Yom Kippur 5774: Three Longings

For Congregation Ner Shalom

The Chasidim who, like me, love to toy with words, re-sorting letters to see what new can be found, have an interesting teaching about this day, Yom Kippur, which is called in Hebrew, Yom Hakippurim. They mess with the vowels just a little and point out that the name of this holy day could be read as yom k'purim. A day like Purim.

Of course on the surface, that seems ridiculous. These holidays are nothing like each other. On Purim we celebrate with indulgence. It is an ecstatic and intemperate holiday of costumes and merriment. So very unlike this solemn day of fasting and introspection. And yet the Chasidic masters are insistent that we notice that these two moments are linked. To my mind, the strongest bond between Purim and Yom Kippur has to do with hiding and revealing. Each holiday involves an unmasking of sorts.

At Purim we wear disguises, in deference to Queen Esther herself who, disguised as a gentile queen, is forced by circumstance to muster her inner resources and lower the mask, own up to who she is, and take responsibility for her fate and that of her people.

And here we are on this Yom K'purim, this Purim-like day, struggling to muster our inner resources and lower our own masks, to reveal to ourselves, and each other, and the Universe, and God perhaps, who we really are. What's in our hearts. What we're made of. And what we long for.

This does in fact take some unmasking. Because so many of our longings are invisible even to us, even though they inform so much of our lives. Our longings sit below the surface, like rules of grammar that indiscernibly conjugate our verbs and line up our words before issuing them from our mouths. The grammar of longing informs our values and arranges our choices. Our longing is the deep structure of our lives. And much of that longing plays its part without our even noticing it.

But tonight I'd like us to notice. I'd like us to take up three longings that I think we as a community struggle with and that we, as individuals, have often sent into exile as being, somehow, wrong or undesirable. Three longings which, I believe, deserve our attention and some honor and maybe even some forgiveness. These three longings I will refer to, for short, as House, Home and Whom.

HOUSE

We'll start with House, by which I mean the House of Israel. Being a Jew. The longing to be a Jew, to be a good Jew. 

Now I know that I was the one standing here two years ago reclaiming and praising the Bad Jew. But my point then is still my point now even though this time I'm using "good Jew" language around it. The idea is this: that wanting to be a good Jew is not something to be ashamed of. It can inform what you do in this world. It does not have to mean coming to shul every week, although you are certainly invited to do so (and you already have a name tag). It doesn't mean being orthodox or looking that way, although tzitzis on radical Jews and tefillin on women is always a bit of a subversive turn-on.

But what I'm suggesting is this. We all openly aspire to be good people; but maybe that's not quite enough. Wanting to be a good person is easy; it's a popular want. But owning the Jewish part of that is harder. The Jewish part that says "repair the world" or "feed the hungry" or "stop gossiping" or "have compassion" or "learn learn learn." That is what we've abandoned, the understanding that those ideas, clearly of universal application, originate - for us at least - in our own Yiddishkeit, in our own Jewyness.

Yes, those values drive us in beautifully universal ways. But it is always of note to me that the leaders of every modern Utopian movement, the visioners of anything designed to make the world better -- whether it's environmentalists or communists or feminists or unionists or Esperantists or even, I would suggest, early Hollywood folks dreaming up a world better than the one we live in -- every social exercise intended to make a better world has been seeded and populated by Jews. And then, almost simultaneously, the Jewishness has gotten erased right out of it. Erased, in large part, by Jews. As if being associated with Jewishness delegitimizes. That is what centuries of Anti-Semitism has done to us. We are driven to accomplish and to better and to be ashamed of where that spark came from.

So I ask, like I did two years ago when talking about Bad Jews, that we bring the Jew back into our jewbilation and rejewvenation and jewrisprudence and all the jewcy things we do. That we let our longing to be good Jews guide us in the world and we call it what it is. That we go ahead and fight for peace. For justice. For the Earth. That we strive and struggle and heal and learn at every turn. Not just because this is what humans should do, but because this is what being a Jew requires of us. That we let our beautiful universal values and accomplishments retain something of our fine specificity, of the flavor and temperature of the Jewish tables we grew up at. 

HOME

The second longing that I suspect many of us have abandoned is the longing for Home. And by Home I mean homeland, I mean Israel. This is a tricky subject, as you know by how you are tensing up right now.

But this land is the long longing of our people. Since the Babylonian conquest 2600 years ago, the sense of being in exile, displaced, deported, has been part of our psychological makeup and our spiritual essence and our cultural production. We sing Psalms about  our longing. Im eshkachech Yerushalayim, tishkach yemini. "If I forget thee Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning." Centuries of poets have poured out their yearning. Libi b'mizrach va'anochi b'sof ma'arav; eych et'amah et asher ochal. "My heart is in the East and I in the uttermost West; how shall I find savor in food?" We conclude every year's seder saying, l'shanah haba'ah birushalayim. "Next year in Jerusalem." And then we hurry to explain, to apologize, that by Jerusalem we mean something metaphysical.

But Jerusalem is a place. Physical. In a physical country that we are for better or for worse deeply connected to. Now those of us of a certain age grew up at a time when the dream of Zionism -- of a present-day, non-Messianic, non-mystical return to the land -- when the dream of Zionism was still unmarred; when Zionism embodied huge and important values - the safety of our people, the end of exile, a halt to our long persecution, a brighter future than we'd had since the Golden Age of Spain, and our first crack at Jewish autonomy in millenia. Those of us of a certain age grew up with a powerful, deep, incessant longing for Israel, for Modern Israel, not the mythical place. An Israel of blooming deserts and Nobel Prizes and medical advances and folk dances. We longed to go, to live, to visit, to breathe it in. To see a new era and to be its emissaries.

But the problem now, of course, is that 65 years of history have intervened. Real life, on-the-ground, difficult history. Because we planted our dream in a land that was and wasn't ours. And our hope, over time, has given rise, and given way, to such suffering and such bitterness. We have learned things that were hidden from us as youngsters. We have learned about things done that should not have been done. The present-day leaders of the State have, in the name of survival, abandoned our great vision of a land of harmony and renewal. Those Jews who remain the staunchest supporters of the State of Israel have been forced to abandon the dream of peaceful co-existence and religious pluralism. Forced to go along with ghetto walls enclosing our supposed enemies; and forced to turn a blind eye to the Orthodox male stranglehold on religious life in Israel, including who is and is not allowed to pray at our holiest sites or to be called a Jew anywhere in the land still, tenaciously, called holy. So much longing abandoned in order not to abandon the State.

Meanwhile those of us who see ourselves on the Left, who articulate our criticisms of Israeli policy, we who are quick to see Israel's flaws, have also lost touch with something, and that is our deep love and longing for this place. A longing and a love that are still in our bones. A love that we have sent into exile out of disappointment or sadness or shame, but which, if reclaimed, would give us greater, not less, legitimacy when we say, "No, no, Israel. Not that way, this way."

What Jews on both sides of the debate have given up, it seems to me, is a longing for an Israel that is as great and holy and just as we can imagine it. And it is up to us to bring that longing back and let it inform our words and actions. We owe it to our people's past and to our people's future. 

WHOM?

The third and last longing I'd like to call in tonight is what I will call Whom. And what I mean by that is the longing for whom? For God.

Because I think this longing is in us, in each of us. Not belief, not faith, but longing. It is deeply rooted in our human experience. It is a longing that grows out of the disconnectedness of our psyches and the fenced in nature of our bodies. Our spirits, or the parts of ourselves we identify as spirit, tell us that we are capable of full and deep and complete connectedness. Perhaps it's a sense memory of the womb. Or else it's just imagination. But we long for a connectedness greater, deeper, more intimate and perfect than anything a lover or parent or friend could give us. We long for God to take that place. God, as confidante, as personal coach, as yedid nefesh -- the companion of the soul, always always present with us. I'm not certain any of us ever longs for a Creator God, or an angry God or a law-giving or justice-doling God. But this personal, immanent presence, this Shechinah, is something we yearn for, even while we might rationally deny any such emotion.

Or perhaps our longing isn't for that intimate embrace but for transcendence. To be able to experience something beyond the walls of our human existence. Beyond the limitations of our bodies and intellects. We do seek out such moments of transcendence in our lives, mystical moments, by walking in the woods or on the beach or hearing Beethoven performed or seeing some powerful piece of theatre. Or by dropping acid or marching in a protest or sometimes even by going to shul. We feel that transcendence in a flash; or sometimes it is like a deep glow inside, what Rabbi Art Green might call the n'kudat p'nimiyut, the internality of the God experience. Not a reaching out or up to touch the Divine, but a reaching and recognizing deep within.

Or maybe it's not connection or transcendence but life itself that we long for, the denial of which our finite physical bodies cannot comprehend or accept. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, said, "God may not in any way resemble or correspond to the idea we form of him [sic], but he is present in the very will-to-live, the reality of which we experience in every fiber of our being."

I think it is fair to give in to this longing, even without having any certainty about believing. I think it is fair to long, even while living in the not-knowing. More than fair. Because it is a fire burning within us. And it can inspire us to new paths, great actions, deep love, readier compassion. It can cause us to return on Yom Kippur to who we want to be, and how we want to be accountable.

But how do we notice and consciously stay in touch with that longing? We can't count on transcendent moments. Rebbe Elimelech of Lizensk characterized that flash of transcendence, of opening up, of revelation as God's free sample. Like the Sample Shack at Trader Joe. You get one piece of deliciousness for free. And after that you have to pay for it. Rebbe Elimelech instructs that our payment, our slow recapturing of the goodies, comes through practice: prayer and mitzvot and, above all, d'vekut.

