Not a Laughing Matter: VaYikra
I just finished reading comedian Trevor Noah’s book, Born a Crime.
From the first page, you’re waiting to hear whether and how his mother survived a gunshot to the back of her head by his stepfather, and you don’t find out until the last page (spoiler alert: I’m going to tell you, but the book is still really good).
Even though this is a story of Trevor’s life growing up in South Africa and the intricacies of Apartheid from his own experiences, his mother is central to his life and his book.
Through the systemic racism, poverty, years of hunger and physical and emotional abuse by a husband she can’t get away from because the police are complicit, his mother insists that Jesus is all she needs.
This is a woman who drags Trevor to church every Sunday---correction: churches--three, to be exact; “the White Church, the Black Church, and the Mixed Church,” for the different experiences and needs they fulfill in her.
Her story of survival is one of those crazy ones of a woman pinned to the ground, a gun pointed at her head, a gun so powerful and reliable it never backfires, yet it spits the bullets out the back, one after another, giving her time to get up and run for her life with her son (not Trevor).
She runs to her car and, once in the driver’s seat, her husband shoots again, this time hitting her in the back of her head through the rear window.
The bullet goes clear through her head, she collapses, and blood is strewn everywhere.
Her son climbs into the driver’s seat and gets her to the hospital.
Trevor, now a grown man making a living as a comedian in South Africa, gets a phone call from his brother, races to the hospital, finds his mother alive but bleeding profusely, and learns that she had canceled her health insurance (“because it’s a scam!”).
He is faced with a decision about giving his credit card to the nurse and getting into debt for the rest of his life, or letting her die, which she probably will anyway. She is expected to be in the ICU for weeks if she survives (he gives the nurse the credit card).
But it turns out that the bullet through her head does one of those ricochet things where it just barely misses her skull, her spinal cord, and her brain, any major arteries, and her eye, making a hole through the side of her nose instead, and leaving all else intact.
The only thing the doctors have to do is stop the bleeding, and she’s miraculously awake in a few hours and out of the hospital in a few days.
When she wakes up, she jokes that Trevor is now officially the most good-looking person in the family.
And when Trevor chides her for having canceled her health insurance, she says, “But I have insurance, Trevor. I have Jesus. And God has blessed me with a son who could pay my bill.”
Talk about complete faith!
The Torah portion this week, as we begin the Book of Leviticus, Vayikra, starts with God calling out to Moses, letting him know there is more work to be done; after the Exodus, now “free,” the Israelites need to learn what it means to know God, to get close to God.
The way they will do this is through animal and grain sacrifices, prepared in a special way and burnt on an altar, by way of the priests, the kohanim.
The “sacrifice” is not actually called a sacrifice in Hebrew, but rather, a “Korban,” a coming near, or an approaching of God.
In other words, God is calling out to Moses and the people, and instructing them on how to approach God: how to come close.
Over and over, the parsha’s description of how to properly make an animal offering includes taking the blood of the animal and dashing it all around the sides of the altar.
It also includes a repeated commandment to make the offering a “re’ach nichoach,” or a pleasing odor.
One type of offering is of shalom, peace, also translated as wholeness.
Trevor Noah’s mother has learned this lesson already, of how to approach, or get close to God and how to believe with the wholeness of her being. And despite the blood, her own blood, that is dashed around her car, she carries peace: a peace that comes from deep faith.
She believes wholly that despite human imperfection, misbehavior, abuse and tragedy, God is there for her. She knows that believing and praying doesn’t necessarily mean that God can prevent humans from being hurt or from hurting each other, but she uses her deep belief, and the Bible, as her guide to living a truthful and honest life.
Her “pleasing odor” for God are her constant prayers.
I don’t know about you, but I look to people like her, who have suffered greatly and seen and experienced terrible human tragedy, yet manage to maintain a sense of well-being and wholeness, not to mention humor, never giving up on themselves or humanity.
Such deep faith in God translates into a deep faith in humanity and the possibility of redemption, if only we keep working at it, despite, or perhaps because of, the blood we keep spilling.
PPE + PPK; Vayakhel/Pekudei
Personal Protective Equipment + Puzzles, Poetry & Kindness.
I’m suddenly into poetry, and now puzzles--two things I never liked or understood as a child.
Kindness is something I’ve always been into, though I don’t always manage it.
If I were 20, I’d say about this pandemic: “I am soooo over it.” (Okay, I do say that, even though I’m way older). Which means I’m not. But I want to be. Or I want it to be. And though we can begin to glimpse the horizon of over-ness, it’s not.
A few days ago, in my determination to “feel better” (which, I know, according to Buddhism, I’m not supposed to be trying), and to avoid ordering from Amazon (yes, they should be avoided!) and to do something different than going for a walk in the park, I set out for a walk across town to a small bookstore I love--to buy poetry: a cool place called Book Culture. (I mean, how can you not want to buy a book there?)
There, at the cool bookstore, I saw puzzles for sale. I was suddenly seized with the urge to buy one. A cute one: 500 pieces, with little pictures of New York scenes (what can I say? I’m a devoted New Yorker).
As I was browsing, this person came along who wanted to browse in the same spot where I was. In her anxiety over Covid, and her impatience at my occupying the space she wanted, she was unkind and short-tempered. She shoo-ed me away and said in an authoritative voice, “I’m going to have to ask you to move.”
My blood pressure rose, I grumbled an incoherent protest, but moved away. It pissed me off.
I wasn’t happy with myself for reacting the way I did. I met unkindness with unkindness.
Then I got home and discovered for the first time how meditative and peaceful doing puzzles is.
You’re hyper-focused, you look at the detail of the tiny pieces, then the big picture, then the detail again, and so it goes, slowly, until you have the satisfaction of placing each individual piece in its place.
And you sigh and smile with each little piece placed correctly. Aaaah. The beauty of it, seeing how all the pieces fit together into the one big Whole.
Like the words and images of a poem. Focusing on the minutiae of life. The mundane. Because what else is there, really, as poet Naomi Shihab Nye says? We’re not living in Star Wars; we’re living in our own little lives, filled with tiny details, many of them beautiful, if only we take the time to look.
That’s the kind of thing the double parsha this week presents to us: detail after detail, repeated again and again, of who and what and how the Dwelling Place for God, the Mishkan, will be constructed and decorated to make One Beautiful Whole to be carried through the desert.
Once again, the Israelites are asked to bring their special gifts from the heart (so much repetition) and now also their special skills, until it’s too much and they are told to stop.
Their offerings, of a generosity that comes from the heart, are a practice in kindness and the way we should be treating each other, our fellow earthlings. They carry beauty, like puzzles and poetry (not like that woman in the bookstore or my reaction to her).
The following excerpt from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye was written years before this pandemic--more than a half century, in fact! But it holds an experience and also an intention for how to live.
It’s called “Kindness:”
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved.
All this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness…
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing
You must know sorrow as the deepest thing
You must wake up with sorrow
You must speak to it
Till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore...
Only kindness that raises its head
From the crowd of the world to say,
It is you I have been looking for,
And then goes with you everywhere
Like a shadow or a friend.
Hmmm. Until we see the size of the cloth.
While we’re figuring out the puzzle of life and how we fit into the Whole, let’s remember: look for beauty in the details, look for kindness; Bring beauty, bring kindness—as offerings of the heart.
Maybe that’s how we will get through the rest of this when it feels like we’ve lost everything.
The Whole is still there. We just forget to look at it.
PPE can protect us from Covid, but let’s not allow it to separate us from the cloth—and the beauty of PPK.
A Golden Trump; Ki Tissa
It’s been almost exactly one year since I fell ill with Coronavirus, nine months since I published my first blog about lessons I’d learned from it. I don’t know if I’ve retained them. Maybe the lessons are meant to be learned over and over again.
I keep feeling all this rage and grief, and not just from the world, but also from things that have come to light recently in my own circles. I keep asking myself if my feelings are normal. I continually need people to remind me that it is.
If I were to sum up the themes of the year, it would be fear, rage, grief, heartbreak, betrayal, truth--on a national and worldwide basis over this year, as well as in personal experiences.
And it makes sense that it should all happen at this very time; the world is at a reckoning point, and society and its institutions are being turned on their head.
It makes just as much sense as it makes for the Israelites to doubt, in their fear and anxiety, that this man Moses is ever coming down from the mountain where he’s hanging out with this supposed “God;” as much sense that they would demand a solid substitute god in exchange; as much sense that Aaron would panic and quell their anger by rushing to construct said substitute; as much sense for God to want to unleash all his rage at their betrayal ; as much sense as Moses unleashing all his rage after all the sacrifices he’s made and forcing the people to “drink” their Golden Calf now in the form of dust (can you picture it?).
And as much sense as Aaron stretching the truth, like a child; “I did it. Don’t be angry. Please. I threw the gold into the fire and a calf came out. I didn’t mold it.”
