Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 83

How to thrive in this broken world

We live in a world of trauma and tragedy and outrage and constant micro-aggressions. In recent weeks we've seen hurricanes bring unthinkable devastation. The massacre in Las Vegas is heartbreaking. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports a rise in misogyny both overt and systemic over the last nine months. Many of us live in fear of violence against women. There's been a documented rise in antisemitism over that same time period. (David Duke just blamed the Las Vegas killings on Jews.) The United States just voted against a UN resolution that would have condemned the use of the death penalty for being gay. (I could go on.)  How can we not only live but thrive in this world? I don't have a single simple answer. But here are seven suggestions.

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Kindness. Be kind to yourself in whatever ways you can. Notice your internalized voices of critique -- maybe you knock yourself for not having the spaciousness to pay enough attention to the brokenness of the world, or maybe you knock yourself for not being able to make enough of a difference. Those voices can be helpful, up to a point. But they can also harm. Tell your internal critic to take a break, and be kind to yourself. Maybe that means taking a few extra minutes to put on lotion and be grateful to and for your body. Maybe it means a cup of tea, or a walk in the fresh air. Maybe it means clean sheets on your bed and the laundry folded, or a bouquet of flowers on the table. Do the little things you can to be good to yourself, to replenish yourself.

Boundaries. Maintain good boundaries. Maybe that means being attentive to your social media use, or your consumption of news. Maybe it means taking one day a week away from news altogether. (I suggest Shabbat, for reasons that are probably obvious.) If there are people in your life who deplete you, try to find ways to minimize contact with them. If the twenty-four hour news cycle is wearing you down, take a break from it. If the omnipresence of misogyny and antisemitism fill you with despair (as they do me), find a way to turn away from them and focus elsewhere for a while. This may feel like a luxury, but it's actually a survival tool. Maintain good boundaries around your body, your heart, your mind, and your spirit. This will help you stay intact.

Balance. Seek balance in your life. Maybe this means work / life balance. Maybe this means balance between engaging with the broken world, and seeking respite from the brokenness. Maybe it means balance between reading the news, and reading a novel. Maybe it means balance between focusing outward (on the world, on the work that needs to be done) and focusing inward (on your own heart and soul.) It can be tempting to throw yourself wholly into engaging with the broken world -- there is so much that needs to be repaired! There are protests to attend, letters to the editor to write, worthy candidates to support, hungry people to feed, systemic injustice to unravel. But if you throw all of yourself into that work all of the time, burnout is inevitable.

Endurance. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. The great struggles for justice, civil rights, safety in all four worlds (physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual), human progress -- these are long and their work will not be complete in any of our lifetimes. Find a rhythm that is sustainable and that sustains you. That rhythm might be six days of work, one day of Shabbat. It might be setting aside time each week for justice work -- or setting aside time each week for not doing justice work. The work of healing our broken world is enormous. It needs all of us, but it can't be accomplished single-handedly by any one of us. And if we don't engage in that work with an eye toward sustainability, the likelihood that we will hurt ourselves in so doing is high.

Beauty. Seek beauty in what your eyes look upon: notice the beauty in the faces of other living beings, in a forest or a tree or a houseplant, in the sky. Seek beauty in what your ears listen to: notice the beauty in music, in a beloved voice, in rhythm, in poetry. Seek beauty in what you breathe in: the scent of spices at havdalah, or autumn leaves rustling underfoot, or a sprig of rosemary, or a bowl of soup. Seek beauty in what you touch with your skin: notice the warmth of your clothes, the weave of your sheets, the fur of a pet. Seek beauty in what you consume: whether media, or music, or food, or drink. Seek beauty, and cultivate gratitude for beauty. This may feel frivolous when the world is so broken, but it is not: it is life-affirming and can be life-saving.

Connectivity. Connect with the place where you are. Connect with your communities, whether geographic or far-flung. Connect with your roots and your ancestry. Connect with your heritage. Connect with your creativity, and bring new words or work or ideas into the world. Connect with your friends, the people who put a smile on your face. Connect online. Connect with people you love. Connect with causes that matter to you. Connect with places and things and ideas and individuals that make you feel hopeful and strong. The more rooted we can be in our connections with place and time and each other, the stronger we are, and the more able we become to withstand the damaging winds of hatred and bigotry and tragedy with our hearts intact.

Presence. There is an immanent, indwelling presence that enlivens all things. That presence has many names. In my tradition alone we name it as Shechina, the Divine Feminine, Malchut, God between us and within us and among us. You may have other names, other metaphors. Whatever words you use, welcome that presence into your life. Maybe that means making regular time for meditation or contemplative practice. Maybe it means regular liturgical prayer -- or spontaneous prayer, whenever you feel called to speak to the divine. Maybe it means spiritual direction, discerning the presence of God in your life. Maybe it means talking with Shechina in the front seat of your car. Open yourself to presence and let yourself be sustained thereby. 

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May our abraded places be balmed, and our hearts be strengthened.

 

 

(These seven suggestions map to the set of seven qualities that the Jewish mystical tradition says we share with the divine -- the seven "lower sefirot" -- about which I have written here many times before.)

Prayer after the shooting

I loved and grieved from the day you claimed your free will,
Knowing that you too would open into infinite love and grief,

Knowing how your hearts would bloom with gratitude and hope
With every child’s every first, and lament every child’s every last,

As I do and always will with My children’s every first and every last
In the raw and wild cosmic dance we began together in the garden.

What else could I do? You must become what you must become,
Like Me infinitely becoming, infinitely capable of love and grief,

So I clothed your shimmering lights in skins and hid in plain sight
For you to seek and find Me amidst life’s sweetness and sorrow.

How fast your lights flickered underneath: your second son’s blood
Cried out to Me from the ground, too soon returning earth to earth.

