Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 231

What I Carry

  for Dale

 

It was said of Reb Simcha Bunim that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha-olam -- "for my sake the world was created." On the other he wrote: V'anokhi afar v'efer -- "I am but dust and ashes."

 

In my pockets: receipts
for last autumn's drycleaning,
tampons, tissues,

the crumpled ticket stub
from a Paris airport train,
worn from repeated fingering.

The whole cosmos unfolds --
from the Big Bang to right now
-- so I could wear these boots.

But I'm one tiny dot
on a vast pointillist canvas.
From a distance, no self matters.

The real trick, you're right,
would be to swap the papers.
Which shell is the pea under?

Maybe I'm insignificant.
Maybe I'm everything.
Watch me open my hand.

On caring for the home care workers who care for us

Image borrowed from Mercy Caregivers.

As part of my class in sage-ing last semester, I imagined my own death. We all did -- everyone in that class -- and once the meditation was complete, we talked about it with one another. I found it quite powerful to imagine what I might want my deathbed scene to be. I would like, if I have the choice, to die at home, surrounded by family and friends. I would like, if I have the choice, to go into that transition mindfully. To tell my loved ones that I love them, and then to consciously give myself permission to let go.

Of course, before that moment of death, there may be declining health. There will, I hope, be all the vagaries of old age. (I say "I hope" because if I don't get to experience old age, then I will have died sooner than I wish!) I want to die in the comfort of my own home, but before then, I expect I will need people who can care for me here.

I learned this week from the Progressive Jewish Alliance and Jewish Funds for Social Justice that most home care workers in the United States do not earn a living wage. They have been considered exempt from minimum wage and overtime laws.

Think for a moment about what that means. The people -- mostly women; often women of color -- who work as home care aides, caring for our sick and our elderly, holding their hands and providing their meds and washing their bodies and cooking their meals and doing all of the things that people in this field do every day -- they do this work without earning minimum wage, and without any protection against overtime and overwork. Flip burgers at a fast food joint, and you get minimum wage; care for the elderly or disabled in their own homes, and there's no such guarantee.

No small wonder that turnover in this field is incredibly high. It's work which is often difficult both physically and emotionally. These workers help those who are elderly and/or disabled to walk, to bathe, to eat, to dress, to take their meds on time -- and I suspect they often wind up providing a shoulder to cry on and a listening ear, which constitutes a kind of pastoral care in my book. What kind of society are we, that we value this work so little that we don't even ensure minimum wage for the people who do these holy tasks?

The number of people over 65 will nearly double in the United States over the next two decades. Most of us would prefer for our loved ones (and ourselves) to be cared-for at home, rather than being placed in a nursing home or other similar institution; overall, home care costs far less than institutionalized care, and it's also more personalized, more comfortable, more heimish. But what does it say about us that we allow the people who provide this care to work without a living wage and without protection from overwork?

Last December, President Obama proposed a rule change to the Fair Labor Standards Act which, if approved, will provide some measure of justice to American's 1.7 million home care workers who have long been exempted from minimum wage and overtime laws.  As things stand now, people employed in the home cleaning industry are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, but not those who care for our elderly and disabled family members. I'm glad to know that those who clean our houses are guaranteed minimum wage and reasonable working hours -- but chagrined to learn that our elder care workers don't receive the same treatment. We can do better than this. We must do better than this.

The U.S. Department of Labor is accepting public comments on the proposed change, which would correct part of a longstanding legacy of devaluing the work of women and African Americans. You can learn more about how to support the home care workforce at the PJA/JFSJ website; at that website you can also click over to submit a comment to the Department of Labor to tell them why this matters to you. Comments need to be submitted by February 27, so the time to speak up is now.

A gorgeous teaching for this week: on Honi the circle-drawer

One of the stories we read at Tu BiShvat (the New Year of the Trees -- this Wednesday) is the tale of Honi ha-Magel, Honi the Circle-Drawer. Honi was a Jewish miracle worker during the first century before the Common Era, known for his ability to bring rain.

