Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 215

This week's portion: blessing and curse

Here's the d'var Torah I gave yesterday at my shul, crossposted to my From the Rabbi blog.

See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.

That's how the JPS translates the beginning of this week's Torah portion: Deut. 11:26-28. I like to read it slightly differently.

Behold: this day I set before you
blessing and curse.
The blessing is when you listen to My mitzvot
and the curse is when you don't connect with My mitzvot
but turn away
and follow other gods
with whom you don't have a personal connection.

In my reading, Torah isn't telling us that if we follow the mitzvot we'll receive blessing and if we fail to follow the mitzvot we'll be cursed. As in, do the right thing and you'll be rewarded, do the wrong thing and you'll be punished. Torah is telling us that following the mitzvot is, itself, the blessing. And that being alienated from our Source is, itself, the experience of being cursed.

The word mitzvah -- you probably know this -- means commandment. You may or may not know that it's related to the Aramaic word tzavta, which means to attach or join. Mitzvah can be understood to mean not only commandment, but also connection.

I love the idea of the mitzvot as connections. They connect us with God. They connect us with our tradition. They connect us with other human beings and with the earth. They connect us with ourselves.

The classical Jewish tradition identifies 613 commandments. 248 of them are positive commandments -- do this, do that -- a number which our tradition considers equivalent to the number of elements in the human body. 365 of them are negative commandments -- don't do this, don't do that -- and that number is understood to be equivalent to the number of blood vessels in the human body.

One strand of the tradition teaches that if you have an ailment in your body, you should consult a hakham -- one who is wise in these matters -- who can tell you which mitzvah is associated with that part of your body, so you can do the mitzvah and thereby become healed. Does this sound far-fetched? It might. But I find it very beautiful.

613 may be a daunting number to approach. Some of the mitzvot outlined in Torah were only possible when the Temple was standing. So I invite you to set aside your perfectionism. Even if we can't necessarily do all 613 mitzvot, we can still aim to live in a way which connects us.

The mitzvah of daily prayer is connective. Say thank you to God for the food which sustains you; say thank you to God for waking up alive in the morning; on weekdays, ask God for what you need, because articulating your needs to God can be transformative even if you don't believe that a literal response is going to come your way. Say the bedtime shema and reconcile yourself with each day's actions before you sleep. The mitzvah of making blessings is connective. Bless bread, bless wine, bless the rainbow, bless your child, bless a stranger you meet on the street.

The mitzvah of sanctifying time is connective. When Shabbat arrives, let go of your workday consciousness. Gather the light of the candles into your heart. Stop rushing and planning and doing, and take one day of the week to emulate God and to rest, to just be. Celebrate the holidays and festivals: eat apples and honey and hear the shofar at Rosh Hashanah a mere month from now. Fast and connect with God on Yom Kippur. Rejoice in a sukkah during Sukkot. Each of these mitzvot connects you with millennia of history, with Jews around the world today, with God, and with a deep part of yourself.

You can't do mitzvot without knowing what they are. So in order to gain the benefit of living the mitzvot, you need to experience the mitzvah of Torah study. And the more you learn, the more you're able to do; and the more you do, the more connected you are; and the more connected you are, the more blessing you receive.

The Torah verses I read earlier include the idea that the curse comes when we turn away from God's path and follow other gods whom we have not personally experienced. Some of us may not feel that we've ever experienced our own God, much less anybody else's. We may not feel that we know how to have a direct experience of God.

But I invite you to consider that you can experience God -- you can experience a connection with the Source of all Being -- whenever you do a mitzvah, whether an ethical one (such as cooking for Take and Eat) or a ritual one (such as lighting Shabbat candles.) You can experience a connection with the Source of all Being when you feel love for your parent, your child, your spouse, your friend. You can experience a connection with the Source of all Being when you walk in the woods, or step outside our sanctuary, and become aware of the birdsong and the glory of the mountains.

