Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 232

Interview with Linda Hirschhorn now in Zeek

Two years-and-a-bit ago, at the ALEPH Kallah in Ohio, I had the opportunity to sing with Linda Hirschhorn. While I was there, I interviewed her for Zeek. (I mentioned that in one of my blog posts from the conference that year: Kallah, another day in the life.) For reasons which don't bear exploration at this juncture, the interview has just now been published! Hopefully it's timeless enough to still make good reading.

Here's a taste:

(From my introduction) A lover of Talmud and a college philosophy major, Hirschhorn sees polyvocal harmonies as emblematic of the same kind of diversity-within-unity found in the pages of Jewish sacred texts. She believes that different voices blending together in harmony is not only a metaphor for, but an example of, the kind of coexistence the world needs. And after a few hours singing under her enthusiastic tutelage, I'm inclined to think that she's right...

LH: Harmony is like drash. Singing a song simply is like pshat; harmonies give you the chance to interpret text. If you hear a lyric, especially sung in counterpoint, the words coming at a different time, you'll get a different experience of what the words might mean, what's important. Major or minor, syncopated or lullaby: those communicate so much. It's important to understand the text, to try to find how my song matches my understanding of the text.

...

LH: Everybody has some kernel that's uniquely their own that they can offer. The best of my songs are something which cuts deeper, which looks at a universal experience in a particular way.

Read the whole thing at Zeek: In Song Together.

New essay in Religion & Literature: "Transformative Work: Midrash & Fanfiction"

Contributors' copies of Religion & Literature volume 43.2!

The genre is an ancient one. Throughout the history of the Diaspora, Jewish imagination has flourished through midrash, elaborating on the tales and characters of the Hebrew Bible. But the postwar period has produced a surge of provocatively original midrashic writing in America, which seems to be accelerating like a kind of cosmic dark energy...

A new midrash is a juicy green leaflet on an ancient tree. Yet contemporary midrash has less to do with faith, or even McClure's "partial faith," than with what Adrienne Rich once called "the will to change."

So writes poet Alicia Ostriker in her introduction to the Forum section of volume 43.2 of the journal Religion & Literature. Alicia edited this issue's Forum section, which consists of essays exploring different aspects of contemporary midrash.

The essays collected here display extraordinary depth and breadth. Rivkah Walton writes about the feminist midrashic poetry of the 1980s and 90s; Rabbi Jill Hammer explores the work of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and American poet Veronica Golos; Eric Selinger explores the theologically and politically challenging poetics of Joy Ladin and Peter Cole; Merle Feld explores her own play "Across the Jordan", which arose out of her experience doing Israeli-Palestinian dialogue in the 1970s; Peter Pitzele explores Bibliodrama as a place of collision between text and improvisation; Norman Finkelstein articulates discomfort with the claiming of the "modern midrash" mantle for contemporary English-language poetry; Monica Osborne writes about how literature of trauma functions midrashically.

And the final essay in the Forum section, I am honored and humbled to note, is my own: Transformative Work: Midrash and Fanfiction.

Here's how that essay begins:

Judaism has long been a read/write tradition. We are not expected to be passive recipients of revelation; we are expected to join the conversation. Receiving Torah at Sinai was the beginning of our story, not the end. The Jewish daily liturgy describes a God Who every day renews the work of creation; just so, revelation is an ongoing process, and we are expected to take part.

Torah itself urges the reader to find a voice, since one of the last commandments in Torah is to write one's own Torah. (Deut. 31:19) This is an injunction which can be interpreted either literally (mastering the scribal arts of sofrut) or metaphorically (adding our perspectives to the body of commentary surrounding Torah—or, in another interpretation, donating money to a qualified scribe who can write Torah for us.) The canon is never closed. New interpretations are always being created.

One story (in Midrash Tanchuma) holds that Torah is written in black fire on white fire. The black fire makes up the letters of the received text, while the white fire contains the silent stories which contextualize the received stories and which we ourselves are called to write. Another story (in Talmud, Menahot 29a) shows us Moses witnessing God putting artful tagin, crowns, on the letters of the supernal Torah. God is doing this work so that untold generations to come will have hooks on which to hang our interpretations and our stories—our midrash.

Through midrash we reveal Torah's meanings. Midrash allows us to posit answers to our questions, to explore hidden motivations for mysterious moments in Torah, to offer explanation. Sometimes through midrash we temper Torah, rendering it more comprehensible to a contemporary audience or more in-tune with contemporary values. Midrash allows us to celebrate the loopholes and inconsistencies in Torah. They are not (only) accidents or signs of where the text was stitched together from disparate elements, but rather the hooks placed there by God precisely for the purpose of giving us something to work with.

