Embracing the giant grapes

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In this week’s parsha, Shlach, the scouts go to peek at the Land of Promise. They return with a giant bunch of grapes, so big it needs to be carried by two men on a carrying frame. And most of them say: nah, there’s no way we can conquer that land. The people who live there are giants. We felt like grasshoppers next to them, and we must have looked like grasshoppers in their eyes. We can’t do this.

And God gets angry, and says: because y’all don’t trust in Me, or maybe because y’all don’t trust in yourselves, fine, let’s make it a self-fulfilling prophecy: you can’t do this. This whole generation is going to die here in the wilderness, except for the two people who believed in this enterprise. They’ll lead the next generation into the land of promise. You don’t feel up to it? Now you can’t even try.

If all goes according to plan, I’m sharing these words with you from our first multi-access (a.k.a. hybrid) Shabbat service since the pandemic began some fifteen months ago. When the pandemic started, we went digital, like everyone else. It took us a while to find our feet, but we figured out how to pray together, how to celebrate and mourn together, how to learn together, how to be a community together over Zoom.

Now we’re standing at the edge of another paradigm shift. Many of you have told me how much it meant to you to be able to participate in the spiritual life of our community from home — even from afar. Congregants who long ago moved away joined us for shiva minyanim or Shabbat services. Family members in other states, even in other countries on the far side of the world, joined us for the Days of Awe and Pesach.

As we return to offering some onsite programming, like this morning’s Shabbat services, we’re met with a choice. We could go back to the way things were before, and stop offering an option for digital participation. Or, we can try to figure out how to chart a new path so that both the “roomies” and the “zoomies” are full participants in our community. So that those who are homebound don’t lose access to what we do.

But it’s not just about ensuring that if one of us is homebound or doing a stint in a rehab facility we can still watch CBI’s services as though they were on tv. The real challenge is figuring out how “zoomies” can be full participants. How we can all see each other, whether onsite or online. How all of our voices can be heard, whether onsite or online. How we can all count in the minyan, whether onsite or online.

This is a tall order. It’s going to require some technological infrastructure, which costs money. And it may lead to a fundamental redefining of what it means to be “in community,” what it means to be “together.” That’s not just us, by the way: that’s the whole Jewish world. None of the classes I took in rabbinical school exactly prepared me for this… except inasmuch as they taught me that Judaism has weathered changes before. 

It is tempting to be like the scouts: to say, nope, this is too hard, there’s no way we can do this. One bunch of grapes is as big as a black bear, we are not up to this, we feel like grasshoppers. The fact that our forebears in Torah said exactly that tells me that it’s a natural human impulse. It’s normal to feel afraid, faced with an enormous new challenge we’ve never before imagined being able to try to face.

And — as I was discussing with our b-mitzvah students a few days ago — because those scouts didn’t use their ometz lev, their strength of heart, the whole k’hillah suffered. Courage and community are two of the Jewish values we’ve been studying during this pandemic year. These values are part of their Jewish toolbox — and ours. If we want our k’hillah to flourish, we need to cultivate our ometz lev.

It will take a while for us to find our feet in this new chapter. I imagine we’ll have new and different technological challenges, and some personal and spiritual ones, too. If the tenth member of the minyan is on Zoom, will we all feel comfortable counting that person for kaddish? If someone’s joining us from another time zone, will they feel weird joining our evening prayers while the sun is rising where they are?

But if we bring hope and courage to bear, I’m confident that we can navigate a path through. This may not be exactly the Land of Promise we expected, but I believe it has gifts for us. And who knows: maybe when humanity has spread to the stars, Jewish space explorers will look back on the pandemic of 2020 as the moment when our sense of sacred place and time began to evolve into what it needed to become.

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered at Shabbat morning services this weekend (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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Going the extra mile: a d’varling for Naso

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When a person commits any wrong toward a fellow human being, thus breaking faith with YHVH, and that person realizes their guilt, that person must confess the wrong that he has done. They shall make restitution in the principal amount and add one-fifth to it, giving it to the one whom they have wronged. (Numbers 5:6-7)

Early in this week’s Torah portion, Naso, comes this injunction. The first thing that jumped out at me this year is that when a person wrongs another person, they are “breaking faith with God.” What commitment did we make to God that we break when we wrong each other? 

Last weekend we stood at Sinai and received Torah anew, and Torah is full of ethical instructions about how to act justly and with compassion. That’s the promise we made to God: we’ll keep the mitzvot. When we harm each other, we fail to live up to that promise.

So this week Torah teaches: when we realize we’ve wronged someone, there are two steps we need to take. First, we admit the wrong. Then we make restitution — and then some. If I wronged you fiscally, I need to repay the money and add an additional one-fifth. If I harmed you in some other way, I need to go the extra mile to repair the damage I’ve done.

