Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 178
September 19, 2013
First morning
I wake to the sound of feet on the stairs, but keep my eyes closed so that I can pretend to be startled when our son shouts "boo!" from the bedroom door. This is how mornings begin, these days. We cuddle for a while, and then he says -- as he does every day -- "I was thinkin'..." He pauses for dramatic effect, then goes on. "You could put on your robe-in, and come downstairs, and make me some waffles, and put on some cartoons, and then you could shower!" And that's what we do.
Once I am dressed for the day, I take up my lulav and etrog. "I'm going out to the sukkah," I tell him. "Do you want to come?" At first he says no, he wants to watch cartoons, so I come out here alone. It's a stunning late-September day: clear, sunny, bright blue sky. Our sukkah sparkles, tinsel garlands reflecting the early morning light. I make the blessing, shake my lulav in all six directions, sing some of the psalms of Hallel.
I am interrupted by a shout from the deck. "Does this one go on this foot?" It's our son, wanting to confirm right and left before putting on his sneakers and padding out to join me in the sukkah. "Daddy built this sukkah an' I decorated it," he tells me proudly. He gets up on the stepstool to admire the little birds which he so proudly hung on one of the rafters before the festival began. "One is for me," he says, "and one is for Daddy, and one is for you!"
Then his attention turns to the lulav. "What's that," he asks. I tell him it's a lulav, and that the fruit is called an etrog. I encourage him to smell the etrog; he makes a surprised face at its strong scent. Then he says "It goes on the roof." He thinks the lulav is more schach, roofing branches; not an unreasonable theory, actually. I tell him that if I can find last year's lulav, which might be in my study somewhere, we can add it to the roof -- but this one is special; it's for shaking in all different directions and bringing blessings. I pick it up and show him. Then he asks if he can try.
His hands aren't big enough to hold the lulav and etrog together, so he just holds the lulav. He wiggles it this way, that way, the other way. "Blessings over here," he crows. "Blessings over here!" And then he gets bored and puts it down and wants to run around the yard looking for more branches for the roof, which is okay too.
It is such a beautiful morning, this first day of Sukkot 5774. I don't know how to end this post except with this deep wash of gratitude. For the pileated woodpecker and the rooster calling in the distance. For the quiet hum of the crickets and the chipmunks chasing each other in the first rustling fallen leaves. For this airy little house which my sweetheart built and the sparkly adornments which suited our son's aesthetic just so. For this beautiful tall boy with his curiosity about everything. For everything.
September 18, 2013
The four in-between days
There are four days between Yom Kippur and Sukkot.
In the old Pesach counting song I learned as a child, four are the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. These days I tend to count six matriarchs, including Bilhah and Zilpah, the other two handmaidens from whom the twelve tribes descended. (With today's consciousness, ignoring them seems to smack of a kind of classism; I'd rather be inclusive in my davenen.) So it's hard to connect these four days with those four foremothers.
But four suggests the four letters of the Tetragrammaton; and it suggests the four worlds of action, emotion, thought, and spirit.
If each of the four days between the holidays represents one of the four worlds, then perhaps we began with a day of assiyah, action and physicality, and today we move into the day of atzilut, spirit.
It's customary to begin building one's sukkah right after Yom Kippur. (Some make a practice of driving the first nail after the sun has set on what was Yom Kippur day.) That's definitely an assiyah act, an act in the physical world. On Sunday, Ethan built the frame for our sukkah out of wood and screws.
The next day was our day in the world of yetzirah, emotions. I find that my emotions are always heightened during and after Yom Kippur. Something about the long day of fasting, singing, praying, chanting, standing, yearning -- it opens the floodgates of my heart and they often stay open for a little while. On Monday, our son and I gathered some branches for the sukkah roof. Creating a safe container, maybe, for all of that open heart.
Then comes the day in the world of briyah, thought and intellect. A day for intellectually processing everything that has transpired since this season of teshuvah began back at Rosh Hashanah. Or maybe back at the start of Elul. Or maybe back at Tisha b'Av, the fast which falls two months before Yom Kippur. On Tuesday I did a lot of thinking. And our son and I pondered where best to hang the various decorations which we had saved or procured.
And now it's the day of atzilut. The day of spirit. The last day before Sukkot. Tonight at sundown the festival begins.
These four days are meant to be days of integrating whatever we received at Yom Kippur. Once upon a time the High Priest went into the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur and, some teachings say, received a new name for God. Today there is no High Priest; each of us must serve that function in her/his own way. Our old names, our old partzufim (literally "masks" -- think faces, archetypes, ways of seeing God) grow worn over the course of a year of use. On Yom Kippur, we davened with all our heart and all our might in hopes of receiving a new name for God -- a new way of understanding God -- a new insight -- new way of relating to holiness.
And whatever came down for us on that holy day, we have these four interstitial days to integrate it. To install that new name, as my teacher Reb Zalman likes to say, on the hard drive of our hearts.
It's been impossible, this year, not to see Sukkot through the lens of the flooding happening in Boulder. Sukkot is many things at once: a harvest festival, a remembrance of the harvest huts in which our ancestors once dwelled while harvesting their fields, a remembrance of the temporary shelters in which our ancestors dwelled during the Exodus from Egypt. It's also a festival of impermanence, when we leave our safe and stable homes and spend a week "living" (or at least dining, learning, and rejoicing) in flimsy temporary shelters with leaky roofs. It's one thing for that to be a voluntary practice, as it is for my family and me. It's another thing entirely for the many in Colorado who have had no choice but to leave the homes they thought were safe and stable.
The shviti image I've included in this post (drawn by Morton Breier) features the Jewish Renewal chant which says that in assiyah, in the world of action and physicality, "it is perfect." What does it mean for us to consider this physical world to be perfect when there is so much suffering in this world? Maybe the "perfect" is aspirational -- maybe we can only get there if we try to take care of one another when there is need. If you are able to participate fiscally in that work, please know that the Allied Jewish Federation of Colorado has set up a 2013 Boulder Relief
Fund; 100% of donations will go to support victims of the flood. You can also donate to support my teacher R' Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and his wife Eve Ilsen as they work to rebuild what they have lost; or to Bonai Shalom, my friend R' Marc Soloway's shul, which was badly damaged by the flooding.