The guilty wandered the land howling, pining for peace and safety
Denied by the very violence that condemned the guilty to wander,

Setting in motion also the vicious whirlwind spinning through
Columbine, Sandy Hook, Orlando, Las Vegas. Where next?

I did not mean for you to live like this or die like this – in fear and terror,
In trauma’s torrents, in shrapnel showers turning streets into killing fields.

You still can choose life: the free will your ancestors claimed for you
Remains yours even now, and still I gasp with loving pride and worry

With your every first and every last, grieving the countless innocents
Returning to Me in My own image too soon, bloodied and bagged.

But still you choose death. Aimlessly you wander the land howling,
Pining for peace and safety that senseless violence steals from you.

Choose to be My love, My strength, My intuition, My prophets, My beauty,
My healing hands – My living essence in this bloody and weary world.

Only then will this cruelest of your roulette wheels stop spinning red.
Oh, how I long with you for that day when you truly will choose life.

 

Claimed your own free will – Eve’s “defiance” in Eden claimed human agency for all her successors (Genesis 3:6-7).

Knowing … bloom – An allusion to the Tree of Knowledge and humanity’s “opening” into the knowledge of love and loss.

You must become – God describes God’s self to Moses as אהיה אשר אהיה / Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, “I Am Becoming Who I Am Becoming” (Exodus 3:14). We who are made in the divine image are also called to perennially become.

Clothed your shimmering light in skins - Because the Hebrew words for “skin” (עור) and “light” (אור) both are pronounced or, Zohar teaches that Eden’s first humans were beings of light, before God made us garments of skins. Even so, our skins cover our light, which we still can see if we look carefully.

Your second son’s blood… returning earth to earth. Humanity’s first murder – Cain killing Abel (Genesis 4) – spilled Abel’s blood (דם / dam) to the earth (אדמה / adamah).

Wander - Cain, after murdering his brother, was condemned to wander the land without peace (Genesis 4:14).

Setting in motion also - From Cain comes not only the first murder but also the rhetorical question – “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:8) – that continues to reverberate through the generations, and also the first “Why?” (Genesis 4:6), which teaches all future generations the possibility of teshuvah / return and repair (Radak Gen. 4:6).

Whirlwind – An allusion to the סערה (storm) from which God answered Job (Job 38:1). The storm’s circular shape resembles both a roulette wheel and a gun’s rotating cylinder that conveys bullets.

Choose life - “Choose life, if you and your progeny would live’ (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Aimlessly - The indiscriminate shooter, the nation’s inertia.

My love, My strength… – Seven emanations of the divine, corresponding to the seven lower sefirot of Kabbalistic tradition: chesed (love), gevurah (strength / boundaries), tiferet (balance), netzach (endurance / momentum), hod (beauty / gratitude), yesod (foundation / generativity), malchut (indwelling).

Roulette wheels stop spinning red – For the gaming tables of Las Vegas and the ultimate gamble: walking the streets safe and unafraid.

14 stanzas – 14 for יד, the yad (hand) of God: we now are the hand that must act.

332 words - 332 for לבש, lavash (clothed) in divine skins that cover our light.

 

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat and Rabbi David Evan Markus

(cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi and to R' David's website; feel free to reprint, with attribution.)

Who by fire: a sermon for Yom Kippur morning

 
A couple of weeks ago, on a Shabbat morning before services, a congregant said to me, "Rabbi, Houston is flooded. There's a hurricane heading for Florida, and more are already forming. The Pacific Northwest is literally on fire. There are earthquakes in Mexico. Is there a God in control of everything, and is God angry with us?"

I said to her: no, I do not believe that God causes disaster because God is angry with us. And as far as whether or not God is in control of everything, that's a bigger question, and my answer depends on what you mean by "God" and what you mean by "control." 

And she said, "But doesn't Jewish tradition say that's exactly how it works?" Well: yes -- and no. "Jewish tradition" says a lot of things that don't necessarily agree with one another! But it is true that one of the strands in our tradition holds that God is in control and decides what will be. The Unetaneh Tokef  prayer we recite at the High Holidays says exactly that. (It's a very old prayer, by the way: written between 330 and 638 C.E.) "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: who will live, and who will die; who by fire, and who by water..." That's a theology that can be hard to swallow.

Now, I'm a poet, so I read the whole prayer as metaphor. I think it tells us something about one of the faces that we as human beings have needed to imagine God to have. We need to imagine God as the shepherd who lovingly takes note of each one of us, who sees us and accepts us as we are. And we need to make sense of the fact that our world contains fire and flood, so we imagine God deciding who will live and who will die. But I don't want to stop there. If we keep reading, in that prayer, we reach the refrain:

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹֽעַ הַגְּזֵרָה.

"But teshuvah, and tefilah, and tzedakah, soften the harshness of the decree."

Teshuvah is a word we use a lot at this time of year. Some translate it as "repentance." I prefer "return." It comes from the root meaning "to turn," and that's the quintessential move of this season: we turn inward, we turn ourselves around. We look at who we've been, and we take steps to be better. We let go of old habits and patterns and stories that no longer serve, and we orient ourselves in a better direction.

Tefilah means prayer. You know, that thing we're doing here together this morning. But the Hebrew word tefilah is also richer than that simple translation would suggest. להתפלל / l'hitpallel means "to discern oneself." That's what prayer is supposed to be: a practice of discerning who we are, and refining the inner qualities that enable us to build a better world. 

And tzedakah means righteous giving. At its simplest, it means "charity." But tzedakah comes from a Hebrew root connoting justice. Tzedakah means making justice in the world. And sometimes we pursue justice through charitable giving, and sometimes we pursue justice through feeding the hungry with our own hands, and sometimes we pursue justice through electing public servants who will enact laws that we believe will make the world a safer and fairer place.

Teshuvah, and tefilah, and tzedakah. Turning ourselves in the right direction, and doing the internal work of discerning who we are and who we need to be, and pursuing justice: this prayer teaches that these three things sweeten, or soften, the harshness of the divine decree. Whether or not we believe in a God Who decrees what will be, teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah are our tradition's tools for fixing what's broken in our world.

