Ḥazak, Ḥazak, v’Nit’ḥazek:  Building Spiritual Strength in a Broken World
 - offered by Rabbi Diane Elliot Erev Rosh Hashanah 5785 ~ October 2, 2024
at The Aquarian Minyan, Berkeley, California
 
L’shanah tovah, my friends, l’shanah tovah. I speak those words tonight with the full force of my deepest, most urgent longing, praying, hoping with my whole heart for a good year, a better year ahead. 
 
This has been a year of dreadful loss. Many of you may remember that I last stood before this community on the Friday night of the Aquarian Minyan’s Golden Jubilee Shabbaton back in June, the night before my beloved husband, Rabbi Burt Jacobson of blessed memory, one of the Minyan’s early leaders, passed from this world. My deepest heartfelt thanks for all your support and messages of comfort during this very sad time. This past year we’ve also mourned Marty Potrop and Abigail Grafton, two of the Minyan’s g’dolim, and just within the past month, we’ve lost two more of the founding generation of Jewish Renewal leaders, the brilliant and complicated Rabbi Michael Lerner and the great hazzan and teacher Jack Kessler, zikronam liv’rakhah. May all these souls be lifted up. May the blessings they bestowed be amplified and any pain they caused be washed away, leaving only healing and the gifts of their lives to bless us moving forward. 
 
As we’re all painfully aware, there’s a much longer litany of loss in this past year. Hamas’s vicious October 7th attack on the southern Israeli kibbutzim and Nova music festival goers turned a day of rejoicing, the culmination of the High Holy Day cycle, into a nightmare of shock and horror. Twelve hundred Israelis brutally slaughtered, many more injured or taken hostage, and since then, an estimated more than 40,000 Gazans killed, many of them civilian women and children. The heart-shattering murders of Israeli hostages, the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, and now yesteray’s massive, terrifying missile attack on Israeli cities. In our country, an explosion of antisemitism, strife on college campuses, the looming prospect of a frighteningly uncertain presidential election in November––one in which a candidate with a proven track record of inciting violence has lately declared that, if he loses, it will be the fault of the Jews. And globally, the collapse of ecosystems, fast-spreading wild fires, increasingly violent storms, floods, earthquakes, famine, whole species dying, people displaced….
 
Waves of grief wash over me, flashes of anger, stabs of fear. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been holding my breath this whole year. Meh’ayin, meh’ayin yavo ezri, from where, from where will help come? From where will our strength come, the strength to carry on, to fight for the values we hold so dear—truth, justice, peace––to respond effectively to the certain challenges ahead, to acknowledge and celebrate ha-nisekhah sheh-b’khol yom imanu, the ongoing daily miracles of our lives? The miraculous improbability of life at all, here on our beauteous, beleaguered planet Earth?
 
In his book On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old,
the author, activist, and educator Parker Palmer writes:
 
Suffering breaks our hearts, but the heart can break in two different ways. There's the brittle heart that breaks into shards, shattering the one who suffers as it explodes, and sometimes taking others down when it's thrown like a grenade at the ostensible source of its pain. Then there's the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, the one that can grow into greater capacity for the many forms of love. Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.
 
In this time of polycrisis, it is this supple strength of heart and mind to which we are being called, the kind of strength embodied in the soft, open, readiness of the tai chi fist, a strength that is determined, focused, flexible, and resilient. A strength that defies the myth of isolation, the primacy of the single strongman or superwoman, president or commander-in-chief. A strength welling up from the earth, pouring down from the heavens, shining through every molecule, every cell of Creation––HavaYah, Shekhinah, HaMakom. A strength manifest through community, like the faithful circles of giant redwoods, these havurot of the forest, the world’s tallest, oldest trees, whose roots entwine in a sturdy web of collective support and care, teaching us invaluable lessons in mutuality, endurance, and longevity.
 
So, short of planting ourselves in a garden of Minyanites and sprouting a tangle of intermingled roots to keep one another from toppling over––though we can certainly show up for Shabbats in Bob Jaffe’s magical garden––how shall we support one another to incubate the special strength that these extraordinary times are calling forth? 
 
In his book on teshuvah, Reclaiming the Self, Rav DovBer Pinson writes, “Teshuvah is a movement of awareness towards a full-recognition of all-embracing unity, towards one’s own essential self, and towards the Source and Essence of all life… a recalibration of consciousness.”  
 
Seen in this way, teshuvah, the process of return, the essential movement of these Days of Awe, requires a shift in consciousness, a change in the way we think, in the way we are seeing the world, ourselves and one another. The liturgy—the prayers and Torah texts that we encounter during these Holy Days—spotlight some potent shifts of vision, moments of heart-strengthening that reveal how we might “hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.”
 
Tomorrow morning, for instance, we’ll read the story of Hagar, cast into the wilderness with her son Ishmael and who, dying of thirst, abandons the boy beneath a bush and raises her voice in a hopeless wail. At just that moment a Voice calls out to her from heaven, a messenger of God, telling her to get up, to lift up her son and to grasp his hand--v’haḥaziki et yadekh bo—literally, strengthen your hand through him. And when Hagar does this, when she takes Ishmael’s hand, lifts him up, and reconnects in that maternal bond with her son, her eyes are opened and she is able to see the well of water that saves their lives.
 
On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we’ll hear the terrifying tale of Isaac’s near-sacrifice at the hands of his father Abraham, when, just as the knife is raised to do this awful thing, a Voice again calls out from heaven, a messenger of YHVH, from the side of Hesed, the loving aspect of Divinity, saying “Abraham, stop! You’ve gone far enough!” And at that moment, Abraham raises his eyes, and behold! Ayil aḥar ne’eḥaz ba-s’vakh b’karnav, he sees a different ram, a replacement for his son, caught––literally grasped, same verb, ne’eḥaz––by its horns in the thicket. In that moment, Abraham is able to see differently, from a different angle––or in the Baal Shem Tov’s reading, he calls forth a different vision of divinity, raising up the compassionate side of God.
 
There are many ways to read these stories, but tonight I’m hearing them as tales of radical teshuvah, of the complete surrender of self, the cracking of an outworn identity, that allows a shift in consciousness, a different vision, and a new kind of strength to be born. This teshuvahis an antidote to despair; it gives agency. It changes the way we are in the world, and so it changes the way the world is.
 
One more bit of instruction comes to us from the last verses of Psalm 27, the signature psalm of the High Holy Day season, traditionally recited daily from the 1st of Elul through Sh’mini Atzeret. Filled with affirmations of faith and appeals for Divine protection in times of danger and distress, this powerful psalm concludes:
 
לוּלֵא הֶאֱמַנְתִּי לִרְאוֹת בְּטוּב־יְהֹוָה בְּאֶרֶץ חַיִּים:
Would that I had the faith to see God’s goodness—literally, to see the goodness of the Ongoing-Process-of-Being––while I’m alive.
 
And the final verse:
קַוֵּה אֶל־יְהוָה חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יְהֹוָה:
Direct your hope toward YHVH, get a grip—there’s that hazak again--hazak v’ya-ametz libekha: Get a grip, strengthen your heart, and direct your hope toward YHVH!
 
In other words, while we’re here on this Earth, let us choose to see through the eyes of faith. Let us school ourselves to see the good. Let us lean into Divine support, as we encourage each other to remember and celebrate goodness, amidst all that weighs on our minds and hearts. Let us remember our own goodness, our capacity to choose, to change our minds and our actions, which is perhaps our greatest strength as humans. Let us be strong, strong, and strengthen each other, practicing together suppleness of spirit and open-heartedness, alive to the pain of this world, not naïve, not minimizing the gravity of our situation; nevertheless, strengthening our minds to commit to hope, to work toward change, to live in service of the miraculousness of this existence during these precious moments in time that we share. So that somehow, despite all odds, it may be for us, for our world, a shanah tovah. 

Forgetting, Remembering, Belonging and Compassion -
offered by Rabbi Diane Elliot - Yom Kippur 5785 ~ October 12, 2024
​Kehilla Community Synagogue, Oakland, California
 
L’shanah tovah. I’m so honored to be here on this most holy day, to pray with you, to sing with you, and now to speak with you. Some of you know me as the wife of Kehilla’s founder, Rabbi Burt Jacobson of blessed memory. Some of you know me as a rabbi, teacher, and spiritual director in Jewish Renewal. Some of you know me as both, and some not at all. 
 
For those who are receiving today’s service primarily through your ears, I stand here on the bima, a woman of medium height, pronouns she/her, wrapped in a great, flowing white silk prayer shawl, with pale skin and short brown hair, a former dancer now creakily bordering on old age, wearing reading glasses, which I may repeatedly take off or put back on, because I can’t tell if they make any difference.
 
I don’t have to tell you—because we’ve said it over and over during these holy days, and because your bones know it—that this has been a hard, sad, gut-wrenching, heart-stopping, awful year—in the world, and for me personally. Caring for Burt at home during his illness, a choice we made together, was a great honor, a profound learning, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done. He passed away on a brilliantly sunny Shabbat morning, exactly 16 weeks ago today. I feel his spirit here with us now, hovering over his regular front row seat (where I’ve been sitting during services), blessing us, and kvelling.
 
I’m going to speak about remembering and forgetting, belonging and compassion in a very personal way today. It ws hard for me to write this talk. Part of what made it so hard to write, to even think clearly, besides grief, is my trepidation about stepping on people’s hearts. I live more from feeling than from theory, and to be authentic to my own lived experience, I can’t pretend to be different than I am––a white Ashkenazi second-generation American-born Jew, a child of the 1940’s and ‘50’s, who has spent much of my life reclaiming my ethnicities and addressing stuck trauma responses––distressing symptoms in my body and mind––and feeling “other” (if not “othered”), even within my privilege. 
 
Yom Kippur is a day of viddui, of truth telling, and also a day of selichot, of offering and receiving forgiveness. Maybe some of my experience will resonate with yours, maybe not. I humbly ask your forgiveness if anything I share inadvertently excludes or hurts you or makes you feel othered.  
 
Last night Rabbi Dev asked us to attend closely for a few minutes to what it feels like in our bodies when we sit in the judgment seat, and how it feels to move to the seat of raḥamim, of compassion. Today I want to ask a different but related question: what does it feel like—how does it feel, in your body­­—to belong? How do you know when you belong somewhere? Is it a mind state or more of a felt bodily sense? A combination? Take a moment and maybe remember a time or a place when you felt real belonging. Maybe you feel that here, now. Does your belly relax, do you feel welcomed, comfortable, settled, seen? Like you can let your guard down? This is a question that I’ve long asked myself, because, though I’ve been part of many groups, many communities, even communities I’ve co-created, in some way I’ve never really felt that I truly belonged. Anywhere. My body-mind has never felt fully “home.” 
 
Maybe the fact of having lived at five different addresses by the time I turned four and having moved many times since then has something to do with that. Or the fact of being highly sensitive. I am the eldest of four children, born in 1949, at the end of a devastating decade, to a dad who had fought in Italy in World War II and dropped his last name, Goldstein, after experiencing virulent antisemitism in the army, and a mom who, when she was only six, lost her own mother to septicemia in the aftermath of an abortion. While I enjoyed many advantages growing up in white, privileged, upper-middle-class suburbia, unprocessed trauma permeated our household. (Think Ordinary People, only Jewish.) 
 
In 1956 a 24-year-old British auto-didact named Colin Wilson shot to instant fame with the publication of his landmark monograph, The Outsider, a study of the archetypal alienated white male in western literature and art. I and so many of my cohort consciously or unconsciously embraced that archetype, rejecting the “establishment,” our parents’ values, their economic and lifestyle choices. We became the “counterculture,” cool, hip, free, mobilized––or perhaps more accurately demobilized­­––by the phrase coined by psychedelics guru Timothy Leary, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Out. Far out.
 
Dressed in tie-dyed tank tops and homemade bell bottoms, cutting our teeth on marijuana and hashish and those little blue pills, professing free love, grooving to hard rock and folkie protest music, we tried in our own self-absorbed way to say, “Enough already!” Enough of war and bloodshed, enough of genocide and victimhood! Enough of racism and police brutality, of sexism and conformism and every ism! Who would want to belong in a world like that? 
 
But even on the outside, I felt outside. Not able to tolerate drugs—when I smoked a joint, I didn’t get a high, just a cold––not feeling so free about loving or sex, not wanting to get beat up by burly Ann Arbor cops or shot at by the National Guard, I nevertheless engaged in my own hot critique of the materialistic suburbia I’d grown up in. I wrote bitter poetry, made jagged dances, and moved from one roach-infested New York City tenement to another, living the dancer’s bohemian life––but not truly leaving the “home” I grew up in, still benefiting from my middle-class whiteness, even as I rejected it.
 
Maybe it wasn’t just coming of age in the 1960’s, in the long shadow of war and holocaust, that shattered my sense of belonging. Maybe it was a much older strain of outsider-itis, rooted deep in the soil of my Jewish and Israelite lineages, exemplified in those archetypal figures who populate our sacred scriptures: Abraham, who’s told to leave behind kith and kin, jettison his cultural attachments, to follow an all-powerful Deity; or his son, Isaac, who is nearly sacrificed to that God; cunning Jacob, who risks everything to steal his brother’s blessing and then must flee for his life; and his son, Joseph, so hated by his brothers that they vow to kill him, but instead end up selling him into slavery in Egypt, where he rises to power but remains ever the outsider. 
 
