From Shiva A Beginning

Moshe received Torah on Sinai and passed it to Joshua.
Joshua passed it to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and they to the Men of the Great Assembly. And they said, "Don't judge in haste, raise many disciples, and build a fence around Torah." (Avot 1:1)


As I sit in the week of shiva following my mother's death last Monday, I have had many recommendations, and many thoughts, about how to keep time during the process of mourning. Shiva is obvious, mostly - seven days mostly at home, letting community surround me and my family. And I must say the community, composed of people I know who knew my mother, and of people I know who didn't know my mother, and people I hardly know who did or didn't know my mother, has been incredible. I feel comforted. I feel met and honored in my place of mourning.

The custom of saying Kaddish daily is likely to be difficult, given the lack of daily minyan and the inevitable busy life I will be returning to. Someone suggested study, particularly some piece of Torah or Mishnah or other traditional text, as a daily practice. This would surely honor my mother's zest for learning.

Today, though, it came to me. My mother was a writer - and writing is for me a core part of life and living, a passion my mother passed on to me. Recently I read in one of her journals her words praising a piece I had written. Writing is a way to honor my mother's memory - and writing daily with this purpose is also the best way to avoid one of the pitfalls of grief that I could easily fall into - a sort of writer's block.

So I begin a practice today, on the 5th day of sitting shiva for my mother, in which I will write for eighteen minutes -- memories of life with her, reflections on her life and things she taught me, and, when I get stuck, finding a text to learn and reflect on in her memory. This in addition to journaling daily and any other writing I might do.

Today, I begin in reflection on Avot 1:1 (above):

My mother gave me Torah -- she and the people she surrounded herself with.
   She gave me Torah by choosing Judaism for herself and for me.
   She gave me Torah by choosing to send me to the Seattle Hebrew Academy
          for my early education.
   She gave me Torah by joining and becoming an active member of Temple Beth Am, 
         and by joining the choir and being in the synagogue for Shabbat and 
         other events throughout the week.

My mother gave me Torah by pursuing her graduate education, 
         especially because it was in the field of Jewish Studies, 
         but also because it was the pursuit of ongoing, ever growing knowledge.
   She gave me Torah by celebrating Jewish life at home, weekly and through the year, 
         and at personal moments along the way.

My mother gave me Torah by pursuing justice, through giving to diverse organizations,
         and by being an open and gentle and generous person to whomever she encountered.
   She gave me Torah by living her life with verve and with dignity, from difficult beginnings
         as a war orphan to the very end through adversity and illness.
  
My mother gave me Torah by loving me, from the moment she gave life to me, teaching me
         to walk through fears and to face life head on.
   She gave me Torah by holding on tight to life, and by giving to her family in the moment
         she finally let go of her place in this physical world.

Mom. Ma. Ima! I have called you many names. You gave me life. You gave me Torah.
   Your memory will always be a blessing, sweet on my tongue as I share with friends
         with family, and especially with my son.


I invite my readers to write your own reflections. Think of someone who has taught you Torah - who has taught you about life. Maybe this person is deceased, like my mother, but maybe they are still alive (too often we reflect only after someone has gone). How did this person teach you? What did they teach you? What have you received?

Wake Up, Elul is Here! -- with Writing Prompts

רבי אליעזר אומר, יהי כבוד חברך חביב עליך כשלך, ואל תהי נוח לכעוס, ושוב יום אחד לפני מיתתך

Rabbi Eliezer would say: The honor of your fellow should be as precious to you as your own, and do not be easy to anger. Repent one day before your death. (Sayings of the Fathers (Avot) ch.2)

Asked his disciples: Does a man know on which day he will die? Said he to them: So being the case, he should repent today, for perhaps tomorrow he will die; hence, all his days are passed in a state of repentance. (bShabbat 153a)

Mindfulness is a hot ticket word in contemporary American culture. It goes along with meditation, yoga, contemplative practices. Some of us may roll our eyes at the term, others may say, "yeah, I do that!" and still others — perhaps most of us — have a desire to increase our mindfulness.

In the ancient wisdom of Rabbi Eliezer we find the call to be first of all mindful in our relationships. Hold the honor of our fellows high, and try not to get angry. And, knowing we will err, as surely all humans do, Rabbi Eliezer offers a way out: repent. Now.

But don't we all get caught up in the rush of daily life? Don't we sometimes rush to grumble about the person in front of us on the road, or in a grocery store? Don't we sometimes yell at our children out of exasperation even when we know it won't help anything (I did that the other day at the park, and I'm still thinking how ridiculous I must have looked to all those — one of my less pretty parenting moments)? Aren't we all sometimes selfish, sometimes abrupt, sometimes hot, sometimes judgmental? Haven't we all acted before thinking?

The blasts of the shofar, from this first day of Elul into the coming new year, call us to wake up, to check in with ourselves and see, just how mindful are we? Just how aware are we in our daily lives? 

Even if we have a daily practice of self-reflection and self-improvement — even if that practice has us turning to those we have been angry at, or have judged poorly, in the process of our daily lives — even so, very few of us don't need a reminder.

Elul gives us a month to reflect on the last year and to renew our mindfulness in preparation for the new year, and another ten days to seek forgiveness before we rehearse our death at Yom Kippur. 