When we do these mitzvot, we feel connected to God, and that's our blessing.

When we turn away from this path, and become distracted by the constant chatter of email and twitter and Facebook and obligations; when we imagine that our to-do list at work is more important than really connecting with our family on Shabbat; when we value money and privilege more than we value kindness and caring -- then we're disconnected from God.

There's an old joke which says that heaven and hell are both dinner parties, both featuring people sitting around a table with incredibly long forks. In hell, each person spears their own food with their own fork, and then can't reach their mouth, and goes hungry. And in heaven, each person spears some food and feeds it to someone across the table, and in this way everyone is fed, and there is joy. It's kind of cartoony, and it doesn't match the Jewish conception of heaven or hell, but I think it speaks to this week's Torah portion.

When we ignore the mitzvot, when we think only of ourselves, we go hungry.

When we follow the mitzvot, when we feed one another, we receive the sustenance we need.

Shabbat shalom!

VR Podcast 4: Elul and Teshuvah

VR Podcast Episode 4: Elul and Teshuvah.

Tomorrow we enter the new lunar month of Elul -- a perfect time for a new VR Podcast!

In this episode of the VR Podcast I talk about the lunar month of Elul, explore some ideas about teshuvah (repentance / return), share Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi's translation of Psalm 27, and close with a blessing for you for the month to come.

 

VRPodcast3-Elul

 

To listen online or download:

18 minutes, 20 seconds / 17.6 MB MP3 file

If you're so inclined, you can subscribe via iTunes.

All feedback is welcome and appreciated, always.

 

New Year's card 5773

(If you can't see the embedded image, above, you can find this year's new year's card poem at the VR New Year's Poems page -- scroll down to the very bottom to find the poem from 2012.)

Poem in CALYX

I'm delighted and honored to be able to say that one of my mother poems appears in the latest issue of CALYX, a fantastic journal dedicated to publishing womens' work. Here's their stated mission; here's some of their remarkable history. And here's a description of the journal itself, borrowed from their website:

A forum for women's creative work -- including work by women of color, lesbian and queer women, young women, old women -- CALYX Journal breaks new ground. Each issue is packed with new poetry, short stories, full-color artwork, photography, essays, and reviews.

CALYX Journal is known for discovering important writers, such as Julia Alvarez, Paula Gunn Allen, Olga Broumas, Natalie Goldberg, Barbara Kingsolver, and Sharon Olds, among the more than 4,000 writers published during our first 35 years. CALYX was the first to publish the artwork of Frida Kahlo in color in the U.S. In 1980 CALYX also f eatured work by the Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska -- the first English translations of her work published in the U.S.

That's some amazing company to be in, for sure! And so is the current issue. I'm working my way through the current issue now, and I'm loving it. I'm particularly struck by Lisa Bellamy's "To Matrilineal Haplogroup K" (After DNA testing), 's "Loons," Karen An-Hwei Lee's "Poem Washed in Tuvan Silver," Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo's "Frida's Monkey Nurse," Karen Leigh Moon's "Julekake," Susan R. Williamson's "Spring Offering With Morning Coffee."

My poem "Mother Psalm 6" appears in issue 272, summer 2012. If you're so inclined, you can subscribe to the journal, or purchase a single issue for $10.

Thanks, CALYX editors, for choosing to include my work!

Rabbi Brant Rosen's "Wrestling In the Daylight"

I've identified deeply with Israel all my life. I first visited at a very young age and have been back to visit more times than I can even count. In my early twenties, I spent two years there studying, working, and living on kibbutzim. I have family members and many dear friends who live in Israel. My Jewish identity has been profoundly informed by the classic Zionist narrative: the story of a small underdog nation forging a national and cultural rebirth out of the ashes of its near-destruction. The redemptive nature of this narrative has at times assumed a quasi-sacred status for me, as it has for many American Jews of my generation and older...

