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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A solstice message from Rabbi Rachel

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Hello all! Here’s a short video message from Rabbi Rachel – a story from Talmud, a reflection on where we are in the solar year, and a blessing for hope and comfort and light in the darkness.

If you can’t see the embedded video, you can go directly to it here on YouTube.

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Rededication: a poem for this pandemic Chanukah

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First candle…

It’s not like the Temple, sullied
by improper use and then washed clean
and restored to former glory.
This house is tarnished by familiarity.
Month after pandemic month I’ve circled
from bed to table to sofa to bed again.
I no longer see the mezuzah
on every door frame. Tonight
with one tiny candle I light another.
I want their little flames to galvanize
my hands to consecrate each room.
I sweep flour from my kitchen, affirming
here where I sing to my challah is holy.
So too the hallway where I hang coats
and newly-washed fabric masks to dry,
the bedroom with its pile of quilts
and rosemary plant in the window
struggling to make it until spring.
God, we’re all struggling to make it
until spring. Help me make this house
a place where hope keeps burning bright.

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

Originally published in Great Miracles Happen Here, Bayit 2020; click through to read excerpts and to download the whole collection as a PDF to enliven your experience of Chanukah this year.

Happy Chanukah to all!

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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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Every righteous person matters

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In this week’s Torah portion, Vayera, God decides to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, because “their sin is so great.”

Later in the parsha we’ll see an example of their sin: an angry mob demanding that Lot release the strangers whom he’s protecting, so that the mob can rape them. That’s one way to read the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah: their response to strangers is violent domination.  

Here’s another, from the prophet Ezekiel: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: arrogance! She and her daughters had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility, yet she did not support the poor and needy.” 

But before that happens, Abraham argues with God: what if there are fifty righteous people there? Or forty? And he bargains God down, and God agrees that if a single minyan of tzaddikim can be found, the cities will be spared.

This year we’re reading these verses against the backdrop of election aftermath. We’ve all been on tenterhooks waiting for votes to be counted. Maybe feeling afraid of violence or afraid for our nation.

And here’s Abraham saying to God: wait, even if You’re despairing, count everybody. Here’s what I take from that passage this year: every righteous person counts. Every righteous person makes a difference. Even if we may feel insignificant in the big picture — every one of us who is trying to do what’s right, matters.

Many translations of this dialogue between Abraham and God about Sodom and Gomorrah use the terms “guilty” and “innocent,” e.g. “Far be it from You… to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike!” In that translation, Abraham is urging God to remember the people who are innocent of wrongdoing. 

But I would argue that the plain meaning of the Hebrew words rasha and tzaddik is stronger than that. A rasha is someone who acts wickedly. Some say: a rasha is concerned only with themself and their own needs, rather than the needs of the community or the needs of the vulnerable. And a tzaddik isn’t just “innocent.” A tzaddik is someone who acts righteously — someone who acts with tzedek, justice.

And what is righteous behavior? Judaism has a lot of answers to that — we have 613 instructions, for starters! But here’s a shorter list. Righteousness means loving the stranger — feeding the hungry — caring for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, in other words the powerless and vulnerable — seeking justice with all that we are. That’s our work. That is always our work.

And it’s not always easy. Sometimes it feels like an uphill battle. The pastor John Pavlovitz writes,

“There is a cost to compassion, a personal price tag to cultivating empathy in days when cruelty is trending… Friend, I know you’re exhausted. If you’re not exhausted right now your empathy is busted. But I also know that you aren’t alone.”

For those of us who trust science, it’s exhausting to know that so many of our fellow Americans think masks infringe on their civil liberties — or think covid is a hoax. Especially in a week with days where the US kept breaking our own records for new covid-19 infections: first 100,000, then 109,000…  And that’s just one reason to feel exhausted. Election uncertainty is exhausting. Fears of violence are exhausting.

But in this week’s parsha what I hear Abraham saying is: don’t give up. We need to keep doing the right thing: it matters, it makes a difference, even if we don’t know it. We need to be tzaddikim. We need to keep loving the stranger, feeding the hungry, caring for the needy and the vulnerable, pursuing justice. Wearing our masks. Protecting the marginalized. Feeling empathy for others. Counting every vote.

This is our obligation as Jews — as citizens — as human beings. This was our work before the election; this is our work after the election. And yeah, this is hard work. Most things worth doing are.

Maybe there weren’t ten tzaddikim in Sodom, but I believe there are tzaddikim everywhere. And if we’re trying to act justly in the world, our work matters — our work counts.

