Happy Ritual Change of Year

“I’m looking forward to 2014...I’m so ready to move on.” (Anonymous) 

Yes, me too.  2013 has been a strange year, in some ways painful and in some ways freeing, definitely filled with unexpected transitions.  

But isn’t a calendar change arbitrary?  If we are so ready to move on, can’t we do it without the new year’s arrival?  Shouldn’t a new day be enough?

Sure!  Every day is a new beginning.  “Every day Creation is renewed.”  

One of the reasons I think the New Year holiday is so profound - even if our resolutions don’t last - is that it is so highly ritualized.  We prepare for (at least) a week: Facebook friends, organizations, newscasters and more count down what they see as important music, movies, events, and so forth from the past year.  We are encouraged thus to reflect on our own year, on its ups and downs, on our own successes and “failures,” and ultimately on what we would like to change in the coming year.  And then we all come together - in person or via technology - to count down the last minutes and seconds to the new year.  (But even as I write this it is already 2014 in parts of the world; I understood this early, growing up on the west coast, when the clock struck midnight in the “heart” of our country (Times Square) at 9pm.  See how arbitrary it is?)

Ritual is powerful.  Ritual awakens us - “wake up and see”! - urges us into awareness.  

We don’t have to wait for a new year.  We can ritualize our mornings.  We can wake up to a practice of prayer, reflection, renewal.  If we don’t already do something like this, we can resolve right now that in the new year we will.  Take note - it’s not just tonight as the clock strikes midnight, but:

Every day Creation is renewed: wake up and see

In the spreading light of dawn

The world and all it contains

Coming into being new and fresh,

Filled with divine goodness and love.

Every day, Creation is renewed: wake up and see.   

Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg

(Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat VeHagim)

So my resolution for 2014 is, when I feel like I am ready to move on, to leave something behind, I’m not going to look for an upcoming transition - a year or even a day.  As the saying goes, “never put off until tomorrow what can wait until the next day.”  Oh, wait - that’s the procrastinator in me.  “Never put off until tomorrow what can be done right now.”  This breath, this moment - now is the time!

Wishing you and yours many blessings in the year to come, moment by moment and day by day.  Happy New Year!

Encountering the Divine

Last night I watched an old episode of 7th Heaven, a 90s tv show focused on the family of Reverend Camden, a suburban minister, in which the middle school leadership is concerned that the custodian is crazy and needs to be forced into retirement.  Why?  Because he hears the voice of God.  God tells him to go speak to Reverend Camden, who becomes his advocate, announcing to the school board, "I speak to God every day, [don't you?]....  Do you not even expect an answer?"

How do we listen for answers or connection from the Divine?  The biblical prophets experienced visions, dreams, even the voice of God directly or through Mal'achim - angels (literally messengers).  Were the prophets crazy?

This week the Torah reading cycle enters the Moses story and his first encounters with the Divine.   Song and lore tells us that "none has yet risen in Israel like Moses," no other prophet has, to jump ahead in the story, seen God face-to-face (Exod. 33:11) and lived to tell about it.

When God recruits Moses for the work of bringing the people to freedom, Moses asks a valuable question, "What shall I tell them is Your name?"  God's cryptic answer, Ehyeh asher ehyeh - I will be that which I will be (some translate present tense, "I'm am what I am").

The openness of the answer is brilliant - each encounter may be different.  Not only is each individual's relationship to the Divine unique, but one individual may experience God in myriads of ways.

Admittedly, when someone says they hear God speaking to them I get nervous.  This is not necessarily a bad response.  I think of such God-voices as those described in Under the Banner of Heaven, contemporary prophecy that leads one to take the life of another.

So how do I describe my own encounters with the Divine?  I have said that I believe in the God of coincidences - that there are times that I should have been one place or done one thing and instead have chosen another, and as a result I am saved some horrific experience.  An example?  When I was sixteen I was supposed to meet a girlfriend after school to bring her something of hers.  Instead, I went home, and that is where my mother, who was supposed to be at work but came home because she thought she had left the oven on, answered the phone call with the news that my friend had shot herself.  I cannot be sure what I might have done had I gone to meet my friend as planned and found her lying there with the still-loaded gun - but through what might seem like chance I had my mother's support.

