Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 125

A love poem to Torah - for Shavuot

 

MY TORAH


is a tall drink of water
on a thirsty day

the longer I know him
the more beautiful he becomes

I want to hold him close
and press my lips to his shoulder

to unfasten his gartel
with unsteady hands

to trace every letter
I find on his skin

He is milk and honey
on my tongue

anointing oil
on my hands

voice like flowing water
inscribing my heart

 

Many Jewish mystical texts hint that the relationship of the scholar with Torah is like romance. The Torah is the (feminine) Beloved, and the reader (presumed, of course, to be male) is the one who seeks Her beauty. Sometimes she is described as the beloved daughter of the King -- which is to say, God -- given to Israel in marriage.

I've never seen a poem which takes the opposite tack, anthropomorphizing Torah as beloved and male. If you know of others, please let me know.

Gartel is Yiddish for "belt;" in this context it alludes to the belt which in standard Ashkenazic practice goes around the Torah scroll, beneath the velvet mantle.

Chag sameach -- wishing you a joyous Shavuot!

Day 49 of the Omer

DAY 49: BACK TO THE SUMMIT


The first seder, he said, is like
an airlift to the top of the mountain.
The matzah, the singing, the egg
dipped in salt water—all mnemonics
for the journey you haven't yet taken.

When you wake the next morning
you're miles away, cloud-shrouded peak
barely visible in the distance.
Remember the psalms of praise we sang
like angelic choirs? It's enough

to get you moving. First week's travel
is fueled by the hardtack of slavery
which doubles as waybread of freedom.
As the feast recedes in memory—was
that oasis a mirage?—the song

that we prayed at the sea spurs you forward.
One morning shards of robin's eggshell
dot the stones outside your door
and you remember the sign of new life
dipped in salt tears. The path

grows steeper but now you're in shape
for the discernment work.
This is our last night camping
beneath the splash of Milky Way.
Tomorrow: the summit. Will you hear

the fire, the thunder, the still small voice?
Will you decode the Name
emblazoned on every human face?
This is the end of the journey.
Make every minute count.

 

 

Today is the 49th day of the Omer, making seven weeks of the Omer. This is the final day of our 49-day journey between Pesach and Shavuot, liberation and revelation!

Today's poem was inspired by one of my favorite Hasidic teachings, from the Slonimer rebbe. The Slonimer taught that at the first seder we are lifted up to great spiritual heights, and then the next morning we wake and we're at the bottom of the valley again, and we spend the 49 days of the Omer climbing back up to get back to the high spiritual place where we were on the first night of Pesach.

I share this poem in honor of my friend and teacher Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg, who first introduced me to that teaching when I was in rabbinic school (as part of his fantastic class Moadim l'Simcha, in which we spent two semesters translating and studying Hasidic texts relating to the round of the festival year.)

I wish you blessings as we approach Shavuot. I hope that this Omer journey has brought some meaning to these recent weeks.

i carry it in my heart

You've probably heard the aphorism that being a parent is like having a piece of one's heart walking around outside of one's chest. Being a parent means being vulnerable to everything that can go wrong in the world. It means (or should mean) being intimately attuned to someone else's physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual wellbeing; feeling their sorrows and their joys.

This is not only true of being a parent. It is the complicated blessing of being a person who loves any other person deeply. When someone is beloved to me, and I to them, our hearts become permeable. I open myself to feeling some of what my beloveds feel. I yearn for my beloveds to be blessed with joy, and I accept that when they feel grief my own heart will ache along with theirs.

In this place and time the language of love and beloved is presumed to be romantic, having to do with two people "falling in love." But I think that if that's all the word "beloved" means to us, then we're shrinking the capacity of our language. A sibling can be beloved. A friend can be beloved. We don't just "fall" in love; if we're blessed to have relationships which deepen over time, we grow in love.

Every intimate relationship comes with the price tag of having a piece of one's heart walking around outside of one's chest, vulnerable to harm. If I give a piece of my heart to everyone who is beloved to me, then my heart is always expanding. A little piece of me travels with each of my beloveds wherever they go. An invisible thread connects my heart to theirs, always. They are never alone. Neither am I.

This is an incalculable gift. It is beyond words, and I don't say that lightly -- God knows I have plenty of words for most occasions! But emotional and spiritual intimacy beggars my language. We don't have good words for it, and the words we do have are too-easily written-off as overblown or corny. To love and to be loved -- to be beloved...! The connection is more than I know how to describe.

And sometimes the heartache is, too. I don't mean the heartache you hear about in pop songs, one lover leaving another behind. I mean the heartache of precisely the opposite: of being connected, heart to heart, feeling a loved one's happiness with them -- and also their sorrow or their grief. Have you ever felt so much love for someone that your heart threatens to burst out of your chest?