This week I learned that all of the people of color on Williamstown’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Racial Equity committee are stepping down because they are so disheartened. This week I learned that all of the people of color on Williamstown’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Racial Equity committee are stepping down because they are so disheartened. [Edited to add: I misspoke. Jeff Johnson will remain, though as an ex officio member. But five people of color are stepping down.]

Some of them received threats to their lives. Others received public attacks on their character. The questions they bring to the table — How inclusive are we? How welcoming? How safe and supportive? — are for all of us to answer together, but a lot of us — me included — didn’t participate or offer active support. 

And I thought: I know what it’s like to be Jewish in a time of rising antisemitism. As Jews, we get exhausted naming and fighting antisemitism, especially if it feels like no one else notices or cares. When others pick up some of that load, their allyship helps us in all kinds of ways. As this recent volume attests, allyship is holy work. I saw the news about resignations from the DIRE committee, and I realized: I’ve fallen down on the job of being an ally to people of color in my community.

I didn’t mean to cause harm. I just… wasn’t paying attention. I hadn’t really thought much about how serving on that committee could be traumatic for people of color, because they’re always teaching the town’s white community what we don’t know about racial injustice. And we don’t always want to hear it. Sometimes we might be actively resistant to hearing about experiences of racism in our town. And sometimes we’re passively resistant, and we just don’t pay attention. 

That kind of tuning out is a luxury I have as a person with white skin. It’s like the way a lot of Christians don’t notice antisemitism because it’s not directed at them. But when we treat racial justice as something we can choose either to notice or to ignore, that itself inscribes some harm. My inaction and inattention are part of the problem. I need to make this right, and this week’s Torah portion reminds me that really repairing damage requires me to go the extra mile.

I’m still figuring out what that means for me in practical terms. Paying more attention to town government. Using my voice as a clergyperson to speak up for those who are marginalized or have experienced injustice, especially people of color. Writing more letters to the selectboard, maybe. Educating myself (an essential component of the work of allyship.) Uplifting the voices and the needs of people of color in my town. (If you have suggestions, I welcome them.)

Though the DIRE resignations are heavy on my mind and heart this week, this isn’t just a Williamstown problem. This is work we all need to do, in all of the communities where we live. 

Later in this week’s Torah portion, God instructs Moses to tell Aaron to offer certain words to the people. This is the origin of the words I say to my child every Friday night as Shabbat begins, the words I say to every b-mitzvah kid who stands on our bimah:

May God bless you and keep you!
May God’s presence shine before you and be gracious to you!
May God’s presence always be before you, and bring you peace.

The path our tradition offers us toward blessing and radiance and grace and peace is following the mitzvot. And that includes acting ethically, and protecting the vulnerable, and repairing what’s broken. It includes recognizing and confessing our missteps, and making restitution and then some.

So here’s my blessing for us this morning:

May we be strengthened in the holy work of allyship.
When we fall short, may we do what we can to bring repair.
When we can do that, we’ll feel God’s presence before us and within us and around us and between us. And then every place will be a holy place.

And let us say: amen.

This is Rabbi Rachel’s d’varling from Shabbat morning services this week (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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Hidden Treasure and what comes next: a d’varling for Shabbat Tazria-Metzora

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Last year at the start of the pandemic, my hevruta partners and I studied a text from the Piaceczyner (the rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto) about this week’s Torah portion, Tazria-Metzora. His jumping-off point is a verse about houses contracting tzara’at — some kind of contagion — and the need to quarantine such a house for a period of time.

The commentator Rashi explains that there’s treasure hidden in the walls of the afflicted house, and when we knock down the walls, we’ll find the treasure. But the Piaceczyner is puzzled: if there’s treasure, then why does Torah tell us to wait for seven days before we can knock down the walls and find the treasures hidden therein?

His first answer makes me laugh: well, we can’t exactly know why Torah says what it says!

But then he says, if we look deeply we can recognize that in everything that happens to us, there’s a spark of God’s intention for goodness. Even if the situation we’re in is a difficult one, God intends goodness for us in it somehow.

“There may be times when we can’t access schooling for our children, or praying together in community, or going to the mikvah,” he writes. A year ago, my first thought was: that’s us, right now! Our kids are home from school. The shul building is closed. Everything is closed: to protect us from each other, from the virus we might not know we’re carrying.

The Piaceczyner said there would be treasures to be found in quarantine. I couldn’t yet imagine what they would be.

This year, these lines land entirely differently with me.

It’s still true that we still don’t have access to our former infrastructure for Jewish life. Synagogues aren’t meeting in person, Hebrew school isn’t meeting in person… And yet — look at everything we’ve learned over the last year.

