After the deaths, holiness

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Tombstones-graves-cemeteries

This week we’re reading Acharei Mot-Kedoshim. Acharei mot means after the deaths. After the deaths of Aaron’s two sons, we read, vayidom Aharon: and Aaron was silent. That’s resonating with me in a new way this year.

After the deaths that covid-19 has wrought in our county, our nation, our world — after reading the accounts of ICU nurses and ER doctors in New York — after facing the inconceivable suffering in this moment — I understand Aaron’s silence anew.

Sometimes there are no words. Sometimes nothing we can say makes anything better, and our words of hope for the future ring hollow or feel like bypassing. All we can do is sit with our grief, or sit with our fellow human beings in their grief.

Our double Torah portion this week takes its name from the two parshiyot that make it up, Acharei Mot and Kedoshim. Acharei mot: after the death. Kedoshim: God tells Moses to tell us, Kedoshim tihiyu: y’all shall be holy, for I your God am holy.

This year, the name of the double portion reads to me like a sentence, or maybe like a promise. Acharei mot, kedoshim. After the deaths, y’all can be holy. Because deaths are always part of reality, and we have a choice in how we respond to them.

When it comes to the horrors of covid-19, we can respond with nihilism: deciding that suffering is inevitable, so we might as well do whatever we want. People are going to die no matter what, so it’s every person for themselves, right?

Or we can respond with care and compassion: taking care of our fellow human beings in the ways we are able. I think you can guess which one of those two options I think is ethical and correct. But don’t take my word for it. Take the Torah’s word.

Our Torah portion gives us specifics: Care for our elders. Keep Shabbat. When we harvest the earth’s abundance, leave some for the poor. Care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in our midst. Don’t keep a laborer’s wages until morning.

Here’s another way to put that:

Preserve the life and safety of our elders, and make their needs a priority. Give them the resources they need to stay healthy. Wear masks and shelter in place to protect their immune systems from being ravaged by covid19.

Remember that human lives are more important than productivity. That means life matters more than the economy. If someone doesn’t have enough to live on in this pandemic moment, we can help them. If someone has died, we can’t bring them back.

Make sure everyone has enough to eat: that means give to our local food pantries, if we can, and it also means ensure the safety of those who work in the fields and the meat packing plants. Don’t force them to work in unsanitary and unsafe conditions.

Care for all who are vulnerable to abuse. Torah speaks often in the language of “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger who lives among you.” Today that might be immigrants, refugees, people of color, queer and trans people. Those most at-risk.

Don’t exploit those who labor for others. Protect and uplift them and give them the resources they need to be safe and healthy and fed. In a nutshell, protect and uplift life. That’s what it means for the members of a community to be kedoshim.

Kedoshim is a plural word.  As a community, it’s our job to respond to death with compassion. As a community, it’s our job to respond to death by taking care of the vulnerable. As a community, it’s our job to live out Jewish values — to be holy.

Acharei mot: kedoshim. After these deaths, in response to these deaths, in response to the world’s suffering today, it’s our calling to be a holy community. To respond by caring for those in need and making choices that uplift life.

Kein yehi ratzon — may it be so.

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel shared at Shabbat morning services via Zoom this week. (Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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A Video Message from Rabbi Rachel

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ZFNaIsiSY]

This short video begins with a check-in for the CBI community, and then moves to a teaching from the rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto for this week’s parsha that feels especially meaningful to me this year. There’s a transcript below the video if you’d rather read it than watch it. Thinking of you all. – Rabbi Rachel

 

Shavua tov, friends: a good week to you. I hope that your Shabbat was restorative. As we enter into week six of sheltering-in-place and social distancing, I wanted to check in. How are you holding up?

I miss you. All of you. It’s been a joy to see some of you via Zoom at my drop-in office hours on Mondays, at the Psalm-writing class I’ve been teaching on Fridays, at Friday morning meditation and at Shabbat services. I look forward to continuing to see you on Zoom, or hearing your voices by phone, or receiving your emails and texts, since right now those are the modalities available to us.

Here’s a funny thing that I’m starting to think maybe isn’t a coincidence. At the start of the new Jewish year, back in October, both of my hevruta partners / learning buddies — Rabbi Megan Doherty, who’s the Jewish chaplain at Oberlin, and my colleagues on the board of Bayit: Building Jewish — felt called to study a rabbi known as the Piazeczyner, also known as R’ Kalman Kalonymus Shapiro, also known as the Aish Kodesh, also known as the rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Piazeczyner was writing from the Warsaw Ghetto. In a time of profound fear and anxiety, deprivation and illness. And yet he found ways to cultivate hope, even in those terrible times.

