Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 7

After the Flood: Noah 5785 / 2024

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The verses I chose to read this morning come from the very end of our parsha, when Noah and his family have just emerged from the ark. They release all of the animals, and then Noah builds an altar and makes an offering to God. In return, God makes a promise to Noah and implicitly also to us: never again will God attempt to destroy the earth and all who dwell upon it. 

I gravitated toward these verses because they show us Noah and those under his care emerging after the storm. The worst is over. Now they rebuild. I would love to be able to fast-forward to that part in our collective story. Right now, a lot of us feel like we���re battening down the hatches in preparation for��� well, we don���t exactly know what���s coming. 

And that���s hard. As my friend R. Jay Michaelson notes (How To Survive This Week), it���s easier to live with a known outcome than an unknown one, and there���s a lot right now that we can���t know. We do know that, according to a recent Axios poll, a majority of Americans expect that there will be violence on / after election day. And that���s scary. So in R. Michaelson���s words,

[I]t���s quite alright to be anxious as hell. It is justified, it is not an illusion, and things have gone very badly in the past. So whatever you do, please don���t scold yourself for not being enlightened, balanced, wise, mindful, rich, or calm enough to not lose your cool. I���ve met dozens of spiritual teachers in my time, and the ones who pretend to be awesome all the time are faking it��� to you or themselves or both. 

If you���re feeling anxiety as the election approaches, you���re not alone, and you���re not ���doing it wrong.��� You���re just in touch with your feelings. (Mazal tov.) R. Michaelson is a teacher of mindfulness and meditation practices, and his essay has some good suggestions for managing our anxiety, so if that sounds helpful to you, check out his writing today.

I can���t tell you how the next week will go, or the weeks that follow. (Though for my part I am trying to ignore the constant breathless reporting on polls. Polls actually don���t tell us what real people are going to do in real time��� or how other real people will respond. Life is a giant multivariable experiment and no one can solve in advance for what the future is going to be.) 

(Yes, my teenager is taking algebra II, how���d you guess?

I also can���t tell you the best way to spend this last Shabbes before Election Day. Some of us may need a Shabbat away from these anxieties, a time to rest and allow our souls to be restored. And some of us may need to be ���praying with our feet��� ��� knocking on doors (or phone banking or text banking) to make sure people have the information they need to vote. 

As is so often the case, Judaism supports both of these. Taking today to rest and be restored is a very Jewish thing to do! And pounding the pavement after shul to urge full participation in our democracy is also a very Jewish thing to do. You���ll know best what your own soul needs. 

I can tell you that Jewish tradition offers us next steps, no matter what. Feed the hungry, protect the vulnerable, act with integrity and honesty, engage in community life, take care of each other. The mitzvot give us a road map for building toward a better world. That road map is true and enduring, right and real, no matter what happens next week or in the weeks that follow. 

I can tell you that Jewish values call us to choose honesty rather than deceit, hope rather than despair, uplifting others rather than grinding them down. Jewish values call us to kindness, never cruelty. They demand that we love the stranger ��� the immigrant, the refugee. They invite us to center the pursuit of tzedek / justice and actions of  tikkun olam / repairing our world. 

The thing I don���t like about the story of Noah is that he doesn���t push back against the Divine plan to flood all of creation. He rescues his own family and the animals, as instructed, but he doesn���t say to God, ���Wait a minute, aren���t there some innocent people out there?��� As my friend and teacher Rabbi Mike Moskowitz writes, justice isn���t justice if it���s ���just us.��� 

Whatever arks we construct ��� whatever structures we build together in our community life ��� need to be big enough and broad enough to uplift everyone. I pray that our government can be an ark that lifts all of us out of harm���s way, that helps all Americans and ultimately all the world live with dignity and safety, not at the mercy of floodwaters whether metaphorical or literal. 

Maybe our task this weekend is to trust that no matter what Flood might arise, we have the spiritual tools we need to help each other through it, and to help those who are more vulnerable than we are through it. Our task is to remember that whatever the coming weeks may bring, we can and will lift each other up as we work toward the promise of the rainbow on the other side.

 

This is the d'varling I offered at Shabbat morning services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

Ark

"Make the ark with rooms and pens."
Include thick creamy paper, soft
as brushed cotton, and enough ink
to write our way through.

None of us asked to be born into
the generation that might lose
everything: not just homes
falling into the waters

from North Carolina to Alaska
but also democracy. Not just
a free press, freedom to be Jewish,
freedom to not be pregnant

but also the capacity to draw
a full breath. Who does that anymore?
God, please tell me that somewhere
on this rickety boat, tucked

beside hay bales or the barrels
for collecting rain, I'll find hope.
We understand the physics
behind rainbows now, but

I'm still holding You to Your promise
that the cycles of day and night
will never again be blotted out
from the face of the earth.

 

 

 

"[Make it an ark with compartments (kinim)��� - with rooms (kilin) and pens (medorin).]" Genesis Rabbah 31:9. Yes, I know the original text is referring to animal pens, not fountain pens.

North Carolina to Alaska. I'm thinking of Hurricane Helene on the east coast, and of recent devastating floods in Kotzebue in the far north and west.

But also democracy. See Trump tells supporters they won't have to vote in the future.

A free press. See We must fear for freedom of the press under a second Trump administration.

Freedom to be Jewish. See Trump says Jewish voters will bear 'a lot' of blame if he loses.

Freedom to not be pregnant. See If Trump wins the election, Idaho's extreme abortion ban could go nationwide. 