It's a fascinating story. The version we tell at our Tu BiShvat table, and the version I will teach to our Hebrew school kids next weekend, is only the kernel at the heart of the story -- the part having to do with planting trees for future generations. But the whole story is worth reading. Here's the story as it appears in Talmud; I've italicized the section we typically tell at Tu BiShvat, but I hope you'll read all four paragraphs.

Rabbi Yohanan said: "This righteous man [Honi] was troubled throughout the whole of his life concerning the meaning of the verse, 'A Song of Ascents: When the Lord brought back those that returned to Zion, we were like dreamers.' [Honi asked] Is it possible for seventy years to be like a dream? How could anyone sleep for seventy years?"

One day Honi was journeying on the road and he saw a man planting a carob tree. He asked, "How long does it take [for this tree] to bear fruit?" The man replied: "Seventy years." Honi then further asked him: "Are you certain that you will live another seventy years?" The man replied: "I found [already grown] carob trees in the world; as my forefathers planted those for me so I too plant these for my children."

Honi sat down to have a meal and sleep overcame him. As he slept a rocky formation enclosed upon him which hid him from sight and he slept for seventy years. When he awoke he saw a man gathering the fruit of the carob tree and Honi asked him, "Are you the man who planted the tree?" The man replied: "I am his grand-son." Thereupon Honi exclaimed: "It is clear that I have slept for seventy years." He then caught sight of his ass which had given birth to several generations of mules, and he returned home. There he inquired, "Is the son of Honi the Circle-Drawer still alive?" The people answered him, "His son is no more, but his grandson is still living." Thereupon he said to them: "I am Honi the Circle-Drawer," but no one would believe him.

He then repaired to the beit ha-midrash [study hall] and there he overheard the scholars say, "The law is as clear to us as in the days of Honi the Circle-Drawer,""for whenever he came to the beit ha-midrash he would settle for the scholars any difficulty that they had. Whereupon he called out, "I am he!"  But the scholars would not believe him nor did they give him the honor due to him. This hurt him greatly and he prayed for mercy, and he died. Raba said: "Hence the saying, 'Either companionship or death.'"

That's from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Ta'anit, page 23a. It's a bit mysterious, isn't it? The story raises more questions than it answers. First there's the oddity of Honi sleeping for 70 years, a kind of Jewish Rip Van Winkle. But how does the story flow from the initial quote from Psalms, "When God brought us back to Zion we were as dreamers"? And what can we make of the way this story ends? Everyone likes the theme of planting for our children, and with good reason, but there's far more going on here than just that.

Allow me to recommend a terrific commentary on this Talmudic tale. The essay is called The Dream of Exile: A Rereading of Honi the Circle-Drawer, [pdf] and it's by Rabbi Hyim Shafner, who serves Bais Abraham congregation in St. Louis. R' Shafner explores the parallels between sleep and exile, the value one can find in journeying, the importance of having dreams for the future, what it means to be a luminary for (and within) one's own generation or moment in time, the similarities between Honi and Moses, and the power of childlike prayer. Here's a taste:

Honi discovers that even if it were possible to eliminate exile and jump to the time of redemption, the price he must pay is the sacrifice of himself, of his own lifetime. One cannot go to a different time and still be oneself. We must be who we are, suggests this story in the Talmud, we each have our role in the universe. Whether to plant or to reap, to dream or to wake, to be in exile or to be redeemed, it is of no matter; one state is not less valuable than another, and both are interdependent. Being satisfied where one is, even if that means living in a state of unredeemed expectation, is as worthwhile as being redeemed, at least according to the carob tree planter...

