Chaos, Caves, & Caving in: Chayei Sarah

The Bible tells us, from dust we come and to dust we shall return.

It’s a statement that carries simplicity and equilibrium.

It’s about birth and death that are supposedly on this continuum, yet we welcome one and reject the other, and what they actually share is chaos—anything but simplicity and equilibrium.

My cousin is in the process of dying. She just entered hospice, and I led a prayer circle on Zoom for her this week.

The prayer circle, as much as I tried to keep it centered, calm and focused, was incredibly chaotic.

There were tons of technological problems throughout, people coming and going, people from different walks of life, different parts of her life, and different parts of the world.

The chaos reflected the chaos we go through as we prepare to leave this beautiful earth, and the chaos on earth at this moment.

Chaos is the essence of transition—but maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Birth, we welcome with gusto, but our culture doesn’t help us at all with death. With modern science and medicine, we’ve come to believe that we should be able to live forever, and if not forever, then at least a very long time.

If we don’t, or our loved ones don’t, we feel cheated.

My cousin has been a scientist her whole life, and she loves sharing about the important work she’s done. She is proud, and for good reason.

Yet, though she has lived a long and productive life, she still mourns what she won’t get to do. In the fear and chaos of fighting her imminent death, she has bargained, denied—and refused to return.

This week’s parsha begins with Sarah’s death. Right away, there’s bargaining—between Abraham and the locals for a small piece of land at the edge of a field that has a cave. It’s a false kind of bargaining that implies that the sellers don’t really want money, yet they do, and in the end, Abraham pays good money for it. It ends up as intended from the start.

Abraham buries Sarah in the cave, and next thing we know, he’s sending his servant back to the land of Abraham’s birth to find a bride for his Isaac. She must be of his blood, but under no uncertain terms is Isaac to ever return to where Abraham came from.

Also, “Don’t worry,” Abraham says; “An angel will be leading the way for you.”

I was surprised to learn that my scientist cousin, who I thought was an atheist, didn’t scoff at the idea of angels and traditional Jewish prayer when we talked. When we prayed for her, she said she felt like she was being lifted by angels. Her fear dissipated. She felt held and secure.

In our bible story, Abraham’s servant prays, and to his surprise, finds the perfect girl, Rebecca, immediately, just as he imagined. He is so shocked that his prayers were answered that he insists on telling the family his whole story, blow by blow, before putting a morsel of food in his mouth after his long journey through the hot desert.

Rebecca’s brothers, recognizing that their sister’s match has been ordained by God, agree to let her go, but then they bargain with the servant to wait, to hang out some—because, please, just a little more time?

Though my cousin seemed finally at peace with dying, she still announced energetically to her friends on Zoom that "there was still a 20% chance of survival!”

In our story, the servant begs Rebecca’s brothers, no, please, let my mission be successful and let me move on; “The god of my master heard my prayers, and the angel who led me here has helped, so let me be on my way.”

Surprisingly, Rebecca agrees to leave right away—though it’s not a simple bus ride home to her family, and who knows what she’s getting herself into!

Rebecca carries a calm, unwavering aspect that reflects that she trusts. She has faith. She doesn’t bargain.

When my cousin felt the presence of angels, she had an aspect of Rebecca in her; I’m ready to go. I am not afraid. God is leading the way and I must follow.

I heard Katherine Hayhoe being interviewed by Krista Tippett the other day. Hayhoe is not only an atmospheric scientist who dedicates her life to reversing climate change, she is also an Evangelical Christian.

Hayhoe has no doubts about God or angels, and total faith that we still have time and that there is enough will to remedy the problem of climate change, disaster and chaos. She is bubbly and happy and is spreading the Word to climate disaster deniers who have been caught up by the political chaos. She offers solutions that people can relate to personally. She’s amazing.

Hayhoe understands that it is only politics that has created the divide we’re living in, between “Creationism” and science, between science and religion/spiritual belief—and how it serves our present political chaos.

And we have a choice not to feed and participate in the unhealthy divide our culture has created between life and death, between science and spiritual belief, all of which exist on the same continuum.

If we practice enough, I believe we can have enough faith, and with enough faith, like Hayhoe, we will have the strength to come out of the caves we may have crawled into to avoid feeling the feelings of dread and fear associated with the present chaos in our country and government and the future of the world.

With enough faith, we will have enough strength to stand our ground and not cave in to politicians who insist on creating and exacerbating the current chaos—politicians who want us to make false bargains, creating chaos in our government, that give away the health of our home the Earth in exchange for greater personal wealth.

With enough faith we will know which way is the way towards home. We will also know when it’s time to surrender.

Then we can say goodbye to the chaos we are living through now and find our equilibrium as a united earth.

And let us say Amen.

Laughing at Angels: Va-yera

I was listening to This American Life and heard this great story of a woman who was driving her mother to the hospital for her cancer treatment. Her father was in the car with them.

As usual, the woman was using her GPS, but this time, it took her by a route it had never taken her before, way out and around Queens, in New York City. They couldn’t understand it. Her father asked her, “Has it ever taken you this way?” “No,” she replied. “Never.”

Her parents started recognizing the streets, they turned a certain corner and they suddenly found themselves right in front of an old and favorite Italian bakery where they used to go years ago, exclaiming at the coincidence. Her father jumped out to buy a loaf of bread (because they’re Italian, and when you’re Italian, bread always makes you feel better, she said).

As they continued, the GPS kept taking them is strange directions, but they followed, and along the way, her parents continued to exclaim at places they’d known and frequented in their youth together, for her parents had been together since they were sixteen.

It was like they had been taken on a life review, bringing them back to the joy they had experienced together over their life together.

They didn’t know that this would be her mother’s last visit to the hospital.

A week later, she died.

We may scoff at the idea of “being led” and “angels,” but you don’t have to believe in angels to know that these kinds of things happen to us in real life, maybe not usually as dramatically, but they do happen.

We may also scoff at the Torah as being full of made-up stories that are there to teach us a lesson, yet these stories are also asking us to suspend our perception of reality for a moment and consider other possibilities.

This week in Torah, there are lots of angels, and there’s a lot of reference to sight and seeing, just like this family saw lots of things they didn’t expect to.

The title of the parsha is “Va-yera,” meaning “appeared” or “shown,” and guess what appears before Abraham’s eyes in the heat of the day as he sits in the opening of his tent recovering from his circumcision?

Yes, you guessed it (or knew it): angels.

The angels, interestingly, look like men, and they are intermittently named accordingly. They are coming to announce that Sarah will give birth to a boy within a year’s time.

This makes Sarah laugh—because of the absurdity of still having “fun” in her very old age, and also finally having the baby boy she'd given up on having years ago.

Later, an angel, or messenger of God, as they’re called in Hebrew, appears to Hagar in the desert, where she has been banished to die with her child, Ishmael. God hears the crying and sends a messenger who opens Hagar’s eyes to see that there’s a well of water right there, nearby (it’s not clear if the well was there all along or not).

The same messengers who come to announce Sarah’s pregnancy are those who lead Lot and his family to safety when God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah—except that Lot’s wife looks back to see the destruction and turns into a pillar of salt.

After the destruction and escape, Lot’s daughters find themselves alone in a cave with their father, hiding, terrified, and imagining that all life on earth is no more. This causes them to decide to get their father drunk and impregnate themselves by him (yuck), and so begin the tribes of the Moabites and the Ammonites—Israel’s future neighbors and frequent enemies!

In mindfulness meditation, there’s a lot of focus on becoming conscious of where we place our attention throughout the day and how that impacts our life; do we pay attention to the negative, like the aches and pains, the things that “shouldn’t” be, all that is wrong in our lives and in the world, every moment focused on what we need to fix?

How good are we at noticing the good and positive?

If we’re not careful, we may become frozen in that habit of noticing mostly the saltiness of life.

We may get stuck in a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife who looks back at the destruction behind her instead of forward if we’re not careful. Or we may become like Lot’s daughters who create new tribes borne out of fear and panic, enemies that become our constant companions.

Tara Brach (she has a podcast, if you didn’t know, and I love her teachings and her soothing voice) says that refocusing our attention away from the negative doesn’t mean we will forget what’s wrong in our lives or the world and become complacent, losing our drive to improve and repair; what it means is that we will be giving ourselves a respite so we have the reserve to support others through their trials and tribulations, and we may even have energy left over for the political work that needs doing to bring healing to the world.

So, I challenge us to suspend our belief system if it’s stuck in a pillar of saltiness, stuck in panic and fear of the end of the world, creating a line of progeny that becomes negative energy, passed down through future generations.

We can laugh at the idea of invisible messengers ever present to help us, or even that a person who comes out of nowhere to help us or give us important information might be an angel, but let our laughter be out of joy for the guidance we may be receiving, opening our eyes to see the possibilities that lie before us.

And let us say Amen.

Entitlement, Majesty & Lech Lecha

I heard a story last week that actually brought tears to my eyes, it was so beautiful.

It was Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love (don’t you love her??).

She was talking about the entitlement we all need to claim in order to live creatively, beyond our personal fears of failure and whatever else holds us back.

The story she told reminded me of Noah and his lack of feeling of entitlement to use his voice and stand up for Humanity before God.

Noah was contrasted in last week’s blog with Abraham who does feel entitled to use his voice in a positive way—but not yet! First he does some really messed up things.

Because, you see, there’s privilege and entitlement that carries and uses power in one way, and a feeling of privilege and entitlement that you can choose to take, even if the world says it’s not yours.

In the end, either way, it depends on how you use it.

This week, Abraham, still Abram before God changes his name, uses his privilege and entitlement in a way most of us would not want to model.

Like, he asks his wife, Sarai, (she gets a name change too: Sarah) to lie and say she’s his sister, and to submit to being passed off as wife to the powerful Pharaoh (pre-slavery)—which she does (and we hear nothing of this experience from her point of view).

Abraham’s actions come from a place of fear, so we can be a little compassionate, but the fact that he even thinks this could be at all justifiable illustrates the power dynamic of society at the time (a power dynamic just beginning to change now after millennia, as we know).

And it shows a privilege and entitlement on his part as a male figure who is more concerned for his own life and wealth than his wife and what this might do to her.

And why shouldn’t he feel entitled? God has spoken to him directly, promising him the stars and the moon and a long line of progeny, power and weath. Like Noah, Abraham has been “chosen;” “Go forth from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.”

Sarai, in her own way, in her own social standing, also feels entitled—to hand her slave Hagar over to Abram as a wife and tell him to produce the heir that she can not give him. Later, when Ishmael is born, Sarai, out of jealousy, uses her privilege to send Hagar off to die with her baby Ishmael in the desert (they don’t die, but what happens is horrifying, except that God will make Ishmael the head of a new people, as you may know).

Again, there’s privilege and entitlement that uses power, and it depends on how you choose to use it, or whether you choose to take it even if you’ve been taught it’s not yours for the taking.