May our journey into Sukkot be meaningful and sweet. May each of us integrate whatever we received on Yom Kippur into our whole being. May we be mindful that even as we celebrate willing embrace of impermanence, others are daily confronted with impermanence they did not choose. May our week of rejoicing in our little temporary houses strengthen our willingness to tend to those in need, here and everywhere.
September 17, 2013
To Die Next to You: poems and drawings by Kamenetz and Hafftka
Poetry and drawing are brothers that emerge from the dark of sleep holding hands -- bringing fresh images out of the vividness of dreams, giving birth to strange monsters who may be saviors, and charging words and paint with electricity which streams from the place in the soul where love and pain are one word.
That's the descriptive paragraph on the back of To Die Next to You, a collection of poems by Rodger Kamenetz accompanied by drawings by Michael Hafftka. These are startling, exquisite works -- in both genres.
But now the foundation must be ripped out
And a new one dug. The earth has teeth.
It's no place to go barefoot, it's raw.
Blood clay. If you find an old bone,
Be sure it's not canine before you call 911.
That's from "After the storm: a brick as fragile as a dream." The accompanying illustration is all rusty earth (bloodied earth?) at the bottom of the frame, a light wash of pale rust giving way to a light wash of darkened sky, a set of small bricks seeming insignificant against the vastness of the frame, and at the top of the frame a malevolent eye: the eye of Sauron, the hurricane, void, destruction. (You can see a detail from that painting later in this post.)
The poems which arise out of that destruction -- which I read as Katrina, though they are intentionally unattributed to any particular disaster -- are unsettling. Fine reading before Sukkot, this. As we prepare for a week of pretend-impermanence, these poems remind me about real impermanence. "A crawlspace without a roof, dug out / like an old pocked cheek," we read in "The Forgotten." Or "Behind the city's ruptured facades / where no one gardens... Many houses were built on mud." (From "After the Flood.") I have the same visceral reaction reading about the floods this week in Boulder, Colorado.
Sometimes the sorrows are more individual:
My friend the medievalist lies on his back in the hospital,
building his strength for the arsenic [...]
I have promised to add ambrosia to his tea, and pile
magnificent snowballs with plum blood at his toes.
I have promised to sing for him, I have promised to teach him
the secret of walking up walls,
I have promised to have always authoritative in the matter
of visiting the sick and dying.
I have promised to look up the numbers of the psalms that heal,
he has refused me.
The vividness of "magnificent snowballs with plum blood" -- what a description of bandages! -- is in counterpoint to the stark flatness of "He has refused me." In the accompanying illustration, a pale figure lies still on a dark bed. The bed is solid, a slash against the page; the person seems watery, almost of a piece with the floor and the background. A bloodied wash of red fills the chest cavity. A golden ring surrounds the face: breathing apparatus? A halo? It is unsettling and sad.
But these are not all poems of trauma. Some offer surprising insights without the added zetz of sorrow. Like this one, which bears worlds of meaning packed into its short lines: "A woman," writes Kamenetz, "gets plural. When she feels / that first stir... she knows a man / has only his name / but she -- has names / in her name." On the facing page, figures are superimposed: the man, the woman, the new being springing forth from her womb.
Reading "The Door," I am reminded that Kamenetz is a dream-worker, not only a poet. Surely this is a dream poem, and a dreamwork poem. "And if I go through the door / will I be forgiven?" asks the speaker. "Will I be forgiven the imprint / I made on my child / when she was soft as butter / and I was blacker than iron?" There's particular poignancy, reading this right after the journey of Yom Kippur. If I go through the door, will I be forgiven?
"Should I go through the door then?" the speaker asks, and his unnamed interlocutor replies, "It is not a matter of should. / You must decide and no one can decide for you / which part has the lead." Who among us doesn't know that feeling? On the accompanying pages: dim figures seen through the door, one bearded and wearing a fedora, grey and peach washes of watercolor, and some darkness, and a spattering of ink bringing the darkness from the door to the rest of the frame.
These poems are wry in the best self-judging Jewish tradition. (Remember that our word for prayer, l'hitpallel, can also mean to judge oneself.) "Not to be moved by the music of the violin / Is like being a Jew and changing your last name / To Jones." (From "After Hearing Bloch on the Upper Upper West Side.") On the facing page, a figure lies in repose on an uncomfortably-curved four-poster bed, its pillars extending into the air like the legs of Kafka's beetle.
In "The History of Today," one of the collection's prose poems, we read:
I was born only to have this past. My mother taught me to worship it and my father was indifferent to radiance, like lead. So I was left alone in the temple, with the candles blown out and the incense of old spoiled prayers.
The accompanying illustration is a man, hands and feet and face smudged as though tears had fallen on his stark ink outlines. Is it too corny to say that he is each of us, smudged by tears as we struggle to reconcile everything we've inherited? Transcendent past -- a parent with religious leanings and a parent with leaden indifference to spiritual life -- all of that endless weight each of us must learn how to carry?
The title poem, "To Die Next to You," speaks in the voice of a person on an airplane who wonders what it would be like to meet death in the company of anonymous others whom we do not know. This isn't the malevolent anonymity of the cattlecar, but the simple reality of the modern world: when we travel, each of us is a stranger among strangers. The facing image is a wash of waxy darkness with pale scribbles -- falling angels? -- barely visible behind the page's dark grain. For me the most moving lines of that poem are these:
Possibly you are a secret saint,
Perhaps your death was even ordained
And I am just a packing accident, a baggage slip...
I will never have looked openly into your face,
For we each flew in secret, each in separate fear.
There's so much we never know about each other because we are too afraid to make ourselves vulnerable and ask. Is this all we are, in the end -- strangers beside one another on an airplane, each flying in secret, each in separate fear? Though surely we are also (in Kamenetz's imagery) the neighbor who brings "a welcome drink of water in the pool of her hands," we are gold "the color of pollen, and of children's stars," we are "everything joined together, my hand in your hand."