This is beautiful stuff, and it illumines the story of Honi for me in new ways. I particularly love R' Shafner's assertion that Honi is a kind of mystic; he is like a child in his state of natural, unmediated closeness with God. Read on:

Part of Honi's inability to comprehend the preparatory exilic state is that he is beyond it. In exile the Divine is mostly hidden and so we do not see our prayers immediately answered. But for Honi, there is immediate gratification. For him God is not in hiding, He is revealed to Honi and close to him like a parent. Honi is not bound by the limitations of the veiled physical universe. Though this Divine awareness is the source of his greatness, it also prevents him from relating to its opposite, exile — our people's exile, its value and necessity. Honi's despair in the face of exile/planting/dreaming results from his inability to fathom, and therefore experience, distance from the Divine.

The whole essay is very worth reading. Take a look.

For me, the most poignant part of the story of Honi is its ending. He is fundamentally displaced; the scholars of the future don't believe Honi's identity, and he becomes so inconsolable that he asks God for mercy -- which is to say, for death. On the basis of this, Raba teaches us that in Jewish tradition, companionship -- hevruta, friendship in which we learn with and from one another -- is so important that without it, one might die. That's a powerful teaching at any time of year.

We harvest from trees planted before we were born; we plant trees so that our children will have something to harvest after we are gone. This is both a literal and a metaphorical/spiritual truth. And this planting and harvesting connects us across the generations: as my grandparents planted seeds which bear fruit in my adult choices, I plant seeds for the grandchildren, and the students-of-my-students, who I may never know. But as important as these vertical intergenerational connections are, we also depend on horizontal connections in our own lifetimes. Our beloved friends, our study partners (both in Torah terms and in life-terms), keep us from dissociating from our lives as Honi ultimately did.

At this season of Tu BiShvat, may we be nourished by our deep roots; may we plant for our descendants, paying the blessing forward as it was given to us; and may we be blessed to experience the sustenance of friendship and hevreschaft, keeping us grounded in the here-and-now.

Torah poems for this week's portion, Yitro

I'm not writing weekly Torah poems this year. (Perhaps not surprisingly, I'm finding that balancing a congregational rabbinate and mothering a two-year-old is keeping me plenty busy!) But in years past I've written poems arising out of this week's Torah portion -- parashat Yitro -- and since poetry, like Torah, doesn't have an expiration date, I thought I'd point y'all to them this week.

Back in 2009 I posted The Deal (Yitro) -- which begins

Three months out
we enter the wilderness,
a new landscape of the heart...

And last year in 2011 I posted Coming Back Down, a poem which is at once about the Israelites coming down from the Sinai moment and about my own experience of "coming down" from my rabbinic smicha (ordination) and beginning to integrate it into my new rabbinic life. That poem begins

After Sinai's synaesthesia
(power surge, transmission)

our ancestors blinked and backed away
already forgetting how to read
the Name in each others' faces...

I hope that both of these poems speak to you and open up this week's Torah portion in new ways. Read the whole of each one: The Deal (Yitro) and Coming Back Down.

A lovely review of 70 faces in Lilith!

Deep thanks to Lilith, the awesome magazine of feminism and Judaism, for the generous review of 70 faces, my collection of Torah poems  (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011). The review appeared in the Fall 2011 issue, alongside reviews of poetry collections by Linda Pastan, Merle Feld, and Adrienne Rich. (What company to keep! And as it happens, I reviewed this same collection of Merle's in Zeek a while back.)

Here's an excerpt from the Lilith review:

Rachel Barenblat's 70 faces: Torah poems also wrestles with the question of memory but from within the collective traditions of the Torah. The title of the project comes from a passage of Bemidbar Rabbah, "There are seventy faces to Torah: Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it." Barenblat turns through the old characters and narratives of the Torah as though she is holding a prism in light: her modes are distinctly personal and shine with her understanding of life as a woman, rabbi, wife, and mother. She places herself in the predominantly male tradition of midrash (exegetical stories that seek to understand scripture) and she asserts her own voice in this rich lineage. What unfolds is a set of poems, one for each Torah portion, that speaks to body, ritual, complex, familial relationships, and the very act of writing...