And what about Moses, perhaps the ultimate exemplar of identity confusion—a Hebrew baby, adopted by an Egyptian princess, who grows up in a palace, separated from his enslaved blood family, until he suddenly realizes he is not of that place, kills an abusive slave-master, and must run for his life to the wilderness? Outsiders, all! Did any of them—or their sisters, wives, daughters--ever feel that they belonged? How did they experience community? Learn to care for their fellow beings? 
 
Love the stranger, our scriptures remind us over and over, because you were strangers! You know the heart of the stranger! And perhaps in the set of our nervous systems, in our epigenetic legacy, strangers we remain. Perhaps this is the “land” we’ve inherited, exiles even in the spaces of belonging we strive so hard to create.  
 
A story: while living in Minneapolis in the 1990’s, I joined a Jewish Renewal havurah. After a year, a conflict broke out over who should lead the group, and our little community imploded. People stopped speaking to one another; the group scattered, leaving people bereft. A small contingent of us met for nine months, trying to knit things back together. When that effort failed, I invited whoever wanted to, to join me in addressing the question, why do Jewish communities so often blow up in conflict? Why do we so often turn on our leaders and on each other? 
 
Seventeen people signed up. Looking for a place to gather, I realized I didn’t feel comfortable meeting in any Jewish space in town, the synagogues or the JCC. So I met with the director of the Powderhorn Phillips Cultural Wellness Center, a space established by visionary women of color, dedicated to promoting well-being of body, mind, and spirit for folks in one of Minneapolis’s poorest neighborhoods. “We’re Jews. We’re not poor and we’re white,” I told her (there were no people of color in our havurah). “But we’re wounded and unwell. Our communities don’t cohere. We don’t know how to love ourselves or each other.” She cried with me and invited us in. When we arrived for our first meeting, we found that someone had put a mezuzah up on the wall near the door, alongside the African, Hmong, and Indigenous American cultural symbols. We felt welcomed.
 
Each month for over a year, we sat in a circle, read, talked, told our family stories, invoked our ancestors. I brought my background as a dancer, contact improviser, somatic therapist, and mindfulness practitioner to facilitating the group. I’ll never forget one session when I suggested that we try a simple movement exercise: to hold a partner’s hands and support them to squat. I explained that there’s a reflex, the tendon guard reflex, in which all the muscles of the back side of the body contract in readiness to fight or flee. When a person is carrying unprocessed trauma, this fight/flight response can get stuck in the body, making it hard to squat, much less stand on the ground, receiving earth’s full support.  
 
As people partnered up, holding one another’s hands, sinking toward the floor (we were younger then!), I began to hear sobbing. Words spontaneously poured out, a jumble of stories of parents and grandparents forced from their homes, running for their lives in the night, no ground to stand on, no place to belong. This went on for a long time. We tried to witness—to withness––one another. Some of us couldn’t even stand to be touched or held in our grief.
 
Every year, shortly before High Holy Days on the Shabbat of Parashat Ki Tetzei in the Book of Deuteronomy, and again on Shabbat Zakhor, one of the special Shabbats leading up to Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, these words are
traditionally read in synagogues all over the world: 
בַּדֶּרֶךְ בְּצֵאתְכֶם מִמִּצְרָיִם: עֲמָלֵק לְךָ זָכוֹר אֵת אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂה
Remember what the Amalekite people did to you on your way out of Egypt, how they attacked you from the rear, your weary ones, your elderly, your women and children. So, when you are settled in a safe place, the Land that YHVH is giving you as an inheritance — תִּמְחֶה אֶת־זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמָיִם––wipe the memory of Amalek from off the face of the Earth, לֹא תִּשְׁכָּח: –– don’t forget!
 
This is not the club of memory I want to belong to. Yet if I am somehow a de facto member of this club, this club of the long memory of betrayal and persecution, of attack and retaliation wired into my very nervous system––amygdala, hippocampus, cerebellum––how can I simply choose to resign and join another club, one that doesn’t require me to fear and exclude and wipe out the memories of other people, even the ones who have hurt me? 
 
Or is this verse possibly saying something else? That when we’re settled, when we have rest from surrounding enemies, when we have some space to breathe, a modicum of safety, we need to remember to forget our fears and enmities, to process them through and to release ourselves from the trauma matrix, so that we don’t unconsciously act out on others the hurts we sustained? So that we can remember to re-member that we humans are all members of the same club, all indigenous to this Earth? 
 
What I’ve learned is that in order to do that very difficult thing––to remember to forget in order to remember––which is teshuvah––I have to be willing to face my own shadow, face it squarely, and grapple with the fear that binds me beneath the level of consciousness, the way Jacob wrestled with the dark angel of his own fear and jealousy. We have to wrestle with the instinct to “other” that lives in our bodies, in the very set of our nervous systems, our hair-trigger reactivities. We have to be willing to hang out with uncomfortable bodily states, to support one another in bringing consciousness to those scabbed-over, unhealed wounds that subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—isolate us, leave us feeling alone, bereft, hungry for contact, distant from Spirit. Only by attending deeply to the ways our pain has bound us upon the altar of the wrong god and caused us, in turn, to pain others, can we hope to fully belong here on this earth, in this community, in this room, and to thrive together.
 
Part of what drew Burt and me together was that we recognized in one another a fellow outsider, someone dissatisfied with the way things are, who lives outside the box, who sees what could be and advocates and works for that. But while the “classic” Outsider in white western culture retreats into themself and focuses on self-realization through self-expression, Rabbi Burt, though in many ways a product of his times, broke that mold. After many years of grappling with his own inner demons––something I got to witness at close range––he chose to envision a space, a structure, that would support not only his own, but other people’s expression, a community of and for “outsiders,” a community sensitized to the basic human need to belong, yet not predicated on others’ non-belonging: a Synagogue Without Walls, a real space, and also a holy aspiration, a mandate to gently, with compassion, dismantle our inner walls and so grow our capacity, our tolerance for living in loving community. A synagogue where he himself and others might find a home and aspire and act together to bring about a better, more compassionate, more inclusive reality. He did so with the religious sensibility of a prophet, the esthetic sensitivity of an artist, and the social urgency of an activist. His vision, his invitation, has opened up space for others—for each of us—to bring our gifts, to practice being human together. 
 
When Rabbi Burt saw that Kehilla was well launched, now in its third and fourth and fifth generations of leadership––active, alive, multi-generational, becoming more and more fully diverse, gradually over the years building itself into a true “caring community,”––he felt at peace, he felt he had accomplished his life’s work—though he still had one final burst of ambition, and that was to complete his writing on the Baal Shem Tov. 
 
Because, as Rabbi Dev shared on Rosh Hashanah, for Burt, the Baal Shem Tov represented the fountainhead of compassion, of love, of non-judging acceptance, the portal to a Jewish spiritual path focused not on surviving as a nation nor on wiping Amalek from the face of the earth, but on rebuilding the sacred Temple of the human heart. And whether or not the Baal Shem was a deeply flawed human being—and Burt believed that he was, and that grappling with his own flaws in a religious context was the very source of the Besht’s spiritual power—we Renewal Jews have chosen the Besht’s lineage of love and compassion. This is where we situate ourselves, where we belong. This is the superpower that drives us toward honoring the brilliance of our differences and, at the same time, recognizing the intrinsic Source of our oneness.
 
The great 20th century prophet, James Baldwin, wrote, “Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can be felt….”  
 
We come together on these High Holy Days, and especially on Yom Kippur, naked and empty-handed, eyn banu ma’asim, to enter as clear-eyed as we can into the vortex of uncertainty––“Who shall live and who shall die….”––to join together in the great symphony of living/dying, to tune our instruments to the key of compassion, and to loosen our cherished identities, so that as agudat aḥat, a unified kehilla, we can feel our belonging to one another and help one another swim in the strong current of grief and love ever flowing through the great Ocean of existence. 
 
Let us remember and imprint the feeling of this Day of Atonement when, for a little while, we strip off the beautiful clothing of our individual selves, our identities, and float together in the vast Sea of Compassion, so that when we dress again, our clothes are just a little looser, there’s a little more space to breathe, a little more breath to share with one another.

This D'var Torah, offered  B"H at the Aquarian Minyan Erev Rosh HaShanah service, September 15, 2023 / 1 Tishrei 5784, responds to the community's theme for these High Holy Days: A Sacred Future Summons Us.

Shanah tovah. Here we are. We arrive again at Rosh Hashanah, the Head of the Year, the celebration of the birth humanity. Maybe we’re battered, clearly the worse for wear, but we are here—still here together. Hallelujah!  
 
Maybe you’ve been engaged these past seven weeks since Tisha B’Av, or these past four weeks of Elul, in teshuvah, the spiritual and emotional work of returning to essence, to core values, cleaning up your human relationships in order to be square with God. All our efforts notwithstanding, I would guess that we each arrive here tonight in some degree of what our tradition might describe as “tamei.”
 
The Hebrew word tamei is difficult to define. It’s a biblical category, often translated as “impure.” Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank z”l, a teacher for so many of us, spoke of tamei as a “state of  being “tainted by death residue.” Many of us have lost loved ones during this past year, even in this past week, and our hearts are with you. Tamei. Many of us feel the encroaching ills of body and mind as the breath of death approaching. Tamei. And as we continue to experience and to witness waves of covid, climate disasters, burgeoning gun violence, police brutality, prison violence, racial hatred, war, human trafficking, and ultimately the extinction of life form after life form from our precious planet—it seems that we all find ourselves smudged with death residue –tamei, tamei!
 
I’ve heard that the human organism responds to the presence of the dying and the dead with a natural recoil, an instinctive drawing away. Rabbi Alan Lew related that when he would visit sick congregants, before entering the hospital or the hospice room, he would pause at the threshold, willing himself to overcome his trepidation so that he could be fully present with the suffering or dying person in that room. 
 
I think that Reb Dovid was suggesting that “tamei” was the word our ancestors used to describe this instinctive recoil. To be tamei signifies a kind of shutdown, a sense of being separated from the Whole, cut off from the ongoing stream of life. Tamei names our primal terror of not-being, a fear that freezes the soul, tunnels our vision, chokes off gratitude, and silences praise.
 
Our ancient ancestors deemed a person in a state of tamei unfit to enter the holy Temple environs. Torah tells us in great detail about the metzorah, a person afflicted with a contagious skin ailment. Tamei! Purification required spending time in quarantine, outside the camp, until the symptoms resolved and the High Priest could declare the person tahor, recovered, pure, one hundred percent “back.” The Kohen would then perform a ritual, an animal sacrifice and a dabbing of blood and oil on the ears, thumbs and big toes of the healed person, to welcome them back into the community, into Wholeness, holiness. Tahor.
 
We now know collectively what it’s like to be quarantined,  to be “outside the camp.” We who have been ill, maybe housebound, know how painful, how isolating the “brush with death” can be. Confined to our homes, unable to gather in public spaces, to be together in community, we shrivel. In our Zoom-saavy age, we’ve learned to overcome some of this debilitating isolation through technology. But we don’t always know how to transform our tamei-ness, to return to wholeness, to become tahor. 
 
We’ve lost touch with the power of those ancient purification rituals, the body-and-soul cleansing of the mikveh, the priestly ceremonies of reentry and rededication. Though in many ways our technology connects us—and thank God, so many of you can be here tonight with us on Zoom—that same technology, misused, abused, makes us even more isolated, as many choose to stay in our homes, doing more and more of our relating on flat, two-dimensional screens. Our world becomes more fractured as lies and vitriol spread through social media and passionately held untruths fuel people’s fear and hatred of one another.
 
Teshuvah in these death-saturated days is of a whole other order. Personal heshbon ha-nefesh, taking stock of my own life, righting my personal relationships is not enough. Now something more global is needed—ongoing processes, daily, hourly, sometimes breath by breath, ways to cleanse my body, refresh my mind, energize myself to take up again and again the small tasks that may cumulatively, collectively lead us toward a renewed world and allow us, please God, to hear and to respond to the call of a Sacred Future.

It's taught that our season of teshuvah actually begins with Tisha b’Av, our national day of mourning. We fast. We scrape down to the bottom of our souls, we pray without melody or feeling. We give ourselves a chance to recognize the inner deadness we have allowed to engulf us, and that recognition  is the beginning of our return to wholeness. 
 
The tears of grief we shed for ourselves, our beloveds, and our Earth wash us clean. They are our mikveh. We chant from the Book of Lamentations, “Shifkhi kha-mayim, kha-mayim libeykh nokhakh p’nei HaShem, Pour out your heart like water before the Mystery.” Weep in the face of the Mysteries we cannot solve, before the Great Mysterious Story of our Cosmos, which we can only glimpse in snatches. Our tears of loss, our wails of grief are the purifying waters, the very waters that begin to render us tahor.
 
Dr. Lewis Gordon, a Jew of color and distinguished scholar, writes, "What many don’t understand about the loss of those we love is their irreplaceability. To love is to see in those we love each day the ongoing possibility of life…. To lose those we love is to experience the shattering of our world, which, for some of us, is identical with losing the world."
 
Surely, we are daily losing our world as we have known it. And yet, just as surely, in the secret spaces of the soil, beneath the surface of the oceans, and in the depths of the hearts and minds of human beings seeking and loving life, the world is being rebuilt, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, breath by breath. Nothing lost, nothing wasted. We, then, become the imaginal cells, carrying the template of the butterfly-to-be during the complete dissolution of the caterpillar in its delicate cocoon. 
 