Dreaming with Rodger Kamenetz, my 2008 interview with Rodger Kamenetz in Zeek
Review of the lowercase jew, posted 2012
September 15, 2013
Six jewels from this year's Days of Awe
Marveling at how the evening's storms gave way to an incredible glow of post-storm late-evening light. Making havdalah and then singing the songs of Selichot with my community on the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah. With my mother present, too -- an extra-special gift, to see her there in our small sanctuary, looking impeccably-put-together, and enthusiastic about experiencing Selichot at our sweet smalltown shul. (It's a bit more formal where she usually goes.) That night I got to play my new guitar, and to debut my beautiful new white High Holiday tallit. The feel of the fabric and the wood under my fingers. The way my heart settles back into the well-worn groove of these words and these melodies. As Elul draws toward its close, this is the first real step on the High Holiday journey.
2.
Sitting on the floor of the sanctuary with our visiting cantorial soloist (rabbinic student David Curiel) and his wife Amberly and their almost-one-year-old daughter, on the day which would become erev Rosh Hashanah. It was midafternoon, a few hours before the holiday, and we had just rehearsed a few melodies, and we caught a moment together to play with the baby and just be together before the festival began. The synagogue was empty except for us. The chairs were all set up, beams of sunlight poured through the windows, and everything seemed to vibrate with silent anticipation.
Joining my family for a festive meal Rosh Hashanah services on the eve of the first day of Rosh Hashanah. We sang the usual round of blessings for candles, wine, challah, apples. And then as we were about to move on to dinner, our son piped up, "Mommy! You forgot to bless ME!"
Of course: every Shabbat he receives the priestly blessing after we bless candles, wine, and challah. How could he have known that this is a Shabbat custom and not a Rosh Hashanah one? Nu: a new family custom was born on the spot. I placed my hands on his head and gave him kisses as I offered the blessing he knows so well. Let him begin the new year, as he begins every Shabbat, knowing that he is blessed and that he is loved.
4.
Interstitial time: hanging out with my family at the house my parents rented in Williamstown. Sitting on the deck with my parents and with my sister and her family, watching my son play with her kids, enjoying fabulous chopped liver on good wholegrain crackers (our son preferred the crackers plain) and sipping white wine in the beautiful cool northern Berkshire late summer evening. Having the spaciousness to just be together, talking about everything under the sun.
Standing with our hazzan before the open ark at the start of Ne'ilah, the closing service. We had just spent five minutes making wordless niggunim out of many of the melodies of the Days of Awe, as people came up before the open ark to quietly whisper whatever they most needed to say to God. Then I put down my guitar and we moved into the closing stretch of the final service, which began with the final repetition of the Thirteen Attributes.
The lights were off: the room was lit only by the ark lights, the flickering yahrzeit candles, and the setting sun. I had just reconciled myself to the fact that though it had been a beautiful holiday, and I could feel that we had done a good job of leading davenen and channeling what we wanted to channel, it seemed that I wasn't going to get my own intense experience of connection with God. In that moment, I was okay with that.
And then we started singing "Adonai, Adonai, merciful and compassionate," and I closed my eyes, and suddenly I was weeping as I sang. My whole heart broken right open. God, God, full of mercy and compassion! Even in our worst moments, the times when all we can feel is failure and sorrow, God's endless mercy and compassion are open to us. I can't quite verbalize it now. But it opened my heart right up. And I was so grateful. I feel so blessed.
6.
Breaking my fast, as has become my custom, the way my grandfather Eppie used to do: with a nip of ice-cold vodka. One of my congregants (the one who leyns Jonah, blows shofar, and arranges our break-the-fast) brought the bottle of Absolut forth from the shul freezer and we raised our wee cups. "To the memory of your grandfather," he offered, "and the memory of mine, too." Nasdrovie! The liquid was cold fire going down; it spread to my fingertips, warming me. And then a few other congregants came up to me during the break-the-fast, asking, "where's the vodka in memory of your grandfather?" (So I brought it out of the kitchen and into the social hall, where others partook as they so chose.) That warmed me, too: the realization that this community which never knew Eppie thinks of him now every year as Yom Kippur ends, as do I.
Yom Kippur is over; Sukkot is almost here!
Prayer Before Building the Sukkah
for the sturdiness of my house
and for the willingness to leave it
for this chance to build
a temporary home, to remember
nomad desert wandering
and harvest houses: thank You.
Connect me, God, with all who labor
here and everywhere.
Increase my compassion
for anyone who has no home.
There is no Temple, and I do not farm:
all I can offer You
is the work of my hands
my heart, open as these walls.
The festival of Sukkot begins four days after Yom Kippur. Many of us will be building our sukkot, our little temporary houses, today in preparation for the coming festival. Here's a prayer intended for recitation before that work begins; if it's helpful to you, please feel free to use it and/or share it! This will appear in my forthcoming volume of Jewish liturgical poetry, hooray.
September 14, 2013
Isaiah, Trayvon Martin, and Yom Kippur (A sermon for Yom Kippur morning)
Several weeks ago, on the Shabbat morning immediately before Tisha b'Av, I sat down at the table in our social hall to study Torah with those who had joined us for services. We studied the haftarah reading assigned to that particular Shabbat, which comes from the prophet Isaiah, just like our assigned reading for today.
Here is a taste of the haftarah we read together that morning:
Why do you make sacrifices to Me? says your God.
I am overfull with burnt offerings; I take no delight in bloodshed.
Bring no more vain offerings. They are hateful to Me.
New moon and Shabbat when you gather --
I can't bear the iniquity of this community.
I hate your new moons and your appointed festivals.
They are a burden to Me. They weary Me.
When you spread out your hands in longing, I will hide My eyes.
When you call out in prayer, I will not hear.
Your hands are bloody with wrongdoing.
Wash yourself, make yourself clean: put away your evil acts before My eyes.
Turn from evil and do good.
Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, tend to the fatherless, plead for the widow.
