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A Blessing in Four Worlds

2/23/2021

Last month I had the honor of being invited to help confer smikhah (rabbinic ordination) on my dear friend and colleague, the amazing Rabbi Irwin Keller. Irwin had spent several years studying in the ALEPH rabbinic program and many, many years before that serving as the spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati, California.

He also happens to be a lawyer, an amazing singer/musician, and a beautiful writer--see his blog!--and for years he toured the world as a member of the comedic and politically trenchant drag quartet, The Kinsey Sicks. I wanted to offer Irwin a blessing on the day of his ordination that would honor the work he has done in the world, uplifting, cheering, educating and comforting so many souls, and to offer him strength and courage for the continuing work of holding both his local and his extended communities. What emerged was a blessing that invokes the qualities of each of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah: Assiyah, the world of Doing and physicality; Yetzirah, the world of Formation and emotional flow; Bri'ah, the world of Thought and imagination; and Atzilut, the world of Spiritual Presence. In our current covid-driven reality, ordination happened on zoom, with all ordinees and witnesses in our own homes, connecting electronically across the globe. Prior to the ceremony, I was invited into a zoom breakout room, where I offered Irwin this blessing. He has encouraged me to share it more broadly, so here it is. May it support us all in the various ways that we serve and heal in this complex world.

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Why I write

10/17/2020

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Last weekend I participated in a day-long women's movement-and-writing retreat with yogi, writer, and teacher Anne Cushman. If you don't know Anne's work, I highly recommend it, especially her recent memoir, The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood. The day (on-line, of course) was billed, "Write Your Way Home" and began with a period of movement practice, followed by a number of timed writings and sharing of our work in small groups. The very first writing prompt, "I write because....," unleashed a flood of emotion in me and the two other women who shared their work with me and witnessed mine. In this time of global dissolution, grief and fear, how poignant it is to free one's own voice; to share pain, hope, memory with other women, strangers who swiftly become comforters, confidantes, and mentors; to bless one another's words and tears.

I write because

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Standing Prayer

6/15/2020

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It has been a wild two weeks of despair and hope in the world--the spiral upward of covid deaths, the murder of George Floyd in the wake of so many other murders and lynchings of black Americans, the intensity of protests and uprisings against this ongoing racial violence all over the world, the meeting of peaceful protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, police in riot gear clubbing and arresting those marching in the streets for human rights and respect and decency. And there has been dancing, heart-wrenching expressions of pain, and singing and wailing and mourning, and then more organizing. This past Shabbat I participated in a morning service with the Aquarian Minyan, in honor of the 80th birthday of one of the Minyan's longtime leaders, Shoshana Dembitz. Invited to give a kavannah, an intention for the Amidah, the time of silent communion with the deep self and with the Divine, which precedes the reading of Torah in the traditional order of the prayer service, I offered these words...

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A Poem for L'ag b'Omer

5/12/2020

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Dear Friends,
We've turned the corner in our Omer counting journey for 5780––away, we pray, from the sorrows and oppressions of enslavement, and toward the gift of revelation, the space of spiritual intimacy that, in our ancient Torah tradition, is known, simply, as "Sinai." Last week, as I contemplated what I might present duringe ALEPH's L'ag b'Omer women-led extravaganza, organized and stewarded last night by Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael and her stellar team [available for viewing here], this poem emerged. May the energies of this season conduct us toward a time of less fear and urgency, more ease and peace and just distribution of the riches of our world--a deep integration of Torah wisdom.
Khag sameyakh,
Diane

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Rosh Hodesh Prayer

3/27/2020

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We enter this new Hebrew month of Nisan––the month of spring, the month in which Jews the world over recall our liberation from the constriction of the "narrow spaces" of enslavement––in a state that, for many of us, seems to be mightily constricted. Some of us are quarantined at home. Some of us are sick; some very sick. Others of us are constrained to move into the public sphere, to risk our own well-being as we perform jobs deemed essential to the continued functioning of society and to the well-being of the rest of us: farm workers and those involved in food production, grocery store workers, bus operators, communications workers, and most crucially, health care workers. How can a time of such restriction, fear, grief, and constraint be perceived and known in any way as a liberatory passage? as a birthing, hedged all around by the possibility--and the reality--of dying? At Passover seders, as we retell the ancient story of slavery and liberation, we often ask, who are the Pharaoh's of our time? How does Pharaoh live within each of us? What are the plagues of our time? How do we perpetuate or participate in them? What transformation is called for, and how do we open to receive its energies and help manifest new structures in the world?

I'll also be asking these are other questions this year,

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