Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 16

Why poetry matters (now)

[image error]Poetry and liturgy and art work differently than essays or arguments do. They can reach us in different ways than prose does.

Pastorally, I think art and prayer can meet a need that discursive forms don't / can't meet. Arguments call forth more arguments, and that doesn't interest me, especially now amidst so much suffering. 

Poetry and liturgy and art can also hold multiple meanings. Jewish tradition has beautiful teachings about God's speech being polysemic (saying multiple things simultaneously). I've been thinking about how prayer and art can function like that too.

Multivocality is part of the point. No prayer or poem or artwork will be understood in exactly the same way by everyone who reads or prays or views it. For me that's an important value right now. I need words and images that can hold multiple meanings and valances.

Anyway: all of this is why I've been grateful to my fellow builders at Bayit over the last couple of weeks. Much online conversation about Israel and Gaza feels fruitless to me, echo chambers talking past each other. And I'm simultaneously drawn to refresh news websites constantly to see what new horror may be unfolding, and aware that so doing doesn't actually help anyone (and might harm me.)

But a few days after the Hamas incursion into southern Israel I reached out to the Liturgical Arts Working Group and asked if there were interest in collaborating on an offering, and the answer was an immediate and fervent yes. So we brainstormed, we drafted, we commented and workshopped, we revised, and when all of that work was done I curated a flow through what we had co-created.

The collaborators on this artistic and prayerful response span the gamut from Reform to Orthodox. Some of us are mystics, others are rationalists. Our Judaisms are not the same. Our relationships with that beloved land and its peoples are not the same.  In this we mirror the Jewish community writ large. That feels important to me, too. We are different and we are part of the same whole.

Find the new offering of liturgy, poetry, and artwork from Bayit here, as downloadable PDF chapbook and as google slides suitable for screenshare:

 

Our Collective Heartbreak

 

(And for those who need the above poem in plaintext, instead of as an image, here it is.)

 

Buried

I can't even wish
for a time machine --
we���d argue
which fork in the road.

The blood of beloveds
cries out from the ground.
Every bent and broken body
was someone���s beloved.

If I say
we���re more alike than not,
all our hearts are shattered
someone will disagree, but

how can I not grieve
with every bereft parent,
most treasured hope
now buried.

 

R. Rachel Barenblat - originally published at Bayit

 

A little bit of a week

[image error]A tangled ball of grief.

 

On Friday nights, before L'kha Dodi -- the prayer welcoming the Shabbat Bride into our midst -- we sing a prayer that asks God to untie our tangled places. (I've written about it here before.)

Years ago I started using a little patter before the prayer that I borrowed from Rabbi David Markus. It was originally ad libbed to be singable to the Rizhyner's melody for the prayer, but it's basically become liturgy in my community. My son sings it to me sometimes. Other members of the community quote it. The opening has become part of the prayer now. And this past Friday night, as soon as I played the opening chord, everyone knew what was coming.

"Maybe you've had a little bit of a week," I sang.

"I don't know about you, but I've had --"

That's when I noticed the tears pouring down my face.

*

...For the people torn from their homes and shot. For the concert-goers at the all-night dance party whose dancing ended in a massacre. For children, killed and kidnapped. For lifelong peace activists, killed and kidnapped. For over a thousand Jews slaughtered last Shabbat. For my friend whose partner grew up on one of the now-massacred kibbutzim. For the first responders whose job it was to locate and cover every dead body. For the people who were traumatized seeing Torah scrolls draped in tallitot at Simchat Torah because they evoked Jewish dead bodies draped in tallitot. For everyone struggling now with generational trauma. For the hostages in Gaza. For the families of the hostages, frantic and afraid. For the mother I know whose child couldn't fall asleep in the bomb shelter. For the children and adults who have no bomb shelters and nowhere safe to go. For Awad Darawshe z"l, killed by Hamas while doing his EMT work. For the recognition that someone out there is wailing and mourning every single death this week, including those who weren't EMTs or peace activists, just "regular" Palestinians and Israelis. For every life snuffed out. For every child now without parents, and every parent now grieving their child. For the inhabitants of Gaza, with electricity and water cut off, whose buildings are now rubble. For the hopelessness and the anguish. For the fact that grief becomes politicized, and strangers on the internet critique for whom and how we grieve. For the fact that I had to firmly instruct my teenager not to watch videos of hostage executions that Hamas has threatened to broadcast. For the fact that not everyone has the luxury of looking away from the death and loss and horror. For every heart now shattered. For the near-certainty that it's going to get worse before it gets better...

*

"-- a little bit of a week," I managed, somehow.

By now people were singing along with me, quietly.

"And if you've had a little bit of a week -- ai yai yai yai yai yai yai yai!"

The words of the prayer don't really matter, I've said more times than I can count. I'll sing some Hebrew. Maybe you'll sing some English. Then I'll sing some Hebrew, and you'll sing some English. But what really makes this prayer work, what gives us the spiritual capacity to let go of our baggage and be fully present to welcome Shabbat, is the krechtz. The cry from the heart, from the gut, from the core. The ai yai yai. We have to let it all out before we can let Shabbat in.

I've never prayed that prayer with more fervor than Friday night, even though I could scarcely get words out around the lump in my throat.

"Receive our call, and hear our cry!" I was not the only one in the room weeping. So many of those whom I serve have come to me in the last week seeking comfort, seeking hope, seeking meaning, and the grief is so vast. How do we welcome Shabbat when there is so much bloodshed, and so much trauma, and so much more loss than our small human hearts can begin to understand?

And yet this is what Jews have always done. We make Shabbat even in the worst of times. We kindle our Shabbat candles, a reminder of creation's primordial light, and we affirm that the brokenness that characterizes the world as we know it is not the only way things can be.

Shabbat is our foretaste of the world to come, and when it is over, we begin again to fumblingly try to find our way toward a world better than this.