Come now and let us reason together, says God.
Though your sins be scarlet, they will become white as snow.
Though they are red as blood, they will become white as clean wool.
"I hate your new moons and your appointed festivals." I tremble every time I read that passage. Because I love our new moons and our appointed festivals! I love how our tradition teaches us to mark time, to pursue spiritual transformation and teshuvah. Of course, today we offer prayers, not animals. But what I hear Isaiah saying is: because our hands are bloody with wrongdoing, God is sickened by our worship. As one of the people sitting around the Torah study table put it, on that Shabbat morning before Tisha b'Av: if we aren't also pursuing justice, our rituals are meaningless. Worse than meaningless, because they delude us into thinking that spiritual life is "enough" even if our world is unjust.
I love our rituals. I have made it my life's work to try to connect people, through those rituals and texts and practices, with God. But I hear Isaiah's words, and I know that he is right.
There's a visible tension here between priest and prophet. In antiquity it was the job of the priests to keep Temple sacrifices going, to make atonement for the people through appropriate slaughter and prayer, to maintain and lubricate the flow of blessing into the world through their service in the Temple. And it was the job of the prophets to speak truth to power. To say, what y'all are doing isn't enough; God demands more of us. God demands justice and right behavior. If you don't act justly, then it doesn't matter one bit whether you're doing the sacrifices the way you were taught. The sacrificial system isn't enough.
In our Jewish lives today there exist neither priests nor prophets. The priestly system came to its end when the second Temple was destroyed in the year 70 C.E. The end of prophecy is slightly harder to pin down, though the mainstream Jewish answer is that the era of prophecy came to an end even earlier.
We have neither priests nor prophets in today's world. But I don't think that means that the work they used to do is no longer necessary. On the contrary: I think it's our job, all of us, to be both priest and prophet for ourselves and for those around us. It's incumbent on all of us to sustain the rituals which keep our community life flowing smoothly -- and also to hear God's call for justice.
Three days before Tisha b'Av I sat with a group of y'all here and we talked about Isaiah's furious words. Two days before Tisha b'Av, we learned that George Zimmerman had been acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Trayvon Martin was seventeen, an African American high school student from Miami who went to the town of Sanford, Florida, to visit his father. One evening, he walked to a nearby 7-Eleven to get some Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea. On his return trip, he drew the attention of a neighborhood watch captain named George Zimmerman, who was patrolling the neighborhood in a sport utility vehicle and called 911 to report "a real suspicious guy," muttering "they always get away."
The police told Zimmerman to stay in his car. Instead, Zimmerman got out of the car, confronted Martin, and fought with him. Then Zimmerman shot him, and killed him. Trayvon Martin was unarmed.
And just before Tisha b'Av, Zimmerman was acquitted. Because Florida's Stand Your Ground laws, as I understand them, allow him to argue that he fired in self-defense. The law there gives him the benefit of the doubt.
I was surprised by that verdict. I shouldn't have been. Because I know that we live in a nation marred by systemic racism and injustice.
Let me be clear: I don't know of a place on this earth where perfect justice prevails, or where racism and prejudice are unknown. And there's much that I love about this nation of ours. My anger comes from that love. Because I love our country, and I want it to be better than this. And I know that it won't get better than this unless we stand up and make it so.
I am the mother of a boy. Someday he will be a teenager. Someday he will walk the streets of an unfamiliar neighborhood in the dark. He might even be wearing a hoodie, or whatever item of clothing teenaged boys think is cool in another twelve or fifteen years. And the odds of someone deciding that he is a threat, and (God forbid) shooting him, are vanishingly slim. Because my son is white.
Because my son is white, if he's pulled over while driving his car, he's not likely to be searched, or to be mistreated by the police. His African American and Latino friends will be three times more likely to be searched and frisked -- at least if things stay the way they are now. Right now, African Americans are almost four times as likely as white Americans to experience the use of force from police. [Source]
And the injustice doesn't stop there. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer than white offenders -- for the same crimes. The Sentencing Project also reports that African Americans are 20 percent more likely than white defendants to be sentenced to prison, and 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory-minimum sentences.
The Supreme Court has granted the police license to "stop and frisk," which means it's legal for police to stop someone on the street and search them if an officer has "a reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime[.]" [Source]
In New York state one recent year, 84 percent of those stopped were Black and Latino — although they comprise only about a quarter of New York's population. Contraband was only found in in 2% of the stops. [Source] But because most of those who are stopped-and-frisked are African American and Hispanic, the overwhelming majority of those arrested for drug possession are kids of color -- even though we all know that white people do drugs too. [Source]
All of this adds up to a reailty where Latino Americans are incarcerated at double the rate of white Americans, and African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white Americans. In recent decades, incarceration rates—especially black incarceration rates—have soared regardless of whether crime was going up or down. In this country today, one in every 87 working-aged white men is in prison or jail, compared with 1 in 36 Hispanic men, and 1 in 12 African-American men. One in every nine African American men between the ages of 25 and 29 is currently incarcerated. [Source] Today the US imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did during the hight of apartheid. And these statistics impact not only the young men themselves, but also their families: their parents and grandparents, their siblings, and their children.
"Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans," notes Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. She continues:
Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.
Once you're labeled a felon, you're a member of what Alexander calls an undercaste, permanently locked out of mainstream society. And the system which leads to that labeling is dangerously prejudiced against people of color.
If my son were a teenager now, he wouldn't be likely to be stopped-and-frisked, or to be mistreated by police, or to be incarcerated for posession of a few joints... because he is white. Through no merit of his own, my son is likely to be treated better than his non-white friends. No one will glare at him or follow him in expensive department stores, assuming automatically that he's there to shoplift.
My son is less likely to be arrested, and less likely to be mistreated by police. No one will ever pull him over for "driving while white," or suspect his motives and his ethics simply because he is a white boy. No one will ask or expect him to speak for all white people. If he needs legal or medical help, he'll be able to seek it without fear of bias against his white skin.