So writes Rabbi Brant Rosen of the blog Shalom Rav in the introduction to his new book, Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity, recently released by Just World Books.

In that introduction Rabbi Brant writes about his longstanding liberal Zionism, about his slowly-creeping doubts about Israel's treatment of Palestinians (and his awareness that his concerns arose more out of concern that the occupation was "corrupting Israel's soul" than out of concern for Palestinians per se), about the horrors of the Second Intifada and then Israel's military campaign in Lebanon in 2006.

It was that campaign in Lebanon which began to shake the foundations of his Zionism. "Although I certainly felt compassion for -- along with a certain tribal solidarity with -- the citizens of Northern Israel suffering under Hezbollah rocket fire, I was unable to accept the utter destruction the IDF was inflicting upon Lebanon in the name of national security," he writes.

And then came Operation Cast Lead. Rabbi Brant writes:

On December 28, 2008, I read the first news report of Israel's military assault on Gaza -- a campaign that would soon be well-known as Operation Cast Lead. On the first day of operations, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Hamas security facilities in Gaza, killing more than 225 people, most of whom were new police cadets participating in a graduation ceremony. Numerous civilians, including children, were also among the dead. By the end of the day, it was clear we were only witnessing the beginning of a much longer and even more violent military campaign that would drive much farther into Gaza.

I remember reading this news with utter anguish. At the same time, oddly enough, I realized that I was finally observing this issue with something approaching true clarity: This is not about security at all -- this is about bringing the Palestinian people to their knees.

Once I admitted this to myself, I realized how utterly tired I had become. Tired of trying to excuse the inexcusable. Tired of using torturous, exhausting rationalizations to explain away what I knew in my heart was sheer and simple oppression.

Rabbi Brant notes that "rabbis and Jewish leaders are under tremendous pressure by the American organizational establishment to maintain unflagging support for the state of Israel." This is, I think, true -- and it makes his own willingness to publicly chronicle his wrestle with these issues, these stories, and these realities all the more remarkable.

Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity is Rabbi Brant's self-curated compilation of his blog posts from Shalom Rav, so if you've been reading Shalom Rav, this material won't be new to you. But I'm finding, as I read, that reading the posts in this new setting and context -- curated by their author into a narrative which clearly shows the progression of his thinking over time -- is a different experience from reading the blog. And Rabbi Brant has chosen to reprint some of the comments from readers as well as responses he's offered to those comments, which gives the book a bit of the internet's Talmudic multivocality (and offers an example of how one can host difficult conversations in a thoughtful and generous way -- which can be hard to come by on the internet, especially on questions of Israel/Palestine.)

The choice to include commentary makes the book particularly interesting, I think. Some of Rabbi Brant's most frequent commentors disagree with him deeply. Over the course of the book, one can see conversations unfolding. Sometimes they are quite heated. And his responses are always thoughtful and respectful, even as he resists attempts at derailing the conversation. Having hosted some conversations about Israel at this blog over the years, I have a sense for how difficult that can be.

At the end of the book, he reprints an article from the Chicago Jewish News with the wonderful headline of Hell freezes over, Cubs win world series, Jews find way to disagree agreeably, about his congregation and its movement toward a new form of dialogue around Israel. The article notes that many of Rabbi Brant's congregants have children who have made aliyah and grandchildren who are settlers, and that his outspokenness about Israel and how he has come to see Israel is not always easy or comfortable for his community.

Here's an excerpt from that article, which closes out the book:

"I have very strong feelings about Israel and I express them pretty openly. My activism is very public," [Rabbi Brant] says. "That is my own truth as a Jew and a rabbi, and it is very important to me to be true to my private personal conscience."

But as the rabbi of JRC, "I also feel strongly that my job is to create the kind of environment where people, even those who don’t agree with me -- and there are many -- feel welcome to express those views and have those views heard. I respect the diversity of opinion at JRC," he says. "We may be (perceived as) left-leaning, but on the subject of Israel, we are more diverse than people think."