May Shabbat bring balm to our bruised and anxious hearts… so that when the new week begins, we can bring renewed energy to the work of doing what’s right, the work described in the Langston Hughes poem that was our haftarah reading today, the work of building a better world. 

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

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A message from Rabbi Rachel

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Here’s a short video message from Rabbi Rachel. You can watch it / listen to it here, or, if you prefer, you can read the text below.

Hello friends.

I’m here because I wanted to say hi and that I’m thinking of you.

It was a joy to be with many of you during the Days of Awe in various ways — on Zoom, and via Facebook live, and for our socially distant and masked Tashlich service on the suspension bridge. It was a joy to sing with you and pray with you and mark that holy season with you. And it was a joy to be with you on Zoom during Sukkot! And now we’re in the quiet season, the open space after all of the fall holidays, like the silence that falls after a song.

I continue to hold every one of you in my prayers and in my heart.

I know that many of us are feeling increased anxiety these days.

Sometimes we can look at our anxiety and think: okay, that’s just my brain, doing what brains do. And sometimes we look at the world around us, and anxiety feels like a reasonable response!

I read in the Washington Post recently that while every presidential election feels important, this one may feel uniquely so — and a lot of people, on both sides, fear that America’s future is dark if the other side wins. That’s a difficult and scary place to be.

Meanwhile, around the nation the pandemic is worsening. Record numbers of new infections have been reported in several states, and the country as a whole recently broke our record for most cases reported in a single day — not a record that anyone wanted to break.

Anxiety makes sense. And… it can also really get in the way of our ability to live.

So I wanted to share a small meditative practice

One thing that can help, when we’re in the grip of anxiety, is to notice it and name it. “Oh right: this feeling is anxiety.” Naming it distances it, a bit. It’s a feeling; it’s an experience; but it’s not ME, it’s not who I am. If it’s just a feeling, and not my essential self, then that means it comes and it goes. It isn’t forever.

Once we’ve named the feeling as anxiety, we can breathe in, and on the exhale, let breath flow out with the intention of letting go of the anxiety, too. Slow, deep breaths can help regulate the body, and because we’re integrated beings, helping the body helps the heart and mind and spirit, too. Breathing in, feeling the inhale; breathing out, letting go.

And sometimes it helps to find a physical sensation to hold on to, to shift focus away from the anxiety. Pick up a pebble or a seashell, and hold it in your hand and really feel its surface. Or touch a mint or rosemary plant and bring the scent to your face and breathe it in. (A drop of essential oil can serve that purpose too.)

I’ve been taking a lot of comfort lately in the rhythms of time that were here long before this pandemic election season, and will be here long after. Watching the trees put on their autumn show. Lighting Shabbat candles every Friday night. I hope there’s comfort for you also in the rhythms of the seasons and in the Jewish ways we mark and sanctify time.

As always, I’m here if you want to talk, and I hope to see you on Zoom soon. Thank you for being a part of CBI.

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If the mindfulness practice here speaks to you, you might also enjoy Rabbi Jay Michaelson’s teaching Mindfulness of Cortisol.

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Joy to fuel our building – a d’varling for Sukkot

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The CBI Sukkah this year. (Thanks to Jen Burt and family for building it!) Sign up to use it here.

Sukkot: festival of impermanence, festival of joy even in vulnerability. We build sukkot to remember our ancestors’ harvest traditions; to remember the flimsy sukkot in which we dwelled after leaving Egypt; to remember the cloud of glory that protected us in our wilderness wanderings. Sukkot asks us: can we feel protected by God’s presence even now, even in a flimsy little house that lets in the rain and the wind?

That’s always the question at Sukkot. What does it mean to feel safe and protected? What does it mean to build structures — whether physical or spiritual — knowing that nothing we build lasts forever?

On the physical front, this year there may be a paradoxical sense of safety in the sukkah because a sukkah is as well-ventilated as any space can be. It has to be, in order to be kosher. A sukkah can’t be airtight with a solid roof. The roof needs to let moonlight and raindrops through. In these covid-19 times, this flimsy sketch of a room in the fresh air of the great outdoors is the safest place to breathe.

In part through the very fact of what a sukkah is, Sukkot asks us to grapple with impermanence. As soon as we put on the (purposely insufficient) roof, the roof starts to come apart — the cornstalks dry up, the palm fronds or branches wither. “Emptiness upon emptiness,” as we read this morning in Kohelet. Nothing that we can build lasts forever.