He'll experience privilege in other ways, too. When he's old enough to apply for a mortgage, it's likely that no one will deny him the mortgage because he's moving into an area considered to be a "poor financial risk" because it's inhabited mostly by people who look like him. If he gets home from a business trip and finds his front door stuck, as did Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, and has to jimmy his own lock to get in, he's not likely to be arrested for breaking into his own house.
I am grateful that my son will enjoy the blessings of liberty and autonomy. But I am angry and appalled that other people's children don't have them, simply by virtue of the color of their skin. Every child deserves the privileges I want for my son.
In 1955, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy named Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi after reportedly flirting with a white woman. He was visiting relatives, far from his home of Chicago. He spoke with a white woman who ran a small grocery store. Several nights later, her husband and his half-brother abducted Till, beat him, gouged out one of his eyes, shot him in the head, and threw him in the river. They were subsequently acquitted of his murder.
Today it's widely-understood that the murder of Emmett Till, and the acquittal of his killers, was a travesty of justice. It's easy to look at what happened there and then and to say, that was awful and it was wrong, full stop. But do we turn that same eye on the systemic racism endemic to our own moment in time?
I'm not talking about individual acts of racism or prejudice. I'm talking about a systemic reality in which people of color are persistently suspected, mistreated, disenfranchised, incarcerated, and even killed.
Most of us in this room listening to this sermon today are white. We experience privilege merely by virtue of having been born with skin this color instead of that color. And because we experience this privilege, we have a moral obligation to act to change the system. As long as our children are safe while someone else's children are at risk, we have an obligation to act. As long as we can assume we will be well-treated, while others will be ill-treated, we have an obligation to act.
Isaiah calls us to turn from evil and do good. To seek justice, relieve the oppressed, tend to the fatherless, plead for the widow.
To seek justice: not only for people who look like us or sound like us, but for all people; for every human being, created b'tzelem Elokim, in the divine image.
To relieve the oppressed: not only "our own" who experience oppression, but all who experience oppression. Regardless of their skin color. Regardless of their race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, ability or disability.
To tend to the fatherless: those who are orphaned by disease or war or violence -- and also those who are orphaned in other ways, like the 64% of African American who are fatherless, many because their fathers are in prison. [Source] (And their fathers are likelier to be incarcerated than white dads because of the arrest and sentencing injustices I touched on earlier.) Studies have shown that kids who grow up without two parents are five times more likely to commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school; and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. [Source]
To plead for the widow: the person whose spouse, whose source of support, whose source of social capital and belonging, has died and left them bereft. In antiquity the widow and orphan were disenfranchised, alone, and at-risk. They were likely to be mistreated, simply because they had no status in that society. Who are the people today in America whose lives are circumscribed in those ways? People who are poor; people who are gender-non-conforming; people who are non-white.
Isaiah demands that we create justice for those in need. Full stop. If we don't, then what does it matter how meaningful our Yom Kippur fast may have been?
I'm giving this sermon because I need to hear it. I love our rituals, our prayers, our mystical teachings; our poems and psalms, our tools for imbuing everyday life with gratitude and with spirit. But if I don't also live by Judaism's powerful ethical and moral teachings, then I deserve Isaiah's disgust.
If I don't work to change the systemic racism endemic to my nation, then I'm no better than those who punctiliously made sacrifices but didn't worry about honest weights and measures, or about people in power accepting bribes, or about murder and thievery in a city which was supposed to be righteous and just.
If we only work for justice when it directly impacts us, we're doing it wrong. And we're making a mockery of every value we claim to hold dear.
We've all been born into a system which gives us privilege by virtue of the color of our skin. It's our job to recognize that and to educate ourselves about it. It's our job to recognize our own prejudices -- not so we can beat ourselves up about them, but so we can unlearn them. And it's our job to work toward a future in which racism and prejudice are eradicated: not only on an individual level, but on a societal and systemic level.
Maybe this means becoming involved with Multicultural BRIDGE, a nonprofit organzation which aims to "serve as catalysts for change through collaboration, education, training, dialogue, fellowship and advocacy."
Maybe it means supporting the Greylock branch of A Better Chance, or hosting a Fresh Air Fund kid from a low-income New York City community.
Maybe it means reading Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and getting involved with a nonprofit organization that works to dismantle the racism in our prison system.
For instance, The Sentencing Project, which "works for a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing policy, addressing unjust racial disparities and practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration."
Or The Prison Birth Project, a reproductive justice organization in the Pioneer Valley which supports, educates, and advocates for women at the intersection of the criminal justice system and motherhood.
Maybe it means writing to our senators and congressmen in support of the policies we believe are ethical and just, and condemning the policies we believe are wrong.
As our sages remind us in Pirkei Avot, "it is not incumbent upon us to finish the task...but neither are we free to refrain from beginning it."It's our obligation to begin to build a better world, a more just and righteous world for us and for our children.
Because we are all equal in the eyes of God.
Because no one deserves to be maligned, or automatically suspected of wrongdoing, or treated as a second-class citizen, or God forbid killed, for who they are or how they look.
Because our teshuvah is meaningless unless it impels us to take action.
In his essay "On Prayer," Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehood. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, and the vision.
Our prayer here today should inspire us to examine our hearts and our deeds...and to overthrow and ruin our nation's racism and prejudice -- and our own.
Kein yehi ratzon: may it be so.
September 13, 2013
Yom Kippur and Shabbat: Lightning and Light (A sermon for Kol Nidre)
This summer, for the first time, our son has been afraid of thunder and lightning. I can't blame him for that. Thunder and lightning can be scary. Especially when you are small, and you don't remember ever having experienced them before. At times like those, even the comforting presence of your stuffed animals isn't enough: you need a parent to cuddle you and tell you everything's going to be okay.
So that's what I do. I tell him it's all going to be okay. I tell him it's only thunder, it's only lightning, it's not going to hurt him. When the lightning flashes, I tell him it's the clouds playing with their flashlights, just like he does. When the thunder cracks and rolls, I tell him it's the clouds playing their drums.