No, I didn't hear a voice telling me to go home instead of meeting my friend - not in the conventional sense of spoken words anyway.  Call it more gut instinct.  And it's not that the outcome of such moments is joyful, as I sometimes imagine all Divine encounter ought to be.  Sometimes it's downright miserable - involving things like losing a friend to suicide.

But this is the marvelous thing about Ehyeh - God can be the connector in the moment when one needs support from family, friends, colleagues; but God can be other things in other moments, like the indescribable moment when the world simply seems beautiful, right, amazing, awesome, or the flame that doesn't consume but catches our attention, or the invisible but tangible outstretched arm guiding us away from narrow places and into freedom.  And maybe sometimes it is the still, small voice - a voice from within and beyond, that calls us by name and tells us:

"Ehyeh asher ehyeh - I will be that which I will be." (Exodus 3:14)

Ehyeh - I will be
I will be with you
I will be what you need
Don't look
   I am not what you think you need
Don't expect me
   I am already here
I will breathe you
I will carry you
I will dance you
I will sing you
I will hold you
I will nudge you
I will guide you
I will support you
Ehyeh - I am

Havdallah - Blessing of Separation

Most holidays have a beginning and a middle, but the end can be less clear.  I think of Thanksgiving - before the holiday there is all the planning (where and with whom) and cooking, and then there is a time when all that planning comes together for a meal.  But how does it end?  From the dinner table to the football game - moments of drifting away, hugs goodbye for those who have gathered?

I love the ritual of Havdallah - a ritual that marks the end of Shabbat and all major Jewish holidays with candle, wine, and spices.  The candle, with its multiple wicks, sheds more light than the single-wicked candles that begin holidays - brightening the dimness that is the transition from holy time to the everyday.  The spices often make me think of smelling salts, even as they also carry a sweetness forward into the week to come.

There is great value in recognizing changes - from season to season, from year to year, and major life transitions. My graduating class modified the Havdallah ritual for our transition from being rabbinical students to being rabbis.  It was a profound moment, and that ritual as much as the larger graduation ceremony, helped us (certainly me) to move from one place in life to another.

This past Saturday evening, as my family ushered in the new week with the Havdallah ritual, I felt again the larger value of marking transitions.  I was entering my first week after separating from my employer.  I could feel the difference - the inevitable losses and changes in relationships I had worked hard to build that are no longer necessary, the shift in myself to cultivating new and different relationships and doing different work.  As the candle burned and we sang the blessings, I reflected on these changes.  As the candle sizzled out in the wine at the end of the ritual, I felt a calm come over me. I was ready to move forward.

Many holidays are, in themselves, markers of transition - either in some obvious way like marking the new year, or in more subtle ways.  Indeed, any holiday can help us to mark change, as we go around the seasons.

Holidays and rituals that mark transitions help us to name the changes in our lives.  By naming, we give ourselves space to acknowledge and process changes, both privately and publicly.

We can bring meaning to the holidays through our own reflections: Where were we last Thanksgiving, or ten years ago?  Who have we spent this holiday with?  Who are we spending it with this year?  What does it mean for us?  If you, like me, are also celebrating Chanukah, ask the same questions about this Festival of Lights - and then ask how the convergence of these two holidays changes our experience of them.

Whatever holiday(s) you are celebrating this week and in the coming month, may you find whatever blessings you need - blessings of naming change, blessings of light and joy, blessings of gratitude.

Dreams and Dreamers

Joseph is a dreamer. His dreams - or at least his sharing of his dreams put him in danger. They are the dreams of a prophet, dreams that know something that can't be known.

Dreams can be like that. Dreams sometimes tell us a situation is or isn't right in a way we don't seem to grasp in our waking life. 

The double entendre of the word "dream" is really quite profound. We dream in consciousness about our hopes, and we dream to process life while we sleep. I believe that in dreams my subconscious mind can work in the space, the veil, between olam haba (the world to come, or the spiritual world) and olam hazeh (this world, the physical).  

Someone recently asked, thus reminding me, about my journey from anthropologist to rabbi. It is a multifaceted journey, one that relies on conscious and subconscious dreams. Since childhood, I have loved digging through layers of past cultures, and this passion is directly connected to my spiritual and moral identity. 

Sleeping dreams have directed my journey through these interests on more than one occasion. A series of dreams during my work as an archaeologist ultimately led me to leave that academic field and pursue the rabbinate. The dreams were difficult, filled with ethical dilemma, and left me raw. The transitions weren't easy (if ever they are).