What is d'vekut? There is no appealing English word for it. It means something like "clinging" or "attaching," both words carrying rather unattractive connotations of the relationships we had in our twenties. But d'vekut suggests attaching oneself to the idea or possibility of God in all things. Not just when in prayer or meditation or study or moments of ecstacy. But in the day to day. Holding a mindfulness of the godliness, the divine, the qi that runs through all things, even things we barely notice or consider insignificant. Expanding our consciousness until we can perceive the divine in the glorious and in the painful and in the mundane.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav described d'vekut as imagining oneself in the presence of the Shechinah. For Rebbe Nachman, this practice was a way to accustom oneself to being in the World to Come. And Rebbe Meshullam Feibush of Zabrizha said that the way to always notice the divine in the world is simply always to be aware of one's longing for God.

The truth is that we don't know. When I have moments of feeling God's presence, I can't tell you if I'm perceiving or projecting. I can't tell you if I'm looking outward or inward or if that makes a difference. I sometimes wish I had the certainty that some believers express, although I suspect that none of us is truly without doubt. If God is there, then God makes it difficult. Playing hide and seek with us all the time. And getting characterized by religion so severely and narrowly that it is almost always easier to say "no" to the idea than to say "yes."

But still, I'm okay with not knowing. I'm okay with spelling God with a question mark in the middle. I'm okay with God creating the universe, or God being a synonym for the universe. I'm okay with God being nothing like we've ever conceived and this cosmos being really good glamour-drag. I'm even okay with God being the ayin, the great emptiness. I don't know. And in this not-knowing, I will stay attuned to my longing; I will continue to look for God in the hidden places and let that affect how I see you and me and the dog and the tree and the rock and the sky and the microbe. And the joy and the loss.

As Medieval poet Yehudah HaLevi wrote, Yah ana emtza'acha, m'komcha na'alah v'ne'elam. Adonai, where shall I find Thee? Hid is Thy lofty place. V'ana lo emtz'acha, k'vodcha malei olam. And where shall I not find Thee? Whose glory fills all space.

Our universe, our reality, is like the Book of Esther; it is a place where God is never mentioned by name, and can only be found by inference. It is a place where God, if there is a God, is masked.

But this is Yom K'Purim. It is a day is like Purim. Where masks are lowered and the hidden is revealed. So on this Purim-like day, let us recommit to the longings that we've kept masked. Longings for House, Home and Whom. Let us strive, openly, to be better Jews as well as better people. Let us feel, without shame, our love for the land and let that guide us toward fashioning a fairer, kinder Israel that is truly a light to the nations. And let us revel in our longing for God, living it everywhere, locating it in our hearts and in the world, so that, whether God's mask ever gets lowered or not, we at least may be drawn to give our best to this creation and to each other and to our selves.

And let us say, Amen.


_____________
I wish a shanah tovah, a happy, healthy year to all my loved ones.
I am grateful to my study partner, Reb Eli Herb, for some lovely insights that made their way into this drash.



 

Rosh Hashanah 5774: Burning and Longing

For Congregation Ner Shalom.

Gut yontiff.

Welcome again to this new year, to this new beginning. The birthday of the world as we know it.

I'm appreciating the world and its possibilities in a new way this week, having gotten back two days ago from Burning Man, which I attended for my first time, despite my advanced age and a social milieu which would seem to suggest that I'd have gone years ago already.

Photo: Oren Slozberg

Burning Man, if you don't know, is a vast week-long encampment in the Nevada desert, in which people come together from around the world to try out a different way of living. It's a celebration and it's a circus. People make art, splendid and colossal and ephemeral, to be disassembled or burned by week's end. They navigate a tent city with no roads or curbs indicating where you can and cannot go. Bicycles and foot are the transit of choice, unless you catch a ride on a vehicle refurbished to look like an octopus or an airplane or a merry-go-round.

The place feels like another world, this year one populated by 67,000 people, all longing for something different: to be creative, to live simply, to engage generously without the pressures and inequalities of money (which is not allowed to be used in the city), to experience freedom - artistic freedom, body freedom, sexual freedom. By day, Burning Man, in the narrow Nevada desert palette, looked like a refugee camp. And the people living in those beautiful tents - mah tovu ohaleycha - constituted a sort of tribe of refugees from a more complicated and more constricting existence. They had left their narrow places, like our own ancestors leaving Egypt, to become a desert people, and to experience a great expansiveness there.

There are even the rudiments of new religion in this gathering, as the annual rituals become more fixed, particularly the burning of "The Man" - the eponymous effigy that presides over the encampment until he goes up in smoke; and the burning of the Temple, a structure in which people leave notes of farewell to deceased loved ones, or to relationships gone bad, or to elements in their lives they need to let go of. These burdens are purged, kind of like we do at tashlich, when the Temple is set alight on the final night and all those intentions are offered up in fire rather than water, before tens of thousands of silent witnesses.

My experience at Burning Man, like all human experiences, was not without its blemishes. But still, on the whole, it had a flavor of Olam Haba, of the world to come, as was pointed out by the rabbi leading Kabbalat Shabbat services over at the Jewish camp at Burning Man. And in fact the whole week was more shabbos than I've had on any Saturday in memory. And the burning of the effigy of The Man - this year perched on a wooden space ship and done up to recall the robot Klaatu in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" - the burning of The Man, preceded by fire dancers and accompanied by fireworks was declared by my family to be: Best. Havdalah. Ever.

So I tell you all of this not as a "what I did over my summer vacation" report-back. I tell you because I am captivated by the idea that people came to this event full of longing for a new kind of living and a new kind of belonging. And what I noticed - and what particularly startled me - was the lack of impediment between the longing and the fruition. 

Because it's not that way back in this world, which we choose to call the real one. We yearn but the bridge between longing and living is sometimes narrow, or rickety, or sometimes already burned, but without the glorious ceremony.

Certainly each of us desires things. Good things, legitimate things. We want. A nice home. Or a partner. Work. Money. Health. Ease. Time. But these desires ride atop a carrier wave of deeper longing, that we don't always give voice to with the same specificity. I desire work, but what I long for is to be of use, or to belong. I desire money, but I what I long for is to be safe and feel safe. I desire a partner or a sweetheart or that hot guy I saw on the bus. But what I long for is to be held, what I long for is love, what I long for is not to feel so alone. I desire health, but what I long for is to keep living, to live and live and live the way this eternal-feeling soul of mine insists it can do. I desire justice or a better world or children or to leave some kind of a moral legacy. But what I long for is to feel that my time here has had meaning.

Maybe it would be easier for us if we didn't long. The Buddhists say that our longing is the source of our suffering, that disattachment is the path to spiritual happiness. I get that, and I think it can work. But it's obviously not a Jewish path. For better or for worse, ours is officially and full-on a path of longing, even if suffering is the price tag. In our tradition we long for return from exile. We long for the reemergence of an Edenic past. We long for peace. We long for Torah. We long for God. This longing, much of which I'll discuss more on Yom Kippur, is part of us. For better or for worse.

At Burning Man a friend was explaining to Ari, our 12-year old, how the structures that were being burned were designed with that end in mind. Besides being beautiful, certain faults were built in so that as they burned that would look glorious, their parts bursting into flame in the right order, the structure collapsing inward rather than outward. I was caught by this idea of vulnerability being designed right into the architecture. Because that is what longing is for us. It is our architecture, as individuals and as a people. And it is also a vulnerability. Longing impels us to move forward in this world. It is the only thing that does. Our yetzer - our deep impulse to do, to achieve, to live, to love, to experience another day. It is the machinery by which we travel. And it is a built-in weakness too, as we try consciously or unconsciously to fulfill our longing, sometimes in specific and surfacy ways, and we re-learn again and again the frustration at not being able to make our dreams come true.

So enough with the Burners and the Buddhists. What about the Jews? What does Torah say about this, about our longing? If, in Judaism, you want to think about longing, you are required to turn to Shir Hashirim, Song of Songs, our ancient book of erotic poetry that Rabbi Akiva rescued from the discard heap 2000 years ago and elevated to a status above all the other books of Torah, calling it our Holy of Holies. Because, in his view - and in the view of every Jew since - in describing physical desire it gives voice to our ongoing love affair with God. Its words are some of the most memorable in our tradition. Ani l'dodi v'dodi li. "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." Yishakeni min'shikot pihu ki tovim dodeycha miyayin. "Oh that he might kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is sweeter than wine."

But a friend recently pointed out to me something about this book that I'd never noticed.  That at no point in Song of Songs is this love actually consummated. It is a book about anticipation, about longing, about looking forward. The lovers don't actually ever touch, despite their heightened awareness of each other.

Kol dodi hineh zeh ba m'daleg al heharim m'kapetz al hag'vaot.
My lover's voice comes to me skipping over the mountains
And jumping over the hills.

They see each other in their dreams.

Ani y'shenah v'libi er; kol dodi dofek pitchi li achoti.
I am asleep, but my heart is wide awake;
My lover's voice knocks, saying open up for me, sister.

The lovers describe each other's beauty; they anticipate a rendezvous; they go to the garden to meet. But we never see the meeting. The most contact we witness is a glance:

Hineh zeh omed achar kotleynu
Mashgiach min hachalonot matzitz min hacharakim.Look! It is my beloved, standing behind the walls,
Observing from the window, peering out from the curtains.