Those cells are the seeds of the Sacred World to come, its beauty and its Mystery. They carry the ancestral DNA of an ethical world, a world founded on the human capacity for empathy, kindness, and the kind of radical love in which, in Dr. Gordon’s words, we “take responsibility for responsibility itself,” in which we humbly know ourselves as part of nature and all humanity, part of a larger ecology of Wholeness. Those seeds have been here all along, are here now, in each one of us, sustaining us even and perhaps especially in our brushes with death, in our losses. 
 
We come together on Rosh Hashanah each year to celebrate the imaginal cells that we are, to remember the Whole that we are part of, to reaffirm our love, our commitment, to bless one another with the capacity to remember, so that we can, literally or imaginally, drop to our knees and lie on our bellies on the Earth on the afternoon of Yom Kippur and rejoice in the High Priest’s cry of Tahor! So that we can remember that this is not a once-a-year moment, but a daily sacred charge, to nurture those imaginal cells within, to keep them alive and pass them on.
 
In the final verses of his masterful poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden speaks to this necessary process, a ritual of remembrance and healing, if you will. Written in 1939 on the precipice of World War II and the Sho’ah, these verses affirm the power of poetry to cleanse and heal us. As you take in Auden's immortal words, feel how profoundly resonant they remain, more than 80 years after he wrote them:  

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of our days
Teach the freed ones how to praise.

Hearing these verses, we can each ask ourselves, what is my poetry? What is my art, my prayer, my faith, my work, my play, my joy? What is the part of me that remains tahor, life-focused, begging to be discovered, recovered, resuscitated, eager to answer the summons of the sacred future? 

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of our days
Teach the freed ones how to praise.

Keyn yehi ratzon, may it be so. May fountains of healing spring from our broken-open hearts and praise pour from our mouths, as we turn to face the year ahead. May this be, truly, a shanah tovah.

So does the commanding voice of the prophet Isaiah call out to us across the millennia, breaking through apathy and despair with words of relief and release: “Nachamu, nachamu ami, comfort, comfort, my people!”[i]—the very first words of the first of seven special haftarah readings marking what are called the Seven Shabbatot of Comfort. 
 
Back in August, some seven weeks ago, these words launched the journey of teshuvah, of return, that has led us to this Rosh HaShanah eve. We begin our trek amidst the ruins of the Holy Temple on Tisha B’Av, that day of harsh remembrance, when we acknowledge and grieve utter destruction beyond comprehension—repeated losses of security and safety, of love and life and home—the flavors of loss that we as Jews know so well and that are now rampant in our world as war and political violence, hunger and climate disasters displace people from Pakistan to Ukraine, from Somalia to Guatemala. 
 
There on Tisha b’Av, sitting year after year in the very ashes of our lives, we begin the journey home, the journey toward Rosh HaShanah, and the possibility of a new beginning. The prophet’s words, traditionally chanted on that first Shabbat after Tisha B’Av, soak like a healing balm into our shattered souls [sing]: “Naḥamu, naḥamu naḥamu ami….” 
 
Isaiah’s next words cut through the numb silence of desolation and disconnection: “Kol koreh ba-midbar”––a voice cries out in the wilderness, a saving voice, an urgent voice, waking us from a seemingly endless nightmare of pain and loss––a voice that sparks in our souls the dream of teshuvah, the possibility of return to innocence, to sanity, to connection: “p’anui derekh HaShem, clear a way, a path for God! ki mal’ah tz’va’ah, for your time of exile is over.”[ii]
 
Here we are, my friends––another Rosh Hashanah, we’ve made it! Thank God, we are here together to buoy one another up and to celebrate the turning of the year, the possibility of transforming pain, of lifting up joy, of expanding love, of reconnecting with Essence and making a fresh start. The theme that weaves through our prayers and songs, the yearnings of our hearts this year— “Awaken and Cry Out for Justice!”—calls us to a wider, more expansive kind of teshuvah, a generous teshuvah that extends beyond the repair of our inner selves and personal relationships and demands of us a commitment to people outside our circles of family and friends, to generations yet unborn, and to the larger unfolding of our world. 
 
This is a time to wake up, the Sages tell us, to the truth of our lives, to strip the blinders from our inner eyes, so that we can see ourselves and the world more clearly, more truly, so that our voices can ring out strong and pure, calling out injustice and evil where we see it. “Uri, uri, shir daberi, wake up, wake up, utter a song! Kavod YHVH alayikh niglah, The Divine Presence is revealed over you!”[iii]
 
So often, I find that it’s the very crying out—the voice of my own deepest self emerging, or the anguished voices of others—that triggers my awakening and knocks me out of complacency. Voices banging on the doors of my heart, “kol dodi dofek, pitchi li, open, open to Me!”[iv]—the muffled moans of those who’ve been suffering quietly around me for generations, unnoticed; the voices of courageous truth tellers calling out lies and corruption; the cries of longing, grief, or joy issuing unbidden from my own throat; and sometimes, the conspicuous absence of voices—an empty schoolroom, once alive with the sounds of children learning and laughing, a silent garden, once filled with birdsong and the hum of bees. These sounds, even more than words, break through the constant noise and natter of business as usual. They jolt me awake, and point me in a different direction. Teshuvah.
 
Our Torah tradition is filled with such sounds, such voices that arouse and awaken, inspire and engender: “Kol damei ahiv,” the voice of the blood of Cain’s murdered brother, Abel, cries out to God from the very earth.[v] “Abraham, Abraham!”––an angelic call awakens our primal father, his knife raised to slaughter his son Isaac on the altar, from the trance of human sacrifice.[vi] And the cries of the rejected Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham’s other son, cast out into the desert, dying of thirst, draw forth mercy from heaven and the gift of life-giving water.[vii]
 
It is the groaning cries of the Israelite slaves, mired in degradation in a life-denying land, trapped in a nightmare of oppression, that set in motion our people’s epic saga of return, the Exodus, which leads directly to our being gathered here, together, this evening. For, our tradition teaches, the Israelite dream that became the Jewish people collapses time and space into “no before or after,” so we were all there too. God hears their moaning—our moaning—and remembers the covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob, with Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, “Va-yar elohim et b’nei Yisrael, va-yeda Elohim, God saw the Children of Israel, and God knew.”[viii] Even God has to be woken up.
 
What gives voice such power to awaken, to draw us toward compassionate action or, if misused and abused, to stir people to acts of violence and hatred? Perhaps it is that the voice, this shaping and vibrating and sharing of breath, makes our very soul, our neshama, audible. Is not voice itself, in our mythic and mystical canon, the very instrument of Creation? “And God spoke….” the world into being.
 
When we hear and feel the voice of truth, does it not also awaken the deepest truth in us, call us to action on behalf of the other, on behalf of our planet, in ways both mysterious and simple, deep calling to deep? And when I am paralyzed by fear, numbed by trauma, is it not the release of my voice, starting as a trickle and building to a raucous scream, that must crack the ice of dissociation to reopen the channels of connection?
 
I think of the voices, the distinctive timbres and rhythms, that have energized me, galvanized me, encouraged and called me to action: my 11-year-old self, thrilling to the ringing summons of a new young president, rousing a somnolent nation on his inauguration day, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!” My teenage self, vibrating to the thundering conviction of a great black American preacher and civil rights catalyzer, declaring “I have a dream” and vowing to persist in truth-telling and nonviolent resistance until, in the words of the prophet Amos, “justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”[ix]
 
More recently I’ve been moved by the tender, impassioned urging of a young Sikh—s-i-k-h—American civil rights activist, Valarie Kaur, exhorting us to breathe and push, to birth a new kind of love—love as sweet fierce labor, bloody, imperfect, life-giving—love that enables us to tend to our own wounds, so that we have the wherewithal to tend the wounds of our enemies, to see and hear them as human beings with stories of their own, to approach the other with curiosity instead of hatred, to see no stranger. This, teaches Valarie Kaur, is revolutionary love, the kind of love that, applied with sustained communal effort, can topple oppressive systems and, with time and persistence, bend the arc toward justice.[x]
 
And I hear the voices of the next generation: the powerful witness of Emma Gonzales who, as a 17-year-old survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Florida, spoke out just days after a disgruntled former classmate gunned down 17 students and staff and injured 17 more at her high school, decrying the inaction of politicians bought off by the National Rifle Association, shouting out over and over, “We call B.S.! We call B.S.”[xi] And the choked, angry voice of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, addressing the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York City: “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words!”[xii]
 
Empty words. How will we fill our words in the year ahead? Join our voices with those of our inspired leaders and our outraged neighbors, translate words into actions, small acts that, when taken together, will roll down like a mighty stream, cutting through the accreted layers of duplicity and cynicism, greed and racism baked into our society’s institutions? 
 
How will we allow the voices of the suffering, the dispossessed, the murdered, the dying species, the Earth herself, to awaken us, energize us, and move us to become the eyes, ears, hands, and hearts of God that we were always meant to be? How shall we breathe through the fires of pain and refuse to let them harden into hate? How will we, in the ringing words of Isaiah, clear the path of God, make a straight road through the desert for our Godliness? What will you do differently this year? What can we do together? 
I close with this excerpt of an invocation by James O’Dea, Irish-born activist and mystic, award-winning author of The Conscious Activist and numerous other works, a peacemaker who has conducted societal healing dialogues in war zones around the world and taught peacebuilding to a thousand people in 30 countries. He calls this piece “This Consecrated Hour”:
 
Do you not see them
the ashen ones
the gray ones
the starving orphans
the seduced innocents
the decimated specters of conflagration
all the beings trampled in degradation
crowding our collective shadow field?
 
Go find them
in this, this consecrated hour of human becoming
find your estranged, your lost and abandoned family
and embrace them into the vital marrow of your life.
Kiss them until the ashes of their betrayal
turn from gray to red
and the blush of love blows through
the One Soul, the One Life of All….[xiii]
 
What voice is calling out within you tonight? How will you answer?  Let’s sit silently for a moment and breathe together.
 
[i] Isaiah 40:1
[ii] Isaiah 40:3
[iii] from L’kha dodi, piyyut sung during Kabbalat Shabbat service, quoting The Song of Deborah (Judges 5:12) and Isaiah 60:1
[iv] Song of Songs 5:2
[v] Genesis 4:10
[vi] Genesis 22:11
[vii] Genesis 21:16-17
[viii] Exodus 2:24-25
[ix] Amos 5:24
[x] see Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger, A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, One World, NewYork, 2020.
[xi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jmO89T3G1w
[xii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAJsdgTPJpU
[xiii] hear the full interview with James O’Dea at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aunsQChqWWY

 
 © Rabbi Diane Elliot 2022
 

Have you ever known a special tree? A spreading live oak or bay laurel, a towering redwood or pine, a great old oak or a gnarled apple tree? A tree whose leaves or needles sheltered you, whose trunk supported you, whose branches begged to be climbed, a tree that befriended you, comforted you, received your joys and sorrows and prayers? 
                          Tree at my window, window tree,
                          My sash is lowered when night comes on;
                          But let there never be curtain drawn
                          Between you and me….
wrote the poet Robert Frost. If you have known such a tree, then you know something of the great life-giving wisdom of trees, with their complex root systems communicating underground, through the mycelial network. You know why the great, mythic Tree of Life is a symbol for rebirth, renewal, and resource in so many cultures. 
 
Tonight, as we enter a new year, a year of shmitah,[1]  a year of release and rest for the land and for our tired hearts, we are asking, how does this great Tree live inside us and we within it? How does it appear, disappear, and reemerge in different forms in our Jewish mythic, mystic tradition? How does it nourish and exhort us? What is it asking us to learn? to bring forth into the world?
 
We begin in Oneness. A mashal, a parable…. Once upon a time, so the Wise Ones tell us, this Earth was a lush Garden, and at its center stood a magnificent Tree. Its roots penetrated deep into the earth and drank from the four great rivers that issued forth from and watered the Garden, while its branches spread outward, shading every nook and cranny, and arched upward, touching the heavens. The Tree absorbed the light of the sun by day and bathed in the glow of the moon and the sparkle of more distant stars by night. It produced fruit of every variety—juicy oranges, fragrant apples, tart lemons, many-seeded pomegranates, and plump figs, to name just a few. 
 
The Tree of Life, they called it, Etz Hayyim. Its very leaves breathed life into the sun-drenched, moon-kissed Garden. It sheltered many creatures, including the one tasked with naming and caring for the others––the one formed from Earth, the one called adam. “From this tree you are not to harvest,” decreed the Mystery. “She is the Tree of Oneness. Contemplate her, rest in her shade, inhale the fragrance of her leaves, delight in the varied shapes and colors of her fruit and eat what falls to the Earth, lean against her solidness, caress her bark. But do not pick, categorize, or analyze. Don’t ask too many questions!”
 
Now, though the Mystery had created adam in its own image and likeness, it had not fully grokked that, from the very beginning, adam carried within the seed of Two-ness, which by another name might be called “duplicity,” and a restless mind, which by another name could be termed “curiosity.” And so adam was destined to pick the fruits, to name and categorize them, and to learn, with great delight, that from each seed a different kind of tree may grow. From the One Tree, many! Just pick and plant and water and eat! And, endlessly resourceful, adam learned also to smoke the leaves, and to chop the wood and build settees, porch swings, and backyard fences. “Good fences make good neighbors,” that same poet noted.
 