This week’s Torah portion is Tazria-Metzora, which offers teachings about how to handle a particular kind of sickness that was observable both in people, and in their dwellings. Both human beings, and their homes, could become “contagious” and needed to be quarantined for a time.

Whoa, that resonates in a whole new way this year.

The scholar Rashi, who lived around the year 1000, says this teaching is really about treasure hidden in the walls of the houses of the Emorites, whom our ancient ancestors conquered when we moved into the promised land. The houses would be marked as having tzara’at, and then they would be demolished, and we would find treasure in them.

The Piazeczyner asks: if the point is that there’s treasure in the walls, why wait seven days? Why not just knock them down? His answer is this: because the waiting helps us cultivate faith that good things will come.

Even in a difficult time, he writes — “when there is no school for our children, no synagogue in which to pray in community with a minyan, no mikvah (ritual bath)” — even in a time like that (a time like this!), we need to trust that God can help us turn even the most difficult of circumstances into blessings. We never know, when something difficult is happening, what blessing we might be able to find in it later when we look back on it.

So as we stay quarantined, sheltering in place, socially distancing to protect the vulnerable from the spread of this awful disease: may we follow the advice of the Piazeczyner, and try to cultivate trust that there may be treasure in these difficult days.

Maybe it’s the treasure of knowing that we are protecting each other from illness. Maybe it’s the treasure of coming to recognize what really matters to us — even if what really matters to us is something that right now we can’t have.

May we live to emerge from this narrow place, and may we connect in person again: speedily and soon, with God’s help.

Thinking of you and sending blessings to all.

 

Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi. With special thanks to R’ David Markus for learning this with me on Shabbes. For those who want the original teaching, it’s the Aish Kodesh on M’tzora 1940 / 5700.

 

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In the wilderness

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A d’varling for the end of week five of covid-19 sheltering-in-place.

As we leave Pesach behind we set out into the wilderness, trusting that somehow we’re moving toward Sinai, toward revelation, toward connection. The spiritual practice of counting the Omer is tradition’s way of helping us link Pesach with Shavuot, liberation with revelation, the constriction we’re leaving behind with the expansiveness and covenant we’re heading toward.

This year it may be hard to focus on that count because we are doing another kind of counting: how many days we’ve been quarantined / sheltering-in-place / socially distancing / staying home. How many days and weeks it’s been since life felt “normal.” And how many weeks it might be before we can return to seeing each other again, being with each other again.

The first thing I want to do is give all of us blanket rabbinic permission to “mess up” the Omer count. It’s okay if we forget. It’s okay if we miss a day. It’s okay if we can’t focus on the kabbalistic meanings of the seven qualities we’re called to cultivate. A lot of our brainspace is dedicated right now to the news, the pandemic, what we’re going to eat, who’s sick and who’s well.

That’s normal. And it’s okay. And… that’s exactly the wilderness in which we’re wandering this year — as a people, as a nation, as a planet. Which means we’re right where our core ancestral story says we should be. In the wilderness. Not totally sure where we’re going or how we’re going to get there or what losses we’ll incur along the way. Maybe uncertain. Almost certainly afraid.

The Hebrew word bamidbar, “in the wilderness,” shares a root with the verb l’daber, “to speak.” The wilderness can be a place of fear, a place of not-knowing, a place that feels dangerous. And that’s exactly the place where we hear God’s voice. The place where holiness speaks to us. The revelation at Sinai takes place in a place that no one owns, in the wilderness, in not-knowing.

As I watch the pandemic play out at hospitals around the world, I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I spent as a student chaplain at Albany Medical Center almost 15 years ago. I remember that hospitals are profoundly holy places — not despite our fear and not-knowing, but precisely because of it. When our hearts are cracked open, they also open to connection.

It’s like Jacob said when he woke from the dream of the ladder with angels moving up and down: “God was in this place, and I — I did not know!” God is always in the place where we are, when we are there fully. A crisis like this one can focus us. It can make us really present, which may be uncomfortable. And it can open us to God’s presence, which may be uncomfortable, too.