I am speaking here primarily of midrash aggadah, midrash arising out of non-legal material in Torah. Jewish tradition also encompasses halakhic midrashim which explore and explain Torah's legal texts. The body of Jewish midrash not only expands the universe of possible stories in our tradition, but also explores and teaches how we should live. But whether halakhic or aggadic, midrash is transformative work.

"Transformative work" is a technical term which comes from the language of legal scholarship. According to the United States Supreme Court, transformative work "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning or message." (Campbell v. Acuff- Rose.) This is, I think, what midrash is and does. Through the lens of midrash, Torah texts take on new meanings.

The Supreme Court's description of transformative work also suits another kind of transformative work—a form of storytelling practiced primarily by women for an audience which is likewise mostly women, (Jenkins, 476) in which the central texts of literature and modern pop culture are explored, remixed, and interpreted: fanfiction. Fanfiction is "a work of fiction written by fans for other fans." (Fanlore, web) It is fiction which takes an existing story as its starting point and then goes somewhere new. In fanfiction, Sherlock Holmes can solve mysteries he never encountered; the USS Enterprise can explore even more new worlds and civilizations; Harry Potter can become a side character in Hermione Granger's life story, instead of the other way around.

The tradition of derivative works (artistic creations which are rooted in other people's art) is as old as literature itself. But what makes fanfiction unlike Virgil's retelling of Homer or Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone (which recasts and reframes Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind) is that fanfiction arises within the context of community...

Alas: Religion & Literature does not seem to make their material available to the general public, so I can't point you to the whole essay in a readily-available online format! Of course, you could always choose to buy a copy of volume 43.2 or to subscribe. And the journal can be found online at JSTOR, so if you have access to that online academic database, feel free to check out the essay and let me know what you think.

When I first sent the essay to Alicia, she responded with great enthusiasm. "You are showing me a whole world I knew nothing about and making radical connections between Torah and pop culture," she wrote to me, and asked all sorts of terrific questions about the ways in which midrash and fanfiction intersect. It was a joy to have the chance to spend a while writing about midrash and fanfiction, and to be able to share my thoughts with Alicia and with all who read this journal now and in days to come.

Jewish Renewal and my red boots

I am utterly, endlessly, delighted to have sparked Rabbi Barbara (Shulamit) Thiede's essay Jewish Renewal's Red Boots.

Reb Shulamit and I were admitted to the ALEPH rabbinic ordination program at the same time. (Somewhere I still have the email which Reb Marcia, our dean, sent to the student e-mail list in which she invited them to welcome two extraordinary new talmidim). Reb Shulamit and I were in DLTI together; we took countless classes together; and last year we were blessed to receive smicha together.

And at this year's Ohalah conference, to which I took only two pairs of shoes (including the pair of burgundy-red knee-high Doc Martens which Ethan gave to me for my thirty-fifth birthday), she found inspiration in my footwear.

She writes:

What is Jewish Renewal?

It's so very hard to describe something that ranges from starshine to sunshine, something that sparkles and sings and calls on the deepest spaces and places of the soul while making you laugh with recognition...

...[When we gather] we pray all at once together or in the spontaneous creation of a kind of complicated twenty-part madrigal. It's awesome, actually.

As are the Velveteen Rabbi's red boots. They are the example you need to understand Jewish Renewal.

Curious? Read the whole essay at her blog Adrenaline Drash.

Thank you for honoring me with this essay, dear Reb Shulamit! And thank you also for speaking such wonderful truths about our transdenominational Jewish community, our values, and our vision for the world -- and the Judaism -- we hope to help midwife into being. Boots and all.

On plagues and hardened hearts (d'var Torah for parashat Vaera)

Here's the d'var Torah I'll be offering during services at my shul this morning.

This week we read one of the most dramatic narratives in Torah: the story of the ten plagues. (Or, at least, the first eight plagues; the final two will come next week.) Intriguingly, the idea of calling these "plagues" is rabbinic; in the Torah they are called "signs," demonstrations of divine power and might.

Moshe and Aharon ask for the Israelites to be released, but Pharaoh's heart stiffens and he says no. The Nile turns to blood, and all the fish die; Pharaoh's heart stiffens and he says no.

Frogs die in heaps in the fields, and Pharaoh is stubborn and says no. When the dust of the earth is transformed into lice, Pharaoh's heart stiffens and he says no once again.