And so much is broken. In recent weeks alone we've seen hurricanes, wildfires, and Nazis marching. Since I began working on this sermon, there have been more earthquakes in Mexico, more hurricanes in the Caribbean, unthinkable devastation in Puerto Rico. How can we maintain hope? How can we keep putting one foot in front of the other?

First we have to face in the right direction. Jewish tradition says we should orient ourselves toward God. If that word isn't comfortable for you, try: we should orient ourselves toward justice and righteousness, toward kindness and compassion, toward hope and love. 

We have to be willing to do the inner work of discerning our own patterns and how they feed into the brokenness of the world around us. We have to resist "checking out" and assuming that someone else will solve the world's problems. Our spiritual practices can be critical tools in this work. Prayer and meditation and spiritual direction can help us to be authentic and whole as we do the work the world demands. They keep us honest. They keep us real.

And we have to pursue justice in all its forms. We have to work toward a world of righteousness. Feed the hungry. Rebuild what's broken. Protect the vulnerable. Dedicate our hands, and our pocketbooks, to helping others. Even if you can only give a few dollars, or a few hours of your time, what matters is that you give.

These things are how we sweeten the harshness of living in this world where there are fires, and floods, and losses.  Notice that even in this ancient prayer, it doesn't say that God will soften the decree. It says that we will -- if we choose to. 

Last night we sang Rabbi Rami Shapiro's poem "Unending love:"

We are embraced by arms that find us even when we are hidden from ourselves. We are touched by fingers that soothe us even when we are too proud for soothing. We are counseled by voices that guide us even when we are too embittered to hear. We are loved by unending love.

We are supported by hands that uplift us even in the midst of a fall. We are urged on by eyes that meet us even when we are too weak for meeting. We are loved by unending love.

Embraced, touched, soothed, and counseled, ours are the arms, the fingers, the voices; ours are the hands, the eyes, the smiles. We are loved by unending love.

Ours are the arms, the fingers, the voices. Ours are the hands, the eyes, the smiles. We are the hands of God in the world. Whether our hands build or destroy is up to us.

It's easy to get hung up on whether or not we "believe" our high holiday liturgy: is God really judging us? (What do you mean by "God?" What do you mean by "judge"? For that matter, who's the "us"?) I invite you to try setting aside the question of belief, and ask yourself instead: how does today's liturgy make me feel, and what does today's liturgy ask me to do?

How it makes you feel is a question I cannot answer -- though I'd be delighted to sit down with you to hear about that anytime. But I can tell you what I think today's liturgy asks us to do. Today's liturgy asks us to take responsibility. It asks us to take our choices seriously. It asks us to resist despair, and instead to recommit ourselves to working toward a world that is more compassionate and more righteous than the one we inhabit now.

The question that sparked this sermon was rooted in flood and fire and devastation. The destruction we've seen in recent weeks is horrendous. I do not believe that God caused the hurricanes, or the wildfires, or the earthquakes.

I do believe that their damage was worsened because of human choices. For instance, generations of lawmakers and businesspeople, in south Texas where I grew up, chose to pave the wetlands and marshes and prairies that used to act as natural flood absorbers. And because those wetlands and marshes and prairies are now covered with asphalt, when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, there was nowhere for the floodwaters to go. 

Our choices impact the world. That's the bad news. It's also the good news, because we can choose differently.

We can't keep hurricanes from happening. But we can elect government officials who take science seriously. We can pressure our government to enact laws that will change the system in which paving over a wetland for somebody's profit is considered a good idea. We can build a society in which no one lives in poverty anymore, and no one lives in places that are polluted or unsafe. We can collectively make different choices about how we care for each other and for the planet that we share.

Whether or not we believe in a God Who decrees what will be, we can see in the world an infinitely complex chain of causality, and laws of nature, and human choices. The laws of nature aren't up to us. But our choices are.

To say that our choices matter is frightening because it means we're responsible. And it's exhilarating because it means we can make the world better, if we choose to.

One of the most radical Jewish teachings I know is that our actions impact God. I want to say that again, because it's so surprising. Every little thing we do or don't do has an impact on God, the Source of All! According to the Jewish mystical tradition, when we do mitzvot with intention -- whether lighting Shabbat candles, or fasting on Yom Kippur, or feeding the hungry -- we impact God's own self. When we do mitzvot with mindfulness, we heal a brokenness within God.

Rabbi Isaac Luria taught that when creation came into being, God withdrew God's-self -- God created a space that was not God -- in order to make room for us and for our free will. Free will means that we can choose to harm, or we can choose to heal. Our mystical tradition teaches that when we act here "below," our actions are mirrored "on high." When we act to bring healing to our world, we arouse the flow of healing within God too.

That idea may or may not work for you. Maybe you don't believe in a God Who needs our help in order to heal. But there are human beings who need our help. In south Texas, in Florida, in Mexico City, in Puerto Rico. And even if we aren't acting for God's sake, we must take action for theirs.

As we face a world that may feel increasingly apocalyptic, Jewish tradition offers us valuable tools for staying focused and creating change. We need teshuvah, turning ourselves and our communities and our world in the right direction. We need tefilah, the inner work of spiritual practice to keep us spiritually honest. And we need tzedakah, creating justice with our choices, and our hands, and our hearts. 

This is the work to which Yom Kippur calls us. This is the work to which authentic spiritual life calls us. May we emerge from this Yom Kippur with our hands and hearts strengthened, ready to direct our teshuvah, and our tefilah, and our tzedakah, toward fixing what's broken. As we sang last night, and we'll sing again now: may we bring all of our love, and our compassion, and our kindness, to the work of building a world of healing, a world of safety, a world of shalom.

 

 

Ahavah V'Rachamim

 

Ahavah

V'rachamim  

Chesed

V'shalom.