To be fair, we have to give Aaron some credit and compassion. He’s left alone and in charge of thousands of people while Moses has disappeared with no sign of imminent return. The people are getting anxious, and anger is welling up. Aaron must be terrified. The need to placate, with all the unknowns, is urgent. And he’s afraid of Moses’ anger. He stretches the truth.
But sometimes there’s no place for compassion in our heart.
Like when we’re talking about outright lies and neglect that lead to so many unnecessary deaths.
Or there’s an abusive coach or politician or teacher or spiritual leader--and you play a part in covering it up, year after year after year, and pretend you didn’t know about it!
Betrayal, heartbreak, rage.
We live in a culture of denial: “I didn’t do it. I didn’t know about it.”
Maybe it’s the culture of blame and punishment that’s at the root of the problem; a punitive God? Corporal punishment? Blame and shame? Punitive prisons? The death penalty?
And a culture of reverence. The need to make some superior to others.
There are photos of people posing with a golden statue of Donald Trump at the CPAC conference.
Golden Calf; Golden Trump. In the same week. (Who says the Bible is irrelevant??)
The people are afraid. And they’ve been seduced by lies. But fear doesn’t trump the need for truth.
This story is a warning about something very real.
A warning against arrogance.
A warning to be humble.
A warning about how important truth is.
We can’t point fingers at others in places of greater power and shake our heads like we don’t know how it could happen. Because we do it to each other each and every day.
Better to admit you did it or allowed it to happen.
Because in the end, truth comes out and grief and rage have increased astronomically (and unnecessarily) by then.
It starts with us--in our houses, with our family and friends, in our organizations and workplaces. We have to admit we did wrong, not after months of hounding, but right away. The sooner we admit it, the sooner we can get on with the healing.
Whatever is stopping us, we have to get over it. It’s part of creating a new and equitable society: part of building a world where we take away the punitive attitude and simultaneously hold each other accountable.
Just say it: I messed up. And I’m sorry. And I hold myself accountable. I hold my politicians accountable, and I hold myself accountable.
And whatever we’re feeling, it’s normal. We need to remind each other, and we need to soften each other’s anger, like Moses does for God, soothing his face, reminding him that these are his peeps: that love is real.
And then set about the work of fixing it.
For the sake of love and a new and equitable society. Tell the truth.
How can we laugh? How can we not? (Purim)
Between Texas freezing over (like hell it is!) and---well, just everything else, I wondered how we can laugh on Purim.
But then I read the Purim story in detail again and I realized, how can we even laugh about Purim at all, let alone when people are freezing to death in Texas and---well, just everything else.
Yesterday I was walking in the cold and the snow in Central Park and from afar I could hear some very loud dance music blasting from the ice skating rink. Disturbing the peace of the North Woods (I grumbled) were some 50 people dancing in unison to bachata (Dominican dance music), legs lifting, arms pushing out, to the left, then the right (I do hope they were masked). They were having so much fun, I almost wished I could join them.
It’s the season of fun. Or it’s supposed to be. Mardi Gras, Purim.
But if you read the Book of Esther you find the humiliation of women (girls?) paraded in front of a king in a beauty contest for his choosing, our hero Esther who saves the Jewish people through her bravery, and the revenge of a joyfully saved people attacking and killing thousands of their enemies.
For this, we distribute “mishloach manot,” a little care package to our friends and neighbors and the poor, in celebration, and we dress up and get drunk.
Maybe the custom started in difficult times for the Jews; things suck, so find a reason to have fun!
But I ask, how can we laugh?
And yet.
How can we not?
I heard an interview with Rabbi Ariel Burger, student of Elie Wiesel (who would say, “and yet,” instead of “yes, and”), and author of Witness, Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom.
Burger tells of a moment with a group that meets regularly in a “cafe” for discussion and suddenly found they didn’t agree when it came to January 6th and the attack on the Capitol. There was a heated discussion, the hour was almost up, and they turned to their leader looking for a solution.
Knowing that there would be none, he led the group in niggun (wordless melody) for the last minutes of their time together, they sang, and the tension dissipated immediately.
A chapter in Burger’s book is called, “How can you sing? How can you not?”
Burger quotes Rebbe Nachman as saying, “When two people talk at the same time, it’s dissonant, it’s cacophony, but when two people sing together, it can be harmony.”
There’s a mystical teaching in Judaism about the white space around the letters of the Torah; it’s also the white empty space we sometimes look for during meditation.
Burger asks us to consider, what do we want to create in that space?
The white space allows us to expand our repertoire: what got us into our present mess is not what’s going to get us out of it. The white space takes us beyond the limitations of words.
Burger continues: We can’t absorb everyone else’s suffering, or we will be driven to depression, as many great spiritual leaders have done, yet we need to sensitize ourselves enough so we feel implicated enough to have that feeling of responsibility--but without allowing despair to creep in.
...The more hope we have and the more capacity to choose hope, the more we can take responsibility for the world around us...this is why hope is the first moral choice; it allows us to stay in the game, which is a lifetime’s work, or even more than one lifetime…
...If we give up, it’s over. We’re just choosing to allow people to be humiliated (like the girls in the king’s harem) over and over again in our presence.
Since talking and arguing isn’t solving our problems, what creativity can we find flowing through the white spaces beyond the limitations of words? What harmonies?
While we might ask, how can we sing when so many are suffering?
Well, how can we not?
How can we laugh?
And yet, how can we not?
Peaches, Cynicism and Offerings of the Heart: T’rumah
Was I shocked and appalled by last week’s Torah reading? The slave and the ear and the awl and the doorway and the impossible choices?
Not really. The Torah has all kinds of crazy stuff that doesn’t apply to our world today.
Am I shocked and appalled at the acquittal of former president Trump at his impeachment trial?
Appalled, yes. Shocked, no.
It’s easy to say that, depressingly, things haven’t changed that much since ancient times.
Like: we’re still learning how to love, after all these millennia.
But maybe, yet again, the problem is our expectations.
Writer Alain de Botton, interviewed on (yes, again) Krista Tippett last week (and why exactly am I feeling apologetic about this?) talks about sentimental optimism.
He defines sentimental optimism (so American) as the unrealistic expectations we have that set us up for disappointment and cynicism. It’s an idea put out by our culture of what things are “supposed to be” like, especially concerning love; we prepare for the “Big Day,” as if it were the culmination of our love when it’s really just the beginning.
He says that as the human race, we’re also really just at the beginning of learning to love (hard to deny, if you really think about it; we’re not that good at it).
And true love is rocky; it’s hard work because we’re human.
The opposite of “sentimental optimism” is “pessimistic realism,” which De Botton defines as the way things are, and he says it’s a much better way to live.
You say, A better way to live?? I don’t want to be pessimistic! I want to be hopeful! That’s the American Way!
But! When we are pessimistically realistic, we know that difficulties are going to occur, so we prepare for them.
When we’re not realistic, we get angry when things are difficult--specifically because we haven’t prepared (says the source), especially when they're things we think of as mundane. We don’t give legitimacy and prestige to these mundane difficulties; our narrative is that we’re arguing over “stupid” things like the laundry.
On the societal level, it’s a common thing for people to say, with shock and appal, “How can (fill in the blank) have happened? It’s/they’re so stupid!”
But it’s precisely the little things we have to pay attention to; airing our dirty laundry is exactly what’s happening now in American politics. It’s become obvious that we can’t ignore the little things and think they will just take care of themselves--leave the “bad apple” in the bushel and say “It’s only one.”
No! It will spoil the entire bushel! We have to prepare for the inevitability of the rotten bushel and remove the bad apples in order to change our culture.
The Trump administration didn’t appear in a vacuum. It took years--no decades and decades--of preparation on the part of the Republican party to set this up.
Just as there has been preparation for greed and hatred, there must be preparation for love.
Even Torah tells us to prepare!
This week’s parsha begins with this idea presented to the Jewish people: “You’re starting on a difficult journey, so…make for Me a dwelling place that I may dwell amongst you...
“And this is how you are to prepare it: with gifts that people feel impelled to bring--from the heart--to decorate this portable dwelling place for My Presence to travel among the people through their difficulties.”
God is very precise about how to prepare this sanctuary. He doesn’t just say, let the people bring whatever they want...their old rags (dirty laundry isn’t an option) and whatever garbage they can manage to find.
No! It’s with beautiful things of value: gold, silver, copper, special stones, skins, yarns, incense, oils, acacia wood—real sacrifices for people living with practically nothing.
And there are instructions to tie together curtains with clasps, “to make it one.” It says this twice: to make the dwelling place One.
How do we make ourselves, humanity, as One? How to learn to love one another? How to prepare for a world of love that we haven’t accomplished yet.
A functional society, says De Botton (just like a functional family), requires love and politeness and the capacity to look for charitable reasons for others’ behavior (without making excuses or excusing).
So, first, be careful what we expose ourselves to, De Botton says; as social beings who are very sensitive to outside influences, when we listen to angry voices, we become angry—and there’s an overabundance of angry voices out there to listen to.