Capacity to draw / a full breath. See What is the no. 1 leading cause of stress for you?

"Your promise." See Genesis 8:21-22.

Every Time

Every time I reflexively twitch
toward news or polls or news about polls
I will write a line of poetry instead.
No, that won't be sustainable, I'd write
an infinite poem. Did you know
there are infinities bigger
than infinity? That's how much
we're carrying this season, bursting
through the flimsy walls of our hearts
like the floodwaters we all just saw
on the news I am resolutely not checking.
Every time I stop myself from doomscrolling
I will study some Torah. That might work.
"Turn it and turn it, everything is in it."
If I lift high enough I remember God's
in everything, even the wrong lawn signs.
Still, all mental roads lead here:
anxious and agitated, restless as Cain.
This is a problem as old as humanity,
though the welter of computer monitors
and phone notifications can't help. I almost
wrote minotaurs. I might feel calmer
in a Cretan labyrinth: only one monster.
Uneasy thoughts, I welcome you
like Shabbes guests. You want to warn me
the world is ending? Message received.
Let's root ourselves again in breath.
The moment I turn myself around
I'm no longer lost. Every time is now.

 

 

Turn it and turn it. See Pirkei Avot 5:22. 

Restless as Cain. See R. Yisroel Hopstein / the Maggid of Kozhnitz, Sefer Avodat Yisrael, Bereshit.

Anxious thoughts, I welcome you. Thanks for your teaching, R. Sam Feinsmith.

And as always, to my hevruta partner R. David Evan Markus, thank you for learning with me. 

(Almost) A Year

 

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I don't know what to say as this yahrzeit draws near. Last year we woke on Shemini Atzeret / Simhat Torah (the two festivals are celebrated on the same day in Israel and by Reform Jews everywhere; for other Diaspora Jews they fall on subsequent days) to the news of the Hamas massacre. That night we gathered to dance circles around our sanctuaries with our Torahs, shellshocked and uncertain.

Almost Simhat Torah again. How can we dance in a world so broken? And yet how can we not? Jewish history is filled with times of trauma and terror, and we've never let that stop us from cleaving to mitzvot. The Aish Kodesh wrote that even in grief we must open ourselves to whatever joy we can find, and allow joy to flow in and lift us. (He was talking about Purim, but the point stands.)

Last night I was rehearsing with our Simhat Torah band. One of our hakafot (circle dances) will be to the song Bashanah Ha-ba'ah. "You will see, you will see, just how good it will be..." But sometimes it's hard to hold fast to the faith, or the dream, that better days will come. Here, or there, or anywhere. The drumbeat of sorrow and loss and injustice feels relentless. Here, and there, and everywhere.

This path is a deep groove worn in my heart from a year of grieving. I step outside to mail my ballot and I'm startled by how warm the air is, how beautiful the sunlight filtering through yellow leaves. What if I stop trying to find the right words (as though there were right words) that would make meaning out of all of this -- and just let myself be, breathing here, in the beauty of the broken world?

Charge

This old phone no longer charges.
The solution's simple,
a silvered circle. Current
soaks in, awakening from below.

I think about that in the sukkah,
layers stripped away by holiday
after holiday. Low battery so familiar
I forget I was ever otherwise.

The answer is to sit and wait.
Don't close up. Trust
that sustenance exists.
God, remind me how to shine.

Roots

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I went outside to bentsch lulav -- to take up the Four Species of date palm, willow, myrtle, and etrog, bring them together, make a blessing, and shake them in all six directions. I waited until the temperature rose to 40F (4.4 C) and the white rime of frost had melted. Even so, a plastic flowerpot that had filled with rain had frozen over. I could see my breath. I came back inside pretty quick.

Sometimes I'm mildly envious of people who live in Mediterranean climes at this time of year. I see photos of sukkot in California: open, airy spaces decked with tapestries and pillows because rain is unlikely. It was like that in Texas where I grew up, too. Here in New England, especially when the holidays are late on the secular calendar, Sukkot is cold. We wrap up in lots of blankets. 

Torah doesn't explain the taking up of the Four Species. Maybe in antiquity they just made sense. A lot of people see them as fertility ritual (the etrog could be analogous to the womb; bringing it together with the phallic lulav carries some pretty clear symbolism.) We know that lulav and etrog were taken up and waved in the Temple daily at Sukkot during the centuries when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. 

Midrash teaches (Lev. Rabbah) that of the four species, one tastes good (dates / palm), one smells sweet (myrtle), one is neither sweet-scented nor sweet-tasting (willow), and one is both tasty and delicious (etrog). These in turn represent people who study Torah but don't do good works, people who do good works but don't study Torah, people who do neither, and people who do both. (Be an etrog.)

Sometimes they're understood to represent four parts of the body with which we might serve the One (eyes, lips, spine, and heart), or the four letters in the Holy Name. And they can also evoke four ecosystems in the land of Israel. The lulav / palm hints at the lowlands; the aravot / willows suggest the rivers; hadassim / myrtle, the mountains; and the etrog, the irrigated areas where people farm.

I wonder how many people just stopped reading because I mentioned the land of Israel. I just wrote several impassioned paragraphs about that, and then deleted them. I shouldn't need to present my progressive bona fides in order to meditate aloud on these sweet ancient earth-based rituals of sukkah, lulav, and etrog, and why they connect my spirit with the place where this tradition began. 