After the swarms of insects, Pharaoh gives the Israelites permission to go a short distance away in order to make offerings to God, and the plague is lifted...whereupon, you guessed it, Pharaoh's heart becomes hard and he says no again.

The Egyptians' cattle die, but Pharaoh remains stubborn. Then God tells Moshe and Aaron to cast soot from the kiln toward the Egyptians, and the soot turns into boils. This time, God hardens Pharaoh's heart, and Pharaoh again says no.

When hail levels the crops, Pharaoh apologizes for his misdeeds. But when Moshe raises his hands and the hail ceases, Pharaoh's heart once again stiffens, and he says no yet again. That's where this week's portion ends.

Every time I read this, the vindictiveness troubles me. On the Egyptian end of things, Pharaoh will not let himself see the Israelites' anguish. Even when his own people are suffering in retribution, Pharaoh refuses to relent.

And on our end, we see a vision of God Who is pretty vindictive, too. God punishes the Egyptians not only for their misdeeds, but also for their leader's unwillingness to hear the call of justice. And the one time in this parsha when Pharaoh does not harden his heart, God hardens his heart for him. What can we make of that?

The interpretation which works best for me is that Pharaoh accustomed his own heart to being hard. He made a habit of acting without regard for justice or for the needs of the oppressed. You know how, when children make ugly faces, parents sometimes say "be careful, your face might get stuck that way"? Pharaoh made his heart ugly, and it got stuck that way. He wore grooves of injustice and lack of compassion into his heart, and was then unable to change; God "hardened his heart."

We might even replace the word "God" here with the notion of karma: because of all of Pharaoh's prior actions, his own karma predisposed his heart to harden even when he didn't take pains to harden it himself.

Reading this, we may justifiably feel a bit smug. The Israelites in this story are slavery's innocent victims; nothing here is our fault.

And yet. Let me shift our focus.

Every year, from September until May, millions of tomatoes are harvested in Florida and shipped around the country. The workers who pick the tomatoes come from all over the world. But because of exemptions related to farmworkers in American labor law, farmworkers are paid by the pound, not by the hour. They are paid $0.50 for every 32 pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. (For the same quantity of tomatoes, we would pay almost $80 at Stop n'Shop.).

At those rates, many workers make well below the minimum wage, earning an average annual salary of about $10,000. This holds true regardless of whether workers are here legally or illegally. They face extreme pesticide exposure and unsafe working conditions. Meanwhile, cases of human trafficking and slavery are rampant.

I learned these things from Rabbis for Human Rights. Now, I don't generally eat tomatoes between September and May. Living in northern Berkshire where fresh farm-grown tomatoes are so spectacular in season, I avoid them in winter because they don't taste very good! But that doesn't change the fact that these workers are laboring under terrible conditions, and I am sitting idly by.

We are not Pharaoh. We do not directly oppress. But in our country the least desirable jobs are done by those who have the most to lose. Often the poorest among us live in housing which is the most vulnerable -- witness the devastation wrought on the Spruces trailer park and elder community last August when Irene blew through town, leaving most of our homes unscathed.

When Pharaoh and his people bitterly oppress the Israelites, they reap plagues -- the equation is clear. The connection between wickness and punishment may not be so manifest in our world...but surely our indifference to the environment leads to storms of increasing ferocity, and to climate change which we will not be able to control. We may not believe in a God Who directly punishes the wicked, but it seems to me that we co-create our reality, and our choices are not always compassionate or just.

Twice a year we read the story of how God lifted the Israelites out of slavery and into freedom and covenant: first during these weeks of Torah readings, and later at Pesach. We learn that each of us must see herelf as though God had lifted her out of slavery. The children of Israel in this story are our ancestors -- spiritually, if not in genetic terms.

But there's nothing keeping us from being like Pharaoh, too. This week's Torah portion calls us to take a hard look at our choices, at the ways in which we habitually harden our hearts against people who are not like us. Do our hearts begin to harden themselves against the poor, against people who practice a different religion than we do, against those who pick our tomatoes or scrub our floors? This parsha holds a warning.

This Shabbat, may we soften our hearts toward everyone we meet. May our actions, our emotions, our thoughts, and our spirits lead us not toward the inevitability of suffering, but into freedom and into relationship with the Most High.

I'll close this d'var by reading the Torah poem for this portion which appears in 70 faces.