Yes, let’s take some advice from Torah: to carry us through these difficult times, prepare beautiful sanctuaries for ourselves, carry them within us so that “God” may dwell among us—and make offerings from the heart (perhaps some peaches with cream?) a central, daily practice.
Ears and Awls: Mishpatim
I have to admit that last week I fell into a few moments of questioning and regret that I’d left my job five years ago to go to rabbinical school; even though I’m close to being finished, what’s ahead feels especially hard at the moment for a variety of reasons.
It was a scary thing to leave, and it’s still scary. I left behind people and things I loved, and jumped into this vast unknown.
In this week’s Torah reading we get a bunch more laws given by God to the Israelites on how to live an ethical life—good for ancient times, I might add, not so practical for today.
The first is what is to happen with a slave who is set free by his master, but chooses to stay back; his master must take an awl, pierce the slave’s ear to the doorway and the slave is his forevermore.
So much has been said about this: Why the awl? Why the ear? Why the doorway? (and, um, how long does he have to stand there? Is he standing or sitting? Which way is he facing: inside or out? I wonder…)
One commentary is that it punishes the inability of the slave to move on and be free. He is given a chance at freedom but doesn’t take it.
But the slave in question stays back because he loves his wife and children and doesn’t want to leave them. It seems more like Sophie’s Choice than a real choice (in the movie, she is literally forced to choose between sacrificing her son or her daughter to the nazis or she will lose both—and she chooses “wrong”).
The parsha ends with God telling Moses that he must ascend the mountain-—Mt. Sinai-—again, this time to receive the tablets of the commandments he had told him about before. There, God appears in a cloud again, though the people below see God as fire. There, Moses will remain for forty days.
Sometimes we are forced to make choices that don’t seem clear; we must leave behind people and things we love, and we don’t know what lies ahead. And there is a transition time that might seem very long, with lots of waiting.
Still, the push is there to walk out the door, to the unknown, into what feels like a cloud, or from afar it might even look like fire.
But walk through the door, we must, as a nation and as individuals; we might make the wrong choices along the way, but there has to be something better that urges us on, even if it takes a long time.
Clouds, Smoke, Fire, Blasts, Trembling and Truth: Yitro
Sometimes Truth comes in a cloud, sometimes in smoke and fire, sometimes in a great trembling, and sometimes in loud blasts.
Maybe our sight is blurred or misty, so it must come through other senses.
We might have to hear and listen to a gentle calling.
Or it’s so loud, our instinct is to cover our ears.
Sometimes Truth’s wake-up call comes in a burning sensation and flames.
Maybe we feel it under our feet and through our whole body.
The way to Truth is by various means, but it will come through in the end.
In this week’s Torah reading, Yitro, Jethro in English, Moses’ father-in-law passes wisdom to him about how to accept help from his community as opposed to taking it all on himself.
God talks to the people through Moses and shows God’s self through the above-mentioned ways: in a cloud, fire and smoke, a loud blast, or a deep trembling.
It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last effort to get the people to have complete faith in Moses and in God.
And Moses reassures the people; Don’t worry, don’t be afraid—that’s just God trying to get you to listen.
The Ten Commandments, as they are popularly known, are first stated here in this reading.
For me, in this moment, this parsha, and God, are just trying to get the people to understand a basic message: Don’t bow down to falsities, have respect for the inter-connectedness of all, and try to be a good person.
In whatever form it comes, when we mess up, the Truth comes out, and we often need others to point it out to us; we can’t do it alone.
Alone or with the help of others, Truth will find us, whether in a small, still voice, a loud blast, fire and smoke, or in a deep trembling.
It will find us. And it will come out.
Just give me a break! (B’shalach)
I felt a little guilty about my posting last week the day after Inauguration Day--did I put a damper on others’ joy? Can I just take a day to feel pure, unadulterated joy and relief at the fact that this wonderful thing happened and Trump is gone from office?
Should I just drink the Kool-Aid sometimes? What’s everyone else doing? Are they drinking the Kool-Aid, or am I just voicing what others are thinking also?
No, if I really think about it, they’re not, and I’m not ruining their day by speaking the truth.
I realized that Torah doesn’t take a break, either.
No sooner does Pharaoh let the Israelites go, no sooner do they walk to freedom, through the Sea of Reeds over dry land, with a magical wall of water on each side, than reality hits them in the face again.
They take a break of about one sentence (okay, a few paragraphs) when they awaken to the glory of God, finally realizing that God is capable of performing immeasurable wonders. They sing the famous Song of the Sea (Who is like You…?), Miriam takes out her timbrel and leads the women in dance and song, and it’s all very merry and wonderful.
For a second.
Then: wham! Scene change: the Israelites are in the desert, and they start complaining to Moses immediately: “How could you take us out of bondage only to bring us into this (God-forsaken?) place where we will starve? What, they didn’t have enough graves in Egypt? Better to have stayed and died there! What exactly is the point of this? Woohoo! We’ll get an unlimited supply of fluffy white stuff to eat instead of real food, maybe like freeze-dried military/space food, and we have to learn these rules, like only gathering enough for the day, because if we gather too much, it will get maggots, except for Shabbat, in which case if we don’t gather enough, we’ll go hungry for the day.
Oy! So much to learn! And this really sucks. You didn’t tell us, Moses, that things would continue to be so hard! We didn’t sign up for this! Not even a little break after our trauma of escaping slavery before things are hard again!
It’s enough to make the Israelites think that things in Egypt had been a beautiful dream (were they thinking, “We have to make Egypt beautiful again”? Aaah, that willful forgetfulness I talked about in last week’s blog).
I heard a podcast with Krista Tippett interviewing Katherine May on her book called “Wintering” (are you getting tired of my mentioning On Being?). The author loves winter and snow and darkness (so do I!), and talks and writes about how “wintering” replenishes us and the earth; we all need to take a break.
She points out that we have lost touch with our bodies and the earth in our modern lives and we often can’t even allow ourselves to be sick and to rest without needing a doctor’s confirmation; we don’t know how to rest just because; we don’t know how to take a break without planning a grand vacation (because it’s not like everything’s going to magically get better if we just go to a spa!).
In the interview, Tippett and May also discussed the pandemic and the talk at the outset of how people were getting to be at home with their children and bake bread and do homey things again, getting back in touch with what’s important.
In fact, this was more of a hopeful Christmas miracle movie, like the Israelites dreaming of the good ol’ days in Egypt than any kind of reality for most people.
Nonetheless, the pandemic has offered a kind of pause to look at the ugly reality that our society has become and to re-evaluate our value system---to give some real thought to how we’ve gone wrong and how we want to live our lives going forward as a whole, not just individually.
Yes, we have a ton of rethinking to do.
The Israelites, also, have a ton of thinking to do. They start with the ugly reality of leaving behind a lot of destruction: all the dead Egyptians, drowned when God allows the waters to fill in the dry land again--and Torah tells us that they see it! I wonder what that clean-up looked like, and what impact it had to know that their survival depended on the death of others.
If God made the Israelites wait forty years--yes, forty years--in the desert before entering the Promised land, why do we think we’re so special?
Why should we think that we can just wish away the pandemic and the bad Trump years, and imagine that they will all go away as quickly as they came---because they didn’t come quickly, as I pointed out last week--nor will they go away quickly.
Walking through the split sea, as grand as it seems, is only a first baby step for the Israelites, like Inauguration Day, with all its pomp and circumstance, was for us.
There’s a lot of clean-up to do, both spiritually and physically, and it’s on us to do it, not just on our new administration, any more than it was for the Israelites to simply rely on God to do all their work.
I guess this week’s blog, like this week’s Torah reading, is just one more reminder that we know there’s a lot of clean-up to do, we have no choice but to do it, but maybe we can take a momentary pause to regain our strength--and just take a little break to replenish ourselves, get back in touch with what really matters, and be ready for the blooming of spring.
(Post)-Inauguration Special on Remembering: Still “Bo”
So much relief. So much emotion. So much to celebrate; the ability to breathe again.
Yes, “We stopped the neo-fascist threat,” in the words of Dr. Cornel West.
“A day of hope, renewal, resolve: a day for Democracy--the cause of democracy,” in the words of our new president on his inauguration yesterday.
Like I said in yesterday’s blog post, we are commanded in this week’s Torah portion to remember--even before we have walked to freedom!
Yet! “America is that country that forgets--willingly...we were all there,” in the words of journalist Maria Hinojosa this morning on Democracy Now!
Just as we are to remember the bondage and the suffering and the locusts and fire and hail and lice and blood and death of the firstborn; just as we are to remember the Holocaust, let us remember that the three men who stood together and made a video for Joe Biden’s inauguration yesterday are responsible for crimes against humanity, along with the Old Biden himself. They started the machine that Donald Trump continued.
So, let us remember that it was, collectively, Clinton and G.W. Bush and Obama who are responsible for Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran, for the so-called Welfare Reform Bill that led to the intensification of poverty in this nation, for mass incarceration of Black and Brown people, for the beginning of the building of a border wall, for the greatest deportation of immigrants in the history of our country, for bailing out Wall Street instead of common Americans, for increased militarism,...We were all there. Did we forget already?