 

Some of the pieces I've read this week:

Be careful, Esther Perel
A Prayer for Peace, R. Sheila Weinberg
A lot of things are true, R. Danya Ruttenberg, which ends with this heartbreaking Prayer of the Mothers for Life and Peace by R. Tamar Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed.

From Chaos to Light: Bereshit 5784 / 2023

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Torah begins, ���When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was �������������� ���������������� / tohu va-vohu��� ��� chaos and unformed, scrambled and unpredictable. (Gen. 1-2) In the beginning, there was chaos. Tohu va-vohu was the original state of the universe. It's a law of thermodynamics: entropy is always already with us. Chaos pre-existed creation.

Surely chaos preceded the formation of the modern State of Israel. In the years before 1948 our world experienced profound upheaval and destruction. The hope encoded in the modern state of Israel was planted in spiritual soil laced with the shrapnel of our broken hearts after the deaths of the six million. Could we have imagined, in 1948, the particular grief of right now?

This week we have re-learned some things about chaos and broken hearts. I have no words for the horror of what we���ve witnessed from afar��� and I know this pales in comparison with what our beloveds there are going through. I think of when Aaron���s sons die unexpectedly and Torah says simply that he is silent (Lev. 10:3). Sometimes our sorrow is beyond all words.

There is unspeakable sorrow also in this week���s Torah portion. In Bereshit we read about Cain and Abel, the first siblings, born to Adam and Chava. One brother brings produce to God, the other brings animals, and God looks with favor on only one of their offerings. We might wonder why God's favor seems here to be zero-sum, but Torah doesn't answer that question.

Torah just tells us that the face of Cain, the farmer, has fallen. And God says, "Why is your face fallen? Surely, if you do right, there is uplift." (Genesis 4:7) But Cain doesn't do right. He slays his brother in the field, and when God asks about Abel, Cain retorts, "Am I my brother's keeper?" And God replies, ���your brother���s blood cries out to Me from the ground!��� (Gen 4:10)

I keep thinking about the grief Adam and Chava must have felt ��� and the grief God must have felt, too. Torah seems aware from the very beginning that human beings are capable of unthinkable harm. Indeed, there's midrash that says at least some of the angels tried to talk God out of creating humanity, arguing that humans would be violent and terrible.

Truth and Peace say: don���t do it, God, humanity���s going to trample the values we stand for. Justice and Compassion say: no, God, create humanity, they���ll act with mercy and justice! Of course, we know that God creates humanity, because here we are. Our mystics say that���s because God yearns for relationship with us. God yearns for us to live up to who we can be.

Chaos is at the very beginning of the cosmic story, and bloodshed is at the beginning of the human one. In this sense Torah feels very realistic. It���s a funny word to use for a seven-day creation story that midrash populates with angels! But Torah has no illusions about who and what human beings are. This is what we have to work with. Torah begins with chaos.

And then: ������������ ����������  / Yehi or, says God: "let there be light," and there is light. And God sees that the light is good. (Gen. 1:3-4) Torah isn't talking about sunlight. We know this because God creates light before creating the heavenly bodies that illumine our sky. This light is something else. This is what our mystics call the primordial light, the light of creation itself. 

The primordial light shines in the darkness not of space but of spirit. And when God declares it good, God is saying that there is capacity for good in this world. God is saying that we can choose to create, not just to destroy. Our Shabbat candles shine with the glow of that primordial light. Shabbat comes each week to remind us that tohu va-vohu is only the beginning.

Shabbat is supposed to be a holy time out of our ordinary existence. But I am here tonight to say to you: if we need to grieve, then Shabbat can hold our grief. If we need to pour out our hearts at the pain and horror of it all, then we can. God can take it. And I promise that even if we feel our hearts are shattered altogether, I know that in time healing will come.

Cain asks God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" We learned at Kol Nidre that kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh -- all of Israel is responsible for one another. We're mixed up in one another. We're part of one another. It's why when others are harmed, we feel the hurt. And I wouldn't want to be any other way. Even if that means worrying and crying and grieving from afar.

And I'm also here tonight to say to you: this week's Torah portion comes to remind us that we have agency. Chaos isn���t the end. On the contrary, it seems to be a necessary precursor to beginning. Even when darkness and chaos feel like all we have, this is where creation itself begins. Existential darkness gives way to light. It���s why a Jewish day begins with evening.

For R. Isaac Luria the story of creation begins with breaking. When God first began to create, he teaches, the vessels meant to hold God���s light shattered. Creation as we know it is full of shards, and also holy sparks. That was the original meaning of tikkun olam: lifting the broken shards to find the sparks of holiness, and lifting those sparks back up to their Source.

I���ve been thinking a lot this week about these words from the Kotzker rebbe, as taught by Rabbi Alana Suskin: ���The Torah says, ���In the beginning, God created������ God only created the beginning, and left the rest to humankind.��� It���s up to us to figure out how to get from this beginning to something better. I believe that most people, in Israel and in Gaza, want better than this.

A friend recently mailed me a book by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, and I opened it one morning this week over breakfast. Immediately I had to pick up a pen to draw exclamation points in the margins. The sentence that drew me in was, ���Hope and grief can coexist, and if we wish to transform the world, we must learn to hold both simultaneously.��� 

I don't have answers to the vast tragedies and traumas we've witnessed this week from afar. But the voices that resonate most for me this week are the ones saying: these two peoples can live in peace. Nobody's children should be killed. Out of this terrible mourning, we pray for a better path forward. A better world is possible. 

May we remember that we are all each others��� keepers. May we extend ourselves with care to all who are suffering across that beloved land. Out of this chaos, may we find our way to creating light. In the words of the National Council of Jewish Women, this week we���ve seen the worst in humanity; may we respond by cultivating the best in humanity. And let us say ��� amen.

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Wondering how to help?