That image! A lovesick youth, watching for the beloved to appear at the window, the way so many of us in our youth could, embarrassingly, be found pacing outside a dormitory or lurking at a cafe waiting for the object of our desire to walk by.

That is the closest the lovers actually come to each other in Shir Hashirim. A glance. Our great text of longing in Judaism celebrates not the fruition but the anticipation. It glorifies the suspense and honors the not-knowing.

And what a lesson this is for us. That we consider judging ourselves by the quality and flavor of our deeper longing, and not by whether or how our longings come true. We seem to be instructed to find the juice in the longing itself.

And in suggesting this, Torah is wise. Because we so often do not get what we want. And being created full of desire for stuff or people or a life you mostly you can't have is otherwise rather a cruel trick of nature. No, you can't always get what you want. Life unfolds in unpredictable ways. The physical world places limitations on what we can do and achieve. The culture places limitations on who we might meet and how we might interact and what futures we might concoct together. And other people's actions limit us too, because they also have longings that they're trying to work out in their own imperfect ways. But, suggests Torah, holiness is not in achieving the thing, it is not in having the most toys at the end of the game. Instead holiness is in the near Godlike longing inherent in each of us, even if the expression of it is flawed.

Now Torah is not, I think, saying don't want - don't want the house, don't want the job, don't want the lover, although the commandment of al tachmod, "do not covet," does sound a cautionary note about watching where your longing ends up. No, Torah is not saying don't want. But perhaps Torah is decoupling longing from acquiring. And by doing so it is suggesting that "not getting" is not the same as "failing." And for that matter, getting is not the same as succeeding and having is not the same as deserving.

But we are only human. We spend so much of our time and energy judging ourselves and others by these surfacey things; we become frustrated and unkind when we sense that we're not getting something that we desire, whether it's love or respect or safety or just the feeling that we belong. We judge ourselves as unworthy when love does not manifest in the way we'd imagined. Or, we make questionable decisions. Fueled by our longing for connection, say, we end up trying to make it happen with the wrong person, under infelicitous circumstances, in the last 10 minutes before the bar closes. Or we stay in a bad relationship because our longing for love is stronger than our longing for wholeness or our sense of already being loved. And over and over, we behave in ways we later regret because we have acted out of longings that we pretend, that we convince ourselves, we don't even have.

But not today. Not on this new year. Tik'u bachodesh shofar bakeseh l'yom chagenu. "Blast the shofar," says Torah, "on this day where there moon is hidden." In other words, for me, this is the moment, the annual moment, to break the silence and wake up to the longing that we have obscured, that longing that each of us has concealed from ourselves.

Teshuvah is what is required of us. Not atonement for sin. But a Returning to the deeper parts of ourselves. To dig through all this shmutz that comes from the misdirection of our longing or the frustration of some of its supposed goodies. And to honor instead the longing itself. Our yearning for love and closeness and safety and life; to feel the depth and loftiness and wonder of our eternal and insatiable yearning. And to forgive ourselves for so often getting it messed up in the translation. Letting go, as the Buddhists would certainly have us do, of some of the superficial cravings and attachments, and to look instead at what our deepest longings are and to honor what they say about us.

Take a moment right now, and look inside. Find something you've done that you're not proud of. And then go down one story to find the longing that was underneath that act. Notice the beauty of that longing, and go ahead and forgive yourself for the stupid thing that sprang out of it. And then think, if we were to give these longings some fresh oxygen, and relieve them of the burden of our judgments, who among us knows where they might go? How they might fly? Where any of us might find ourselves? What, inside of us, or in each other, or in this glorious Creation, might be speaking to our longing at this very moment, saying, "Come, come to the garden." What voice that we didn't hear until the shofar of this great and new day made us shut up and listen.

Longing is certainly a vulnerability in our architecture; it can weaken the joints of our lives and it so often proves flammable. But it is the noble stuff we are made of. And, unencumbered by judgments of success and failure, of should and shouldn't, of better and worse, who knows where that longing might bring us, and what beautiful, if temporary, art we might still make out of these lives we have been given.

Shanah tovah.


I am grateful for the insights of Rabbi Eli Cohen, Sasha O'Malley, my family, and the people of Burning Man.

Founders' Syndrome and the Ethical Will

For Congregation Ner Shalom

So when I read the Book of Deuteronomy, I confess I get kind of bummed out. Don't get me wrong, I also get plenty bummed out in Leviticus. But for different reasons. Leviticus, with its baroque elaboration of laws: impartiality and impurity and sacrifice and sex, some of it beautiful and universal, some of it punitive and painful; Leviticus, with its repeated refrains of "I am Adonai your God," presents itself as God's word, as direct as we can get it, despite the lurking presence of unnamed and invisible editors. I read Leviticus, and know that I am stuck with this difficult text, which is a very Jewish predicament; and I struggle with it, which is a very Jewish privilege.

But in Deuteronomy, I get bummed out for Moshe Rabenu, Moses our teacher, our great prophet and liberator, making his final speeches to the Children of Israel before they pass into the Promised Land which, Moshe obviously grasps, he will not be doing with them. We are still in the wilderness, but only barely. It is year 40 of the Great Wandering: the 40th year, 11th month, 1st day. Just one moon away from leaving behind nomadic life and becoming instead conquerors, occupiers, settlers and farmers. The life of Israel is about to be unrecognizable. With fewer exceptions than you can count on one hand, there is no one left in this mass of humanity who remembers the slavery in Egypt or the Parting of the Sea. In fact, there's no one who can even remember receiving the law at Sinai except perhaps in a vague and unsettling childhood memory.

This is the final chapter of Moshe's story and the fulfillment of his great work. In partnership with God he changed history, he changed the world. But unlike his Partner, Moshe is about to be left behind. At his death, a few chapters from now, Torah will say that there never arose in Israel another prophet like Moshe. And I suspect Moshe foresees this. He and God had something special, for sure, seeing each other face to face like they did. There would never again be anyone who could know God's will with such certainty or could relay God's word with such credibility.

But there's also something amiss in what should be Moshe's triumphant moment. As he redelivers God's laws, he does so with an extra punch. In this week's portion, Parashat R'eh, he places blessing and curse before the people, offering reward for obedience to God's mitzvot, threatening punishment and death for those who transgress or who worship other gods on the sly. This stuff coming from God in Leviticus might be problematic, but the problem is theological. This stuff coming from Moshe in Deuteronomy is somehow personal and somehow tragic. One hears in it Moshe's sadness and anger and fear at his own mortality.

Poor Moshe. Who am I, nebuch, to pity him, yet I do. Moshe was great, but also tragic. And while other tragic figures like King Lear overtrust the future, Moshe undertrusts it. And so, with nothing short of desperation, he tries to control what will happen next by promising and lecturing and threatening and cajoling. All that we have are his words, which can be interpreted in various ways. But if Deuteronomy were a movie, there would be reaction shots of Israelites listening to him, and we'd know a bit more by seeing whether they were filled with the fear of God, or impatience at Moshe's long speech, or a mix of love and sadness for this lonely 120-year-old man, now in his dotage.

Moshe seems to have a case of what, in the non-profit world, we might call "Founder's Syndrome." He founded the Israelite people as we know them; he did the immense, unimaginable task of leading them - perhaps hundreds of thousands of them - out of slavery and away from their homes and the only life they'd ever known, to reconstitute them with new identity and vision and ambition.  But now Moshe digs the heels of his sandals in deep because he knows change is coming. He doesn't think there is a successor equal to the task of leadership. And he doesn't see the possibility of the people as a whole exerting authority, even though the people who will experience this new life are, arguably, more qualified to step up and lead than Moshe, who can only guess at what the future might bring.

Moshe responds to his not knowing by trying all the harder to control. A calmer, saner Moshe could not possibly have thought that a law that says, "neither add to nor take away from my commandments" could ever be workable. With all due respect to Justice Scalia, one cannot legislate the principle of "no change ever." Yet Moshe makes this very demand as he stands before the people, fiercely protecting what he brought into the world while, my heart imagines, envying, even begrudging the people the future that they will enjoy. Moshe, our Founder, insists that it must happen his way; he can only imagine disaster if it doesn't. 

Of course what also makes Moshe's desperate clinging to his work product tragic is that there but for the grace of God goes any one of us. We all like things to go our way. We all want our contributions appreciated and remembered; we all want legacy; we all want our thumbprint on the future. It is in our nature; perhaps because our spirits feel eternal to us, despite the mortality of our bodies. It seems natural to want to be part of whatever happens next.

But we are all mortal. We all stand at the brink of death, whether that brink is a day or a decade or, God willing, much wider. And most of us realize that we can't orchestrate the doings of things and people that will outlive us. Change will happen, change has to happen. Our successors will do things differently; they will have to. And certainly Moshe knew this. In fact there is a famous midrash that when Moshe ascended the mountain to receive the law, God temporarily transported him to the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, living millennia later, where Moshe Rabenu sat in the eighth row and didn't understand any of the Torah that Akiva taught, despite Akiva calling it Torat Moshe, the Torah of Moses.

Who knows, maybe it was that very vision of a strange and unintelligible universe that made Moshe clutch the Torah that he knew all the tighter.

