Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 221

A rabbi and a nun walk into a bar

It ought to be -- it probably is! -- the opening line of a joke: a rabbi and a nun walk into a bar...

Okay, it isn't a bar; it's a restaurant, though I do have a beer. (Who could resist a brew named Rapscallion Blessing?) And we begin our wanderings hours earlier, at Thorne's marketplace, where Drew -- happily chatting with everyone in the mall as he shows off his small wooden robot and his box of raisins -- accepts the presence of mommy's friend in the grey Buddhist nun's robes without blinking.

All afternoon we roam Northampton: from Look Park (an ice cream despite the chill, dashing about from the blue playground to the red one and back again), to Cup and Top in Florence (tea for the grown-ups, a snack for the toddler, a small indoor slide and assortment of toys, and surely every other toddler family in town), to my in-laws' apartment (where Drew demonstrates both his love of Thomas the Tank Engine and his skill at knocking down towers of blocks.) In between entertaining Drew we snatch snippets of conversation. Parents and parenting. The monastic life and how it both is and isn't similar to my householder existence. Clothing as religious signifier.

And then, thanks to my sister-in-law's willingness to babysit, we nip out to the aforementioned restaurant, where there is glorious food and even more glorious uninterrupted grown-up conversation. About what it's like to weave the words of a second language into one's own -- words for prayer or for practice, words for ideas which aren't neatly expressed in the tongue we share. About gender and the rabbinate, gender and the monastic life. About life and travel, New England and Korea, Hebrew and Tibetan, silence and chanting.

We could have talked all night. (Well: more properly, all morning -- we're neither of us night owls anymore, not given Seon Joon's responsibilities to her temple family and mine to my congregation and toddler and spouse.) As it is, we savor every moment we are given, and we part with a hug and a promise.

There is something incalculably precious about friendship between people committed to different spiritual paths. The glimmering shift between one set of lenses and the other: this is how we do it, and oh, that's how you do it, how wonderful! The same and not the same. We speak in terms of God (though, as I quipped last night quoting my beloved teacher, "the God you don't believe in, I don't believe in either") and you speak in terms of Buddha. Before meals I bless this way, and you bless that way. The differences sparkle because they're set against so very much common ground.

Equally precious, I think, is friendship cultivated over distance and time. First via blog and email. Then in person. Then via blog and email. Then via paper letters, envelopes adorned with foreign stamps and creased from long travel. Then via blog and email again. Then by -- well, walking into that proverbial bar.

Having had the thought, I can't help wondering whether this actually is an extant joke. A quick googling reveals that there are several jokes which begin "a rabbi, a priest, and a nun walk into a bar..." No offense intended to our brothers on our various spiritual paths, but we can have a good time on our own, thank you kindly. And we do. We really do.

 

I've linked to this before, but it bears rereading: Seon Joon's post Bhikkuni Ordination, April 3, 2012.

Joy Ladin's Through the Door of Life

Joy Ladin's extraordinary memoir Through the Door of LIfe: A Jewish Journey Between Genders begins with a short chapter I wish I could excerpt in full. Instead, I will link you to it; it was published in Zeek, as the essay A Blessing Over Progesterone. Here is how it begins:

Every day I say a blessing in Hebrew over my medication: “Blessed are You, O Lord our God, who has kept us, preserved us, and brought us to this time.” That blessing is traditionally said at the beginnings of holidays, on the eating of new kinds of fruit, and at any joyous occasion at which Jews want to heighten their sense of gratitude by becoming mindful of the singularity of the moment and the precariousness of the lives that have brought us to it. It is not said on the taking of medication; it is specifically not to be said over daily events, for which there are different blessings; and it is never said over a disease.

The medications I take — progesterone tablets, which I swallow whole, and sweet circles of estrogen that I dissolve under my tongue — are synthetic versions of the powerful hormones that naturally define and regulate many of the physiological characteristics of normal female bodies. I don’t have a normal female body. Born without the capacity to produce more than trace amounts of female hormones, for decades my body instead has produced testosterone, masculinizing my face, bones, muscle, hair, and skin. Though there are few aspects of my physical form unravaged by testosterone’s effects, thanks to my medication, those effects are diminishing. For the first time in my life, when I look in the mirror, I see someone who has begun to resemble — me.

Every trans person has a coming-out story. Most of these stories involve struggle for acceptance -- from oneself and from others -- and often these stories are heartbreaking. Joy's struggle takes a very particular form: she dealt with the impact of her transition while teaching at the women's college of Yeshiva University, the flagship institution of modern Orthodoxy. She writes:

Orthodox Judaism, like most traditional forms of religion, considers the things transsexuals do to fit our bodies to our souls to be sins. In my case, those sins included wearing women's clothing and taking hormones that destroyed my fertility. I was also violating customs and conceptions of gender that, while not mandated by Jewish law, are held to with religious conviction by many Orthodox Jews[.]