And so the great Tree was split and cut and sold down the river, and the Knowledge of orange vs. apple, good vs. bad, ripe vs. rotten, right vs. wrong, love vs. hate, black vs. white, you vs. me, replaced the Wisdom of many-fruited, multi-colored Oneness. And so was born the religion of difference and exile, jealousy and competition, wreckage and breakage, war and suffering—or so the story goes.
 
Was this a failure of understanding? A failure of vision? Or perhaps just the nature of embodied life, how it was destined to be? Outside the sacred Garden now, humans proliferated and found they needed words to communicate across the distances that separated them. No longer were the vibratory hum and buzz of grasses and bees, the heartbeats shared with the birds and other animals sufficient for communication. Words, spoken and then written, soon became necessary for business—impressed into clay or inked onto parchment. Contractual words, sometimes benevolent, sometimes harsh and punishing––reminders of how to bridge the in-betweens: “v’ahavta l’reyakhah kamokha: Remember, love your fellow beings, for they are not simply like yourself, they are yourself.”[2] But they—we—had forgotten.
 
And so there came to be a Torah, a contract, a brit, a written document laying out a contractual agreement between human beings and the Mystery, and our ancestors called it the Etz Hayyim, the Tree of Life. God’s blueprint for Creation, the Sages said.
                          She is a Tree of Life
                          more precious than gold
                         Hold her in your arms
                         and you will understand
                         Etz Hayyim hi––
                        Her roots are deep and wide
                        Her branches filled with light
                       And all her pathways are…
peace. Netivot Shalom. Wholeness. Shleymut. Torah became for us a portable Tree of Life, a locus where Oneness could be remembered and reconstituted, fenced in, so to speak, a way back to the Garden––or so they hoped.
 
Down through the ages, with each wave of suffering, shattering, and dispersal, a new story would emerge, a new version of the great mythic Tree, in whose shade the exiles longed to rest, whose fruit the scattered ones dreamed of tasting—new stories to somehow hold and heal the splits and rips and tears in the fabric of Oneness, which now more and more impaired humans’ ability to tend their earthly gardens, much less to remember at all the Original Garden, with the One Tree at its center.
 
In an early mystical work, the Sefer Yetzirah,[3] the Book of Formation, the Indivisible Creator carves out the universe with three tools—with numbers, the ten s’firot; with letters, the twenty-two otiot; and with consciousness. A thousand years later, the great Kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria,[4]described these same sefirot as vessels, into which the Infinite funnels a thin stream of its Boundlessness—a new, quantum Tree of Life, constituted of Divine qualities. But the vessels, too weak to hold the liquid light, shatter, scattering shards of divinity throughout the cosmos, sparks now hidden among the husks and shells of materiality. The Tree is splintered. In a world of brokenness it becomes our spiritual task to gather the shards and splinters and to somehow piece the Tree back together. In a world of brokenness, the life of the Spirit becomes a day by day, moment by moment, breath by breath affair. 
 
Aleinu…it is up to us. With song and dance, with planting and chanting, with gratitude and tears, with praise and with reverence, with study and with silence, with compassionate action--teshuvah, tefillah, tzedakah[5]—we seek to reconstitute the wisdom of the ancients, of the shamans and the mystics and the healers and all those who have lived in loving balance with the Earth, to tend once again the Divine Garden, Shekhinah Herself,[6] whose heart is the Tree of Life. Can you recall, somewhere in the far recesses of your memory, your imagination, how it was to sit in the shade of the great Tree of Life, the circle of dark and light, where there is no other, no you and he, you and she, you and them, where all are of the One? 
 
To embody a thing is not simply to study, to know, to witness it, but to become it–to fully inhabit that which we already are. And isn’t that the essence of Teshuvah? We climb the branches of the Tree, the Ladder of Return, s’firah by s’firah––now humble, now strong, now generous, now firm, now efforting, now submitting, now active, now at rest––learning as we climb, that we’re part of a Whole we cannot see or wholly know or fathom, that we each already are a Tree of Life, birthed from the Sea of Divine Presence that waters our roots. 
 
In our American lives this past year, we experienced a brief bit of respite, a change of leadership, the hope of science and big pharma beating back the virus with a vaccine. Yet black and brown people are still hunted down in cities and at borders, stripped of basic human rights, excluded from full citizenship. And the earth is still warming, the weather is wildly extreme, species continue to go extinct at alarming rates, and people are at war. Wave upon wave of crisis looms, as a new story struggles to emerge from the ashes of our forests, the dry basins of our reservoirs, and the ruins of our democratic institutions. 
 
To embody the Tree of Life in our dire times—these times in which the entire project of Life’s continuity on Earth feels endangered—entails a mass Teshuvah of epic proportions. We are being asked, I believe, to integrate all the stories, to reclaim each incarnation of the sacred Tree—the Oneness at the center of the Garden, the living Torah, the sacred ladder of the Sefirot—to embody all these levels of Treeness, as we seek to heal our own selves, our ruptured communities, and our embattled Gaia Herself. 
 
And so, in this year of shmitah––of release and return, when we’re told to stop extracting from and exploiting the Earth and to simply entrust ourselves to the Tree of Life, that her bounty will nourish us––it becomes ever more urgent to nurture and support one another, to embody those truths that the founders of this nation knew to be “self-evident” but didn’t know how to implement. Ever more imperative is the need to keep our eyes on the pole star; to see beyond the brokenness; to “place the Creator on its foundation” as our mystics teach; to return to Center with the faith that it will hold; to offer our resources, whatever we may have, in the service of those suffering and in need; to make reparations to the black and brown and indigenous people we and our ancestors have harmed, directly and indirectly, those ones who knew how to live in balance with the land––to learn from them and with them and with one another to live the Oneness, as best we can, through every layer of our beingness. This, it seems to me, is what it means to embody the Tree of Life.
 
                                                                                                       May this new year bring us goodness
                                                                                                         and the discernment to know goodness,
                                                                                                                the moral compass to seek wholeness 
                                                                                                                       the physical strength to act justly,
                                                                                                                               the grace to radiate compassion 
                                                                                                                               and to live in gratitude,
                                                                                                      and the spiritual vision to turn toward the Oneness,
                                                                                                           ever-present, ever-glimmering through the surfaces
                                                                                                                 of our mirrored world, 
                                                                                                           the Oneness planted deep inside ourselves,
                                                                                                                             within our embodied lives,
                                                                                                                             and to love it into Presence.
                                                                                                                              L’shanah tovah um’tukah
​
 
[1] In the Torah each seventh year was designated a year of shmitah, a year of release, a Sabbath for the land. No crops were to be planted; the land was to lie fallow and people were to live on the crops they had gathered the previous year and on what the earth produced naturally. In addition, debts were to be forgiven and indentured Israelite servants freed. See Exodus 23:10-11; Leviticus 25:1-7, 20-22; Deuteronomy 15:1-6.

[2] Leviticus 19:18. The Ba’al Shem Tov taught that this verse is to be translated not “you shall love your fellow as you love yourself,” but rather, “you shall love your neighbor because s/he is yourself, quoted in Schneerson, HaYom Yom, 78. 

[3] Sefer Yetzirah is earliest extant text of Jewish mysticism. Traditionally attributed either to Abraham or Rabbi Akiva, it is thought to date to early medieval times and appears in a number of different versions.

[4] Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572), also known as the holy ARI, was one of the leading mystics of 16th century S’fat, and is considered the originator of contemporary Kabbalah. Many of his teachings were recorded by his disciple, Hayyim Vital, in a book titled Etz Hayyim, The Tree of Life.

[5] Return to God and one’s own true nature, prayer, and righteous acts—the three pillars of High Holy Days practice.

[6] The Feminine Divine Presence, identified as the 10th sefirah, Malkhut, Sovereignty/Presence. The Ba’al Shem Tov taught that the whole material world and everything in it are manifestations of Shekhinah.

                                                                                                                            © Rabbi Diane Elliot 2021

Parashat Aharei Mot/Kedoshim
Leviticus 16:1-20:27 | April 2021
​
​Where and when do you experience a sense of the holy? In synagogue, immersed in prayer and song or carrying a Torah scroll? Watching a radiant sunset or catching a first glimpse of the new moon against the deep, blue evening sky? Holding a newborn or gazing into the eyes of a beloved partner or cherished friend?
 
Recently I was overcome with a sense of holiness in an unexpected place. When I arrived at the Kaiser Permanente Covid Clinic in Richmond, California for my second covid vaccination, I joined the outdoor registration line with some trepidation, because I’d had some adverse reactions to the first shot, nevertheless aware of how fortunate I was to be able to receive this life-saving vaccine. Right away I noticed how much more efficient and humanely organized the Clinic had become since my first visit, five weeks earlier. At every phase of the process, masked aides stood ready to welcome, guide, and reassure the people of all ages arriving for their shots. 
 
The line moved swiftly, and I was soon seated at one of the many inoculation stations in a large, noisy, indoor space repurposed for this use. A petite young woman in red scrubs administered the vaccine, while an athletic looking fellow with tattooed biceps monitored a computer, making sure that I was me, that I would receive the proper vaccine, and that it was all accurately recorded. As the computer guy handed me my “I’ve been vaccinated” sticker, I sensed him smiling behind his mask. “Congratulations!” he said. I felt my heart open and relief begin to trickle into my body. “Thank you for all your good work, for all you’re doing,” I said. For risking your lives to serve me and all these people, I thought. “Thank you for coming in!” he responded, and directed me to an area of red chairs at the far end of the room to wait for any immediate adverse reaction to the vaccine.
 
As I made my way toward the chairs, a slim young man in blue scrubs and hospital mask, with dark curly hair and black rimmed glasses, his face covered by a plastic shield and a stethoscope around his neck, approached and called out, “Diane Elliot?” “Yes!” I answered. “How did you know my name?” I felt strangely seen, known in the midst of this anonymous hubbub. “Oh,” he explained, as he led me to one of several curtained cubicles at one side of the room, “since you haven’t been able to come recently for regular check-ups and tests, we thought we’d take advantage of your being here to check in with you, to remind you of what care you’re due for and see how you’re doing.” They must’ve tagged me at the registration desk.
 
The health care worker, perhaps a nurse-practitioner, sat down near a desk with a computer on it and invited me to sit across from him, a few feet away. My eyes started to well up as I felt, for the first time in over a year, the simple human connection of sitting panim el panim with a caring stranger, someone I didn’t know but who was evidently concerned for my welfare. He saw my tears over the edge of my two masks and said, “I’m so sorry, we don’t have any kleenex here!” Fortunately, I’d shoved a couple of tissues in my pocket before leaving home, and as I wiped my eyes (I wouldn’t be able to blow my nose until I got back to my car), I expressed my gratitude for all he and other medical workers had given and risked during this past year. He responded, “The day that we received our shots, we had to wait in line, too. We medical workers aren’t used to waiting in line for care! But the moment that we entered that room, everyone became quiet. It was like being in a meditation hall. We were all crying.” 
 
This disclosure brought more tears to my eyes. I told him that I was a clergy person, and that I felt so privileged to be able to work from home all these months, yet how challenging it’s been to  hold people in their grief and fear, their illness and losses, people mourning their loved ones, especially grief-stricken that they’d not been able to be at their sides, to hold their hands as they passed. He responded with empathy, as he gently asked me about various medical conditions, my stress levels, and advised me about routine tests and inoculations I would need in coming months. When I rose to go and wait out the rest of my 30-minute vigil on a red chair, I thanked him again for his service. “It was so wonderful to be able to spend these 15 minutes talking with you, instead of sitting alone, waiting for some possibly bad reaction to the vaccine!” I could feel his smile behind his mask, as he reached toward me and said, “I’d hug you if I could!” The little curtained cubicle in the Kaiser Covid Clinic had become a mini-holy-of-holies.
 
This week’s double Torah portion, Acharei Mot/Kedoshim, comprising five key chapters in the Book of Leviticus, teaches us about the nature of holiness as our ancestors perceived it. While much of Leviticus contains detailed injunctions for the priests about how to purify and maintain holy space and time through korbanot (sacrifices) and rituals of purification to be performed in the Mishkan, the “holy precinct,” this week’s parshiot also center Divine imperatives for living each day in ways that render the space within and between people holy. 
 
You shall not curse the deaf, nor place a stumbling block before the blind…. You shall not spread gossip amidst your people, nor stand by while the blood of your neighbor is shed—I am YHVH. You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but call out their behavior, so as not to bear their sin. You shall not take revenge or bear a grudge against members of your people, v’ahavta l’reyakhah kamokhah, ani YHVH, but you shall love you neighbor as yourself, I am YHVH.  (Lev. 19:14a, 16-18)
 
Here we find the roots of many practices for self-examination and refinement, developed over centuries, that enkindle what contemporary Mussar teacher Alan Morinis calls “everyday holiness,”[1] practices rooted in compassion for self and others, in the ability to sit in another’s seat, to perceive the world as another perceives it, and to act compassionately on their behalf. We hear how each of us is called to holy service, not only in the spaces we have designated as sacred, but in the streets, in our homes, in all the mundane spaces and the web of daily relationships in which our lives unfold.