Unlike Joseph, whose initial downfall may be in sharing his dreams too readily, I was cautious about with whom and how I shared my dreams. But like Joseph, my dreams have led me on a long, sometimes arduous, often splendor-filled journey.

I am never sorry when I follow my dreams.  It is good to be reminded of this.

How do you make use of conscious dreams - dreams of hope? And how do your subconscious dreams - of sleep - speak to you? Do you have a little Joseph in you?

[edited for clarity]

Reaping Blessing Through Wrestling

You should never argue with a crazy mind
You oughta know by now...
It seems such a waste of time
If that's what it's all about
If that’s movin’ up then I’m movin’ out.
(Billy Joel)

Wrestling is hard work.  It can be painful in the moment, and it can leave a person exhausted and disfigured.  In this week’s Torah portion, Jacob wrestles, and comes away with two things: a lifelong limp and a new name.  Israel - one who wrestles with God - becomes his name, and it also becomes our name, the name of all of the descendants of his father and grandfather.

One of my personal mottos is na’aseh venishmah, literally “we will do and we will understand,” but what I understand to mean “do the next right thing.”  Sometimes we need to do in order to understand.

This is also a place of intense wrestling - wrestling with the godliness within, wrestling to understand God’s desire for me.  If I don’t understand, then how do I know it is the right thing? What part does gut feeling play in some of the most important decisions I might make as a result?

As a place of wrestling, it is a place of scarification, a place that cuts into me with permanence. Doing the next right thing requires knowing when to wrestle, when to keep up the fight. It also demands that I know when not to wrestle, when to let go, when to walk away from the fight. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing - letting go before the wounds get to deep. 

There are things to give up on, and there are things not to give up on.  I had a conversation with a colleague, recently, about responding pastorally to a family around suicide.  I have been on both sides, having lost a brother and a close friend to suicide, and having officiated at funerals for suicides.  I understand suicide to come at a moment when an individual has given up on everything.  I see that - but I don’t fully understand it, and I hope that I never will.

But actually, that’s the key word - hope.  It is a remarkable thing, always creeping up when the wrestling - when the decision about how to wrestle and when to let go - is at its worst, when I think I’ll never figure it out.  Hope creeps in and reminds me of one of my other personal mottos, gam zeh ya’avor, “this too shall pass.”  Clearly, this is something that someone in the midst of suicide cannot or will not grasp.  But for me it has led to some of the most beautiful experiences in my life.

I wrestled, angrily, with God over infertility.  I couldn’t stand the pain.  I shouted and a quarreled with God as friends and colleagues brought child after child into this world. But even when I laughed in disbelief, hope crept in - day after day, month after month, year after year.  Today, I dance with Torah today because my son desires it.  My son, the beloved neshama I thought I had lost during those days of wrestling.  He came only after I let go of the wrestling.

When I wrestle with God over things big and small, hope creeps in, I remember that this too shall pass, and I try to do the next right thing, even when I don’t understand it.  Even if things don’t get better on my timeline, the world brings so many blessings that it’s worth the fight.

Fixity and Flexibility

The hardest part of religion (or any part of life, frankly), for me, is that which is fixed.  I don’t like to follow rules.  The more rules you give me, the more I rebel - inside if not out.  Tell me that I have to do something a certain way, and that’s the only way I don’t want to, almost can’t, do it.

Perhaps this is a case of “point a finger out and three are pointing back.”  When I ask people to do things, I sometimes expect them to be done a certain way.  

Over the years, though, I’ve grown more flexible in the latter (I think) than in the former. I’ve grown deeply aware that things can get done well and properly even (and sometimes especially) if it isn’t done the way I expect it to be done.  But if someone tells me something has to be done a certain way, I still fight.

When I’m working on a project, large or small, I am prone to extreme flexibility - not setting anything in stone ever.  As a rabbi, if I am leading services, I frequently make choices in the midst of the service, based on who is present or a feeling in the moment, to add or skip a song or reading.  At a bigger event like the Community Day we did last Sunday, our Hebrew School students sharing their learning from the first third of the year, I am open to changes in the order of presentations even after the program is printed.  

I like the fluidity of water and dreams, ever changing and changeable.  In this week’s Torah reading, Jacob sees the ladder with angels ascending and descending.  As I understand dreams to be of us, I see Jacob processing his world.  When he wakes and says, “God was in this place and I, I did not know!” I think he is saying that his heart, which knew, was telling his head, which had not grasped that God is everywhere.