Elizabeth Gilbert tells the story of an awful weather day in New York City years ago (way before the pandemic—like, “normal awful”), and she gets on a crowded bus where everybody’s having this shared human experience of discomfort and misery.

Suddenly the bus driver speaks through his microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen. I’m your bus driver. I want you to know that I can tell that you’ve all had a bad day. And I’m sorry this traffic is so bad. And I’m sorry the weather is so bad. And I can’t do anything about that. But I have an offering I want to make. Every one of you, when you walk off this bus, when you walk by me, I’m going to put out my hand and you’re going to place in my palm all your troubles and all your worries and when I get to the Hudson river, I’m going to throw all your pain out into the river.”

This broke the trance of the riders, everybody burst out laughing—and every single person took him up on his offer.

Gilbert says this man felt entitled: “He believed he had the right to interrupt the air with the vibration of his voice and his idea and invite people to open their hearts and make his bus ride, which he did every day, into something newly evolved.”

With this simple offering, this man transformed the people on the bus and himself. Who knows the effect it had on these people as they went about their lives after this?

This bus driver, with no apparent power, created a piece of magic out of the mundane. Because, “It doesn’t have to have majesty to have majesty.”

Abraham, though promised so much, and with all his access to majesty and wealth, has so little faith that any of God’s promises will actually come to fruition—or he wouldn’t have done all he did. If he had, he probably would have acted quite differently. The same is true for Sarah.

The “simple bus driver” in Gilbert’s story (not Gilbert’s words, I don’t think), with no apparent power, took the power of his imagination and his voice and changed one small corner of the universe.

We don’t know exactly how, but Abraham’s and Sarah’s different use of privilege and entitlement would have transformed their tiny corner of the universe and might have affected generations to come.

So many people feel so powerless over the overwhelming current events of the world, but we have a choice: to be like Abraham and submit to our fear and the power structures that exist, or to decide we are entitled to use our voices, in big ways that challenge existing power structures, and also in small ways that challenge power structures.

Perhaps, if we decide we are entitled, we can take God’s commandment to go forth to unknown lands and bring more majesty into the world.

Oh, No, Noah!

I was listening to a comedian, Danny Jolles, the other night and boy, did he make me laugh—unlike the story of Noah and the destruction of life on earth (check out what I wrote last year).

First Jolles says, “So many people say to me, how can you still believe in God? The Bible? It’s thousands of years old. How can you still be reading that? Science, buddy! That’s the truth! It’s proven!”

Jolles counters: “But how often do the scientists say, ‘Here, We’ve got this great new drug! It will solve all your problems.’ And twenty years later, you see your doctor and they say quietly, Oh, …uhh…you’re still taking that? We made a mistake. We’ve updated it.

“I mean, we don’t look at science journals from twenty years ago, so why should be read a book thousands of years old?

“So maybe God is up there saying, ‘Oh, you’re still reading that? Uhhh…’”

It got me thinking…Yeah, we’re still reading that, and it is really outdated, but there is still so much old wisdom to be gleaned from the stories, the same way there is great medical wisdom from thousands of years ago that is being brought back—because there are ancient ways of healing in gentler ways than the pharmaceutical companies want us to be believe.

I’m also continuing to think about Creation as we make our way into the second parsha of the year. How can you not, when all of Creation, just created (last week it was In the Beginning…), has just been destroyed?

With the flood, God destroys all that he’s just made, except for one family, headed by Noah, “the one tzadik,” or righteous person, of his generation, along with pairs of animals, to start things over again. God commands Noah to build an ark (in only seven days—things must be urgent!), and two by two…You know the story.

I was reading a drash, or interpretive writing, by Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman published by The Shalom Center and she talks about Noah not challenging God to defend humanity and the earth against destruction.

We are not the first to ask the question, “How much of a Tzadik—how righteous—could Noah have been? He obviously didn’t have enough righteousness to even question God in protest—maybe he didn’t have enough faith in humanity—or himself!

In fact, as Friedman points out, the Kedushat Levi, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, answers the question by saying that Noah, though blameless, didn’t even have enough faith in his own voice to have an effect on God’s decree.

Noah gets drunk afterwards, and Friedman suggests this is because he can’t deal with the utter destruction he witnesses plus the fact that he was silent and allowed it to take place without even a word!

If this is so, if Noah’s conscience spoke to him, so did God’s conscience speak to God.

It’s true; God realizes immediately that he’s made a mistake; he swears he will never destroy life on earth in its entirety again.

But recognizing his mistake doesn’t prevent him from making more mistakes.

Generations go by and the descendants of Noah are getting very spread out, Torah tells us. Everyone still speaks one language, but they seem to be concerned about losing touch, because they have this great idea; they will build a city with a solid brick tower, the famous Tower of Babel, high into the sky. According to some sources, this is a multi-layered temple-like thing: a meeting place between heaven and earth.

This is usually read quite cynically as, the people want to be equal to God.

But the Hebrew says, “Let’s make a tower and we’ll make a name for ourselves.” I want to be less cynical and read it as, maybe—just maybe—they want everyone to stay together, as a recognized people, and they’ll be able to be closer to God way up there in the sky!

To me, it could be the ultimate act and intention of unity—among humans and between humans and God.

God did not agree with me.

God’s take was, by trying to reach so high, they were overstepping, and what is this “making a name for themselves,” thing? Who do they think they are?

So God punishes them by “mixing up their speech” so they can’t understand each other, making their plan impossible to complete, and from then on, the people of the earth spread farther and farther apart, speaking many different languages.

It says in Torah that God scatters the people, and the word for “scatter” in Hebrew even a sense of “shattering.”

What if God knows now, and I do mean now, that “he” made a mistake—not only in destroying all life with a flood, but by scattering, or shattering, the unity between people?

And what if God is really up there thinking, “Hey, you’re still reading that? You need to get the new, revised, version. I’ve evolved since then. I realize now that those people were just trying to get closer to me. Maybe I was being a little touchy and misinterpreted their intentions.”

Religion teaches that God is perfection, but it’s obvious that God is far from perfect. Mistakes are a part of God’s journey, as they are for us. Imperfection is just a part of the universe as Creation continues to change and evolve.

Also, recognizing a mistake doesn’t automatically stop us from making more.

It has taken generations of "mistakes,” accidental and sometimes even intentional, to get to the place where global flooding is a reality that’s becoming more real every day, threatening all life.

Rabbi Friedman quotes the 13th century mystical text, the Zohar Chadash, which contrasts Noah’s silence to Abraham’s protests for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (coming soon, to a theater near you!).

Friedman imagines Noah as an ancient man of over 900 years meeting Abraham when he was a young boy, seizing the child by the arm, hissing desperately into his ear: “When the Judge of All the Earth comes to you and tells you He plans destruction, make Him act justly.”

Friedman challenges us to remember that Jewish tradition demands that we speak up and act. We are not to lie back, despairing as we see the destruction of the world happening before our very eyes.

We really have no choice but to say, “Oh, no!” and move on to try and fix what we’ve done. We are not to give up our faith in humanity just because of our mistakes.

Let us speak for a new and revised God, whose voice we can only hear through the cries of the people, a God who now knows that separation and scattering are a mistake, and find our way back to a healthy, balanced earth though our own unity, a unity that requires our voices, our time and our money—for the righteous cause of saving life on our planet.

Let us have faith, the faith that Noah didn’t have, in the power of our words and actions to change the course of events.

And let us say Amen.

Was it Good or Was it Bad? (Breishit)

Yesterday I saw a meme: “Sorry I didn’t answer your text messages. It’s been a Jewish holiday for the past thirty days.”

It’s truuueeee!

Every year since I started observing all the Jewish holidays, I’ve been floored by the intensity of them and how exhausted I am by the end.

Were they good? Well, they were definitely different this year—which is good; a little more ease being with others in person. I know what I need and want now, which is also a good change.

This past Tuesday in the park, on Sh’mini Atzeret, the second-to-last holiday in the fall cycle, we prayed for rain. This custom is tied to the arid climate of the Middle East, but we still do it here in the Diaspora.

Rain was actually predicted for New York City that day, but I really thought it would hold off. That’s what my phone was implying, in any event, but you can’t really trust your iPhone to be terribly accurate about the weather. It’s inconsistent from phone to phone, and sometimes it says it’s raining when it’s actually sunny!

The accuracy of technology aside, we had prayed for rain, and it started drizzling. We giggled. It was good.

In fact, it didn’t seem so bad at first, and then, as we were going through the Yizkor service and the rituals for remembering lost ones, (yizkor means remembering), it started to really pour. We stood under a Ginkgo tree, which was good but not shelter enough to keep us dry anymore. We felt the magic of heavy rain, which was good.

We were chilled by the time we headed towards home, but there’s something thrilling and invigorating about being caught in a heavy downpour. By that point, there were only three of us huddled together in person and one other on Zoom (the group I led was no very small to begin with). We were soaked through and high on singing and connecting, and I felt giddy and alive. It felt really good.

And we laughed about being careful what you pray for.

If only it were as easy as a prayer and a few words to change the weather and the general course of things.

On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing that our words aren’t as effectual as we sometimes think.

When we look back on this past year, we mostly think of it as hard and bad, and we’ve named it thus.

We’ve labeled it, and thus it is so.

Or, the opposite happens; overloaded on fatigue around how hard the year has been and having talked so much about it, we decide not to name it at all.

This week, as we start reading Torah again at the beginning, it feels like we’re starting with a bang, all about creation and life. It’s all good—we are told.

All that is needed is a word—God’s speech—and God creates light and darkness, heaven and earth, water and land, the sun, the moon and the stars, the animals and Adam.

Things start to get more complicated than just naming things when Adam is created. It takes a little thought to decide on a partner for him, and two contradictory stories come out of this. Also, we have the Garden of Eden and the serpent and the Tree of Knowing good from bad. What follows is the banishment of the first humans from the garden where, in the diaspora, they will break their backs to get food and giving birth to new life will involve pain. Life gets more complicated.

In other words, it’s not all good. This is the beginning of the human conscience and the desire to acquire the power of insight, but also for human emotions like jealousy, as in the story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s first children, which famously ends in murder.

This is the foundation of our Story and everything that will follow, all starting with God’s speech.

God saw that it was good.

And then it was bad.

God is disappointed enough in his creation of human beings that he is ready to destroy us by the end of chapter 6. The Torah tells us that God is sorry; he suffers from regret. God already needs comfort (the word for sorrow and regret shares its root with the word for comfort.)

God is in emotional pain at seeing how the human heart and thoughts bend towards the “bad.”

The labels “good” and “bad” are simplistic, yet humanity is clearly not simple. Maybe the fact that there are two creation stories points to how complicated human beings were to become; the biblical God couldn’t even decide how to make us! Ha!

For instance, it may feel good to not talk about the hard year it’s been, by which I mean lighter, and not talk about the ways in which the world is different and we are different since the pandemic began. We no longer have to convince others that gathering together is a good thing. But the disadvantage of not naming is that we don’t also get to take the time to say how our needs have changed.