All over the world, Jews don't pray for rain during the Land's dry season. (Ending in a few days.) Our daily prayers remind us when the Land relies on dew, and when the rains might come. Local climate notwithstanding, my lulav hyperlinks me with there. "[A]s wines on far continents prickle / to bubbles when their native vines bloom," as Marge Piercy wrote in her poem about Tu BiShvat. 

I love this 2000-year-old connection with the earth and weather, the plants and seasons, in the place where Judaism began. The older I get, the more meaning I find in remembering that the place where Judaism began shaped it, and therefore shaped the spiritual practices we've been carrying with us for centuries. Sitting in my sukkah I'm part of a chain of tradition bridging both time and space.

This doesn't obviate the fact that Palestinians are spiritually and physically rooted in that place too. (And now I've ticked off a whole different group of readers!) I reject the right-wing fantasy of "Greater Israel." I don't know how the two peoples will ultimately coexist, but along with every Israeli I know, I believe that they must. I yearn for dignity, self-determination, safety, and peace for all.

How will they get there? I have no idea. I suspect the folks at Standing Together have plenty of thoughts. The realm of what I can impact feels very small. At least in my own spaces, like this one, I can push back against those who would use this practice to deny another people self-determination, and against those who would deny the geographic roots of this practice and my religious tradition. 

Engaging in imaginary arguments with people to my right and with people to my left does no one any good. I scratch the etrog lightly with my thumbnail and breathe deep, grounding myself in spiritual practice and in things I can touch and sense. The clack of palm fronds. The spice of myrtle leaves. The knowledge that all over the world we are taking up our lulavim and praying for better days.

We build

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Sukkot is approaching, the festival where we build little "booths" and dwell in them for a week, representing the harvest houses of our ancestors or the tents of our ancestral wilderness journey. According to the path we call halakha (with which different Jews have a wide variety of different relationships; that's a conversation for another day) a sukkah must be impermanent. A perennial gazebo won't cut it. It has to be something we build and then take down. "Impermanence embodied," Buddhist-inflected Jews like me say. A reminder that there is profound beauty in what doesn't last.

The roof must be made of something that grew in the ground: palm fronds, bamboo, cornstalks, fir branches, whatever grows and can be sustainably harvested wherever we are. This is one of Sukkot's connections to earth-based practice; in our ancestral story we come from earth and to earth we return. There has to be enough roof there that it registers as a roof, but not so much that it blocks our capacity to see the full moon (Sukkot begins at full moon) and the stars. A leafy roof. "A leaky roof," R. Arthur Waskow once wrote -- a typo that can teach us a deeper truth about bittersweet openness.

Here in Massachusetts autumn has arrived. Yom Kippur was unseasonably beautiful, dappled with golden light through autumn trees. Now we've got cold rains. It will be a chilly week for eating and praying outdoors. I predict that at least once we'll wind up citing the teaching that when the sukkah is unpleasantly cold and wet, it's ok to forego the mitzvah and return inside. This morning I went to the hardware store and bought a 50-lb bag of play sand to place atop one of the bottom struts of my sukkah kit, because last night the winds that accompanied the rain blew it halfway across my deck.

Sukkot lands differently this year than ever before. Last Sukkot feels like a time of innocence. Before the Hamas attacks. Before the ensuing war. You don't need me to tell you; you know what the last year has been. Some of our feelings of permanence were shattered on Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah last year. Granted, Oct. 7 didn't come out of nowhere. The horrors of that day are rooted in the complex welter of choices made by people in power across the Arab world and Israel over the last 75 years. Before Oct. 7, I was able to set that aside, living as if it mostly didn't impact me. But it does.

Before Oct. 7, I never imagined that in my own era I would see the world seemingly rejoice at the slaughter of Jews, though probably I should have. I never imagined that the ensuing war in Gaza would result in the loss of so many lives, though probably I should have. I never imagined any of how this last year would feel, for me or for those whom I serve. The activated trauma. The horrors of war seen from afar. The more intimate wounds of friendships and relationships coming apart at the seams. The hardening of positions. The blame. The feelings of unsafety. The grief -- God, so much grief. 

Who am I to teach about impermanence -- the disability wisdom I gave over on Yom Kippur morning; how a sukkah is like a sand mandala is like parenting; the beauty of living and loving in our fragile bodies and homes and lives -- when there's a literal war going on? When many people I know and love, and countless people I will never know, are displaced or homeless or sheltering from rocket fire or unable to shelter from rocket fire? When Jews and Israelis are under siege, when tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, with hostages are still in captivity, as this awful war expands?

And that's not even getting into the climate crisis and the two hurricanes that struck Florida in rapid succession. Those who live in places that flooded, who are without power, who have lost something or anything or everything -- y'all don't need me to tell you what you're going through. And those who don't live in those places have all seen the footage, and I suspect that none of us feel as safe as we did before. Honestly, who am I to teach about impermanence in a time like this? The world is teaching us plenty. And amidst this, we're supposed to resist hiding under our blankets, and instead build sukkot?!

Yes. Amidst this, we build sukkot. We hammer together our metal kits with mallets, or we pound nails into wood. We make walls out of tarps or tapestries or, in my case, the kind of material that waterproof camping tents are made of. We make roofs out of something organic, branches or bamboo mats or armfuls of cornstalks. Maybe we adorn them with fairy lights and pumpkins, or with the Seven Species that grow in the Land of Promise, or with handmade decorations and garlands. And in them starting Wednesday we will bless wine and bread, we will eat and drink, we will be thankful.