Support Humanitarian Efforts In Israel and Gaza - a donation made here (via CNN) can be split among multiple nonprofits working to meet desperate humanitarian needs there, both in Israel and in Gaza. You can also donate by texting RELIEF to 707070.
National Council of Jewish Women���s Israel Granting Program Emergency Appeal - Donations provide support on the ground to NCJW���s partners and additional gender justice organizations meeting the immediate needs of women and children.
Jewish Federation of North America���s Emergency Fund - This fund is focused on making sure that the Jewish Agency���s Victims of Terror Fund can help victims��� families, and will also help the Israel Trauma Coalition and Joint Distribution Committee provide food, shelter, and trauma care. 

 

This is the d'varling I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

My heart is heavy

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Here's the message I wrote to my community to accompany that prayer:

We woke this morning to the news that Israel is officially at war with Hamas. My heart is heavy with grief. It���s especially heartbreaking on Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah. Like the Yom Kippur War, almost exactly fifty years ago, this coordinated series of attacks via land, sea, and air were a shock on a day of national religious celebration.

How can we rejoice with the Torah at a moment like this? And yet our tradition calls us to do precisely that. Our ancestors danced with Torah in times of Crusades and pogroms. We too can find strength in our traditions and in community. And we can dedicate our grief and our celebration alike to our most fervent prayers for peace...

Read that whole letter here. (And I'll include the text of the prayer below, knowing that some of us need plaintext rather than images.)

To our friends and family
From the windswept Golan
To the sands of the Arava:

We hold you in our hearts
We hold your children in our hearts
Our fate is bound up in yours.

And to the parents and children
From Ramallah to Gaza City
Who also do not wish for war --

But we love this land with you
We pray for better with you
And we yearn for peace with you.

God, with all the desperation of our hearts we plead: may it be true that peace will yet come.

���������� ���������� ���������������� ���������������� ���������� ����������. ������ �������� ������������ ���������� ������ ���� ��������

 

Rejoice / Fragile

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I've been working on these two Sukkot poems in tandem. Sukkot for me evokes both fragility (the sukkah begins falling apart as soon as it's created; every life is a sukkah, fragile and fleeting; God knows I've sat with sorrow in the sukkah at times) and joy (Torah tells us to rejoice in our festivals; this is zman simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing; on Shemini Atzeret, the 8th day, God calls us to linger a little longer in joy.) These poems are somewhat in the mode of Texts to the Holy, though I leave it to you to decide who is speaking, and to whom. They appear above with accompanying images (and alt-text for screenreaders). Below are the two poems as plain text.

 

Fragile

I see how fragile everything is
around you, how tenuous
any peace. Reasons for sorrow
pile up like fallen leaves.
Feel my heart touching yours,
enfolding yours.
I'm here with you where you are
under this roof that lets in rain.

���������������������� / Rejoice

My door is open. Will you enter?
Taste the air, heady and fragrant --

limned with honeyed autumn light
and wet with morning dew.

Let me wrap around you
like a cloud, like an embrace.

Stay with me just like this.
Joy expands to fill everything.

Yizkor For Our World: Yom Kippur 5784 / 2023

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[image error]One of the most powerful books I���ve read recently is Allison Stine���s novel Trashlands, which takes place in the near future, after climate catastrophe. Many of the characters we meet work as ���pluckers,��� pulling plastic from the trash-choked rivers and woods. The creation of new plastic has been banned, and plastic now functions as currency, because it lasts forever.

Most poignantly, everyone we meet in Trashlands is named after a thing or a place that is gone ��� like the Ashkenazi Jewish custom of naming our children after our dead. Characters have names like Miami, and Shanghai, and New Orleans, and Coral. Imagine a world in which coral is a distant memory.

[image error]We may not need to imagine it for long. Earlier this summer the oceans off the southern coast of Florida clocked in at 101 degrees. Scientists were literally racing to save samples of different species of coral by removing them from the sea and sequestering them in tanks on land.

As I read in the New York Times, ���The world���s oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the additional heat unleashed by people burning fossil fuels and razing forests. [As of this summer] about 44 percent of the global ocean [was] in a heat wave.��� In water that hot, coral can���t survive. 

[image error]Serge Schmemann, a member of the New York Times editorial board, argued recently in an op-ed that It Is No Longer Possible To Escape What We���ve Done To Ourselves. His essay begins by describing Canadian wildfire smoke ��� remember when the sun looked red and air quality was so bad we were told to stay indoors?

���This has been the summer from climate hell all across Earth, when it ceased being possible to escape or deny what we have done to our planet and ourselves,��� he writes.

That same week, that same newspaper covered the first Presidential debate in which most of the candidates refused to give a straight answer on whether they ���believe in��� the climate crisis. One argued that ���the climate change agenda is a hoax.��� The Times was quick to note that there is no scientific disagreement: the climate crisis is real and it is worsening. But what do we do when so many deny the existence of (much less responsibility for) the most significant existential crisis we have ever faced? 

One answer is, we grieve. We grieve the rising seas, the countless species that will vanish, the beauty our world is going to lose ��� from majestic polar bears to grand reefs of spectacular coral. (And the less ���charismatic��� ones, too, the plants and insects and creatures that don���t fit our definition of beautiful but are still part of the web of life.)

We grieve the reality that a significant subset of society doesn���t believe that our collective actions over the last few hundred years have radically changed our planet. And we grieve the human beings who already suffer climate change: the unthinkably vast wildfires, unprecedented heat domes breaking record after record, rising seas everyplace in the world where there are seas. Those impacts are felt most by those who are poorest: who can���t afford to move, or to access air-conditioning, or to buy clean drinking water.

Climate grief is the ache brought on by awareness of the losses that come with our warming planet: from the extinction of countless species across the globe, to places becoming inhospitable to what used to be their native flora and fauna (including us), to the large-scale displacement and death of living beings (including us).

And I suspect I am preaching to the proverbial choir this morning, because I know how many of you in this room have come to me to talk about climate grief and how to live with it. 