As we begin a new Jewish year, with new intentions, and as we begin to slowly gather again in small groups, let us be intentional, as God of the Bible was in creation, every step of the way, in how we gather, in naming how we feel and naming our needs, and in finding new ways to walk in the world.

And remember that how we name things may be true or not, because life is never simple, but our words do have power—for good and for bad. We need to make a conscious effort to lean our hearts toward “good.” It’s just the way it is. Our negativity takes over so easily.

Also, even a downpour could be seen as good or bad, depending on our perspective and where we are in the world. So, yes, let’s be careful what we pray for.

What’s in Your Head? (Sukkot & V’Zot Habrakha)

I know…there’s been so much build-up to the end of the Torah. Week after week, Moses is saying goodbye. I guess there’s so much to say, and it’s hard to take one’s leave. Maybe that’s where the Jewish tradition of not being able to walk out the door comes from! Ha!

Well, we did it! We finished it—again. For this, we say thank you for having arrived at this time again, for having made it through another year, for arriving at this season, this holiday of harvest, again. For still being alive!

I did it. I went through an entire cycle of Torah and had something to say and write about each parsha. Who knew I could do that? I wondered, honestly. It was a challenge I set myself last year, and I’ve accomplished it.

This week’s parsha is named for all the blessings Moses gives each tribe just before he dies. They are blessings of bounty and security going forward. (You can read my last year’s commentary here, just for nostalgia’s sake pershaps: This, you say, is a blessing?).

Are we supposed to all feel blessed?

I can say that I wasn’t feeling blessed at all on Sunday when I returned to rabbinical school classes. In fact, I was freaking out. It’s my last stretch, and it was a very difficult transition. There were a bunch of new students, young whipper-snappers that entered the program while I was on leave, coming in with lots of background knowledge I did not come in with, for one. On top of that, the two classes I attended are probably going to be the most difficult classes I’ve taken yet. At least that was my perception.

But how often is our perception based in reality? Our minds play all kinds of tricks on us, don’t they? Our insecurities—okay, I’ll speak for myself—my insecurities took over, and I was totally intimidated—to the point of tears!

Also, I was actually cursed by a stranger the other day in Central Park!

She was obviously mentally ill, and I had gone to the park with my lulav and esrog (palm frond and lemony fruit) to observe the Jewish holiday of Sukkos, the “Holiday of the Booths,” which commemorates our 40-year sojourn through the desert, the instability of living out in the open (just as we are leaving the desert in Torah! Ha!), and the fall harvest festival, one which was observed by bringing the first fruits of the season as an offering to the Temple many eons ago.

Now we observe Sukkos as an “earthy” holiday, with (dare I say) some very pagan-like rituals that the Rabbis gave some beautiful mystical meaning to. Who doesn’t love shaking a palm frond around and singing, huh? And the lemony fruit! Yum.

Anyway, I had gone to connect with the earth, and to do my earth/heaven/energy practices of Qi Gong.

I had taken off my shoes and placed my lulav and esrog against one tree, my bag and shoes against another, as I stood under a beautiful canopy of trees, my “sukkah.” I had a view of the Harlem Meer, the water looked beautiful, and it all felt perfect (aside from what feels like endless summer heat and humidity).

Suddenly, from a distance I saw a woman picking and gathering brush along the side of the lake. Then she was suddenly closer to me, right under my trees, just a few feet away, looking straight at me, breaking off low-hanging branches.

“Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind. God says it’s okay. This is for the children I’m teaching,” she stated frenetically.

(Do I continue on? Okay, wait and see, I decide.) I gave some indication that I didn’t mind (I knew better), and continued doing my Qi Gong, assessing how dangerous this situation might get and strategically planning my escape if needed.

“Do you know how close to God you are?” she said aggressively, continuing to tear branches. Luckily, she didn’t wait for an answer: “Very close.” (Oh, cool!)

My go-to when someone starts ranting about God is to bless the person, hoping to disarm them, which I did, and it worked for a moment; she quietly blessed me back.

Then she started in on Jesus and the miracles he performed, even on the Sabbath, she wanted me to know.

Suddenly she stopped short, looked down at my bag and said, “Can I have a dollar? (in an annoyed voice.) I said I was sorry not to have any cash on me.

After calling me a name usually directed at women, she pointed to my palm frond. “Can I have that?”

I carefully moved towards my bag, which meant very close to her, and started gathering my things.“Can I have your shoes?”

As I started walking away barefoot, shoes under my arm, she followed me, hurling more insults and curses at me.

I was completely rattled and it took me a long time to calm down.

Ironically, we had exchanged both blessings and curses, but in thinking about it, I was probably no more rattled by this interaction than by my return to classes.

The stuff in her head was very real to her, and the stuff in my head about the challenging classwork and my intimidating classmates who know way more that I do, was all very real to me, but in the end, none of it was real. And all of it was real at the same time.

As I walked away thinking about the police being the only recourse for a mentally ill person and the tragedy of the terribly underfunded and almost non-existent mental health system in our country, I was not only rattled, feeling unsafe and exposed, I was saddened. Just saddened at the tragedy of the world we live in. Some of it is in our heads, some of it is real. And sometimes it’s hard to know the difference. One thing I know is real is that that woman lives on the street with a lot of insecurity on many levels.

Speech can be as powerful as action, as we know, especially since the years we’ve just gone through with Trump as president.

At the end of the yearly cycle of Torah, we recite a couple of phrases for strength and peace before beginning again.

May we have strength and peace and put out lots of blessings for the year to come, for the miracle of being able to create a new kind of world where everyone lives in security, safety and peace, and where mental illness is treated as an illness and not a crime.

And let us say Amen.

REALLY Late (with Push-ups): Ha’azinu and Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur came “really early” this year (for those not in on the joke, Jewish holidays are neither early nor late if you see them independently of the Gregorian calendar, but that calendar rules the human world so much that it’s hard for us to separate the two—kind of the way so many people refer to Chanukah as the “Jewish Christmas,” and if you know anything about Judaism, there is no connection!!).

Where was I?

I was really late, not only this week but even today, in sitting down to write my blog. In fact, I didn’t know if I’d get to it all, what with Yom Kippur being just yesterday and basically co-opting the entire week for those of us who observe it. But I surprised myself at the last minute after Rosh Hashanah, so here I am again—REALLY late.

But, surprise! Here I am!

I’m exhausted (with no migraine—yay!), and reflecting on Yom Kippur yesterday and what a wonderful day it was for me. I almost didn’t want to share that because it felt a little like bragging when so many people are still online for services, which feels especially hard for the High Holy Days. It’s yet another reminder that we are still…still, still, still…

But I’m going to share my experience anyway.

I was in Central Park with a group of about 40 people, the scary chance of rain and thunderstorms disappeared, and the weather was perfect in the end: not 88 degrees like the day before, only 72, with a nice breeze.

The theme for the holiday in this group was “Healing,” and a lot of healing did go on for me.

While last year I spent the day on my living room floor with my tallis/prayer shawl and a migraine, listening to and praying along with beautiful services, this year there was no migraine, and I spent much of the day under my tallis on the ground under tall trees and hearing the voices of fellow pray-ers singing with me. I didn’t worry about whether I was “supposed to” be standing or sitting; I just followed my heart and my body and what they needed at the moment. I even got to lead some prayers for the group. It couldn’t have been more perfect.

While last year I was just beginning a year’s break from rabbinical school classes, I am now re-entering classes for my last stretch and have been through a year of personal growth in terms of my studies and creativity, following my heart instead of teachers’ directives.

Moses just recited his last speech in the form of a poem to the Israelites this week in Ha’azinu. At the end he reminds the people to take heed and teach the poem to future generations, for this is what will get them through.

This is in no small thing for them, he says, but their very life.

Then God tells him to go up to the mountain where he will be able to see the land he will not be allowed to enter, and there he will die.

It is Moses’ very life we’re talking about.

It was not lost on me that we read this parsha during the same week as Yom Kippur, when we are enjoined to confess our sins, ask forgiveness in the most serious way possible, pray all day and fast in repentance; we pray for the world and ourselves.

We pray for the world and our very lives.

Yesterday, in the midst of this serious prayer, during a standing prayer we call the Amidah, people were invited to go off by themselves for quiet contemplation.

What did my husband do? He started a push-up competition in the grass with his friend.

I was standing with my friend, having a beautiful moment of prayer with her, when she spied my husband out of the corner of her eye and indicated quietly that I should take a look.

Like a little boy who couldn’t connect to prayer, there he was doing something that might have embarrassed someone else—or my younger self—but frankly I found it all pretty hilarious at this point in my life and marriage. I’ve learned to love and accept him for who he is (including his little-boy parts) and to know that he is not a reflection of me.

Also, I believe that a little bit of irreverence was the perfect medicine for all the seriousness of the day.

It’s been a hard year. And we will all die, like Moses, but under different circumstances. Most likely, God will not be giving us as much advance notice as he did Moses.

In the meantime, we keep praying, and doing, and praying.

And my husband and his friend reminded me that, while we’re still alive, we have to keep playing and laughing and connecting with our friends to get us through.

A little irreverence—and a little push-up competition—might not be such a bad idea when we’re in the middle of praying for our lives.

A Plumbing Issue: Rosh Hashanah & Va-Yeilech

I am one of those people who believes that all physical symptoms have an emotional factor to them, so when my friend told me just a little while ago that she realized that her stomach issues are connected in some way to old trauma, I was not surprised (but I didn’t say “duh”).

Funny that I just finished dealing with a major blumbing issue—not in my body, but a real one, as in my kitchen sink was backed up and it took hours for the plumber to unclog it, to flush the pipes clean, only to go work on other surrounding apartments.

So it got me thinking; how might this all be connected to Rosh Hashanah and this week’s Torah portion?

We started the intense work of cleaning out, letting go, and returning, in the past month. We have been in a different stage of the pandemic in terms of decisions on how to meet for the holidays this year (online/in-person/a combo?), we celebrated the new year in a different way, perhaps—and Moses is leaving behind his community.

Yes, this week, Moses begins his last speech to his people, informing them that, at 120 years old, he is about to die, he is putting Joshua in charge from now on, he will not be crossing over into the Promised Land with them.

One last time, he tells them how naughty they’ve been, how impossible in their turning away from God and worshiping other gods—and that they will continue in their backward ways, and probably worse—because if they were that bad with him around, how will they be when he’s not? (Yes, he actually says that.)

Still, Moses reassures them that God will be with them; they will not be abandoned. They will not be alone.

The prediction that we, as a people, would continue to be difficult has come true. There’s even a chant, “Come, Come, whoever you are, Even though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times before; Come, come again.” We always get another chance to try again, and the somber atmosphere of Yom Kippur reminds us take our vows more seriously.