This is probably proof, if proof were needed, that I am a poet and not a scientist. I think in metaphors. We have friends who teach their kids about electrical charge building up in the clouds. I make up stories about the clouds having parties with their flashlights and their drums.
I did learn something extraordinary about lightning this summer, though.
And because they say the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else, I'm going to share it with you now. Here is what I learned about lightning, in a class on kabbalah and quantum physics which I took with R' Fern Feldman and Dr. Karen Barad at the ALEPH Kallah:
In a stormcloud, air molecules become polarized. The negatively-charged ions cluster at the bottom of the cloud, and the positively-charged ones cluster at the top.
You know how if you hold two magnets near each other, the ends which have the same charge will push each other away? The same thing happens with the stormcloud and the earth. The negative ions at the bottom of the cloud push the negative ions in the ground further into the ground, because like repels like.
The negative ions in the earth sink down low, moving away from the cloud. So the surface of the earth becomes positively charged. Now the earth and the cloud are charged in opposite directions: positive earth, negative cloud.
Here's the wild part: as the cloud sends electricity down, the earth sends electricity up. Before the lightning ever comes down from the cloud, the cloud is reaching down with its negative ions and the earth is reaching up with its positive ions.
If you look at time-lapse photography of lightning, this is what you see: the cloud sends little rivulets of light downwards, and the earth sends rivulets of light upwards. They are reaching for each other. And when they connect, most of the light goes up.
The moment I learned this, I thought about spiritual life. I thought of the story from Torah about Jacob camping out for a night and dreaming about a ladder with feet planted in the earth and a top stretching into the very heavens, with angels going up and down the ladder in constant motion. One of my favorite teachings asks: it makes sense for angels to be coming down the ladder from heaven to creation, but what's with the angels going up? And the answer is: the angels going up are our prayers. When we pray, our prayers become angels which ascend this cosmic ladder, and in response, blessings come pouring back down.
And that, in turn, makes me think of the Days of Awe, the process of teshuvah, repentance and return. What happens, spiritually, when we all get together for these services every year. In our spiritual lives, as in physics, when things get charged up, light can pour fourth. And the light comes from both directions, not just from above. The light comes from our yearning toward God, and from God's yearning toward us.
Tonight is a night of yearning. Tonight, in every Jewish community in the world, we are making teshuvah, turning toward holiness, aligning ourselves in the right direction. On a spiritual level, every electron in us is reaching for God.
Here's another thing I understand now about lightning: when the concentration of ions becomes dense, lightning becomes visible. But even when we can't see the ions, they're there. This too strikes me as a metaphor for spiritual life, especially life in community. Even when we're not all together in this room praying at the same time, we're part of something greater than ourselves. That something-greater, that sense of community, is not always visible to the naked eye -- but it's always there.
One photon is an impossibly small light. A hundred photons, more light. A hundred million photons, exponentially more light. Our hearts and souls are the same way. Our spiritual energy is greater when we're all together. When we come together to make teshuvah during the Days of Awe, we're like those positively-charged ions in the earth during the storm. Together, our combined energy makes it possible for us to reach up to the heavens in a more powerful way.
Here's one of my favorite teachings about spiritual life and light. This comes from the writings of Rabbi Shalom Noach Barzovsky, the Slonimer Rebbe, from Belarus. Here's what he teaches: every Shabbat, we receive the light of the Shekhinah.
The Shekhinah is the aspect of God which is immanent, manifest in creation. Not up there, out there, on high -- but here with us, embodied, in the world. Every Shabbat, teaches the Slonimer, the light of the Shekhinah shines in and through us, and this light cleanses our souls. Shabbat is a deep spiritual cleansing.
Yom Kippur is sometimes called Shabbat Shabbaton, the Shabbat of Shabbats. And the Slonimer teaches that on Yom Kippur, too, this same transformation takes place. On Yom Kippur, we are bathed in the light of Shekhinah and our souls become pure. This, he says, is what atonement means.
There are three Hebrew words which we use when we ask God to forgive us: s'lach lanu, m'chal lanu, kaper lanu. "Forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement." We'll repeat this refrain several times over the course of Yom Kippur.
Every day of the regular year, during the Amidah, we ask for forgiveness and pardon. Forgiveness and pardon are everyday experiences. But this notion of kapparah, atonement, is unique to today. For the Slonimer, "atonement" means that the light of the Shekhinah shines in our souls and removes the corruption or inner impurity caused when we sin.
We may not be comfortable with the idea that we besmirch our souls each time we sin. But I think what he's saying is, our misdeeds change us. Think back to a moment when you did something really wrong. I'm not talking about speeding on Route 2 through Charlemont or keeping a library book out too long; no offense to our traffic cops and librarians, but I'm talking about something bigger. Think of a time when you were cruel or unkind. When you repeated ugly gossip. When you looked down on someone. When you turned away from a person in need.
We all do these things. And when we do them, they have an impact on us. They leave a kind of residue behind. Over time, that residue accrues, like plaque hardening our arteries. Our misdeeds create a kind of karmic build-up. On Yom Kippur, the light of the Shekhinah shines into us and dissolves those clogged-up places.
All year long, we ask for pardon and forgiveness: either in the ritualized words of our liturgy, or on a case-by-case basis whenever we realize we've screwed up. Either way, asking for pardon and forgiveness enables us to cleanse the schmutz which gets attached to us on the outside. But we still need a kind of inner refinement to cleanse our deepest interior places. That's what Yom Kippur does.
Another understanding: s'lichah and m'chilah, forgiveness and pardon, repair the damage we do when we sin against other people. But kapparah, atonement, repairs the damage we do when we sin against the Holy One of Blessing.
A sin against another person: that's easy to understand. These are sins with direct objects. I do something to you. And then I need to ask your forgiveness. But what exactly is a sin against God?
Some say that when we fail to observe the mitzvot which are designed to give our lives meaning -- regular prayer, lighting Shabbat candles, giving tzedakah to help those in need -- we sin against God. These mitzvot are our system for mindfulness and meaning, and when we ignore them, we're insulting their Giver. Some say that when we squander the Earth's precious resources, we sin against God, because God put the Earth in our keeping.