[image error]For me the first step in any kind of grief is naming it and being honest about how much it hurts. Grief is not linear. It ebbs and flows according to its own mysterious tides. Sometimes it ties us in knots. Sometimes it threatens to wash us away. Sometimes it leaves us spent and gasping on the shore. 

Judaism has good tools for certain kinds of grief. I think our tradition is really good at death, actually. Is that a funny thing to say? It���s true, though. I am in awe of our traditions around death and mourning. They���re incredible spiritual technologies.

The deathbed vidui, the words of release we speak at the end of life ��� akin to the vidui prayers we say today. Our biodegradable caskets and shrouds, because we all return to earth���s embrace. The palpable finality of shoveling earth onto the casket with our own hands. Sitting shiva, taking a week to live with our grief and let it wash over us while others bring food and community and prayer to our door. Ritually emerging after the week is over, walking around the block, and coming back in through a different door ��� because the week of shiva has changed us. Reciting the memorial prayers of Yizkor four times a year, when we go beneath our tallitot and remember our dead. I love that our traditions don���t pretend away loss, or the reality that our lives are finite. 

I don���t know what tools to bring to bear on the ongoing losses of climate grief. It���s one thing to mourn a person, or even a lot of people. But to mourn countless plants and insects and animals, to mourn the loss of human lives, to mourn the burning taiga or the boiling seas? I don���t think we have good tools for that. We may need to create them. 

Here���s what I do know: loss is a fundamental part of human life, and our work is to feel it fully even as we refuse to let it wholly define us. The fact that our lives are finite is part of what gives them meaning. And the sacred task of remembrance is part of our inheritance as a people. The word Yizkor means ���[God] Remembers.��� In the Yizkor prayers we say four times a year we ask God to remember each of our beloved dead. And we pledge acts of tzedakah, acts of justice and righteousness, in their memory. 

[image error]This year in addition to our loved ones we might ask God to remember the ivory-billed woodpecker. The splendid poison frog of western Panama. The freshwater fish of Lake Lanao in the Phillipines. The bramble cay melomys from Australia. The western black rhinoceros in central and west Africa. We name them and we remember them, and we pledge acts of justice and righteousness in their memory. 

And this year in addition to our loved ones we might ask God to remember the victims of the Lahaina wildfires this summer, and the victims of deadly flooding in Pakistan last year, and the two million deaths that the United Nations says were caused by extreme weather over the last half-century. We can���t possibly name them all, but we can remember them in the aggregate, and we can pledge acts of justice and righteousness in their memory.

Maybe we pledge acts of environmental tzedakah, like installing solar panels, or buying things secondhand, or supporting the creation of the Zero Carbon Renovation Fund to help make buildings in our state more energy-efficient. (There���s a half-sheet handout at the back of the room from Western Mass Dayenu full of climate teshuvah ideas. Take one with you later today.)

[image error]Earlier this summer, my son and I visited the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem. Most crushing for me was the Hall of Children, a tribute to the 1.5 million Jewish children slaughtered by the Nazis. Sparks of light shine like distant stars. A constant litany of childrens��� names is read, and images appear and disappear like ghosts.

Maybe we need a place like that for grieving and remembering the victims of climate-change-fueled wildfires and floods, extreme heat and rising seas. The climate crisis isn���t a function of hatred or bigotry the way the Shoah was, but like the Shoah, its losses are already so vast I can���t process them. And we know that more is coming.

[image error]When I think about those who ignore the scientific realities of the climate crisis, I feel despair. But then I remind myself that Ruth Messenger, when she spoke here last month, said, ���Despair is not an action plan.��� She was talking about saving democracy, but it���s equally true of our response to the climate crisis.

And I remind myself of Mariame Kaba���s dictum that ���hope is a discipline.��� It���s something we have to cultivate. And the way to counter despair is to do something: to act with empathy, to make ethical choices, to care for our planet and all its inhabitants. We don���t know what impact our actions will have, but we know that inaction can���t be the answer. 

Yom Kippur comes each year to remind us that though we inevitably wander off course, we can course-correct. We can aspire to make teshuvah and be better tomorrow than we were today. Honestly I can���t think of much that���s more hopeful than that. No matter who we���ve been, we can be better than we were, if we do the work. That���s the powerful core of hope at Yom Kippur���s heart. I think that hope is central to our whole religious tradition.

Here in New England Yom Kippur comes as the season is turning. This year we���re just a few days past the autumn equinox. It���s officially fall. The light is changing. This half of our planet is beginning its long slow turn away from the life-giving warmth of the sun. Soon we���ll reach the year���s first killing frost. I don���t know if the plants can tell that their end is coming. But we can. These days, along with the inevitable poignancy of autumn, I also feel the poignancy of uncertainty: what will fall be like here as our climate shifts? I take comfort in knowing that the annual cycle of fall and spring will continue���  although I know that many species will not survive the transition to a warmer planet. 

But I also know that living things, given any opportunity, will try to thrive. One day last month I noticed a squash plant flowering in wild abundance, growing out of a crack of pavement outside the laundromat. Living beings want to live and grow. We yearn to flourish so that when we reach our natural end we���ve flowered and borne fruit in all the ways we can. At Yizkor we remember each life���s harvest of wisdom and presence. Saying Yizkor for our whole world means remembering and honoring the inherent value of every life on this earth��� including the species that will not return.  

[image error]I���ve talked before about different Jewish views on the afterlife. In my own theology, at the end of our lives our souls return to the Source from which we came. I imagine God lovingly gathering us in. I imagine perfect clarity and deep understanding and absolutely no pain. Maybe God also gathers in the souls of every species we lose. Maybe in the World to Come our souls reconnect surrounded by passenger pigeons and Tasmanian tigers and St. Helena Olive and Sigillaria trees. 

Death strips away everything that���s extraneous. And it turns out that an awful lot is extraneous. Our to-do lists, our possessions, our frustrations ��� all of that falls away, in the end. Death returns us to our deepest selves: we are beings who love, who yearn, who ache for meaning. When the time comes to die, that���s who we are. And when the time comes to live ��� are we brave enough to live that way?