So in an ever-changing world, what thumbprint can we hope to have on the future? Perhaps the best any of us can do is embodied in the Jewish custom of the ethical will. A message to the future that embodies our values without coercing adherence to them. I have had cause, sadly, to hear the reading of some truly beautiful ethical wills. Full of advice and humor and encouragement and vision. Revealing what moved the writer's soul, written with the hope that it might move the reader's as well.
I think that is the best we can hope for. To provide an ethical legacy, in writing or through our deeds, communicating the great principles that inspired us.

Maybe the Book of Deuteronomy is in fact Moshe's ethical will, albeit a flawed one. And if so, then I think that perhaps the great principle that drove him was kedushah, the holiness that he breathed in when he saw God face to face. This is what inspired him and what he wanted for us. But, growing up in the palace of Pharaoh, his toolbox for constructing kedushah on earth contained more law than poetry. How different might it all have been if Moshe had grown up not in the home of a monarch, but of a musician or a midwife or a mystic? Perhaps the ethical lesson he would have taught would have been closer to one shared in a 14th Century ethical will written by one Asher ben Yechiel who wrote the very opposite of what Moshe expresses in this week's portion. Instead of saying, "I have set before you blessing and curse," Reb Asher writes to those who survive him, "Do not obey the law for reward, nor avoid sin from fear of punishment, but serve God from love."

Ultimately, if we are going to be of service to the future, we must leave a legacy of love and of hope and possibility. Nelson Mandela, right now only 25 years Moshe's junior, will, when he goes, leave a legacy not about how to govern a people but about the possibility of freedom and equality and love. And it will then be other people's jobs to find the right vessels for those values.

We can't see all paths; we certainly can't control them. Still, we owe the future our best efforts - our love and care, even without knowing what the specifics will be. None of us is timeless. Moshe was the leader for his time. We must be the leaders for ours. And we must let future generations lead in theirs. If we are to be prophets, let us be prophets who reassure those who come after that there is always the possibility of making this world better. As it says in the book of Isaiah, mah navu al heharim raglei m'vaser mashmia shalom. How pleasant the footfalls of those who, climbing to the peaks, peek into the world ahead, bearing messages of peace!

Nachamu: Fly Thought, on Golden Wings

For Congregation Ner Shalom ~ July 19, 2013

Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves at the Lviv Opera

I didn't want to write a drash this week. Didn't have it in me. I was away last week having an adventure for my husband's birthday, and came back to pull together the last details of our community-wide Tisha B'Av commemoration. Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av, marks the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. And also the destruction of Temple v.2.0 by the Romans in 70 CE. And then every expulsion and exile and massacre and catastrophe enacted upon our people since then. On Tisha B'Av, we read Eychah, the book of Lamentations, and we imagine ourselves sitting in the ruins of the proud city of Jerusalem, and we weep.

So the commemoration happened but it took a lot out of me. The evening didn't go exactly how I'd envisioned, and I experienced angst about that during. And beforehand. And after. And the next morning. But on the whole, it seemed to work for many people, myself included in large part. During the ceremony, as attendees got in touch with the losses they were still lamenting, both current grief and old grief that still haunts footsteps and decisions and relationships, I also rediscovered grief that I hadn't noticed and articulated in a long time, and I did so, and I was exhausted by it.

So as the holiday ended, I found myself sitting in the ashes, not of Jerusalem, but of Tisha B'Av itself, my creative spirit shell-shocked and my imagination immobile. I did my day-to-day things: meetings, more meetings, and then more meetings. I could do things. What was hard to do was to open up and feel and let my thoughts take flight again. I felt like I had no more lift left in me.

The Book of Lamentations doesn't give us guidance in this matter. It is not a "how to get over grief" self-help book. It is a book of full-on despair. In your independent bookstore you will find it in the Desolation section. Read it and weep. It is Lamentations, not the Inferno, that should open with Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

There is no comfort in Eychah. And at the time it was written - in the wake of that first unimaginable national Destruction - perhaps no comfort was available. As Rabbi Shimon says in Pirkei Avot, "Do not comfort your friend while his dead lay before him." In other words, in grief that is fresh and unchecked, there is no meaningful comfort to be offered. One must be ready to be comforted for comfort to be of use.

Psalm 137, like Lamentations, also describes the people's grief for the loss of the Temple, but from the perspective of the Jews carried off into exile, rather than those left behind in Jerusalem:

By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept as we remembered Zion. On the willows we hung our harps, for our captors required of us song and our tormentors mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." But how can we sing Adonai's song in a foreign land?

This is another beautiful and lifelike depiction of sadness and despair. How can we entertain when we grieve? How can we be creative, how can we be happy, ever again?

It's true, our grief marks us for a very long time. We carry scars on our psyches that are decades old. And our suffering draws our attention more than our joy does. Our suffering is long lasting; our joy is quick to be dismissed. What does Joni sing with Psalm-like rhythm? Pleasure moves on too early and trouble is too slow. 

This is for a couple reasons. Trouble lasts longer and draws more attention because trouble tends to complicate our lives. Going into exile uproots you. Re-learning to live alone is a tremendous and ongoing struggle. Even just filing an insurance claim for the fender bender is time consuming and frustrating. Waiting for justice that doesn't come can imprison our attention solidly for long sentences of time. Dwelling in our suffering is natural and par for the course.

Not only that, but letting go of our grief is, on some levels, undesirable. It can feel like a betrayal of whatever it was that we loved and lost. We want to hold on to our pain as a demonstration of our loyalty. How can I, sitting on the banks of the Euphrates, sing Adonai's song, even though it is Adonai's song, without it being a betrayal of Jerusalem?

Jews are teased about - and we tease ourselves about - our attachment to our suffering, about its inevitable mundaneness. We joke about one Jew asking another, "How are you?" And the other saying, "Terrible, thank God." But we all know, it is not just Jews who suffer or who can be trapped by suffering.

So what is the way out of this bind? Must we be stuck? Is there no comfort allowed us ever?

This week's Shabbat, immediately following Tisha B'Av, is called Shabbat Nachamu. The Shabbat of Comfort. It is named after the opening words of the week's haftarah portion, from the Book of Isaiah, which goes like this: Nachamu, nachamu ami. "Take comfort, take comfort my people, speak tenderly to Jerusalem and declare to her that her term of service is over." (Isaiah 40:1)

So here at last are words of instruction. Take comfort by speaking fondly, lovingly, to what has been lost. This is a beautiful idea. So that we don't harden into statues of grief and anger, we continue to express our love to what we loved and lost, even if our longing for it can no longer be fulfilled. "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem."

In the opera Nabucco, Giuseppe Verdi gives voice to the Hebrew exiles standing on the shore in Babylon. They deliver what has become the most famous choral piece in the operatic repertoire, the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. They sing:

Va pensiero sull'ali d'orate
Va, ti posa, sui clivi, sui colli,
Ove olezzano tepide e molli
L'aure dolci del suolo natal.

"Fly, thought, on wings of gold; go settle on the slopes and the hills, where, soft and mild, the sweet airs of our native land smell fragrant."

The exiles in Verdi, unlike the exiles in Psalm 137, don't refuse to sing. They actively engage their thoughts of Jerusalem. They imagine it in its beauty; they send their thoughts there with love. Their comfort, if there is to be comfort, does not come from silence but from song. They even protest to the very harps that the Psalm portrays as hanging, untouched:

Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati,


Perché muta dal salice pendi?

Le memorie nel petto raccendi,
ci favella del tempo che fu! 

"Golden harp of the prophets, why do you hang mute from the willows? Rekindle the memories in our hearts and speak to us of times gone by."

Verdi's Hebrew slaves are dwelling inside the loss but not squarely inside the suffering. They establish loving memory as the key response to loss. And, as is suggested by this week's haftarah, Nachamu, they speak tenderly to Jerusalem.

One more thought on moving on from destruction. This week's Torah portion, V'Etchanan, includes Moshe's repetition of the Ten Commandments, followed shortly thereafter by the Shema - Moshe's voice saying "Hear O Israel" - and then, significantly, the V'ahavta.

V'ahavta. "You will love." In this very week where we feel the Destruction most deeply, we are advised to love. Advised, not commanded. V'ahavta doesn't mean "love!" in an imperative sense. It means "you will love." Is this a prophecy? A prediction? Or is it a reassurance, that out of the places of suffering comes deeper and deeper love. "You will love again." V'ahavta.

The Ten Commandments sit there in the portion, sticking out awkwardly, at least to my mind. It is a terrible week to be reminded of them, this week of lamentation and suffering. These are in fact commandments, given in the imperative. "Honor your father and mother." "Don't murder." "Don't steal." "Don't covet." But these are commandments habitually honored in the breach. How much of our civilization is built on greed and theft and murder? Leading in turn to new destructions both great and small. I don't think we can be expected to read the Ten Commandments this week without feeling despair.

But v'ahavta. Not a command. Not a demand. An outcome. "You will love." If you can survive the loss, you will do so by loving. You will love what you lost. And you will love what remains. You will love this creation and maybe, sometimes, the Creator implied by it. You will love your joy, without feeling guilty doing so, because joy is a gift and is ephemeral and it deserves your attention as much as your sadness does. In your suffering you will find new depths that will become available for love. You will love all of this: with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. This will happen. V'ahavta.

We are scarred by Destructions, each of us. The ones that sent us into Babylon and into Europe and to America. We are scarred by the injuries of our childhoods. By the loss of loved ones too young. By love that didn't work out. By longing that wasn't quite realized. We are all justified and allowed to weep. And - we are encouraged, once more, when it seems unlikely or futile or beside the point, to love again. Love, our loving, is not meant to replace the loss. But it is comfort nonetheless.