If this review makes you want to read the book, of course, you're always welcome to pick up a copy of 70 faces -- if you click on that link, you'll be taken to the publisher's website, where you can look inside the book, read some of the poems, hear me reading some of the poems aloud, and buy a copy directly from Phoenicia. (It's also available on Amazon, though the publisher and I each make a few more pennies if you buy from Phoenicia direct. Do what's best for you, though; what I really want is for people to read the poems!)

Thanks, Lilith -- as a longtime reader, it's really lovely to see my work reviewed in your pages.

Second post at poetree: on poetry, Judaism, and being (or not being) a religious poet

My second post is up at poetree -- On poetry, Judaism, and being (or not being) a "religious poet". Here's how it begins:

A bit more than ten years ago I took my MFA at Bennington. It was an amazing experience. I still miss the ways in which being a poetry grad student gave me "permission" to focus on poetry. (It's a little bit analagous to how being a rabbinic student, later on, gave me permission to focus on Judaism and Torah.) But back when I was a Benningtonian, I did not think I would go to rabbinic school. On the contrary, I felt that Judaism and I were on the outs. And yet I found myself somehow irresistably drawn to reading Jewish literature, and to writing poems which had Judaic content...

Read the whole thing at poetree -- including the new poem "Morning Practice," written just this week -- and then feel free to join the conversation there.

Living in Jewish time

It's a funny way of inhabiting time, this Jewish calendar of ours. Every seventh day a holiday. Every new moon a holiday. And then, studding the year like jewels in a crown, the festivals, each with its own music, its own flavor, both literally and metaphorically.

Right now we're ascending toward the full moon of Shvat, the New Year of the Trees. Making shopping lists: we'll need three kinds of fruit (fruits with shells, fruits with pits, fruits which are soft all the way through -- each representing a different sphere of existence, body and heart and mind), maple syrup (why not celebrate the rising of spiritual sap with some literal sap?), juices of different colors for the chemistry-set pleasure of slowly transforming the pale white grape juice of winter into the vivid flame of deep purple autumn.

One month later comes Purim. Our carnival holiday, costuming and amateur theatrics. The remembered taste of hamentaschen (I always love apricot and plum the best.) The annual re-enactment of the almost-tragedy which turned comic, Haman's attempt at a Final Solution which was deflected by Esther's bravery and wisdom, the villain ultimately hoisted by his own petard. I met this morning with a friend and congregant to plan our annual Purimspiel, and and together we dreamed up a scheme for bringing the art of Jewish puppetry to my shul. Now I am pondering hot glue guns and papier-mâché.

One month after that, Pesach. The season of our liberation. The remembering and re-telling of our Exodus from the Narrow Place of enslavement, in mythic history and in our own hearts. The fifteen steps of the seder, from sanctifying the day all the way to concluding the evening with song. I can almost taste the crunch of matzah smeared with horseradish; the matzah balls my grandfather (of blessed memory) used to make. The scent of roasted egg.

Jewish time has ebbs and flows. Right now our spiritual sap is rising. At Purim-time, we retell a story in which God is (on the surface) entirely absent -- and yet divine sovereignty is hidden in plain sight all over the columns of the holiday's text. At Pesach-time, we're called to take the leap of faith of leaving slavery and plunging into the sea, trusting God to part the waters when we get too deep. We spend seven weeks doing the inner work of preparing ourselves for Sinai, and then Sinai comes.

At Shavuot, we remember and re-experience the Sinai moment, a deep encounter of connection with the Infinite -- and then we head toward the burning heat of remembering the breach of Jerusalem's walls and our communal broken hearts. Then we immerse in the weeks leading up to the Days of Awe, another season of inner work, in order to emerge with due fanfare and whole hearts at Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur takes us inward; Sukkot is our chance to go outward; at Simchat Torah we dance circles with our circular story. In the dark of (northern hemisphere) winter we kindle tiny lights until the whole chanukiyah is ablaze. And then, after a fallow period, our sap begins to rise again as Tu BiShvat approaches.

It's a neverending spiral from one festival to the next. From rejoicing to mourning to rejoicing again, from extroversion to introversion and back, from autumn to winter to spring to the next autumn. The whole year is a slow wheeling dance with God.