I’ve realized that our work at this time of year really is a plumbing issue, maybe especially now. We have so much to flush out of our systems: old traumas, newer traumas, communities we’ve perhaps left behind during the pandemic, whether we moved or saw new opportunities arise in the past year.

And we will continue to struggle with what it means to return, return again.

As a people, and I mean as a world full of people, we will continue to struggle with what it means to have faith in the each other, in humanity—and in God, which to me means believing in the inter-connectedness of all and the interdependence we have.

Because there is no escaping global warming and climate disaster; there are no safe mountaintops to retreat to, and the air we breathe circulates around the entire earth. If we don’t take care of the earth and each other, then we’re not taking care of the One.

If we focus on what divides us, then we are bowing down to the differences—those smaller gods. I really hope we can learn the lesson Moses so wanted us to learn: that there is only One.

So on this Yom Kippur, let us get to a deeper place of flushing out our traumas, flushing out our differences, finding what unites us, renewing our faith in humanity and our ability to heal each other and the world.

That’s what I’ll be praying for this Yom Kippur: a good flush.

Shabbat Shalom and G’mar Hatima Tov; May we be written in the book of life (wherever that book is—we gotta find it).

Who By Fire…(Nitzavim)

All week I’ve been waiting and hoping for some inspiration for this week’s blog, but honestly, I didn’t want the kind of inspiration that came yesterday morning.

I woke up, after a terrifying night of hour upon hour of pelting rain, high winds, a tornado over Harlem (where I live), and non-stop lightning, only to hear that 8 people had died—in their apartments!—due to floodwaters that, in one case anyway, broke through an outside wall!

What more do we need to begin heeding the dire predictions, not just from science but from the Bible as well?

What more do we need to make the Unetaneh Tokef prayer more real: Who by fire? Who by water…? On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, according to our tradition, who shall die in the coming year and by what means. So we pray and pray until the end of Yom Kippur for forgiveness, and to be written in the Book of Life (where is that book, anyway?).

This week, in Nitzavim, God is very angry again, but as I read it this time, God’s anger felt different to me than other times. For some reason, I felt a seriousness, a heaviness, that I hadn’t felt before.

Other times I’ve kind of scoffed at it: “Oh, God is angry AGAIN, in a frantic out-of-control way, a way that seems momentary and will pass as soon as Moses talks him down. Here He lays out (again) what he expects of the Israelites. Mostly it’s about worshiping only our One God and not bowing down to other gods. Then God will open our heart—circumcise it, cutting away the crustiness that covers it.

God clearly says that we have a choice: to choose the blessings or the curses that have been laid out for us, so that we may “live and not die.” We are told to “choose life.”

And the famous lines, “Surely this is not so difficult to grasp; it’s right in front of you, close by, not up in the heavens, not an extraordinary wonder or marvel difficult to make sense of—nor is it across the sea, far away, that we should need someone to go and get it for us and bring it back to explain it so that we can then do it.

Surely.

Yet, it’s not simple. If only back then, when the Bible was written down, God and Moses had known how difficult such a commandment would prove to be. If it were simple, we would have done it a long time ago—like, thousands of years ago.

As we watch as troops finally withdraw from Afghanistan, approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, review the past year and a half of pandemic along with all the other confusion and chaos around the globe, we enter a time of trying to heal, of rest for the earth during this coming Shmita year, and prayer for ourselves and all that lives.

We take a break from the action so we can be renewed to continue our work of repair and hopefully begin to remove the scabs we’ve built up around our hearts, to open them again.

May it be so.

Don’t F** Up, It’s a Commandment: Ki Tavo

I know I’ve missed a few weeks of Torah blogging, but time off/vacation is always a necessity, any year and especially this year. After extending my vacation, I was then forced to cut it short in order to avoid being caught in—yes, a hurricane, yet another climate crisis.

Which easily brings me to this week’s Torah reading, Ki Tavo: When you come into the land the Lord Your God is giving you...(last week was Ki Teitzei: When you come out, interestingly enough).

As we come to the end of Torah, there are more and repeated warnings of all the curses that will come upon the people Israel for not walking in God’s ways, and all the blessings if we do.

It’s pretty frightening reading of environmental catastrophe and skies of copper when you know that’s what we actually see skies of copper as forests continue burning. There is no doubt in my mind that prophetic voices are recorded in Torah.

The confusing question remains: What does it mean to walk in God’s ways?

How many people do we each know who profess to doing exactly that, yet their value systems are completely opposite to ours?

While on vacation, I read a historical novel (yes, I had time for that!), one of the best I’ve ever read, called The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. It’s about slavery, the intricate and complicated relationships between Black and white, rich and poor, light-skinned and dark-skinned, immigrant, native and native-born. It delves deeply into the complexities of Black slave ownership, into the mind and mentality of the time and of the characters.

It’s beautifully written, fascinating, and as painful as the subject was, I didn’t want it to end.

There’s one character, a white slave owner, who believes God doesn’t care what we do, and even if He does care, you can hide from Him (we have psalms that also ask God not to hide from us, so that’s not so surprising).

Another white character, the sheriff, continually looks to the Bible for answers on how to live his life, and finds perfect justification for slavery within our Holy Book—so disturbing to us now, both the idea of slavery and that this is our holy book.

The anti-abortionist and anti-gay population today easily find what they’re looking for, too. The fact is, if you look, you can easily find something that justifies your opinions.

This isn’t to say that there are no hard truths. And those who have experienced or seen the harm and trauma our holy books have caused may have already decided to walk away.

But then they would have missed out on the parts where we are reminded to take care of each other and the earth, where we get the chance to repair what we’ve done, to set things right—to heal.

They’d also miss out on the commandment to rejoice, which appears again in this week’s parsha, and they might stay in a place of doom and gloom.

During this month of Elul, as we work on ourselves, getting ready for the High Holy Days, trying to be better people and not f** up any more than we already have, let’s not forget to put aside the hard work we’re doing at least once a day—to rejoice in who we are, the gifts we already bring to the world, and what we have.

It’s a commandment.

(Afterthought, as in P.ost S.cript: In deciding whether it was too risky to use the title I really wanted for this blog, I consulted a teacher who has been very important to me. They suggested the asterisks; “As they say, you only have your asterisk.” I decided the risk was worth it.)

The Biblical View: R’ei

Hello, friends and readers,

I’m on vacation and giving myself a badly needed break, so this is going to be super short and quick.

Mostly I want to refer you to a podcast that greatly inspired me this past week and left me with a deep amount of faith and belief for the future.

I was listening to Krista Tippett interviewing the very young and wise Rev. Jen Bailey. The title of the episode goes perfectly with this week’s Torah portion, R’ei, which means “See!” because what they talk about is something we all need to see and understand.

With only 7 weeks left to the Torah for the year, we continue on this path of last instructions before the Israelite people will cross over into the Promised Land, leaving Moses behind. It was curious that in the interview, Krista notes how her younger self always thought that Moses not getting to enter the Promised Land was the “wrong ending,” but her mature self understands that it could be a relief.

I don’t know if Krista had any idea where we are in the Torah at the moment, but her reference was perfect timing. She says that she now understands that what we will do for the rest of our lives we will not see the fruits of (like Moses), but what we do see is the younger generations and what they are capable of.

And a quote from Jen Bailey to peak your interest: “I can do what I can do during this time and also pass on that which came to me as seed, as blossom, and plant it, and let someone else tend to it. It’s okay not to build the whole house, to just lay the foundation.”

So take a listen to this sweet and comforting conversation between two generations. I have faith that you will be as inspired as I was: What We Inherit and What We Send Forth.

Good Shabbos and good week!

Starving children—Where? (Eikev)

I had an experience last week that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind.

As I was walking down the street, I saw ahead of me two young people of color wearing bright blue shirts with a professional logo—obviously about to stop me to get me to sign/sign up for something, give money for some worthy cause—and I knew it was going to be something I didn’t want to do.

I was ready to say no, to keep walking, thank you and I’m sorry, with a smile, but they took me off guard: “You look like a friendly face!”

It was perfect, really, because I’m one of a few people who really, really minds the thought that I might be perceived as unfriendly, closed, cold-hearted, in a cold city. Lots of others walked by, no problem, as I stood there observing myself, totally paralyzed: “Juliet, just leave, just walk away. What are you doing? Why can’t you? You woos!”

As this young woman started showing me photos of children that were supposed to pull at my heartstrings and whose letters I would receive, I searched for ways to say no and walk away without losing face, and things started to unravel.

(You can analyze me all you want: I know it has to do with poor boundaries and the need for outside validation, but it was also so much more complicated and deeper than that.)

First she told to pick a country. (I didn’t want to pick a country!) I said there was enough poverty in the U.S. and that I believed in starting at home. She cheerfully said, no problem! We have children to sponsor here, too!

Then, “Oops. The U.S. is fully sponsored. Choose another country.” I shrugged, choosing Mexico. Honestly, it’s all the same to me. “Oops, fully sponsored, too.” Same for the next country.

“Fully sponsored? What does that mean?” I thought. I so wanted to sarcastically say; “Oh, so you’ve solved the problem of poverty and hunger for all the children in the U.S., Mexico and Guatemala? That’s amazing!”

I actually did finally walk away, canceling the whole process I’d almost finished, which really pissed off the young woman whose time I’d just wasted. I apologized, with real reasons she had no desire to hear. It didn’t matter that I’d had no income for a year, was way behind in my rent. She probably didn’t even believe me. Most likely, I’m just another rich, white lady to her.

“Don’t say you’re sorry to me,” she said calmly, snidely, yet a little like a robot. “Say you’re sorry to this poor child who won’t get to eat because of you. I really feel bad for her.” I wasn’t entirely convinced she felt so bad for the child.

As I walked away, I literally cursed her under my breath—over and over again. Of course, I was mostly angry at myself, but she’d pushed so many buttons, she had no idea.

You see, I wanted to save all the children (more boundary problems?), but this whole thing ran against two basic principals I’d been taught:

1. Make sure you know the organization before you donate, and…

2. Although there is a place for philanthropy, this is exactly what those with money and power need in order to keep the same system going and the money in their pockets—and it’s mostly women who participate in it. It’s a feel-good thing that allows people to walk away patting themselves on the back.

In this week’s Torah portion, Eikev, we’re almost there, about to cross over into the Promised Land. It’s a continuation of Moses’ recounting to the Jewish people all that has happened to them thus far. Moses is at a stage of letting go, giving his last bits of advice before saying goodbye.

He quotes God again and again, and reminds them of how difficult they’ve been, and that, though God has chosen them, they really should thank Moses himself for having saved their behinds over and over again.

Moses makes an incredible promise: “If you follow all God’s commandments, you will be blessed above all other people, and there will be no sterile males or females—ever—among your people or your livestock forevermore, God will ward off all illness and disease, and there will be an abundance of food and wine…

…Because, remember that during the forty years in the desert, you were never hungry, nor did your feet get tired, nor did your clothes wear out.”