אַהֲבָה

וְרַחֲמִים

חֶֽסֶד

וְשָׁלוֹם.

 

Love, compassion, lovingkindness, and peace.

 

This is the sermon I offered at Congregation Beth Israel today (cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.)

 

Opportunities for tzedakah / righteous giving:

Unidos por Puerto Rico
Jewish Community Center of Puerto Rico
Hispanic Federation
Help Victims of Hurricane Maria (CNN vetted list)
Where to donate to Mexico earthquake victims (New York Times list)
Where to donate to Harvey victims (New York Times list)
How to help Hurricane Irma victims (New York Times list)
Help Anguilla
Nepal, India, and Bangladesh flood relief

Benediction on making the culinary combination

For food dipped
    in honey, say
        "your love leaves

my fingers fragrant."
    Don't rush to wash.
        Let sweetness linger.

For savory dishes
    with stone fruits
        say "may the year

balance my sweet
    with your salt."
        Let your mouth water.

For nubbled citrus
    steeped in vodka,
        recite the verse

"as a deer thirsts."
    Close your eyes.
        Savor every drop.

 

 

I ran across a machzor (high holiday prayerbook) from 1931 recently. The first thing in the table of contents is "Benediction on making the culinary combination." The thing itself is pretty prosaic -- it's just a prayer for the practice of eruv tavshilin. (Click on the link to learn more about that.) But it sparked my poetic imagination. 

[A]s a deer thirsts. See Psalm 42, verse 2. 

[N]ubbled citrus / steeped in vodka. See Etrogcello.

 

Shabbat shalom to all who celebrate!

When granting forgiveness is not mandatory

Every year, as the Jewish holidays approach, someone seeks me out because they’re struggling with forgiveness. Maybe this person is the adult child of a narcissist who was a cruel and self-centered parent. Maybe this person feels betrayed by an authority figure, a mentor or teacher who let them down. There are many variations. What they have in common is, they don’t feel able to forgive someone who hurt them, and they’re worried about what their inability to forgive says about them.

What does Judaism teach about the obligation to forgive, and why is this coming up for everyone now?...

That's the beginning of my latest essay for The Wisdom Daily. Read the whole thing here: When granting forgiveness is not mandatory during the high holidays.

The stranger in our midst: Ki Tavo and Dreamers

At the beginning of this week's Torah portion, Ki Tavo, we read instructions for when we have entered the land of promise. When we enter that land, we are to recount where we came from, remember our hardships in life's narrow places, and then enjoy the bounty of our harvest, together with the Levite and the stranger who lives in our midst. Then Torah instructs us to set aside a tenth of the yield of the land and share it with the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.

That's the first dozen verses of this week's parsha: remember our hardships, be grateful that with God's help we have made it out of slavery and into freedom, and share what we have with the needy -- especially those who have nothing of their own (the Levites), the immigrant or migrant or refugee, and those who have no one to take care of them and keep them safe.

Our Torah was written a very long time ago. Sometimes it reflects sensibilities that are deeply alien. Sometimes we have to grapple with it, or turn it in a new direction, in order to find meaning in it. But for me, this year, these verses sound a clarion call that's all the more striking for how ancient we know them to be.

No one in this congregation, to the best of my knowledge, is Native American. That means that all of us are descended from people who came to this land in search of something better than what we had known before. The first Jews came to North Adams in 1867 from Eastern Europe and Russia. My own ancestors came to this country more recently than that, from Poland and from Russia and from the Czech Republic -- which was called Czechoslovakia when my mother was born there.

My ancestors, like your ancestors, came to the United States hoping that it would be the "goldene medina," the land of prosperity and promise. My ancestors, like your ancestors, came to this land in hopes that it was a nation that held to be self-evident the truth that all human beings are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

My ancestors, like your ancestors, had to struggle with a governmental system that sometimes held Jews in low esteem. There were quotas. There was red tape. There was economic anxiety, and when there is economic anxiety, people turn on the Other: on those who don't speak or look or dress like them. You don't need me to tell you how many Jews perished in the Shoah because they couldn't get permission to enter this country where they would have been safe.

Today, this Shabbat, is the culmination of a week during which the President chose to end protection for "Dreamers" -- the children of undocumented immigrants who came to this country, often at great risk to themselves, out of those same hopes that brought my own mother and grandparents here. The "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" program had given them safety, security, refuge, and belonging. Some 800,000 young Americans are now living in mortal terror of deportation to so-called "home countries" that are not their home.

When you enter the land of promise, says Torah, the first thing you need to do is stop and remember where you came from. Torah cites the story of how our ancestors fell on hard times and descended into the land of Egypt and there were enslaved. (Each of us can tell our own family story of hard times that led someone to make the perilous journey to the United States. There were pogroms in the village. There was antisemitism in the town square. There were Nazis marching. We remember where our people came from, and how fortunate we are to be where we are now.)

And then, says Torah, you take your abundance and you share it. Share it with the stranger who lives among you: the immigrant, the refugee, the powerless. Share it with the Levite, who has no land of their own to farm and no crops to harvest. Share it with the person who has no protector to keep them safe from the cruelty of predators. Then, and only then, can you go to God and say, I've kept Your commandments, please give me blessing.

All of us are migrants to this land of promise. And if we have the safety of citizenship, we owe it to the Dreamers to fight for their safety and their inclusion and their continued right to live in this nation they already call home. We owe it to the Dreamers to protect them from the cruelty of a predatory government that would strip them of their status and send them packing. Then, and only then, can we go to God and say that we're honoring the mitzvot and we seek blessing.

Sometimes Torah is ambiguous. And sometimes Torah offers teachings that appear to be in conflict with modern sensibilities. But on this issue, Torah's teachings feel timeless and timely and unspeakably important. Today is Shabbat: a day to live as if the world were already perfected and suffering were already a thing of the past. But tomorrow when we re-enter the work week, I hope you'll remember Torah's call to action. We live in a land of promise. It's incumbent on us to remember how fortunate we are to be here, and to share our good fortune with others in need.