I know I can't imagine what it's like to be in flood-stricken Appalachia or Florida or in the wartorn Mideast. And I know I can't regain the innocence of last Sukkot, before I was constantly and consciously aware of so many excruciating things. All I can do is bring all of this awareness with me into the sukkah, and trust that its flimsy, barely-there walls will be strong enough to hold this vast tangle of emotions. (They always are.) So I build. Because building is fundamentally our job as Jews. We build on ancient foundations; we build toward a world of justice; we build and resist despair.

We build because being part of a thousands-of-years-old tradition is itself a form of resilience. We build because we are links in a chain of tradition. A sukkah is like a human life: here and then gone. But its brevity doesn't make it less meaningful; on the contrary! And Jewish tradition and practice don't die when we do, because we teach them to our generations, as our forebears taught them to us. We are impermanent, but the tradition outlives us, and this is precisely how. We build and we beautify. And then we sit in our sukkahs, and even in this broken world we uplift sparks of joy.

 

Inspired, in part, by this post from Sarah Tuttle-Singer.

Yom Kippur Morning 5785: The Book of Resilience

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The prayer Unetaneh Tokef, which we recite on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, probably dates back to the Crusades, when Christian soldiers en route to the Holy Land slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews. We don���t actually have exact data on the number of Jewish deaths at Crusader hands, though in 1298 up to 100,000 Jews were killed by German Rintfleish knights ��� and that wasn���t a Crusade, just blood libel! Those centuries were not an easy time to be Jewish.

In maybe its most memorable passage, the prayer imagines that on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, what our fate in the coming year will be. Who will die by fire and who by flood, who by sword and who by beast. Who will be tranquil, and who will be driven; who will fall down and who will be lifted up.

[image error]This year, I���m experiencing that prayer through the lens of Kate Bowler���s memoir No Cure for Being Human, which I read this summer, and which opens with her diagnosis with stage IV colon cancer. Bowler writes: 

While I believe that there may be rich meaning at every crossroad in our lives ��� each meeting and departure, car accident or choice encounter ��� I do not believe that God will provide for every need or prevent every sorrow. From my hospital room, I see no master plan to bring me to a higher level, guarantee my growth, or use my cancer to teach me. Good or bad, I will not get what I deserve. Nothing will exempt me from the pain of being human.

There may be meaning at every crossroad, but that���s different from claiming that ���things happen for a reason.��� 

I appreciate Bowler���s point that sometimes terrible things just��� happen. We may learn valuable things in our suffering. And we may make meaning from and in our suffering ��� I hope that we do. But that doesn���t mean the suffering is ���good��� or that the learning feels ���worth it.��� I admire Kate Bowler���s willingness to say: from my hospital bed I don���t see a master plan. 

I don���t understand the Unetaneh Tokef prayer as fatalistic, an angry God making threats about how we���re going to suffer. The prayer says, ���At Rosh Hashanah it is written, and at Yom Kippur it is sealed,��� but that metaphor doesn���t have to mean that God is predetermining anything. Our tradition regards this time of year as spiritually elastic and malleable. We take a spiritual accounting of who we���ve been and who we want to be. We recognize and confess our screw-ups; we resolve to be better. What���s changeable at this time of year is us. 

Yom Kippur is a day for confronting our mortality: not for the sake of wallowing, but for the sake of recognizing that time is short. As Bowler writes, ���The terrible gift of a terrible illness is that it has, in fact, taught me to live in the moment. Nothing but this day matters: the warmth of this crib, the sound of [my toddler���s] hysterical giggling���time is not an arrow anymore, and heaven is not tomorrow. It���s here, for a second, when I could drown in the beauty of what I have but also what may never be.���

Living in the moment is not easy. Most of us spend a lot of time in the past, remembering old injuries or old joys, depending on our temperament. And most of us spend a lot of time in the future, looking forward to or dreading whatever we think is to come. But yesterday is over and tomorrow isn���t guaranteed. It���s true for all of us, terminal diagnosis or not. Our job is to remember that, and to open to the beauty in it. 

[image error]This was brought home for me also in reading R. Julia Watts Belser���s Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole. R. Watts Belser writes: 

We often treat disability as an aberration or imagine it as exceptional. But that���s a strange way of thinking. Disability is a ubiquitous part of human experience, an ordinary part of our existence. The particulars differ for all of us. But the fact that disability will enter our lives? That it will change us and our loved ones? It is a universal truth, a truth that is as inevitable as our mortality.

I remember, from my mother���s long illness, how she didn���t want to talk about her body���s losses. Even when the drugs prescribed for the resistant infection in her lungs gave her neuropathy and hearing loss. I think she wanted to just pretend everything was ���normal��� for as long as she could. I wonder now how that could have been different ��� for her and for us ��� if we���d been able to see her illness not as apart-from normal, but as a part of normal.

Watts Belser writes, ���When I use the word disability in this book, I include physical and sensory disabilities, cognitive and intellectual disabilities, mental health disabilities, and long-term health conditions like chronic pain and chronic fatigue.��� 

Her list drew me up short, in part because it feels so expansive. If we consider all of the things she lists, she���s talking about almost all of us. I think this is part of her point. In the words of disability activist Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, "Our modern culture tells us that disability is an exception when in fact it is the rule of the human life��� all of us will become disabled if we live long enough.���

Who by fire and who by water, and who by just��� living long enough. We may not know who���s going to suffer by this, and who���s going to suffer by that ��� but we know that suffering is a radical equalizer, part of being human. 

