like the Odyssey. The story of the human race scraping up against the mythic, navigating paths that lead right past the divine. But nonetheless a human story, with believable human protagonists. And once Moses dies, at the end of Deuteronomy, we are inescapably in the land of history, plain and simple. Where we still live today.

But that makes this world sound awfully unmagical. Isn't this ground holy ground too? Isn't all of Torah holy, even though only some of Torah is mythic. Don't we endeavor to find, and sometimes succeed in finding, a mythical, holy quality to everything? If so, what is the source of all that holiness?

Well, let's look way back to Chapter 2 of Genesis, where it says,

ונהר יצא מעדן להשקות את הגן

"A river is pouring out of Eden to water the garden." In other words, Eden isn't strictly walled off. It leaks! It pours out into the garden, into the world. So what is the nature of this river?

Torah says that this river is the headwaters of four mighty streams*1* and that these four rivers encircle all the known world. So by this beautiful vision the entirety of the world we live in is surrounded by some flow whose origin is paradise.

The mystics go on to connect the four rivers with famous foursomes of our tradition. Not the Marx Brothers or the Beatles or the Golden Girls. But, for instance, the four rabbis who, according to Talmud, entered pardes, entered the orchard of paradise - Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha ben Abuya and Akiva.*2* And the four ways of understanding Torah represented by the acronym pardes or paradise - that is pshat (literally), remez (allegorically), drash (metaphorically) and sod (mystically). And the Four Worlds that stack like a layer cake or surround us like Russian nesting dolls: asiyah (the physical world), yetzirah (the emotional world), beriah (the world of vision),  and atzilut (the divine internal).

Through this stream of consciousness, our tradition suggests that the river that flows from Eden comes from a singular source, but then breaks up in order to permeate all our personality types, all our approaches to understanding, and all our experiences of the world.

Then, just when you think you've got a handle on it, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk adds one more twist. He re-reads the Hebrew word, nahar, "river," as the Aramaic word, nahor, "light." It is no longer a river emanating from Eden, but light. Or maybe a river of light. Divine light that nourishes the garden, that nourishes this realm we live in. Primordial light that can illuminate everything we experience in our lives.

I've been noticing the light a lot since I've been home, perhaps because everything that is lit is looking so different from how it did when I left a month ago. I've noticed the light striking the remaining red and orange leaves in our yard. I've noticed that the light is unexpectedly low in the sky and it shines more often in my eyes and makes me sneeze. I've noticed how rapidly the light shifts location and hue.

Noticing the way physical light affects our seeing in this world is a model, a Beta version, for seeing everything in a holy light. Looking at the light in this world is practice for perceiving the supernal light, the Edenic light, the or ganuz - the too-oft hidden light.

But wait, maybe we're getting far afield. We were talking about Jacob and his sons, I believe. What is the relevance of this description of a river all the way back at the opposite end of the book of Genesis?
Jacob is pushing his dozen sons out of the primordial nest into the future, where they will land - thunk - on the hard earth of politics and conquest and law. Out of the realm of magic and myth and into the realm of history. But that realm is not devoid of holiness, of divine light. We know this because the river that flows from Eden still flows. Torah uses the timeless participle yotze, "flowing out," in describing the river, not the past tense, yatza or vayyetze, "flowed out."

And so wherever Jacob's children, the Children of Israel, find themselves; wherever the children of Eden, all of us on this earth - plant and animal, find ourselves, the river of light continues to flow into us.

Jacob's sons are pushed out of the book of Genesis, some with their father's kind words, some with his harsh words, some with hardly any words and nothing like closure. In truth, we have all also been pushed out of the nest by the past with incomplete information and little preparation and nothing like closure. And we all are pushing a future or a dozen possible futures out before us. And we will never be able to give those futures everything possible to give.

But we can trust that there is a light that will shine from Eden. It will break through the dam of the text, pour from the scroll, and surge past us to flood our futures.

With this river of light, the inch of blank parchment between Genesis and Exodus, the division between myth and history, between the distant past and the not so distant future, ceases to be a sharp break. It is all of one flow. The light is still flowing from Eden, from the place of our dreams, from the beginning, from God's first words and it is watering our  gardens. And it will continue to nourish the gardens of the future, even when we and everything we've ever known have long become myth.

And so may we ride the wave like the fearless California surfers that we are (or wish we were), floating, flying with our arms outstretched like eagle's wings or like the fins of a manta ray, riding the wave from Eden, awash in holiness, bringing light into the darkest places.