Yes, let us give the New Biden a chance, but if we keep talking about “returning to normalcy,” then we are talking about continuing an old system, a system not so different from Pharaoh’s, with continued bondage and suffering and hail and fire and blood—things we know exist in our country and world today!
I end with Amanda Gorman’s words from her poem yesterday:
“While once we asked, how can we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
We now assert
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?”
“We will not march back to what was but move to what shall be.”
“If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children's birthright.”
“When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it
If only we're brave enough to be it.”
Darkness and Laughter: Bo
A darkness so heavy, the thickness hangs in the air and you can’t see a person standing right next to you.
A not-knowing so vast, it stretches out before you.
And a sadness so deep...you know you will have to laugh again.
This is how it feels to so many of us today, with all that has happened over the past year and weeks, as we await the transition to a new president, and also commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King and his legacy.
And so it was for the Egyptians and the Israelites in this week’s Torah portion.
Added to last week’s plagues that God brought down on Pharaoh are locusts that eat whatever crops remain after the hail, a heavy darkness so frightening, I imagine it could take your breath away, and, finally, perhaps worst of all, the death of every first born baby Egyptian boy and animal.
It is from here that we get the famous story of Passover, which is laid out as a festival to be followed down through the generations--matzoh and lamb’s blood and all--to remember...
Remember the bondage and the suffering, the babies and the midwives that saved them; the cruelty of a Pharaoh whose heart was hard and wouldn’t be humbled; boils and locusts and lice and hail and fire--all sorts of things that reflect an imbalance in the physical world, all not so different from today.
We are commanded to remember and observe this festival even before the Sea of Reeds has parted and we have walked to freedom.
To remember--even before we’ve left.
It is in this parsha that Moses says, “We won’t know how we will worship God until we get there.” For the Israelites, this means they don’t know what animals they will need for the sacrifice once Pharaoh lets them go up to the mountain to which their God has commanded them to go and worship. I guess for them, this was a big deal.
For us, too, there is a big question. We don’t know what the transition will be like in the White House today or around the country, and we really don’t know what will happen in the next weeks, months or years.
We don’t know how much violence there will be going forward from the right wing militias that have developed in this country, we don’t know how much Trump will continue to play a role in this, we don’t know how strong Biden and Harris will be, how much real change will happen, we don’t know when and how the vaccine will work and be distributed, we don’t know when the pandemic will end.
The not knowing always seems the hardest part, as I’ve said before.
We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know.
I heard an interview the other day from my favorite spiritual podcaster, Krista Tippett, with Nicki Giovanni, African-American poet and professor at Virginia Tech.
On slavery, she noted: it didn’t start with Europeans. (Duh.)
When speaking on her campus at Virginia Tech after the shooting over ten years ago, she said:
We are sad today and we will be sad for quite a while.
We are not moving on.
We are embracing our mourning.
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly.
We are brave enough to bend to cry.
And we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.
Nicki Giovanni said of rape (specifically on the Virginia Tech campus): (sadly) there is no (true) justice that can come from it: only revenge.
What we have seen from these right wing militias is lots of hatred and the intent of revenge for what they have been made to believe was an unjust election.
There are many things we don’t know, but there is one thing we do know: taking revenge does not bring justice: only violence and more suffering.
I’m not sure the Torah sets a good example here when God takes every firstborn Egyptian’s life. It seems a lot like revenge that can lead to more violence and suffering.
The last thing we want to do is mirror the hatred, anger and violence coming from the carriers of Confederate and Nazi flags.
It is a spiritual practice to not hate one’s enemy.
It is also a spiritual practice to accept and live with the not-knowing.
I’m failing pretty miserably at both these days. The only thing that seems to help is not listening to the news, which doesn’t feel like an option at a time like this.
I guess all I can do is keep practicing.
And keep remembering that we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.
The Stench of Rot: Va’era
Well, the shit has finally hit the fan.
Or more like: fire and smoke rained down on Washington.
In my own personal life, last week rained down a few, smaller, stressful things, including some sad and slightly traumatic news that came my way, followed by injuring my lower back, and culminating in the insanity of an attempted coup on Washington, all three of which happened on the same day! So, yes, fire and smoke rained down.
What happened in U.S. politics last week and in Pharaoh’s Egypt of the Torah this week are one and the same.
In Torah, the conversation God had with Moses in the previous parsha is put into motion; Moses does what God tells him to do, performing all the “signs” in order to prove God’s existence, strength and greatness so that Pharaoh will let the Hebrews, as they’re called, go and worship in the desert.
There is a rod turned into a snake; it’s the same rod that then strikes the Nile and turns it to blood, killing all the fish, causing a stench that makes the water too putrid to drink; there’s a second rod that turns all other Egyptian rivers and bodies of water into blood, blood that fills all vessels used anywhere; there are swarms of frogs that come out of the river and fill Pharaoh’s bedchamber and bed, all Egyptian ovens and kneading bowls; after they die, they are piled in heaps, and the stench fills the air. Next come the lice which cover “man and beast,” followed by swarms of insects and then a pestilence that kills all Egyptian animals, and finally all humans and beasts are covered in boils.
It all culminates with fire and a very destructive hail raining down from the sky, ruining most of the crops, but none of this touches the Hebrews.
For a while, Pharaoh’s magicians are able to match and perform every single sign Moses performs, but eventually they can’t. And he keeps promising he will let the people go and worship their god, but immediately goes back to his old ways each time the present situation is solved.
Pharaoh’s deceit continues until he must finally concede that he stands guilty-—yes, guilty: “Your God is right and I and my people are in the wrong.”
You get a little jolt when you read this: Wow! Pharaoh admits he’s done wrong!
But Moses is wiser than this. He says, “I know that you and your people are still not afraid/in awe of our God.”
And Moses is right not to trust Pharaoh’s words. Over and over, he has lied to Moses and to his own people as well. True to form, in the next moment, Pharaoh goes back on his promise to let the Hebrews go.
This, my friends, is where the parsha ends.
The parallels between this story and our present day situation are eerie. The lies have been spewing out of Washington for years, and too many people have been fooled and manipulated.
The stench from the dead fish is the stench of hatred in our country resulting in neglect, abuse, imprisonment, and disenfranchisement of certain populations, deportation of others and the long lasting repercussions that such policies have on generations of people---all of which has been hidden under the surface, swept under the rug, and has now been forced above ground like the swarms of frogs in Pharaoh’s Egypt.
The blood is the blood on the hands of our president and his supporters: of hundreds of thousands dead from Covid, so many bodies that they had to set up outdoor morgues in L.A., no longer able to be tucked neatly from sight; it is the blood on the hands of police who have continued the legacy of racist ancestors, and of lawmakers who refuse to change their policies.
And the fire and hail are what rained down in Washington last week. A final warning.
Though I didn’t like his policies as governor of California, I have to admit that Arnold Schwarzenegger got it right, if you saw his Tweeted video. Here, he talks about growing up in post-war Austria with a father and neighbors who had quietly colluded with the Nazis and later couldn’t live with their guilt, becoming violent, drunk men. He made a warning to our nation that telling lies, the type that Hitler told and like those of Trump and his supporters, will destroy a country like they did Germany.
Like Moses with Pharaoh, we must be careful about believing that politicians who are abandoning their posts at the last minute are in any way repentant. We must be careful with a man like Pence and not hold him up as a hero just because of his actions last week.
And we must remember that part of the lie is that we’re supposed to be “shaking hands across the aisle,” and negotiating.
There was no negotiating with Hitler any more than there was with the KKK, and there is no negotiating with white supremacists today any more than in previous generations. There is no “agreeing to disagree.”
Civil Rights advocates stood their ground, using Moses as an example, and calmly but forcefully kept repeating: Let my people go.
So must we.
Fire and Blood. Scales, too.
Unbelievable!!! But NOT! Because we knew this was going to happen. And to pretend otherwise would be like putting our heads in the sand, like Moses burying the Egyptian he’s just killed—although this is the opposite situation, of course.
Anyway, I feel compelled to re-blog this morning, as what I posted yesterday at mid-day did not address the alarming—and not unexpected!!—events that occurred later in the day and into the night in our “Great American Democracy’s” capital.
What Trump, our own Pharaoh, caused to happen is no more surprising than what we’ve been seeing over the past five years, or in light of the history of this country, and as much as law enforcement officials want us to believe that they were caught unprepared, we know that they were complicit in the attempts to incite a coup: A small taste of our own medicine—a reflection of what our government has been carrying out in other countries for decades and decades (watch/listen to today’s show on Democracy Now! for a non-mainstream analysis of the current events). As Cory Booker said, “We brought this hell upon ourselves!”
Our own Pharaoh may be on his way out, while the Torah’s Pharaoh has just been introduced to us in this week’s parsha, but he has shown that he is very capable of doing so much more damage, spilling much more blood, before leaving office in a little under two weeks. Invoking the 25th Amendment for the first time in American history would be totally appropriate in this case—and there should be no shaking of hands across any aisles!! When will that stop??