Our synagogues are open, even though our buildings are not — because the synagogue isn’t the building, it’s the people and the connections among and between us, and our traditions, and our Source. We’ve learned how to pray together over Zoom, and how to make our home spaces into sacred spaces. We’ve learned how to build community and connectivity online when we can’t safely be in person.

We’ve learned how to educate our children online. Hebrew school is happening: online. Services are happening: online. We’ve learned how to share funerals, b-mitzvah celebrations, shiva minyanim, even batei din (conversions) online.

We’ve learned to find sweetness in glimpsing each others’ households — our dogs and our cats, the children and elders who share our homes — when we gather for learning or prayer. As a member of our Board said to me after Rosh Hashanah services, “Seeing people at their tables and on their couches and with their coffee cups made it feel like we were all in each others’ homes — I felt like I was getting to know people in a different way because I got to see them where they live.” Who could have imagined that, before the pandemic?

We’ve learned how to embrace video, and how to enliven our davenen with art and images. This doesn’t make up for the fact that we can’t embrace, and we can’t sing together in harmony, but it brings a different kind of hiddur mitzvah (beautifying the mitzvah) to our spiritual lives.

And we’ve learned how digital offerings can more easily include those who are immunocompromised, or hospitalized, or disabled, or homebound. We’ve learned how having our digital doors open makes our synagogues more accessible than they ever were before.

The Piaceczyner insists that even when something appears to us to be a plague, God intends goodness in it. We might just need a while to find the hidden treasure in whatever’s unfolding. As we prepare, in time, to return to our former Jewish infrastructure, I want to ensure that we do so in a way that doesn’t lose the new treasure we’ve found.

Here are some of the big questions my colleagues and I are asking:

  • How can we create hybrid offerings so that as some of us feel safely able to gather in person, others can be full participants digitally?
  • How can we continue to embrace the gifts of multimedia and visual art once we’re back in the building again?
  • How can we welcome and include people joining us digitally, without creating a future in which no one bothers to “come to shul” because it’s easier to just stay home?
  • How can we use what we’ve learned this year to help us become more accessible, more equitable, and more inclusive?
  • How can we use what we’ve learned this year to help us build and sustain community across distance, whether it’s the distance between the shul and a hospital bed, or the distance between here and someplace further away?
  • How might our sense of community expand and adapt if people keep participating in services and learning and festival observances online — if you don’t have to be in Northern Berkshire to become a part of CBI?
  • And how can we honor the treasures of this pandemic learning while also honoring the very real losses of this incredibly difficult year?

We don’t know the answers yet: we’re figuring them out as we go. The crisis of COVID-19 offers us an opportunity to dream big and think creatively about what it means to do Jewish together now. I hope you’ll grapple with these questions too, and let me know your answers.

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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Shabbat HaGadol: From Where We Are

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A slide from Bayit’s Pesach offerings this year.

Many of you have heard me say that on Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach, it’s customary for the rabbi to give a sermon about how to prepare for Pesach. Traditionally speaking, I’m supposed to give you instructions on how to prepare yourselves and your homes for Passover. You know — here are the five “leavenable” grains, here’s how to remove them from your homes for a week, here’s the halakha on how to properly clean to remove every last scrap of hametz.

As we approach our second pandemic Pesach, the idea of preparing for Pesach feels different than it ever has before. I mean, if you remove hametz, you can do that the same as you always have. And even if you’ve never followed that tradition, you can mark the week by making a conscious choice not to eat bread. A week of mindful eating is a valuable experience and a deep way to connect with our traditions. But that’s not the kind of preparation with which I’m grappling this year.

It’s the inner preparation that’s challenging me. Because the pandemic continues. Last year who could’ve imagined that we’d be here now: preparing for another Zoom community second night seder? Still staying apart to protect each other and ourselves. Many of us still in lockdown mode, or sheltering in place, to prevent the spread of a virus that’s still killing 1200 people each day in this country — about three times as many as last July 4; the equivalent of a 9/11 every three days.

There are three excellent vaccines out in the world now. There is reason to hope that once the population reaches a certain vaccination threshold, we will be able to be together safely again. Elementary schools are even about to re-open! But we are not “there yet.” What does it mean to prepare ourselves for liberation when many of us may still feel constrained: by pandemic, by economic challenges, by racism and all the harm it creates, by the reality of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers?

The haggadah teaches: in every generation one must see oneself as if one had been liberated from Mitzrayim / the Narrow Place — from tzuris / suffering, from meitzarim / constrictions. How can we see ourselves as if we were going forth from those tight spaces when we are still manifestly living in them? We aren’t liberated from COVID. We aren’t liberated from racism and hatred. We will celebrate Pesach as a community again via digital means, not “in person.” What kind of liberation can this be?