The largest group of congregants, he says, fall somewhere in the middle of a continuum, with some on both ends of the spectrum.

With these thoughts in mind, Rosen says, he and a number of congregants "decided together that rather than raise all this dust, it would be a great opportunity to use these emotions in some kind of constructive way."

Rabbi Brant and his congregants contacted the Jewish Dialogue Group, a nonprofit which works to foster constructive dialogue within Jewish communities about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other controversial issues, and together they developed a program called Sicha (conversation) which has helped his congregation enter a new paradigm in their communal conversations about Israel and Palestine. Reading this article as a congregational rabbi -- aware that within my congregation too there is a wide diversity of experience with and opinion about Israel; aware that I have congregants whose children have made aliyah and whose grandkids have served in the IDF; aware that I need to find a way to minister to my community without my own writing on these issues getting in the way of our relationship -- I'm moved and inspired.

Rabbi Brant Rosen is one of my role models in the difficult but important work of coming to terms with the clash between the classic Zionist narrative (a story which many of us want to continue believing -- I know I still yearn for it to be true) and some of the realities on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories. He models for me not how one would do this internal work despite his ardent Jewishness, but precisely of it; not despite being a rabbi, but precisely because his rabbinate calls him to take seriously the Jewish call to stand with those who are oppressed. And he has also taught me a great deal about how to disagree without falling into the trap of looking down on (or dehumanizing) those with whom one disagrees.

If you're interested in progressive Jewish takes on Israel and Palestine, this book is worth reading, and worth having on your bookshelf to return to again.

A poem of praise by Anne Sexton

There's an Anne Sexton poem which a friend shared with me some time ago, and which has been sitting in a file on my desktop ever since. I open it from time to time, and reread it, and am reminded of how much I love it. Today I wanted to share it with y'all.

 

Welcome Morning

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.
All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.
So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.
The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

 

I particularly love the part of the poem which begins "All this is God." And "I mean / though often forget / to give thanks[.]" And "as the holy birds at the kitchen window / peck into their marriage of seeds." And the notion of painting a thank-you on my palm for God. Like mehndi, maybe. Or the mnemonic device of tying a string around one's finger (which is one of the ways I like to think about tefillin, too.) I hope this one speaks to y'all, too.

Music for the Days of Awe at CBI

Two years ago, when I first served as cantorial soloist at my shul alongside my friend and colleague Rabbi Jeff Goldwasser ("Reb Jeff"), we put together a cd of some of the melodies we'd be using during the chagim and shared the cd with our membership.

People seemed to like it. So I did it again last year. And I'm doing it a third time this year -- this time in consultation with my friend David Curiel, an ALEPH rabbinic student who will serve as our cantorial soloist for this year's Days of Awe.

We haven't burned the cds yet, but this year I'm also trying something new: putting all sixteen tracks online so that they can be either streamed (using the embedded audio player) or downloaded (if you want them on your own computer or iPod or what-have-you.)

This year's cds features a few old favorites (among them recordings of me singing "Achat Sha'alti" and Barbra Streisand singing Max Janowski's setting for "Avinu Malkeinu") and a few things which are new (the "Modeh Ani" chant written by our hazzan David Curiel, and Shir Yaakov's beautiful new setting for Rabbi Rami Shapiro's "We Are Loved," recorded at Romemu -- among others.)

If you're interested, you can find our Days of Awe playlist for 5773 / 2012 online at my From the Rabbi blog: Music for the Days of Awe. Feel free to listen, download, share at will! The High Holidays are just short of six weeks away...

Thanks, Progress Planet!

The kind folks at Progress Planet interviewed me recently about life, my blog, and my hopes.

Here's a taste:

PP: What are your personal goals for your blog? What do you hope to achieve with it?