Chazak chazak v'nitchazek. Hang on tight. Exodus is coming.


*1*The Pishon, the Gichon, the Chidekel (i.e. the Tigris) and the Prat (i.e. the Euphrates).
*2*You might remember this parable, that in this paradise one of them instantly died, one went mad, one destroyed the grass, and only Akiva came in peace and departed in peace.

Chayei Sarah - The (3) Lives of Sarah

For Congregation Ner Shalom
November 18, 2011

 

Sarah No. 1

This week's Torah portion is called Chayei Sarah, after the portion's first words. Chayei Sarah - "the life of Sarah," a portion in which, ironically, Sarah, our great mother, does not appear. Instead, the portion opens this way:

ויהיו חיי שרה מאה שנה ועשרים שנה ושבע שנים שני חיי שרה: ותמת שרה...

The life of Sarah was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years, 

these were the years of Sarah's life. And Sarah died...

We are then told that Abraham wept for her and eulogized her. But alas, we are not privileged to hear the words of the eulogy.

Certainly there would have been something about Sarah's larger-than-life life. An epic life. Great journeys. A hard-to-shake sadness, perhaps from decades of unreconciled childlessness. A sardonic sense of humor. Great physical beauty. A regal bearing, as is suggested by her name, Sarah, the Babylonian word for queen. An ingrained practicality, misread as harshness by those who didn't know her well. And a deep and enduring care for her people's posterity, evidenced first through offering her servant Hagar as a surrogate to bear Abraham a child when her own body wouldn't comply, and then by creating a sharp boundary between her family and Hagar's once she'd unexpectedly born a child of her own.     

Abraham, whom our tradition considers a mystic, might have noted Sarah's strong pull to the trait of gevurah, of discipline or boundariedness, in counterpoint to his own attraction to chesed, limitless giving. Even Abraham would have had to admit that he was constitutionally unable to say "no," and that Sarah had no such problem.

In the portion, Sarah's final age is announced in an unusual way; not unprecedented but unusual. Her years are fragmented, as if into different lives: 100 years and 20 years and 7 years. In Hebrew, the word for life - chayim - is grammatically plural. Always. There is no way to distinguish between a singular life and plural lives. Chayei Sarah, the name of this portion, could just as easily mean "the lives of Sarah." *1*

Which reminds me of a little Midrash that says that there were two Abrahams, and this was revealed when he reached out to sacrifice his son, and the angel called out, Avraham Avraham. Why say Avraham twice? The Midrash answers that there is the Abraham of the story and then there is an Abraham who lives in every generation of our people.

I'd argue that the same is true of Sarah. The lives of Sarah. The Sarah in the story, and the Sarahs who find their way into each of our stories. And I'm going to tell you about two of them.

Sarah No. 2: Sade Jacobs (later Newman)

Sarah No.2

Sarah Number 2 is my grandmother, Sade Newman. Sade. Not Sadie. The question of Grandma Sade's name deserves comment before anything else. In 1903, in a village a day's ride from Bialystok, my great-grandmother Rayzl was pregnant, and so was her sister-in-law, also named Rayzl. The mother-in-law they shared, Chayeh Sorke, had recently died and these sisters-in-law, out of custom or affection or both, intended to name their daughters, if they had daughters, after her. But in order that those daughters shouldn't have identical names - a problem already plaguing the recent spate of boys in the family all named Mayshe - one would name her daughter Chayeh Sorke, like their mother-in-law and the other would reverse the order: Sorke Chayeh. My grandmother, though born second, was called Chayeh Sorke, like her grandmother.*2*

But within the next three years both families would cross the ocean on great ships and come down the St. Lawrence Seaway to Chicago, where the two cousins' names would be Americanized. And in the Americanization, the name order of both girls was mysteriously flipped. Chayeh Sorke became Sadie Ida. Sorke Chayeh became Ida Shirley. So somehow the precedence of names evened itself out.

But my grandmother wasn't done with the name changes. She was a formidable child, a spitfire. The name "Sadie" sounded like a diminutive to her, and I suspect she didn't ever want to be thought diminutive, either in size (which she was) or in spirit (which she wasn't). She shortened it to Sade and, while still a child, got all the official documents changed to suit, seemingly having staged an occupation of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the same way she was known to occupy the school principal's office or talent competitions or whatever, until unbending authority bent to her will or skill or charm. She only ever answered to Sade, S-a-d-e, and if more educated acquaintances or later generations connected that name with a certain French Marquis, they were polite (or cautious) enough not to mention it.

