“Transforming Together”
offered at the Aquarian Minyan's Virtual Erev Rosh Hashanah service
September 18, 2020 ~ 1 Tishrei 5781
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
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
"The Torah of Hannah"
Haftarah Reading: I Samuel 1:1-2:10
offered at Urban Adamah with the Torah of Awakening, on Rosh Hashanah 5780, September 30, 2019
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
Haftarah Reading: I Samuel 1:1-2:10
offered at Urban Adamah with the Torah of Awakening, on Rosh Hashanah 5780, September 30, 2019
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
" The Missing Blessing"
Parashat Va-yekhi
Genesis 47:28 - 50:26
In this week’s parashah, the last of the Book of Genesis, Jacob, our perfectly imperfect patriarch, comes to the end of his long and eventful life—a life shaped, you might say, by the effort to grow into his father Isaac’s blessing—the blessing stolen from his huntsman brother, Esau: to receive the dew of the heavens, the abundance of earth, to be a lord among nations, and a ruler of his kinsmen. Now, lying on his deathbed, eyes “kavdu mizoken,” heavy with age, as his father’s had been at the end of his life, it is Jacob’s turn to bless his large, unruly brood, twelve sons, sired through four mothers—the beloved Rachel, the less loved Leah, and their handmaid surrogates, Bilhah and Zilpah.
Last year during the week of Parashat Va-yekhi, I was co-leading a retreat at Commonweal in the Pacific coastal hamlet of Bolinas, CA. Attending the retreat was a multi-generational group of artists and activists who had come together to deepen their connection to Jewish text and practice. I looked forward to chanting from Torah on Shabbat and had chosen some of these verses in which Jacob instructs and blesses his twelve sons. As is the custom in my Jewish Renewal community, I planned to introduce the verses with a kavannah, an intention, designed to “call” to the Torah whoever felt called by the essence of that aliyah, and then to seal the reading with a spontaneous mi-she’berakh, a blessing inspired by the encounter between the text, the moment, and the energy of the people present.
As I studied my verses throughout the week and meditated on possible kavannot, on the blessing that might come to all of us through Jacob’s sometimes opaque, seemingly prophetic blessings for each of his twelve sons, nothing was coming. Usually, when I’m to leyen Torah, streams of text and commentary, both old and new, flow together and mix with my intuitive sense of who will be in the room and what they might need to hear. Now I felt completely dry.
On Shabbat morning, before we gathered for our service, I walked through the pine trees to a small meditation hut perched on a windswept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Commonweal was founded more than 40 years ago, with a vision of providing healing retreat space for cancer patients and their families. Many of the folks who have come to meditate in the tiny chapel by the sea have brought both deep grief and the dawning of acceptance––for their own years shortened or for the imminent passing of a loved one. Alone there, in the quiet, resonant space filled with the loving energy of the many who had meditated there before me, I sank into a reverie.
Suddenly it was as if the ruakh ha-kodesh, the ocean winds outside and the rise and fall of breath within, had swept the heaviness from my eyes and freed an inner voice, whispering to me how to enter the Torah text on this particular Shabbat, surrounded by these particular folks, many of whom were young and burning with a passion for justice for people of all races and genders and classes, and for our earth. Quickly I made my way back to our communal meeting room, where the Shabbat service was beginning.
When it came time to chant the verses of Jacob’s final prophetic blessings for his sons, I explained how I had struggled to connect with the Torah’s message for this Shabbat and for our group, and how I had gone to meditate on the bluff. “What came to me,” I told them, “is that the I could not bring through this Torah, because the blessing for Dinah, Jacob’s only daughter, is missing. In our parashah Jacob sees and touches and honors and blesses his two grandsons, Menashe and Efraim, Joseph’s sons, and then offers blessings for each of his own twelve sons, whose offspring will become the tribes of Israel. But nowhere is Dinah—the beautiful, raped, disgraced daughter of Leah—seen or mentioned or blessed.”