Earlier this winter I worked with a group of poets, artists, rabbis, and liturgists to co-create new materials for the start of seder, recognizing the meitzarim that still bind us so that we can prepare our spirits for the liberation that is not yet quite here. (We’ll use those materials at our community seder on Zoom with Rabbi David and the TBE community — please sign up now, we need your RSVP by Wednesday!) And, there are things we can do practically to prepare our hearts to go free.

Set your seder table with a white tablecloth, if you have one. If not, use a bedsheet… or whatever festive cloth you can find. Make it feel different than on a regular night. It’s too early to have spring flowers where we live, but if you can pick up a bouquet at the grocery store, treat yourself: a symbol of spring, something beautiful and festive. Put candles on your festival table: we’ll light them to bring the light of the festival into the room and into our hearts.

Create a second seder plate memorializing this COVID year: hand sanitizer, a face mask, a vaccination card if you’re fortunate enough to have had a shot. We’ll light a memorial candle for the half a million who have died as we move through the door into this year’s community seder. And you’ll also want a “regular” seder plate symbolizing our ancestral story of freedom: an egg, a roasted shankbone or beet, a sprig of green, haroset, maror. Maybe an orange and an olive.

We’ll harness our sensory experiences to bring us into the festival of freedom. The crunch of matzah, the taste of parsley (or whatever you use for karpas, the green vegetable dipped in salt water tears), the sharpness of horseradish and sweetness of haroset… all of these will spiritually hyperlink us with seders past and seders to come. Our people have celebrated Pesach in narrow straits before. Our rituals give us strength, and they connect us with each other and with our Source.

The journey to Passover begins where we are. Not in some imagined reality where the pandemic never happened, but right here and now. And I know with all my heart that when we gather on Zoom for second night seder, the words and the tastes and the rituals will lift us out of where we are and prepare us for the unfolding of something new. The journey to Sinai. The journey to togetherness. The journey to the better world we’ll build together on the far side of the sea.

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services (cross-posted to Velveeteen Rabbi)

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I Will Sing

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In this week’s Torah portion, Beshalach, we read the Song at the Sea. “I will sing to God…” Our commentators note that this verse is in future tense: not “I sing,” but “I will sing.” Hold on to that; we’ll come back to it.

The rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Piazeczyner, notes that many of our psalms are called songs. They name themselves that way, in the opening phrase. The name “songs” seems to imply praise and thanksgiving, but often these psalms contain sorrow and fear. So why don’t we call them laments? Why do we call them songs, even when they express something painful?

Talmud teaches us to call them songs because that name reminds us to seek the spark of good within the pain. Phrased another way: a “song” is something that’s authentic. Song doesn’t just mean happy-clappy, it means expressing the heart. Sometimes what we have to express is sorrow and fear, but that expression opens us to a spark of good within whatever’s unfolding.

And… the Piazeczyner notes that it can be difficult, almost impossible, to truly sing while enduring suffering. “In order for a person to sing, their essential self — heart and soul — must burst into song.” And sometimes, we just can’t get there.

I underlined that phrase in my book because it speaks to me so deeply. It can be difficult, almost impossible, to truly sing when we’re suffering. Some of us may be finding it difficult to sing in month eleven of the pandemic. Tired of staying home, fiercely missing other human beings, fearful of new and more contagious variants, grieving more than 433,000 dead so far.

Some of us may be finding it difficult to sing because we’re lonely or worried about loved ones. Or because we’re still shaken by the violent storming of the Capitol building earlier this month, or distressed by conspiracy-minded voices that blame recent years’ wildfires on Jewish-funded space lasers. (I wish I were kidding about that.)

Sometimes, the Piazeczyner says, when the suffering is so great that our hearts feel crushed, we can’t find even a spark of rejoicing. That’s how he understands the kotzer ruach, constriction of spirit, described in our parsha a few weeks ago. We were so crushed by our suffering that we couldn’t even hear that things were going to get better.

And yet this week our story takes us to the Sea of Reeds. We’re leaving Egypt. We’re singing the Song at the Sea. How did we get from “unable to even hear hope” to “crossing the Sea toward liberation”? For me, the answer is in singing our own real songs.

If we can really inhabit the song of our hearts — even when it’s a fearful song, or an anxious song, or a grieving song — then we can be real with each other and with God. And it’s in that being-real that we find the spark of hope that gets us through.

There’s a debate about how the Song at the Sea was originally sung. Was it a call-and-response, in which Moshe sang each line and we sang it back? Or did we sing all together? Probably this debate arose because both of those were traditions, and somebody wanted to know which one was “right.” But in typical fashion, our sages turned that debate into a deep teaching.