But I knew her given name was Chayeh Sorke; she always told me so, and she knew I would listen and remember. And so whenever in my life I stumble onto this week's Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, I inevitably think of her, because "the Life of Sarah," Chayei Sarah, sounds like her name, plain and simple.

Now no one's life is easy, and hers was no exception. In pictures of her as a teenager, she's always in a cluster of friends, smiling, inevitably at the center. She married at 21 and I think over time had trouble fitting her strength of character into changing American expectations of wifehood and womanhood. She had a daughter, my mother. Some years later she had a stillbirth, an event that was never spoken of again, until in my teen years she whispered it to me so that I would know, for the record.

You see even as a kid I was the family historian. She perceived this, and began to give over the family history to me, all she knew of it. Some time, perhaps right around my Bar Mitzvah, I remember taking out sheets of ledger paper and beginning to draw a tree as she dictated the names of her many aunts and uncles and her scores of American cousins, all of whom she knew, all of whose children and grandchildren she knew, all of whom she talked to regularly on the phone. I loved making the tree and recording the names, but mostly I loved this act of transmission. My willingness gave her pleasure, and we two were conspirators in a secret plot for posterity.

As I think about my grandmother, Grandma Sade, Chayeh Sorke, I think she was not so dissimilar from the biblical Sarah. She certainly suffered. She had some terrible times of depression, and even worse times being treated for it. But she loved her grandchildren and her friends and her large family and that web of family - and its preservation and transmission - is where she established herself.

In her 80s, Alzheimer's disease overtook her and began to erase her memory. We never had an official, bilateral goodbye. But we had closure anyway. As the disease progressed, she recognized everyone, even strangers, as a friend or relative, kissing them and fussing over them. Like Sarah No. 1, she began living in reverse. Sarah No. 1 was an old lady who then became a mother. Sarah No. 2 was a mother who then became a little girl. I, still in my 20s, would visit her and she'd decide I was her father. I'd speak to her in my schoolbook Yiddish, and she'd talk back in the domestic Yiddish of her childhood. I didn't mind her thinking me her father. Somehow it didn't matter which end of the line of transmission I was on. We both knew we were on it together.

Sarah No. 3: Sarah Ekshtayn Chinsky

Sarah No. 3

Sarah No. 3 was born Sarah Ekshtayn, in a tiny, independent Jewish farming village called Kolonja Izaaka. Back at the turn of the last century, waves of the village's children had emigrated to America, my grandmother's family among them. But in each of the village's 17 Jewish homesteads, one child remained to inherit and farm the land. Sarah Ekshtayn's parents had been the ones of the Ekshtayn family to stay. In our tribe it was my grandmother's Uncle Itzik.

Our family, the Knishevitsky family, according to the records, held Kolonja Izaaka Farm No. 11. Farm No. 10 was held by the Ekshtayn family. Had my family stayed, Sarah No. 2, my grandmother, would have been the next-door neighbor and probable babysitter of Sarah No. 3, who was perhaps 12 years her junior. But all of this I learned later.

Only 5 years ago did I even discover the existence of this village and my connection to it. In my research I found a short Yiddish essay about life there, included in the Memorial Book of a nearby town, and written by one Sarah Chinsky, née Ekshtayn. The Memorial Book was published in 1968, and Sarah Chinsky's essay included her memories of being a teenager in Kolonja Izaaka in the 1930s. She painted in living color the life my family had left behind and which I could only imagine in black and white. Cherry trees, beehives, and the unpaved, poplar-lined road that ran straight through the village. Shabbos, harvest time, market day. The healing rituals of the town wise-woman. The friendships the young people had with the youth of the nearby shtetlach.*3*

In her essay, Sarah Chinsky mentions my grandmother's cousin, Uncle Itzik's son, one of that wave of Mayshe's born to our family at the turn of the century. The next time I saw Mayshel's name was in the Yad Vashem database of those killed in the Holocaust. It was on a daf ed, a Page of Testimony, recording his death and that of his wife and his mother and his three children. The page was dated May, 1999, and was signed by, again, Sarah No. 3, Sarah Ekshtayn Chinsky.

The Yad Vashem database allows you to search on any field including the name of the person submitting testimony. I found that Sarah Ekshtayn Chinsky had submitted over 60 such pages of testimony, that is, record of over 60 adult members of the farming village and their children. Sarah herself had gone to Palestine with her family in the 1930s, and 65 years later, she sat down in her kitchen in Tel Aviv and somehow managed once more to walk up and down that poplar-lined dirt road, referred to affectionately by the colonists as the boulevard; from house to house, remembering each person who lived there and recording their name for history. Talk about gevurah, about strength, tenacity, heroism. Could any of us remember 17 of our childhood neighbors, spouses, children? She did not know the details of any colonist's death. She only knew that they had lived, and that they lived no more.