As I spoke, I could sense Dinah hovering just outside the room in which Jacob lay dying. Or perhaps she was far away, in exile. Had she come down to Egypt with the rest of the family to escape the famine in Canaan? Or had she been drummed out of the family? Ancient and contemporary midrashim, most notably Anita Diamant’s richly imagined The Red Tent, have attempted to fill in the bare bones of Dinah’s story, but I needed her here, this day, this Shabbat, present with her brothers at their father’s bedside, seen, acknowledged.
So I invited all of us, together, to channel the words of Dinah’s missing blessing. I can’t remember exactly what we said, it was so much of the moment. There were affirmations of Dinah’s being, expressions of comfort and understanding and honor. And there were tears. I heard one of my fellow retreat leaders, a male rabbi, sitting behind me, quietly sobbing. “Dinah, come, we welcome you! No matter what has befallen you in your life, no matter what path you have chosen, you, too, are our lineage holder! You, too deserve your father’s blessing. We honor you, we make space for you in this room, in our family. You are seen, embraced, invited.”
I felt the spirit of Dinah seep into the room. Only then, only after we had ignited the “white fire” of Torah, the invisible words emanating from between the lines of the Torah scroll and rising from our hearts and throats, was I able to chant the verses inscribed on the parchment.
Sometimes what is missing is as important as what is seemingly present. As countless generations of midrashists have taught us, it is often from these proverbial “white spaces,” these wellsprings of dream, imagination, and visionary truth, that the Torah needed for this very moment, the Torah that speaks directly to our hearts, bubbles up.
On this and on every Shabbat, let us bless our daughters and our sons, our nieces and our nephews, our grandchildren, our students—our beloved young people of every gender—not only with our words, but through the integrity with which we live and through our fierce, ongoing commitment to make this world a better, more habitable place for them to grow and come of age in. And let us never fail to witness, name, and cherish each one’s shining essence: “May God help you become exactly who you are. May the Divine bless and keep you safe; may God’s light shine upon you with grace; may you perceive the Holiness in the faces of others and in the world, lifting you up, cherishing you, making you whole.”
Khazak khazak, v’nit’khazek,may we be strong, strong, and strengthen one another.
© Rabbi Diane Elliot 2019
Parashat Va-yekhi
Genesis 47:28 - 50:26
In this week’s parashah, the last of the Book of Genesis, Jacob, our perfectly imperfect patriarch, comes to the end of his long and eventful life—a life shaped, you might say, by the effort to grow into his father Isaac’s blessing—the blessing stolen from his huntsman brother, Esau: to receive the dew of the heavens, the abundance of earth, to be a lord among nations, and a ruler of his kinsmen. Now, lying on his deathbed, eyes “kavdu mizoken,” heavy with age, as his father’s had been at the end of his life, it is Jacob’s turn to bless his large, unruly brood, twelve sons, sired through four mothers—the beloved Rachel, the less loved Leah, and their handmaid surrogates, Bilhah and Zilpah.
Last year during the week of Parashat Va-yekhi, I was co-leading a retreat at Commonweal in the Pacific coastal hamlet of Bolinas, CA. Attending the retreat was a multi-generational group of artists and activists who had come together to deepen their connection to Jewish text and practice. I looked forward to chanting from Torah on Shabbat and had chosen some of these verses in which Jacob instructs and blesses his twelve sons. As is the custom in my Jewish Renewal community, I planned to introduce the verses with a kavannah, an intention, designed to “call” to the Torah whoever felt called by the essence of that aliyah, and then to seal the reading with a spontaneous mi-she’berakh, a blessing inspired by the encounter between the text, the moment, and the energy of the people present.
As I studied my verses throughout the week and meditated on possible kavannot, on the blessing that might come to all of us through Jacob’s sometimes opaque, seemingly prophetic blessings for each of his twelve sons, nothing was coming. Usually, when I’m to leyen Torah, streams of text and commentary, both old and new, flow together and mix with my intuitive sense of who will be in the room and what they might need to hear. Now I felt completely dry.
On Shabbat morning, before we gathered for our service, I walked through the pine trees to a small meditation hut perched on a windswept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Commonweal was founded more than 40 years ago, with a vision of providing healing retreat space for cancer patients and their families. Many of the folks who have come to meditate in the tiny chapel by the sea have brought both deep grief and the dawning of acceptance––for their own years shortened or for the imminent passing of a loved one. Alone there, in the quiet, resonant space filled with the loving energy of the many who had meditated there before me, I sank into a reverie.