We are living in what often seems to be an unholy time. For the past year, many of us have been isolated, cut off from family members and friends and the connective tissue of casual social interactions that hold and support us. We have witnessed the dire effects of public discourse being awash with slander, lies, and vitriol. We have painfully experienced, through the power of the media, what it means to “stand by the blood of our neighbors”—on the street in Minneapolis and in many other cities, in the very Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.—how anger and inciting speech and fear can infect whole communities with the inability to perceive the humanity of other people, much less to love them. This hurts all of us on levels we can hardly fathom. It’s a contagion no less deadly than the viral pandemic that has upended our world for the past year and more.
 
Yet, embedded within the overlapping series of crises of these difficult days, are sparks of holiness, embers waiting to be fanned into bright flame by the ruakh ha-kodesh, the holy breath that animates each of us. This is the “revolutionary love” of which Sikh lawyer and activist Valarie Kaur writes in her powerful, poignant memoir and call to action, See No Stranger.[2] “Do not hate your brother or your sister in your heart.” Speak up, but only from a place of love. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” because, as the Baal Shem Tov famously taught, your neighbor is the same as yourself.
 
For many of us, this pandemic year has been a time to take stock, to rethink our lives and relationships, to find new ways of working and serving. The spread of the pandemic and the enforced separations of this past year have brought home to us as never before our interdependence, how the well-being of all humans on this beautiful, amazing planet is interconnected as surely as the mycelial network that connects the vast fungal forests, as surely as the oceans of the world meld every river, creek, and mountain stream into one vast body of water.
 
What shines for me through the central mitzvot of this week’s parashah is their underlying intention of tending connection. We are to maintain certain membranes, certain restraints, to “mask up,” if you will, in order to honor the other, so that ultimately we may connect with more clarity and compassion, balance, and harmony; so that love may flow more freely between us and our family members, friends, and co-workers; so that we may act with compassion toward strangers; so that we will know ourselves to be in community with plants and animals, water and soil and air; and so that we may connect deeply and regularly with the Divine Oneness that sources and nurtures all connectivity. May we be blessed to remember, more and more, our own holiness and the holiness of the world. May the holiness of clear, compassionate, respectful connection flow through, enliven, and enlighten our every day.
 
[1] Morinis, Everyday Holiness, The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar (2008).
[2] Kaur, See No Strange, A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love (2020).

                                                                                                    © Rabbi Diane Elliot 2021

Hanukah | December 2020 | Kislev 5781

​In the spring, seven, the symbolic number of Creation, is emphasized in our Jewish calendar: seven days of Passover, followed by seven weeks of counting the Omer, beginning on the eve of the second day of Pesach. “Pesach,” the Hebrew name for the Passover holiday, refers to the skipping dance of the newborn lambs, the spring sacrifice of the pascal lamb in ancient Israel, and accompanied by the sweeping out of all leavened products from the previous year. 
 
These ritual acts symbolize both the bursting of winter’s bonds and the Israelite people’s release from the political bonds of enslavement in Egypt. Shavu’ot, the holy pilgrimage festival that follows on the heels of the seven-week Omer cycle, literally means “weeks.” Although Shavu’ot takes us beyond the realm of seven's, since it’s celebrated on the 50th day, the focus of the season is a celebration of the winter barley harvest (an Omer measure of barley was to be brought to the Temple and waved as they days were counted) and spiritual encouragement for the healthy gestation of the all-important wheat crop. Over centuries, the Shavu’ot celebration of growth, hope, and welcoming new life became associated with the transformational encounter between the Infinite and the Israelite people at Mt. Sinai and the receiving of Torah—Divine instruction, the fruit of our freedom. But the focus on the barley and the wheat draw that Unbounded Sourcing right down into the realm of the physical, the domain of seven.
 
In the fall, however, the emphasis seems to be more on the number eight, the numeral shaped like an infinity sign that takes us beyond Creation into the realm of Ayn Sof, the Infinite Source from which the Cosmos, including our material world, arises. Sh'mini Atzeret, a day of lingering in Divine Presence at the end of the High Holy Day cycle, follows directly on the heels of Sukkot, adding an eighth day to the great fall harvest holiday, in which we're enjoined to “dwell in huts” for seven days (in Diaspora, the cycle lasts an extra day). In the mystical tradition of the 16th century kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, the whole High Holy Day cycle––beginning with the first of Elul a month before Rosh Hashanah and extending through Sh'mini Atzeret and Simhat Torah––encompasses  a divine dance in which YHVH, the masculine aspect of the godhead, seeks unification with Shekhinah.  Shekhinah, or Presence, is the name given to the feminine aspect of the Divine, immanent in this material world of separation. In this sacred story, Sh'mini Atzeret, the eighth day of lingering, is seen as the moment of zivug or erotic coupling between YHVH and Shekhinah, a time of great joy that releases a boundless flow of Divine shefa or blessing into the world. 
 
The eight days of Hanukah, a rabbinic holiday not mentioned in Five Books of Moses, mirror those of Sukkot. This festival, marked by the nightly lighting of candles, from one to eight, commemorates the successful rebellion of the Hasmoneans against the rule of the Selucid Greeks in the second century BCE and the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple, after it had been desecrated by the foreign rulers. It may have been instituted as a substitute for the Sukkot observances that the priests had not been able to perform earlier, because of the Greek oppression. At this darkest time of year, we celebrate the renewal not only of the Temple of old, but of the Great Bayit, the hidden structure of the cosmos, the Dwelling Place of the Divine, accessible to us through dreams, imagination, intuition. Mystics tell us that in this month of Kislev, the month of Hanukah, we make a spiritual tikkun or repair in the realm of sleep, entering the world of deep, thick, winter hibernation. The ancients considered sleep to be “one-sixtieth part of death.” Immersed in a realm beyond the veils of this reality, we release our consciousness into the vast dreaming spaces in which we may draw on Infinite Resource and allow the Mystery to heal the tattered garments of our souls. We rededicate our hearts, the Holy of Holies in the Temple of our bodies, to service of these Invisible realms.
 
Our Torah readings at this time of year are filled with the power of dreams and dream-like states, not only those of Joseph the dreamer, whose story we always read during the Hanukah holiday, but also of Jacob. Both these ancestors achieve great success on the material plane, acquiring wealth, possessions, and power. But the deeper layers of their lives are defined in key moments by both dreaming and, in Jacob’s case, waking encounters with the Mystery. We trace, for instance, the course of Jacob’s spiritual development, which begins when, as a duplicitous brother fleeing for his life, he encounters ba-Makom, “by means of the Place,” in a dream, a ladder upon which angels, messengers of the Most High, ascend and descend, connecting Heaven and Earth in an unbroken flow. In that dream YHVH Godself actually stands over Jacob, declaring that the ground on which Jacob now lies asleep will one day be given to him and to his numerous descendants, and that God will be with him always. Awaking, Jacob exclaims, אָכֵן יֵשׁ יְהֹוָה בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי: “Truly, God is in this place, but I was not aware.” In awe and trembling Jacob announces, מַה־נּוֹרָא הַמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה אֵין זֶה כִּי אִם־בֵּית אֱלֹהִים וְזֶה שַׁעַר הַשָּׁמָיִם  “How awesome this place is, this is none other than the House of God––this is the Gate of Heaven!” (Genesis 28:16-17)
 
Yet, having set up a monument and bargained with God to ensure his own protection and prosperity, Jacob then goes on his way, seemingly forgetting the awesomeness of this sacred encounter as he makes his way in the world, acquires wives and flocks, and spars with his Uncle Lavan, ultimately stripping him both of daughters and many of his worldly goods. It’s only when Jacob heads toward home after 20 years away that his past rears up to confront him. Overcome by fears of his brother’s possible revenge, he divides his family and goods into two camps, sending the women and children ahead, both to testify to his wealth and to signal his willingness to be vulnerable. He himself hangs back, beyond the River Yavok. Here he is accosted by a being––not a chain of angelic presences ascending and descending, but, this time, one unidentified ish, a man. Is this a messenger? Jacob’s own shadow? Or perhaps the same Divine Power that stood over him in his dream at Luz, the Place of Light, that he renamed Beit El, House of God, all those years ago? 
 
Now, in his second defining encounter with the Mystery, Jacob wrestles mightily all night, declaring that he won’t let go until this ish blesses him.  Exhausted, injured, but triumphant, Jacob says, הַגִּידָה־נָּא שְׁמֶךָ “Now tell me your name!” (Genesis 32:30)  But this manifestation of the Divine is not about to divulge its identity, to declare, “I am YHVH, God of your grandfather Avraham and God of your father Yitzhak,” as in the dream of the ladder. The Presence will not make itself known so directly a second time. Instead, the blessing is simply given, and as the morning dawns, Jacob receives a new name, which in itself is an answer to his query: "Yisrael," Israel, one who perseveres in his struggle with God and with life. Jacob bears forever after the evidence of this encounter as a kind of branding in his flesh, a dislocated hip, a torn tendon that leaves him with a limp. Is the p’gam, the defect, in his left or right leg, in his netzakh or his hod, his endurance or his splendor? his success or his humility? The text leaves us to decide for ourselves. But one thing is clear: if we are to come into the fullness of our lives, if we are to fulfill our transformational potential, we, like Jacob, must strengthen ourselves for  inevitable wrestling matches with unnamed Adversaries. Especially in this late fall season, we are asked to open ourselves to receive and learn to trust the messages encoded in our dreams and visions, waking or sleeping. In so doing, we enlarge our capacity for holding and healing “previous experiences in [our] lives that, up until this point, [we] have not dared to attempt to pick up and heal.” Together we can support one another to know that we each “have ‘what it takes’ to return to these precious pieces of [ourselves] – claim them, hold them, and in [our] developing Compassion, help them transform.” (Ellen Kaufman Dosick, “Cosmic Times,” December 2020)
 
This is the legacy of Ya’akov, Jacob, the duplicitous one, the trickster, the cheater and the cheated, who comes to learn that only by facing life, owning his deficiencies, encountering his demons head-on, will he gain the promised blessing and become known to himself and then to the world as “YisraEl”–– the one whose life is a testament not only to his own perseverance, but to God’s; the one who becomes a channel for blessing, abundance, and love, despite his  blind spots, his fears, and his failings; the one who, awed by momentary yet life-changing encounters with the Infinite, leads us all into an uncertain future, bearing the scars of the past, yet blessed.

                                                          © Rabbi Diane Elliot 2020

September 2020 |  Tishrei 5781
Offered at the Aquarian Minyan's
​Virtual Erev Rosh Hashanah service

Dear friends, I’m honored and humbled to have been invited to speak this evening, on this new moon of a new year, this Rosh Hashanah. What a blessing—what an urgent necessity—for us to be together, now, at the turning of the year, and thanks to this amazing technology, to meet in the zoomisphere—to hold big questions together, to face the uncertainty of the times ahead with the encouragement of our shared hearts, our Aquarian Minyan family, uplifted by the resonant High Holy Day prayers and soul-stirring music. 
 
This year…. what a year. A year like no other. “Challenging,” “chaotic,” “unprecedented,” “apocalyptic”…. we’ve heard all the descriptors, reaching for a reality beyond imagining, repeated to the point of numbness.  
 
There have been many times before in the story of humankind, certainly in the story of the Jewish people, when the veils have been thin, very thin. But never before in my lifetime have I experienced with such immediate visceral potency the thinness of the divide between living and dying.
 
I’d like to ask us to pause for a moment, as we enter this portal of the Holy Days together, to remember the hundreds of thousands who’ve died in the pandemic, of Covid and other causes, those who cannot get medical care or food, those struggling to survive the collapse of our social support systems, those who have no work, those risking their lives daily at essential jobs to keep our communities functioning, and those whose lives have always been under threat because of the color of their skin or their gender or simply being who they are. [pause]
 
Here we are, together, in this extraordinary time of living and deathing, opening to the possibility, the hope, the urgent necessity of transforming. Years ago, in a class preparing for the High Holy Days, one of my students, a psychotherapist, asked a simple, potent question: “Can people really change?”
On the one hand, that everything changes constantly is a given. We and everything around us are always changing states, moving, evolving and devolving, birthing, dying. Even after death, changes continue, though in ways that are mysterious to us. This is the nature of things. Scientists tell us that, of the approximately 37.2 trillion cells in the human body, some one million die every second, and that over the course of seven to ten years almost all of the body’s cells are replaced. If change is always happening, if the cells in our body are constantly being renewed why does it seem like the same old (and older) body each day? Why do we come back around again and again to the same stuck places in our psyches, the same arguments in our relationships, the same road-blocks in our communal lives? 
 
Teshuvah—the essential gesture of this High Holy Day season—is a call to change, to change our lives, to revision our world, to empty ourselves and start anew. Rabbi DovBer Pinson, in his book Reclaiming the Self, The Path of Teshuvah, makes a distinction between change and transformation. “When Teshuvah  is merely about change,” he writes, “it comes into direct conflict with any existing system that stands in resistance to that change. Yet real Teshuvah is of a higher order, not just about change, but about genuine transformation. It is a major spiritual shift, through which the by-product of change occurs organically.” 
 
So what is the nature of this major shift that allows change to happen, that sets the stage for newness?
 
If to form is to shape or mold something that’s been perhaps dis-organized into something recognizable, nameable; and to re-form is to form again, to return a thing or person to its original form or to give it a new and better form; then we might say that to trans-form is to go beyond that which has been known or imagined, to transcend the imagined limitations of form.  
 