That conviction is so strong that Joy feared that even receiving tenure at Stern would not be enough to keep her in her job once she transitioned. And transition was necessary. "My gender identity crisis had destroyed my marriage, shattered my family, and turned me into an unwelcome stranger in my own home," she writes. Upon receiving tenure, she moved out of the home she had shared with her wife. "My children were grief stricken, angry, and baffled by the double blow of losing their happy family and the strange transformation of the father they loved."

When she explained to her dean that she was beginning the process of transition, she was forbidden from setting foot on campus. But she was allowed to return to teaching in 2008. After much negotiation (including which bathrooms she would be permitted to use), she returned to her life as an academic.

Finally, September arrived, and with it, my first happy day in a long time. After years of hiding and pretending, I was finally going to stand before my students and colleagues as the person -- the woman -- I knew myself to be. More important, after centuries of intolerance, an institution representing Orthodox Judaism was about to welcome an openly transgender employee...

My office was heaped with the same stacks of papers, the same teaching anthologies, but the name beside the door said "Dr. Joy Ladin." It was a miracle. I -- the real me -- was here, in plain sight. I walked through the halls, waiting for my transition to matter to someone. It didn't. Teachers rushed to and fro, students talked on cell phones or swayed back and forth in prayer. People had more important things to do than think about my gender.

All of that is how the book begins.

After this beginning, we leap back in time. We see a man standing in the shower, listening to his three beloved children screaming happily with their mother, "the woman he has loved and been loved by since he was seventeen." He knows he must be burning with happiness at his beautiful family, but he can't feel it. He is numb. He speaks to God -- he prays aloud -- first saying thank you, then admitting his exhaustion. "And then, as the pain of the distance between himself and the life he is living overwhelms him, he prays a prayer he knows can never be forgiven: 'If it's okay with you, and it would be okay for them, please let me die.'"

Oh, my heart.

We see Joy as a boy (these historical passages written, for the most part, in the third person -- a fine distancing technique, and a painful articulation of the extent to which that boy's childhood never felt like her own) discovering at an early age what she was...and knowing she wouldn't be welcomed by her parents if they knew. We see her learning to pass as a boy (learning to be a boy is, she writes, a separate problem.) We see her meeting her beloved in college; telling that beloved who and what she is; and agreeing to a life in which she will hide. Thus began a pattern which would continue for years:

I would be consumed by gender dysphoria and unsuccessfully seek professional help; my wife would offer me a choice between becoming myself and being loved. It was a horrible choice but not a hard one, and with practice it got easier -- almost as automatic as averting my eyes from girl-things as a child. I didn't know what life as a woman would be like, but I knew what life was like without my wife's love.

Later, Joy writes, "My wife knew something was wrong with me, but she believed -- she wanted to believe, and I worked hard to enable her to believe -- that the problem wasn't a threat to our life together, that it was a character flaw or a neurosis, a willful refusal to allow myself to be happy. Happiness was right there, all around me, like a fragrance, if only I would let myself breathe. // But for me, being a man meant holding my breath. If I couldn't breathe as myself, I wouldn't breathe at all."

This memoir is characterized both by emotional honesty and by linguistic precision. Here's one moment from the book which moved me deeply. Joy is teaching about persona poems. She writes:

I wish I could stop talking about personae in poetry and tell my students the truth -- not just the truth about me but what the truth has taught me about the image of God. I wish I could tell them how hard it can be and how necessary it is to embody that image, to find it in oneself and to find the self that can make God visible in the world. When you look in the mrror, I want to say, you see your own faces; when I look in the mirror, I see the mystery of God's creation. Look at what makes me so hard to look at. If you can see the image of God in me, you'll see God everywhere.

The image of God manifest in Joy comes through so clearly on the printed page.

As a boy, Joy came near to suicide many times. She describes the taste of Clorox flooding her mouth (although, ashamed, she found herself unable to swallow the toxic substance.) She doesn't draw the direct parallel, but it's clear that she imbibed more than her share of toxicity in other ways. And the tough stuff doesn't magically end when she transitions. Joy is open about the suffering which she knows her choice to live as herself causes to her wife (ex-wife, now) and her kids.