 

See also: HIAS Slams Trump Administration's Decision on DACA, Urges Congress to Protect Dreamers (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), US Jewish Groups Blast Trump's Decision to Scrap 'Dreamers' Program as Cruel, Unnecessary (Ha'Aretz),  How You Can Help (Mashable)

Also, from the Reform movement: Take Action to Protect DREAMers.

 

(This is the d'var Torah I offered at my shul this morning, and is cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.)

A rehearsal for the day of our death: a sermon for Kol Nidre

Before he died, Reb Zalman -- the teacher of my teachers -- made an unusual request. He knew that once he died, the chevra kadisha would perform the rituals of taharah: they would wash his body, and bless his body, and dress his body in white linen shrouds in preparation for burial. He wanted to experience that while he was alive, so that his neshamah, his soul, would be prepared for what was coming.

So he asked them to perform the rituals as though he were dead, and he closed his eyes and let himself be tended-to and prayed-over and cared-for in that unique way.

Can you imagine what that would be like? To lie still, as though your soul had already departed your body, and submit without flinching and without fear to your community's tender care? Can you imagine wanting that kind of "dress rehearsal" for your own death?

I've got news for you: today is that dress rehearsal. Welcome to the rehearsal for your death. Does that sound strange? It's a traditional way of thinking about Yom Kippur. To be clear, it's not about already being dead, or being deadened. (If your heart feels deadened today, then we're "doing it wrong.") Today is a rehearsal for feeling, with your whole heart, what it is like to know that you are dying.

Because of course, we are all dying.

Here are five practices that we take on, to varying degrees and in different ways, to make today a rehearsal for death. Maybe the most obvious is not eating. Today those of us who are physically capable of fasting will forego food and drink -- maybe because when you know you're dying, there are more important things than mindlessly ingesting calories.

Some have the custom of immersing in a mikvah, a gathering of living waters, before Yom Kippur -- as the dead are immersed in a mikvah before burial. In the mikvah before burial, we wash away the psycho-spiritual schmutz of a lifetime and declare the soul to be tahor, pure and clear.

In the book of Jeremiah we read that God is the mikvah of Israel. (This is a bit of rabbinic wordplay: read literally, what Jeremiah is saying is that God is the hope of Israel. But the words come from the same root, a reminder that mikvah is all about hope: hoping to feel reborn, hoping to be better tomorrow than we were yesterday.) If God is our mikvah, then even if we didn't immerse in a literal river or pond or ritual bath before the holiday, we can immerse today in God. Today we immerse in God's presence, and when we emerge tomorrow night our hearts will be open and our souls will be pure and clear.

Today we say the vidui prayer, confessing our mis-steps before God. Some have the custom of doing this daily. Of course, the other time when our tradition invites us to recite a vidui is on our deathbed. Before death, we confess where we've missed the mark... just as we do on this holiest of days. And as we recite the vidui, we look back on our actions and our choices. We wonder: did we do the best we could with what we were given?

Many of us follow the custom of wearing white on Yom Kippur. White is a Shabbat color, too, and Yom Kippur is called The Shabbat of Shabbats -- even when it falls on a weekday. (This year, Yom Kippur is Shabbat squared.) White represents the purity to which our souls aspire. And white is the color of the shrouds in which all of us will be buried. Some wear white kittels today: the very garments in which they will someday be buried.

And many of us follow the custom of avoiding leather on Yom Kippur. We wear shoes made from canvas or rubber because we don't want to profit from the death of any living being on this day when we open ourselves to God's judgment. Another interpretation: soft shoes remind us to maintain tender hearts. Stiff leather protects us from the world, as stiff habits protect us from our own feelings, but today we seek to wholly feel.

This is a custom also during shiva, the first week of mourning. During shiva we avoid leather because as we mourn, we don't want to benefit from the death of other living beings, like the cow or goat or alligator that gave its life so that we could have belts and shoes and handbags. So if you don't resonate with the idea of today as a rehearsal for death, you could think of it instead as a shiva minyan, in which the person being eulogized is -- you.

There's a famous story about Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite. Maybe you've heard it. The story goes that he opened the newspaper on the day after his brother's death, and saw printed there not his brother's obituary, but his own. The obituary described him as having the dubious honor of having made it possible to kill more people at one time than anyone had ever done before.

Alfred was horrified. That wasn't how he wanted to be remembered. So he changed his life. Most of us now don't think of him as someone who facilitated mass murder: we think of him as the creator of the Nobel Prize, who dedicated his fortune to honoring people whose work benefits humanity.

Imagine opening up the newspaper tomorrow and seeing your own obituary. What would it say? When you die, what will the world remember about you?

These are the questions to which Yom Kippur invites us. If I died tonight, how would I be remembered? What would my obituary say? The person described in that obituary: is that the person I want to be?

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, in his essay "Death as Homecoming:"

If life is a pilgrimage, death is an arrival. [...] Death, what follows death, is a mystery defying imagination. Facing it, our language is silence. Yet while the body descends into the grave, trust remains, hope persists. [...] This is the hope that in dying I become a seed and that after I decay I am born again.

Death is a mystery. We may not all be able to share Heschel's faith that when we die, we come home... or that after coming home into God, our souls will be born into life again. But what would it be like to seek that feeling of "coming home" even while we're still here?

As we sang earlier tonight, in the words of Lev Friedman: Bar'chu, dear One; Shechinah, holy Name; when I call on the light of my soul, I come home. As we call ourselves into prayer, we call ourselves to come home. Prayer is always an opportunity to come home.

Shabbat calls us to come home. No matter what we may experience during the workweek, no matter what alienation or distance or frustration, Shabbat is the time to relinquish our binaries and our distinctions and melt gratefully into the embrace of our tradition, the embrace of that One we name as God. Shabbat is always an opportunity to come home.