Suddenly it was as if the ruakh ha-kodesh, the ocean winds outside and the rise and fall of breath within, had swept the heaviness from my eyes and freed an inner voice, whispering to me how to enter the Torah text on this particular Shabbat, surrounded by these particular folks, many of whom were young and burning with a passion for justice for people of all races and genders and classes, and for our earth. Quickly I made my way back to our communal meeting room, where the Shabbat service was beginning.
When it came time to chant the verses of Jacob’s final prophetic blessings for his sons, I explained how I had struggled to connect with the Torah’s message for this Shabbat and for our group, and how I had gone to meditate on the bluff. “What came to me,” I told them, “is that the I could not bring through this Torah, because the blessing for Dinah, Jacob’s only daughter, is missing. In our parashah Jacob sees and touches and honors and blesses his two grandsons, Menashe and Efraim, Joseph’s sons, and then offers blessings for each of his own twelve sons, whose offspring will become the tribes of Israel. But nowhere is Dinah—the beautiful, raped, disgraced daughter of Leah—seen or mentioned or blessed.”
As I spoke, I could sense Dinah hovering just outside the room in which Jacob lay dying. Or perhaps she was far away, in exile. Had she come down to Egypt with the rest of the family to escape the famine in Canaan? Or had she been drummed out of the family? Ancient and contemporary midrashim, most notably Anita Diamant’s richly imagined The Red Tent, have attempted to fill in the bare bones of Dinah’s story, but I needed her here, this day, this Shabbat, present with her brothers at their father’s bedside, seen, acknowledged.
So I invited all of us, together, to channel the words of Dinah’s missing blessing. I can’t remember exactly what we said, it was so much of the moment. There were affirmations of Dinah’s being, expressions of comfort and understanding and honor. And there were tears. I heard one of my fellow retreat leaders, a male rabbi, sitting behind me, quietly sobbing. “Dinah, come, we welcome you! No matter what has befallen you in your life, no matter what path you have chosen, you, too, are our lineage holder! You, too deserve your father’s blessing. We honor you, we make space for you in this room, in our family. You are seen, embraced, invited.”
I felt the spirit of Dinah seep into the room. Only then, only after we had ignited the “white fire” of Torah, the invisible words emanating from between the lines of the Torah scroll and rising from our hearts and throats, was I able to chant the verses inscribed on the parchment.
Sometimes what is missing is as important as what is seemingly present. As countless generations of midrashists have taught us, it is often from these proverbial “white spaces,” these wellsprings of dream, imagination, and visionary truth, that the Torah needed for this very moment, the Torah that speaks directly to our hearts, bubbles up.
On this and on every Shabbat, let us bless our daughters and our sons, our nieces and our nephews, our grandchildren, our students—our beloved young people of every gender—not only with our words, but through the integrity with which we live and through our fierce, ongoing commitment to make this world a better, more habitable place for them to grow and come of age in. And let us never fail to witness, name, and cherish each one’s shining essence: “May God help you become exactly who you are. May the Divine bless and keep you safe; may God’s light shine upon you with grace; may you perceive the Holiness in the faces of others and in the world, lifting you up, cherishing you, making you whole.”
Khazak khazak, v’nit’khazek,may we be strong, strong, and strengthen one another.
© Rabbi Diane Elliot 2019
“Embracing Infinity”
Parashat Sh'mini
Leviticus 9:1-11:47
“Va-yehi ba-yom hash’mini…” It is on the eighth day that the dedication of the Mishkan, the desert Tabernacle, spoken into being by God’s desire to dwell amongst the Israelites and built with their heart-offerings, culminates in Aaron’s successful performance, for the first time, of his priestly service. After he performs all the offerings flawlessly, according to Divine direction, Aaron raises his hands to bless the people, and YHVHmaterializes as a density visible to all! Holy fire leaps forth to consume the offerings, a great joyous cry of relief rises from every throat and, as if with a single impulse, the whole people throw themselves upon the ground in awe.