I still stand by my statement yesterday at the end of my blog post, and add to it:
We may be transitioning from a wannabe-dictator, but we are not out of danger, and we have not yet created a new kind of society. Not only are the problems of the world not solved through a vaccine, our problems are so much bigger than Coronavirus, because the inequity that exists—highlighted by the lack of police arrests yesterday of those attempting a coup, with the police literally moving the barriers back to allow violent people carrying Confederate flags into the Capitol in contrast to all past responses to protesters demanding a more equitable society (you know what would have happened had they been Black)—well, we have a long, long way ahead of us.
Again, our hearts don’t have to be pure to speak up for ourselves nor to speak up for those who need speaking for, any more than Moses’ heart was when being assigned the role of Great Liberator.
And again, we do need to reach into our hearts, scaly or not, and have more faith in ourselves and in each other as vehicles of the Divine, capable of bringing about liberation, not only for our country, but also the world.
It is this that is required of us, whether it be loudly clambering, or quietly resisting, like the midwives Shifra and Puah.
All are valid. All are necessary.
Earth, Water, Fire; Hands, Hearts, Blood, and Snowy Scales; Sh’mot
What is left to say about one of the most famous Bible readings? So much pressure…
Because so much has already been said and written about this parsha: Moses being rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter, set in a basket on the Nile; the two famous midwives, Shifra and Puah, who go against Pharaoh’s command and rescue Hebrew babies; Moses and his problem with speech; the burning bush; Moses turning away from the bush, afraid to look at God; Moses protesting his assigned role as liberator; God’s naming himself “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” or “I am what I am; I will be what I will be.” Not to mention Moses as another in-between Egyptian/Hebrew like Joseph (Is there something significant about this under the surface?).
Here’s what struck me:
The elements of nature (water, fire, air and earth) seem to play a really big role throughout this Torah reading.
Moses is named for being drawn out of the water (element #1).
Later, when fleeing for his life after killing an Egyptian slave driver, Moses sits by a well (water, again) where he meets his future wife (yes, I know, several romantic connections result from wells in Torah).
There is fire in the famous, unconsumed burning bush, from which an Angel of God emanates, and then God’s voice--into the air, of course (second and third elements).
In the burning-bush scene, God tells Moses to take off his sandals because this is “holy ground” he is standing on (earth!).
In addition, speech and the senses are very significant in this parsha:
Moses protests to God that he cannot be God’s messenger because the speech that comes from his mouth is “heavy.” He needs to use his tongue and voice, which must be expressed and heard.
Moses wants to know what to do if people doubt that this god made himself seen to Moses.
God becomes angry and points out that, isn’t God the one who gives and takes away speech, gives and takes away sight?
The speech is heard and miracles seen by the Israelites, but his speech falls on deaf ears, too, because Pharaoh refuses to heed Moses’ demands or requests, for which God prepares Moses.
And God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, numbing his feelings.
But let’s talk about Moses’ heart and hand.
Moses worries that the Israelites will not believe him when he says he’s gotten a command from God’s own self. Will they have “emunah,”—faith in him? Will they trust him? And if they ask who this god is, what shall Moses tell them?
This is where God gives him “signs,” and names himself; Tell them I am “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” or simply, “I will be what I will be”—not terribly reassuring, to say the least, to those who want to know, “Who is this guy??”
For the first “sign” to prove God’s power, God turns Moses’ staff into a snake. The third is the water of the Nile turning to blood (which we also understand to be a foreshadowing of what’s to come).
For the middle sign, God tells Moses to put his hand in his bosom. When he pulls it out, it’s all scaly and white like snow.
Did Moses touch his heart?
Moses is a vehicle for God; he speaks for God and represents what God wants for the world. Moses states that it is his speech that gets in the way of his ability to lead, but speech is often a reflection of what’s in the heart. Is this scaliness an indication of the state of Moses’ heart? Is Moses’ heart muddied like the waters of the Nile will be with blood later on, when push comes to shove?
Most importantly, does Moses’ heart need to be pure in order to serve God in this capacity as Great Liberator? Moses has killed an Egyptian, so the water/blood is already symbolic of what’s to come. Could Moses be questioning his ability to “speak” for God because of this?
Anyway, Moses protests and protests that he can not do this job, and God gets angry, but finally God says, okay, okay, I’ll let Aaron speak for you. But you’re still the leader!
God knows that Moses’ heart is not pure—whose heart is? But maybe it doesn’t have to be, any more than his speech. Moses is human, after all.
God can’t do it without Moses, nor can Moses do it without Aaron. Moses may be God’s chosen “leader,” but God also can’t do it without the smaller, quieter protesters, like the midwives, who have a huge impact by saving babies—look who they save, after all, but little baby Moses!! (And, speaking of the smaller, quieter protesters, the midwives’ hearts seem pretty pure—they know what they have to do—and their voices are strong when they speak to Pharaoh and slyly defend their actions.)
Maybe the focus on the elements of nature and Moses’ heart and speech are a reminder that God is all around us, found within everything and in every one of us: the fire, the water, the ground beneath our feet; our hearts, our voices.
“I will be what I will be” is a reflection of the constantly changing and developing world, and God will be whatever we need God to be in any given moment, constantly in flux, always available, through others, their hearts, speech, actions—and in the earth that is there to support us all.
There are people who say that physical illness is a reflection of what’s going on deep inside a body, and that this pandemic is a symptom of the sickness of our society.
Many people thought Covid-19 would be a thing of the past within a matter of months.
We may be transitioning from a wannabe-dictator, but we have not yet created a new kind of society, and the problems of the world are not solved through a vaccine.
Our hearts don’t have to be pure to speak up for ourselves nor to speak up for those who need speaking for.
But we do need to reach into our hearts, and have more faith in ourselves and in each other as vehicles of the Divine, capable of bringing about liberation for the world.
Composing Your Life: Vayechi
“It was supposed to be this way.”
It may sound absurd, but that was my thought when I realized I had Coronavirus back in March. I was standing at the kitchen sink, and I had this thought, “I guess I was supposed to get Coronavirus.”
It was so weird, because all the days prior to the shutdown of New York City, I kept going back and forth: we’re going to get sick; we’re not going to get sick.
And then we did. And that’s the thought that came to me, like a flash. And I thought, what a strange thought.
I wasn’t too public about this thought because, I thought, “What does this say about my theology?”
It’s a dangerous thought, because, isn’t it this kind of thinking that leads to the attitude that poor people are supposed to be poor and the rich are supposed to be rich, therefore we don’t need to do anything to change the social structure”?
You see, I don’t believe that. I love Liberation Theology for that reason, which counters the Catholic Church’s traditional teaching that we are here on earth to suffer and our reward will come in the afterlife.
No! That kind of thinking is one of acceptance of oppression as the natural order of things--and no one can deny that the Catholic Church has been very oppressive and controlling throughout millennia, try as they might.
So how does my thinking about myself fit in with the wider picture?
I’ll be honest: I don’t know.
I just know it felt true for me.
Don’t get me wrong: I was terrified the entire time, for myself and my husband, especially when he was in the hospital; I was having panic attacks and calling for support at 2 a.m.
The spiritual growth that came from that time, though, for all in my household, was immense, and I am grateful for it, and grateful beyond expression for our survival.
But I was struck when I heard the same words, “supposed to,” come out of musician, songwriter, speaker Gaelynn Lea’s mouth in an interview with Krista Tippett this past Sunday. Here is a tiny woman in a wheelchair, born with Brittle Bone Disease, has literally never walked on her own two feet, has lived unable to do things most people can do, who said, “This was supposed to happen to me.”
She and I not the only ones; Joseph, too, says so yet again in this week’s Torah reading. His father has died after living 17 years in Egypt, and now his brothers worry again that Joseph will take revenge on them for what they did to him as a boy.
And Joseph repeats, in so many words, “Don’t worry. Though you meant me harm, God intended it for good, because it was my life that saved a whole lot of others.”
Basically: “It was supposed to be this way.”
I asked the question last week again, about whether Joseph had been transformed, or grown spiritually, through his suffering. My answer was finally, yes. Joseph is at peace now. He has found deeper meaning in all his suffering.
The thing is, we can never see the reasons for our experiences, good or bad, except in hindsight. Which is why we can never say to someone else in the midst of their suffering, “You’ll understand one day; it’s part of your spiritual growth.”
You do that, and they’ll spit in your face--or worse--and for good reason; we should never diminish another’s suffering.
Which is why I was fascinated by what Gaelynn Lea had to say.
She said that she had learned that she had a kind of freedom that people without disabilities don’t have (and 29% of the general population does have some kind of disability, many invisible to others; you should watch the movie Crip Camp on Netflix if you haven’t seen it!! It will give you a deeper understanding of the nuances of living with disabilities and the people who live with them—and it’s a beautiful movie all around).
Lea said that everybody has some kind of disability, meaning we all don’t fit in somehow.