And Sukkot asks us to find joy in the midst of impermanence. One of this holiday’s names is Zman Simchateinu, the Time of Our Rejoicing. How can we rejoice in a little temporary house where rain gets through the roof? We might as well ask: how can we rejoice in fragile human bodies that we know will someday die? And my answer is: how can we not?

Early in the pandemic, my friend Cate Denial reminded me that life doesn’t go on “pause” while we’re sheltering-in-place. This is the life we have. Right now it may be more constrained than we want it to be, for pandemic reasons — but it is still life, and we need to live it, not sleepwalk through our days waiting for the pandemic to be over.

I think of that teaching often, and it feels deeply relevant to Sukkot. This little temporary house is a metaphor for human life. It’s fragile. It’s vulnerable. It’s not forever. But as Cate taught me, this is the life we have — and the time to cultivate joy is not in some unimaginable future when everything broken is repaired, but here and now.

Sukkot reminds me to grab joy with both hands, wherever I can find it. In my morning cup of coffee; in the scent of the etrog, sharp and stirring; in the light of the full moon. In the voices and faces of friends, even when the only safe way to see them is on Zoom. In the melodies of our prayers. In the rhythm of weekday and Shabbes.

These are quotidian joys, but they are real, and they can be sustaining. To be sure, the existence of these joys doesn’t negate the difficult realities of this moment. One million dead from covid-19 around the world so far. Credible threats of election violence and voter intimidation. Fears that our democracy might be as fragile as this flimsy sukkah.

So during chag we cultivate joy, and we let that joy fuel us and strengthen us to do the rebuilding work that our world so desperately needs. Maybe this year that rebuilding work means textbanking or phonebanking to help eligible voters register to vote, or volunteering as a poll worker. Those actions help to build our democracy.

Or maybe you feel called toward something more tangible… like chopping onions for the Berkshire Food Project’s grab-and-go meals, because need has tripled since the pandemic began. Helping to cook the meals that feed our hungry neighbors is a mitzvah that comes right out of Torah — and it’s an action that helps to build our community.

Sukkot invites us to cultivate joy that will sustain us in this work and more. Sukkot teaches us to seek joy in the full moon even though we’re also vulnerable to the falling rain. Sukkot teaches us to seek joy even as we recognize the world’s brokenness and work to fix it. Sukkot invites us to remember that this is the life we have, and our job is to live it.

This is Rabbi Rachel’s d’varling for Shabbat Sukkot (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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Holy at Home, With Love

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTun5Lk9PfE]

Here’s a recording of my sermon if you’d rather watch it than read it. (It’s here on YouTube.) Or, read below…

 

Not quite two thousand years ago, the Roman army sacked the second Temple.

That’s a tough place to begin my words to you on erev Rosh Hashanah! But in a way, it’s where tonight’s story begins.

The Temple was the center of our universe. It was our axis mundi, the holy connection point between this world and God.

And then it was destroyed.

Judaism could have ended when the second Temple fell. The Temple was the site of our daily offerings to God. Our whole religious system was built around it! We could have given up hope. That could have been the end of the Jewish people and the Jewish story.

Thank God, it wasn’t. That destruction sparked a paradigm shift in how we “do Jewish.” Jewish life become portable, something we could take with us into every corner of the globe. The center of Jewish life became the synagogue, which aspires to be a beit knesset (house of community gathering), beit midrash (house of study), and beit tefilah (house of prayer) all in one.

And, some would say: the center of Jewish life became the Shabbes table. Tradition teaches that the table where we celebrate Shabbat each week is a mikdash me’aht, a tiny sanctuary. The home table replaces the altar of old; the twin loaves of challah replace the doubled Shabbat offerings on that altar; and holy space becomes… wherever we make it.

Never has that seemed so true to me as it does right now… or as necessary.

Six months ago when we began sheltering-in-place to stop the spread of covid-19, we hoped that a few months of disciplined quarantine would quell the pandemic and that we would be back together again in person by Rosh Hashanah. Instead here we still are: making Rosh Hashanah in our homes, keeping each other safe by staying physically apart.

Our synagogue is still a house of gathering, a house of study, and a house of prayer… and right now all three of those houses are our own houses. Our challenge is learning how to create sacred space here at home where we are. Learning how to create community together when we can’t embrace or sing in harmony. Learning how to find holiness in our everyday spaces, and how to feel community connections even when we’re apart.

It turns out that Judaism has some spiritual technologies designed for exactly these purposes. The Shabbes table is one of them — a white tablecloth, maybe some flowers, the Shabbes candles burning to remind us of the first light of Creation and the light of revelation at Sinai. These are tools for making sacred space.

