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.