In Egypt, our sages teach, we sang praises as a call-and-response. We couldn’t muster praise on our own, but we could repeat it. (So yes: call-and-response is correct.) When we crossed the Sea, we all sang together. Our own hearts sang out. (So yes: singing in unison is correct too!) Tradition even teaches that our song then-and-there arose from direct personal experience of God.

Sometimes all we can do is repeat someone else’s words. We repeat the words of our prayers, we mirror someone else’s hope. At other times our own song pours forth. Both of those are authentic spiritual life. And when we’re willing to be real, we open to our own song. That’s how — even when still in Mitzrayim — we became able to envision that things would someday get better.

That’s why “I will sing to God…” is written in the future tense: it speaks to the future song that we know we will someday be able to sing.

Someday we’ll be able to safely gather in person. Someday we’ll be able to safely sing together in person. Right now we may still be in Narrow Straits, but let’s be real with each other: that’s how we open the door to hope. Someday songs of praise will sing forth from our hearts when we sing together, when we dance together, when it’s safe to be together, on the far side of this Sea.

This is the d’varling that R’ Rachel offered on Shabbat morning at CBI (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

Shared with gratitude to my hevruta R. Megan Doherty for studying the Aish Kodesh with me this week.

Image source: R. David Markus. 

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Not the end of the story

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In this week’s Torah portion, Va’era, God hears the cries of the Israelites and promises to free us from bondage. But when Moshe comes to the children of Israel to tell them that, Torah says:

וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה׃

They did not hear Moshe, because of kotzer ruach and hard servitude.

Rashi explains the phrase kotzer ruach by saying, “If one is in anguish his breath comes in short gasps and he cannot draw long breaths.” For the Sforno, kotzer ruach means “it did not appear believable to their present state of mind, so that their heart could not assimilate such a promise.”

So which one is it, a physical shortness of breath or a spiritual diminishment that keeps hope beyond our grasp? Of course, the answer is both. Body and spirit are not separable. If you’ve ever had a panic attack, you know the feeling of being physically unable to breathe because of an emotional or spiritual reality.

Kotzer ruach means that we were short of breath in body and soul. Our breath and our spirits were in tzuris, suffering. Literally at this point in our story we are in Mitzrayim (hear that same TzR /צר sound there?) But this isn’t about geography, it’s about an existential state of being so constricted that we couldn’t even hear the hope that things could be better than this.

I know a lot of us are navigating heightened anxiety these days. A scant ten days ago, an armed mob refusing to accept the results of November’s election broke in to the US Capitol with nylon tactical restraints and bludgeons. Many members of that mob proudly displayed neo-Nazi or white supremacist identities.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the attack on the Capitol wasn’t spontaneous, but planned. The FBI is warning now about armed attacks planned in all fifty state capitols and in DC, on inauguration day if not before.

The covid-19 pandemic worsens by the day. We keep breaking records for number of sick people and number of deaths. Meanwhile the integrity of our country feels at-risk. I mean both our capacity to be one nation when some portion of that nation refuses to accept electoral defeat, and our moral and ethical uprightness.

Anybody here feeling kotzer ruach? Me too. 

And… Our Torah story comes this week to remind us that kotzer ruach is not the end of the story. Being in dire straits — unable to breathe, unable to focus, hearts and souls unable to hope — is not the end of the story. On the contrary, it’s the first step toward liberation.

In our Torah story, our kotzer ruach causes us to cry out. That’s where this week’s Torah portion begins: with God saying hearing our cries and promising to help us out of narrow straits. If you have a prayer practice or a meditation practice or a primal scream practice, now is the time to cry out. (And if you don’t have such a practice, now is a good time to start.)

I don’t actually believe that God “needs” us to cry out before God takes notice of us. I think it goes the other way. We need to cry out, because that’s the first step in opening our hearts to God — to hope — to the possibility that things can get better.

The path toward the pandemic getting better is pretty clear. We shelter in place as best we can, we stay apart, we wear our masks, we get the vaccine. And then we probably keep wearing our masks. But in time, it will be safe to gather again outside of our household bubbles. In time, we will be able to gather in community, and sing together without risk, and embrace.

The path toward restoring the integrity of our nation is less clear to me. I think it involves accountability, and justice, and truth, because I think integrity always asks our commitment to those ideals. Regardless, we begin that journey from here, where we are, crying out with our anxious and broken hearts.

We’ve entered the lunar month of Shvat, known mostly for Tu BiShvat, the New Year of the Trees, which will take place at the next full moon. The full moon after that brings Purim. And the full moon after that brings Pesach, festival of our liberation. These three full moons are our stepping-stones to spring, and change, and freedom.

When I was working recently with the rabbis and poets and artists of Bayit on new liturgy for Tu BiShvat, one of my colleagues said something that moved me so much I wrote it on a post-it and stuck it to my desk. I wrote,

“Karpas dipped in tears — like the tears that water our new growth.”