Wake Up! shouts the shofar. Pay attention. How are you being in the world?

One of my spiritual teachers regularly asks the question How be you? Sometimes this sets my inner grammar police wriggling uncomfortably. But just now, I'm hearing it differently. "How are you feeling" is not the question she is asking me. Rather, I am sure, she is asking How are you being in the world? How be you?


And this is the question I offer to you. How are you being in the world?


WRITING PROMPT: If you don't have a journal, find some blank paper. Write down the question, How am I being in the world? How was I in my interactions with people today? Now spend 18 minutes (my timer is set there, but chose your amount of time) reflecting on one or more encounters you had with other people today. Focus on how you were in those interactions; let go of how they were, only judging them with honor. 

Repeat this exercise throughout the week. If there are days when you feel like you don't have much to say, reflect backward; is there an experience from the last week, month, year that you are still thinking about, that is still bothering you in some way? Reflect!

Ask Me a Story, Tell Me Your Freedom

Props support our storytelling, too.

Passover is a storyteller's holiday.

Everyone gathered at the table is called on to "see" that they themselves have come out of the narrow place of slavery into an expansive freedom. This creative remembering is drawn out of us through the Haggadah, a book whose very name means "the telling" but does not actually ever get to the business of telling any story. Rather, the Haggadah is a book that prompts us to tell the story, or rather stories, of the holiday.

Those of us who gather at a Seder table every year (sometimes twice or more) work our way through an orderly array of prayers, and a somewhat disorderly array of symbolic acts and questions that amount to nothing less than a long evening of storytelling prompts.

Our first radical act of the evening, departing radically from a regular Shabbat dinner, arrives early and emphatically - we must dip greens, symbolic of the season, in salty water, symbolic of nothing less than emotion. Are we seriously meant to do so with as few words as a blessing for eating the greens? The basic Haggadah simply says that we dip greens in salt water, bless, and eat. But who can resist the question that invokes? Not any Jew I know, for whom questions are as autonomic as breathing.

Still, we haven't arrived at the youngest child's query, "How is this night different from all other nights?" The notorious Four Questions, commonly written as one line with a question mark followed by four lines ending in periods, don't arrive until after we have blessed and drunk our first cup of wine - while leaning on pillows - and after we have washed our hands, dipped our greens in salt water, blessed and eaten them, uncovered a plate of matzah, broken the middle cracker in half, wrapped one in a napkin and begun the magic of making it disappear until late in the night.

By this time, just writing this, I'm simply itchy with (no, not the lice from the plagues) questions!

What? Why?! Where? Why? What did you just do? What just happened? Why????

As a storyteller, as a writer, I feel the words tickling my tongue and fingers - the desire to respond to this amazing series of prompts, of question-makers, of story-guides.

How many ways does the Haggadah encourage us to tell the story that it never tells?

There are the ritual acts and the symbolic objects strewn across the table, from Seder Plate to the salt water and matzah, not to mention Elijah's cup; and more recent symbols from an orange to Miriam's cup.

There are the questions: not just the Four Questions, but the Four Children - consisting of four biblical quotes containing three questions and a non-question, all prompts about how to tell the story. And each an opportunity for type casting family members as "wise" or "wicked" or "simple."

There is a listing of plagues, without any real context - and the fabulous removal of wine (read "joy") at the listing of each plague, lest we rejoice in the suffering of any human being.

There are intriguing dialogues between ancient rabbis.

There are the songs. Dayenu, Had Gadya, Who Knows One (more questions and answers!), and more!

I have hardly exhausted the list. But you get the idea. From this one evening alone (or two), I could, as a writer, have enough prompts to keep me busy at least long enough to get me through the long trek through the wilderness, through the counting of the Omer (oh, and there's that) to the next holiday filled with symbolism, Shavuot, when we receive Torah.

What story or stories are we meant to tell with all of these prompts?

"In every generation, every person must see him/herself as having left Mitzrayim," a narrow place of slavery under a harsh taskmaster. Each of us!

What stories are we meant to tell? We are meant to tell the story of our freedom. Each of us. Every generation at the Seder, indeed every individual, will have a unique story or set of stories to tell. Each of us will likely to tell the "original" story differently, flavored by the way we have learned it, and influenced by the stories we have, whether we tell them or are even conscious of them, of our own experiences of narrowness and oppression, expansion and freedom.

And why - what is the purpose of all this prompting rather than telling?

I have one idea: the Seder is a family or communal opportunity to share - to tell or think our stories of personal oppression, and to free ourselves spiritually by finding the shared experience, even of different oppressions. In Torah, the Israelites don't cry out under the oppression until after Moshe kills the Egyptian taskmaster, though they had been enslaved and oppressed for many years.

Perhaps we need the prompts of the Seder to remind us to look for the narrow places in our own lives, to cry out and be recognized, and to seek and do the work involved in becoming free. I know I am thinking about it differently this year than I have in past years, and have been prompted to a whole new layer of understanding and storytelling.

So at your seder, I hope you will ask your companions for a story and tell them your own.
May the season bring you insight into your own story, and may you be free to rejoice.
A zissen Pesach - with blessings for a sweet Passover.