Part of what I love is that she writes about this journey through a profoundly Jewish lens. She writes, referencing the end of Deuteronomy:

Three thousand years late, I had finally reached the steppes of Moab. There, before me, were life and death, blessing and curse. The choice was finally clear, but now I could tell which was blessing and which was curse, and for whom. How could the death of our lives together be life to me? How could a life that was a curse to them be a blessing to me? Easier, infinitely easier, not to make any choice, to deny, as I had so long denied, the possibility of choice, to choose, if I had to choose, to simply fade away...

But that wasn't the choice I made.

Later in the book she compares herself to the patriarch Jacob, disguising himself in goatskins to fool his blind father into giving him the blessing meant for his more obviously masculine twin Esau. But mama Rebekah, she writes, knew who Jacob really was; Joy feared that once the truth was out, her mother would never speak to her again. The scene where she describes the phone call in which she came out -- and her mother's (thank God) loving and accepting response -- made me gasp with relief.

Joy describes learning to walk again, learning to talk, learning to buy clothing, learning to make choices about her hair. I don't know why it never occurred to me that coming out as trans in this way would involve a kind of second adolescence -- complete with the acne sparked by a new inrush of hormones, anxieties about one's body and one's clothing choices and one's movements, and the horrifying fear that perhaps one isn't lovable after all. Joy describes, too, the overwhelming inrush of feelings: having chosen to be herself, to become, all of the defense mechanisms which had kept emotion at bay come tumbling down.

"You sparkle," said an old friend, the first time she saw the new -- the real -- me. "You're sparkling," my therapist confirmed. "It's like a layer of pain has fallen away, said a rabbi who had known me for years. I couldn't see that sparkle -- I felt too awkward, too raw, too grief stricken -- but I knew what they meant.

I was born cis-gendered; I can only imagine what Joy describes. But I know what it is like to find one's home, to find a kind of spiritual acceptance of which one had barely dared to dream, and to come away sparkling. (That's the word I often use to describe how I am after a few days on retreat with my Jewish Renewal community.) And Joy describes her journey so poignantly that I can't help but place myself, if only for a moment, in her new shoes.

Joy writes about needing, literally, to find her new voice in order to continue teaching, the work she loves and the only space in which she had reliably been able to feel intimacy and connection. She takes voice lessons in order to be able to speak again. Once again, I find myself thinking: this is so clearly, and beautifully, a memoir written by a poet! She is delightfully attentive to metaphor and meaning.

The scene where Joy confronts God -- "You have no idea how it feels to have your children reject you" -- and then after a moment corrects herself (if anyone understands that experience, surely it is God, from Whom we so often turn away) -- is one of my favorites in the book.

The scene where she remembers a 2002 visit to the Kotel -- perhaps the most painfully gendered space in Judaism -- makes my innards twist. I know how much it angers and frustrates me, as a liberal Jewish woman, to be denied the opportunity to pray as I would wish to pray at the Kotel (see Morning prayer at the Western Wall...almost, 2008), or to read about the harassment Women of the Wall receive when they try to participate wholly in Jewish life at that supposedly most-holy Jewish place. I can only imagine what it's like to visit the Kotel and be consigned to the men's section when one's whole being is screaming to be on the other side of the mechitzah. Joy writes:

As my son and I walk closer, I feel sicker and sicker. To approach the sacred, I have to erase what, despite all the repression and resolutions and lies to myself, I know and have always known I am.

That's in 2002. There's also a 2008 visit to the Kotel, which is poignant for all the ways in which that earlier trauma is healed (Joy is now living as a woman and can't imagine otherwise) and also the ways in which she's conscious of new and different forms of suffering. (The so-called separation barrier or security fence, which seems to be successfully keeping Israelis safe from suicide bombings, often divides Palestinian villages in half, keeping families apart.) Joy writes:

According to both religious traditions, Jews and Muslims are children of Abraham.

I certainly am. I sacrificed my true self again and again for more than forty years, and for more than forty eyars I never heard a whisper of an angel telling me to stay my hand.

But that doesn't mean the angel wasn't calling.

I still remember hearing Leslie Feinberg, author of Stone Butch Blues, speak at Williams when I was an undergrad, probably in 1994. Leslie read from the book and then spoke with us about hir life. About the fear of being pulled over, presenting as a man, when hir driver's license was still legally required to say "F." The talk was eye-opening and heartbreaking. I find myself thinking of it again as I read Joy's memoir; thinking about all the ways in which our collective task of creating a healed creation, in which no one need fear living as who they know themselves to be, is not yet complete.

"I need to feel my heart becoming equal to whatever road I'm on, no matter how steep," writes Joy in one of the book's final chapters. She's ostensibly talking about cardiovascular health during a walk on a winding rural road, but the truth of the line rings clear in all four worlds. Later, she notes, "According to my voice teacher, the only way I could find my female voice was to realize that there was no difference between what I was and what I wanted to be." Sound spiritual advice, too.