Let us love and yearn and ache for our fragile planet. Let us live not despite climate grief, but with it: feeling the poignancy it brings to every moment, and resolving in every way we can to make teshuvah in our relationship with the earth. I said on Rosh Hashanah that whatever we do won���t feel like ���enough��� when the world is as broken as it is. But compared with doing nothing, it���s everything. 

[image error]Let us grieve as we say Yizkor for every species we���ve lost and every species we will still lose, for every human being lost to the catastrophic floods and hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires that are all rapidly becoming our planet���s new normal��� even as we cultivate our moral agency and our capacity for change.

And let our prayers of remembrance today remind us how lucky we are to be alive and even to lose. Because it would be so much worse not to love anything or anyone enough to feel loss when they go. The degree of grief we can experience is a sign of how deeply and wholly we can love.

Our lives are finite, but when we try to do right by each other and by our world we align ourselves with the flow of spirit and love. And our tradition teaches: that flow of spirit and love is eternal. More eternal even than plastic. When we transmit memory to the generations that will follow, we become part of something that is forever. And when we commit to deeds of justice and righteousness in memory of those who are gone, we uplift the best of who we can be.

 

This is the d'var Torah I gave before Yizkor at Yom Kippur morning services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the congregational From the Rabbi blog.)

Responsible: Kol Nidre 5784 / 2023

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[image error]Art Spiegelman���s Maus came out in 1986, and in 1992 it became the first graphic novel ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. Maus tells the story of Spiegelman���s parents who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to America, interwoven with the story of Spiegelman himself as an adult drawing forth his father���s stories. If you haven't read it, I commend it to you. It's extraordinary. 

[image error]Last year Maus was banned by school districts in several states, along with several other Holocaust-related titles. Spiegelman has joked, darkly, that schools want ���a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust��� to teach to children.

According to PEN America, book bans increased by 28% in American schools during the first half of last year, and most of the books challenged or banned deal with race and history, or have LGBTQ themes or protagonists. 

The impact is that books about the Shoah are gone from shelves and curricula in a time when Holocaust distortion and denial are on the rise. And books with LGBTQ themes and protagonists are gone from shelves and curricula in a time when a record number of anti-trans policies are being proposed and implemented around the country. And books about Black life are gone from shelves and curricula in a time when, according to the ADL, white supremacy propaganda has soared to an all-time high.

[image error]This summer Florida also banned some Holocaust textbooks, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in part for discussion of ���special topics��� prohibited by the state, such as ���social justice.��� Maybe not coincidentally, the Florida state board of education also mandated a new approach to American history. Florida���s new standards say that ���students should learn that enslaved people ���developed skills��� that ���could be applied for their personal benefit.������ In other words, slavery wasn���t so bad. 

Meanwhile, the state legislature passed laws that ���forbid teachers from offering instruction that makes students ���feel guilt��� because of actions committed by others in the past.��� And they���re not alone. Several other states have new laws that criminalize making students feel guilt or discomfort. (The Washington Post recently published an in-depth piece about the impacts of such a law on one teacher and her community.) 

[image error]When I read news stories like these, all I can think is: wow, is that not aligned with Jewish values. We don���t sweep our wrong actions under the rug and pretend they were never there. On the contrary, Judaism calls us to look clearly at our mis-steps and mistakes. Our tradition calls us to always be engaged in the work of teshuvah. And we can���t do that work if we ignore our mistakes in the first place. 

This is the opposite of the kind of national teshuvah I wish we could do. Germany, it turns out, has done amazing national teshuvah work. They have faced their nation���s darkest chapter, resolved to learn from it, and sought to reorient their society around what their Nazi history means they now owe to the world. (I learned about this from my friend and colleague R. Daniel Bogard���s Rosh Hashanah sermon Germany, T'shuvah, and the Obligations of our Pasts, also available as a video.)

Granted: Germany is now experiencing a rise in far-right groups, as are we. Which is a good reminder that the work of teshuvah is never one-and-done. But Germany at least made a national generational effort to reckon with their past.

Our nation has yet to collectively grapple with our responsibility to those harmed by slavery. Notice: I���m talking about responsibility rather than guilt. Because leaving aside all the tired jokes about Jewish mothers, I���m not interested in guilt. I think it���s much more productive to focus on responsibility. And Judaism has much to say about our responsibility to make someone whole after harm.

[image error]For instance, R. Aryeh Bernstein writes that Jews, having received reparations from Egypt as we fled during the Exodus, must support reparations for others. And R. Sharon Brous cites the dispute between Hillel and Shammai about what to do when a house is built on a stolen beam: do you tear the house down and return the beam, or do you pay money to the original owner?

Though Hillel and Shammai disagree, as always, neither sage argues that the beam wasn���t really stolen, or that stealing it wasn���t so bad, or that it���s already stolen so there���s no point in trying to rectify the situation. Rabbi Brous writes: 

Our country was built on a stolen beam. More accurately, several million stolen beams. Only they weren���t beams. They were human beings. The palace they built was magnificent, but they have never been compensated for their labor.

There are conversations we can have about this, as Jews and as Americans. But the erasure of African American history makes it less likely that we���ll have those conversations, much less act on them. Just as the erasure of Jewish history means that nearly two-thirds of young Americans were unaware, when asked in 2020, that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. And the erasure of LGBTQ history and identities ��� in the words of Jared Fox at the ACLU, ���When queer students are denied access to these stories, they lose a piece of their humanity.���

The erasure of our history hits me hard. And I also believe that the clarion call of Jewish tradition asks us to care about book bans and erasure of history even when our own stories aren���t at risk. 