Others argue that when we sin against each other, we're actually sinning against God, because there is a spark of divinity in each of us.
Here's another teaching, from 18th-century rabbi Chayyim Yosef David Azulai: "The cries of a broken heart can purify us on the outside, the face we present to the world. But when it comes to the inner damage we do to our souls when we err, that inner tum'ah can only be cleansed when the light of the Shekhinah shines inside us. When God's light shines in us, this has the power to cleanse." Like the Slonimer, he teaches that asking each other for forgiveness can cleanse us on the outside, but on the inside, the only way to heal our damaged souls is to receive the light of the Shekhinah on Yom Kippur.
And, of course, in order to receive that light, we have to open our hearts and souls... and we have to believe that we deserve the light. We have to know that deep down, ultimately, in the most fundamental sense, we deserve to be made clean.
On Shabbat, God's light shines in us and through us and we are cleansed.
On Yom Kippur, God's light shines in us and through us and we are cleansed.
And when we can experience them both together...? What an amazing opportunity. Today we have a unique opportunity to open ourselves up to light. We can be like lenses. God's light shines into us and through us, and we refract that light into the world.
One of Judaism's most central teachings is that sacred time is special. It's kadosh: holy, set-apart. This doesn't just mean you don't go to work. It means that the day itself is different. It vibrates with a different energy. And when we expose ourselves to that, when we really put ourselves into this different energy field, a deep kind of personal and spiritual transformation is possible.
Today -- Shabbat and Yom Kippur, together -- is a day for entering that special energy field and experiencing its light. Have you ever been outside just before a thunderstorm, and felt the hairs on your arms standing up? That's from the build-up of electricity: the clouds yearning downwards, the earth yearning up. This moment, right now, is that moment of electricity. The electric field between us and the heavens is becoming stronger as we pour our hearts and our souls into the prayers and songs of this Kol Nidre and Shabbat night.
In this moment, God is yearning down to us, and we are yearning up.
We read in Leviticus (16:30) that "On Yom Kippur, the Kohen Gadol makes atonement and purifies you from sin; when you come before God you will be purified." There is no Kohen Gadol anymore. But each of us can be our own High Priest. On this day, we can go inward to our own Holy of Holies, to the hidden sacred spaces of our deepest heart and soul. We can go inward and throw the windows wide open, and let divine light shine in.
On Shabbat, we're called to relax and stop doing. To sink into a different headspace and heartspace; to recognize that subtle shifts can take place in us when we experience that special kind of time. On Yom Kippur, the same is true. Today we're called to open our hearts, to open our souls, and to trust that the work of transformation and purification will happen. That when we turn to God seeking to be cleansed, God will do the cleansing.
Have you ever seen a sonic cleanser? People use them to clean coins, watches, surgical instruments, jewelry. My dad has a small one. When I was a kid, I used to love going into his closet, where the sonic cleanser was kept, and watching it work its magic. You put a smudged and dirty thing into the basket; you fill the chamber with plain ordinary water, and submerge the basket in the water; and you turn it on. Sound waves penetrate the water, and somehow, as if by magic, the dirty item becomes clean.
Though it's not magic -- it works with electrons, at the atomic level. Which takes me back to the ions with which I began. A sonic cleaner works at the atomic level to cleanse and purify, just as our prayers and God's light can work at the atomic level to cleanse, purify, and heal our souls.
Yom Kippur is our sonic cleanser. We immerse ourselves in the
experience of this holiday like coins immersing in the sonic cleanser's
basket. And the spiritual energy of this day vibrates at its unique
frequency, and God's light cleanses and heals our souls, and when we
emerge at the end of Ne'ilah, we are cleansed.
Take deep breaths. Breathe God in. Feel God's presence, God's light, penetrating into your every cell. Feel the unique vibrations of Yom Kippur in your bones.
I believe that God is present with us in every moment of our lives. But life intervenes, and we forget God's presence. We forget that we are made, every one of us, in the image and the likeness of the Holy One of Blessing. We lose sight of the absolute miracle that we are capable of change and growth. We forget that, like God in Whose image we are formed, we can choose mercy over judgement. We can embody kindness and compassion. We can seek to heal the broken world.
Today -- Shabbat and Yom Kippur, together -- is our day to remember who we truly are. Remember who we yearn to be. Remember what it feels like when we really seek forgiveness with our whole hearts. Remember what it feels like to be washed clean, illuminated, loved.
Today we're in the sonic cleanser. We're in the mikveh of this doubly holy day. God's light, God's vibrations, God's love wants to come pouring in to cleanse us of the karmic baggage of the last year. All we have to do is open up and let it in.
And when we reach out and let our own light shine, our souls are like the lightning coming up from the ground. When God yearns for us, and we yearn back for God -- just imagine the kind of light we can create.
(Song: We are opening up in sweet surrender to the luminous lovelight of the One.)
About lighting yahrzeit candles tonight
As our congregational administrator and I were setting up a table for tonight with a bunch of memorial candles, little folded index cards where people can write the names of those they're remembering, and boxes of matches, it occurred to me that not everyone is familiar with the custom of lighting a yahrzeit candle before Kol Nidre. So I very quickly pulled a few explanatory paragraphs together, printed them and put them in a pretty frame, and stood that frame up on the table with the candles.
I mentioned this on Twitter, and Emily Hauser suggested that I share this here, since some of y'all who read this blog might find merit in it. So here it is. It's necessarily brief; I could say a lot more! But for the moment, this will have to do. If you're lighting a candle tonight but weren't sure why, maybe this will shed some metaphorical light. And if you weren't planning to light a candle, but you have some beloveds who have died, perhaps this will inspire you. (And if you don't have any special yahrzeit candles on hand, you can light whatever you do have. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.)
(For more on yizkor, the memorial service, stay tuned -- I'll have a post on that when we reach Shemini Atzeret. The image which illustrates this post comes from the Wikipedia entry on Yahrzeit candles.) G'mar chatimah tovah / may you be sealed for good in the year to come!