Herein lie the famous verses: “For it is not by bread alone that you live, but because of God’s grace. It is not by the strength of your own hands, but by God’s power,” I paraphrase.

It is not by bread alone.

I thought of the hungry children I was supposed to feed.

Then on Sunday, I heard an interview of two spectacular women with Krista Tippett, Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach, talking about courage. (Hmmm, which was I practicing: the courage to stay or to walk away? These things are never black and white.)

Within the context of courage, one of the things they talked about happened to also be the relationship between philanthropy and the system it maintains. While Glennon said that giving, even in tiny amounts, can take away a feeling of despair, she also maintains the importance of political action going hand in hand with charity, since charity conveniently alleviates without changing anything at all for the future.

Later in the Torah reading, a paragraph we recite after the central prayer in Judaism, the shema, also shows up here. It spells out in even more detail what Moses says above, both the positive and the negative; there will be total blessing for walking in God’s ways, or utter destruction and suffering for the earth and all its creatures—a total imbalance—if the people do not.

Was I participating in the evil of the world by not giving in order to alleviate the hunger of one child, walking away from the suffering of another?

In the podcast, Glennon later brings the word apocalypse in and the idea of total destruction, the world coming to an end, punishment for our evil ways (Glennon was making some sort of joke).

Then Krista jumps in and says she’d learned from some theologian that the word apocalypse does not mean actually mean destruction at all, as it is commonly used in society. In Greek, it actually means uncovering or revelation/revealing.

Glennon totally agrees and adds; harmful and destructive truths must be uncovered, then destroyed (i.e. racism, capitalism), and only then, will something new come about.

The word apocalypse, like the characters and stories of the Bible, and like the situation I found myself in, is complicated.

So is society.

Maybe the reality is, there is no perfect, happy ending. You don’t get heaven until you get to heaven. Humanity is messy. We all know how this story pans out; the Israelites do not walk in God’s ways.

And here we find ourselves today.

Maybe we need to remember this phrase: For it is not by bread alone that you live, but because of God’s grace. It is not by the strength of your own hands, but by God’s power.

May we keep trying to walk in “God’s” ways, as complicated as it seems sometimes, giving for the sake of giving while choosing wisely, and also acting to change a system where charity is a necessity.

Enough Already! (Va’etchanan)

I’ve been feeling very irreverent in my writing lately, “bashing” Torah a bit and…Judaism, too? I’m not sure about the second part, but maybe Torah and Judaism are inextricably intertwined.

Actually, I’m not sure about either of these two things. Does being critical of Torah and questioning God constitute “bashing?”

But it is related to a question that repeatedly comes up for me, which is: how do I justify being Jewish, following Jewish law, (or at least some of it), when so much of my Holy Book and prayer books are full of so much that challenges my moral compass?

In other words, how do I claim that Judaism is beautiful when so much of it is ugly?

I wouldn’t be the first or the last to ask this question about my religious heritage—Jewish or otherwise.

Also, can we separate “Judaism” from “Jewish people” the way we might want to separate Israeli people from the Israeli government and its actions?

Perhaps “cultural” Jews would say there’s no connection between one and the other of any of the above-mentioned—at least not for them. I would say I was one of those Jews at one time, and though I identify as more than a “cultural Jew” now, I still think it’s important to continue to think about such ideas and bring them out in the open.

Like for me, the relationship between being Jewish and Israel, as I already mentioned. When I was growing up, there was absolutely no emotional attachment at all to such a concept because of the way I was raised.

When kids in school found out I was Jewish, after a moment of surprise, often (stereotypes about Jews not having blonde hair?), the ensuing questions were always, “Oh! Have you been to Israel?” and, “Do you speak Hebrew?”

To these I would answer indignantly, “Why would I go there? And why would I know Hebrew? My grandparents spoke Yiddish!”

In addition, though neither God nor synagogue ritual were a part of my vocabulary or experience, I still felt very Jewish and very proud.

That brings us to this week’s Torah portion, Va’etchanan.

The parsha begins with Moses publicly retelling how he pleaded, or more literally, asked for grace from God, (for which the portion is named) by letting him see the Promised Land, to which God answers, “Enough already! Stop asking! In fact, never ask me again!” In Hebrew, it’s Rav L’cha—which is like saying, you’re too much!

God has made his decision and is not going back on it.

Moses blames God’s decision on the waywardness of the Israelite people and their lack of faith and cooperation. (Who else can he blame?)

When you read it, your heart sort of breaks for Moses—at least, mine did. After all that Moses has done! After all his dedication! He just wants to see it. He just wants a little peak. In his pain, he throws the blame out onto someone else.

Here again, we are faced with a God that’s supposedly unending in compassion. Yet here his compassion has clearly come to an end. And he’s unbending about it.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen God in this light.

Yet God is supposed to be perfect.

Lucky for me, our tradition allows for criticism, and here’s the problem: it seems that so many people are afraid to do this; if we admit that there’s much to criticize, then others will be justified in rejecting our religion and us as a people?

On the other hand, if we jump the gun and are the first to reject and criticize, then we can’t be blamed; we’ve joined the Modern World; we’re not so stupid after all.

For me, criticizing Israel falls into the same category.

On Tisha B’Av this past Sunday, I attended a bunch of workshops through Hadar, and I heard some beautiful ancient commentary on this holy day.

One was a story of someone challenging God, accusing God of having been absent during the suffering, and abandoning his “Treasured People” during the destruction. God answers, “I was there, but I couldn’t do anything!” (What? The Great and Powerful couldn’t do anything?)

Another story makes God into a sibling as opposed to the traditional king or parent, and accuses “Him” of being not even as good as a sibling because: look at how Joseph forgave his brothers who had treated him so poorly, throwing him into a pit and abandoning him for dead; you, God, don’t possess the compassion even of Joseph, who was a mere human.

The amazing and beautiful thing about these commentaries, or midrashim, is that it was rabbis from, what, more than a thousand years ago, who wrote these things—rabbis that our tradition takes very seriously.

In my mind, this should give us at least a little bit of permission, if we’re waiting on someone else or on an ancient text (which I’m not) to give us permission to be critical of Judaism, of our Torah, of our god.

We could extend that to permission to be critical of the government of our beloved Holy Land.

And we could hope that by having such permission, we might not be called anti-Semites or self-hating Jews for such criticism.

This coming Saturday, the Shabbat after Tisha B’Av, is called Shabbat Nachamu—the Sabbath of Comfort.

May we take comfort in the beauty of the traditions we have, and may we gather the strength to put fears aside, and be unbending and unending in both our commitment to Judaism, our pride in being Jewish, and also in the ability to look critically at ourselves—like our tradition invites us to do—in order to create a Judaism and a Jewish world to match the world we want to live in.

Because—enough already! It’s too much!

“F” and “M”: D’varim & Tisha B’Av

When you think about this week’s Torah portion and Tisha B’Av, if you know anything about them (don’t worry, I’ll tell you), you probably don’t think of the words “fantastical,” “funny” or “magic.”

Here’s something fantastical, funny, and magical: Jane the Virgin, a series now on Netflix.

My husband and I just finished marathon-watching all six seasons over the course of only a couple of months, I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit. It was a special time we spent together every evening (and, truthfully, filled a void left by our younger daughter moving out (yay for her, though!).

If you haven’t seen Jane the Virgin—you HAVE to.

No, I’m serious.

It’s a dramedy, SO well-done as a real-life portrayal of three generations of strong, Latina women, and addressing all kinds of serious issues, including U.S. immigration policies. (As proof of what I’m saying, my real-life Latino husband completely agrees with all these statement).

It’s also a spoof on telenovelas, or Spanish soap operas, meaning it’s completely absurd and fantastical. You cry at the pain, grip your seat and scream out loud at what happens at every turn—and you laugh hysterically. (You can watch the trailer on YouTube here.)

Most importantly, you come away being reminded of the power of love and with a deep desire to believe in the fantastical, magical possibilities of life and living in community.

I need a lot of messages like this these days as a counter to the constant reminder that our world is in serious trouble.

I also don’t need Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple and the burning of an ancient city to remind me to be in mourning. Our tradition says we’re supposed to observe mourning rituals for three weeks before the holiday, with special restrictions in place, which feels especially burdensome to me at a moment when I feel like I partly live in a place of mourning all the time these days.

On the other hand, ritual is important, and Tisha B’Av offers an opportunity to practice ritual in community—because you’re never supposed to mourn alone, and community is crucial to survival. Even the rituals of Tisha B’Av are magical; you sit in the dark in community, with flashlights, and chant the Book of Lamentations together.

At the same time, our tradition says that if Tisha B’Av falls on Shabbat, you have to push it off for a day; we’re not allowed to mourn on the Sabbath; funerals and burials are not allowed on the Sabbath or holidays. Mourning takes a break or it comes to an abrupt end.

Maybe that’s a message for how to live our lives.

Here’s a message I heard from Torah this week: “It’s time to cross over.” God speaks to Moses saying, “It’s time to cross over into the Promised Land, so prepare the people for it; it’s happening soon!”

Of course, Torah stories are all very magical and fantastical, from the way God speaks to Moses to water pouring forth from rocks to giving birth at 90 to the description of the Promised Land as “flowing with milk and honey.”

And such stories helped millions of African Americans survive slavery and make freedom happen, and helped millions make new lives in this country as immigrants.

I heard an interview with DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter activist who believes in magic with all his heart—and in making magic happen through community—in simple ways. (You can hear his beautiful story on Episode 25 of Meditative Story.)

While listening to McKesson’s story, I thought, I want to believe in magic. And believing in magic is kind of like believing in God. It takes both faith and action.

You know what else is magical and fantastical? Laughter. And playfulness. They carry the power of survival.

Psychotherapist Esther Perel was interviewed by Krista Tippett and told a story of a group of Holocaust survivors who saw a play that dramatized their lives in the camps. In an effort to honor the pain of these survivors, the play was very serious.

When it was over, they were asked, “What did you think?”

“It was good,” they responded, “but where’s the laughter? We didn’t survive such an ordeal by being serious all the time. We laughed at ourselves and our situation. This was part of our resilience.”

Perel says we’ve become way too serious and earnest in our desire to respect each other. We’re afraid of offending, but to an extreme. We’re afraid to laugh at ourselves; even self-deprecation has become taboo.

But finding humor in the pain, the ability to laugh instead of cry, is just as crucial as community or the determination to survive. Humor offers distance, ownership, autonomy and perspective. It gives us a say over the matter. Laughter is play, and when you lose humor, you lose playfulness.

The effects of humor are magical.

So let’s remember to cross over, like our tradition reminds us—maybe even moment to moment.

Let’s mourn together in the magic of community, take action in community, and then cross over into fun and playfulness—all the time; let’s continue to celebrate life and remember to feel alive in the midst of the pain and suffering, using the magic humor and playfulness.