[image error]That���s part of what it means to love the other as ourself: we must concern ourselves with the needs of others��� including their history and lived experience. And when they are suffering, we are responsible to try to alleviate their suffering.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel z"l wrote:

���Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings. Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.���

My family immigrated to this country in the 20th century: none of my ancestors owned slaves. By and large, Jews didn���t cause these harms. But that doesn���t absolve us of our human responsibility to respond to their impacts. As the parent of a white teenager, I���m not worried that he���ll feel ���guilty��� when he learns American history. Honestly, I hope he���ll feel outraged by our nation���s worst moments, and proud of our best ones, and most of all, responsible to his fellow human beings.

[image error]Collective responsibility for and to each other is a core Jewish value. In Talmud (Shevuot 39a) we read, ������� ���������� ���������� ���� ������ / Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh��� -- all Israel is responsible for and to each other. (Shevuot 39a) The word arevim means ���mixed.��� We're mixed up in each other. We���re not as separate as we think. In the words of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, ���We do not exist independently. We inter-are.���

���All of Israel is responsible for and to each other.��� When that text was written, it made sense to say: all Jews are responsible for each other. Life was more insular then. We weren't allowed to be citizens, we couldn't own land, we were banned from most trades. Of course our sages were concerned with our responsibility for and to each other within our own community.

But in today's paradigm, I think we need to expand the sense of ���us.��� All humanity is bound up together. The whole planet is bound up together. And the biggest challenges that face us know no borders. The climate crisis. White supremacy, Christian nationalism, antisemitism. The sowing of mistrust in elections and in the justice system. The banning of books, the erasure of history, disinformation and misinformation... These impact all communities. But we can respond to them as Jews, with our tradition���s wisdom and our tradition���s tools.

Today is one of our tradition���s best tools for honing and strengthening our sense of responsibility to each other, to ourselves, and to our Source. Every year Yom Kippur offers us a day of reflection and realignment. Where are we not making the right choices, or not doing enough, or falling down on the job?

For places where we miss the mark in our spiritual lives, Yom Kippur atones. Maybe we didn���t take advantage of Shabbat as a weekly day of soul-replenishment. Maybe we thought we were too busy to bless our food with gratitude, or to study Torah and Jewish wisdom. These are missteps between us and our Source, and tradition teaches that this day wipes the slate clean of these mistakes: we get to start over and try again.

[image error]For places where we miss the mark in our ethical and interpersonal lives, Yom Kippur does not atone until and unless we do the work of teshuvah. In her stunning book On Repentance and Repair, R. Danya Ruttenberg outlines the five steps of that process, and they are: Name where we've caused harm. Start to change. Make restitution as best we can. Apologize. And make better choices next time. 

This is lifelong work. It's meant to be lifelong work. It asks us to carve new grooves of habit. To notice our blind spots and work to overcome them. To do better than we did before. 

Making restitution is often where the work gets difficult, because it asks something of us. This is the work of making someone whole after harm. The Hebrew �������� / l���shalem means to pay what we owe, and it comes from the same root as shalom, wholeness and peace. This isn���t just fiscal; it���s also spiritual.

Notice how many of our prayers tonight are in the plural. ���For the sins we have sinned against You by������  The work of repair will also be in the plural: it takes all of us. Not because we ourselves caused the problem -- maybe we did, maybe we didn't -- but because we are responsible to each other. 

Put plainly: I don���t care who broke it. I want to know who���s going to fix it.

If we���re living our Jewish values, part of the answer has to be ���us.��� Judaism calls us to love the stranger, help the refugee, feed the hungry. Instead of saying ���that���s not my problem,��� we embrace our collective responsibility for each other. We cultivate empathy and connection. We make a practice of teshuvah. And we find meaning in making things better for others, however we can and for whomever we can.

The prayer Kol Nidre reminds us that we always make promises we can���t keep. Every year we gather to ask God to see us through gentle eyes and to absolve us of the vows we make that turn out to be beyond our capacity. Even so, I believe it���s worth promising ourselves and each other that we will do what we can. We must do what we can. Even though a year from now we���ll find ways in which we fell down on the job. Even though it won���t be enough. Because the alternative is to shrug and let injustice stand. 

In the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King z"l,

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

This sacred day calls us to look with clear eyes at where we've missed the mark, and to recommit ourselves to doing better. Even if we ourselves aren���t responsible for the mistakes of the past, or even the mistakes of the present, we���re responsible to each other and to our community and to the stranger and the refugee and to our democracy and to our planet. 

What would it feel like to live with full awareness that we are ���������� ���� ������ / arevim zeh ba-zeh, mixed up with one another, responsible to one another ��� to all of one another? What would our teshuvah look like then? 

And honestly, isn���t that who we want to be on this earth?

May our prayer and song and fasting and contemplation on this holiest of days galvanize us to live this highest Jewish value in all the days to come.

This is the sermon I offered on Kol Nidre at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the shul's From the Rabbi blog.)

Connect: Rosh Hashanah Morning 1, 5784 / 2023

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���So what are you going to talk about, Rabbi, with the world as it is?���

[image error]We all know the world is on fire. Climate catastrophes continue. Our democracy feels fragile in ways I don���t need to describe ��� you���re living them too. In many parts of this country, rights are under attack: my right to decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy, or the rights of people like my friend Rabbi Daniel Bogard in Missouri to pursue appropriate medical care for his trans son. 

This is our world, and the road to repair will be long. The climate crisis isn���t going anywhere, and I don���t think a quick fix will do it for democracy or human rights, either. The emotional and spiritual impact of living with all of this can be heavy. 

Over the winter, I picked up a new coping mechanism: learning Arabic on Duolingo with a rabbi friend. Any time I caught myself doomscrolling, I���d open Duo and practice Arabic instead. His resolve to learn had come from a recent trip to Israel and the West Bank. My resolve to learn was because I hoped to travel there.

[image error]Learning a new language is an adult is humbling. After about nine months, I can say, or slowly read, things like �������� ������ ������/ kahwa Seth tayyib, ���Seth���s coffee is good!��� or ������ �������� �������� ���������� ������ / hadhe matbakh wesia alhamdulillah, "this is a spacious kitchen, thanks be to God!" Basically I���m a pre-schooler. 