Suddenly, in the midst of this ritual high drama, a shocking rupture occurs—Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s eldest sons, each place fire and incense upon their fire pans and bring “esh zara, strange fire,” before the altar. In an instant, they are consumed by the same miraculous Divine fire that, just moments before, had engulfed with favor their father’s offerings.
At this excruciating moment, Moses says to his brother, simply, “This is what God meant when saying, ‘Through those near to me will I be sanctified; before all the people will I be glorified.’ ” Aaron’s response? “Va-yidom Aharon, and Aaron was silent.” (Leviticus 10:3)
Rashi, the great 11thcentury Torah commentator, interprets Moses’ words as high praise for the spiritual attainments of Aaron’s sons. Moses is telling Aaron, Rashi posits, that it’s because of Nadav and Avihu’s “nearness” to God, their saintliness, that the final sanctification of the Mishkanhas taken place through their deaths.
I want to hear the tone of Moses’ voice, to see his face. Have his eyes softened in empathy? Are they brimming with tears? Is he speaking gently, attempting to offer his brother some comfort in the face of unspeakable loss? Or is he impassive, majestic, still rapt with the elevated energy of ceremony, teaching his brother yet another lesson about the Torah order that is henceforth to govern Israel’s religious and communal life?
And what of Aaron’s silence? Does it signify, as the Biur(Naphtali Hirz Wessely, German, 18thc.) suggests, patience, resignation, and an inner peace that accepts his sons’ fate and receives with equanimity ol malkhut shamayim, heaven’s yoke? Or is Aaron’s a shocked, frozen, stunned silence? After all, God stayed Abraham’s hand when Isaac was upon the altar! Why now must these sons, these princes of the people, be sacrificed (drawn close), along with the bulls, rams, and goats?
Only once in my life have I experienced the sudden, shocking loss of someone with whom I was emotionally and spiritually bound up. It was not the loss of my child or close relative, but of my teacher, R. David World-Blank z”l, killed in a car crash at the age of 47. At the moment I received the news, it felt like being kicked in the gut and having my heart ripped open at the same time. I wanted to cry out, to writhe, but at the time, I was living in a shared household with people I didn’t know well, with whom I didn’t feel safe. So I kept silent as I tried to stay present and ride the powerful feelings and sensations of wrenching pain alternating with numbness and disbelief.
The psalmist cries out to God, “l’ma’an yizamerkha kavod v’lo yidom, Adonai elohai, l’olam odeka, So that my soul might sing Your glory and not be silent, YHVH, my God, I will forever thank you!” (Psalm 30:13) Here the quality of yidomis not a resigned or accepting silence, but a heavy-hearted silence that chokes off joyful song. Gratitude and praise, the psalmist suggests, can release the voice again, providing the antidote to this silence of despair.
But both the psalmist and Aaron know that this takes time. “Ba-erev yalin bekhi, v’la boker rinah, at night one lies down weeping, but with the dawn—joyful singing!” (Psalm 30:6) In the “dark night of the soul,” pain can be digested, and eventually transmuted into song. Aaron, ever more in touch with the human, fleshly realm than his God-centered brother, instructs Moses in this truth by refusing to eat the sin-offering within the sacred precinct on the same day that his sons have died. “Didn’t they, this very day, bring close their sin offering and their burnt offering before YHVH—and things like this befell me? Am I now to eat the sin-offering? Would YHVHapprove?” (Leviticus 10:19)
Yom ha-sh’mini, the “eighth day,” takes us beyond the pale of Creation, the familiar rhythm of seven, and into the realm of the Infinite, where the mysteries of life and death, of joy and loss, of elation and heartbreak, flow into one another in a single song of simultaneous love and awe. It’s not an easy realm for most of us to inhabit.
When such ruptures, such losses occur in our own lives, may we be gentle with ourselves, honoring the nights of weeping, the days of silence, and taking the time, as Aaron teaches, to allow words of praise and thanksgiving and blessing to find their way through our shattered hearts and gradually back into our mouths, where they teach us, bit by bit, to embrace the Vastness, the infinity, for which we each are a vessel.