And Yom Kippur calls us to come home. Our mystics teach that Yom Kippur is a day of intense joy. Because all year long, our souls get schmutzed up: we make poor choices, we miss the mark, we fail to live up to our highest selves -- but today we get to shed all of that and be clean and clear. All year long, we fall into distance from God and distance from our truest selves, and today we're invited to come back again. Yom Kippur invites us to call on the light of our souls and come home.

Today is a rehearsal for our death: in Heschel's words, the ultimate homecoming.

Dying is a transformation. A portal: though to what, we don't know. We might have theories, but we can't know. Today can transform you, too, if you let it.

Of course, death isn't only literal. There are other forms of death besides the physical. Some of you may be familiar with tarot cards as a tool for interpreting one's life. In most schools of tarot interpretation, the Death card doesn't mean there's a literal death ahead. Instead, it points toward some kind of metaphorical dying. It means endings, beginnings, change, transitions, transformation. Every life contains those -- in abundance.

Sometimes life becomes constricting, holding us too tightly for the growth our hearts and spirits need in order to thrive. Sometimes we have to let go of an old life in order to be ready to be born into a new one. That might take the form of leaving home, or ending a relationship, or leaving a job. It almost certainly means accepting the death of a cherished narrative who you thought you were or who you thought you would become.

And I don't mean to minimize that. Dying to one's old self is hard work. It requires letting go, sometimes of hopes and dreams that had been a lifeline. It requires accepting that some things won't come to pass. It's natural to feel resistance to this kind of death. Most of us don't want to die to our old self. Even if who we are and how we are isn't entirely who or how we wish we could be, change is hard.

But dying to one's old self is a necessary precursor to the rebirth of new beginnings. In time, our old dreams and stories can become fertilizer for new unfolding that we can't yet begin to imagine, as the autumn's old leaves become food for spring's new green.

The only way to avoid change is, in fact, death: literal death, physical death. As long as we're alive, we're changing. The only question is, will we embrace the opportunity to change in ways that open our hearts and deepen our compassion, or will we resist that self-awareness?

Today is a rehearsal for your death. For all of our deaths. But we all know that it is possible to be physically alive while being deadened emotionally and spiritually -- and it's equally possible to embrace the death of old certainties, in order to open ourselves to new life.

The mishna, that great second-century compendium of early rabbinic wisdom, instructs us to make teshuvah -- to return to our best selves, to re/turn toward God -- on the day before our death. But we never know when the day of our death will be, so we'd better make teshuvah every day.

Of course, ordinary life gets in the way. Our to-do lists, our obligations, bills, homework, the job search, the laundry, the 24-hour news cycle, the internet, our favorite tv shows: we have endless ways of distracting ourselves from the need to look seriously at our lives.

That's why Jewish tradition gives us the Days of Awe: an opportunity to set all of that aside. Not forever! There's nothing wrong with to-do lists or tv shows or laundry. (There is something wrong with the 24/7 news cycle, and that's part of why we need Shabbat.) But we need to set our distractions aside from time to time, so we can pay attention to life's big questions. Now is one of those times.

Today tradition calls us to face the truth we usually do everything we can to ignore: we're all going to die. So how do we want to live?

 

[Cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.]

After Charlottesville: a sermon for Rosh Hashanah

One Saturday last month I was sitting by the pool after services, watching my son and his friends swim, when my cellphone started to buzz with messages from friends. I picked it up, and I watched in horror as white supremacists marched in Charlottesville.

Angry white men with flaming torches had stormed the university campus on Friday night. On Shabbat they marched through the city, some of them carrying swastika flags and giving Nazi salutes. They shouted the old Nazi slogan "blood and soil." They shouted, "white lives matter."

Of course I knew that hatred of Jews existed. But I've never encountered it in my daily life. I thought of Jew-hatred, along with Nazism, as a largely defeated ideology of the past. On the day of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville I recoiled in horror. This hatred of us is real, and I was completely unprepared. And it's not just hatred of us: it's hatred of everyone who doesn't fit the white supremacist mold.

Nazis and white supremacists must be stopped. And the fact that some people draw a false moral equivalency between the Nazis and the counter-protestors also horrifies me. But on this day of remembrance and introspection, I want Charlottesville to spur us to do some inner work... and the first step in that work is acknowledging that we weren't the only ones triggered, or targeted, by Unite the Right.

The Nazi chants and swastika flags in Charlottesville were badly triggering for many of the Jews I know. And the mob of angry white men with burning torches was badly triggering for many African Americans. Their communities carry the memory of of Ku Klux Klan attacks and lynchings, just as our communities carry the memory of pogroms and the Shoah.

While many of my white friends were as shocked as I was by this display of bigotry, none of my non-white friends were remotely surprised. Sad and angry, yes. Surprised, not at all.

In recent months, when I've had cause to say, "this isn't the America I thought I lived in," my non-white friends have said, "...this is the America we've always known." And they've pointed out that the fact that I'm surprised by this kind of ugliness shows that I've never had to walk a mile in their shoes.

They're right. No one throws racial slurs at me because of my skin. No one tells me to "go back where I came from" because of the way I dress or because of my mother tongue. My one visible marker of difference is my kippah, and I've heard people exclaim, "I didn't know a woman could wear one of those," but I've never been accused of supporting terrorism because of the way I cover my head. My Muslim friends have.

I have the luxury of being surprised by racism and bigotry because I don't live with them every day. That's part of the privilege I inhabit as a person with white skin. But we who had the luxury of being shocked by racism do not have that luxury any more. We need to open our eyes to the privilege we've unconsciously enjoyed as people with white skin; to the systemic injustices faced by people whose skin is brown; and to our obligation to dismantle the systemic privilege that benefits us over them.