Another is tzitzit, wearing fringes on the corner of our garments to remind us of the mitzvot — that’s a tool for mindfulness, and for community connection. Our community’s tradition of making bracelets each year serves the same purpose. For several years now we’ve printed silicone bracelets for the Days of Awe. This year’s bracelets read:

Love ♥ Ahavat Olam ♥ Rebirth ♥ Courage ♥ Resilience ♥ Teshuvah ♥

There are two transliterated Hebrew words or phrases. One is teshuvah — repentance, return, turning ourselves in the right direction again. That’s the fundamental move of this season, and that word has been on our bracelets every year we’ve gotten them printed. The other is ahavat olam, a phrase from daily liturgy. It means unending love, or forever love, or eternal love. Our tradition tells us that God loves us with ahavat olam.

For some of us “the G-word” is a stumbling block. Which God, what God, what do we mean by God — God far above, God deep within, Parent, Sovereign, Creator, Beloved? And for some of us “the L-word” might be equally challenging. The word love gets so overused it becomes almost meaningless.

“Wait ’til you hear this song, you’re going to love it!”

Fiddler on the Roof: “Do you love me?” (“Do I what?!”)

My son would tell you that he loves Minecraft and plain vanilla soft-serve. That’s not the same thing I mean when I tell him that I love him.

When I say I love my child, I’m talking about something profound and soul-expanding. If “I love ice cream” is a five on the love scale, maybe “I love my child” is 500… and ahavat olam is infinity. And I think in this pandemic year, we need connection with that sense of infinite ahavat olam more than ever before.

That’s why love — ahavat olam — is our theme for this year’s Days of Awe. And our four cups tonight at our Rosh Hashanah seder represent different facets of love.

The first cup was for creative love. One of my favorite teachings holds that God created the universe of love, because God yearned to be in relationship with us.

Our second cup was for courageous love. Love asks us to risk disappointing each other. To risk speaking difficult truths. To act with courage and integrity, even when we feel as though we’re in the wilderness.

Our third cup just now was for resilient love. In this season of teshuvah, love asks of us the resilience to honestly turn our lives around.

And before Mourner’s Kaddish we’ll bless a cup of tears, evoking love that remembers.

Tonight we’re celebrating Rosh Hashanah while sheltering-in-place. We’re making our home spaces holy, and learning how to feel connected as a community from all the various places where we are. These are actions that we take to protect each other, to prevent viral spread, to care for those who are medically vulnerable and immunocompromised. They’re actions we take out of love.

Our bracelets this year also say rebirth: because tradition says that today the world is reborn, because this season is our chance to begin again. They say resilience, because the new year calls us to resilience; because the pandemic calls us to resilience; because authentic spiritual life calls us to resilience. And they say courage, because starting over takes courage. And living during a pandemic takes courage. And as Brene Brown reminds us, “courage” has its roots in the French word coeur: heart. Courage takes heart. Which brings us back once again to love.

May these Days of Awe strengthen our resilience and our courage and our heart. May they help us find holiness at home, here in all the physical places where we are. And may we emerge from this sacred season more able to give and receive love in all the ways that our world most needs.

L’shanah tovah.

 

This was R’ Rachel’s brief d’varling from tonight’s Erev Rosh Hashanah Seder (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

 

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Blessing and curse in pandemic times

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Blessing-and-curseLast week my son and I were watching the fifth Harry Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix. There’s a moment where two teenagers are kissing on a bench, and with a flick of her wand, Dolores Umbridge separates them by several feet.

We’ve seen this film several times before. But this time, six months in to the pandemic, my son joked, “Look, Mom, social distancing!” And we both laughed.

The laughter feels complicated for me as a parent. I know he’s layering this pandemic experience over what he sees in movies or on tv because it helps him process needing to stay apart. It breaks my heart that he has to do that. And I’m also glad that he can find a way to make sense of what’s happening, and even to joke about it, as we stay apart from loved ones in order to keep each other safe.

In this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, Moses says: I want these six tribes to stand on this mountain for a blessing, and those six tribes to stand on that mountain for a curse. Reading that verse this year, my mind made the move my son keeps making: “look, it’s social distancing!” Okay, obviously not. But then I thought: actually, this matter of blessing and curse does feel relevant.

Torah teaches, “Cursed be he who moves his fellow countryman’s landmark.” Literally, moving someone’s landmark means causing them to be lost. Spiritually, this verse resonates for me as a teaching about gaslighting. One who claims that the pandemic is hype, denying the reality of more than six million cases in the United States alone, is denying reality’s landmarks.