Head and heart.  Different parts of our body, in both of which thought forms and action derives.  Forgive me a bit of spin - the head is the place of fixity, of fixed ideas and of “set-in-stone” action, and the heart is the place of fluidity, of open ideas and flexible action.  

Both head and heart, both fixed plans and flexibility, are valuable.  When we choose to attend an event -- a play, a religious service, a carnival -- we expect certain things, because those event names carry some fixed meaning.  But if every play is the same, if every religious service is identical, sameness becomes droll.  We want something different -- a new inflection for Tevye or MacBeth, a different sermon or an innovative prayer that reaches out to where we are, a new ride at the carnival.

God of Jacob, dreamer of angels, dreamer of heavens, hear my prayer!  Give me courage not to require others to do things "my way," and strength to be flexible to all that comes my way, including fixity demanded by others.

You Are What You Read (and Read What You Are)

You Are What You Read, declared a link posted by a friend on Facebook.  Apparently the news is a little old (2011-12), research suggesting that identifying with a character in a book can actually change us.

Actually, this isn’t news in Jewish tradition at all.  I find the annual cycle of reading Torah -- a practice dating back thousands of years -- to be a practice of identifying with characters and of becoming.  I spiral back to each story individually and with community, and each time I read a story I bring different questions to it.  

I mean that at any given point I am living certain questions.  These questions may be big or small, but they always are about where I am in my life, on a journey or in a stuck-place, grieving or experiencing newness and joy, as teacher and/or student, focused on love or grappling with darker emotions. 

Admittedly, the questions I am living at a given moment impact my reading of a story (biblical or other) -- but the wisdom of Torah and the cyclical reading of it is that  each story brings answers, somehow, to the questions in which I am living.  

The many questions I flow between in my life are not by any means unique to me.  Torah (and much good literature) is brilliant in leaving space for questions -- in answering questions with questions -- leaving room for the reader to examine what isn’t written, the stories between the stories.  This is midrash. 

From this week’s reading we have sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau beginning in the womb: “the children struggled within her” says the Torah, and Midrash says, “whenever she passed by a place of study Jacob would struggle to come out, and whenever she passed by a place of idolatry Esau would struggle to come out” (Genesis Rabbah 63:6).  The midrash has each child dealing with their own personal struggles, rather than the sibling rivalry that seems the original intent of the text.  Author beware -- your reader will find things in your writing that are more about him/her than about what you thought you wrote.

One of my favorite contemporary authors, Dara Horn, employs the concept of midrash to her writing.  I have just finished her recent book, A Guide for the Perplexed, which brilliantly tells a 21st century story by sweeping together the biblical Joseph story with a medieval book of the same title and a 19th century rabbi-scholar.  This is a book that has influenced me in recent weeks.  Another of Horn’s books, The World to Come, provides some of the foundation on which I tell my son the story of his birth (which came a year or so after I read the book).

Our modern experiences really aren’t that different from what has happened to people in the past, despite the illusion created by changing technologies and our own sense of progress.  Whether Torah or contemporary literature, horror or fantasy, news or memoir, self-help or spirituality -- what we read influences who we are. 

On the flip side, I am finding that who/what/where I am in my life has a lot to do with the choices I make in reading material.  Last spring I slipped into a phase of reading fiction that described terrorism and human slaughter in gruesome detail.  This literature somehow helped me to deal with loss and grief in my own life. 

Recently, I have realized that I am unable to open such books.  My circumstances have changed.  I’m moving out of hardcore grief and into a journey of hope.

And what am I reading?  Besides the weekly Torah readings, which are filled with great stories for the journey-oriented questions I am currently engaging, I’ve moved into the “cozy” mysteries, where deaths may happen but the details are kept to a bare minimum.  And I’m reading life-journey books, including Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, and Dara Horn’s Guide.  

Thank you for reading my words - I can only hope they are helping you with your questions. Recommendations for my next read are welcome!  

Chayye Sarra and the Dance with Torah

Welcome to my new blog!

This week, Jews around the world read from the Torah the section known as Chayei Sarra, literally “the life of Sarah.”  Thirty years ago, I read from this story at my Bat Mitzvah.  It is a fascinating segment of the book of Genesis, which in fact begins with the death of the great matriarch, Sarai cum Sarah.  

