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.