Karpas is the spring green we dip in salt water during the seder. The salt water represents the tears of our enslavement, the tears of feeling stuck in kotzer ruach. For us this year those might be tears of grief at covid-19 deaths: 381,000 and counting. They might be tears of grief at how far our democracy has fallen from its ideals, or tears of fear for whatever may be coming.

Our tears can water new growth of heart and soul. Our heart’s cry now is the first step toward the changes that will lead to liberation. Then we will fulfill the words of the psalmist: “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” Kein yehi ratzon.

This is Rabbi Rachel’s d’varling from Shabbat services at CBI (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

Illustration, by R. Allie Fischman, from Connections: Liturgy, Art, and Poetry for Tu BiShvat, Bayit, 2021. 

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Stop and let goodness catch us

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At the start of this week’s Torah portion, we read that Jacob was afraid, and his fear was constricting. He was afraid that Esau would come after him, that the mistakes he made in that relationship earlier in life would come back to harm him now. And from that place of fear he sent his family away. Torah says he was alone on the riverbank, and there, an unknown someone wrestled with him all night until dawn.

The Baal Shem Tov (d. 1760) teaches that sometimes we don’t see ourselves clearly. We don’t know what would actually be good for us. All we can see is our own fear, and because we’re marinating in that fear, we run away. Maybe we run away from relationships, or we run away from opportunities. We run away from what would actually be good in our lives, because we’re operating out of that constricted place of fear.

The Baal Shem Tov quotes Psalm 23: “Only goodness and mercy will pursue me all the days of my life.” He says: maybe that line from psalms comes to teach me that I’m trying to escape from things that are actually good for me, but I don’t have the wisdom to see it. So God, when You want to give me good things — when you want to give me blessing — please keep pursuing me. Chase after me until You reach me.

I love this teaching. I love his point that sometimes we don’t have the good sense to know what would be good in our lives, and we run away from what we actually need. And I love the image of God chasing after us with goodness. Usually I think of spiritual life as us seeking God, but he flips that on its head: maybe sometimes God is seeking us, chasing after us, trying to bring us blessing and sweetness and hope.

Maybe we’re running away from a relationship that could be meaningful, but we’re too afraid of having to be real with someone (or with ourselves). Maybe we’re running away from a change that would be good for us, but we’re too afraid of having to face what isn’t working. Maybe we’re running away from hope, because it’s too scary to imagine letting ourselves yearn for something better than what we’ve got now.

In this week’s Torah story, Jacob has been running away from his twin brother for most of his adult life. And he’s about to have to face his brother, whom he tricked out of a birthright and a blessing, and his whole perspective is colored by his fear and his lifetime of running away. This is how his whole life has been, and he can’t imagine it being anything different. He’s always been Yaakov, “The Heel.”

And that’s when he has this encounter with the angel who blesses him with a new name, a new possibility. I’ve always called this the story of “Jacob wrestling with the angel,” but one of my hevruta partners pointed out to me this year that the Hebrew doesn’t say that. In the Hebrew, the subject and object are flipped around. Jacob didn’t seek out this encounter. The angel wrestled with him.

Through the Baal Shem Tov’s lens, we could say: the angel pursued him. The angel was the messenger of God chasing after him to make him grapple with his own baggage all night until morning. And after that grappling, the angel gave him a new name: Yisrael, Godwrestler. That’s the name we take on as the Jewish people, the people that grapples with God, with holiness, with our sacred story… once we stop running away.

Look, running away is normal. It’s human nature to get stuck in our constricted consciousness and our fears. And that’s where the Besht’s teaching comes in, that heartfelt request: “So God, when You want to give me good things, when You want to give me blessing, please keep pursuing me. Chase after me until You reach me.” Don’t give up on me, God. Chase me until You catch me and give me the sweetness I need.

What would it feel like to stop running? To face our own story, to grapple with the lived Torah of our own experience, to look closely at ourselves and our choices? To trust that what’s chasing after us is actually goodness? That if we stop running, here on the banks of this river — if we let ourselves be alone with who we’ve been — God will catch up with us, goodness will catch up with us, and blessing will come?

Shared with gratitude to my hevre in the Bayit Besht Study Sandbox.

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered at Shabbat services (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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Surge capacity and old wells

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An old well.

This week’s Torah portion, Toldot, is so rich. There’s great stuff here. This week we’ve got Rebecca conceiving twins, feeling them grapple with each other in her womb, asking God why this is her life. We get Jacob, whose name means The Heel because he grabs Esau’s heel on the way out of the womb.

There’s the whole thing with the birthright — first Esau bargains away his firstborn birthright for a bowl of lentils, then Rebecca coaxes Jacob to trick Isaac into giving the firstborn blessing to him instead of to his older twin. Or how about Esau begging his father, “Don’t you have a blessing for me, too?”