I imagine her drawing a map, so as not to overlook any of the 17 families. I've since been told that her younger sisters sat with her to add any names of their early childhood playmates that Sarah might have missed.

I wondered when this heroic woman, Sarah Ekshtayn, had herself died. The internet was silent about her. And one day in 2008, figuring I had nothing to lose, and that maybe I'd find an old neighbor or a child of hers, I wrote a letter, and addressed it to the street number she'd written on the Page of Testimony in 1999 and I sent it off into the ether.

Her first aerogram to me arrived within two weeks. It was in Yiddish and Hebrew in an unsteady hand. We wrote to each other for a couple years; we even met once on Skype, with her son acting as the computer jockey. Despite my declarations that I would be coming to Israel soon, I didn't make it in time. She died last year at an unconfessed age somewhere, I suspect, in her late 90s.

I never met her in the flesh, but she shared with my grandmother, Sarah No. 2, and with our mother of Biblical proportions, Sarah No. 1, a desire or a calling or maybe just an unwanted but unrefusable duty to transmit history; to make sure the stories, the experiences, the truths, the longings of our past find some home in the present. And we, the Sarahs of the present, regardless of our given names, will have to do the same. We will be the transmittors. We already are. We will send something of our lives, chayei Sarah, the lives of Sarah, into the future. It is our calling, it is our inevitability. And what we choose consciously to transmit is for us to decide. May we choose well.

ברוך אתה ה' פוקד שרה:

Baruch Atah Adonai, pokeid Sarah.

Blessed is the One who appoints the Sarah in all of us.

_________________________________
*1*And in fact the first verse ends shnei chayei Sarah - literally, the years of the life of Sarah. But the shnei could also mean the number "2," making the verse end with "the two lives of Sarah."
 
*2*This was likely because her mother had a living sister named Sorke, and custom would have frowned on her sharing a name with a close living relative.
 
*3*About this she wrote:
Our dear young people numbered, taki, rather few. But we drew the attention of all the villages around, and their many young people frequented our Kolonye. In the evening, when our young men and women were still in the fields, who should arrive for a visit but a whole company of meydlach and bechoyrim from Krinek, and Amdur, and Sokolka. Just as if they had all agreed to organize a surprise for us. Suddenly, like thunder and lightning it would start, and we would hurry back from the field, our sickles and scythes in our hands. Soon we would all have assumed a yontifdik appearance, greeted all the guests, eaten, drunk, sung and danced until late at night. And by then it would be too late for those young people to go home, so they would take themselves out and sleep in our haylofts.  

Parashat Lech Lecha: On Greatness, Blessing & Owning Wall Street

For Congregation Ner Shalom, November 4, 2011

Angry anti-Semitic mob enjoying sunshine and used books.

In this week's Torah portion, Lech Lecha, we receive the first of the many blessings bestowed on us by the God of Abraham. And as we all know, even the best of blessings can prove mixed. In the parashah, God famously tells Abraham (then still called Avram) to hit the road and leave his birthplace to strike out for new territory. In exchange, God says:

ואעשך לגוי גדול ואברכך ואגדלה שמך והיה ברכה 

V'e'es'cha l'goy gadol va'avarech'cha va'agadlah sh'mecha veh'yeh b'rachah. 

I will make you a great nation
and I will bless you and make your name great 

and you will be a blessing.

This idea of being a goy gadol, a great nation - not only quantitatively but qualitatively; this sensation of being somethin' special, is in our bones. We are bound up in it. Even we Reconstructionists, who have dismissed the idea of "chosenness" out of hand, are no less susceptible to a certain wonder and, frankly, pride over who our people are, where we've been, what we've suffered and what we have, against all odds, achieved.

Considering our long, long history of marginalization, ghettoization, victimization, our achievements are nothing short of remarkable. And they are quirky too, distributed unevenly across realms of activity. We've always been right up there in scholarship, first our own Torah learning and eventually adding to world's store of philosophy and poetry and science. Music seems to run through our culture, even while our traditional allergy to graven images has kept us more distanced from the visual arts. We've done well competing and excelling in new industries when the timing is right - for instance arriving and taking root in America just in time for the invention of the motion picture.