Nachamu, nachamu ami. Be comforted, be comforted my people. V'ahavta. And you will love.


_______________________________
I am always indebted to Rabbi Eli Cohen for always knowing what in a parashah will interest me!

Marriage and Mysticism in a Less-Gendered World

Dedicated to Anne Tamar-Mattis, a hero of equality for all genders, on the occasion of her birthday.

What a week! With the Supreme Court knocking down the Defense of Marriage Act and also confirming the undoing of California's Prop 8. It is a week to celebrate the freedom to marry, and to rethink what marriage means, and perhaps to wonder why this institution has been so inflexible.

I was re-awakened yesterday to the deep assumptions that we all hold around how marriage operates, and the importance of gender dualism in that conception. I was doing some business in town, and I happened to refer to my partner, my spouse, as "my husband." I paused for a moment to savor the deliciousness of a previously forbidden term. The other person, earnestly celebrating with me, asked, as a follow-up question, "So are you also a husband, or do you think of yourself as a wife?"

It took me a moment to realize this person was not being flip or phobic, but was really wondering how one organizes the institution of marriage in this new era. And the question is, in fact, a deep and pertinent one. The terms "husband" and "wife" are obviously gendered, but not neutrally so. That is they represent a composite of competing  and opposite characteristics, each associated with a gender. I know that what follows sounds old-fashioned, but I submit that it is alive and well and is probably the nemesis of many well-meaning modern heterosexual couples. "Husband" has and continues to suggest breadwinner, protector, perhaps even at times philanderer. "Wife," on the other hand, connotes, well, servant. I could say that nicer - something about productive activity in the domestic sphere, but really we all know the the activity of a "wife" is to meet the needs of husband and children. And a marriage traditionally requires (or thinks it requires) both of these opposing elements. The words "husband" and "wife" are loaded - perhaps irremediably so. So while the court says a marriage of two men or two women can exist, it is unclear, culturally, whether a marriage of two "husbands" or two "wives" can.

Now gay people have often used these terms over the years - but mostly with imaginary quotation marks around them. Lots of us used to call our partners "husband," in ironic mimicry of an institution we were not in fact invited to join. And I've known overworked lesbian couples to sigh over a well deserved cocktail and say, "Let's face it. We need a wife."

But this week is a good week for marriage, not just for LGBTQ people, but for everyone, for the institution itself. Because it is now clear that marriage must be able to accommodate relationships that are not built on the idea of the oppositeness of men and women. Because - as my friend Anne finds herself having to point out again and again - men and women are not, in fact, opposites. Still, that's what we learn. Ask a child, "What's the opposite of boy" and they will say, "girl." But boys and girls are far more alike than they are different. I don't know what the opposite of boy is. Nebula? Lunchbox? Whatever it is, it is not "girl".

In fact, there is very little in this cosmos that has an "opposite." Is a positve charge the opposite of a negative charge? Protons and electrons? I don't know if these things are opposites or just different and attracted to each other. Are matter and energy opposites or just different? If darkness is the absence of light, is it really light's opposite? Or is that like the difference between thighs and lap? It's a lap when there's something on it, and thighs when there isn't? That doesn't make lap and thighs opposites. Left and right might be opposites, but only conditionally so - if you're on the North Pole, both left and right are alternative ways to go south. The truth is, much of what we consider the basic elements of cosmos and cognition that oppose each other, don't quite, upon closer inspection.

And yet we've really played, or overplayed, the idea of opposites in our understanding of the world. We can't see a duo without inventing a duality, a pair without a polarity. Part of this might in fact be the result of a world in which we perceive much pairing - there is predominant (but not complete) gender dimorphism, there is apparent (but mostly superficial) bilateral symmetry in the body. In any event, it has somehow been convenient in our cultural and intellectual history to divide the world into two, along just about any axis you can name. There are two kinds of people in this world: people who divide the world into two kinds of people and people who don't.

The truth seems to me that we are all complex; our internal makeup, our interactions with each other, are all multifaceted and unique, even if there are generalizations that can be drawn. The question is knowing when to let go of the generalizations. When does dividing the world into men and women make sense? At an exclusively heterosexual mixer? Maybe. At the gynecologist's office? Less than you'd think. In quickly organizing groups for a school activity or a synagogue responsive reading? Never.

Men and women are not opposites, but represent part of a spectrum of variation of the human body. Yes, there seem to also be some differences in behaviors and preferences, at least in the aggregate, but the extent to which those are chemically versus culturally driven continue to be a source of controversy.

In any event we keep deeply wanting to divide the world in two, and for the two sides of the dividing line to stand in opposition to each other. Somehow that conveys both dynamism and stability for us. Then we apply that model of opposition to as many binary distinctions as we can dream up. And because gender has played so great a role in our culture, we tend to gender those oppositions. "Hard/soft, intellectual/emotional, strong/weak" - even though in real life, among our families and peers, we know darn well that those distinctions are often misapplied.

And yet we draw them, we gender them, and we pit them against each other. One of the places where this is done extensively, and with undeniable beauty, is in our Jewish mystical, or kabbalistic, cosmological system, which relies on the 10 sefirot of the Tree of Life. This scheme, which represents the flow of Creation, or perhaps God's internal mechanics, is visualized with a central vertical axis, which holds 4 of the ten sefirot, or elemental or spiritual hubs. Then there are three that sit to the left and three that sit to the right. The ones on the right are associated with maleness; the ones on the left with femaleness. The central column contains elements that represent a balance or synthesis of the two previous opposing sefirot. So, for instance, the right, or male, side includes chesed - compassion and kindness, which are considered externally focused - ways of interacting with the world. Opposing it on the left or female side is gevurah, representing strength and discipline which, even though in Western gender archetypes seems male, is here female, reflecting an internal focus. All human characteristics and tendencies end up lined up on one side of this gender-divided tree or the other.

Now I say this is beautiful, because from inside its own cultural context (a hetero-normative world, in which the cosmos was primarily described and theorized by men), having Creation resemble the meeting of the sexes, making Creation resemble heterosexual intercourse, is both daring and arousing. What drives the world to exist is desire, arousal! The attraction of opposites for each other. The dynamo of Creation is based, for instance, on the desire of power to merge with kindness, wisdom to unite with understanding, the masculine to unite with the feminine.

The metaphor is beautiful and romantic. But it is a metaphor, a souped-up yin-yang, thesis-antithesis. It is a metaphor, and sometimes we forget that. I was once at a kabbalistic study session in a town full of hip Jews, a town I shall not name, but it sits next to Oakland and begins with a B. There I challenged the idea of our having to gender the seemingly opposing forces of the kabbalistic tree of life. I said that for many of us - people who are transgendered, people who love in a same-sex way, maybe some intersex people who choose not to think of themselves in traditional gender terms - the system doesn't have the same fire to it; we can understand it and speak in its language, we can understand how the tension of duality is supposed to work, but it doesn't feel like it's representing some essential truth about gender. The responses I received were surprisingly defensive and angry. I was told that the Tree of Life doesn't represent actual biological sex but rather everyone's internal masculine and feminine.

But of course, that doesn't answer anything; it just begs the question, at least for me. Moving the male-female divide from the social world into one's internal world is no less problematic. People who are used to being strongly gender-identified will be expected to naturally identify with that "side" of their personality, even if they are supposed to imagine containing both sides somewhere internally. Telling a man to access his feminine side reinforces the gendering of certain qualities; if he wants to access his nurturing nature (in the broad social scheme) or his sense of gevurah (in Kabbalah), he still needs to cross a metaphorical gender divide; he needs to pass through an internal mechitzah. In other words, instead of seeing himself as a beautiful mix of human (and/or divine) qualities, he instead is being asked to see himself as a person with easy access to Quality Set A (the "male" qualities), and so more effortful access to a suppressed, or remote, or hidden Quality Set B (the "female" qualities). And the only reason Quality Set B is presumed to be hard to access is because he is male. So even if this male/female quality divide is conceived of as internal rather than social, it still reinforces the idea of a divide, and that he belongs on a specific side of it. For someone like me, who has always felt rather like a Switzerland in this presumed "war between the sexes," the metaphor holds no power, and the clear divide of qualities that is supposed to exist inside of me feels untrue, unnecessary, and puzzling.

I do think the Kabbalistic imagination is beautiful and brave. On Shabbat eve it is the custom, originating with the mystics, but now universal among Jews, to open the door and greet Shabbat, imagined as a bride. Most people hear the song that embodies this image, Lecha Dodi, and they imagine us as her bridegroom. But that's not the case. Shabbat is associated with Shechinah, the female-personified, experiential, immanent aspect of God, and also with Yisrael, the People of Israel. Us. We are the bride, on the way to consummate our marriage to the Eyn Sof, the masculine-gendered, remote and unknowable God of the Cosmos. The thought of all these bearded mystics, all men, in their male-only academies, imagining themselves to be God's bride - well, that just pleases me in all sorts of ways. They were able to see the gendering of the system as a metaphor not tied to biological sex or lived gender perhaps more than we can. Whether or not that made a difference in the lives of their real-life wives is unknown. But still, they used their male privilege to imagine themselves not-male. And that's worth something in my book.