There are a dozen divrei Torah in what I just said! And yet I could not find the oomph to write any of them. Because our nation just hit a quarter of a million deaths from covid-19. And winter is coming, and with it, indoor life. And some people are planning to be indoors with others at Thanksgiving next week.

And some number of Americans still believe the virus is a hoax. I read this week in the Post about a nurse in South Dakota, in full PPE, tending to the dying…and the dying patients raging at her for wearing PPE around them because even as they were dying of covid they didn’t believe covid was real.

“These are the generations of Isaac” — that’s how the parsha begins. Isaac is situated in his family line, son of Abraham and Sarah, husband to Rebecca, father of Esau and Jacob. And I can’t stop thinking about today’s generations, truncated. Parents mourning their children. Children who have lost parents.

And I do not understand the refusal to take responsibility, the refusal to act as though we are all interconnected and what I choose to do can impact others. Because we are all interconnected. And whether or not I wear a mask might be the difference between someone else’s life and death.

How could I write a d’var Torah in the midst of all of that? And then someone pointed me to Tara Haelle’s essay on “surge depletion.” Haelle writes:

“Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.”

Haelle’s point is that in a short-term crisis, something in us rallies to pull through. Long-term anxiety and uncertainty — about the pandemic, the future of democracy, who will live and who will die, how much worse things may get before they begin to get better — that’s something else entirely.

We can function in crisis mode for only so long, and then our “surge capacity” gets depleted. Is this sounding familiar? And when our capacity becomes depleted, sometimes we go to the well — the well of inspiration, the well of hope, the well of faith — and there’s no water to be had. It feels like the well has run dry.

When I read that, I thought: yes. That’s what I’m feeling. That’s why I can’t muster what it takes to write. And that’s the image that brought me back to this week’s Torah portion.

In this week’s portion we read that Isaaac re-plumbed the wells that his father had dug. On the surface, that verse is about literally re-digging wells, which are pretty necessary in a desert climate! But on a metaphorical level, this verse reminds me how sometimes the wells of spirit and hope stop flowing.

When that happens, our job is to forgive ourselves for feeling tapped-out… and then to dig into those wells again, to open those channels so they can receive flow again. Here’s what I take from this week’s parsha: that spiritual work of opening channels for the flow of hope and faith isn’t a one-time thing.

So if you feel lately as though your spiritual well has run dry, you’re not alone. Join me in taking inspiration from Isaac, who went back to the old wells and dug away the silt and rocks so they could flow again. The wells of Torah and spiritual practice still flow, but we might need to open them up again.

Because this isn’t a short-term crisis. The pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon, and neither is the precariousness of our democracy or the poison in our public discourse. We can’t rely on surge capacity. We need to build deeper capacity in ourselves and in the systems that support us and our communities.

So here’s my prayer. May we find that those old wells of tradition and practice, when we tend them carefully and give them our attention, open up again to nourish and sustain us in every way. Starting right now, with a measure of Shabbat sweetness, Shabbat hope, and Shabbat rest. Shabbat Shalom.

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services. (Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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Julian’s D’var Torah for Shabbat Bereshit

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This is the d’var Torah that Julian offered at his celebration of bar mitzvah on Shabbat morning.

My Torah portion is the very first reading in the first book of the Torah, Genesis. Genesis means beginning or origin. It’s about the beginning of everything. We read it at the beginning of the Jewish year. Which does not coincide with the beginning of the secular year, but interestingly is close to the start of the school year. 

There are beginnings for everything. You begin your life when you are born; you begin your school year; you begin a new job. You begin writing a rant about how we can change ourselves

 However, lots of rabbis think that the beginning written about in the Torah is one of many, in other words there were multiple beginnings. Most rabbis translate the opening words of the Torah as in the beginning. The rabbis who think that there were multiple beginnings translate it as “in A beginning”. IF it’s translated as in A beginning, then that suggests that even God had to start over or begin again so if we are made in the image of God then it would sense that we too have to start anew.

This is a time of new beginnings for me as a bar mitzvah. I have to start again as a Jewish adult. I’ll have to take on more responsibilities and take a more active part in the community  Moreover it’s a time of new beginnings for the nation, given everything that’s happened over the previous year.

There’s a story that God went around to the people of the world and offered them the Torah as a big book of wisdom, and all of them said “No,”, maybe because they thought it was too much work to be ethical. But it’s not too much work! I think we should get people to begin again — life isn’t just one beginning, you can start over, look at yourself and your flaws. As we do during the High Holidays: “I made this mistake, I want to fix this, I want to be a better person in general.” That is entirely possible! Because I’m changing every day, and I’m a teenager. Adults could learn from that – everyone should be more open to change, and that way we can help make the world a better place.