What happens when you hold the intention, the deep prayer, that your work of teshuvah be not only formative or re-formative, but trans-formative? What happens in our physical world when we transcend form, transform matter? When we open our awareness to the realm of pure consciousness and pure energy, where all is movement, so constant as to seem still? 
 
You know this space. I’m sure you’ve visited it, even if only for an instant, a breath. We’ve all experienced moments outside of time, when we say that “time stands still,” or that “the moment was endless,” because the cognitive mind, which creates time through its ability to transect with perception the flow of Universal Consciousness, has released its grip on reality and allowed pure awareness to arise, allowed you to float momentarily in the quiescent Sea of Being that just is. The kabbalists call this sea Ayin—No-thing. Nothing.
 
One of my great movement teachers, Nancy Stark Smith, of blessed memory, a world-renowned teacher and performer of contact improvisation, put it this way: “Where you are when you don't know where you are, is one of the most precious spots offered by improvisation. It is the place from which more directions are possible than anywhere else. I call this place The Gap.”
 
I dropped into “The Gap” during the first birth I attended, the birth of my goddess daughter, Anika. It was a sweltering July day in the family bedroom, and all who were present entered this extra-ordinary realm together. The mom-to-be, my dear friend Marilyn, a dancer and singer, was toning and breathing through each wave of contraction, and we, her birthing team, were chanting and groaning with her; sweating with her; applying pressure to her back, hands, feet; breathing with her. Afloat in The Gap, a realm outside of time-space, the Ayin zone of limitless creative possibility, we didn’t notice that our friend had entered transition, the final stage before giving birth. Only the dad-to-be, Don, who had kept one foot in the material world, abruptly alerted us to pack up and get to the hospital. 
 
We arrived just in time to support Marilyn as she squatted on the floor of the birthing room and, in a whoosh, the head crowned and with barely a push our girl emerged. At that moment, a huge force filled the room, a living-deathing-breathing force, just for a few moments, before gradually shrinking down to baby body size. “Welcome, Anika,” we cooed. I rubbed her tiny blueish feet, until breath slipped in, gently, her feet turned pink, the cord was cut, and her lips found her mother’s breast. After many hours, my friend Elizabeth and I, both on the birthing team, emerged from the hospital room, dazed, elated, and drove to a nearby lake, where we sat on the shore, swirled our fingers in the cool water and marveled. Where had we just been? Had we been in that room for hours, weeks, or years? It was as if all of us had been born that day, and none of our lives would be the same. Ever. Transformation.
 
This “timeless time and placeless place,” which we sometimes call Shabbat, is the ocean of soul we need to dip into again and again, bringing back into our everyday awareness drops or thimblefuls or cupfuls of peace, wholeness, is-ness. Even—and maybe especially—in a time of crisis—a time like now. 
 
What gives us the courage to stop doing, put down the phone, turn off the computer, and enter that formless state, rife with possibility and uncertainty, much less abide there? Emunah, faith—the same Hebrew root as aman, amen, truth. Faith connects us with the Divine, with the invisible Presence, the Ayn Sof, the Infinite that abides in the Ayin and witnesses the truth of who we are. Faith gives us the courage to reach beyond everything we think we know, beyond anything our everyday senses would lead us to trust, to allow ourselves to dissolve like the caterpillar in the chrysalis, to abide, even momentarily, in the Void.
 
And what gives us the courage to come back? Love, always and only love. Not sentimental love, not love as a feeling, but the kind of love that Valarie Kaur, the Sikh lawyer, filmmaker, activist, and spiritual organizer, speaks of in her new book, See No Stranger, A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. If you’re going to read only one book this year, let it be this one! Kaur calls us to a love that is fierce, bloody, life-giving, awe-filled, trembling—the kind of love that gets you through a difficult birth, a love that enfolds the weak and the vulnerable, that honors differences, that fuels one’s resolve to stand up a bully, to speak truth to power; a love willing to listen to the stories of people not like ourselves; a love that tends even to an enemy’s wound—the only kind of love that could see us through the birthing of a new order. The kind of love that poet Maya Angelou, zikhronah liv’rakhah, describes as “a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.” 
 
This love begins with self-love, self-acceptance, self-forgiveness. It begins with knowing your beingness is enough, your work is good enough, that no matter what, no matter that ayn banu ma’asim, that we have done nothing to deserve it, we are loved by God. Rabbi Alan Lew z”l writes, “Self-forgiveness is the essential act of the High Holiday season. That’s why we need heaven. That’s why we need God. We can forgive others on our own. But we turn to God…because we cannot forgive ourselves.” 
 
What blocks self-love for you? Is it a story someone told you a long time ago about yourself that you’re clasping to your heart like a dear friend or holding in your belly like it would be your last meal? Now, this very Rosh Hashanah, is the time to tend this wound and ask for heaven’s help to let it go. Now, when we’re here together, holding this charged and holy space together. Because this is not solitary work. We can’t do it alone.  We need one another more than ever at this critical juncture. Covid 19 has taught us so well that, whether great or small, wealthy or struggling to survive, we are indissolubly bound together on our ever-shrinking, ever-warming planet. 
 
This is the “together” part of  “transforming together.” Physically separated though we may be, this Rosh Hashanah, more than ever, we need to join the energies of our prayers to generate a great collective wave, a tsunami of tefilah to fuel a hurricane of tzedakah, of right action, to bring healing, in whatever ways we are able, if humankind is to generate the systemic impact that the survival of our very species on this precious and beautiful planet, this Gaia/Shekhinah we call home, this magical blue-green orb that has hosted Life through the eons, now requires. 
 
Until we together commit to accept and to love what and who we are, each and all, until I am deeply rooted in myself, loving and accepting myself, my body, my strengths and my suffering and the suffering and strengths of my lineages, until I can become curious and accepting and loving and willing enough to cross the great divide to connect with “you,” whoever you are––until our hearts melt in tenderness and we aspire to see no stranger, either within our own beings or in one another’s beings, until I do my best to honor your story and recognize your story also, in some way, as mine, until in the words of the great Sufi poet Hafiz, we consistently insist that
            the sword drop from people’s hands
           even at the height of
           their arc of
           rage
           because we have finally realized
           there is just one flesh
           we can wound,
until a significant number of us, all ages, genders, political affiliations, commit to these things, nothing will truly transform here.
 
And clearly, we need to do it now. No more postponements, no extensions. The book is due, the bill must be paid, the eviction notice has been tacked to the door. If we cannot find a way to do it together, to each do our small part to make a home for everyone, that welcomes everyone, then we will all be evicted.
 
And we can do it. We can! “This is our moment,” Valarie Kaur writes, “to declare what is obsolete, what can be reformed, and what must be imagined…. When we create spaces to imagine together,…then we can begin to feel the world we want in our bodies. It feels safe and brave and free. It becomes like a memory we carry.” 
 
Tomorrow we will hear the sound of the shofar, for Rosh Hashanah is also called, in the Torah, Shabbaton Zikron Teru’ah, a Shabbat of Remembering the Great Shouting—breath shaped into a ragged, primal cry by the ram’s horn, wailing, plaintive, strengthening, then stuttering and broken, then steady and sure, stretching into a blast of infinite faith. It is the collective voice of our own hearts, reaching beyond ourselves, touching our own truth, stretching to touch the Infinite, the Unbroken, the Source. Hear these words of activist-poet Dane Kuttler from her Social Justice Warrior’s Guide to the High Holy Days:
 
And G!d says: Hear the sounds of the shofar! And if you cannot hear the shofar, if you cannot step foot in the synagogue for whatever reason, then hear what is meant to wake you. Hear: I Can’t Breathe, Hear: Black Lives Matter, Hear the cries of refugees, Hear: the names of the restless dead. Wake. Stay woke. It is all a shofar.
 
I leave you with this question: what would you be willing to do to set aside your own preferences and give yourself to the task of transforming together with members of this community during the coming year? Please take a few minutes to reflect in silence.
 
[Ana b’Kho’ah niggun]
I invite you now to rise in body or soul or both to offer the first Amidah of these Holy Days. You’ll find the traditional prayers in Hebrew and English on pages 38-42 of your mahzor, and the prayers of your own body and mind and soul moving within you. May this holy moment unseal the lips of your being, so that your whole self vibrates with Divine Presence:
Adonai s’fati tiftakh ufi yagid t’hilatekha

                                                                                             © Rabbi Diane Elliot  2020

September 2019  | Tishrei 5780   
​Haftarah Reading: I Samuel 1:1-2:10
Offered at Urban Adamah on Rosh Hashanah

Who is Hannah and what wisdom does she have to offer us on this Rosh Hashanah morning? We just heard Reb Brian (Schachter-Brooks) chant a condensed version of her story, which makes up Chapter 1 and the first part of Chapter 2 of the First Book of Samuel in the Bible: the beloved but childless first wife of Elkanah, taunted mercilessly by his fertile, second wife P’ninnah. Every year when the family goes up from Ramah to the Shiloh Temple, to make offerings to God, Elkanah gives P’ninnah and her children each a portion, but to Hannah he gives a double portion, “for he loved her and God had closed her womb.” (I Samuel 4:5)  But her husband’s tender consideration brings Hannah no consolation; bitter of heart, disappointed by life, she weeps and refuses to eat. 
 
Finally, one year, she can stand it no longer. Entering the Shiloh Temple after the others have eaten, she throws herself on God’s mercy, weeping her heart out, whispering wild prayers. “If You will really, truly see the suffering of your maidservant and remember me and not forget your maidservant and give your maidservant a son, then I will return him to You––a razor shall not touch his head.” If she is blessed with male offspring, Hannah vows, she will bring him back to this very temple to serve the Holy One. 
 
As Hannah continues to spill out her heart’s deepest desires before the altar––the text reads hi midaberet al libah­­, literally, “she is speaking upon her heart­­,” as if to bear witness with words to her own heart’s torment––Eli, the old priest, watching from his seat in the corner, thinks she is drunk and orders her to leave. “No, my lord,” she answers, “I am a woman of shrunken spirit, pouring out my soul before God.” Then Eli blesses her and sends her on her way: “ufaneyha lo hayu lah od,” the text reads, “and her face was no longer the same.” In due time, a son is born to Hannah, Shmu’el, Samuel, literally, “God has heard,” and he will become a great prophet and judge in the land, the anointer of the first kings of Israel.
 
For the later sages of the Talmud, Hannah is the exemplar of prayer, the Biblical figure who teaches us how to pray. Rabbi Hamnuna opens the discussion: “How many great laws can be learned from the verses about Hannah!” The need to be focused in our prayers, to have kavannah or clear intention, to actually form the words with our mouths, but to pray silently or in a murmur—all these have come down to us over the millennia as models for praying the Amidah, our silent, standing prayer. But Hannah goes so much farther than what the rabbis remark upon.
 
There is a story told of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the great 18th century mystic and shaman, that one year, shortly before Rosh Hashanah, he asked one of his close disciples to do the honor of sounding the shofar in shul. Overcome by this great honor, the man replied, “Of course, Rebbe, even though I do not feel qualified for such a holy task. If you would instruct me as to what I should meditate on while I’m blowing the different blasts, I would be most grateful.” So the Ba’al Shem taught the man the many kavannot, the mystical significance of the Divine Names associated with each of the blasts, which the man carefully noted on a piece of paper, lest he forget and lose focus as he blew. For weeks he practiced and studied, readying himself. But on the way to shul that Rosh Hashanah morning, a sudden gust of wind snatched the paper from his pocket, and when the moment came to sound the shofar, he froze in panic—the paper was gone! Frantic, heartbroken, unable to remember a single one of the kavannot, he burst into tears and blew the best he could. Later the Besht told him, “All of the kavannot, those detailed, kabbalistic formulas I taught you––they are like a ring of keys, each one fitting into one of the intricate locks on the many gates to Heaven. But there is another way to enter: an ax can smash any gate. Just so, a broken and humbled heart breaks open all of the gates!” This is what the shofar-blower did, and it is what Hannah does. Surrendering her grief and bitterness, turning it all over to God, she batters down the doors of heaven with her fervent prayer. 
 
Some years ago, the Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein wrote a book called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart. In it he speaks of emptying the mind and collapsing the self as a path to greater wholeness. He writes: “We fear that which we most desire, the falling away of self that accompanies a powerful connection.” We fear that which we most desire, the falling away of self that accompanies a powerful connection.
 
If we read Hannah’s story the way we would interpret a dream, seeing each figure in the story as a quality of our inner landscape, then perhaps Hannah, whose name means “grace,” is the yearning, the desire to actualize ourselves in the fullest way; her husband, Elkanah, is the part of us that says, “The status quo is fine, why not simply accept things as they are?” P’ninnah, the taunting rival, is the voice that derides our very yearning, tells us we’re worth nothing, that we don’t deserve fulfillment, and that it’s not possible anyway. Eli the Priest, the normative voice of society, at first embodies the judgment that blocks our creativity, and then the recognition that blesses our transformation.
 
And what is the quality, the spiritual intervention that unlocks this stuck situation, that batters down the doors of heaven? It’s Hannah’s full-bodied expression of grief, her opening up to loss, her bitter tears. Rather than continuing to sigh, to seethe, to clutch her bitterness to her heart, to make it her identity, she holds nothing back, and in so doing opens the clogged channels in herself. She brings herself present with the Presence. In becoming present there is peace, wholeness, shleymut, an internal settling.  “Ufaneyha lo hayu lah od, And her face was no longer the same.” The Hebrew word for face, panim, is always plural—“faces”––and it refers not only to the face we show the world, but to our inner facets, the inner manifestations of our beingness. Something fundamental has changed within Hannah, and it radiates out through her face.
 