Another favorite passage: the one where it is revealed that a student (who shares my name) knows Joy's story. Joy writes:

Rachel knows -- knew -- probably has always knows -- that I'm trans. When she's talked about poetry, God, dating, she was talking to me, the real me, the transexual me, the woman she knows was a man.

She sees, has seen, has perhaps always seen, me.

Bare walls, discarded computer equipment, crushed ceral, love of poetry, love of God, and all.

For what more can any of us hope than to be truly seen for who we are, and loved not despite ourselves but in and through who we ultimately are and can't help but be?

This is a brave, unflinching, beautiful memoir. If you think this is the sort of thing you would like, by all means, go and read. (And if you think it isn't, nu, try it anyway, because it's really good.) On Amazon; on BN; on the publisher's website.

 

Revised Mincha/Maariv/Havdalah siddur

Five years ago I worked with one of my nieces to put together a siddur for her bat mitzvah celebration -- a siddur for mincha, maariv, and havdalah. That siddur featured my niece's poetry, artwork, and midrash along with the basic liturgy for this time of day and this day of the week. I put the siddur online after her big weekend, and have received many requests to use and adapt it since then.

What I'm sharing now is a revision of that siddur. I've made several changes. Most notably, I've modified how I incorporate Uva L'Tzion, the prayer which speaks about redemption and encourages us to call out like the angels; I've improved the transliterations and the visual balance of English and Hebrew text on the page; and I've added a few simple images to make the pages more beautiful. And I've done a bit of abridging here and there to keep the service at a manageable length for my community.

This is a template version which does not contain any personalized material. When I use this siddur at my shul, I include the b'nei mitzvah's Torah portion (on the page which helpfully indicates "Torah portion goes here.") It's easy to also include other material from the b'nei mitzvah if s/he wants to add any creative work or special readings, and/or to customize the prayers as desired (e.g. using "Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu" or Shayndel Kahn's "It's Upon Us" in lieu of the more traditional Aleinu.)

You're welcome to make use of this siddur if it's helpful to you. I revised it for my own current use in part because my shul owns the two-volume edition of Mishkan T'filah, the Reform siddur: one volume for weekdays and festivals, one volume for Shabbat. Which is great for those with fragile wrists, who wouldn't be comfortable holding a weekday-festival-Shabbat edition all in one book...but since Shabbat mincha is in one book, and weekday ma'ariv is in another book, holding a Shabbat mincha + weekday ma'ariv service is difficult. Asking people to juggle two hardback books seems logistically challenging; handing out a simple 12-page staple-bound siddur is simpler.

This file was created using Mellel version 2.9.1; if you want to edit your own version, and you need the Mellel file, let me know. Comments / reactions welcome, as always!

 

 

Mincha / Afternoon Offering

we offer ourselves & our hearts
during the special time of Shabbat afternoon
and we call one of our own to Torah as b'nei mitzvah

Ma'ariv / Evening

a short & sweet evening service

Havdalah

sanctifying the separation between Shabbat
and what comes next

 

 

A new liturgy for Shabbat afternoon and evening
created for Congregation Beth Israel / www.cbiweb.org

ed. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat
velveteenrabbi.com | velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/

  Download MinchaMaarivHavdalahSiddur [pdf], 813 KB

The Things They Carried - a d'var Torah for parashat Naso

This is the d'var Torah I'll offer on Shabbat morning at my shul. If you're going to be davening with us, you might want to skip this post so you can hear the d'var with fresh ears!

May God bless you and keep you
May God deal kindly and graciously with you
May God bestow favor upon you, and grant you peace.

Those three verses from Numbers 6 are known as the "priestly blessing." Once these verses were recited by the priests. Today in some communities which preserve the distinctions between kohanim, levi'im, and Yisrael (priests, Levites, and everyone else), the descendants of kohanim recite these words at the end of the amidah with their hands upraised. In other communities these words are a benediction offered by the rabbi. I myself love chanting this blessing, every opportunity I get.

After this blessing, in this week's Torah portion, we read, "Thus shall they link My name with the people of Israel, and I will bless them." When we recite this blessing, we link God's name with our community; we create and strengthen the bonds between ourselves and the part of God's essence which is described by each of our many different names for God. "And I will bless them," Torah says -- the "I," of course, being God. When we recite these words, we are turning a cosmic spigot for divine blessing.

Immediately after this blessing, we read about how once the mishkan (the portable tabernacle; the dwelling-place for God) was built, Moshe consecrated it and its furnishings. Then the heads of the tribes brought carts and oxen as a gift to Adonai. On God's instruction, Moshe gave the carts and oxen to to the Gershonites and Merarites, two groups within the broader group of Levites. The Gershonites were responsible for the curtains and hangings and ropes; the Merarites were responsible for the posts, crossbars, tent pegs and so on.