I have a long way to go before I can engage in meaningful dialogue. Still, learning Arabic connects me outward, instead of stewing inside about all the things I can���t fix. And every word I learn brings me one step closer to being able to connect across what can sometimes feel like a vast chasm.

[image error]In early summer a few of us from this community went to Israel with members of two New York city shuls. At the end of our first full day, our dinner was in the home of Doris Hiffawi in an Arab neighborhood of Yafo. She introduced herself as Christian Arab Palestinian Israeli. 

Doris is Israeli: she���s a citizen of the state of Israel. She's Arab and Palestinian: her lineage is Arab, her first language is Palestinian Arabic, her family has lived in Jaffa for over 100 years. And she's Christian, which is the majority religious tradition here, but very much a minority one there.

[image error]Doris welcomed us into her elegant home with music and dancing. She and her mother had cooked us a spectacular meal of maqluba and shakshuka. She told us about being a minority within a minority several times over ��� an Arab citizen of Israel, and a Christian in a majority-Jewish state and in a majority-Muslim Arab world. She talked about choosing empowerment as a woman in what we might think of as a fairly patriarchal culture. She runs a small business welcoming strangers ��� Jewish Israelis and tourists like us ���  into her home for coffee or a meal and conversations.

And as we were departing, I managed to haltingly tell her, in Arabic, that ���������� ������ ������ �������� ���������� el-ekil jayyid jiden shukran jazilan -  the food was very good, thank you very much. 

Doris Haifawi speaks excellent English. Her Hebrew is gorgeous and fluent, unlike mine. I'll never forget the way she beamed and clasped both of my hands and called me habibti when I thanked her in my slow and clunky Arabic. She had extended herself to us by opening her home and her story. When I made an effort to speak her language, I was extending myself to her, and I could feel the change between us. 

*

This morning's Torah reading is ��� to use a rabbinic term of art ��� a doozy. Sarah conceives a son whom she names Yitzhak, "Laughter." Maybe you remember that Sarah had been barren, so she gave Avraham her handmaiden Hagar, "The Stranger," and with Hagar he fathered Yishma'el, "God Listens." 

Now Sarah sees Yishma'el �������� / m'tzahek, playing with Yitzhak. It's not clear what that means. Rashi says he was doing something inappropriate, maybe engaging in idol worship. Ibn Ezra says he was just playing around, like kids do. The word m'tzahek shares a root with the name Yitzhak: was Ishmael pretending to be his brother? Part of Torah's richness is that it can support all of these interpretations and more.

[image error]But there's not much ambiguity in Sarah's response. She says,���Send away that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share the inheritance of my son.��� Even the language feels dehumanizing. 

It���s possible that Sarah lashed out at Hagar because of her own trauma. Twice, when she and Abraham were traveling, he lied about her identity and pretended she was his sister. He was afraid that if people knew she was his wife, they would kill him and claim her.  Sarah even wound up in Pharaoh's harem at one point, though Torah is silent about how that impacted her. 

I can say this: we know now that when we don't work through trauma, we often unconsciously perpetrate it on others. Maybe those who wrote down the ancient stories in Torah knew that on some level too, even if they couldn���t yet articulate how putting a woman at risk of sexual assault could be traumatic. 

In Islamic tradition, the expulsion of Hagar is seen as a necessary beginning to the story of Islam, foreordained by all-knowing God. In Jewish tradition, many commentators have wrestled with what appears to be Sarah���s deeply unethical act. 

Torah is a powerful mirror for the self. Maybe we resist this piece of Sarah's story because we know how easy it is to "other" someone, to see them as unworthy of our time or care. "I don't want to share what I have with somebody like that. Let them fend for themselves somewhere else.��� 

And maybe that's why Torah tells us, over and over, �������������������������� ���������������������� �������������������������� ������������������ ������������������ ����������������������, "You must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Deut. 10:19) Torah is saying: our history must spur our empathy.  

According to Talmud (Bava Metzia 59b), Torah gives us this mitzvah 36 times. Love the stranger. Do not wrong or oppress the stranger. Care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. In R. Danya Ruttenberg���s words:

���Everyone who has resources must ensure that those who are most marginalized are able to access some of those resources��� [These] aren���t Divine Suggestions, they���re commandments.��� 

And they are so core that for at least two thousand years, they have been first among the critical mitzvot that we enjoin upon someone who joins the Jewish people. (Yevamot 47a)  

Reading again about how Sarah othered Hagar ��� literally pushed her out of the tent and into the wilderness ��� I am here to say: we can be better than that. We can commit ourselves to not treating the stranger that way, to not othering anyone. 

And I also need to acknowledge that power matters, and that our various identities impact how safe we are (or aren���t) with people unlike ourselves. 

[image error]A thought exercise: imagine you���re a white man walking down a street at night. Notice what anxiety you do or don���t feel. Now imagine you���re a white woman. Maybe in your imagination you feel a bit less safe. When I was a teenager my mom taught me how to hold my car keys like a spiky weapon in my fist in case a man came after me. 

Now imagine you���re a woman of color. Probably feeling even less safe, because in addition to sexual violence, you���re also worrying about racial violence. Now imagine  you���re a queer woman of color: all of the above, plus homophobia. Imagine that you���re transgender or gender non-conforming, and the danger rises even more. We can see how risk increases as identity becomes more marginalized.  This too is an exercise in empathy: remembering that when I feel safe, someone else might not. 

Torah obligates us to love the stranger / the ���other��� and to help those in need. And sometimes the people who see us as ���other��� are actually dangerous to us. Our job is to discern when to reach out beyond our comfort zone, and when to withdraw in self-protection. For instance, I would not feel safe extending care toward someone who thinks Hitler had the right idea. Granted, I���m not sure how someone with those views changes, if not through genuinely meeting people like us. But our safety matters. 