So this is Hannah’s first lesson for us––if we want to bring change into our lives, our world, we have to bring all of ourselves to the moment, and then we have to let things fall apart, to let go of what has been, even as we yearn for what has not yet come. And we have to express the feelings of grief and loss that accompany such letting go. Just as the seed must disintegrate in the earth before the plant can begin to sprout, we have to fall to pieces, bare our souls, express our pain, hold nothing back––bellow our fear, our frustration, our terror to the Uni-verse. We have to clear our clogged channels so that we may open, like Hannah, to receive the new life, the new structures, the creative solutions, that want to birth through us.
 
Rabbi Alan Lew, in his marvelous book This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, teaches that the khagim, those times of year that, in the Jewish calendar, are vested with special spiritual properties––the holiness of Shabbat, the liberation of Passover, the revelation at Shavu’ot, the return to essence at Rosh Hashanah––manifest these properties only when we are mindful, only when we bring ourselves present within them. Rosh Hashanah, the ten days of return, the Day of At-One-ment, dare us to bring the fullness of our lives, our triumphs and our deepest sorrows, here, to this temple, today, right now, to raise our voices in song and prayer, to weep and to dance, to release what has been, and to embody our hopes in this very moment, that we may seed a different, wholer moment.
 
Hannah’s second lesson for us is perhaps even more profound. You’d think that, after all her tzurus, Hannah would want to hold onto this gift from God, this much-longed-for child. But no, she gives him back, as she has vowed, to the Great-Force-of-Love-and-Desire that birthed him, and in doing so, she releases him to his larger prophetic mission in service of the whole community. Her song of triumph is not a proud crowing over what she has gained, but a celebration of what is now possible, how the greater good is served when we turn our lives over to a higher purpose. 
 
This is what I have also learned watching the courageous, outraged, grief-stricken young people of the world turning their pain into searing words of reproach for those of my generation who have failed them––failed to protect them in their schools and places of worship, in movie theaters and at music concerts, failed to curb the greed and business-as-usual that continues to degrade our planet’s ecosystems at an ever-more-alarming rate. This is what I have learned listening to the speeches of Greta Thunberg and to the voices of the tens of thousands of school children and young adults that her passion and determination have helped to mobilize, shouting out their pain, their anger, not to gain something for themselves personally, but in service of the whole planet. 
 
On the day that Hannah brings her young son back to the Shiloh Temple, to dedicate him to holy service, she sings:
My heart exults in the Holy One,
my self-esteem has been raised up through Yah,
my mouth is wide open in the face of those who oppose me
for I have rejoiced in being stretched by You!

Some 3,000 years after this exultant song was composed, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young poet, and to us all:
You mustn’t be frightened
if a sadness rises in front of you,
larger than any you have ever seen;
if anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows,
moves over your hands and
over everything you do.
You must realize that something is happening to you,
that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand and
will not let you fall.
 
Take a moment now, before we return the Torah to the Ark, to drop deep into your heart, to release all the written-down words, and tenderly touch your own brokenness, your grief and fear, and your own deepest desires, your hopes, and prayers for the coming year. Don’t hold back. Pour out your prayers! Smash the gates!

​                                                                                             © Rabbi Diane Elliot 2019

Parashat Tazria-Metzora
Leviticus 12:1-15:33
April 2007 | Iyyar​ 5767 

This week’s parashah presents a number of conditions that, in ancient times, were seen to render a person “tamei,” a word usually translated as “contaminated” or “impure.”

Particularly puzzling is the case of the metzora, a person suffering from the mysterious skin disease of tzara’at (which will later afflict Miriam when she speaks of Moses in a dishonoring way).  A person so diagnosed by the priest would be required to go into a kind of mourning, tearing her clothing, shaving her head, and calling out, “Tamei, tamei, contaminated, contaminated!”  He or she would be sent to dwell in isolation outside the camp until the affliction resolved itself.  A priestly purification ritual would mark the person’s reintegration into the community.    

The great modern Torah commentator Nehama Leibowitz poses the question: why, when there are so many physical and spiritual challenges in life, does Torah make a point of teaching us how to combat this particular disease? As the beginning of an answer, Professor Leibowitz cites Midrash emphasizing that, in each suspected case of tzara’at, there is a waiting period of seven days, from initial signs to diagnosis. 

The rabbinic commentators interpret this gradual, progressive onset as a sign of Divine grace; through these symptoms, a person is being put on notice by HaShem that he is out of balance.  More specifically, the Sages point to the word metzora as a contraction of “motzi ra,” a person who “brings out the bad,” by speaking ill of another.  They interpret the swellings, scabs, or shiny patches embossed upon the skin as physical manifestations of spiritual imbalance and ethical failure.

How is tzara’at cured?  Torah tells us only that the sufferer is to be quarantined, sent into isolation. But we’re not told what the metzora does out there, beyond the pale of communal life. Does she fast and pray, weep and repent, take homeopathics, soak in Aveeno baths, use ointments and salves, do yoga?  Or does she simply sit quietly, watch the changing light, listen to the wind, and wait for a sea change?

I find it significant Torah’s prescription for a disease that disturbs the integrity of skin is separation. Skin itself is both a separator and a connector. Like clothing, vessels, and houses, each of which could also become infected with tzara’at, skin serves as a defining boundary, differentiating inner from outer. In my experience, the everyday stresses of familial relationships, raising children, earning a living, and participating in community life often compromise our boundaries. When I’m flooded with information, when I’ve ingested more food or imagery or emotions than my systems can process, both my physical and my energetic skins express the distress. I become “thin-skinned,” “leaky,” irritable, more likely to lash out at a loved one or to dishonor or simply ignore my fellow beings.  I can’t distinguish what’s emotionally mine from what belongs to others.  I become tamei, cut off from the sacredness of life. 

At such times, the most useful spiritual practice I’ve yet found is to declare myself “contaminated!” and to remove myself to a space mikhutz la’makhaneh, outside the camp, whether for an hour’s hike in Wildcat Canyon or a several-day-long silent retreat.  I rest the faculty of speech that can be so abused and give my “skins” the opportunity to regenerate themselves. Sometimes knowing when to exit, when to absent oneself, is the most spiritually powerful action one can take.  Perhaps this is the deep torah of the metzora: that when our boundaries become leaky and compromised, it’s the Divine Presence, woven into our very structure (“…v’shokhanti b’tokham,” ..”and I will dwell within them”), that bubbles to the surface, from under our skins, guiding us onto the path of retreat and purification.


                                                                                                                          © Rabbi Diane Elliot 2007

Rosh Hashanah 2005 / 5766
 offered at the Elijah Minyan, San Diego

Ayn havush motzi atzmo mi bet ha-asurin
                                       – Babylonian Talmud, Masekhet Sanhedrin, Perek Helek
 
My dear friends, l’shanah tovah, it is such a blessing to be here together with you this Rosh Hashanah morning. I’ve struggled and struggled with what to share with you this day—partly because it has been such a difficult year, as we spoke of yesterday, with so much change and loss and pain for so many of us, near and far. And also there’s heaviness in my heart, knowing that this will be my last High Holy Days sharing with you in this way. As I move toward completing my rabbinic education and toward changes in both my work and my personal life, I am flooded with the feelings of all that I’ve shared with this community, and with all I yet wish to speak and teach and learn. And at the same time, words fail me.
 
I guess you could say, I’m struggling to let go. So of all the many learnings that have come to me in this past year, I’ve chosen one small story I would like to share with you. It’s a learning about yielding, about how accepting the truth of this moment, changes, elevates this moment. I have no answers to share with you today, really only the shape of my own struggle.
 
Yesterday Rabbi Dosick spoke to us about heyn v’hesed v’rachamim, grace and unconditional love and mercy. He told us of how these qualities of God and the possibility of our connecting with God through them are always there for us, even in times of deep pain, of seemingly insupportable loss and sorrow. And that our mandate as human beings is to emulate these Divine qualities, from which the very fabric of our cosmos is woven, and to spread them to all others, even while offering them to ourselves. 
 
How to do this? Some folks seem more naturally at ease in touching the holy, in knowing and embodying the truth of God’s grace in a direct, constant way. But for many of us, for me, the small pains and disappointments of life cause tightenings, knottings in our very beings.  When great difficulty, tzurus, challenges us, we may tighten further. Like Hagar, who in fear and despair in the wilderness, cast away her son—like the Israelites worn down by the harshness of enslavement in Egypt—we suffer mikotzer ru’ah, shortness of spirit—a shutting out of love, of life, of God. 
 
And so, my story. A little more than a year ago my dear partner, Burt, gave me this beautiful ring as a symbol of our love and commitment. A band of white gold, it contains eight tiny, exquisite diamonds taken from a ring that had belonged to his mother. I had known that rings are powerful symbols, but I was not prepared for the effect of being gifted with this ring. The diamonds seemed to hold the energy of Burt’s mother, Gert Jacobson, a powerful and creative woman, a pianist and painter, who had suffered deep frustration and depression in her attempts to alert American Jews to the horrors taking place in Europe during World War II. She had died years before I met Burt. I felt the responsibility, the holiness, of placing my finger into the empty space at the ring’s center, a space like the one between the keruvim above the Ark in the Holy of Holies, designed to draw God down into this material world. I would take the ring off each night, place it carefully in its box. Each morning, with awareness and a silent blessing, I would fill its empty space with my finger.
 
Last New Year’s Eve, having returned from a visit with Burt up in Berkeley the day before, I went with a friend to a party. When I got home I washed up a bit and, when I sat down on the couch to read before going to bed, I glanced down at the ring on my finger and discovered with a shock a small but gaping black hole in the row of diamonds. One of them had fallen out. I tried to think where I had been when I had last seen the ring whole. Surely I would’ve noticed if the diamond had been missing at the party. No, the stone must’ve fallen out somewhere in my house. I retraced my steps to the bathroom, where I remembered having taken off the ring to wash my hands and dropped it on the floor. On my hands and knees, I went over every inch of tile with my bare hands. Nothing. I tried to see down the bathroom drain.  Then I went to the kitchen sink where, wearing the ring, I’d rinsed out some cups. I dug through the dispose-all, peering inside to see if anything was gleaming, dislodging a number of rotting lemon seeds, but nothing else. My heart sank. The probability of ever finding a thing so tiny seemed so slim. 
 
Two mornings later I sat down to meditate before leaving for school in LA.   I was still anguished about the missing diamond, but as I sat and breathed, something knotted tight in me let go.  The thought came to mind my, “Nothing’s perfect. Nothing’s ever going to be perfect.” No relationship, not my relationship with Burt, or with my family, not school, or my life choices—everything I struggle with and wish to be different. So simple. I decided to wear the ring to school with the hole in it as a reminder. I got up from my meditation cushion and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth before leaving and afterward, as I often do, ran a tissue over the floor to pick up stray hairs and dust. I turned the tissue over before throwing it into the trash, and there, in it, was the diamond.  
 
Sometimes we are swept away by the immensity of life’s blows. Yet how we meet the small, day-to-day griefs and disappointments is also significant. The Ba’al Shem Tov, the great mystic-shaman who founded the Hasidic movement of which we renewed Jews are spiritual heirs, taught that we react with fear or aversion to these small losses and griefs, tightening our bodies, our thoughts, and our spirits so uncomfortably around them, because they conceal within them fears of larger losses—ultimately of the greatest loss that of our own lives. So when we can yield, soften around these little fears and day-to-day losses, they lead us to God, because they come from God.  In fact, they are God in disguise.
 
I would offer that true joy is a state of “radical acceptance”—a total and complete “hineni”–– that leads us through the doorways of pain, fear and difficulty by means of “God’s love-in-suspension,” which is the fragile, aching and beautiful “shimmering” of this created world. Hineni! Opening to the truth of this moment, I step across the threshold to a churning, quaking, shatteringly ineffable experience of the awesome grandeur of The One. The Baal Shem Tov was said to have exclaimed, “O my body!  I am amazed that you do not shatter out of yirah—fear/awe—of your Creator!”  
 
This is the magnitude of experience of the Divine Presence that drew Abraham up Mt. Moriah to a moment of truth with his knife poised above his beloved son bound on the altar. It’s something I’ve been able to glimpse and know only in fleeting instants, brief sighs of my being.  I feel that every loosening no matter how small, every breath of acceptance, creates more spaciousness of spirit.  I dance around the empty center, where God is, dipping my toe into eternity, hoping that one day I will be ready. I will let go.  
 
                             Ayn havush motzi atzmo mi bet ha-asurin
 
The words to the chant with which I began this talk come from the Talmud, from Perek Helek, Masekhet Sanhedrin, and are usually translated: “No captive releases himself from prison.” Another way of rendering them would be: “No person who is tied up can undo her own knots.”
 
In this world of this world of duality, of seeming separation—of men and women and plants and creatures and mountains and skyscrapers and hurricanes and wildfires—I believe our lessons of letting go – in fact, all of our lessons – come through relationship. All that we attempt to own and must lose, all those whom we love most dearly and who inevitably leave us, or are left by us, teach us about yielding. Our mishpachah, our intimates—parents, children, spouses—so clearly mirror for us those places where we hold on tight to our ideas of ourself, to all that we deem so important. Our power struggles with our partner, the ways we shut him or her out, teach us how we resist God, in what ways we are unavailable to receive God’s chen v’chesed v’rachamim.  If we are very fortunate, we also find or create an eydah, a spirit community of shared witness, willing to serve as mentors, mirrors, and projection screens for each other, eager to play together toward awakening God-consciousness.   
 