CHARGE (VA-ERA)

And God said to Moses: speak
to Pharaoh and tell him to send
the Israelites away. I will harden
the chambers of his heart
and he will not see the sign
of holiness upon your hand.

For him power is close at hand:
all he has to do is speak
and his people obey. By design
no one questions. To send
his workers away would take heart
he doesn't have to spare. Harden

yourself against them; harden
your compassion. You are my hand
in the world; I'll hold your heart
in safekeeping as you speak
truth to power, as you send
this nation into turmoil, a sign

of my disfavor. Bind me as a sign
upon your arm, learn to harden
your eyes, your speech. Send
locusts and lice, every hand
scratching in agony! Speak
to Pharaoh of freedom, your heart

bursting to serve. Brave heart,
take courage: I will be your sign.
My voice emerges when you speak.
For history's sake I will harden
his hearing and stay his hand.
The world must know it is I who send

you on this errand, I who send
Israel out from here, every heart
yearning to be free. Hand by hand
you'll build new signs
of my mercy, but first: harden
your tremulous voice, and speak.

Tell Pharaoh I send you as my sign.
His heart cannot help but harden.
My hand pulls your strings: now speak!

VR Podcast Episode 1: Morning Practices

Several of y'all have asked, over the years, whether I have considered podcasting. This winter, I thought I'd give it a try.

I'm not promising that these podcasts will come out on any specific timetable. (I'm a congregational rabbi and the mother of a toddler; I've got all the deadlines I can handle!) I'll release them periodically. The first episode lasts just over 15 minutes; I'm guessing episodes will generally between 15 minutes and 30 minutes.

Subject matter: Judaism, spiritual practice, Jewish Renewal, prayer, the intersection of prayer and poetry, niggun and chanting, integrating spiritual practice with "ordinary life" -- in other words, the same stuff you already come to Velveteen Rabbi to find.

 

VR Podcast Episode 1: Morning Practices.

Three melodies for "Modah Ani," reflections on beginning the day with gratitude, the birchot ha-shachar / morning blessings, blessing yoga, prayer in the shower, and beginning the day how one means to go on. Duration: 16:06.

To listen online:

VRPodcast1

If you're so inclined, you can subscribe via iTunes -- for now, that link includes both the recordings of poems which I post here, and also formal podcast episodes; if/when that changes, I'll let y'all know.

Give it a listen, and let me know what you think? All comments / feedback welcome!

A psalm for wintertime

WinterPsalm

WINTER PSALM

 

The wind whips spirals of snow
dervishes dancing across icy asphalt

snowplows call out to one another
backing up to ply their routes again

the atmosphere looms, pregnant
with the promise of precipitation

and I? I scatter handfuls of cat litter
across the driveway's uneven terrain

casting prayers for the safe passage
of all who come, and all who go

I've recently been rereading the Worship issue of Qarrtsiluni -- including my own poem Without Ceasing. That poem was written in high summer, and its metaphors reflect that season. This week I've caught some glimpses of what makes this season -- deep winter -- also beautiful here. And, of course, if the windmills and cicadas can offer praise, why not the snowplows?

I had fun with the alliteration and assonance in this draft. I'm still pondering the poem's stresses -- the first few lines have four stresses per line, the fourth line has five stresses, the fifth line has three and the sixth line has only two. (All the remaining lines have four -- at least I think they do.) I can't decide whether or not this bothers me. Read the poem, listen to the mp3, let me know what you think?

Stop SOPA and PIPA

Image borrowed from this post at storify.

Many of the internet's leading websites are "going dark" today to protest, and raise consciousness of, the danger of the impending passage of SOPA and PIPA, two pieces of US legislation which run the risk of destroying the internet as we know it.

I'm not going dark per se, but instead of posting new Velveteen Rabbi content today, I'm linking instead to the following articles. Please become informed on this issue and (if you are a US citizen) consider reaching out to your elected representatives to urge them not to let these bills pass.

Boing Boing will go dark on Jan 18 to fight SOPA & PIPA. "On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world."

"Internet Censorship Affects Everybody": Rebecca MacKinnon on the Global Struggle for Online Freedom."If we want democracy to survive in the internet age, we really need to work to make sure that the internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with democracy," MacKinnon says. "And that means exercising our power not only as consumers and internet users and investors, but also as voters, to make sure that our digital lives contain the same kind of protections of our rights that we expect in physical space."

MIT Media Lab opposes SOPA, PIPA."SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act – and a sister bill, PIPA – the Protect IP Act – seek to minimize the dissemination of copyrighted material online by targeting sites that promote and enable the sharing of copyright-protected material...[E]ntrepreneurs, legal scholars and free speech activists are worried about the consequences of these bills for the architecture of the Internet."