About Lighting Yahrzeit Candles Tonight
Our tradition calls us to light yahrzeit (year-anniversary) candles on the anniversary of a loved one's death and also just before sundown on the eve of Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, Pesach, and Shavuot: the four times when the Yizkor (memorial) prayers are recited.
You can light a yahrzeit candle for anyone you are remembering. Traditionally we light them for parents, spouses, siblings, and children, but you can also light one for a friend, grandparent, or anyone else whom you want to remember at this season.
There are no special prayers or blessings which must be recited while lighting a yahrzeit candle. Lighting the candle presents a moment to remember the deceased or to spend some time in introspection.
In the book of Proverbs (chapter 20 verse 27) we read "the soul of a person is the candle of God." Our tradition has long regarded flames as evocative of our souls. Like a human soul, a flame must breathe, change, grow, strive against the darkness and, ultimately, fade away.
May the candles we kindle tonight in memory connect us with those we have loved and lost, and may their memories heighten and enrich our experience of Yom Kippur.
As we approach Yom Kippur
This late afternoon / early evening we'll enter into Yom Kippur and into Shabbat.
These aseret y'mei teshuvah (Ten Days of Re/Turning) have been chock-full of preparations in every realm: from the physical (setting up chairs, preparing for tomorrow night's break-the-fast) to the emotional (weathering the emotional rollercoaster of actually making teshuvah), the intellectual (finishing touches on those sermons!) to the spiritual and ineffable.
I wish I had the spaciousness to reach out to each one of you individually to ask your forgiveness for any ways in which I have missed the mark in our relationship in the last year. As it is, this blog post will have to do.
I know that I have missed the mark over the last year. If my words or deeds have caused you pain, I hope that you can forgive me.
Please know that I likewise extend forgiveness to you. If your words or deeds have wounded me, I affirm that I am doing my level best to forgive. I will not carry relationship snarls or tangles from the old year into the new one.
May we all emerge on the far side of Yom Kippur feeling lightened and cleansed. Shabbat shalom and g'mar chatimah tovah -- may you be sealed for good in the year to come.
Image source: geekindisguise on deviantart.
September 12, 2013
A communally-written Al Chet for 5774
My first Jewish Renewal Yom Kippur was at the old Elat Chayyim in Accord, New York in 2004. The retreat was led by Rabbi Jeff Roth (of the Awakened Heart Project) and Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg (who was an utter joy to learn with in rabbinic school -- his classes are probably what I miss most now that I'm a rabbi!) One of the practices which moved me most was a practice of collaboratively writing our own Al Chet prayer.
The Al Chet prayer -- "For the Sins (Which We Have Sinned Against You By....)" -- is a laundry list of places where we have missed the mark in the last year. It's written in the plural (though several years ago I wrote a first-person-singular version, which I still daven sometimes.) We recite it in each of the five services of Yom Kippur. (In a traditional setting, it's recited once silently and once aloud in each service, making ten recitations in total!) By the end of the day, the words can feel somewhat repetitive.
At Elat Chayyim that year, we were each handed index cards before the holiday began. We each wrote down, on those cards, anonymously, ways in which we felt we had missed the mark in the previous year. And at each service, the cards were redistributed anonymously, and we chanted them aloud interspersed with the prayer's familiar refrain. I found it incredibly moving and powerful -- especially because almost everything others had written down was something I could have written, too.
For the last several years, we've adapted this practice at my shul. At Selichot services on the Saturday evening before Rosh Hashanah, midway through the service, I play quiet guitar music while people anonymously write down places where they've missed the mark, things they feel they need to release in order to reach forgiveness on Yom Kippur. And then, a few days before the holiday, I collect the basket of cards and type up what's in it, and that becomes the Al Chet which our cantorial soloist and I will chant on Yom Kippur morning.
For those who are interested, here's my community's Al Chet for this year. I share it in hopes that it might speak to you, too, and might help this prayer come alive for you in a new way
My Community's Al Chet 5774
For the sin we have sinned against You by talking before listening
and the sin we have sinned against You by talking without listening
For the sin we have sinned against You by not being thoughtful of people
and the sin we have sinned against You by not expressing gratitude
For the sin we have sinned against You by being demanding
and the sin we have sinned against You by being forgetful
For the sin we have sinned against You by not calling a sick friend
and the sin we have sinned against You by not visiting those who are ill
For the sin we have sinned against You by being quick to anger
and the sin we have sinned against You by not mobilizing for necessary change
וְעַל כֻּלָּם, אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת, סְלַח לָֽנוּ, מְחַל לָֽנוּ, כַּפֶּר-לָֽנוּ. / For all of these, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement!
For the sin we have sinned against You by losing sight of the positive
and the sin we have sinned against You by not being gentle in our honesty
For the sin we have sinned against You by waking a spouse in the night
and the sin we have sinned against You by putting off unpleasant tasks
For the sin we have sinned against You by blaming others
and the sin we have sinned against You by being self-centered
For the sin we have sinned against You by not giving our children our full atttention
and the sin we have sinned against You by being impatient with our aging parents
For the sin we have sinned against You by not sharing with those in need
and the sin we have sinned against You by thinking we're better than other people
וְעַל כֻּלָּם, אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת, סְלַח לָֽנוּ, מְחַל לָֽנוּ, כַּפֶּר-לָֽנוּ. / For all of these, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement!
For the sin we have sinned against You through materialism
and the sin we have sinned against You through animosity
For the sin we have sinned against You by not letting go of our traumas
and the sin we have sinned against You by not being kind to others
For the sin we have sinned against You by wasting our time
and the sin we have sinned against You by neglecting meaningful work
For the sin we have sinned against You through resentment of others
and the sin we have sinned against You through ignoring our own flaws
For the sin we have sinned against You by ignoring the needs of our bodies
and the sin we have sinned against You by numbing the needs of our hearts
וְעַל כֻּלָּם, אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת, סְלַח לָֽנוּ, מְחַל לָֽנוּ, כַּפֶּר-לָֽנוּ. / For all of these, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement!
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