When I say "systemic," I mean something more entrenched than individual acts of bigotry. I mean that prejudice is embedded in institutions and structures: from whose schools are well-funded, to how we're treated in the workplace, to who gets "stopped and frisked," to who gets deported. That systemic prejudice benefits those of us in this room who are white. We didn't ask for those benefits, but we receive them.

Many of us have experienced antisemitism, whether overt or covert. Many of us are living with the inherited collective trauma of thousands of years of persecution: the destruction of the Temples, expulsions, pogroms, the Inquisition, Hitler's attempt at genocide. Anti-semitism is notably on the rise. Many of us don't feel safe. When I say it's our job to dismantle white privilege, it may feel like I'm ignoring the trauma that we carry with us as Jews.

I understand that. I feel it too. But this isn't an either/or. Yes, we live with generations of inherited trauma, and many of us experience antisemitism now. And those of us who have white skin experience privilege because of that skin, whether we want to or not. Those two things don't cancel each other out.

What would happen if we could expand our hearts and our minds far enough to see the whole within which we can be both oppressed (as Jews who experience antisemitism) and oppressors (as whites who benefit from the color of our skin)? What actions would we take to create justice and healing then?

You may be thinking, "hang on, wait a minute: being white doesn't make me an oppressor!" I want that to be true too. And what I've learned from people wiser than me is this: all of us with white skin benefit from white privilege, and that itself is oppressive even if we don't "do" anything to make it so. The nation in which we live is oppressive to people who are not white. If we don't act against the oppression, we align ourselves with those who oppress. As Elie Wiesel wrote, "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

In the words of poet Naomi Shihab Nye, "I'm not interested in who suffered the most." I'm interested in healing the disease of racism and prejudice. While any community suffers from that toxicity, then no community is safe from its poison.

It's our job to stand against that ugliness. And we must do so specifically as Jews. Not only because we have often been the targets of bigotry -- though we have been, and we still are. We must act against racism because our tradition calls us to meet the needs of the disenfranchised and the powerless. Because the verse most often repeated in Torah is "love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Loving the stranger means loving not only the people who are like us, but loving those who are not like us.

And when you love someone, you ask them what they need, and then you strive to meet that need. People of color need us to work against racism in all of its forms. They need us to do this as white people. Because as scary as it can be to stand up to racism when you're white, it's a lot harder to do so when you're not. We need to speak loudly against racism, and act boldly against racism. Because if we don't, then our silence gives tacit approval to the kind of boundless hatred we witnessed in Charlottesville.

White supremacy also hurts us as Jews. Antisemitism and white supremacy have long been deeply intertwined. Although most of us in this room have white skin, white supremacists don't see us as "white." To them, "white" means "Christian." But I believe that we need to work against racism not just because doing so is good for us, but because we aspire to be a people who stand for justice.

We all tell ourselves stories about our nation. We want to believe that this is the "goldene medina," that anyone who works hard can "make it" here. We want to believe that we live in a "post-racial" society that's safe for everyone regardless of race, creed, or gender expression. These stories are not actually true. And by clinging to these comforting falsehoods, we give ourselves an excuse to ignore the realities with which so many of our fellow Americans live.

We all tell ourselves stories about ourselves, too. Stories about who we are and who we intend to be. Sometimes they're stories about why we couldn't live up to our aspirations, stories that make us feel better about our shortcomings and our flaws. This is the season to take a long, hard look at the stories we tell, because some of those stories become excuses for us not to grow, not to change, not to live up to who we mean to be.

Torah too is a set of stories we tell about who we have been. Torah is a mirror for all of who we are: from our best impulses to our worst ones. In today's Torah reading Sarah feels threatened by the presence of Hagar, whose name means "the stranger" or "the foreigner." וַתֹּ֨אמֶר֙ לְאַבְרָהָ֔ם גָּרֵ֛שׁ הָֽאָמָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את וְאֶת־בְּנָ֑הּ -- and Sarah said to Avraham, cast out that woman and her son! She doesn't want the other woman's son to share in the inheritance, to receive the blessings and the bounty of being part of the family.

The word for "woman" or "handmaiden" is amah, spelled with an aleph. But it sounds like amah with an ayin, which means nation. If you hear it that way, the verse reads, "cast out that nation and its children." Sarah's rejection of the stranger, the woman who is not like her, mirrors the ideology that leads to closing our borders, to rejecting or deporting the immigrant, to denying the refugee entry.

The tradition that we love has a shadow side -- a rejection of the outsider, a tendency toward us/them thinking -- that we need to face, and we need to help to heal. In this we are not unique. Christianity also has a shadow side. So does Islam, so does Hinduism, so does Buddhism. Particularism can lead to triumphalism, and we're not immune to that. Our task is to be aware of that danger, and to choose to strengthen not our history of insularity but our tradition's powerful call to moral responsibility.

The cancer of bigotry has damaged America: with racism, with antisemitism, with white supremacy, with islamophobia, with homophobia and transphobia, with so many forms of triumphalism that say that there is only one right kind of skin, only one right way to pray, only one right way to love, only one right way to be.

But our tradition teaches that we are all made in the divine Image: all races and genders, all sexualities and gender expressions, all nationalities and religions. 

It's easy to want to ignore this brokenness altogether. And it's easy to get so caught up in the brokenness that it becomes all we can see. The High Holidays invite us to resist both of those impulses, and instead to live in the tension of knowing both that things are broken and that repair is possible.

We have to face the brokenness in our nation in order to be able to repair it. And there's no better time for that than now. This is the work of teshuvah, repentance and repair. This season calls us to discernment: who have we been? Where have we fallen short? Where do we need to re-align ourselves? 

Rebecca Pierce, an African-American Jewish filmmaker, wrote recently for the Forward that "Real racial justice struggle is courageous work that involves self-examination, honest assessments of privilege, and a willingness to admit and be accountable for harm." Self-examination, honest assessments, willingness to admit our missteps and take responsibility: that's exactly what teshuvah is.