The more involved story in Chayei Sarra, however, is the story of Sarah’s son Isaac receiving a wife.  More to the point, it is the story of Rebecca as a woman of valor, a woman who is strong and beautiful and kind and generous, and who because of all of these things finds herself in the position of becoming the second matriarch of the Jewish story.  It is far less about Isaac, about whom I am discovering as I reread the Torah year by year we actually know very little.

I find myself thinking of Sarah and her son Isaac -- as I and my son both turn a year older this weekend.  Who was Isaac to Sarah?  He was her son, her only son, her beloved -- the child of her old age.  When she heard she would have a son she laughed.  Was it disbelief?  Was it joy?  A little bit of both?  And how did she experience her son once he was born into this world?

This is a beginning for this blog (you can see previous blog entries on my workplace website), and it needed a name.  I am taking a phrase from my almost-two-year-old’s greatest desires -- “Dance with Torah?” he pleads nearly daily since celebrating Simchat Torah a month ago, and I have tried to find ways for him to do so.  Confession: I am a rabbi, and Torah, as text and in the broad sense of Jewish tradition, is my life.  Yet my son inspires me to deepen the joy I take from Torah, to dance with it physically, intellectually, and spiritually.

It is my hope that this blog, in which I will share about Judaism, tradition and innovation, and general spiritual pursuits, will inspire and support others in the age-old yet stunningly contemporary Dance with Torah.

Losing Our Religion?

[Note: This post predates the creation of this blog by a week - originally posted at www.cbict.org/yepblog, where I posted regularly during the last academic year.  I repost it here as it was the first in my return to blogging this year.]

Much ado is being made about a recent Pew survey suggesting that the number of those identifying as Jewish is dwindling, and that those who do identify as Jewish are not identifying religiously.

Judaism is a culture – and a religion.  Judaism is values and actions, it is rituals and community, and it is about our place in the Oneness of the universe.  Notice the word “and.”  Judaism is not one of these things, it is all of these things.

Torah – the Five Books of Moses – is filled with mitzvot, commandments.  The word mitzvah has been distilled in recent times to mean “good deed.”  But this is a simplification that neglects the values of the original words.  The Talmud, the “oral Torah” of the early rabbis, understands these commandments in a variety of ways.

One teaching says that all mitzvot are rules about relationship, either between one person and another or between a person and God.  Those things seen as the Jewish “religion” typically fall into the latter category, but in fact even those that are about interpersonal relationships are ultimately about God.  We are all made, according to Torah, “in the image of God,” and thus every encounter with another person is an encounter with a bit of godliness.  And ultimately it is through our relationships with each other that we come to know God.

An example: The mitzvah, “ve’ahavta lereyacha kamocha,” love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18) – and the mitzvah, “ve’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha,” love your God (Deuteronomy 6:5).  The former is described by Hillel as “the whole of Judaism, all the rest is commentary,” while the latter is recited as part of the Shema in virtually every Jewish prayer service and at bedtime.  This is a commandment that encompasses emotion and experience, but also holds expectations for behavior.

Rituals help us focus.  The act of putting on a kippah (yarmulke – head covering) or a tallit (prayer shawl) or tefillin – all “commanded” through mitzvot, and all nearly unique to Judaism – can bring the prayers we are about to recite (which are not very unique) into a physical, tangible experience.  The actions and the order and timing of prayer, not the language in which the prayers are spoken nor the words themselves – this is Jewish religion.

We are commanded to remember the story of the Exodus.  The Passover seder is traditionally a family occasion, and is celebrated by more Jews than any other holiday, including people who have left the “religious” part of Judaism behind.  There are literally hundreds of different haggadot telling the story of coming to freedom – often in contemporary terms, and sometimes with no clear religious context.  The gathering in of family and friends, the sharing of a story, the reminder that we are not the first generation to struggle – this is Jewish religion and Jewish community.

The practice of mitzvot has necessarily evolved over the generations.  We no longer sacrifice in a Temple that no longer stands. Artistic variations of ritual garments and utensils (e.g. candlesticks) in every generation.  Judaism will continue to evolve.  But the ideas and rituals of Judaism are religious – whether or not an individual who identifies with Judaism identifies as religious.  So I would argue that we are not losing our religion, but rather continuing to change and shape our religion even as it shapes us.