But the Kohathites -- a third group of Levites -- did not receive oxen or carts, because they carried the most sacred objects, and they carried them on their shoulders. The ark of the covenant, which our tradition says contained both the whole tablets and the shattered set; the golden menorah; the table and vessels; all of these were carried directly by the men of the tribe of Kahat.

The Sfat Emet -- Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (d. 1905) -- offers a beautiful teaching about this by way of a verse from I Samuel as interpreted by the Zohar. (Bear with me! It's worth it.)

The verse from Samuel is: "The cows went straight (וַיִּשַּׁרְנָה / vayiSHARnah) along the way." The cows in question were carrying the ark of the covenant on their backs. The Sfat Emet follows the Zohar in engaging in a bit of aural wordplay, reading vayiSHARnah -- "they went straight" -- as "שרו / SHARu," "they sang." In other words: what really happened in Samuel was that the cows sang as they went. That's the Zohar's claim: "It was the Ark on their backs that enabled them to sing."

The Sfat Emet writes:

The same is true of the Levites! It is the fact that they carry the Ark on their shoulders that gives them the power to lift their voices in song. This is true also of every person who serves God. True service fills a person with light and joy. ...True worship consists of Torah and mitzvot; these of their own accord fill a person's mouth with song and exultation.

Rabbi Art Green adds:

The religious life is not meant to be a weighty burden, but one that helps us to feel the lightness and joy of knowing God's presence. The Levite who carries the ark on his shoulders is also -- or is therefore -- the one who sings! What a great message, and a typically hasidic one: life in God's service is a life of happiness and fulfillment. Like those privileged cows who merited carrying the Ark of the Lord on their backs, the service of God should so fill us with joy that we cannot keep from breaking into song.

I love this reading of the task of the Kohathites. It's not that they were extra-burdened by having to carry the holy implements on their own shoulders instead of having some oxen and a wagon; rather, their service was a blessing. It was their very service which allowed them to sing. We should all be so lucky as to be able to throw our whole selves, not only mind and heart and spirit but also even our bodies, into serving our Creator.

How do these details of who carried what and how they carried them relate back to the priestly blessing with which our Torah reading today began? In the Biblical paradigm, Aaron and his sons -- the Levites -- were uniquely privileged to do the work of serving God (carrying the various components of the dwelling-place for God), and as a result of their physical service, they were given the opportunity to serve as conduits for blessing. In our paradigm, this work is open to all of us.

When we put our whole selves, in all four worlds -- body, heart, mind, and spirit -- into service of the One, that's when we can bless others. That's when we can link God's own Name with our names. That's how we open that spigot for cosmic abundance: not merely through saying the words of the priestly blessing, but through committing our whole selves to serving others, and in so doing, serving God.

Before There Is Nowhere to Stand

I'm delighted to be able to say that my poem "In the Same Key," which appears in 70 faces (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011) will be anthologized in Before There Is Nowhere to Stand (Lost Horse Press, 2012) alongside poems by many poets I respect and admire, including Naomi Shihab Nye, Alicia Ostriker, Mahmoud Darwish, and Merle Feld -- and many poets whose work I don't yet know but am excited to discover.

In 2009, as Operation Cast Lead unfolded, editors Joan Dobbie and Grace Beeler (both Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors) issued a call for poetry. I responded to their ad in Poets & Writers, which read:

Are you Jewish or Palestinian? Of Palestinian or Jewish heritage? Please submit poetry for an anthology that strives for understanding in these troubled times. All points of view wanted in the belief that poetry can create understanding and understanding can dull hatred.

The collection which resulted from that call for submissions is now available:

In her introduction, Alicia Ostriker writes:

"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation," prophesied Isaiah in the 8th century BCE, neither shall they learn war any more.” Presently we are not holding our breath waiting for that moment. Jews have a story. Arabs have a story. Jews and Arabs can both be experts at seeing themselves as victims and the other side as implacable foes. As my engineer friend in Tel Aviv says, “It all started when he hit me back.” The story of Israel/Palestine is ugly, tragic, human. But the book you hold in your hands exists to remind you that the story is not finished.

The editors had hoped to also feature an introduction by a Palestinian poet, but were unable to make that happen. Instead they chose (with permission) to include their correspondence with, alongside two poems by, Vivian Sansour "in lieu of an introduction."