But for me, the important thing is that seeing the world as a series or system of dualities is artificial. It might be based on some observations of the world, but it is a tremendous metaphorical leap from some very select elements of existence. Why pairs? There are other elementals that come in other numbers. There are three primary colors. What if our mystical concept of the world involved threes. Everything was either of the blue sort or the red sort or the yellow sort - every emotion, every behavior. Or the four archetypal elements - water, fire, earth and air? Or the directions? "Ah, strength, well that is very north. Mix it with passion, which is very west, and you get bravery, at center-left." Couldn't we imagine a system like that? Or what if we wanted a system that accounts for predominance of certain types or phenomena, without denying the legitimacy of the less frequent? How about a mystical system based on prime numbers? Each one is equally unique. But they are not equally prevalent. The number 1 is ubiquitous, 2 is associated with half the universe of whole numbers; 3 with a third of them. And then there are some of us who are a 17 or a 71 or a 457. We are all similar to each other, we are all magnetic poles of some sort, each with a similar pull, but exerted in all directions. We are all similar, but some fit into more common types, and some don't. And wouldn't that make a better metaphor for Creation and for the flow of shefa from the Eyn Sof into our world? A mix of infinite unique elements, in unequal proportions?

So back to marriage. I'll stop short today of wondering about whether pair-bonding at all makes sense in the world that we live in. I'll stop short of wondering if community, intimacy, childrearing and legacy are best served by a pairing of two people, as opposed to loosely associated and mutually supportive single people, or even a more closely bonded kibbutz-like group, such as my own remarkable family. I'll stop short because why rob this week's marriage victories of their sweetness by wondering if marriage is still relevant. And I'll stop short because I'm part of it too. I understand the romance of finding someone who feels like your bashert, even though I don't actually believe that any of us are specifically destined for each other. I understand the pull and feel the romance, and I've benefited from them for sure.

But I will say this: that same-sex marriage does hold the possibility of destroying traditional marriage, in ways that will accrue to the benefit of all partnered people, straight or gay. Because we bring to marriage an idea of complementarity without polarity. Marriage can no longer rest on assumptions of how each partner will be, based on the dictates of their sex. Every marriage will have to be seen fresh, and assessed on the basis of each person's gifts and each person's needs without regard to gender. Just as racial integration has benefited every institution that opened itself up to it, so marriage will now be enriched. Spouses, partners, maridos, can now be a team that does not require husbandness and wifeness in order to flourish. We can at last exorcise the antiquated dybbuk of gender roles from the body of marriage. Modern heterosexual couples have been trying to do this for a long time; now they do it with the added support of a surge of thousands of new married couples for whom organizing their relationships without reference to traditional gender roles is not just a progressive anti-sexist step, but an utter and definitional necessity.

A friend said to me today, "marriage is never equal." Meaning that at any moment, in any sphere, one partner is demanding and one deferring. Compromise, negotiation, respect, complementarity. Those will always be part of marriage and of the flow of this Creation. And we don't need oppositeness to make it happen.

Shabbat shalom.

PS. I'm available for weddings. My husband handles my bookings.

Very important insights in this essay flowed from conversations with Eli Herb, Janet Shifrah Tobacman, and Anne Tamar-Mattis (with whom my conversation is constant and delicious). I am also grateful to Yael Raff Peskin, who helped me fix a rather glaring error which, now that it's fixed, I'm too embarrassed to identify!

Parashat Balak: Hatred & Angel Action

For Congregation Ner Shalom, June 21, 2013

Mah tovu ohalecha Ya'akov, mishknotecha Yisrael. How goodly are your tents O Jacob, your dwellings O Israel.

These words, which many of us know well, and which are recited every morning by Jews who pray every morning come from this week's Torah portion, Balak. It is a funny little offstage side-story in the Book of Numbers. It is to the Book of Numbers what Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" is to Hamlet. Several chapters of intrigues having to do with the Children of Israel, but about which the Children of Israel are completely unaware. The story starts with the hate-filled king of Moab, named Balak, who hires a well known freelance prophet and paranormal hitman named Bil'am to curse the Israelites, who are encamped on Moab's borders.

Balak the king is a simple and predictable character - a monarch who fears attack by a sea of people wandering in the desert. He wants them gone, but fears attacking them physically unless he can first arrange a good wallop metaphysically. But Bil'am, who would deliver said curse, is a  more complex figure. Unlike the king, he seems to have scruples, at least some. He is in frequent communication with God, with YHWH, our God, whom he frequently calls by name, something we don't even do.

He announces that he will not do what God commands him not do,  although he keeps veering close. In the end he is brought to a peak overlooking the vast Israelite encampment and instead of a curse, what issues from his mouth is blessing: mah tovu ohalecha Ya'akov, how goodly are your tents.

The sages over time have been quick to villify Bil'am. I suspect they were uncomfortable with his power to bless, curse and prophesy. His intimacy, as a non-Israelite, with our Israelite God  could only have felt like an embarrassment to our sages and their belief in our chosenness.

The later mystics see Bil'am a little differently. He is a sort of shadow Moses. They point to one of the last lines of Torah,

וְלֹא־קָם נָבִיא עוֹד בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל כְּמֹשֶׁה

which means, "there never arose in Israel another prophet like Moshe." They take this to mean that while Moshe has never been duplicated in our camp, he has peers among the other nations. And Bil'am was the Moshe of Moab. But the difference, according to the Berditchever Rebbe, is that Moshe is the channel for kedushah, for holiness. Whereas Bil'am is part of the k'lipah, the husk, the earthiness and everyday-ness that holds and obscures holiness. So maybe Moshe is the favorite because his relationship with the divine is of a higher caliber. Or maybe Moshe is the fave just because he's ours.

But in any event, there's more to this story than Bil'am's character. The tale is full of suspenseful elements. The question of "will he or won't he curse Israel" gets drawn out and re-posed repeatedly. God is a surprisingly lively player in the story, instructing Bil'am every day. But God's messages are a little contradictory - don't go, go, don't go, go. And God's methods are, as always, inexplicable. You can't tell if this is all part of a master plan, or if God is just improvising as it goes.

Meanwhile, there are both fantastical and comedic elements. Delegations run up and back between Balak the king and Bil'am the prophet. In the movie in my head, they're played by the Marx Brothers. Then there's an angel (obviously played by Tilda Swinton) who appears brandishing a sword to block Bil'am's path on his way to deliver what might or might not be a curse. Oh, and there's a talking donkey too, because why not?

I wonder sometimes why this story is so catchy, and why it's even included in Torah. It is one of our few chances to imagine the conversations and machinations of other nations. It captures a universal fear, that there might be people who hate us and plot against us without our even knowing. The story's resolution reassures us that while we have to deal with the hate that hits us head on, there might at least be some divine protection against the hate we don't see coming. Angels bar the path of those who would curse us. A beautiful thought.

In re-reading this parashah, I was caught a little differently this time by this image of angels barring the path. This is because last week, I took a few Ner Shalom teens to Los Angeles for a short Jewish heritage trip. Besides the requisite deli food (eliciting from one teen the observation that he'd never been in a restaurant with so many Jews), we made a trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance. Besides its careful presentation of the history of the Holocaust, the museum presents examples of hate and intolerance in the world today, and draws attention to creative responses to it.

So one panel in the diorama was on anti-gay violence, focusing on the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming 15 years ago, which brought on the early public appearances of the now-famous  Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church. They showed up at Mathew's funeral with their "God Hates Fags" and "Mathew Burns in Hell" signs. Their next visit was during the trial of Mathews torturers and killers, again with the same message that this young man deserved what he got. But this time, in anticipation of their hatemongering and the pain it would cause, friends of Mathew's organized what came to be known as Angel Action. Scores of people dressed as angels, with white robes and 7-foot wingpans, formed an outward-facing perimeter around the God-Hates-Fags people, rendering them invisible and silent; containing the hate before it could harm.

The museum had a photo of this, an image that I'd seen before but forgotten, and I gasped and teared up with the beauty of it, the kedushah, the holiness, that these counter-protestors manifested in response to this very unholy hate.

I was choked up because hate remains as prevalent in our world as ever; and while some hate seems to abate, new victims slide into the "most despised" category. Where does all this hate come from? What part of our heart? Is it nurture or nature? One of the rebbes of Broadway explains it this way:

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

And clearly we do this. We teach our hatreds to our children, through what we say and what we don't say; through what makes us laugh and what makes us tense up. Yes we teach it; but why is it so easy to learn? Because we can hate many years before we learn a verse of the Bible to hang the hate on.

So I asked our 16-year old what makes hate so attractive. A couple thoughts came to him right off the bat. One had to do with identity - that people feel a need to belong, to go with the crowd, and attacking those outside the group makes them feel more accepted inside the group.

This idea seemed right to me. Hate plays on very primal tribal instincts. The tribe survives if it can retain control of sufficient resources. Anyone outside the tribe is competition. The division between "us" and "them" must be clear, and moral judgments, "we are good, they are bad,"  or even, "we are human, they are animals," must be overlaid to justify not sharing - or worse. It's all about the group.
In the parashah we have an interesting moment right at the top when it says, "Moab was alarmed because the Israelites were so numerous. Moab dreaded the Israelites and said, 'Now this horde will lick clean all that is about us as an ox licks up the grass of the field'." This speech is not attributed to a single speaker - not a Hitler or a Fred Phelps or an Assad or even Balak. It is the voice of the country, the voice of the Zeitgeist. It is the tribe as a whole calling the other tribe "animal."