Attitudes of Platitudes & The Promise of Bliss: Mattot-Masei

Ignorance is bliss—or so they say.

I know I’ve asked this question before, but: How much do we want to know—really? And how much do we really know?

(Spoiler alert: we think we know so much, but we really know very, very little, about pretty much everything, and sometimes we don’t really want to know a whole lot more, because it’s so overwhelming, especially when we’re not sure what we can do about it—and we risk despair and giving up when we know stuff and feel helpless to change it.)

(Spoiler alert #2: Ironically, we really do want to know, and when secrets are kept from us, even or especially by people who love us and think they’re protecting us, and even when it changes our life forever, we actually wouldn’t choose not knowing—and always suspected the truth anyway.)

It was the Fourth of July on Sunday, and it felt like the whole world was out celebrating. Central park was teaming with people, large groups that couldn’t gather last year—due to the pandemic (dah).

I remember the weeks-long fireworks starting around Juneteenth last year after the murder of George Floyd, and up through July 4th. On July 4th, we traditionally celebrate the beautiful history of our country and freedom (which I say with more than a little bit of irony). But this felt more like rage.

This year couldn’t have been more different. The day was unusually cool (a short but glorious break from the extreme heatwaves that keep coming), and you couldn’t find a space in the grass between the celebratory gatherings, with grills giving off the delicious smells of summer cookouts, stretching past the park, throughout Harlem.

And it’s true that there’s so much to celebrate: the pandemic feels like it’s just about over in New York, and there’s been an awakening of so much of our nation to the truth about police brutality and racism. It feels like an awakening that’s taken things to a whole new level, thanks to the pandemic (if we can thank it for anything, I think we can thank it for that).

And there have been other positive political developments in the past year, including the passing of a bill for expanded LGBTQ rights and, most recently, additional protections for the trans community.

We could focus on all the horrors, and we should remember that the LGBTQ community is under increased attack over the last couple of years, in spite of the legislation, but there is also some positive to recognize.

Would recognizing the good mean that people are unaware of the state of the world? I don’t think so. Are they aware they’ve been lied to and that the lies continue, and that not enough is being done about the climate crisis?

I believe the majority is aware.

And do they want the truth, along with some true compassion that translates into things like truly affordable housing, and real investment in the earth, not this fake thing we’re getting?

Of course they do.

I was listening to a bonus episode of the podcast Family Secrets, and the conversation started with discussing the platitudes,“What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” “There’s a reason for everything,” and “God only gives you what you can handle.”

So WRONG, right? Because these are the last things you can believe, or want to hear, when you’re in crisis. And the country and the world are in crisis, on so many levels.

And such platitudes are really only helpful to the one who gives over such a message. It makes them feel better—or they think it’s better than the backlash of telling the truth.

On Family Secrets, Kelly Corrigan talks about how she found out that she was conceived through a sperm donor—long after both her parents had died—and that they’d kept it a secret from her her whole life. Learning the truth blew up her entire identity.

But the truth, as painful and shocking as it was, was also liberating, because the disconnect, the questions, were always there under the surface.

So who feels better as a result of secrets or denying the truth? I don’t think anyone does.

You know what else doesn’t feel better? The retelling of the story of Pinchas, the violent zealot from the Bible I spoke about last week.

Yes, our tradition takes a really nasty story, that of Pinchas, and says that Pinchas is one and the same as Elijah, the wonderful prophet we invoke on Passover and at the end of Shabbat and as part of the ritual circumcision of a baby boy. We tell beautiful, magical stories about Elijah. We think of Elijah as a rescuer and protector of Jews.

When we hear the story that Pinchas was really Elijah, or became Elijah because he lived a really, really long time, it leaves us with a potential feeling of bliss. That’s what actually happened to me. When I heard this, it made me smile and sigh with relief inside for a few blissful moments. It gave me a soft, fuzzy, warm feeling inside.

But thinking about it later, I got angry.

Why do we do this? Do we think that the Torah and Judaism will somehow be saved and redeemed by this possibility?

In my eyes, it does neither. It just makes me angry, and makes me want to walk away. It makes me want to disconnect.

Add to the truth of Pinchas’ violence the thought that he has a place of honor again this week in the Torah, and that Moses, our great hero, has one last job to do before he dies, and that job is to wage war and wipe out an entire people so the Israelites can dwell in peace in the land that God is giving them.

And add that Bilam, the one who blessed the Jewish people over and over again a couple of weeks ago gets a special mention as needing to be murdered for being a Midianite. I know; the Midianites were guilty of pulling the Israelites away from their God and the idea of One-ness, and it was a hard message for people to get, but does that justify genocide??

Also, I get that God literally made Bilam bless the people, and Bilam acted like an ass with his ass, but Moses’ own wife is a Midianite, and I think it’s fair to say that there was a genuine love and respect between Moses and his father-in-law, Jethro.

So, what messages are sent here?

It feels like racism to me.

Telling the truth of the nasty parts of Torah doesn’t cancel out the good things that happen, and there are good things in this week’s parsha. Like the guidelines for trying a murderer, and the establishment of cities of refuge for such fugitives. The premise is fairness of judgment. A difference is drawn between those who intentionally kill, with hatred in their heart, and those who do so by accident. It sounds a lot like the American system of law! Also, Zelophahed’s daughters get their inheritance and the laws about females inheriting property are clarified.

But I don’t want to make up a pretty story about Pinchas just to feel better about the Torah and being Jewish. I don’t want to gloss over the pain.

What’s more, I don’t think glossing things over makes me—or others—want to stick around more. People have been walking away from Judaism and other religions partly due to lies told: not because of truths. How many Catholics walked away from the Catholic Church because of the widespread cover-up of sexual abuse by priests?

I believe that the more we tell the truth, the more permission we have to wrestle with the text, the more we will turn toward instead of away from Judaism (or whatever community—or family—we belong to). Ignorance is only temporarily blissful, until the truth comes out—and then we realize we not only wanted to know it, but we suspected it all along.

Kelly Corrigan reinforces this idea in Family Secrets. She talks about how people keep secrets from each other mostly out of fear and the belief that they are alone.

But the more chances we take in revealing ourselves (with caution), sharing truths that we think are so deep and dark that no one would ever want to talk to or look at us again, the more we realize how we are not alone—that there is at least one person out there, and more likely thousands, who understand our experiences—because they’ve had them, too; literally anything we’re ashamed of, she says, we can find others like us, and more connection will result, not the isolation we fear.

Because we’re really not alone. And the truth will come out, no matter how well we think we hide it, or try to. And then we’re left with, “What else did you lie to me about?” Carl Jung would call this “psychic poison.” It takes away any trust that was there. It makes us want to walk away, and isolates us further.

What’s true for us personally, and for our country, its history and present, are true for Torah as well. And if we talk about the truth, we can work through it.

It’s time to face the truth of all of it and stop glossing things over. In facing the ugly, we will connect more, not less, and we can’t change the ugly if we pretend everything is bliss—of the Torah or our country. Plus, we risk giving up in despair if all we see is the ugly.

So let’s stop saying that ignorance is bliss, that what we don’t know won’t hurt us, and that God only gives us what we can handle. And let’s stop retelling stories in ways that change the reality just to make it pretty. These platitudes and attitudes only harm and separate us.

And I’m really hoping we choose to walk toward each other—as Jews, as Catholics—as anyone. Together.

We have the option of turning away from the racism of Torah and pretending it’s not there, that it’s only about God wanting us to know that One-ness is the biggest truth, or we can take the ugly stories as lessons for how not to live.

Starting with truth, we will turn towards each other and figure out how we want to live—as One—on Earth.

Joie de Vivre: not so Pinchas

I have so much on my mind when I think of the parsha named Pinchas.

It starts as a continuation of a horrendous story that ended last week’s reading, and continues with one of the most empowering, beautiful, and random stories of the Torah. I say random, because we don’t hear about Zelophehad or his daughters before or after this.

Zelophehad is supposed to be a good guy, righteous in that he didn’t participate in Korach’s rebellion against Moses. That’s pretty much all we know about him. Pinchas is righteous, too, according to God, but I don’t like him at all.

Pinchas is what we would call a zealot—violent and ready to kill in the name of God. Last week’s parsha, after the talking donkey and Balak and Bilam took up most of the story, ended with a brutal murder by Pinchas, an Israelite who was all too happy to stick his sword through a couple (an Israelite man and a Moabite/Midianite—this detail is not consistent), entering a tent to have sex. He literally follows them into the tent and stabs them through as one. Yuck.

The story of Pinchas is all about the Israelites being lured away, apparently through the use of sex, to worship a different god (the struggle towards monotheism is a very long one), and “our” God orders the ringleaders to be impaled. A plague that God has started (again) is stopped because of this “righteous” behavior on Pinchas’ part. Pinchas is rewarded for his behavior at the beginning of this week’s reading; he and his descendants will all become priests for evermore.

Here’s something that struck me: God seems to live from a place of outrage. He is ready to spring at any moment. And he rewards violence.

Not good.

Another thing that struck me: random women are named in this parsha—the Midianite woman and the daughters of Zelophad—which is a very rare thing in the Torah. And these daughters are special.

Zelophad has five daughters, and when he dies, they’re not due any of his property, leaving them desolate. So they appeal to Moses, and Moses goes to God, and God says okay, the law should be changed so females can inherit property so long as there are no males around (obviously a big deal at that time).

This is a big win, and there’s no big argument, just pure and simple justice. Here God is kind and caring.

Today we might say that God has borderline personality disorder; his behavior is erratic, he’s manipulative, and he swings between being kind and generous and violent, punishing and rageful. This God is a god you’re walking around on eggshells.

All joking aside, what do you do in a world that has all of these things: injustice, violence and outrage; justice and love and caring and open-mindedness and flexibility.

In the middle of this week’s parsha, there’s a repetitive taking of the census, and it ends with a reminder of the holidays and how to observe them, most specifically the sacrifices to be made and how to make them. To me, it’s like saying, there’s a normal, even-keeled part of life, too. It goes on, no matter what you think. Everything continues, the drama passes. Life can be routine as well.

I heard Dr. Ruth on a podcast called The Experiment the other day. I was a young teen when she started talking about sex on the radio, so she has a very special place in my heart. (I wonder what she would say about the “whoring women” in the bible! Ha!)

Anyway, here we are coming to the end of the pandemic, at least in the U.S., with life “going back to normal,” “things opening up,” as everyone is wont to say, and the interviewer wanted to get Dr. Ruth’s perspective; what should we take from the pandemic? What about our trauma and grief? We need to make room for that, right? Keep talking about it?

“Absolutely not!” says Dr. Ruth emphatically. “Move on.”

When all the rest of us were whining, Dr. Ruth knew this would end. She stayed in her apartment, at 92, now 93, all alone, for over a year, never going out. Talk about lonely! She was a therapist to herself, she said, which got her through it.