She said that Herbert Marcuse, political theorist, philosopher and sociologist, opened her eyes to the idea that capitalism controls the very images of ourselves and is designed to make us all feel inadequate; as we know, we are taught every day by the media, what we are supposed to look like, and we place people in categories that are so hard to free ourselves from: “too” this or “too” that---
And because the regular rules of how Gaelynn Lea was “supposed” to look were so far off from her reality, she was free from the unattainable standards set by the capitalist system. She was free to “compose her life” and become herself entirely. And she has (with undeniable privilege, as she says)!
The point is, we limit ourselves and others by our beliefs of what is “supposed to” be.
On his deathbed, Jacob gives blessings to each of his children, according to his knowledge of who they are. Some of what he knows may be astute, but by doing so, he limits them through his blessings.
Something similar happens with Joseph’s two sons, Menasseh and Ephraim (remember them? “Make Me Forget” and “Double Fruit”?).
Joseph brings them for grandpa’s blessing in the proper order of their birth, on the right and on the left, and Jacob crosses his arms to give them their blessings the other way around.
Joseph protests (after the fact, I must point out!), saying, “No, father, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be,” to which Jacob answers, “Yes, it is.”
One wonders, how was Jacob “supposed” to be buried? He makes Joseph swear to take his body back and bury him with his family. Joseph fulfills his promise, but not before embalming and mourning him in the Egyptian manner, only to “sit shiva” for him months later, after burying him—not the “Jewish way,” to say the least.
And Joseph? He himself is embalmed and mourned as an Egyptian, yet his sons become the leaders of Jewish tribes.
Both Jacob and Joseph remain in a kind of liminal space of Jewish vs. Egyptian, unchanged and yet transformed, Jacob/Israel, Joseph the Jew/Joseph the Egyptian, in both life and in death.
What is “supposed to be?”
I don’t know what’s “supposed to be,” for other people or for the world. And we should never stop demanding that the world should be a place of more equity, greater justice, and less suffering.
But--to end with Gaelynn Lea’s lyrics:
Where to turn?
There’s so many opinions and the outlook’s getting dim.
What makes you think you’ll ever get there?
What makes you think you deserve to know?
Who are you really?
Are you really so important?
Take a look around and watch the world unfold.
Take a look around and watch the world unfold.
Because, maybe it’s somewhere in the liminal space between “Supposed to be” and “Is.”
With this way of thinking, perhaps we, too, can compose our lives.
Dark Knight of the Soul: Va’Yigash
I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide this week--NO, don’t worry--NOT MY OWN!
It’s just that I’ve been hearing about it--on a podcast called Last Day (I highly recommend it if you want to learn about addiction as well), and then in an interview with Jennifer Michael Hecht with Krista Tippet on On Being: an historian, writer, poet, philosopher who writes and speaks on the subject of suicide and its prevention, among other things.
Hecht says that suicide is often thought of in a very individualistic way, reflecting our culture; people will often say suicide is a “right.”
To which Hecht asks, “A right to what?”
She presses further: “Would you say a parent of young children has a right to kill themselves? What about a teenager?”
Inevitably, the answer is, “No.”
So who are these people who are supposedly of sound mind and should be allowed to choose suicide?
Besides experiencing complete despair, many severely depressed or sick people often worry about being a burden to those who love them and think that killing themselves will relieve those around them (and to be clear, we are not talking about medically assisted suicide).
But both Hecht and the podcaster for Last Day want people to know that a person’s suicide will be exponentially more of a burden to those left behind than their staying; anger, disbelief, and guilt are just a few of the emotions that proceed a suicide.
This is part of a communitarian, as opposed to individualistic, argument, which says that we are all in this strange and absurd thing called Life together; each of us is of more value than we can ever imagine, and the effect on those left behind--not just family and friends, but even those at a distance, is devastating and among the worst possible things that could happen to them.
Says Hecht: Staying alive means so much more than any of us can ever know.
Hecht also says that our culture needs to put more value on suffering and survival than we do; we need to honor perseverance.
Don’t say, “Everything’s going to be alright,” because it’s not true.
Rather, since there is no avoiding pain, we need to have the attitude that we learn and grow through pain, she says. Our culture teaches the exact opposite; taking away pain is our cultural m.o.—avoid at all cost!
Not only is there an entire pharmaceutical industry built around masking pain, we have lots of gadgets and “things” to distract us from it and help us avoid it.
But! Hecht points out that many leaders highlight humbling experiences--their own suffering--and the fact that they made it through, as the thing that allowed them to become leaders; it is our suffering that makes us wise, and gives us the strength to lead, carry and hold each other.
Life is absurd and strange and difficult, as the ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca, said, but we have to stay for each other.
Now I ask: What if it had been our forefather, Joseph, who, in his misery, had decided his life was not worth living?
Last week we saw the pain Joseph had been carrying his entire life, trying to forget his misery and loss at being separated from his family, sold and shipped off by the cruelty of his brothers.
Joseph has been in pits and dungeons: literally, in the depths of darkness.
Joseph has been through the Dark Night of the Soul, and he wanted to make his brothers feel just a little bit of his pain.
Last week I asked the question about whether Joseph had been transformed by his suffering in all the time he’d had to think. My answer was that it wasn’t clear.
But this week’s reading makes it clear: he has been transformed. Even though he is still angry, his perception of what happened to him shows immense growth;
...after revealing his true identity, Joseph says to his trembling brothers who had long ago wanted him dead: “Don’t be distressed. This was not your doing, but God’s. If God had not sent me here, I would not have been able to help with the famine, and we would all be dead.”
Living through the Dark Night of the Soul is an act of courage---the courage of a knight, perhaps, who throws himself into battle despite his overwhelming fear---that can have an effect with exponential reverberations that we will never know unless we stick around. As Hecht says, “You don’t know what your future self will be.”
Joseph’s future self is a rise to power that helps an entire nation and surrounding lands survive a severe famine. Having been humbled more than once, Joseph ultimately becomes a great leader.
The effects of our lives may not be as dramatic as Joseph’s, but the fact is, we really don’t know--again, like the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life! (Merry Christmas?)
Maybe, in the end, this blog post isn’t really about suicide (it’s definitely not about the societal causes of it, or the society we need, which would truly take care of its people), but about ordinary suffering and the fact that, as a culture, we think that if each of us individually just did things right, we would no longer have to suffer—which is, again, a (messed up) individualistic idea that comes from the culture of blame that we are the products of (because it serves certain interests).
Instead, this blog post is really about how much more important each of our little lives is than we think, and that the little things we do and the little ways we are matter way more than we think.
May we continue to hold each other up in our struggle and suffering, because the fact is, we’re in this strange and absurd thing called Life---together.
Dreaming of Forgetting, and Fruit in the Dark: Miketz
This week’s parsha starts with Joseph being let out of the dungeon. Like the time of year we are in and the very year we are ending, he has been in the darkest of places.
Joseph is remembered by the chief cup bearer to Pharaoh who needs his dreams interpreted. As a result of Joseph’s interpretation, Egypt is able to prepare for a severe famine, and he is elevated to an even higher position than before, entrusted with all the food stores of the land and their distribution-- all this, and he’s only 30 years old! He’s also given a new name, like his father before him, and to show even more appreciation, Pharaoh gives him an Egyptian wife of high standing.
And guess who shows up in the midst of the famine? Joseph’s brothers--looking to procure food!!
Remember the dream about them one day bowing down to him? Well, that’s what happens.
Joseph is now a powerful man, dressed in the finest Egyptian garments, I suppose with a different hairstyle, too, and they bow low without even recognizing him.
His dream has come true, but I imagine not in the way he would have wanted, for it is in this parsha that we learn of Joseph’s pain.
Joseph is no longer the cocky youth who smugly told his brothers his dreams. He is now the man who not only humbles his brothers, but who has himself been humbled by life.
Joseph has been on a roller coaster. He has gone from being his father’s favorite to being thrown into a pit, sold and shipped off to Egypt, become the favorite of a king, been framed by Pharaoh’s wife, thrown into a dungeon, forgotten, and now elevated almost to Pharaoh’s level.
Like his uncle Esau before him, he’s had time to think and reflect in the darkness, and like his father Jacob, he’s had time to be transformed.
But was he transformed?
What kinds of thoughts does one have when in a pit--or a dungeon?
It’s not entirely clear what lessons he’s taken from this time, except that forgiveness and contentment are not among them like they were for Esau.
One thing we do know for sure is that he wants to forget. One of the two children he has by his Egyptian wife is named Menasheh, or “God has made me forget my hardship and my parental home.”
But just because he wants to forget doesn’t mean he does.
In fact, he remembers so clearly what his brothers did to him that he puts them through the ringer. It’s like he’s been planning his revenge for years: he accuses them of being spies, sneaks their payment for the foodstores back into their bags, demands that they bring their youngest brother, Benjamin, back with them next time on pain of death, keeps one brother in prison until they return, and places a silver goblet in Benjamin’s bag---all to scare the *#@%& out of them.