And alas, we still do this. Our more complex society, with so many overlapping identities and allegiances and needs, produces a constant scramble for who is the "us" and who is the "them." Until recently, gay people were a popular "them" but we're witnessing the erosion of that hate, at least in many overt ways. But hate is still everywhere. We see the constant attacks on immigrants, attacks made by the very people who rely on them to do the underpaid and undesirable work. Employers have policies against race bias, but a person with a black-sounding name is 50% less likely to get a response on a job application, despite her education and qualifications, because of what her name suggests of her race and her class origins.

Like the angel in the Balak story that is there all the time and only suddenly is it visible, so I have suddenly had my eyes truly opened to the widespread and unquestioned hatred of fat people in America. It is a hatred so deep that no American is happy with their body; they either feel too fat or terrified they will become fat. No meal is eaten without a calorie judgment or an apologetic comment, all of which adds to our idea that the only desirable body is a thin body and being fat is the worst kind of shame. This hatred pervades the culture. With the possible exception of Kathy Bates, we all know that a fat person never appears on the screen except to be the butt of a joke or to represent some undesirable personality trait - greed, cowardice, selfishness. As Ner Shalomer Anna Mollow pointed out in her recent essay, "Sized Up", fat jokes have replaced queer jokes as the hurtful humor that is acceptable in just about any social setting.

"So why else is hating so attractive," I asked our 16-year old. His answer was revealing. He said, "Once you've decided to hate, it's one of the few emotions you can act on without restraint." He pointed to examples from bullying to terrorism, the freedom that comes once you've rejected whatever it is that would otherwise hold you back. And sadly, that sounded true to me as well, and the Westboro Baptist rank and file, people who might have started out as good Christians but ended up picketing funerals seemed to prove it.

So where I've arrived is this: we are hardwired this way. We don't have to be carefully taught to hate. We have to be carefully taught not to. We have to learn to unlearn. We have to learn to apologize  for hate when we discover we've been behind it. After all, if the Exodus Ex-Gay Ministry which, baruch Hashem, closed their doors this week, can apologize for the merciless harm they inflicted on countless LGBTQ people, both directly and by propping up other people's hate, we can apologize for our missteps too.

And we can learn from the the great teachers of non-violence who came before us: learn how to dam the surge of hate without giving it back in kind. Refuse to go along with the fat joke. Or the racist or the anti-Muslim or even the self-hating Jewish joke. Respond to injustice and hate not with more hate but with creativity, with satire and, when we can manage it, with love. That is what takes the wind out of hate's sails.

These skills will be our wings, as we take our place as angels, barring the path, keeping would-be haters from uttering their words of curse. So that instead they (and we) may open our mouths, and find words of kedushah, of holiness, there. So that we can climb to higher ground, view the great expanse and the colorful tents filling it, and say, mah tovu ohalecha Ya'akov, mishkenotecha Yisrael. You, yes you of the other tribe, how goodly are your tents, your dwelling places.

What Jews Look Like (Or: did they ever diet in the shtetl?)

This week we read Parashat Korach, the portion of the book of Numbers in which a Levite named Korach, along with his family and friends, speaks out against Moshe's authority, arguing that the people's truth needs to have a role as well. Moshe sets up a test, or maybe an ambush, and Korach receives a divine slapdown of almost unimaginable proportions. Not only are his ideas quashed, but he and his people are swallowed up by the earth. The firepans they had used in the test are purified in fire and become part of the altar -- as a warning, according to the harsh text.

It's an interesting portion because as modern Jews, as voices for social justice, as questioners of authority and would-be truthtellers, our sympathies tend to lie with Korach. For me, this week has become an annual celebration of the rebel in us, and of our willingness to suffer the slapdown, the backlash, the firestorm that sometimes follows in the wake of representing unpopular truths.

And so I was particularly interested and excited this week to read the essay "Sized Up" by my friend Anna Mollow. In it, Anna takes to task our conventional wisdom about fatness and the health risks popularly associated with it. She asks us to look at the science, which does not support our suppositions and, once we're done with that, to see the ways in which it has become popular and unremarkable to scapegoat fat people in our society. Why, she wonders, is it important to harangue fat people for being fat, when studies actually suggest that fat people live longer than skinny people.

Speaking out, Korach-like, against conventional wisdom -- against ideas that we are certain are truth but can't quite put our fingers on how we know that -- she brought on a firestorm. If you're wondering where firestorms occur in this day and age, just look at the "comments" section of any online article. Some commenters expressed gratitude and relief for their truth being spoken. And others condemned, sometimes in cruel and personal terms, the very suggestion that our ideas about fat might be wrong. After all, what believer in healthy living wants to be told that they might actually be guilty of an ugly sort of prejudice that can no longer quite so easily be packaged as scientific or even painted as well-meaning?

I was among those who thought, "This can't be true. Fat people live longer?" So I went to some of Anna's sources, including The Diet Myth by Paul Campos and New York Times reporter Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss---and the Myths and Realities of Dieting. These books are exposés, gathering up the science that supposedly justifies our views of fat. But what the studies actually say is not at all what we've been told, and it's eye opening. Here are some of the surprising findings that you might need to read a couple times to absorb:

• People categorized as "overweight" under current body-mass index (BMI) standards typically have a decreased risk of premature mortality. That is, fat people live longer. Mind if I say that again? Fat people live longer. 
• Healthy diet and physical activity promote longevity -- in fat and thin people equally, without regard to whether it produces weight loss. 
• Fat people have no greater risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. than thin people.
• People at the far extremes of the bell curve -- both fat and thin -- suffer complications. 
• Making a long-term, significant change in one's body weight is nearly impossible.
• The greatest health risk fat people seem to face -- and it's a big one -- is dieting. Shedding 20 pounds and gaining them back (which is nearly always the case in the long run) radically increases the risk congestive heart failure, vascular disease and other problems we've typically associated with being fat per sé. In other words, it's pushing fat people, including ourselves, to diet that puts one at risk for all those nasty conditions.

In her essay, Anna sketches this problem as a queer issue, noting how the almost unthinking scapegoating of fat people looks like, and serves a similar social function as, the oppression of queers in this country (at least until relatively recently). Where queers were medicalized and psychologized baselessly; where queer jokes and disparaging comments used to be safe in any social setting, it is now fat people who are medicalized, and it is the fat joke that no one will object to.

And I, because it's what I do, would like to make this a Jewish issue as well. My friend Jane Herman recently pointed out to me that we Jews, as a tribe, come from shtetl stock; our bodies do, in fact, deviate from the American ideal. Thin is not our dominant shape. And our shape should be our core reference point, not the shape of someone on a Weight Watchers commercial.

So I'd like you to meet some poeple.

These are my great-grandmothers -- the two on the sides, seen here flanking my grandmother,  all celebrating Mother's Day in the early 1950s on Chicago's Michigan Avenue. Rebecca is on the left and Rose on the right. Grandma Sade is in the middle, but it is Rebecca and Rose I want to talk about. Both diminutive in height, both formidable women, both immigrants, both zaftik.¹

Neither of my great grandmothers was ever told to diet; neither of them ever did. Neither of them was told that fat was bad or that to be Americans they had to be skinny and blonde. Neither was informed of the supposed health risks of obesity, although both would certainly qualify as "obese" under the current BMI standards (as do, by the way, George Clooney and Tom Cruise). As busy balabostehs, heroic homemakers with many newly American children, neither had time to notice that fat people were supposed to be lazy and sedentary. Probably neither ever ate a McDonalds hamburger, although they ate well and Jewish. Both lived well into their 90s.

This is, takeh, how Jewish women look. At least in my book.

The point is that our ideas about fat are social, not medical. There is a social hatred of fat people in this country today, and in the last generation or so we have justified it with false science. The real science is out there, but the media and the public haven't caught on, and the diet industry doesn't want us to.

What is normal weight? What makes a weight ideal? Looking at the data, heavier than our current norm is in fact better for you. It's as if someone took the actual ideal window, compressed it and gave it a hard shove leftward on the bell curve.

Remember your grandmothers and your aunties; your Ashkenazic, immigrant, pre-diet craze foremothers. That is what women look like.

Once the science is yanked out from under the supposition that fat is bad, what is left to justify our constant criticism of fat people? An aesthetic judgment? Fat people are not attractive? A moral judgment? Fat people are lazy or lacking in self-control? No one would have called my great grandmothers any of those things. No one would have called them unattractive -- at least not until they arrived in America, where Jews and other undesirable ethnics increasingly could not be kept out of the professions and the social clubs, but at least they could be kept out of the aesthetic of physical desirability. A skinny Anglo-Saxon aesthetic, combined with a Puritan work ethic and, eventually, a multi-billion dollar diet industry, turned people who look like our grandmothers into people to be judged on the basis of their bodies.

Jews - take note. Our bodies haven't changed; just our values. Did anyone ever go on a diet in the shtetl? What would the idea of purposeful weight loss have sounded like to them?

Narishkayt.

Goyim naches.

Reject the war on obesity. Reject the vilification of fat people. Speak up against fat jokes. Oppose the shaming of fat kids, whether it is by school yard bullies or by public health campaigns. Fight for good health, healthy food, healthy activity and health care for everyone of all sizes. Stop trying to make fat people thin - and that includes yourself.

Before we finish, though, there is something in the Korach story that has always puzzled me. The firepans that belonged to Korach the rebel and his people are incorporated into the altar in the mishkan, the holy tent. You'd expect them instead to be cast out of the encampment. And though the text says it's a warning, some element of Korach's rebellion is clearly understood to be holy. And over time, Korach's plea for equality and fairness has become as holy and Jewish a value as anything Moses handed down at Mt. Sinai.

