At Its Worst. At Its Best. (Tazria-Metzora)

There’s an image I can’t get out of my head. It’s a memory as described to me by two adult children of a woman whose funeral I officiated at last week.

Here it is:

A woman with two young children is alternately standing and parading her two young children in front of a synagogue on Yom Kippur. She’s dressed them up—because that’s what you do on Yom Kippur. And she’s brought them to synagogue—because that’s also what you do on Yom Kippur.

But she won’t go in.

It’s sometime in the early 1960’s. She is estranged from her father because she married a man who was not Jewish. She has also rejected any religious upbringing she had. She and her husband are atheists and active in the Communist Party.

Her mother had sent her across the country to California hoping to get her away from “those crazy Communists” (I can imagine her saying that). But instead of becoming alienated from political activism, she’d met a man, fallen in love, gotten married. Now she was alienated from her family instead.

When I asked these adult children what values they thought she’d gotten from her Jewishness, they had to think for a second. Then they remembered how Adele liked to repeat often and proudly that the Anarchist/Socialist/Communist/Union/Civil Rights/Social Justice movements had all been filled with Jews.

For Adele, being Jewish meant standing up for the oppressed. It meant becoming a headstrong woman who “stuck to her guns, never hesitating to express her opinions.” She was an “early feminist by nature, a rebel at heart: no-nonsense, independent-minded, willing to risk physical violence for her beliefs.” Not just “strong-willed,” but the “strongest-willed.” Not an easy person by any means, Adele loved a good fight, and would never back down in an argument—which she often caused.

All this, to her family, was being the quintessential Jewish mother and grandmother—”Not original at all. Sorry, Grandma.” (Everyone laughed.) And Adele had great love for her family, and appreciation for her four children and three grandchildren. These were returned to her in kind, despite the challenging person she was. And she kept hanging on, ‘till 94. Though tired and cranky, she’d wanted to make sure everyone was okay before she left, one grandchild told me.

It was a challenging crowd for me. Most of the family identify as atheists, some as anti-religious. In a way, I’m still getting used to being “religious,” so it can be difficult. Funny thing for a rabbi to say, I know. (But at this point, what else is new? These are the families that are finding me and need me. I understand them.)

We’d done a graveside funeral a few weeks prior. This time, they wanted none of the traditional prayers recited at funerals, with one exception: it would be “okay” to recite the Mourners Kaddish.

Instead of sung prayers, an old acquaintance/friend, Lisa Gutkin from the Klezmatics, played violin and sang a little Yiddish along with some Woodie Guthrie. Another friend played keyboard and sang other favorites.

Again—why exactly did they want a rabbi?

Well, their mother had. Just like those years so long ago when her father had refused to talk to her for four years, she seemed to crave Jewish connection—with her family and her “roots.”

So, what could I say to make this one “religious” moment meaningful to this crowd? I’d given it a lot of thought. And when it came time to recite Kaddish at the end, I gave a little speech.

I said, it seemed that, though Adele proudly identified as Jewish, she’d had a complicated relationship with Judaism. “Who doesn’t?” (Everyone laughed.) “Religion is problematic.” (I actually said, “It sucks.” No one laughed.)

I continued: The word “religion” comes from the Latin, religare, meaning to bind, or connect. True: it’s about binding ourselves to the Divine, but it is meant to connect us, to offer community—and maybe that’s the same thing.

Unfortunately, at its worst, religion divides, alienates, shames. (I noticed some nods, especially from the Queer people in the room.) Adele had been painfully rejected by her father, and though he’d (amazingly?) come to accept and like her husband, the damage had been done.

But Adele’s Jewish values, like the other Jews in the social justice movements she’d talked about always, whether she knew it or not, had come from the Jewish idea that humans are made in God’s image, and that every human is thus equally valuable and worthy of respect. We are not allowed graven images and statues and such because we are to see God reflected in every single person we meet.

I reminded the crowd that a few weeks ago we’d buried Adele; Jewish tradition and our Bible teach that we come from the earth and to the earth we return. Even our use of the word “roots” when we talk about family, reminds of earth. We all know it: the Earth is our home. We feel it in our bones. In burying Adele, we had reconnected her to our “Mother” in an intimate way.

If done right, religion offers connection, with family and friends gathered around to witness this beautiful, if painful, moment.

If done right, religion connects us through prayer as well.

Prayer should help us open to astonishment and wonderment at all that surrounds us, the Mystery of a hidden energy we cannot understand or explain, but that joins us, binds us to each other, to each living and inanimate object on Earth.

If done right, religion shouldn’t be about fear but rather awe, like the one Hebrew word that means both of these things.

This Aramaic prayer, the Mourners Kaddish, that we say for the dead is all praise. Yes, it is praise for “God,” but to call it the Mystery of the Universe is good enough for me, to paraphrase something one of Adele’s staunch atheist, scientist, children had once written. If we are each made in “God’s image,” then in reciting this prayer, we are praising the Mystery of Life, because Life runs through us all.

In that moment, I asked everyone to stand in praise Adele’s life and the values she inherited from her Jewish roots, values she lived—a life filled with conviction and the fight to achieve equality for all—using these ancient Jewish words.

And they all did. With perhaps a new understanding and appreciation of why, maybe, Adele had felt so bound to her Jewishness, even if she herself never quite came to understand why.

This week’s Torah portion feels like the epitome of Judaism at its worst. It reflects that part of religion that alienates and isolates rather than bonds.

It begins with one of the most painful Torah texts that exists and that has done some of the greatest harm: the rules around women, their menstrual period, and childbirth. The new mother is seen as impure, unclean, forbidden to touch any sacred object, isolated for twice as long after giving birth to a female as a male. In the same way, the menstruating woman is impure and untouchable by men. Such laws can be explained away and prettified, given spiritual beauty in an effort to justify them. Many have tried and are still trying. But the fact is, they have caused terrible pain and harm throughout generations. The damage has been done.

There’s a passage later in the reading describing skin infections and then those that pervade the walls of a house. This time, temporary removal from community can be seen as watching out for the greater good, the health of the wider community. But then the priest, who stands in for a doctor and diagnostician, must cry out, “Impure! Impure!”

How incredibly alienating to be publicly shamed in such a way.

Again, religion at its worst.

I can only imagine Adele’s terrible loneliness on those High Holy Days when she tried so desperately to find some link to her family and her roots, though she wasn’t quite sure why.

In a time when so many people feel isolated and lonely, wishing for connection, not quite knowing how to achieve it, let us open doors that allow more people in. Let us be aware of the ways in which we might alienate others, in actions or speech. Let us invite people in, conscious that we are all made in the same Image, equally worthy of love and respect.

Finally, may we act in ways that show that we know that we are all bound to each other, needing each other, and let us heal wounds of feeling cast out.

And say Amen.