You can order the book directly from Lost Horse Press, or pre-order it from Amazon. A percentage of profits will be donated to Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam (the Oasis of Peace), a cooperative village in which Jews and Palestinians of Israeli citizenship live together in a community based on acceptance, mutual respect and cooperation. (I've written about Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam before.)

Contributors to the anthology are working on setting up readings in a variety of places, mostly in the US and in Israel / Palestine. I'm working on setting up a reading in western Massachusetts for the three of us who are local to my neck of the woods; I'll post about that once it's organized.

I'm looking really forward to reading this anthology. I suspect that I will find the poems in this collection moving, heartbreaking, uplifting, saddening, beautiful -- as I find the place, and the peoples, at the anthology's heart.

 

 

Balm to my heart: Israelis celebrate Shavuot with African kids in Tel Aviv

I follow Mya Guarnieri on twitter, so when her post at +972 -- After race riots, Israelis celebrate holiday with African kids -- went live, I read it immediately. (The race riots in question happened last week in Tel Aviv -- I wrote about them in my post For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.) Here's an excerpt from Mya's latest essay:

After last week’s race riots, the mood in the area is dark, tense, pessimistic. While our conversations took place in public, a number of Africans told me that they are scared “even right now.” These were grown men who were frightened for their physical safety on busy streets in broad daylight.

So I was moved to see a couple of bright spots in the area. The Garden Library -- the initiative of local NGOs, including Mesila -- was up and running yesterday. Asylum seekers and migrant workers were perusing the books while Israeli volunteers played with African and Filipino children.

In the grass to the side of the Garden Library, a small group of Jewish Israelis and the children of African asylum seekers marked Shavuot by reading the Book of Ruth together in Hebrew...

This sign reminds that while racism and xenophobia are huge problems in Israel society, there are some Jewish Israelis who oppose hatred of foreigners (photo: Mya Guarnieri)

The whole piece is very much worth reading.

After posting a link to her essay, Mya tweeted "Caveat to last tweet: that bright moment does not mitigate or whitewash, in any way, the prevailing racism in Israeli society." In response, I tweeted back saying "Bright moment doesn't change underlying issues, but it does my heart good."

Mya's bio on +972 tells me that she's working with an agent on a book about migrant workers in Israel. I can't wait to read it.

Sleeping and waking, Torah and revelation

Midrash holds that the children of Israel fell asleep on the cusp of the revelation of Torah. This is the reason usually given for the custom of the tikkun leyl Shavuot, the late-night or all-night study session whose name means "healing on the eve of Shavuot." The healing needed is a kind of spiritual rectification, a chance to make up for our own mistake. When we stay up late studying Torah, we are saying to God (and to ourselves) that revelation matters to us; that we want to be open to the Torah which is coming. We don't want to oversleep this time.

Curiously, the midrash also tells us that God was pleased with the Israelites, and ensured that no mosquitoes bit them that night, so they could enjoy a deep and restful slumber. Perhaps, as the author of Angels, human beings, and the Torah argues, they went to sleep because they knew they couldn't grasp the full meaning of Torah with their conscious minds. They wanted to receive revelation in their dreams. And God got that; God was pleased! But God still asked Moshe to wake them up so that Torah could be given to people who were spiritually (and physically) awake.

In the Hasidic understanding, the Torah which we know in this world is a physical manifestation of -- and also a pale reflection of -- the supernal Torah which is known to God on high. Bereshit Rabbah (a classical commentary on Genesis) teaches us that when a person sleeps, a portion of their soul ascends on high and is united with God; upon waking, the soul returns to the body. Who can know what Torah was revealed to our ancestors in that holy sleep? Their souls (or, as another midrash has it, our souls -- since we all stood at Sinai, every Jewish soul which has ever been or will ever be) ascended on high and connected with God. And then they woke up, and received revelation in a different way.

I've long loved the custom of the tikkun leyl Shavuot. Late at night, the world feels different. I can believe that revelation takes a unique form in the wee hours of the night. When I used to stay up all night for fun in college, I relished both the silliness and the philosophical insights which arose at, say, three a.m. When I did my year of hospital chaplaincy, many years later, I found that some of my deepest and most meaningful encounters took place in the wee hours. Maybe we're more vulnerable in the middle of the night. Maybe we're open to things in a way which is different than the ordinary waking day.

Of course, since Drew was born, I don't stay up so late anymore. (Indeed: he's two and a half and I still haven't shaken the habit, learned during his first year, of keeping jealous track of my hours of sleep. When I wake in the night, I can't help counting how much sleep I've managed and how much I know I still need in order to function in the new day.) I've learned since having a child that sleep is a precious commodity, not necessarily replaceable, and that when I don't have it, I don't function well.