© Rabbi Diane Elliot 2015
“I've Got You Under My Skin”
Parashat Tazria-Metzora
Leviticus 12:1-15:33
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 2008
“For Heaven’s Sake”
Parashat Korakh
Numbers 16:1 -18:32
Our Torah tradition seems to present us with two kinds of enemies—those who are “other” like Amalek and the Philistines, attacking Israel and threatening its survival from without; and those who transform from “us,” to “other” as their words and actions threaten to unravel the very spiritual and moral fabric of the community from within.
In this week’s parashah we witness the painful and disturbing swiftness with which the unity of the Israelite people can shatter, swiftly reconfigured to “us” and “them,” when Korakh, a community leader of impeccable lineage separates himself from the kahal, drawing other leaders of the community into a rebellion against the authority of Moses and Aaron. In the ensuing spiritual showdown, orchestrated by Moses, the earth splits open, swallowing Korakh, the members of his household, and all their possessions, while 250 other leaders of the community who had stood with Korakh are consumed by G~d’s fire as they offer incense. When the people protest, G~d’s fury is unleashed upon them in a plague.
One classic interpretation of this troubling story is expressed in a passage from the Mishnah (Avot 5:17): “Controversy for the sake of heaven (makhloket she’hi l’shem shamayim) will in the end yield fruitful results, while that which is not for the sake of heaven will not. An example of controversy for the sake of heaven: that of Hillel and Shamai. An example of controversy not for the sake of heaven: that of Korakh.”
The sages imply something very profound here: the disastrous result of Korakh’s mutiny stems not from the relative merit of his complaint, but from the way he conducts the dispute. For is there not, after all, truth in Korakh’s claim, that we are all One before G~d, all holy? Had not the mishkan been built so that G~d’s Presence could manifest within each one of the Israelites and in the midst of the community, as well as through its prophetic and priestly leaders?
Contemporary Biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg invokes Levinas’ image of “the voice from another shore” to further unpack Korakh’s failure. In her analysis, Moses, heavily invested in speaking, tries until the last moment to engage Korakh in an interaction that might have a chance of restoring the integrity of the kahal. But after making the initial accusation, Korakh remains silent, unwilling to engage with the “voice from another shore” that irritates and annoys him, unwilling to enliven the space between Moses and himself because, the Midrash suggests, he is afraid of being won over.
A controversy for heaven’s sake, as my colleague Rabbi Shelly Lewis wrote last week, “assumes a bond of trust and affection between the interlocutors. It also assumes a willingness to listen, to learn, and to accept the perspective of another if it proves to be the best. The sides seek the best, the most wise solution.” Refusing to engage, to take even a single step into the gap that separates him from Moses and Aaron, Korakh generates an irreparable crack in the community, one that is mirrored by the crack in the earth that opens under him, swallowing all that he is and has. In his disengagement, his fear to let his challenge be challenged, he controverts the very truth he seeks to assert, invoking heaven in a way that, ultimately, is not for heaven’s sake.
These past ten days, following news of the situation currently unfolding off the shores of Gaza, I’ve read many passionate, conflicting interpretations and felt the painful, unsoothable tension of a seemingly intractable conflict once again escalating, both in the Middle East and within our own communities. I’ve been tempted to ask, as I imagine the community of Israelites in the wilderness, exhausted and traumatized, must also have been asking as they witnessed the confrontation between Korakh and Moses: who has the ear of heaven? who speaks with the voice of heaven? who can be trusted?
But to ask these kinds of questions ultimately pulls me back from a terrifyingly shaky edge on which I need to stand—the place where I have to admit that I don’t know what’s going on. This is the groundless ground of true engagement, the Void between polarities from which, our mystics teach, all Creation was birthed. Korakh’s name, which comes from the Hebrew root meaning “bald” or “absent,” hints at his inability to stay present in the face of this very Void (Ayin) in which opposites dissolve and something new can emerge. And so he falls, leaving a hole in the heart of the world, depriving the community of the richness he might have offered in service of the Holy, if only all parties had been able to stay engaged, present, and vulnerable. I pray that we may somehow learn at last to rest together in the place of Ayin, with humility and love, inviting the Light that can shine only through the broken shards of our certainties, our self-righteousness, our most dearly held convictions.
© Rabbi Diane Elliot 2010