I've been thinking lately about what it means to seek to live with an open heart -- even when that also means that my heart is vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, not only my own but also the fortunes of those whom I love. How can I live that truth with integrity? How can I express my love in a way which will help to sustain my beloveds, and how can I receive their caring in return?

I'm using the term "beloved" to mean someone dear to my heart. But Beloved, with a capital B, is one of our tradition's ways of imagining God. God is the ultimate Beloved, and to God, we are all beloved. God has compassion for us, which is to say, God feels with us, because we are beloved of God. When we feel sorrow, God's heart breaks along with ours... and when we feel joy, we illuminate the heavens.

Our liturgy teaches that we are loved by an unending love -- a love transcending all space and time. A forever love. An infinite love. Sometimes I catch glimmers of how the love I feel for my beloveds is an infinitesimal fragment of that ahavat olam. Sometimes my love threatens to overflow my chest, and I think: I'm just one. If we could put together the love of all humanity, we could move mountains.

To borrow a term from Thich Nhat Hanh, when we love each other we inter-are. I become a part of you, and you become a part of me. This is one of the places where I experience God: in the connection between your heart and mine. God is in the space between us which is charged with concern and with caring and with love. And that's true whether we are physically side by side, or a thousand miles apart.

"When you love one another, then God is within you," as the Shaker hymn has it. Maybe that's why my heart feels too expansive for my chest. What human ribcage could contain that luminous Presence which is made manifest within us when we open our hearts in loving connection? As e. e. cummings wrote, i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) -- and in the link between our hearts, there is God.

Day 48 of the Omer

 

DAY 48: THE WEDDING


The wedding's in two days
and all the guests are arriving. Look,
there's your best friend
and your great-aunt
and the grandparent you haven't seen
in half of your lifetime.
If you squint
you might catch a glimpse
of your descendants.
Everyone is here.
Whatever work you meant to do
before now, let it go.
Do you know your Partner
one hundred percent? Probably not;
but if you wait until you feel fully ready
you might never act at all.
There's a time for waiting
and a time for leaping
and the salt sea is warm
and the waters will part for you.
There's no telling
where this honeymoon will take you.
If you didn't pack
everything you intended, don't fret:
the hotel gift shop has necessities.
What do you really need, anyway?
Your Intended brought
the ketubah, all six hundred
and thirteen detailed instructions, and
the chuppah is ready
to be lifted over your heads
like a canopy of flowers
or an inverted barrel
or a hovering mountain.
Your Beloved
is in the next room
so close you can almost touch.
Whisper sweet nothings
through the air vent.
Send giddy texts: can you believe
we're really doing this?
But it feels right.
Do, and understanding will come.
Say I do, and trust
that the One Who loves you
won't do you wrong.

 

 

Today is the 48th day of the Omer, making six weeks and six days of the Omer. Today is the 48th day of our 49-day journey from Pesach to Shavuot, liberation to revelation.

Shavuot can be understood as the wedding anniversary of God and Israel. In that metaphor, the Torah is our ketubah (wedding contract); God is the "groom" and we are the "bride" (at least in the most traditional gendered understanding); and Mount Sinai itself -- which one midrash says was lifted into the sky and held over our heads -- becomes our wedding canopy.

There's also a midrash which says that every Jewish soul -- past, present, and future -- was there when Torah was given at Sinai.

Day 47 of the Omer

On the third new moon after leaving Egypt
    we entered the wilderness at Sinai and camped
        by the mountain. God called us a holy nation

and claimed us for Her own. Enraptured
    we promised we'd do anything, as lovers do.
        And God said: stay pure. Wash your clothes.

Get ready: something big is coming.
    And Moshe said: don't go near a woman—and zzzt!
        skips the record with an awful scratch, the song

marred now for all generations. I beg
    your pardon? Was Moshe so afraid of our bodies?
        Is that why he shunned his own wife, to keep himself

at the ready for God? Stay off the mountain,
    God said, and we understood that: the very air
        crackled with electricity, scaring the goats.

When the shofar sounds, then approach,
    God said, and we understood that: we knew
        the triumphant song of the ram's horn.

But when Moshe said avoid women, we cried out
    to his sister Miriam, and her voice reached us
        saying he can't help his limitations, but

between you and me, the only way Torah comes
    is to everyone together. To all of us,
        all in one place, all hearing the Voice

which contains all voices.
    Don't hold yourself apart from anyone.
        The only way to get it together is together.

Wash away your jealousies
    and garb yourself in righteousness.
        Get ready to listen up. Torah is coming.