But wait. It���s part of being human, but it���s not the whole story. 

[image error]Here comes the turn in the prayer, the place where ��� for me ��� it pivots toward hope. ���Teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah have the power to sweeten the decree.��� Teshuvah: repentance, return, turning our lives around. Tefilah: spiritual practice. And tzedakah, giving to others in a justice-oriented way. These may not change the material circumstances of our lives (although they might!) But they can change how we experience those circumstances. And that makes me think of what R. Watts Belser writes about the spiritual subversiveness of seeing oneself whole.

[image error]Watts Belser writes: ���I could have stayed forever in the land of wanting. Instead, I built a fierce and tender bedrock of radical self-love. When I said no to the pursuit of cure, I said yes to my own bones. I said, ���I love this body as she is, right here and now, with no regrets. No miracles necessary.������ 

That is some powerful teshuvah to make with one���s body. Every year when we write down the mis-steps for which we seek forgiveness, someone always writes, ���I wasn���t good to my body.��� ���I didn���t appreciate my body.��� ���I didn���t treat my body well.��� I can relate. As I approach fifty I carry the scars of two strokes and a heart attack. And stretch marks. And some things that don���t work as well as they used to. Not to mention a lifetime of being taught in subtle and pervasive ways that a woman���s body is only worthwhile if it looks a certain way and does certain things. Can I say, ���I love this body as she is, right here and now, with no regrets. No miracles necessary���? 

When I say ���teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah,��� I wonder whether anyone feels like I���m asking something unreasonable. Am I asking each of us to change our life, become super-religious, and give away everything we have? Not those last two. (Changing our life: yeah, actually. That���s kind of what this season is for.) 

[image error]But spiritual practice doesn���t have to look any particular way. One of the most moving passages in the book, for me, is when R. Watts Belser is describing how disability impacts what Shabbat means in her life. She writes:

I practice what I���ve come to call crip Shabbat, a way of being where I tend the needs of my own body-mind. Sometimes that means letting go of expectation, letting go of ought and should. I recall with vivid clarity the Friday night when all I did was pop a frozen pizza in the oven, or the Shabbos days I���ve lain in bed. I recall the services I���ve skipped, when a week of work snapped back upon my bones, inexorable. When exhaustion swallowed me, when all those body needs I held at bay came home to roost, when rest was not a choice but a demand.

I love the way she writes about attunement to the needs of her own body-mind. Letting go of ���should,��� and allowing herself to be as she actually is. How profoundly counter-cultural to actually give her body-mind what it needs. How many of us feel we have to apologize for doing that, if we ever even manage to do it at all? 

Spiritual practice can be thanking God silently for that frozen pizza, and giving ourselves permission to rest. Or it can be all kinds of other things. It���s not one-size-fits-all: not for all of us in this room, not even for any one of us at every time. Spiritual practice asks us to be real, and to listen to what R. Watts Belser calls our ���body-mind,��� the integrated whole of who we are.

[image error]Watts Belser rejects the dualism that would depict us as ���a brain in a jar.��� I���ve never read a better unpacking of that metaphor ��� and the damage it can do ��� than Matthew Sanford���s memoir Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. 

The book begins with the car accident at thirteen that changed his life. On the way home from a Thanksgiving meal, the family ran off the road on a patch of black ice.

His father and sister were killed. His mother and brother were lightly injured, but basically walked away fine. Matthew broke his spine in several places, along with both arms and several other significant injuries. To this day he is paraplegic, paralyzed from the chest down. His memoir traces the long slow path of recovery. 

Talk about ���who by fire and who by water.��� This is the kind of senseless, out-of-nowhere life-changing event that I imagine the Crusades to have been for the people who lived through that moment in time. One minute everything is familiar, the next minute life is forever changed. 

Sanford writes, ���What I have actually lost in my experience of myself is an inward connection to much of my body. Below my chest has become a mental dead end ��� my mind has been blocked from entering. The loss of basic life skills, including my ability to walk, is simply a symptom of this mind-body dislocation.��� 

He describes, during his recovery, beginning to feel as though he might faintly be able to sense some kind of connection with his feet. The doctors, not wanting him to suffer false hope of walking again, stress that medically there is no way he can ���connect��� with his paralyzed lower half. The spine is broken. The connection is gone. End of story. At thirteen, he believes them; who among us wouldn���t? So he stops trying. 

[image error]���Healing is still possible for my mind-body relationship,��� he writes later, ���and it doesn���t mean that I will walk again. Unfortunately, I do not fully grasp this until I begin to practice yoga many years later.��� Did I forget to mention���? Matthew Sanford is now a yoga teacher, who teaches both disabled and ���able-bodied��� students. 

The gift I find in Unetaneh Tokef is its recognition that a life-altering paradigm shift could come at any moment. We can���t control that. But we have agency in how we respond. And how we respond can help us build resilience, and even seek joy.

Sanford writes beautifully about what he describes as ���silence:���  

Silence is what remains when mind becomes separated from body��� the medical model���s answer is that I won���t interact with [the silence] at all. ��� The relevance of this book turns on a simple thought. My traumatic experience of a spinal cord injury and its resulting paralysis has made more tangible a silence that exists in everyone���s consciousness, a silence that can be experienced in the gap between mind and body.

Severing his spine is a profound silencing. His brain can���t reach his feet anymore; his feet can���t send signals back to his brain. At least, not in any way that medicine can understand. But in his mid-twenties he finds a yoga teacher who begins to work with what his body can do, and he develops an intuitive understanding of what yoga poses do energetically and how to engage in them even given his body���s silence. 