This is the perspective of a woman who was sent off to travel on her own to safety as a young child during the WWII, lost her entire family to the Holocaust, and made a new life over and over again, in several different countries.

This is the kind of person who only looks forward: "Move on!” she says. “Take the lessons from the past—from the Holocaust, from the pandemic—never forget them!—but move on. Keep planning for the future. “The tulips were so beautiful this year. And they will be even more beautiful next year!” Dr. Ruth loves to repeat the phrase, joie de vivre.

What do we take from the lessons of the Torah and what do we leave behind?

How about we leave behind the violence and misogyny of an ancient society? Isn’t it time? How about the almost constant state of outrage? It’s not good for us individually, and it ripples out in destructive ways socially. It’s time to let that all go, don’t you think?

How about we carry forward the lessons of the power of the collective and the power of women, the ability to work together? How about the ability of these women to lead the way for other women, and to do so peacefully, without fighting, either among themselves (someone who comes to my morning minyan pointed out: how often do sisters get along—and five of them?”), or with Moses or God. They come level-headed, organized, coherent.

How about the possibility of those of us who can to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves?

And how about more joie de vivre?

Great Story (Maybe Not True?): Balak

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, and I learned of Alex Elle, whose friend told her a few years ago that she should start sharing her story on Instagram—that it was a story people needed to hear and it could have a great impact.

Elle believed there was no way anyone would want to hear her story. But her friend said, even if it made a difference to one person, it would matter.

Elle went ahead and did it. Now she has over a million followers! (Great story and true.)

For eight years, I believed that I was meant to end up as a rabbi at the synagogue where I interned a couple of years ago. I had this whole fantasy around it, that I would become a rabbi, and one day be up there at the pulpit in my favorite place—because I belonged there. It was a secret I kept from most people because I was embarrassed; who was I to think that I could end up in such a position at such a renowned synagogue?

I also believed that if I didn’t end up being a rabbi there, it meant that somehow I was flawed, not worthy, lacking.

Great stories. Both not true; the door kept slamming in my face to prove it.

The figurative door slamming in my face was something like being Bilam in the Torah this week, sitting on a she-ass, with his leg being slammed and crushed against the wall.

You see, Bilam can’t see the angel, sent by God, standing with a sword in outstretched arm blocking the way. The angel, or “satan" (pronounced “sah-tahn”—yes, the very word Christianity appropriated and whose meaning it changed) is an adversary, there to redirect Bilam from where he thinks he needs to be going.

This angel, or adversary, has been sent to stop Bilam from going to meet Balak, who wants him to curse the Israelites for him.

Balak believes that the Israelites are too many, too strong, so numerous they are like cows who will lick all the grass in the fields clean, leaving nothing for his own people (love the imagery, right?), so numerous you can not see the earth beneath their feet.

Great story. Not true. (It reminds me of male white supremacists that believe they’re being ignored and losing their power because women, people of color, and Jews, of course—Jews are always part of the story—are taking over—okay, maybe not such a great story).

Bilam can’t see the angel blocking the way, but the donkey can! That’s why the donkey careens, pushes against the wall to avoid this scary-looking angel, and collapses under Bilam like a child who goes limp to get its parent to stop.

Bilam, in his frustration, starts beating the animal, whom God finally gives speech to. The animal talks to Bilam and says, “Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to you? Haven’t I always obeyed your commands? Haven’t I been a good ass?” (Basically, “Maybe you’re being the ass here.”)

Great story. True? And is Bilam being an ass?

Well, God reveals the angel/messenger/adversary, and Bilam has to admit that he is indeed being an ass.

The way the story goes from here is that Bilam can only speak God’s truth now, and will not curse the Jewish people because God literally won’t let the words come out of his mouth. Balak becomes more and more incensed; though offering great compensation in exchange for the curses, and setting up sacrifices on three occasions, his plan is frustrated.

That means that both Balak and Bilam don’t see what they need to see. They both act in ways that show how asinine they are; they are both being blocked in what they believe to be true and right, and they act shamefully.

Even God acts shamefully. First, he tells Bilam he may go meet Balak to talk about Balak’s request, though God’s word would hold true, and then God flies into a rage when Bilam actually gets on a donkey to go. This is when God throws the angel, the “Satan,” in front of Bilam.

Remember what I said last week about humans being made in the image of God? Does our rage reflect the The Better Angels of our Nature, or another part of humanity we’re not so proud of?

Are there adversaries standing in our way, trying so hard to get our attention so we can see and change course?

How do we recognize them? How many times do we have to have a door slam in our face? How many times do we need to beat our poor, innocent donkey (or a dead horse)? How painful does our leg have to get, smooshed against a wall, before we decide it’s time to listen to our bodies? At what point do we stop to think, maybe this thing/animal/being is God trying to communicate something and I’m not listening or I’m unable to see?

A friend of mine told a great and true story this week at the morning chanting/prayer service I lead on Mondays (you can come if you want—it’s on Zoom): yesterday, she was swimming in a lake. She turned over and was floating on her back. She didn’t realize she had left her glasses on top of her head, and they fell off, of course. They looked for hours, unable to retrieve the glasses. So she’s wearing cheap pharmacy glasses for the moment.

My friend was thinking about what happened. She had decided there must be a message in it for her, and our discussion on Balak and Bilam helped her find it; perhaps she needs to see things differently.

It took me a long time to realize that the door slamming in my face was a good thing: an angel/adversary—my own personal “satan” with a drawn sword, showing two edges: a blessing on one side; a curse on the other. But I couldn’t see it. I’m grateful now for the doors slamming in my face.

May we see the adversaries placed before us as blessings rather than curses. May the Better Angels of Our Nature win out for the sake of blessings rather than curses—and may they multiply from one to millions.

Water and the Better Angels of Our Nature: Khukat

Last week I wrote about guilt and responsibility—not exactly subject matter that leaves you feeling happy or with a whole lot of faith in humanity. I mean, come on. I wrote about Nazis.

So this week I wanted to bring in the opposite: faith in humanity. It may be like drawing water from a rock, but hey, that’s what this Torah portion is about anyway, so let me draw!

Indeed, Moses strikes a rock with his staff to get water from it. The people have been complaining again, tired of the bland food, mostly fearful (still) of dying in the desert, and for good reason; there’s no water. God tells Moses to talk to a rock, and water will come from it.

Even though he doesn’t exactly follow God’s directions (instead of talking, Moses strikes the rock), water still comes gushing out—enough for the myriads of people and their animals.

But since Moses has disobeyed God’s command and he’s made it look like he and Aaron made this miracle happen and not God, Moses and Aaron are punished; they will not be allowed to enter the Promised Land with the people because of the lack of faith shown by their words. Also, Aaron will die later in the parsha, as punishment for his disobedience.

According to God, Moses shows a lack of faith that God will provide the water by taking credit for it himself.

Many of us struggle not only with faith in God, but also faith in humanity. The way the world is going, even with bits of positive things happening, they still feel like just drops in the grand ocean of the negative. And perhaps lack of faith in humanity is not so different from lack of faith in God.

Let’s take this a step farther; if humans are made in the image of God, as they say, then our emotions and actions reflect God-like emotions and actions, and as we see in the Torah, God isn’t always so nice, kind of like human beings. (Case in point: God flies into another one of his rages over the people’s complaints and sends serpents to bite the people, and Moses must intervene on their behalf—again.)

We could look for a male propensity for violence in Moses in this moment at striking the rock, or his hubris, or we could tell a different story and decide that his actions reflect his current emotional state. You see, I failed to mention that right before the rock incident, Miriam has died. There’s no mention of a mourning period (unlike for Aaron, who gets a full 30 days, not the normal seven days—maybe because she’s a woman?)

The story we could tell might go something like this: Moses must be in shock and grieving. Maybe he’s angry about Miriam’s sudden death. Maybe he feels abandoned by God. This might explain his striking the rock instead of being in a conversational mood. Also, as Miriam is famous for her connection to water, perhaps her spirit helps the water come gushing from the rock after Moses strikes it. This might be Miriam’s response to Moses, saying, “I’m still here. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be alright.” But in his grief, Moses can’t see or feel or hear this message.

I heard Nicholas Christakis, author and professor at Yale University, on the On Being podcast last Sunday with Krista Tippett: How We’re Wired for Goodness. Christakis’ work is about re-narrating what we believe about humanity. He says science has focused way too much and for far too long “on the dark side of humanity and our propensity for selfishness, tribalism, mendacity, cruelty, violence—as if this were a normal and primary state of affairs.”

Christakis says that the bright side has been denied the attention it deserves. He’s more interested in focusing on the qualities that make, not an individual, but a collective “good.” He wants to know how a group of humans comes together and cooperates.

Moreover, his work looks at the human qualities that have evolved over millions of years—qualities like love, friendship, cooperation, and teaching. He points out how unusual these are in the animal kingdom, like teaching others, but also to teach and love those not connected to us genetically. He argues that these qualities are more powerful than the negative ones and in some ways much more important because they outweigh the cultural aspects that separate us because we are hardwired for them.

Tippett and Christakis talk about Theodicy and a term he coined called Sociodicy.

Theodicy questions how we can believe in and justify a beneficent, omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving God given the amount of suffering in the world. How do we explain the origins of evil?

Sociodicy takes a different angle by asking, how can we vindicate a confidence in the goodness of society despite the manifest evil in society? It is not to deny that every century has been replete with horrors, venal actions of all kinds, but rather to draw attention to the equal propensity we have for goodness—despite these horrors.

Sociodicy recognizes that even our evil qualities are features of our humanity and the good qualities we’ve evolved are in response to those evil qualities. As humans, we have few natural predators, and we in fact are our own predators, so we’ve had to evolve to cope with the evil qualities for our own survival.

Christakis says that we don’t really have what’s called Free Will in the denigrated way we have been taught; we’re wired for certain feelings and behaviors, evolved over time, and part of that behavior is copying each other; just like with mob mentality, “social contagion” has its positive side. And when we act in ways that show cooperation, love, concern, and teaching, the effects are magnified dozens, maybe thousands of times. This raises Free Will to a different level, because we have the option of working with what he calls, “The better angels of our nature.”

Water shows up again and again in this week’s Torah reading, whether it comes gushing from a rock for drinking or it’s to wash infected clothes or it’s sprinkled on a person exposed to death, or it’s a reference to countless wells in the desert, including one the Israelites sing to in order to help water spring up from it.

God wants Moses to give credit where credit is due: he wants Moses to remember that he can not possibly lead the people to freedom without God’s assistance. God is saying, “Remember the Source of All Life; you are not it.”

As with the water springing from the rock, human agency seems to be involved here. But maybe Moses, or Miriam, having some agency in drawing water from the rock reflects the faith that we need to have in humans as much as God since, as it is said, we are made in the Image of God. Again, if we have faith in humanity, we are showing faith in God, and vice versa.