 

 

Today is the 47th day of the Omer. Today is the 47th day of our 49-day journey between Pesach and Shavuot, liberation and revelation.

Today's poem arises out of the Torah reading for the first day of Shavuot. I couldn't resist responding to Moshe's instruction.

The lines about Moshe shunning his wife come out of midrash which says that even after the giving of the Torah, he stayed away from his wife in order to be more available to God.

"The only way to get it together is together" is a quote from Reb Zalman (Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi) z"l.

Day 46 of the Omer

DAY 46: FOUR DAYS


Imagine a four-day calendar.
Four empty rectangles waiting.
Now add an overlay blazoned
with the four letters of the Name

we never pronounce, or maybe
we whisper it with every breath.
Make the letters bold, great
calligraphc slashes of ink.

Today is the י, the seed
from which the rest of the Name
grows, the still point
before breath, the pregnant pause.

Tomorrow the first ה, inbreath
filling the lungs with spirit
which hovered once over the face
of the waters at the beginning

of time. Then the ו, lungs full,
divine flow down the straight chute
into creation. Finally another ה,
breathing out, returning spirit

to the One from Whom it came.
The head, the two arms, the spine,
the two legs: that Name fits
on the human body as though

we were made for it -- or from it.
Four letters hinting at the whole
of space and time, Was-Is-Will-Be.
Four days to embody those letters

before the download
before the fire and the thunder
before the still small voice
before we're opened up to receive.

 

 

Today is the 46th day of the Omer, making six weeks and four days of the Omer. Today is the 46th day of our 49-day journey between Pesach and Shavuot, liberation and revelation.

When I thought about the fact that there are four more days of the Omer, I immediately thought of one of Judaism's most prominent fours, the Four-Letter Name (sometimes called in English the Tetragrammaton; called in Hebrew the Shem Meforash.) That's what sparked today's poem.

The idea that we speak this Name with every breath comes from Rabbi Arthur Waskow. (See his Why YAH/YHWH.)

New prayers for b'nai mitzvah at Ritualwell

I have long been a fan of Ritualwell, an online resource center where one can learn about Jewish rituals and practice, browse a large bank of new and innovative Jewish prayers and rituals, and find resources and materials to enhance one's own spiritual practice.

This spring they've launched a series they're calling #ReimagineRitual, and the first ritual they wanted to explore is b'nai mitzvah, our coming-of-age ceremony for thirteen-year-olds. First they shared some blog posts about new ways of thinking about b'nai mitzvah (don't miss Renewing the Bar/Bat Mitzvah One Student At A Time). Then there was a #ReimagineBnaiMitzvah chat on Twitter. And then they commissioned me to create something new.

My offering is now live on the Ritualwell site. Here's the introduction I wrote to contextualize the prayers I shared:

After the #ReimagineBnaiMitzvah chat, what emerged for me most strongly were not answers but questions. People tweeted a lot of questions: how can we encourage students to take ownership of their own b'nai mitzvah journey? Is there a way to do b'nai mitzvah which doesn't reinforce binary notions of gender? How can we tend to the unique soul of every child, regardless of where they are on the spectrum of gender and sexuality? Is there a core body of material which we expect our b'nai mitzvah students to master? What kind of role does (or should) social justice play in their learning?

These prayers arose in response to the chat. I hope that they will speak to our b'nai mitzvah students,  to those who are entrusted with their care—and also to people in "traditional" congregational contexts, and people whose Jewish lives unfold outside of congregational walls.

I wrote a pair of prayers to use as the b'nai mitzvah ties tzitzit onto their tallit before the celebration, and a trio of prayers (one for parent or caregiver, one for the student who is coming of age, and one for the rabbi or spiritual leader) to be used at the celebration itself.

You can find my offering here at Ritualwell: Blessings for a B'nai Mitzvah. Feedback welcome, here or there!

Day 45 of the Omer

DAY 45: INTERCESSION


Today's a good day to intercede with God.
Don't let sheepishness hold you back.
When the Holy One grew furious
that we'd dallied with idols, Rachel
put her hands on her hips, pointed out
that when Jacob married Leah
(whose veil hid her true face from view)
Rachel hid beneath their marriage bed
and responded to his every caress
in her own voice, so that Leah
would not be discovered and shamed
on her first wedded night. If Rachel
could overcome her jealousy, shouldn't
God do the same as well? And God relented,
and forgave our imperfections. Rachel
represents Shekhinah, the divine feminine
exiled in creation and yearning upward.
Put on your Shekhinah face and say:
God, I'm part of You and I'm asking
for compassion. I can balance mercy
with judgement. Let me be an instrument
of Your kindness. Amen, amen, selah.