And yet, come Shavuot -- come Shavuot, I offer God my wakefulness until the darkest hours of the night, two and three and some years even four. Over the years, I've come to see the tikkun leyl Shavuot as a mysterious blend of waking-consciousness and dream-consciousness. My body is awake and I am giving myself to the experience of Torah study: in that sense, I'm repairing the mistake made at the night before Sinai. But after a while I'm not exactly awake -- not awake in the same way as during the ordinary daytime, anyway. Who knows what the revelations may come when I'm in that strange spacey middle-of-the-night headspace and heartspace? Once a year, I have a date with God; I can lose a little sleep for that.

Still, I can't help being struck by the mixed messages in the midrash. On the one hand, God kept the mosquitoes from biting on the eve of the theophany at Sinai. God wanted to ease our sleep, to help our souls reach the deep Torah which can be accessed not with the waking mind but with dreaming consciousness. And on the other hand, God told Moshe to wake us up (and our central holiday practice is one of attempting to "heal" our error in oversleeping.) Because the spiritual, heady, dreamy aspects of Torah which we can access while we're sleeping are only part of the revelation. The other part -- perhaps the practical tangible part, the this-worldly part -- has to happen while we're awake.

This is one of the reasons I love teaching Torah poetry in the middle of the night at Shavuot. Poetry can function on levels beyond the purely intellectual. Like dreams, poems often work associatively. They recast ideas and images in new ways. Reading Torah poetry in the middle of the night feels a bit like a waking dream -- a chance to fulfil both the mitzvah of staying awake for Shavuot, and the mitzvah of opening ourselves up to the revelations in our dreams.

Poems of Ruth - for Shavuot

Chag sameach! I hope you're having a wonderful Shavuot so far.

I promised I would share the poems I taught last night at the tikkun leil Shavuot co-created by my shul and the shul up the road in Bennington. Here you go -- enjoy!

Poems of Ruth

woodcut by Jacob Steinhardt

Shavuot 5772 / 2012

Poems by Marge Piercy, Rachel Barenblat, Catherine Tufariello,

Tania Runyan, Victor Hugo, Kathryn Hellerstein, Anna Kamienska

Download RuthPoems [pdf]

For you were strangers in the land of Egypt

Photo of the anti-asylum-seekers rally in Tel Aviv by Tomer Neuberg.

My friend rabbinic student Marisa James shared this photo on FB, adding, "At the anti-asylum-seekers protest yesterday in Tel Aviv - the slogan on the shirt reads "death to the Sudanese." I'd love to know where the girl wearing the shirt would be living today if her ancestors had been deported back to where they came from. Or if she would be living at all." Her comment struck a chord with me, and it's been resonating in me uncomfortably all day.

I've been reading news stories about the violence against Sudanese migrants at the recent rally in Tel Aviv. Here are a few: Hundreds demonstrate in south Tel Aviv against illegal migrants (Ha'aretz); Israeli politicians are fanning the flames of anti-migrant tension (the Guardian); Africans attacked in Tel Aviv protest; MKs, 'infiltrators' are cancer' (+972); Politicians stoke hatred for African Refugees (NIF newsletter). The rhetoric is ugly (right-wing members of Knesset calling illegal migrants "a cancer in our body"); the violence and beatings (Ha'aretz reports that "nine people were arrested, some while they were beating Sudanese migrants") even more so.

Here in the States our discourse around immigration, and migrant workers who are here illegally, can get pretty ugly too. (I'm not going to dig up links, but we all know it's out there; instead I'll link to The Damage of Anti-Immigrant Laws and Rhetoric, an excellent interview which deserves the signal-boost.) If it's troubling to mistreat illegral migrants who are seeking a better life for themselves and their families, how much more so when the mistreatment is of those who seek asylum.

Of course, there are voices within Israel -- including members of the Knesset -- who are outraged by the rhetoric and the violence. (See, e.g., Gal On: Stop Inciting Against Illegal Aliens!) MK Gal On argues that the violence we've just seen in Tel Aviv is ultimately caused by economic hardship -- which makes sense to me; when people are feeling economically and socially marginalized, they lash out at someone more marginal than they.

Violence against those who are powerless happens everywhere. And it shouldn't. But one could argue that it especially shouldn't happen in a state which aims to embody Torah ideals. "You shall love the stranger," Torah tells us, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." (For some beautiful commentary on this verse, and how it applies today, see Va'ahavtem et ha-Ger: Love the Stranger; also Love the Stranger [pdf] by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling.)

Jewish history is filled with exile and wanderings. Our community retains the memory of being marginalized and mistreated. When economic times were tough, time and again, we have been the victims of attacks, of prejudice, of pogroms. I'm reminded of another verse from Torah: that which is hateful to you, do not do to another. (The sage Hillel famously cited that verse as a summation of the entire Torah -- adding, of course, "all the rest is commentary; go and learn.")