Historical circumstances in Europe over the past millenium have also shaped some of our areas of achievement. Restrictions on occupations we could engage in; different restrictions on occupations Christians could engage in; heightened literacy among Jews regardless of class or gender; a certain focus on education; the existence of shared Jewish languages and culture throughout the Diaspora - these all set the groundwork for a famous history of involvement in finance and trade. Some elements of these professions were portable; some were not. Jews coming to America, for instance, could not easily enter the old boys' club of banking, but some found their way to the more flexible fields of investment, brokerage, etc. Merchanty skills transferred readily, and we had famous success in retail. The old blue-blood industries - mining, oil, railroads, farming - on the other hand remained a kind of goyim naches. Like hunting or skiing, something Jews just don't do.

But yes, on the whole, our collective story in America is undeniably one involving economic success even though many of our individual stories might not comport with that narrative. And certainly our collective economic success has outshone our political success. We're much better represented in commerce than in politics. We are not people who have ever, at least outside of our current up-and-down experiment in the State of Israel, held political power. America, even now I think, would still rather buy from us than vote for us.

For some Jews, the economic success has been remarkable. A few years ago a Jewish writer in Chicago took the list of Vanity Fair's 100 Most Influential Americans and counted the Jews. (Fine, we all do it, but he published it.) Between the Zuckerbergs and Bloombergs and Katzenbergs, plus many half-bergs with just one Jewish parent, he managed to tally a jaw-dropping 50% of those top 100.

I don't know about you, but as I describe and attempt to quantify the success of our people in the American marketplace, I feel myself tensing up. Because when I hear talk of Jews and finance or Jews and Hollywood or Jews and media, I begin to picture villagers carrying torches. The story of our success has too often been twisted into a battle cry of angry, anti-Semitic mobs, suffering in bad economic times.

Which brings us to Occupy Wall Street - a huge, angry, leaderless movement, protesting not the government but corporate greed, with a special focus on banking and finance and - dare we utter the word? - moneylending. Areas of our historic, disproportionate and somewhat stereotypical involvement.

It sure feels like the blueprint for an anti-Semitic mob.

But interestingly, over six weeks in, it hasn't become one. Yes, there have been people with signs saying Wall Street is owned by Zionist Jews (and if you're ever wondering whether a reference to Jews is anti-Semitic, I say if the word "Zionist" is slapped on, your answer is yes). And while the decentralized structure of the Occupy movement has not even been able to get drummers to take the night off let alone condemn anti-Semitic messaging, there have in fact been responses to anti-Semitism from among the protesters, in a way that is proportional, or so it seems for now, to the tenor of the anti-Semitism on display.

To me, the anti-Semitic threat to worry about is not the crackpot with the sign. But instead the rightwing idealogs who try to discredit Occupy Wall Street by painting it as anti-Semitic at the same time that they reinforce the anti-Semitism they claim to condemn. For instance, Rush Limbaugh a couple weeks ago commenting on the now-famous slogan "We are the 99%." He said, "[T]hat leaves 1%, roughly the percentage of Jews in the population... And Wall Street and bankers have been anti-Semitic code for Jews in this country going back quite a while." For any Rush listeners who hadn't previously associated Jews with banking and wealth, those dots have now been connected. And not in a way that I could call, even in my wildest imagination, "good for the Jews." Thank you, Rush, for caring.

But in the same way that I confess to feeling some pride at how some of our people have succeeded in the world of competitive capitalism, in ways far beyond their immigrant grandparents' dreams, I also feel pride at the visible presence of Jews in both leadership and rank and file of the Occupy movement. And why not? Our heritage imcludes both Rothschild and Trotsky, factory owners and union activists, silver spoons and red diapers.

A few decades ago economist Milton Friedman wrote a famous essay trying to understand why Jews tend toward collectivist, anti-capitalist values despite having benefited from capitalism. He reviews the theories of other economists and historians, dismissing most of them. Instead he sees Jewish leftism in America as an apologetic reflex - Jews specifically distancing themselves from the successes of capitalism in order not to be targets of anti-Semitism. In other words, our value of selflessness over selfishness is just a subconscious ploy to be visibly unlike the stereotype of the greedy Jew.

Interestingly, Friedman rejects the idea that today's Jews are influenced by the prophetic tradition of seeking justice. He quotes sociologist Nathan Glazer's dismissal of that possible connection: "The Jewish religious tradition probably does dispose Jews, in some subtle way, toward liberalism and radicalism, but it is not easy to see in present-day Jewish social attitudes the heritage of the Jewish religion.”

