Devarim: Shaking Up Routines

וַנֵּפֶן וַנִּסַּע הַמִּדְבָּרָה
"And we turned and journeyed to the wilderness"
(Deut. 2:1)

This morning I parked in a different place, took the wrong elevator up, then a different (but right) elevator down, got off at the wrong floor, walked back up, used a different restroom, then missed my usual turn. All of which led me to a hug from my dad. And in the end I needed to sit and process, so I stopped at a favorite coffee house I don't ordinarily pass.

In this week's Parashah, Devarim, Moses begins to recount for the Israelites where they have been and what they have done. They have arrived at the border of the Promised Land a second time, nearly 40 years after the first time, and in truth the people who were there, and the actions Moses is referring to, all occurred when those present were either children or not yet born - all except Caleb, Joshua, and Moses himself.

What strikes me here is not so much the place or the people, or even the history lecture from Moses, but the quick recount of the wandering itself. A map of the wandering looks a little like a maze that crosses in and over itself. And the return to the edge of promise comes not after a relatively direct journey from Mitzrayim by way of Sinai, but rather from this loopy roundabout journey.

Just as I have seen my day differently, my mind jogged by my unusual morning route, I am sure this new generation of Israelite adults must have seen their approach to the promise of what lay beyond the Jordan differently than their parents and grandparents had.

Being fully aware sometimes requires a little interruption of routine. My routine this one morning a week has been quite comfortable, in its way, for nearly a year, now - I leave the house early, drive in usually quiet traffic, park in the garage, have breakfast with my mother, read out loud to her, then leave to go to work. Never mind that I have changed jobs, and maybe twice have had to skip a breakfast, it has been very regular routine. This morning, I got a hug from my dad, whom I don't ordinarily see on these early mornings. This morning, I learned a couple of things I didn't know, and I am now thinking of possible support for something. This morning, my transition from breakfast to work was more mindful.

Whether or not the Israelites that stood on the precipice in Deuteronomy were literally a new generation, I can only imagine that they stood there with new eyes, with a new perspective, because of their circuitous journey through the wilderness. Perhaps more than that they would no longer remember slavery personally, which might be a valuable difference, their journey had given them something valuable - had set them up for positive interactions with their neighbors by giving them a tour of the area as a free people.

I am grateful for the periodic diversion from the direct route, for the jog to my mindfulness that comes from shaking up--or being shaken from--my routines. Although I admit - forty years of such diversions might have me throwing up my hands and begging to set down roots. Indeed, while I have traveled across our country, lived in many states, and journeyed internationally - I am so very ready to stay in one place for a very long time. And the timing of this could not be more apt, as we near the first anniversary of my having returned to my "homeland," the city in which I was born and raised, after 24 years of wandering.

St. Helens - I will never forget! 35 years

On top of St. Helens
All covered with ash
We lost Harry Truman
And his 800 cats.
     (sung to the tune of "On Top of Spaghetti")

Thirty five years ago today, Mount St. Helens blew her top. She puffed out ash and smoke, creating beautiful and terrifying visuals for miles to come, leaving anywhere from a dusting of ash here in Seattle and a lot of other places (apparently as far away as Minnesota) to feet of it in the immediate surrounds.

My older brother and I used to sing the little ditty above with a sort of glee, but the truth is that Harry Truman (not the president), refused to evacuate his home on St. Helens prior to the eruption. He and his sixteen cats (okay, our little folk ditty exaggerated a little) died there. One of 57 human and countless animal deaths.

Whenever May 18th rolls around, I find myself reflecting. 

We felt small tremors at our house in Settle - watched the red mushroom lamp swaying on its wire over our kitchen table.

I can still see the ash plume in my mind's eye - I don't need the photographs, though I don't think we could see it from our house (we had a good north view, but not south).

I can remember the dusting of fine ash that was impossible to clean, and stories from family and friends south and east who had a foot or more of fallen ash to contend with. I always thought, if it's so hard for me to clean one little layer, which scratched the heck out of the plexiglass in our front door beyond repair, how much harder for those who had not just the dust but the weight of piled ash.

For years, when we would drive down I-5 to Oregon, we could still see barren hills of ash, pushed off to the side of the road. Eventually, these became fertile, grasses and wildflowers covered them, and eventually trees made them essentially indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape, so that if you don't know where to look you would have no idea what you were seeing. 

Like St. Helens, who has welcomed the return of plants and animals to her reshaped landscape, I too have changed in these past 35 years. Sometimes inside I feel very much like the 9 year old child for whom the above events were so immensely important. But 35 years adds a lot of layers. For St. Helens, a mountain, those layers include the rebuilding of the inner dome and the reshaping of the outer flora and fauna. 

For me, those layers include growing up (still, every day), developing an appreciation for landscapes across our country and, indeed, our world, and learning to welcome the diverse nature of this world into my heart. For me, these 35 years have helped me to deepen the sense of human journey in the world, the way we are drawn from and to places. 

35 years later, May 18th, 2015 - and I have returned to the PNW, where the local news (see here and here, for example) is acknowledging, investigating, and commemorating this event that has been a natural marker in my life, in that "do you remember where you were when" way. In my call to return, throughout the years, I think I can understand a little of Harry Truman's refusal to leave, his willingness to stay in a place where death was almost certain. Where else would he feel so at home?


Note: I can find no reference to the little folk ditty at the top of this post. Did my brother and I make it up? Was it limited to our neighborhood? Did you, my Seattle readers, also sing this?

Counting the Omer - Leaving Mitzrayim, a Starting Point

בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים
In every generation, every person is obligated to see him/herself as if s/he came out of mitzrayim.
(Passover Haggadah)

From whence do we come, and whither do we go?

Mitzrayim evokes both the literal narrowness of Egypt's fertile strip on either side of the Nile, and the emotional/spiritual narrowness of slavery.  It is the latter that each of us is obligated to search for in our own lives.  But the "coming out" from narrow places is only the beginning, what we read starting on the first night of Passover.  On the second night of Passover, we begin to count the Omer - for seven weeks we will count days and weeks, until we arrive at our next holiday, Shavuot.

The Omer reminds us that leaving mitzrayim is only the beginning.  It is like Abraham's Lech Lecha moment.  "Get up and go...to a land that I will show you" (Genesis).

In the moment we leave the narrowness - whether it is a way of thinking, or a job that binds us, or a relationship that restricts us - we do not land immediately in a place of certainty and strength.

Wandering in Haifa (c. 2005, RSR)

Rather, we begin a journey into the unknown, into openness.  It takes time to shake off old habits. We might, like the Israelites, sometimes question why we ever left, wonder if we really had to leave the security of what we knew (was it really so bad? "were there not enough graves in Egypt?").  Wherever we think we are going, like Abraham and like Moses and the Israelites, we really have no idea.  And that uncertainty can be disorienting and disturbing.he begin the journey - not expect that just because we have begun the journey we must have arrived somewhere special.

The Omer, the counting of days, helps to ground us on the journey. It grounds us with the simple act of counting, but also with Kabbalistic spiritual teachings, and a custom of self-reflection as we count, as we mark the journey. 

ארמי אבד אבי
"My father was a wandering Aramean" (Deuteronomy 26:5; Passover Haggadah)

I love the closeness in English of the words wander and wonder.  The journey is about openness - about being able to wonder at what we encounter, to find awe.

As we begin this wandering period, this counting of the Omer, I invite awe and wonder.  I also invoke compassion in response to the desire to shelter in the known narrowness, and for the desire to know "are we there, yet?!"  May the journey be the "there." May we not become stuck in the places where we sojourn.

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.

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.

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!