 

 

Today is the 45th day of the Omer, making six weeks and three days of the Omer. Today is the 45th day of our 49-day journey between Pesach and Shavuot, liberation and revelation.

Today's poem was inspired by Rabbi Jill Hammer's Omer Calendar of Biblical Women. In her book, today is the day for thinking about the foremother Rachel. Many of the details in this poem come from that book (and from classical midrash.)

The name "Rachel" means "ewe," so the line about sheepishness is a bit of a Hebrew pun.

Day 44 of the Omer

DAY 44: SONG OF THE WETLAND


Don't bend down like the willow
trailing her fingertips in the pool.

Cup your hands, gather the waters
that flow around the reeds.

Rejoice in the sedge and bulrush,
the pussywillows and red-winged blackbirds:

small precious things in God's sight.
You don't have to live in exile.

It's all right if you tremble.
You can be both mighty and afraid.

The weeks of waiting are almost done.
Wear patience like a garment, measured.

Carve letters of gratitude
on the clay tablet of your heart.

 

 

Today is the 44th day of the Omer, making six weeks and two days of the Omer. Today is the 44th day of our 49-day journey between Pesach and Shavuot, liberation and revelation.

I looked up the gematria of the number 44. (Remember that in Hebrew, letters double as numbers, so every word has a numerical value -- and every number can be correlated with the words whose letters add up to that value.) This poem arose out of this list of the words with a gematria of 44.

God, too, is lonely: a d'var Torah for Behar-Bechukotai

Here's the d'var Torah I offered yesterday at my shul. (Cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.)

This week's Torah portion, Behar-Bechukotai, teaches that every seventh year we must give the land a rest. Every seventh day we get Shabbat, a time to rest and be renewed; every seventh year the earth deserves the same thing.

This is called the shmita year -- in English, "Sabbatical." And this year right now -- 5775 -- is a shmita year, which means that all over the world people have been talking and thinking and praying about how we can best care for our earth.

This week's portion also teaches us about the yovel, or Jubilee. After seven sevens of years, we reach the 50th year, a Jubilee year, during which all debts are canceled and all property is returned to its original owner. Or, I should say, its original Owner-with-a-capital-O, because one of the themes of this Torah portion is that the earth belongs to God and we are merely resident on it. As God says in this week's portion, גרים ותושבים אתם עמדי –– "Y'all are resident-strangers with Me."

This is a familiar category. Torah frequently speaks in terms of Israelites, outsiders, and the גר תושב (ger toshav), or resident alien -- someone who is not originally of our community but is resident with us and among us. It's a lovely inversion of the norm to say that even we "insiders" in the community are ultimately resident strangers, because when it comes to the planet, the planet belongs to God and we're merely borrowing space on it for the short spans of our lives.

Earlier this week I studied a beautiful Hasidic teaching about the verse "Y'all are resident-strangers with Me." Usually we understand it to mean what I just said -- that we are גרים ותושבים, resident strangers, on the earth which belongs to God. But the Hasidic master known as the Degel Machaneh Efraim offers a poignant alternative reading.

He cites a verse from psalms: "I am a stranger in the land; do not hide Your mitzvot from me." (Psalm 119:19) Someone who is a stranger, he points out, has no one close to them with whom they can connect and tell the happenings of their day. A גר תושב / ger toshav is inevitably lonely. When such a person does find a friend, he writes, then they can joyously pour out everything which has been in their heart.

Here's where he makes a radical move. He says that the Holy One of Blessing is a lonely stranger in this world, because there is no one with whom God can connect wholly.

Let me say that again. God is a גר תושב / ger toshav.

God is a resident alien, a lonely stranger, existentially alone. This insight really moved me. I know that we all have times of feeling alone, and the insight that God too feels this way -- that our loneliness is a reflection of the Divine loneliness -- changes how I relate to those feelings of loneliness.

The Degel finds a hint of this in the psalm he cited. "I am a stranger in the land," said the psalmist -- as if to say, 'God, like You I am a stranger in this world, so don't hide Your connective-commandments from me!' The psalmist is saying: God, like You I am essentially alone. I yearn for Your mitzvot, Your connective-commandments, to alleviate my loneliness. And God yearns for us in return.

God is the lonely stranger, all alone in the world. We are the friend God finds, and when God finds us, God can pour out all of what is on God's heart -- in the form of Torah and mitzvot, our stories and our opportunities for connection with God.

"Y'all are resident-strangers with Me" can mean: y'all are strangers just as I, God, am a stranger. Y'all feel loneliness just as I, God, feel loneliness. And because we are together with God in this condition of loneliness and yearning for connection, we are never truly alone.

 

My thanks are due to my hevruta partners Rabbi David Markus and Rabbi Cynthia Hoffman who studied this text from the Degel with me.