This has been a year of great turmoil. And our country could use a new beginning

More and more people are coming to see that racism is still a problem and that we need to be better so we can fix it. Police violence has brought it to the forefront. 

I hope that in this new beginning we can work hard toward eliminating racism. We may not fix it in my lifetime but we need to make it better. We need to make sure that people in positions of power value all colors of life. Not to mention the suffering of the poor as they get poorer and the richer get richer.   

There is a lot that needs fixing: poverty, climate change, and of course racism. No one person can fix all of it. But in the year to come, I’m going to try to make things better by continuing to protest these problems. This is hard because those ideas are embedded in our society –but I’m, and hopefully, you as well are, going to try to begin again, to be reborn as a better version of ourselves 

Which is what the High Holidays are about for us. Some people look at Torah and think it’s a scroll for only Jewish people, but it contains wisdom that could be for anyone. 

Everybody should listen to “Don’t do violence because it’s bad.” Or “Give food to hungry people because it’s the right thing to do.” Torah lessons are for everybody.

In a lot of mythologies, the best part about humans is that we can change. I think that is a great truth. If you do not like what you see in yourself,  you can work to change. That’s the message of the high holidays every year and of my interpretation of Bereshit. We can always do better. 

It’s our job as human beings, to fix what needs repair and to continue starting over. We can start by changing ourselves in small ways, and work our way up to big new beginnings. 

Thank you to Heather Levy and Jane Shiyah for being wonderful Hebrew teachers and starting this journey; thank you to my grandparents for all your love and support; thank you to my dad for keeping me on task; and thank you to Rabbi Rachel for everything you’ve done. Shabbat shalom.

Written by Julian Rudin, our community’s newest Jewish adult!

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Wake Up! (A d’varling for Shabbat Shuvah)

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Shofar-in-front-of-stained-glass

כְּנֶ֙שֶׁר֙ יָעִ֣יר קִנּ֔וֹ עַל־גּוֹזָלָ֖יו יְרַחֵ֑ף יִפְרֹ֤שׂ כְּנָפָיו֙ יִקָּחֵ֔הוּ יִשָּׂאֵ֖הוּ עַל־אֶבְרָתֽוֹ׃

Like an eagle who rouses their nestlings, gliding down to their young, So did God spread God’s wings and take [us], Bear [us] along on God’s pinions.

(Deut. 32:11)

This verse from this week’s Torah portion, Ha’azinu, leapt out at me this year. The metaphor of God bearing us on eagles’ wings, lifting us out of slavery to Pharaoh and out of our constricted places, is not a new one. But what struck me here was the word יעיר, to arouse or to wake up.

Rashi says this image is meant to evoke an eagle who doesn’t want to scare its nestlings, so the eagle flaps its wings a few times before coming in to the nest, to wake the young ones up and ensure that they feel strong enough to receive the eagle’s coming.

Later in the passage, Rashi says an eagle carries its young on its wings rather than in its claws, because the eagle reasons, “if there is an arrow, better the arrow should pierce me than pierce my young” — the eagle protects its young, and that’s the quality of love that God has for us.

I love the idea of God carrying us on vast eagles’ wings, seeking to protect us and uplift us. But even more than that, this year, I’m moved by this language of awakening or arousal.

God’s love for us is both protective and a little bit pushy. Torah here imagines God carrying us and keeping us safe — and also nudging us to wake up.

Just as the shofar’s call nudges us to wake up.

Just as this whole season nudges us to wake up.

The commentator known as the Or HaChayyim agrees: “Moses uses the simile of the eagle to show that just as the eagle rouses its young first, so G’d rouses the children of humanity to warn that we have to put our spiritual house in order.” This is the season for doing exactly that.

Shabbat Shuvah is our wake-up call. God is the eagle hovering over the nest, flapping mighty wings to urge us to rise up with all our strength and to do what’s right. God is the shepherd taking account of each of our lives as we pass beneath the staff, reading the Book of Life that we have written with our choices. God is in the shofar’s call — which sometimes sounds like triumph, and sometimes sounds like anguish — begging us to wake up.

Not because Yom Kippur begins tomorrow night, although it does.

But because the world needs us to wake up. Our community needs us to wake up. Our souls need us to wake up.

To what do we need to wake up at this moment in our spiritual year?

To what do we need to wake up at this moment in our national life?

Much is going to be asked of us in this new year. We need to wake up. We need to strengthen our souls and strengthen our resolve to stand up for what’s right.

God is here to wake us up. To rouse us from our sleep. To arouse in us the yearning to do what’s right. To enflame our hearts with a passion for righteous acts and justice: on a personal scale, on a communal scale, on a national scale.

Will we be woken?

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered on Shabbat Shuvah (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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