���We are all leaving our bodies ��� this is the inevitable arc of living,��� he writes. ���Death cannot be avoided; neither can the inward silence that comes with the aging process.��� He was thrust into that silence at thirteen when he shattered his spine, but all of us will feel that silence if we live long enough. Ultimately, that���s the wisdom in his book that left me feeling most changed. He writes, ���As a paraplegic, I can no longer rely on the normal course of my daily life to ensure a healthy connection between my mind and my body. The same is true for all of us.���  

But we can build connection between mind and body. If Matthew Sanford can build that connection when he���s paralyzed from the chest down, that tells me that I can, too ��� we all can. First we may need to recognize that the mind-body connection is there, even if we���re not accustomed to listening through it. (My name for what connects mind and body is soul. You don���t need to call it that, if you don���t want to.) Maybe in order to listen through that conduit we need to figure out how to love our imperfect bodies as they are. And maybe it helps us if we can learn to live in the moment and recognize the beauty of now, even if now isn���t everything we wish for.

[image error]In Kate Bowler���s cancer memoir, she writes, ���God, let me see things clearly. I must accept the world as it is, or break against the truth of it: my life is made of paper walls. And so is everyone else���s.���

Who by fire, and who by water; who will be restless, and who will be at peace; who will be humbled, and who will be exalted ��� we can���t know. But making a practice of teshuvah, tefilah and tzedakah will change how we experience whatever comes. Teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah are all resilience-builders. They help us bend, rather than breaking. And that���s one of Judaism���s greatest spiritual gifts. It might be the reason we���re still here after 3,000 years that haven���t always been great times to be a Jew. (That sense of a ���we��� that���s still here even after any one of us is gone ��� that���s resilience, too.)

���My life is made of paper walls,��� writes Bowler. Even without a diagnosis or a catastrophic injury, our capacity is limited and our time is short. Most of us turn away from these truths most of the time. Yom Kippur comes to remind us to do otherwise. To live in the moment, and make teshuvah now. That���s a practice.

Yom Kippur calls us into spiritual life, including sitting with silence. What if we could, like Matt Sanford, learn to listen to the silence within our body-minds with compassion? That���s a practice. And Yom Kippur calls us to tzedakah: to giving what we can to others in need, as part of our pursuit of tzedek, justice. That���s a practice, too.

God opens the Book of Memory, but we���re the ones who write it. We can���t control the possibility of fire or flood, sword or wild beast, black ice on the highway or genetic predisposition. But we get to write the book of what we do with the life we���ve got. 

And when we truly inhabit this moment, right here, like Kate Bowler ��� when we honor our actual bodies and their limitations with love, like R. Julia Watts Belser celebrating ���crip Shabbat��� or rejoicing in her wheels ��� when we listen into the body���s silence, like Matthew Sanford, and learn how to hear our inherent connectedness ��� we build the resiliency that allows us to live in joy. Not despite what���s broken in our lives or in our world, but in tandem with it. Grief can coexist with joy, as bitter can coexist with sweet. We just have to make a practice (there���s that word again) of letting the joy in.

*

Our choir invites us now, in the words of poet Mark Nepo and music by our own Adam Green, to ���grow by simply listening.��� As we prepare for Yizkor, I invite us also to listen into the silences left by those who are no longer with us in this life��� and listen into what we might need to say to our dead during silent memorial prayer.

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Kol Nidre 5785: How Can We Pray?

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[image error]Earlier this summer I started asking, ���what do you want to hear a rabbi speak about at the high holidays?��� I got a lot of really powerful answers. One of your answers ��� actually a question ��� lodged in my heart: ���How can we pray to a God who appears not to be listening? To whom are we praying, and for what?��� 

The question wouldn���t let me go. So I sat down to answer it, and I wrote pages about how our ancestors answered this question. And then I stopped myself. The question wasn���t, ���how did our ancestors pray in their era.��� It���s how can we pray in ours. It can feel like God isn���t listening, maybe like God isn���t even there. I mean, God hasn���t fixed anything, so what are we even doing? Who are we talking to, and why? 

[image error]Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, wrote about a visit to Auschwitz where he saw countless photographs of small children who were killed. He broke down and wept and asked, ���God, where were You?���

And words came into my mind. I���m not claiming they were any kind of revelation, but this is what they said: ���I was in the words, ���You shall not murder.��� I was in the words, ���You shall not oppress a stranger���. I was in the words that were said to Cain when he killed Abel. ���Your brother���s blood is crying to Me from the ground.'���

And suddenly I knew that when God speaks and human beings refuse to listen, even God is helpless in that situation��� 

When we refuse to listen, even God is helpless. This feels very modern to me, though in some ways it���s a very old idea: tradition teaches that everything is in God���s hands except our awe of God. (Brachot 33b) In other words, the one thing God can���t control is whether we live with awe and choose to do what���s right. 

Our tradition teaches, ���Wherever Israel was exiled, the Indwelling Presence went with them.��� (J.T. Avodah Zara 1:17) The word rendered here as ���Indwelling Presence��� is Shekhinah ��� God within and among us. When we are in exile, part of God is too. Maybe here in this broken world we can pray to the face of God that is here with us in the brokenness. This feels to me like pastoral care: God is the hospital chaplain sitting by our bedside. (Or sometimes I imagine it the other way around: maybe our presence comforts God.)