Torah teaches, “Cursed be he who misdirects a blind person on his way.” In a literal sense, this teaching seems obvious. Spiritually, I think of the claims about quack remedies for covid-19, from hydroxychloroquine to drinking bleach. Remember when emergency rooms started reporting an uptick in people who poisoned themselves by blindly following that bad advice?

Torah teaches, “Cursed be he who subverts the rights of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.” In Torah’s paradigm, this is a way of saying “the powerless.” Torah here condemns the one who disenfranchises or harms those who are vulnerable. I don’t think that one requires any translation. Literally and spiritually, it’s a clear instruction for this pandemic moment.

And then Torah says: the curses aren’t our only option. If we observe the mitzvot and act in accordance with God’s commandments, we will experience the opposite outcome. We’ll be blessed in our homes and in our fields, our flocks and our herds, in city and country, in our comings and in our goings… if only we observe the mitzvot and do not deviate from them.

In years past I’ve struggled with the blessings and curses articulated in Torah. The curses seem so punitive. I don’t believe in a God Who sits on high and throws punishments at us like lightning bolts from Mount Olympus! Many of you have told me over the years that that’s not your theology either, and that encountering it each year in Deuteronomy is challenging. For me, too.

But this year I’m reading these verses through the lens of global pandemic. This year I don’t see these as teachings about divine punishment at all. I’m reading them as teachings about our power to shape the world in which we live. I think Torah is reminding us that we bring about the blessings or the curses by dint of our choices. (And suddenly it feels like Yom Kippur.)

If we gaslight each other, if we misdirect each other, if we subvert each others’ rights — those actions themselves are curses, and they carry their own consequences with them. They harm the fabric of community. They damage trust. And in this pandemic moment, they contribute to the spread of the virus that continues to ravage our interconnected human family across the globe.

And if we do what’s right — if we persist in the discomfort of our masks and strict social distancing in order to protect each other and especially to protect the vulnerable — those actions themselves are blessings, and they carry their own consequences with them, too. When we choose to act in those ways, we bless each other with our mutual concern and care.

May we continue to bless each other with our mutual concern and care, through this pandemic and beyond.

 

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

 

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Runway to the Days of Awe 4: Clothing

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 Dear CBI Members and Friends,

Some of you have asked: if we’re gathering digitally for the Days of Awe, does that mean we can invite our friends and family who aren’t in northern Berkshire to join us? The answer is YES!

Feel free to forward these notes to your friends and family who live elsewhere, and invite them to join the CBI email list so they can receive links for connecting to our services during the Days of Awe. This offers us new opportunities to build community and experience our interconnections in new ways.

In the second post in this series, I talked about making our home prayer space feel special and how to prepare a home space for Zoom prayer. (That post has now been updated with an illustration of what it might look like to ready our space for Zooming into the New Year — deep thanks to Steve Silbert for that!)

This week’s suggestion for high holiday preparations has to do with clothing. Just as a white tablecloth can transform a regular table into a sacred space, clothes can help us transform how we feel in body, heart, mind, and spirit.

One of my earliest high holiday memories is of going shopping with my mom in August, looking for a new fall outfit to wear to High Holiday services. (It was also always far too hot in south Texas to wear heavy wool fall clothes at Rosh Hashanah, but somehow I remember doing so anyway… )

This year many of us may not be shopping, for budgetary reasons or for covid-19 reasons. But I want to encourage us to choose something special to wear for Zoom services, even if it’s something we already own.

Even though we’ll be participating from home (and therefore could show up in pajamas or sweatpants), resist that temptation! Instead make your pre-holiday shower into a spiritual “mikvah,” washing away the schmutz of the old year, and put on something special. Choose clothes that are comfortable and in which you feel good. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur morning, if you’re going to engage in our annual moment of Jewish yoga (prostration / child’s pose on the floor during the Great Aleinu), make sure you’re wearing clothes that allow for movement.

Getting a bit dressed up is a way of physically reminding ourselves that we’re entering a festival. Even when we’re celebrating from home, we can harness the embodied experience of dressing up to help lift us out of ordinary consciousness and ordinary time. 

And on Yom Kippur, remember the tradition of wearing white throughout the holiday, symbolizing purity and new beginnings. You can read more about that here: Preparing for Yom Kippur.

Blessings,

Rabbi Rachel

The Runway to the Days of Awe

Week One: Seven Weeks Until Rosh Hashanah
Week Two: Creating Sacred Space at Home
Week Three: Music
Week Four: Clothing

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