Plus, as my friend Atzilah Solot pointed out to me this week, another element of Korach is this: that even when our ideas are swallowed up by the earth, they become like seeds that will most certainly bloom later.

So let us open ourselves up to new truths; let us question any orthodoxy of thought; let us stand up for equality and fairness even -- and especially -- when the culture tells us that harsh judgments leveled against a class of people are natural and justified. And even if our voices are drowned out right now, know that we will have planted the seeds whose blossoming is just a season away.

Many thanks to Anna Mollow, Jane Herman and Atzilah Solot for all the inspiration and the insights.

---

1 Anna warns in her essay against euphemizing "fat", but I perceive "zaftik" in Yiddish as both non-evasive and as having a warm, favorable valence, meaning literally "juicy." I've always perceived it to be a word that doesn't mince words, and which is said proudly, descriptively and lovingly. I could be wrong - I've never been called zaftik, I don't know how it feels. And being affectionate doesn't necessarily make a euphemism not a euphemism. Maybe it's true that I don't want to say fat, and that I'm still working up to it. But in any event, in the name of reclaiming our particularly Jewish acceptance of diverse body shapes, I'm willing to go out on this limb. ^↩

B'chukotai: The Worth of a Life

For Congregation Ner Shalom and B'nai Israel Jewish Center
May 3, 2013

I heard a very moving story on NPR last week about a college senior back east who had signed up on a bone marrow donation registry a couple years ago and then forgot about it. Last week he got a call that he was a perfect match for a young man with aggressive leukemia. The odds of a perfect match outside of his family were 1 in 4 million. The hook of the story was this: the college senior was an aspiring athlete heading into the America East Championships, the culmination of his college track career. If he underwent the surgery to draw 2 liters of bone marrow from his pelvis, he would be unable to lift anything above his head for several weeks. As fate would have it, the young man's events were discus toss and shotput.

His college athletic career would be over without ever winding up. Meanwhile, the anonymous marrow recipient would not be cured of his leukemia. But he would, hopefully, have another year, maybe more.

The news stories were quick to point out that the college athlete did not hesitate in deciding to undergo the procedure rather than become a track champion. I'd hope we would all do the same.  But the media spin of one person's life pitted against another's got me thinking about the old question of the value of a human life. What is a life worth? What is a year worth? Especially when it is someone else's year? A stranger's year.

This is not the first time I've had cause to dwell on the topic of the value of a life. Among my dark secrets is that I am a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. That institution is famous, among other things, for its School of Law and Economics. Under its principles, the world operates as a sort of marketplace, and value makes itself manifest through economic markers. What I mean is that lives - and everything else - have value that can be quantified in economic terms, and then that value has a sort of purchasing power. So, for instance, let's say there's a hazard aassociated with a particular industry and so many workers die from it in the course of a year. Let's say there's a possible solution to the hazard, but it is very expensive. If the families of the lost workers sue the industry, the industry will have to pay out the value of those workers' unlived lives. If the total cost of those payouts is higher than the cost of the expensive safety measure, the industry will put the fix into effect not because it's right, but because it's cheaper. They will need neither Congress nor conscience to require it. That is the theory. It is rather an ugly theory. In its crass conversion of a life into dollars and cents, it suggests that life's market value is more important than its inherent value. It presumes that money is the primary or sole motivator of human conduct. And maybe that's ugly because it is, sadly, so often true.

My discontent with what my alma mater unleashed on the world came rushing back to me this week as I found in Torah a section doing, seemingly, just such an exercise: assigning cash value to the lives of various types of people. I was preparing to read two aliyot of this week's Torah portion, B'chukotai. In these eight verses I am to chant (Leviticus 27:1-8), the priests are given instructions on how to assess the cash value (erech) of a vow or pledge (neder) that is made on the basis of someone's life.
Let me explain this.

As you know, in biblical times, obligatory Temple sacrifices were the cornerstone of our religious life. The ancient Israelites - our ancestors - would bring their cattle or goats or poultry or grain to the Temple at the prescribed times. Sacrifices would be made, and the priests would also get fed in the process. But if you've ever been in the religious institution business, as many of you currently are, you know that one must do more than feed the rabbi. The electricity needs to run, and the gas and water. Repairs have to be made. Plus insurance and bookkeeping and outreach. And all of that requires managerial staff. Just as this is the case in every synagogue, it was also the case in Beyt Hamikdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The infrastructure required contributions beyond the sacrifices.

So there was a custom of making generous pledges, specifically gauged to one's own life or the life of a loved one. I can't quite figure out what the etiquette of this might have been. "In honor of Aunt Sylvia's birthday, I pledge the value of her life to the Temple!"

Perhaps it was an evolution from an earlier practice of actually donating the person! Remember the story where Hannah weeps and pledges that if she has a child she will dedicate him to the service of the Temple, and that baby turns out to be Samuel. Perhaps that kind of thing was not uncommon; and maybe over time the Temple administration realized that they needed cash a lot more than they needed hundreds of homesick children.

So this bit of Torah allows those nedarim, those pledges, to be satisfied through money instead. And the amount of money is connected to whose life was pledged. If the person whose life is being appraised was a grown man, the amount of the gift would be 50 silver Temple-standard shekels. It would be only 20 shekels if he were under 20; 5 shekels if he were under 5. If he's elderly he rings up at 15 shekels, which is less than a teenager but more than a toddler. And, sadly but not surprisingly, women pull in between 50 and 67 cents on the shekel, with the gender gap smallest in old age. There are many unanswered questions raised with respect to these valuations, such that an entire tractate of Talmud - Arachin - is devoted to the topic.

Now don't get nervous. This practice officially ended with the destruction of the Temple, so no one is about to ask you to pledge the value of a life to support this community. Probably. No, the practice ended, and all we have to show for it is a story: the story of a now-defunct system that set the value of various and sundry lives. It is disappointing to read in this story how women's lives were valued less; how the elderly's lives were valued less; how young people's lives were valued less. Some commentators have defended this system by noting that it ignores the social circumstances of the life in question. In its valuation of a life, Torah doesn't care if the person is rich, poor, able-bodied, literate, Jew or stranger.

This is unlike our legal system, where those factors do come into play, if not directly then indirectly. For instance, the families of victims of the  9/11 attacks were given remuneration based primarily on the lost earning potential of the loved one who was killed. That is, based on their salary. Which meant that the lives of the highest-earning victims - largely white male professionals - were worth more money than the lives of the poorest - largely immigrants and people of color. Although to his credit, Kenneth Feinberg, the Jewish head of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund did skew the formula somewhat to shrink the disparity.

But Torah does not make these economic or educational or social distinctions, say the commentators. It only distinguishes the value of lives based on what it considered to be immutable characteristics - age and gender. So maybe that is better. But on the other hand, isn't that bad enough?

As I chanted the verses over and over, I was glad that they were mine to read, because I would be forced to tussle with them. The passage was irritating me, angering me; it had my household and our non-Jewish houseguests up in arms. "What? You still read that? It's outrageous! Whatever for?"

And I silently agreed in part. Not that I shouldn't be reading it, but that I should have some idea what I'm reading it for.

As it happens, my study partner and I read a teaching of the Ba'al Shem Tov this week, in which the Chasidic master says that when an enemy speaks ill of you, you should look deep inside to see if there might be a modicum of what it is you're accused of, no matter how innocent you may feel. I realized that for me, this Torah portion felt like an enemy. I didn't like it. I didn't like what it says about us. So following the Ba'al Shem Tov's advice, I wondered if the portion was saying something that might actually have a kernel of truth within me, within us.

Maybe it is this. That we, try as we might not to, much as we decry it as wrong, also valuate different kinds of people differently. Clearly our culture and our media do it all the time. The news story of the missing middle class white woman is worth a lot more television time than the many missing people of color. Guns seem to become a national issue only when the victims are mostly white kids in a group, and not when they are black and Latino kids picked off one by one.

Surely many of us are critical of that injustice. But still, do we not quietly, subtly, unconsciously make similar distinctions ourselves? How many of our judgments about people we know or meet or hear about are, despite our best intentions, colored by that person's race or gender or age or language or wealth or poverty or education or sexual orientation or family life or physical ability or size or attractiveness? How might our perceptions of the bone marrow story be different if we knew something more, maybe something surprising, about the recipient? What different values do we assign to other people's lives without even noticing that we're doing it?

And then, kal b'chomer, all the moreseo, using such harsh standards, what value do we assign to our own lives? In what ways do we feel inadequate because we are not something else that we've been tricked into valuing more?

Maybe the problem is the very idea of valuation. Of displacing our fullness; of translating who we are into something more trivial. As if we are goods at a University of Chicago swapmeet and we are sitting on a shelf wondering what price we will pull in.

Maybe the proper measure of our lives is - wait, maybe our lives don't need to be measured at all. Not against anyone or anything or any currency other than ourselves and our own potential. After all, remember what Rebbe Zushya of Hanipol said. "In the coming world they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zushya?'”

How do we let go of our harsh and hardly-conscious judgments? I don't know. I suspect if we easily could, we already would have. How do we bravely offer up to this world our deep and incalculable worth without worry as to its market value? I don't know that either. The small thing I do know is that Torah is here, warts and all, to remind us of these questions when we otherwise might become too complacent to ask them. That even when Torah looks like an enemy, it is my "frenemy," gently (or not so gently) nudging me to look inside and put my own affairs in order.

And I know that each of our lives, not despite who we are, but because of it, is priceless.