The result is the brothers living in terror. They suspect that God is punishing them for what they did to Joseph all those years ago.
Better yet, Joseph is punishing them for the pain they’ve caused him—they just don’t know it yet.
Joseph might have also been thinking, “How is it that I’m special, but I keep getting thrown into dark places?”
Yes, his brothers technically messed up his life the moment they threw him into the pit. He’s experienced tremendous loss as a result.
We, too, have been thrown into a pit. For those younger than a certain age, we’ve collectively had the worst year in our lifetime. We have experienced terror and hopelessness, and tremendous loss. Many want revenge.
Joseph can point fingers at his brothers, and we can point fingers too, at those who have caused our suffering and that of the world.
In the end, Joseph doesn’t get satisfaction from torturing his brothers.
Having the power to inflict pain on them now doesn’t take away his own.
As we see, underneath his rage is just plain raw grief; when his brothers can’t see, and when he can no longer contain himself, Joseph runs from the room and cries the tears he’s been holding in.
His leaving the room might be symbolic of his taking a different direction, releasing grief that’s been bottled up inside for so long.
Our goal should be to do things differently this time, too: to see the humanity in others, as Joseph sees the humanity in his brothers; as angry as he is, he always intended to provide for them. It’s unconscionable what they did to him, yet he does not forget that they are human.
Yes, Joseph is still in the pit in this part of the story, but maybe the release of his tears allows him to move forward in some way.
We, too, are still in the pit in so many ways; we, too, have a lot of tears to release; we, too, ask, “Why does this keep happening?” (the answer for which is not the subject of this blog post.)
But Joseph names his second child Ephraim, meaning “double fruit,” because God has made him bear fruit in the land of his affliction.
Joseph doesn’t forget, but he also doesn’t stay in the pit. He just cries. And he bears the fruit of a new life in many ways.
We also will not forget, nor will we stay in the pit. We need to release our grief so we can move forward as well.
And just like Joseph, we will continue to bear fruit.
May the light and miracles of Chanukah be a reminder of the possibility of bearing the fruit of a new way of living and a new kind of society.
Wrestling with Ego: Va-yeishev
Last week we witnessed Jacob’s transformation and the pain involved in that.
This week, we have Joseph, Jacob/Yisrael’s favorite of all his sons.
The first thing I wondered was, how exactly was Jacob transformed?
I guess not in the way we moderns would have hoped, because he doesn’t change his father’s pattern of choosing favorites, even after his own trauma with his brother, Esau. He doesn’t decide, ooh, I’m not repeating that pattern.
The results of having a favorite are, as we’ve seen, not good.
Joseph is Jacob’s baby, and more than a little bit spoiled. Papa gives him a special tunic that his brothers don’t get (you know, the multicolored coat made famous by children’s storybooks and Broadway).
And he’s a dreamer--but not a dreamer with his head in the clouds. Rather, in the prophetic sense. His dreams come true, and he’s also able to correctly interpret the dreams of others.
So he’s a prophet, he thinks he’s really special, and on top of that, he flaunts it.
Really bad combo.
Which makes his brothers even more angry and jealous than they already were.
So the brothers devise a plan to kill him, finally agreeing not to kill their own flesh and blood and, instead, selling him to some passing Midianite merchants.
These merchants bring him down to Egypt where he ends up in Pharaoh’s court, and becomes a favorite there, too!
Things are going really well, but then Joseph is framed by Pharaoh’s wife because he rejects her sexual overtures, and he is thrown into the dungeon.
There, he meets Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer and chief baker who are also in trouble, and predicts their dreams as well.
If we could, would we choose to know the future?
How much should we know?
Does it matter who the deliverer of the news is?
Does it matter if it’s in our favor or not?
Last but not least, do we really want to know?
Wouldn’t we love to know that we’re going to survive Global Warming, that the earth will regain its balance, when this pandemic will end, whether the vaccine we are offered for Covid will be safe, and that one day we will live in peace on earth?
For real. It would offer us so much comfort.
A woman who attends my morning minyan said the other day, “If I knew what was going to happen to me, my life would be a mess.”
I loved that she said that, because she’s so right.
Her argument was, if it’s good news, then I might become too complacent and not value the time I have left; if it’s bad news, I might lose all hope and think it’s futile to try and change things.
Or I might live in so much fear that it paralyzes me.
Movies have been made about this subject. It’s a rosy picture if you know you get to make different choices (remember It’s a Wonderful Life?). But most of the time the characters are depicted as not having the awareness that they are getting a second chance, so it doesn’t leave us satisfied and happy. That’s real.
Back to Joseph.
There’s something else going on with him that adds a certain angle.
His brothers and father get pissed off with him for more than just knowing and sharing what he knows. Sure; it would make anyone angry if you told them in so many words that you, the youngest, will one day have power over them.
But they get pissed off also because of Joseph’s attitude; he’s superior, privileged and insensitive to the impact of his words. He talks as if they’re just facts, with no feelings involved.
Even after his brothers try to kill him, he doesn’t stop to think why, and repeats the pattern with Pharaoh’s chief cup bearer and baker. Without a moment of hesitation, he tells the baker that he will soon be impaled. This is no harder for Joseph than telling the chief cup bearer that he will be restored to his post, or than it was to tell his brothers and father that they would one day bow down to him.
Prophets have always been outcasts of society because they rail against the rich and against empty offerings, and for society not taking care of the poor and vulnerable. They care. We get angry because we don’t want to hear these difficult truths. It’s too hard to do things differently--to change the status quo. We’d rather not hear.
But with Joseph, he doesn’t seem to care; he just keeps doing it over and over again. He has no humility or sensitivity. And the news he shares with his fellow prisoners is not in any way helpful and might be harmful; one finds out he will be saved while the other finds out he will die. They can’t change the outcome, so how does it help to know?
Knowing the future doesn’t solve any problems. It’s not a magic bullet.
Maybe we need a reminder to meet the future with much more humility. Knowing is neither an answer nor a solution to any situation. It doesn’t take away the fact that we still have work to do.
Maybe it’s also about being able to relax with the not-knowing, to value the time we have, and to be sensitive to how our words and actions impact others and the future.
And maybe, when someone tells us we’re not doing these things, that our patterns are not helpful and may even be harmful, we need to listen.
Wrestling with Demons: Va-yishlach
I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten in the habit of observing my thoughts in preparation for writing my blogs. Like this thought I just wrote down.
In When Things Fall Apart, by Pima Chodron, I read that the purpose of meditation is not to quiet the mind, but rather to observe the thoughts. Thank God, because I can never seem to quiet my mind.
Where do my mind and thoughts go? What do the voices inside say?
I don’t know about you, but usually for me--not such a good place.
I also know that by noticing my thoughts, I can have just a little bit of control over them, and at least try and redirect them. But it takes an inner struggle to do that--a kind of wrestling. In the process, I am transforming the way I view and interact with the world.
Jacob’s mind, as we can see in this week’s parsha, has been in a terrible state for the past decades. He’s heading back “home”, a successful man with wives, concubines, many children and livestock. He’s meeting his brother, Esau, on the way.
And he’s absolutely terrified. (Remember Jacob ran away after impersonating Esau so he could steal his father’s blessing, and then Esau was so hurt and angry that he wanted to kill Jacob? Yeah, things were bad.)
Jacob is prepared for the worst possible meeting. He imagines that Esau might attack him, so he devises an intricate plan with servants leading the way, sending them ahead (thus the title of the parsha), dividing his entourage into two camps just in case, announcing gifts to appease Esau, and presenting himself in the most humble fashion.
When the encounter finally happens, what he imagined would happen never comes true. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Esau hugs him, they fall onto each other and they sob.
Esau refuses the gifts, stating that he has plenty of his own acquisitions, and only accepts at Yaakov’s pressing.
I mean! The years of inner torture. How Yaakov’s imagination ran wild, while all the while, the “wild one”, Esau, has come to a place of forgiveness and apparent contentment.
Esau has apparently done the inner work he needed to do, whereas Jacob, well...not so much.
In fact, the night Jacob spends alone by the river, he wrestles with an angel, we’re told.
Or was it his own self?
It’s curious that it seems to be the angel who begs him to stop, and Jacob answers, “Only if you give me a blessing.” So the angel does. His blessing is a change of name, from Jacob to Israel, Yaakov to Yisrael, which means God-wrestler, according to one translation. It’s a kind of transformation from being the one who comes on the heel of his brother, taking advantage, to someone who faces and wrestles with the demons he himself created.
The wrestling stops, but not without serious injury to Jacob, who goes limping off.
Esau, meanwhile, seems unscathed and at peace. We are not told of his own transformation and how he came to be the man he is and to forgive Jacob.
Either way, there’s a process. And there has to be some introspection, whether conscious or not. Maybe Esau had someone to talk to. Or maybe out in the wilderness, he had plenty of quiet time to be alone, think, and observe his thoughts.
Maybe Jacob was too busy running from the past instead of facing it.
How many of us torture ourselves with our own thoughts?