[image error]R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto, taught that when we suffer, God's very Name becomes occluded; God suffers with us. (Rosh Hashanah 1941) But he doesn���t explain why God doesn���t ���reach in��� to fix things. Etty Hillesum, murdered in Auschwitz at 29, had her own take on that:

"Dear God��� One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn���t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last."

Etty talks about what the Hasidic masters called the God-spark within, the spark of something ineffable that makes us alive. God ���far above��� doesn���t seem to reach in and change things anymore, but God ���deep within��� is precious and needs our care. 

[image error]But why would we pray to a God Who doesn���t seem to fix things? My friend and teacher Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg wites, in her essay Permission Slip:

There is no version of any understanding of the divine that I have that involves me praying for a pony and getting a pony. Or a fast car or that gig that I want or a parking spot or whatever.

Courage, patience, compassion? That's different.  Those are inside you. When you pray for those, you are actually summoning great, gorgeous sleeping aspects of yourself from the deep, inviting them to rise to where you can see them, find them. You���re asking the divine to be your partner in finding them, asking for the capacity to access what is already available to you. 

In this understanding, God is the force that enables us to access our highest and best selves. With God���s help we can be better than we thought we could be. 

We pray in order to remind ourselves to make a better world real. We sang earlier about how we are guided by hands that uplift us, we are urged-on by eyes that meet us, we are counseled by voices that guide us ��� and ���ours are the arms, the fingers, the voices.��� We are God���s instruments in the world. We pray for justice to remind to pursue justice. We pray for peace to remind ourselves to make peace. 

[image error]Our usual Hebrew word for prayer is  ����������, from ������������ ��� a reflexive verb that means to judge oneself or discern oneself. When we engage in tefilah, we���re looking inside. We���re discerning who we are and who we want to be. Our traditional liturgy for today is rich with the metaphor of God-as-judge, but embedded in this Hebrew word is the idea that every time we pray, we are judging ourselves. Not in a punitive way, rather in an introspective way.

Prayer is a spiritual tool for introspection. With our fixed liturgy we return to the same words day after day, year after year, but we are always changing. How do the familiar words land with me now? What is arising in me when I say them? 

[image error]What do I feel, and what do I resist feeling? ���The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.��� That���s 19th-century Danish philosopher S��ren Kierkegaard, though it feels Jewish to me. 

We also learn things about ourselves during personal or spontaneous prayer. Remember the story of Chanah from the first day of Rosh Hashanah? She desperately wanted a child, so she went to a sacred place and she poured out her yearnings. Chanah teaches us that another fundamental aspect of prayer is speaking what���s on our heart.

What���s on our hearts this year might be grief, or anxiety, or rage, or helplessness. I am here to tell you that whatever it is we are feeling, no matter how vast or overwhelming our feelings might be, God (as I understand Them) can take it. And whatever it is, we need to express it, because stifled feelings can fester. Hey, good news, friends: Yom Kippur lasts for 25 hours. And our tradition teaches that right now, the Gates of Heaven are open. Operators are standing by. God is waiting for our call. 

[image error]Are the Gates really more open today than at any other time? I mean, our tradition also says (Zohar 3:31b)  the Gates might stay open until Shemini Atzeret ��� that���s the 8th day of Sukkot, so 12 days from now. And there���s another tradition (Zohar 1:220b) that says the Gates might stay open through Chanukah if we really need them. And there���s another tradition that says that the Gate of Tears is always open, so if we call out with a broken heart, the call always ���goes through.��� 

I love the expansiveness of these teachings, the reminder that it���s never too late. I hold them in balance with the injunction to ���make teshuvah one day before our death.��� (Pirkei Avot 2:10)  I offered that teaching one recent Monday during tefilah / prayer time at Jewish Journeys. Immediately a kid���s hand shot up into the air. ���But how do you know when that���s going to be?��� Of course, we don���t.

The time for teshuvah is always now. And if there���s something we need to say to God, there���s no time like the present. As always, if the word ���God��� doesn���t work for you, find one that does. Meaning. Justice. Love. The Universe. Ultimate reality. That spark within us that makes us part of something greater than ourselves. 

[image error]When God���s face seems hidden from us, I don���t believe that God is gone or isn���t listening. In my understanding God is like the moon. Sometimes the moon is full. Sometimes the moon is invisible. But the moon is there, even when we can���t see her light. God is there, even when we can���t feel Their presence. Martin Buber wrote that during the Shoah, it was as if we were living through ���an eclipse of God��� ��� a time when God���s face was hidden from us. Many of us have felt that way over the last year.  

This is a feeling as old as the psalms, maybe as much as 3000 years old. In Psalm 27 (the psalm for Elul and the Days of Awe) we find the plea, ���������������������������� ������������������ / ���Do not hide Your face from me!��� Sometimes God���s face can feel hidden in a big way, a communal way: during times of crisis or war. Sometimes God���s face may feel hidden in a small and personal way ��� like, ���no one else may be feeling this, but I am.��� 

There have been times in my life when God has felt absent. Sometimes my spiritual practices help me reopen that felt sense of connection��� and sometimes, when I���m really struggling with depression or grief, my spiritual practices can feel hollow. I���ve learned, in those times, to pray for the ability to feel my own prayers again. 

What keeps us from feeling God���s presence? Our busy-ness. Our to-do lists. The ready availability of ways to numb ourselves to feeling, whether through television or social media or doomscrolling or eating and drinking (or avoiding eating and drinking). Our ambivalence. Our trauma. Our depression and anxiety. Our discomfort with the things we might discover if we sit in the stillness and let ourselves feel. Maybe we don���t want to cry. Maybe we don���t want to get angry. Maybe we don���t want to open ourselves to the possibility of hope or joy because what if we can���t find them? There are a million ways and a million reasons to close ourselves off. 