Such a community has this one become for me and we for each other, a container for many of to share our strengths and enthusiasms, to hold each other in times of sorrow and deep dismay, challenging and praising, laughing (or not) at each others’ jokes, helping each other to perceive and thus to loosen the knots. We have grown together. How can I ever express my gratitude for this precious container with all its beautiful holes? To Dr. Gary Hartman whose spirit infuses every gathering and who taught me through the infinite grace of his letting go; to Dr. Burt and Ellen who share the gift of meditation through your generous and wise spirits and always loving presence; to the members of Shir HaYam—Cindy and Mark, Judith and Jack, Mark and Mary, Jack and Janice, Rhonda and David, Erin and Ken, Albert and Ahouva, Rebecca, Marlene—who have helped me grow as a leader have celebrated my leadership, and have become dear friends and spirit buddies for life; and to all of you, who have trusted and witnessed and encouraged and supported, through loving contributions of all kinds, this rigorous rabbinic journey I’ve undertaken. 
 
And most especially today I thank Rabbi Wayne Dosick, who has made me his colleague. He and Ellen, both, have opened their hearts and their home to me; taught and prodded me; fed me; praised, commiserated with, gifted, and loved me. They have helped release me from prisons I wasn’t even aware I had locked myself into.

                             Ayn havush motzi atzmo mi bet ha-asurin
 
There is a yet deeper meaning here, one that extends beyond the ways in which we need each other and the world as mirrors, guides, mentors, even beyond the ways in which we address and are addressed by the Divine—a meaning that defies the capacity of language to express. It goes something like this: the “me” that is tied in knots can never set my-self free. The “I,” the very illusion of my separateness, is the knots, is the prison cell. As our great rebbe Albert Einstein put it, we can’t solve a problem from the state of mind that created it.   
 
Letting go, accepting the holes which are “holy,” softening with love into the fear of loss—for brief instants, separation dissolves. As my friend Marilyn Habermas-Scher, a Zen priest, puts it, God lets go. “Letting go” lets go!  
 
The Jewish Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein, in her wonderful teaching tape titled “The Courage to be Happy,” says this:
"What I deeply trust is that it is possible to wake up and see all the pain and suffering in the world, in our own life, in other people’s lives, in the life of the whole world, and see at the same time the gorgeousness, the incredibleness of a lawful, just cosmos, to see the amazingness of life recreating itself in every single form of creation in every moment.  I deeply trust that the awe of that radical amazement supports the awareness of suffering so that we can be grateful for our own lives and for life itself and serve with joy."
 
This is my deepest aspiration, as a rabbi-to-be and as human being: to be deeply present with what is, to trust the wonder, to be grateful for my life and for life itself, and to serve with joy.  I thank you for witnessing me in it.
 
Ayn havush motzi atzmo mi bet ha-asurin
L’shanah tovah um’tukah, a good and sweet year to us all.
 
                                                                                                                                           © Diane Elliot 2006

Rosh Hashanah
September 2003 / Tishrei  ​5764

Then Hannah opened herself up in prayer and said:
My heart exults in the Holy One,
my self-esteem has been raised up through Yah,
my mouth is wide open in the face of those who oppose me
for I have rejoiced in being stretched by You!
 
                                    [I Samuel 2:1-10, my translation]
 
 
I invite you to take a moment, to close your eyes and take a breath…..and to recall the last time you cried. Recall, if you can, what or who moved those tears to rise in you, how it felt to release them, and how you felt afterward.
 
I want to speak with you today of Hannah, the first person in Scripture to entreat G-d in prayer.  I want to speak with you about the resonance of silence, of words, half-formed, inchoate, whispered from the depths of a soul struggling to open to its own pain. I want to speak with you about voice, the full-throated voice, ebullient in song, that bursts from the belly of a being touched by  G-d.  And I want to speak with you about the power of tears – tears that trickle and tears that burn; tears that seep from the hidden, sore spots of the soul and tears that simply overflow when the heart is full; cleansing tears, purifying tears, tears as salty as the oceans that birthed life, tears that melt and soften, tears that transform. All these are Hannah’s legacy to us, her torah, and it’s no accident that the sages chose to include her story among the texts that guide us through this season in which we seek to rectify our relationships with ourselves, our fellow beings and with G-d. 
 
At the recent Jewish Renewal Kallah (2004) an amazing teaching was shared, a teaching that wove together many of the texts chosen by our sages for inclusion in the machzor, the “script” for the drama of our Rosh Ha-Shanah experience. The theme that unites all these texts, it was suggested, is not judgment – for Rosh HaShanah is never referred to in written Torah as Yom Ha-Din, the day of judgment – but rather, tears. Long before the current psychological trend represented by Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, the Pietzetzner Rebbe, chief Rabbi of Poland who died in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II, taught the primacy of emotion in our spiritual lives.  The tzaddik, the righteous person, he wrote, is one who owns his heart, her heart, and a person who owns her heart is one who can access her tears.   
 
So on Rosh Ha-Shanah we read of Hagar’s tears of resignation as she abandons her son Ishmael under a bush, unwilling to watch him die of thirst in the wilderness. And we hear the implied crying of the lad “ba-asher hu sham,” from where he has been left, to which G-d responds by revealing the saving spring of water to his mother. We note the tears of Abraham, conspicuous by their very absence, as he prepares his beloved son Isaac for sacrifice.  Isaac’s tears, also absent, are replaced, in midrash, by the tears of angels, which fall into Isaac’s eyes as he lies bound upon the altar and cloud his vision forever after.  Today’s haftarah from Jeremiah vibrates with the sound of Rachel’s “bitter weeping” for her exiled children, tears of radical empathy that shame G-d into the promise of redemption.  Even the crying of a figure as minor as the nameless mother of Sisera, the wicked general whose death at the hands of Yael is chronicled in the ancient Song of Deborah, is evoked by the sages of the Talmud, who prescribe that the very manner of blowing the shofar should recall the quality of her wailing when she realizes her son will not return from battle.  It was suggested that all these different flavors of tears – shed or unshed – teach us something about the nuances of our participation in the drama of these holy days, about what is being asked of us here and in the year to come – and in our lives. 
 
No one at the Kallah, however, spoke about Hannah’s tears. What, I asked myself, is their taste and how do they nourish us? Like so many of the matriarchal figures in scripture, Hannah is childless. She is presented as a painfully unfulfilled woman, whose ability to feel loved by her adoring husband is blocked because she has been denied her heart’s deepest desire, a son. Doctors and psychologists are coming to understand how prolonged or extreme pain, whether physical, mental or emotional, leads to a numbing of our senses, a kind of inner paralysis that dulls our very participation in life.  Our organisms cut off feeling in order to survive. I have noticed that even minor disappointments, piling up over time, lead to an attitude of subtle cynicism, a closing of the heart that keeps us protected – both from pain and from joyous participation in life.  
 
Hannah, sunk in her own sorrow, verbally abused by her husband Elkanah’s other wife, the fertile Peninah, and unable to receive his offerings of love, somehow finds it within herself to break the cycle of numbness and despair and to respond in a radically different way.  Surrendering her pain to G-d, she circumcises her heart, spilling her soul tears and whispered words upon the altar of the Holy One at the Shiloh temple. What inspires an action so unusual that it causes the aging priest Eli to chastise her for what seems to him to be drunkenness?  The text tells us only: “v’hi marat nefesh (and she was bitter of soul) va-titpallel al YHVH (and she prayed to YHVH), u-vakhoh tivkeh (all the while crying her heart out).”1  Marat, bitterness, speaks literally of bitter water, specifically the undrinkable waters found by the thirsty Israelites who, after crossing the Sea of Reeds, had spent three frightening, waterless days in the wilderness. Hannah’s soul is filled with these bitter waters, her heart a brackish pool in the barren wilderness of her body.  Yet somehow she is impelled, despite the custom of her world, where an orderly and correct relationship with awesome Divinity is maintained through the priests’ prescribed ministrations and the sacrifice of animals, to approach G-d directly, to offer up her tears and the silent movements of her lips. 
 
The Hebrew root l’hitpallel , which we translate as “pray,” and which can be rendered more precisely as “intercede” or “interpose,” comes from an Arabic root meaning “to cut oneself in worship.”  Our wise rebbe Ellen Kaufman Dosick recently reminded me that the word “tears” can also be pronounced “tears” (tares).  In the depth of her pain, Hannah tears herself open with implicit trust that the Holy One will witness her suffering. If G-d will open her womb, she vows, she will dedicate its fruit, the son she will bear, to G-d’s service. And then we read: “v’Hannah, hi midaberet al libah; rak s’fateyha na-ot, v’kolah lo yishameya: and Hannah was speaking upon her heart; only her lips moved and her voice was not heard.”2   In the act of weeping out her longing and passion to G-d, Hannah speaks also into her own heart, opening at last to the depths of her own desire, silently mouthing words of yearning too ardent, too intimate to be spoken aloud.   In one breath she surrenders all – her pain, her longing, even her unborn son – to G-d, and in this moment begins to find inner peace.
 
I feel a special kinship with Hannah, this mother of prayer, for Hannah is my Hebrew name. And I am named after my mother’s mother, Hannah Dreisl, “Helen,” as she came to be called when she arrived in this country from Hungary at the age of nine, just before the outbreak of World War I.  Like Hannah of the Bible, she was a woman greatly beloved of her husband, my Grandpa Sam; and she was a woman unfulfilled, not for lack of children – of whom she left behind three, including my mother Florence, the middle one – but in years. She died at age 26 at the height of the Great Depression, having shed not her tears, but her life’s blood, and not to bring a child into the world, but to avoid having another one. A Chicago abortionist’s knife took the life that almost certainly would have ended, had she not left Hungary, in the camps of Poland some ten years later.  
 
My mother was six years old when her mother died.  She never grieved.  She told me that at the funeral on a cold October day in 1930 at the Waldheim cemetery in Chicago, her father threw himself into the open grave, sobbing.  But she kept quiet, not knowing what was happening or what to do.  In her immigrant family, emotions were not easily shared.  Growing up, I sensed a great sadness in the house of my mother’s parents (Sam had remarried after a couple of years) and never felt completely comfortable there.   
 
I believe that unshed tears are passed from generation to generation.  My mother carried these unshed tears lodged in her throat, and she passed them on to me.  I discovered them only many years later, when I began to study singing and tapped into a well of tears caught in my own throat.  I would sing jazz standards, songs of yearning and unrequited love. For two years I cried every time I sang. Only later did I come to understand that these songs are also prayers.  I am still learning to cry my grandmother’s and mother’s and my own tears of grief and longing, and perhaps the tears of earlier generations and generations yet to come as well.  It has taken me a long time to begin to name the yearnings of which they speak, and even longer to understand the joy which crying them liberates.
 
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has described prayer as an “adventure of the soul” that shifts “the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.”3  That first Hannah knew, or came to know, that tears of loss are folded into tears of fulfillment, those of fulfillment folded into those of loss, and that to risk fulfillment, we inevitably invite loss. In time she bore her son, and in time brought him back to the temple to enter G-d’s service as a new kind of priest, an anointer of kings.  Then she prayed/praised aloud, and her prayer is a kaddish, a sanctification of the Great Name, an upliftment for all souls who yearn, for she teaches the most difficult lesson of true prayer: the lesson of surrender in the very moment of asking.
                         
At this season, this Rosh Ha-Shanah, this moment of renewing our awareness of the constancy of change, the ever-present possibility of transformation, Hannah teaches me what my grandmother never had the chance to, and what my mother didn’t know how to: the power of opening ourselves to the Possibility Beyond Possibilities, of feeling our deepest yearnings with all of our being, of becoming radically vulnerable, even in the face of our world’s apparent harshness.  “For it is not through strength that humans prevail,” she proclaims.  She teaches us l’hitpallel, to cut ourselves open in prayer, to acknowledge that by ourselves we are incapable of creating what we most deeply desire – love, peace, wholeness – and yet, that if we fully open to those desires, if we can bless our own longings and let them flood through us without inner resistance, then we engage G-d’s co-creative force and draw it into our lives.  Hannah challenges us to let G-d stretch us wide, and by example enjoins us to pray as if our very lives depended on it –for they do. 
 
Of all the many worthy reasons we come together at this holy season – to review the past year; to let go of old energies and realign ourselves with our deepest purpose; to forgive and be forgiven; to celebrate successes and blessings; to lament the ways in which we as individuals, as a community, and as a human race, have failed to be kind, to be strong, to fulfill our potentials for goodness and fairness and truth -- perhaps the most profound is simply this: to open our hearts, to share our tears and to let G-d stretch us.
 
O G-d, Great Discerner, Holy Champion, help us to set aside our bashfulness. Teach us to touch in love the sorest, the least voiced parts of our own souls. Meet our tears and whisperings with your compassion, that our lives may open gracefully into whatever circumstances we face. Let us receive the blessings of this moment, this day and this coming year in healing gratitude.  Amen.


1 I Samuel, 1:10
2  Op. cit., 1:13
3 Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity.

                                                                                                                                                  © Diane Elliot 2004