OTW action on SOPA/PIPA."The internet has been abuzz recently with comments about the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' (SOPA) currently under debate in the US House of Representatives, and its counterpart the 'Protect IP Act' (PIPA) in the Senate. Organizations such as the EFF and the Library Copyright Alliance have raised concerns that the bills - which are ostensibly aimed at curbing 'rogue' foreign sites - have significant implications for the web internationally, and will work to curb free speech and online creativity."

SOPA/PIPA: What's Up With That? "First up, this infographic, which sorted my brain and the various bits of disparate knowledge I had in it about these pieces of legislation in about 30 seconds flat (below it, you'll find a few links to more information)..."

Stop American Censorship. "On Wednesday Jan. 18th thousands of sites will go dark to protest SOPA & PIPA, two US bills racing through Congress that threaten prosperity, online security, and freedom of expression..."

 

Contemporary poems for Shabbat morning prayer

This coming Shabbat, I'm planning to lead a service at my shul where contemporary poetry is juxtaposed with the traditional Hebrew liturgy. My hope is that the poems will offer new ways of understanding the liturgy, and vice versa. Just as a diamond-cutter uses one diamond to open new facets in another, just as Hasidic scholars use one verse of Torah to open new facets in another, we'll use these poems to reflect new understandings of the traditional liturgy...and perhaps the liturgy will be brought to bear on our understanding of the poems, too.

Some years ago I wrote a poem which imagines what it might be like if we read poetry with the repetition and fervor which characterizes our study of Torah and our prayer -- People of the Book. This service arises, in some way, out of the impulse which that poem both describes and enacts. And it also arises out of a wonderful morning service I attended at Ohalah, about which I posted here: Rumi illuminating morning prayer. In that service, a set of Rumi poems were linked with the traditional poems in the Hebrew morning liturgy. We would read a Rumi poem, then pray the Hebrew prayer which Reb Ed had linked with that poem -- and as the Rumi material shed new light on the prayers, the prayers too shed new light on the Rumi. I'm planning a Rumi service for my shul in May, but in the meanwhile, the experience of davening the morning liturgy alongside Rumi poems made me want to try the experience of davening the morning liturgy alongside poems by a variety of writers.

At my shul we daven from Mishkan T'filah, the current siddur of the Reform movement. (I posted some initial reflections on MT back when it was first published: A place where prayer can dwell.) Usually I lead the service which called, in that siddur, Shabbat Morning I. This is a service which pairs the traditional liturgy with "faithful translations" as well as with contemporary poems and readings chosen by MT's editors. I like it because it is flexible. I can lead a service which features more Hebrew or more English, more traditional text or more contemporary reflections, depending on how I'm feeling, who's there, how I sense they're responding or not responding, and so on. This time, I'll be leading from Shabbat Morning II, which features only the traditional material -- it doesn't have contemporary poems on the facing pages. Instead, we'll be using the poems I've chosen, reading each one alongside the prayer I think it speaks to.

Many of the poems I collected for this purpose have been in my regular re-reading rotation for years: poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Norman Fischer, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, Marge Piercy, Jane Kenyon. Often I read these poems as prayer, whether or not their authors intended them that way. These are some of my favorite poems, and I am excited to introduce them (or reintroduce them) to this community in this way.

Others are poems I have only recently come to know: by Esther Cohen, Karel Kryl (I found that poem here at 如 (thus) 是), Anne Porter. And still others are poems I found by rereading the Worship issue of Qarrtsiluni -- which has been spectacular from start to finish, and was well worth re-reading.

Anyway, here's the handout we'll be using in this weekend's Shabbat service. Each poem here is meant to be read alongside a particular prayer; the page numbers on this handout come from Mishkan T'filah, but the prayers themselves are ones which appear in any siddur (Modeh/Modah Ani, Baruch She'amar, Psalm 150, Yishtabach, etc) so this handout could easily be used for any morning service. Feel free to borrow it, adapt it, transform it -- and if you use it, either as-is or in an adapted version, please let me know how it works for you! This is an experiment and I'm really looking forward to seeing what works and what needs tinkering before next time we try it again.

PoemsForPrayer [pdf]

Three Tu BiShvat Haggadot (Tu BiShvat is on its way!)