Just thinking about the conversations I’ve had over the past months of this pandemic and the years of having Trump as president, I am reminded of all the fear. (Well, more like terror.)
Like Jacob, we anticipated and planned for the worst: What if the incumbent got re-elected? What if this pandemic never stops?
But Esau did not attack Jacob; the incumbent did not get re-elected; the pandemic is not over, but it will stop.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t be prepared for the worst. The worst can happen, and we can sometimes prevent it--with our hard work. In the last years and months, we have seen both what happens when you let things go unchecked, and what happens when you work towards change.
But here’s the other part I’m getting at: Isn’t it possible to prepare for the worst while also expecting the best? To do the work required while also not predicting doom?
After all--if we ask how much work it takes to transform the world, we must first ask how much work it takes to transform ourselves. How much wrestling with ourselves and our own thoughts?
Yes, it takes a lot, and we may feel like we’re being injured in the process, but in fact, maybe we’re just allowing old wounds to come to the surface--whether they’re wounds we personally carry inside, or old wounds in our country that are coming out of the woodwork.
Scary as it is facing our demons, the outcome of freedom and transformation is worth the effort.
The Presents of Presence: Va-Yetzei
Yesterday: I’m standing at the sink washing and cleaning the kitchen, and suddenly I become acutely aware of the water. How amazing that I can open the faucet and clean water just pours out. I have a flash in my mind of people in places where this is still not the case.
I think, also, of the fact that I have no idea what it feels like to actually be starving.
This week’s Torah reading starts with Jacob on the run, sleeping in the open with a rock as a pillow, and his famous dream of the ladder with angels going up and down. He wakes up and states: “Surely, God is present in this place and I did not know it!”
He then makes a vow that if God stays with him, protects him, gives him food and clothing, and gets him home safe, he will accept this God.
Later in the parsha, following the beautiful story of love-at-first-sight between Jacob and Rachel, is the heartbreaking story of Leah.
Rachel is barren while Leah keeps giving birth to Jacob’s children, hoping each time that this will be the time when Jacob finally loves her.
Before the birth of her last child, she states, “Now God has taken away my disgrace,” and names this son Joseph.
The Hebrew word for “take away” is asaf, while Joseph, or Yosef, means “add”. The root of each word is the same, while the meaning of each is opposite.
Is God’s presence measured by how much abundance is in our life? If we don’t know God is there, does that mean God isn’t there?
Jacob will only accept God if he makes his life safe and abundant.
Leah’s life feels empty without the love of her husband, yet she is abundant with children. Rachel’s life feels empty without children, yet she is abundant with the love of Jacob.
This Thanksgiving many of us are mourning the fact that “it won’t be the same this year.” We can’t gather with family and friends in large groups. Some will even be completely alone.
At the same time, over the past nine months, I’ve heard over and over about the blessings that have come out of the pandemic--always in a hushed way; it’s too awful to admit that anything good could come out of so many people suffering, dying and losing loved ones. Many can’t pay rent, buy food, or have become homeless.
Without dishonoring the horrors of the past months that are continuing in much of the country, much of which could be and could have been prevented, what this pandemic is teaching us is a new way of being. There are things that have been taken away, but also things that have been added.
As we all know, material abundance does not translate into happiness or gratitude. It’s so easy to be grateful when everything is going well, and much more difficult when times are tough.
Yet, people who live with the least are often the most grateful. A person living with chronic pain might be grateful simply for a good night’s sleep. A starving person might be grateful just for a morsel of bread. I spoke with an 88-year-old woman yesterday who lives alone and who, instead of complaining about not having contact with others, is incredibly grateful for Zoom--unlike so many of us who complain we’ve had enough of it.
Our losses are real, and we need to mourn what’s been taken away, but that doesn’t take away what’s been added.
As human beings, like Rachel and Leah, we have the well-known tendency to look for and notice what’s lacking. It’s a literal survival mechanism. Perhaps Rachel wouldn’t have had a baby if she hadn’t cried out to God.
Some people call God “Presence”.
Let’s continue to find creative ways to offer the presents of our presence to each other until we have figured out a new way of being and living with each other in the world.
Because maybe that’s where God is: in our presence.
This Thanksgiving, let’s be like Jacob in the moment he wakes up from his dream and says, frightened as he was: “God was present in this place and I did not know it.”
Truth or Blind? Toldot
Doctors can be so arrogant: “Oh, so you just ignored it?”
And flippant about dangerous “side effects” of medications they prescribe: “Just keep taking it,” a doctor said to me the other day.
No, I didn’t “decide to ignore it!” I want to scream. “I was trying to avoid invasive procedures.” And I was scared. But I don’t say anything. I just shrug sheepishly. I should have taken care of it sooner. Now look.
There are many reasons to “ignore” something. Maybe it means letting go of the image of myself as young and healthy and the “I can take care of it myself through a good diet, yoga and Qi Gong, meditation, exercise,” attitude.
The truth can be scary.
In the Torah, Isaac doesn’t want to see the truth either, and it’s really easy to do what my doctor did to me: judge him for it.
In this week’s parsha, Isaac and Rebecca finally have babies after at least twenty years: twins, defined by God as warring nations within Rebecca’s womb; Jacob manipulates his twin brother Esau into giving up his birthright, which Esau does flippantly in a moment of extreme hunger and weakness after a long day of hunting.
Later, Isaac, old and getting to the end of his life, asks Esau to go out and hunt and make him his favorite stew in preparation for the special blessing he will give his favorite son (did the boys not tell their parents they’d traded birth places? Or did it even matter in the end, because your favorite is your favorite?).
Rebecca overhears and devises a plan that will make sure that Jacob gets the blessing instead. She helps Esau clothe himself in Jacob’s best, and prepares the hairy skin of a baby goat to cover Jacob’s arms and personify the hairy Esau.
We come to the moment of truth, and Isaac is blind to it.
Yes, Isaac is in fact pretty blind, but he’s still got his hearing, and he knows right away that Jacob’s voice is not Esau’s. When questioned, Jacob denies his true identity, but Isaac’s suspicions are strong enough that he touches Jacob’s arm and smells his clothing.
And he allows himself to be fooled just because a couple of things add up, even though in his heart, he knows it can’t be true.
In other words, with his hearing in tact, plus his intelligent brain that tells him that Esau couldn’t possibly be back from the hunt and have prepared the stew for him in the given time frame, he allows the wool to be pulled over his eyes, so to speak, gives his special blessing to Jacob, and breaks Esau’s heart. Esau is so hurt that he wants to kill Jacob, a foreshadowing of the two warring nations.
Don’t we want to say to Isaac in great frustration, “Really?? You knew! The signs were all there!”
If we knew an Isaac today, we would probably call him an idiot.
But what was it? Did he not trust himself? Or did he not want to believe that one of his children would do such a thing? Or?
People are complicated, and whatever the reasons, we find ourselves saying the same thing we would like to say to Isaac when we hear or watch the news about our present day political situation: “How could this be?? How can people be so blind??” We shake our heads in disgust and disbelief.
But are we really that different from Isaac and all those people out there that we each feel so superior to? Whatever our opinions may be, our mantra is the same, even if we don’t use these exact words: “They’re idiots.”
I’m reading a book, You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb. It’s a fun autobiography of a therapist talking to her therapist. She cries for weeks, months maybe, about her boyfriend who broke up just before they were supposed to get married. The same day he buys tickets to the movies with her for the coming week he springs this on her--out of nowhere! What an asshole!
There’s another character, her patient, for whom everyone in his life is an idiot. You just keep hearing, “What an idiot,” from him, which is really annoying because, of course, this guy doesn’t want to take responsibility for anything in his life so he blames it on everyone else.
After weeks, maybe months, of crying and retelling the story of this injustice done to her, Gottlieb is finally able to recognize that the signs that her boyfriend would not go through with the marriage were there all along. She just didn’t want to see them. And her patient, well, I’m at the point in the book where she finally starts to make progress with this guy and reach his heart, the place where he’s scared and hurt.
I don’t really want to face the fact that my body is getting older, that my blood pressure is high, that I may have other health issues and that I may need to take those prescription meds with side effects.
And I can point to my doctor and say, “How arrogant!” But when it comes down to it, secretly I’m probably just as arrogant and self-righteous, and sometimes even flippant. Though I try not to be, I know that deep down (or maybe not so deep), I think I’m right.
I’m not denying the political mess we’re in the midst of, and that there is real truth out there, and that there are really racist people out there. That right there is a truth in itself. And we are rightly worried about the fact that we have two warring nations within one.
But it’s too easy to judge others when we “hold the truth.” And there are many reasons other may not see.
Isaac is a reminder to all of us that we can be just as blind to the truth and that there are always signs. We just have to take the time to notice them.
Isaac is also a reminder to work on our superiority complex. Because, do we really see any more clearly than other people, or do we mostly see what we want to see. (Yeah, that’s not a question. It’s a statement.)
In the end, I’m just scared. We’re all just scared. And maybe Isaac is too.