Racial justice work requires us to make teshuvah... and I believe our teshuvah work requires us to engage with racial justice.

The inner journey of teshuvah calls us to work against all kinds of bigotry. The inner journey of teshuvah calls us to stand up for those who are vulnerable. The inner journey of teshuvah calls us to the ongoing work of tikkun olam, repairing the world. 

The inner journey of teshuvah calls us to make our nation a better place: to sign a petition, attend a vigil, support a candidate, combat voter suppression, educate ourselves about how we can work to end racism and then do that work. This is true no matter which political party we call home. Whether you are Republican or Democrat or independent, I pray that your teshuvah this year lead you to step up and get more involved with building an America where racism and white supremacy are a thing of the past.

That white supremacy and Nazism must be condemned and disavowed is something on which I suspect we can all agree. But there's also a subtler kind of racism in which we all partake -- an unconscious racism of implicit bias. That's what leads white women to clutch our purses tighter when we see black men on the street; leads police officers to be 2.7 times more likely to shoot and kill black people than white people; leads to the belief that Black people are naturally good at sports or that Jews are naturally good with money. Implicit bias is a lot subtler than Klansmen with Nazi flags and flaming torches. But we need to tackle it, too.

Hip-hop DJ Jay Smooth talks about overcoming unconscious racism with the metaphor of dental hygiene. It requires persistent, repetitive inner work. Changing our unconscious thought patterns is like flossing: we have to keep doing it.

Changing how we think is the first step toward changing how we act. When we change our internal assumptions about people who aren't white, when we allow ourselves to see the structural ways in which non-white people are persistently and systematically discriminated against, we'll be moved to take action to create change. At least, I hope we will. Because if we don't, then we're doing exactly what Elie Wiesel counseled against. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the oppressed. Judaism calls us to fight oppression in all of its forms.

Changing our internal thought processes in order to change our behavior in the world is exactly what Judaism calls us to be doing right now. That's the work of teshuvah. We have to keep putting one foot in front of the other: re-aligning ourselves with holiness, adjusting our course so we're headed in the right direction.

We have to keep building what we can, repairing what we can, rejoicing in what we can. The rejoicing is important. In this, we can learn from African American communities that have faced violence and emerged with their faith and hope strengthened. They have a lot to teach, if we're willing to listen.

We can learn from our own ancestry, too: even in the Warsaw Ghetto, our forebears learned and lived and loved and prayed and found reasons to rejoice. If they could do those things then, we can do those things now. And we must.

Realizing how far we've fallen is precisely what will spur us to rise. Realizing how broken America has become, maybe how broken America has always been, is the first step toward working to make our nation more whole. And in order to do this work on a public level, a community level, a national level, we have to do our own work on a personal level. That's what these days are for.

As our sages remind us, it's not incumbent on us to finish the task, but neither are we free to refrain from beginning it. Healing our nation of bigotry is not work that any of us can "complete," just as perfecting ourselves is not work that any of us can complete. But we're still called to do what we can to make ourselves more whole, and to make our nation more whole, and to build a world of justice and shalom.

 

 [Cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.]

Yahrzeit

When should I light a mourner's candle
in remembrance of my marriage:
the date he proposed, or the date
we were wed, or the date we agreed
we were through? I choose the date

when we sat before witnesses
and poured wine from the silver goblet
into separate cups, the date when we wrote
"I release you," when we took scissors
and cut deep, severing.

My year of mourning is ending, but
what will be different tomorrow? The world
continues, ordinary and real:
call the electrician, don't forget milk,
watch another hurricane slam the coast.

And relationships persist. I carry
eighteen years of marriage in my bones.
How I shaped myself to his contours.
How we failed each other.
The candle flickers in its glass.

We pinched the flame of the marriage.
What burns now is memory: this first year
unpartnered, unwitnessed, unaccompanied
transformed into a thin, wavering light.
The candle goes out. I still shine.

 

 

Related: A ritual for ending a marriage, 2016

 

Walking in the fields

A field, near where I live.

 

If you've looked up at the night sky recently, perhaps you've noticed that the moon is waxing. We're moving deeper into the month of Elul: the month that leads us to the Days of Awe, the last month of the old year.

There are two teachings about Elul that I want to juxtapose:

One tradition teaches that this month, "the King is in the fields."

Imagine God as a King: a sovereign, transcendent, far away, perhaps sequestered in a palace behind walls and gates and courtiers and protocols. This month, the King is in the fields: away from all of those protocols and requirements, directly available to us.

Another tradition teaches that the name of this month, אלול / Elul, can be read as an acronym for אני לדודי ודודי לי / ani l'dodi v'dodi li, "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine," from Song of Songs. The Beloved, here, is God.

This month, we can especially experience God as Beloved, as partner, as intimate and trusted friend and companion, walking with us hand in hand.

If you are so inclined, take a journey with me.

Imagine yourself walking in the fields. Feel the swish of the grasses against your ankles, hear the contented buzzing of bees going from wildflower to wildflower and crickets singing their late-summer song, smell the scent of newly-mown hay. 

Imagine that you're not alone.

Maybe walking beside you is the King, sovereign of all worlds, bending an ear to hear what's on your mind and heart.

Maybe walking beside you is the Beloved, the friend to Whom you belong most intimately, listening. 

What do you most need to say as you walk in the fields this morning, as we approach Shabbat, as we move deeper into Elul, as the Days of Awe draw near?

 

 

This is the guided meditation I offered this morning at my synagogue, more or less. I share it in case it speaks to you.

For more on these themes:

Seeking the Beloved (2005) 
Riding With the King (2008)
the poem titled Pray (2015) -- which will appear in my next collection of poems, Texts to the Holy, due in 2018 from Ben Yehuda Press. 

(Speaking of which, the press is fundraising now for six new titles of Jewish poetry, including mine: check out their kickstarter.)

Shabbat shalom to all!