In Ha'aretz this morning I read an essay by Sudanese refugee Adam Ibrahim, who writes:

If you don't want us here, don't turn your rage at us, because we have no choice. I have nowhere to go. I just want to live in safety. I agree to be deported to any African country, other than Sudan. I just want to live with dignity, without people talking about the color of my skin, and I want to stop feeling hostility on the streets.

It is important for me to say that we are not a burden on society. We work for less than minimum wage in jobs that Israelis wouldn't want to do themselves anyway. We pay rent, and make do with organizations that we established ourselves. It is hard for me to hear Eli Yishai's statements in the media. Their impact on Israelis is tremendous, since in Israel everyone listens to the news.

The state is spreading negative propaganda against us – they say it is unsafe here because of us. I feel that the Jews are doing to us the exact same thing the Germans did to them.

(That's from his essay An African migrant's plea for a few basic rights.)

Props to my friends and colleagues in Israel who are standing up against this wave of anti-immigrant hatefulness. (ETA: props to the New Israel Fund for Our Book of Ruth, which connects this situation with the book of Ruth which we'll read in a few days on Shavuot, and to Rabbis for Human Rights for Today Ruth Would Be Considered an 'Infiltrator,' Forbidden From Gleaning.)  If you're wondering what you can do to help, The African Refugee Development Center does good work, and they're raising funds to support their community in the wake of the attacks.

I'll close with a few words from Haggai Mattar, from his essay How I Survived a Tel Aviv Mob Attack (again in +972):

Morning is now up, broken windows of shops and houses need mending, and the peace is somewhat restored. At the end of the day, we must remember that most of the people in our southern neighborhoods largely live together in peace. Many try to bridge gaps and find solutions. Many on both sides know that their enemy is not the asylum seekers or the local Israeli population but the government – which is both creating this impossibly flammable situation and throwing burning matches into it. But this is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning.

What would it take to change the story -- to move from this beginning into a story of compassion and connection?

Loving the Ger

One of my favorite verses in Torah is Deut. 10:19,  וַאֲהַבְתֶּם, אֶת-הַגֵּר  כִּי-גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם / v'ahavtem et ha-ger, ki gerim hayyitem b'eretz mitzrayim: "and you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." It's a powerful ethical teaching; it's a big piece of how Ethan and I try to live our lives. (Indeed: earlier today I shared a serious post which borrows that verse as its title.)

It also makes me grin because of a multilingual pun. The Hebrew word ger means stranger or foreigner. The Mongolian word ger means a small round dwelling -- what most Americans would call a yurt.

I got interested in gers about ten minutes before I first landed in Mongolia. As the plane descended to the Ulaanbaatar airport, I saw green hills dotted with white. The little dots were sheep - the big dots were gers.

Gers are circular houses, lived in by many Mongolians and by some other central Asians. They're portable, lightweight, spacious, well insulated and comfortable. While more people know the Russian word "yurt", many Mongolians prefer the word "ger".

So writes Ethan in his photo-essay Behold the Power of String, written (and posted) in 2004, the year we built our first ger in the backyard out of "non-dimensional lumber" (saplings held together with twine.) The following year we built our second ger, this time out of latticed wood. We've reprised it every year since.

On New Year's Eve Day, we assemble the frame, cover it with shiny insulation and then with canvas, line the floor with tarps and plywood and then an assortment of old blankets and rugs. It becomes our extra guesthouse over New Year's Eve.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Some years, the ger framework has served as our sukkah, too. I love our homegrown ger. It's beautiful, it's fun to build, it's fun to camp out in. (If you can't see the embedded slideshow, you can go directly to the Homegrown ger photoset at flickr.)

But I have to admit, our old ger pales a bit in comparison with our new one, delivered and assembled by the guys from Groovy Yurts:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

(If you can't see the second slideshow, here's my Mongolian ger photoset.) The giant semi-trailer arrived on our street this morning; Yves and Felix cheerfully loaded the pieces of the ger into my Toyota Rav-4 (with Drew in his carseat, enjoying the show) and we drove it up the hill. Then I did my best to keep Drew out of their way while they assembled the ger from its component parts.

We're going to build a platform for it (it's better for the ger to be raised slightly, rather than placed directly on the -- right now very wet! -- ground.) And I know Ethan has hopes of bringing it with him to Boston at some point. But it is so cool, and so beautiful, and Drew thinks it is so nifty, that I'm not sure it's ever leaving our back yard again.

Love the ger? Absolutely.