[image error]Authentic spiritual practice asks us to open ourselves up, and so does this sacred day.

One of my favorite ways to open up is talking aloud to God when I���m driving alone in my car. Following in the footsteps of my teacher Reb Zalman z���l, I imagine the Shekhinah ��� the face of God that we can relate to; God in creation, God with and within us ��� sitting in my front seat. In my imagination, she���s resting her feet on the glovebox and she���s wearing sandals with a purple pedicure. As I drive, God listens with infinite kindness as I unburden my heart. 

But you don���t have to share my ���belief in��� God ��� my feeling that there is Something or Someone out there listening with tenderness. The practice of crying out can make a difference in us, whether or not we think there���s a Listener. 

The medieval Jewish philosopher Rambam says that the first step of teshuvah  is to make vidui aloud, to ���confess��� verbally where we���ve gone wrong. (We do a lot of that on Yom Kippur.) Centuries later, the Hasidic master Reb Nachman prescribed a practice of hitbodedut, speaking aloud to God in the forest.  Both of them knew that hearing ourselves say things can change us. And Yom Kippur is, at least in small part, about the proposition that we need to change, that our world needs to change.

Even if we don���t ���believe in God,��� we can still do hitbodedut. We can still pray our liturgy. We can even engage in the petitionary prayer of the heart. I���m not all that concerned with belief. I���m more interested in us experiencing the sacred. And even as central as my experience of God is for me, that���s not required, either.

[image error]As these 25 hours of Yom Kippur sweep across the globe [here's an amazing tiny timelapse!], Jews everywhere are looking within and pouring out what���s on our hearts. There is something powerful about doing this inner work in community, knowing that others are doing it now too.

In services tonight and tomorrow, pay attention to what bubbles up. What resonates? What feels uncomfortable? What makes us tune in, and what makes us turn away? So much of our liturgy for today is in the plural. ���We confess that we have sinned.��� ���Forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.��� What does it feel like to be part of a ���we,��� an ���us���? If I���m not feeling these words for me, can I feel them as part of an ���us���? 

During the silent amidah, go inside and see what���s on your heart, and pour that out ��� to God far above or God deep within. Walk our labyrinth tomorrow if the weather���s decent, and spend those long minutes talking to God. I recommend murmuring out loud, like Reb Nachman said to do.

You���re not sure what God is, or you���re not sure what prayer does? That���s fine: what if you do it anyway? What do you have to lose?

The question that came to me was ���How can we pray to a God who appears not to be listening?��� It is core to my own theology that God* ��� asterisk: that word is shorthand for so many different ideas and understandings ��� God is always listening. 

Listening, but not ���reaching in��� to fix. All I can conclude is that the fixing is our job. We pour out our hearts because we need to, because that���s how we learn who we are. And our time spent in prayer isn���t a magic formula that makes the universe do what we want: it���s a spiritual practice that inspires us to build the world that we need. 

[image error]I promise you that if you spend this day searching your heart for what you need to say, and saying it ��� to yourself, to God, to the great beyond ��� it will be a day well-spent. Sometimes prayer has no words, just the cry of the broken heart. Sometimes we pray because we want to change or be changed. Sometimes we might not know why we���re praying, or for what, until we see what words we need to say.

My Facebook questioner this summer asked not only how can we pray, and to whom, but also for what. I don���t know what we each pray for in our personal prayers. But I���ve got one last teaching about what we pray for collectively. 

Through northern hemisphere fall and winter, starting at Shemini Atzeret, our daily liturgy asks God for rain. In summer months, starting at Pesach, our prayers don���t ask for rain but rather for dew. In the place where our prayers began it simply does not rain in summer. Our sages teach that we don���t pray for the impossible, because doing so might harm our capacity to have faith. 

But our liturgy always includes prayers for peace. Our sages ensconced that prayer in our liturgy all year long, which means it must always be possible. Maybe God can���t make rain out of dry skies, but with God���s help we can always seek peace. 

[image error]In the words of R. Abraham Joshua Heschel, ���Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.��� 

May our prayers tonight and tomorrow nourish our souls and awaken our hearts. May our words and our silences help us to know ourselves more fully. May we pour out our hearts before the One Who hears all prayer. And may today help us return to being who the world most deeply needs us to be. 

 

 

 

This is the sermon I offered at Kol Nidre (and the song that the choir sang afterwards), cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.

Answer your soul

 
���������� ���������������������� �������������������� �������������������������� �������������� ���������� �������������������������� ���������� ���������������������������������� ���������������� ������������ ������������������������ ������������������������������������
The tenth day of the seventh month is the Day of Atonement. It shall be a sacred occasion for you, and you shall answer your souls. (Lev. 23:27) 

 

Mine asks: why is social media so enthralling?
Why do you keep opening new tabs to check in
on everyone we've ever known? Are you aware
that refreshing three different newspapers
gives you no control over anything?
Have you noticed how despair is just
below the surface, and do you think it has anything
to do with the questions I just asked
that you clearly don't want to answer? I'm sorry,
did you think I was being rhetorical?
What's so difficult about knowing you're going to die
that you'd rather fritter away your precious days
in a haze of rage and indignation
than live them and love them before you
leave them at an undisclosed location and time?