The moon of Tevet is beginning to wane. It will shrink down to nothingness and then grow again. When it next reaches roundness, the date will be the 15th of the month of Shvat: the full moon of the deep-winter lunar month when, Jewish tradition tells us, the sap begins to rise again to nurture trees for the year to come.

Tu BiShvat is the (observed) birthday of every tree, also known as the New Year of the Trees. It offers an opportunity to take a journey through the four worlds of existence (action / physicality, emotions, thought, and essence) and to experience those four worlds and the round of the seasons through consuming fruits and juices with holy intent.

This is a holiday I didn't grow up celebrating, but it's become a favorite in my adult life. In south Texas where I grew up -- and in the part of the world where the Tu BiShvat seder originated -- trees are preparing now to bloom. Here in western Masschusetts, this time of year is usually characterized by ice and snow...though also by the rise of sap in the sugar maples, followed by plumes of sweet steam rising from sugar shacks all over the hills.

Back in 2006 I shared a Tu BiShvat haggadah here. (Hard to believe that was six years ago!) This winter I've had occasion to revise it. It now exists in three editions: one for adults and teens, one for kids in first through fourth grades, and one for little kids. We'll use each of these three versions of this haggadah at my shul in our various Tu BiShvat celebrations this year.

These haggadot contain poetry, environmental teachings from Jewish tradition, kabbalistic (Jewish mystical) teachings about the four worlds, and illustrations of fruits to color in. (You can probably guess which of these three haggadot is geared in each of these ways.)

And I share them here, in case any of y'all need a Tu BiShvat haggadah this year! Feel free to use these as-is, or to use them to spark your own Tu BiShvat creativity. (I only ask that you keep the identifying information there, and/or credit me for the editing / compiling / creativity.) May your celebration of the New Year of the Trees be joyful, meaningful, and -- perhaps quite literally -- sweet.

Tu BiShvat Haggadah for Adults / Teens [pdf]

Tu BiShvat Haggadah for Kids  [pdf]

Tu BiShvat Haggadah for Little Kids [pdf]

Passing the virtual hat for a vandalized shul

Just before this past Shabbat, a small shul in New York City was broken-into and vandalized. The shul is Temple Beth-El of City Island -- "your shul by the sea" -- and its spiritual leader is Rabbi Shohama Wiener, the director of the ALEPH Hashpa'ah (spiritual direction) ordination program through which I was just ordained as a mashpi'ah. Working by her side is rabbinic student David Markus, one of my dearest friends. (Members of CBI, my shul here in the Berkshires, may remember him from his most recent visit to lead davenen with me -- he taught us to sing "Mi Chamocha" to the tune of "The Water is Wide"...)

TBE is unaffiliated with any denomination. It is the only shul in the area, and the community's been around for more than seventy years. They've been in this space since 1957. Reb David reports:

We had broken windows, thefts include all Torah crowns (retailing for thousands in silver, adorning Holocaust-era Torah scrolls), our silver kiddush cups and candleholders, etc. The place is a mess. Burglers tried to take our electronic equipment but dropped them in the sanctuary and fled; we can't use them while the NYPD investigates.

The community is under 100 but growing against substantial odds, reaching out to disaffiliated, young and old, interfaith families; non-Caucasian communities and elderly Jews who have little else. We are egalitarian and spiritual: we did one of the first same-sex marriages after New York legalized, and we mobilized heavily after 9/11 (we could see the Twin Towers from our street). Our dues are virtually nil and our doors are open free of charge during the holidays to ensure that everyone has somewhere to go.

So this vandalism is as much an emotional blow as a financial one, but we hope and pray that the larger community comes to our support in all the ways that we've tried to support the community over the years -- and that we'll emerge stronger and more united behind our values of inclusion and holy community.

May it be so, speedily and soon.

Some of you may have donated last year when I was passing the virtual hat to pay for prayer rug cleaning at a New York city mosque which was desecrated. I'd like to orchestrate a similar drive now. If you have a few bucks to spare, please send them to me via PayPal (rbarenblat at gmail dot com), and indicate in the subject line of your email that this is a donation for TBE. Before next Shabbat, I'll collect whatever has been donated and will send a check to TBE. Your donation won't be tax-deductible (because I'm an individual, not a nonprofit) but let me know whether you want your name to be included on the list of donors or whether you'd prefer to give anonymously and I will honor your wishes either way.

I know these are tough economic times for a lot of us, but if you can spare a few dollars, please send them along. The money will help Temple Beth El of City Island restore their sanctuary and their precious ritual items, and the gesture of making the donation will help them know that they are in our prayers and in our hearts.