Which might be true, if you remove this particular Jewish social attitude from consideration. But this particular Jewish social attitude is a biggy. Tzedek tzedek tirdof. "Justice, justice shall you pursue." Torah is full of words that speak directly to justice and to economic fairness. Laws about paying your workers. Laws leveling the playing field between rich and poor in legal disputes. Laws requiring landowners - the equivalent of today's corporate CEOs - to designate 10%, not Herman Cain's 9%, of their production for public use. Laws prohibiting wrongdoers from hiding behind the actions of the majority. Torah is vociferous. And Friedman's suggestion that a modern, largely secular Jew cannot take these values to heart - that in the absence of a shtreimel and a kosher lunch there is no reason to think that Jewish values play any significant role in one's world view - is absurd and smug. For many of us it is in fact what is at the core of our Judaism. "Justice, justice shall you pursue." It is when we are protesting and rabble-rousing; when we're standing up or sitting in or shouting back or acting up or being carted off that we feel most Jewish. For how many secular Jews, for how many atheist Jews, has "justice, justice" replaced shema Yisrael as our central creed?

So yes, I think Torah, this still-living Torah, is profoundly relevant in figuring out why we are not just in the Board rooms but also at the barricades.

And I think there is one more element that Friedman doesn't consider at all that feels very real to me. And that is the experience of outsiderness. A thousand years in Europe and still considered aliens certainly has some relevance. But even here and now. More than a century of succeeding in a new country and still not quite being the person this country idealizes. Our outsiderness remains. We are the queers of the American dream. In it but not quite of it. Valued for what we bring to the table, but without clearly a seat at it.

And as queers we've found ways to pass, to make ourselves invisible and unobtrusive. To not identify our successes as Jewish successes. To produce many decades of movies in which Jews do not even figure. To become moguls but only after changing our name from Lifshitz to Lauren. To theorize, like Milton Friedman does, about Jewish participation in the radical left and pretend not to be an outsider when you do it. I can't help but imagine that Jews who really have made it into the inside, wherever that is, probably feel like they're only masquerading as insiders.

And so I think it is in part our outsiderness, our cultural queerness, that allows us to look at systems of power with some distance and some doubt. The ways we have been kept out of power might be different than they are for the 98% of Americans who are not Jewish, but they are no less meaningful. We have, in the aggregate, been successful economically. But we have also experienced the sting of exlusion.

And our historic outsiderness has played a role in instilling in us collectivist values. We take care of our people, whether it is through the old benevolent societies and landsmanshaftn, or through philanthropy or synagogue membership. Taking care of those among us in need has remained defiantly important, even in this new, unapologetically selfish age.

So here we are, Jews, on both sides of the barricades. It is no paradox and it is no wonder.

But one question lingers for me. Do we have something special to offer as Jews in the Occupy movement? Do the Jews participating on this side have any special responsibility to speak our truth, our Jewish truth, to the Jews on the other side? Do we hold them to any standard higher than that to which we hold others of the corporate cast of characters?

I say yes. I say why not? What's the worst that can happen? We'll be disappointed? We're already disappointed. So yes, let's say what we expect of them, not only as living, breathing, thinking human beings, but as Jews. We are inevitably bound up with them and they with us. Such is the mixed blessing of a great nation. We might as well name it.

So what does greatness mean? How do we own our greatness, both as occupier and occupied? Here's a last thought. God says to Abraham,

ואעשך לגוי גדול 

V'e'es'cha l'goy gadol

I will make you a goy gadol. A great nation. The root gadol - great, large, formidable - has another meaning in Hebrew, a rare one, that we see in the word gadil. A twisted cord. Like a wick or a braid. Perhaps our destiny of greatness, if you believe in one, is a prophecy not of economic success, and certainly not of raw numbers, but one of connectedness. We are meant to be bound up together like threads in a cord. And wrapped up with this world also - in all its creativity and its possibility and its struggle. A people integrated, a people of integrity. Threads woven together. Sometimes in a beautiful garment. And sometimes, as gadil is in fact used in Torah, we are inevitably the fringe.

ואעשך לגוי גדול ואברכך ואגדלה שמך והיה ברכה 

V'e'es'cha l'goy gadol va'avarech'cha va'agadlah sh'mecha veh'yeh b'rachah.

I will make you a nation of connectedness, wound together and braided into the fabric of this world. And you will be a blessing.

May we, in fact, be a blessing.



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Below: A Torah scroll is unrolled and read at Occupy Wall Street on Simchat Torah, highlighting texts that speak to matters of social justice.