So how do we use our agency? Christakis recommends going through our day looking for opportunities to see the goodness in others: imagining reasons for their actions, like we did with Moses above, constantly re-narrating anything negative we encounter.

The word for messenger in the Torah is interchangeable with the word for angel. Often messengers are sent ahead to assist on any journey.

Sometimes re-narrating may feel like drawing water from a rock.

May the waters we encounter cleanse us of our negativity, allowing the better angels of our nature to guide us.

Guilty (Korakh)

My mother has been dead for three years, and I think I just forgave her for the ways she hurt me. I say, “I think,” because, you know how these things are; you had an opening, you feel like you’re over it, but then angry feelings come up again.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved my mother very much, and I appreciated a lot of things about her, as a person and a mother, and about our relationship. She was a really good mother in so many ways, and I give her credit for teaching me good mothering skills. But she also held me back in many ways, and caused extra friction in my marriage for some thirty years as I was trying to figure things out for myself.

Here’s how angry I was: After trying and trying, I ultimately didn’t see or speak to her during the last year of her life. I don’t advertise this. It was very hard for me; I’d always prided myself on being a really good daughter and I’ve felt very, very guilty about withdrawing from her.

I know that whatever she did, she did out of fear, but knowing something intellectually is not the same as forgiving someone in your heart, especially when they’ve caused you so much pain. Also, forgiveness is a process.

I’ve been reading a book called The Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal. Perhaps you know it. It’s a true story by a Holocaust survivor who tells how, while still a prisoner, he was put into a situation with a very young, dying SS soldier, maybe 20 years old, who has asked to speak with a Jew—any Jew—to unload the burden of a crime before he dies.

The young man tells of throwing grenades into a building and killing entire families that have been stuffed and locked inside with hundreds of others. He remembers one particular couple who jumps from a window with their young child. This memory haunts him, and he wants absolution for his crime. Wiesenthal is forced to sit and listen for hours as this bandaged man talks. After hours of sitting at the edge of this young man’s bed silently, Simon walks away without offering any words of consolation.

After the war, Wiesenthal goes to find the mother of this young man and, like in a movie, she’s living alone in the rubble that has become her house and surrounding neighborhood in Stuttgart. She confirms that she and her husband had not been Nazi supporters, and they were ashamed of their son becoming a Nazi Youth. She seems to need some absolution as well.

Though Wiesenthal challenges her thinking somewhat about individual guilt and responsibility, he still chooses not to tarnish her memory of her son as a “good boy,” the one last possession she has. He feels compassion for her and the challenges she’d had in the choices she’d made; she’d had to protect her family.

Wiesenthal is haunted by his decisions for years afterwards. Should he have absolved the dying young man, in spite of his rage and disgust? Was he too harsh with the boy’s mother about her responsibility? Was it wrong that he had even an ounce of compassion for the man after all the sadistic acts he had experienced and witnessed in the camps and on the street—a lifetime of open, violent, sanctioned antisemitism and hatred?

Also, does he, a random Jew, have the right to absolve someone of a crime that was not directly committed against him? And how are murderers made? How does one get to forgiveness, and should he be pressured to it as quickly as he was? Will we forget if we forgive?

Finally, he ponders the question of collective vs. individual guilt.

In this week’s Torah reading, Korakh, such a question came up for me. Korakh leads a rebellion against Moses and things do not end up well for him and his followers. Though Moses is our hero, I was able to find compassion for Korakh when I read his chief complaint: How come you get all the credit? What about the rest of us? Aren’t we holy, too?

Obviously, Korakh was feeling left out, unnoticed, neglected. And his followers were scared; they keep repeating their fear of dying in the desert, which is so great that their memory of Egypt is warped and they call it “The Land of Milk and Honey.”

But what resulted was a mob mentality. God punishes the mob. He holds everyone accountable, not just Hitler—I mean, Korakh; each is responsible for their own decisions and participation.

A similar mentality is true for violent Trump supporters: neglected and ignored for decades by our government, they are scared. And they were enveloped and influenced by a mob mentality: a feeling of safety in the mob.

Another example of mob mentality is what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, as you can hear in fascinating detail on the podcast Blind Spot: Tulsa, Burning: government-sanctioned racism, hatred, destruction, massacre—and then kept a secret, by both victims and the offspring of the perpetrators, some of whom felt guilty, all of whom were too afraid to speak out or speak up, thinking only to protect their own families.

It’s one thing to hold hatred in your heart against those one deems inferior to oneself. It’s another to keep silent in the face of what you know is wrong—yet we know that everyone does it when it comes to staying alive and keeping our loved ones alive, even if we want to be on the “right” side of history.

My father used to say that guilt is a useless emotion. His therapist had told him that.

I disagree. I think guilt one of the best human emotions out there. It’s a feeling of guilt that keeps us in check; it’s what makes us at least try not to continue to hurt others.

Collective guilt; collective responsibility. None of us is innocent. We’ve all done things we need forgiveness for, and if we forgive too quickly, then we’re letting others and ourselves off the hook.

I have compassion for my mother’s fear. She inherited it. She learned it. And I can forgive her for it. And it was a huge release and relief to finally feel able to write her a letter telling her I forgive her, and how much I loved her and missed her for the good she gave me in my life. I miss the good parts more and more, which I think is a good sign. It means the pain is receding.

It’s supposed to be freeing to forgive someone, which is why we are encouraged to jump to it. Wiesenthal talks about how Holocaust survivors were pressured to put it all behind them quickly—to forgive and forget—for their own sake.

But I don’t want to forget the pain my mother caused me altogether, and the pain of all the massacres in history should not be forgotten, because every “good boy” is capable of joining in the “mob mentality” or becoming a murderer.

I have inherited my mother’s patterns, and they challenge me, but it’s the memory of the pain and the guilt I feel when I inflict it on those I love that helps me strive not to repeat it.

Oh, Say Can You See? (Shlach Lecha)

My older daughter graduated from law school yesterday. And in person!!

I, know, right? Amazing!

Especially for my husband, first generation Latino immigrant. It was his biggest dream fulfilled, and if he hadn’t made it through Covid, as was a real possibility…how different the day would have been for us. I was reminded of the sacredness of life and how quickly that can change. I was reminded not to take it for granted.

In any event, I couldn’t stop crying, and I was grateful for the mask. Just the hint of my tears was a little too much for my daughter: “Mommy, you’re killin’ me.”

Yet, it was all so perfect, beyond our wildest dreams, in every way: the weather, our joy at being together, the party afterwards.

The speeches were quite inspiring as well, especially after such a year. They made me proud, prouder than I ever thought I could or would be; I’d never particularly aspired to have a lawyer in the family. Too many bad lawyer jokes, you know what I mean?

But the speeches referred to and reminded me of people like Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the power of the law in a good way and the power of a single lawyer or judge to effect change or to at least have an influence. We know that it matters which justices fill our Supreme Court—very much!

Of course, first in the order of things in a graduation is hearing the national anthem.

Now, I’ve always been the kind of person who wasn’t so sure about standing for the national anthem, and I definitely don’t put my hand on my chest.

It’s not that I don’t love my country. I just have a hard time with nationalism.

Every morning over the past week, the school behind my apartment building has been preparing the children for their graduation. I can see them and hear the music blasting. First, it’s America the Beautiful, followed by the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, and then a song from The Greatest Showman, which I’d never heard before, but which my younger daughter “hates” (because some people she knows are “obsessed” with it).

All this seems very much aligned with the Torah reading this week, though. (I was actually wondering if I should name this blog post “Canaan the Beautiful,” but settled on “Oh, Say Can You See.”)

On to the Torah portion, Shlach Lecha, where twelve spies are sent into the land of Canaan, the Promised Land, to scout it out and bring back the news of what kind of place it is; is it indeed a land flowing with milk and honey? What are the people like? What are the cities and towns like? What about the trees? How’s the fruit? Bring some back so we can see!

Upon the scouts’ return, everything’s going great until a couple of them start to spread rumors—wait: are they rumors, or did they start to wonder if what they’d seen was truly as wonderful as they’d thought, or were they imagining things? Was it too good to be true? Did they get scared and start to question the ability of their own people to overcome the people of this other land? (Ah, that good old nationalism: the thing that inspires people to cross oceans, barge in, go to war and take over other lands. This is where it gets sticky for me.)

Whatever it was, their reports of giants in the land that are way too big to confront is taken as blasphemy. God is furious (again); How dare they doubt “Him?” They will be punished; their generation will not be allowed to see or enter the Promised Land!

These are, one could say, the dissenting voices. Should they be allowed to speak? This is what America the Beautiful is based on, right?—Oh, wait, I forgot—we’re not talking about America, we’re talking about the Bible!

Yet the question remains. When does it become dangerous to allow “Free Speech,” and when is it important for a healthy society? We all know what hate speech has done over the past years, causing people to question not only the idea of quarantining and mask-wearing, but even our elections.

This week, we are also remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre, a crime that was not only supported by local law enforcement at the time, but kept secret for many years. Which voices won out there?

It turns out that “saying anything you want” was actually not the original idea behind Free speech after all, which referred to not having to get a permit or pay a government fee in order to print your ideas.

In fact, speaking of the law and judges, the way we talk and think about Free Speech and the First Amendment today comes from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Holmes, with roots in the Civil War, was very much in favor of shutting dissenting voices down in favor of a good cause—like ending slavery. He believed very much in pumping people up with nationalism for the sake of the “right” ideas winning out and shutting down the voices that could threaten that, kind of like what we think of when we talk about World War II and the need to overcome the Nazis.

But all that changed for him in the 1920’s, when he was willing to admit that, “We’ve been wrong before and we’ll likely be wrong again.”

Justice Holmes coined the phrase, “Marketplace of Ideas,” imagining, like a “Free Market,” that the Truth would win out. But both a Free Market and a Marketplace of Ideas assume that everyone has the same resources and that everyone’s microphone is the same size.

Holmes also said, “Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge.” Was Holmes talking about the American justice system, or was he talking about the prophecy in the Torah and this week’s reading?

Either way, I love the words of the song “A Million Dreams,” from The Greatest Showman, whatever my daughter says:

I close my eyes and I can see
The world that's waiting up for me
That I call my own
Through the dark, through the door
Through where no one's been before
But it feels like home

They can say, they can say it all sounds crazy
They can say, they can say I've lost my mind
I don't care, I don't care, so call me crazy
We can live in a world that we design

'Cause every night I lie in bed
The brightest colors fill my head
A million dreams are keeping me awake
I think of what the world could be
A vision of the one I see
A million dreams is all it's gonna take
Oh a million dreams for the world we're gonna make

We can keep dreaming of fulfilling the prophecy—but for all the world: a world where nationalism and national anthems are not necessary in order to reach the Promised Land. (Can you see it?)

Because we have the power to design the world we want, through our speech and our actions—as long as we keep what is sacred in sight.

And if there’s anything we’ve learned this year, I hope it’s that we know what’s sacred. I certainly felt it on graduation day.