Working to end bigotry and othering is collective work. We���re in it together, and that togetherness is key. It���s ok to say, ���this one is too personal, I need an ally to step up for me.��� I don���t feel safe extending myself toward a neo-Nazi, but someone who���s not Jewish could do that work. Meanwhile, I���m a cisgender white woman, so I can stand up for my trans beloveds and for people of color. 

Connection across difference, allyship, the pursuit of justice, empathy: these are lifelong practices. 

*

 A few weeks ago, the following question came my way: 

"Where do we find hope and renewal when everything looks awful? You probably don't have an answer, but I would really like for a spiritual leader to talk about how to deal with the world right now without falling into despair."

We find hope in taking action. We find hope in connecting beyond ourselves. We find hope in helping the stranger, and in standing up for each other. We find hope in resisting doomscrolling and doing something. 

This doesn���t feel like ���enough��� when the world is as broken as it is. But compared with doing nothing, it���s everything. 

In the words of Vanessa Zoltan, a Jewish atheist chaplain whose parents survived the Shoah:

[T]]his is the lived truth of probably half the globe, right? That at any moment you might have to leave. And so you keep your eye out for who could help you... But also at any moment, someone else might be the person who needs to leave or needs help. So keep your eye out as to who you can help.

[image error]Here's one way to connect: my family is part of the Haiti Host Team, working to resettle a Haitian refugee family locally. Yousemane and Josnel came here in July via the Welcome U.S. project. Our work is coordinated by Bridget Spann at First Congregational Church in Williamstown, and I���d love for members of our community to take part. ���Welcoming the stranger��� doesn���t get more literal than that.

Or: reach out to be trained on the security protocols here so you can be a door greeter at services, helping our community stay safe even as we literally welcome people in.  Or maybe in the new year you���ll feel called to join up with our friends in the New Hope United Methodist community to re-start our participation in Take and Eat, the weekend Meals-on-Wheels program that Ed Oshinsky brought to us years ago, which we didn���t have the volunteer power to continue once the pandemic began.

When we help others we galvanize our sense of agency, which matters because feeling powerless leads directly to despair. And: doing this actually makes us feel better. So says Dr. Carolyn Schwartz, a professor at UMass Medical School. She arranged regular peer-support phone calls for people with multiple sclerosis... and found that those who offered support were helped more than those who received the support. 

It turns out that the best way to be spiritually nourished and to feel hope is to extend oneself to someone else. Helping others is a way of helping ourselves; we're not actually as separate as we think. 

So much is broken: the climate, public trust, the national body politic, our capacity as a nation to even agree on a shared set of facts.  Pretending it���s not broken doesn���t serve us. But we can reach into our tradition for the spiritual tools that do serve us, and I think this is one of them. 

The Hebrew word mitzvah is related to the Aramaic tzavta, to connect or join. A mitzvah is literally something that connects us: to each other, to our traditions, to our Source.

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The imperative to love the stranger and to lift up those who are marginalized are among our most core mitzvot. They���re central to who we are as Jews. They���re also at the literal heart of Torah. Torah has a chiastic structure: what���s most important is in the middle. And this verse is in the middle of the middle book, Torah���s deep heart.

On Yom Kippur afternoon we���ll hear instructions to provide for those in need and to act justly, leading up to the verse at Torah���s heart: ���Love your neighbor / your other as yourself.��� (Lev. 19:18) And how do we show that love? By feeding the hungry and acting justly. It all comes down to loving the stranger and helping those in need and doing what���s right.

This is the life-giving spring in the desert of our wandering. And it���s up to us whether we let it become choked with sand, or whether we help ���justice well up like water, righteousness like an unfailing stream.��� (Amos 5:24)

These are the words I offered at First Day Rosh Hashanah services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the congregational From the Rabbi blog.)

Ready or not

The Torah table's in place. The chairs are arranged, and the music stands, like one-footed angels. The microphones, angled just so. The Torahs are wearing white holiday clothes. Prayerbooks wait in tidy stacks. Rolls of stick-on nametags sit beside baskets of printed holiday bracelets. The piano is tuned. The slide decks are ready. The sermons are ready. The blog posts are ready. My white binder of sheet music sports a rainbow of marginal tabs, colorful stepping stones through each service. As for my soul? Just now a spoonful of honeycake batter called her back from distraction, saying: ready or not here we go.

Dear Mom

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Dear Mom: All last week I kept thinking of the time you were here for Selihot. You must have visited early without Dad that year. I remember the high-heeled sandals I wore that night. They were covered in linen, striped in red and orange and coral. Not my usual style, but I knew you would like them.

What did you think of our earnest tradition of writing down our mis-steps from the old year in order to begin to let them go? I can't remember any conversation about it at all. You were never one for regrets. The life of the party, absolutely. But introspective? That's not the word I would've gone with. 

Still, you loved the music of this season. I know you loved both of the melodies we use for Avinu Malkeinu, which you used to play on the piano at this time of year. I can still hear you playing that, and Yerushalayim Shel Zahav -- to this day I can't hear that without coming close to tears. 

Your grandson will be playing the double bass at high holiday services this year. You would kvell, if you were here. Meanwhile 8th grade school picture day was yesterday. If it were going to be cold, he told me, he would want to wear one of Papa's sweater vests and one of Papa's ties in his photo this year. 

You have two great-grandsons now. I imagine you saying, what amazing adventures they will have! You had such a fundamental optimism about the world -- rooted maybe in your own experience of growing up safe as a Jew here after the Shoah. You always seemed confident that good things lay ahead.

It's hard to feel that kind of full-throated optimism now, after COVID, after January 6, as climate crisis intensifies. How would you have responded to all of those? I can't imagine. It's too far from the you I knew. The world felt different to me when you were alive, and not just because you were alive in it.

But I can imagine you dropping in on our Selihot services from Olam Ha-Ba -- maybe with your parents in tow, because I knew and loved them, and they knew and loved me -- and singing along. I wore your necklace of big amber beads as though it were a talisman that could summon you. Maybe it did.