The whole world is wandering in the wilderness of this pandemic. We don’t know how we’ll get to the other side, or how long it will take, or what losses we’ll incur along the way. We’re not alone in this. We may be alone in our homes, but we’re not existentially alone. We’re all in this together. The spread of the virus reminds us that we’re more connected than we ever knew.

Last Shabbat, in the Torah reading for the Shabbat during Pesach, we heard God say to Moses, “I will go in the lead and will lighten your burden.” That verse is bringing me comfort this week: the idea that God is here with us in the wilderness. God is walking with us. God is keeping us company. And our souls are keeping each other company, too, even when we are alone.

May we feel each others’ presence in this time of separation. May we feel God’s presence in this time of separation. May we hear the voice of holiness speaking to us in this wilderness. May we open ourselves to the voice of love, the voice of justice, the voice of hope. And may we build a world of greater justice and love — for everyone — when we make it to the other side.

 

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

 

 

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This week’s digital offerings

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This week’s digital offerings have just been emailed out to our mailing list: login info and password for today’s Rabbinic Drop-In Hour, tomorrow’s Omer discussion with Jen Burt, Wednesday’s Yizkor service, Thursday’s Pirkei Avot class with Rabbi David Markus, and Friday’s morning meditation, psalm-writing class, and Kabbalat Shabbat services with Rabbi Rachel.

The login and password info will NOT be posted on Facebook or this blog, so the only way to get it is by joining our email list. If you’re not on that list and want to be, please email the office at cbinadams at gmail dot com.

Stay safe, everyone.

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We are not alone

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Dear CBI Community,


What a week it has been. Unlike any other we have known. And we know that many more unprecedented weeks are ahead of us.


In this moment we may feel more isolated than ever before. And yet the virus and its spread are a reminder that all of humanity is connected in ways large and small. Even as we take profound steps to curtail our physical connections, our essential connections remain. We are still connected in heart and spirit.


We are only at the beginning of what will be a long journey through the valley of covid-19. We will all need to learn ways to feel, and to strengthen, those connections of heart and spirit.


There’s much we can’t know, including how long this pandemic will last and how it will ultimately impact our community. But here’s something I do know: we are in this together.


Every Shabbat we sing “Mi Chamocha” (to the tune of “The Water is Wide” — you can listen to Mi Chamocha / Water is Wide here). This is the song our ancestors sang after crossing the Sea. Imagine what they had just been through: first the Ten Plagues, then they fled their homes in Egypt, and then the Egyptian army pursued them to the edge of an ocean. Surely some must have despaired. But then someone stepped into the sea — midrash (our interpretive tradition) names him as Nachshon — and following Nachshon, everyone walked through together.


“Mi Chamocha” is a reminder that whatever difficulties we face — whatever armies are pursuing us, whatever seas stand in our way — as Robert Frost wrote, there’s “no way out but through.” Our work in this moment is to resist despair. Instead we are called to cultivate hope, and to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And like our spiritual forebears, none of us have to cross the sea alone. We have each other, and we have that Presence that our tradition names as God.


We don’t have to cross this sea alone. May we find comfort in our togetherness — our fundamental spiritual connectedness — even when our bodies are apart.


In the coming days I’ll share some different opportunities for the CBI community to connect via zoom video, including a schedule of rabbinic “drop-in” hours and new online classes. (If you don’t yet have zoom, I hope you will download the app for your computer, tablet, and/or phone.) I hope that these offerings will help us feel connected as a community — we need that now more than ever.


Meanwhile, I urge all of us to reach out to each other: via email, via phone, via Facetime, in whatever ways we can. “Social distancing” means we need to keep our physical distance, but we don’t need to keep emotional distance. Consider lighting Shabbat candles tonight with a friend or family member, even if it’s “just” over the phone or video. (Here are resources for celebrating Shabbat at home.) Or email a friend to set up a coffee date over phone or video — or even do so with someone who isn’t yet a friend but might become so…


Tradition says that on Shabbat an ‘extra soul’ descends and enlivens us. And this particular Hebrew word for soul, neshamah, is related to a word for breath, neshimah. May Shabbat’s extra soul give us extra spaciousness, extra en-soul-ment, extra breath in these time when panic may be shortening our breath and constraining our spirit. May the light of our Shabbat candles connect us with the light of creation, the light of revelation, and most especially the light of hope. And may we feel our connectedness with each other, deeply — so that even as we are solitary in our houses, we can know that we are not alone.


Holding all of you in my prayers and in my heart this week and always —


Rabbi Rachel

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