RB: I hope to foster conversations about Judaism — to teach Torah — to teach kindness — to teach about Jewish Renewal — to explore the intersections of different religious traditions — to explore the varieties of contemporary Jewish experience. I hope to keep myself writing about all of the above. And I hope to be part of a conscious community of people who take these things seriously, as I do.

You can read the whole thing on their site: “Many Voices” Blogger Q&A: Rachel Barenblat (The Velveteen Rabbi).

Morning Cartoons, Morning Prayer

 

I settle you with animated friends
and swirl my summer tallit
up and over to wrap my face,
tinting my world silky blue.

My intention is the deck, but
when you catch sight of me you ask
"Want to stay here, mommy?"
How could I say no? You're

one of God's most exuberant faces.
I curl into the sofa
and manage a modah ani, kiss
my tzitzit, and join you.

Bless God Who creates the light
which streams forth from this screen
and from your heart, Who creates
the love in your storybooks

and in mine, the Oneness at
the heart of all things
Who gives us capacity to change.
Today these cartoons are my prayer.

This is the twelfth poem in my occasional Toddler House series. (Here's the previous one; you can work your way back through them, and then through the first year of weekly mother poems, by clicking on the mother poems category.) It's also the latest chronicle of my attempt to maintain a prayerful consciousness even when I'm not explicitly able to make time for formal prayer. (That's been a theme here since my son was born -- see Prayer life changes, 2010.)

Modah ani is the blessing for gratitude recited in the morning. The trio of blessings surrounding the shema are, in order, a blessing for God Who creates light; a blessing for God Who creates love and manifests that love for us through the giving of Torah; and a blessing for God Who redeems us.

On a different note: deep thanks to all who left kind comments on my most recent post, about occasional brokenheartedness at the state of the world. Your responses were balm for my heavy heart indeed.

Broken world, broken heart

Sometimes reading the news makes my heart twist and my stomach sink. I don't know what to say about the horrific shooting in a Sikh gurdwara yesterday (CNN: Gunman, six others dead at Wisconsin Sikh temple). Not to mention the dreadful response of Westboro Baptist Church to the terrorist attack -- not surprising, but still depressing. This is not the America of our dreams.

I don't know what to say about the reality that as ugly anti-immigrant sentiment becomes more pervasive, Africans are routinely harrassed in Israel today. (YNet news: African diplomats in Israel: We're afraid to walk down streets.) Nor the reports of more than 50 instances last month of settlers attacking Palestinians. (Ha'aretz: Lambs to the settlers' slaughter, screaming and unheard). This is not the Israel of our dreams.

I don't know what to say about the situation in Syria. Rabbi Brant Rosen's essay Syrians Pay the Price in a Sick Proxy War is sobering. So is Marc Lynch's Preparing for Assad's Exit. I don't know enough about Syria to know whether, or how, things will get better. And these are just the posts at the top of my aggregator. Just today the Lebanon Daily Star reported a massacre which killed forty. I have no connection to Syria, but the news is pretty uniformly heartrending.

Everything I've just mentioned is huge, important, awful. Here's something tiny and grotesque: I learned this week that I've been named, along with thousands of my friends and colleagues, on a list of supposed self-hating Israel threateners. (I'm not going to link to it. Here's the Wikipedia entry about it intead.) On the one hand it's laughable. And on the other hand it's upsetting, and the fact that people chose to spend their time compiling this list makes me sad.

(The people who maintain the list are Kahanists; they're too far-out for even self-identified far-right Jews. But still. How is this a good use of anyone's heart, soul, or time?)

When I look at all of the hatred in our world today, I don't know how to find enough balm for our broken hearts. I want to hold all of this in my prayers, everyone who is suffering, everyone who has been hurt, everyone who is so damaged that they can only manage to hate and hurt others, but sometimes it's so heavy it crushes my prayers; I can't lift it up.

All I can do is close the laptop, say a prayer, and spend time with my son. What response can there be to hatred, other than teaching our children not to hate in return?