I used to wonder what it was like to be a dancer. To have a whole choreographed performance internalized in your body, such that even as you're dancing one movement, you know what movements come next, and after that, and after that. I still can't imagine the literal experience, but on some level, I think maybe it's a little bit like this experience of being rooted in the Jewish year. Doing the dance steps of Tu BiShvat, knowing that the Purim steps come next, and the Pesach steps, the Omer steps, the Shavuot steps. It's a balancing act, being wholly in this moment even as I try to lay the groundwork for moments to come.

And this is something every Jew does, or can do, or might aspire to do. It's not because I'm a rabbi that I get to learn the steps of this year-long dance... though being a rabbi does give me, sometimes, deeper opportunities to practice the steps -- and the joy of knowing that keeping my community dancing is, quite literally, my job. What an inestimable blessing.

A thank-you from Temple Beth-El of City Island

Earlier in January, a dear friend's shul was vandalized and broken-into. I posted about it, and generous readers contributed $984. Here is a thank-you note from the leaders of that shul, to all of you.

To the contributors to Reb Rachel's "Pass the Hat for a Vandalized Shul Campaign,"

We at Temple Beth-El of City Island wish to express our endless gratitude for your generous gifts, for lifting us up in our time of distress. Indeed, we see the sparks shining through the darkness, as we feel held by many unseen hands. In turn, we send you our blessings for God's light and abundance in all realms.

-- Rabbi Shohama, Reb David, and Your Shul by the Sea

For views of Temple Beth-El and the larger story, see Community Looks To End Religious Vandals.

Hosting a conversation about spiritual life and poetry

For those who are interested in poetry conversations, feel free to check out the online poetry community poetree, where moderator J.J. Hunter has graciously invited me to host conversations this week. (Luisa Igloria, whose work I greatly admire, was poetry host there last week. I'm in terrific company!)

I hope to post a few times over the course of the week, each time exploring a different facet of the the creative and spiritual life and how they intersect for me.

My first post, On weekly poems, scripture, inspiration, is now online -- check it out and join the conversation if you're so inclined.

Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach 7.2 - abridged AND expanded!

Hey: did you realize that Passover begins in just over ten weeks? :-)

I've been working this winter on a revision of the Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach -- specifically, a revision which is suitable for use at my congregation.

This is substantially abridged from the most recent edition of the VR Haggadah (7.1, released in March 2011). Over the years, my haggadah has grown by accretion (as indeed the classical haggadah did!) and I've added all sorts of fabulous things without removing the older material. When I use the haggadah at home, I pick and choose, depending on who's there and what I think might be most meaningful for them. But I want this edition to be user-friendly for a broad congregational audience, while still retaining the poetry and the beauty which make it my haggadah. So I trimmed it down -- 48 pages instead of 82.

Of course, I also wound up adding some material; I couldn't resist! There are a few new poems in this edition which weren't in the previous edition. I've added the order of the seder -- the fifteen steps from start to finish -- in Hebrew and in transliteration before each of the parts of the service, to make it easier to see where you are in the journey. There's a more complete Birkat ha-Mazon, Grace After Meals. There's some new formatting and there are a few layout changes, most notably on the prayer for Miriam's cup.

And there are many more images enlivening the pages -- in addition to the beautiful art donated to the VR haggadah by Beth Budwig, Aaron Livay, Emily Cooper, Howard Cruse, Allan Hollander, and Allison Kent, there are now other images I've found in various places (all used with credit, of course, and with great gratitude.)

Anyway: this new version of the haggadah, version 7.2, is enclosed below. Although it was designed for use at my shul, you are welcome to use it at your shul too -- or in your home -- or wherever you celebrate Pesach. (And of course you're welcome to stick with the previous version of the haggadah, too; whatever works for you.)

Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach (CBI Edition) [pdf] - 48 pages, 3.63 MB

or, last year's Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach v. 7.1 [pdf] - 82 pages, 5.6 MB