Velveteen Rabbi

This week's portion: a Torah journey with Rebecca

This fall I'm taking a class called "Torah Journeys" with Rabbi Shefa Gold. Reb Shefa is teaching us her method of intensely personal exegesis, as appears in her excellent collection of parshaniyut, Torah Journeys. We've each been asked to engage in a "Torah journey" of our own around a Torah text of our choosing; I chose this week's portion, Toldot.

At the very beginning of this parsha, we learn that Rebecca is childless. Yitzchak pleads with God on her behalf and she conceives. She feels the tumult of the twins within her, and goes to inquire of YHVH, אם כן, למה זה אנכי? -- usually translated as "If this is so, then why do I exist?

1) Where's the blessing here?

The beginning of this parsha has always struck a chord with me. Even someone who has never been pregnant knows the experience of mixed emotions, of feeling tumultuous motion within oneself, of wondering "Why am I here?" Rebecca is deeply conscious of her own mixed feelings, of her swirl of emotions. They lead her to ask: what am I here for? What am I doing? What is my purpose? And she brings these questions to the Source of All. Although we've never seen her speak directly to God before, she doesn't seem to feel that she needs an intermediary; she brings her question directly to the Holy Blessed One.

It's interesting to me that Rebecca doesn't ask YHVH for a child, nor does she take the extraordinary steps which other Biblical foremothers took -- she doesn't bring her handmaid to her husband as Sarah did, nor does she beseech God herself for a child as Hannah will do. The text doesn't tell us how she felt before the conception: did she understand herself as bereft, as empty? Or was she contented with her situation, and surprised when something new and strange began to grow inside her? One blessing I find in this part of the parsha is Rebecca's readiness to speak directly to God. Another blessing is her willingness to question.

Now that I am only a few short days away from birthing my first child, this text offers me new blessings. I can relate to Rebecca's question not only as an intellectual and spiritual matter, but also as a physical one. In assiyah (the world of action and physicality), although I don't know what it's like to bear twins, I do know now what it feels like to have something which is not-me stirring inside my body. I've struggled at times with the anticipation of yielding control over my life (both in pregnancy, and especially once the baby comes and I am no longer able to pursue rabbinic studies full-time), and I find reassurance in the fact that this foremother struggled too with the question אם כן, למה זה אנכי?

What's more: when Rebecca asks, God answers her. Although I have only rarely had the experience of feeling directly answered by God, this story reminds me to reach out to God when I have questions and fears, and to know that God hears me.

Psalm 20: a psalm for childbirth

As I mentioned a while back, my final project for my psalms tutorial is an exploration of two psalms which have classically been associated with childbirth, one of which is psalm 20, which begins "May God answer you in your day of trouble." In one interpretation,  Midrash Tehillim draws an analogy between the God-Israel relationship and the relationship of a mother and daughter who, though they have quarreled, are still so deeply connected that when the daughter cries out in labor, her mother -- even if her mother is in heaven, e.g. the world to come -- cries out along with her. "The suffering of my daughter is my suffering," the mother says. How wondrous that the sages could understand God as our Mother, who endures the birth-pangs of our transformation along with us!

I have a few more teachings to share on this psalm, but first I wanted to offer my (somewhat clunky) translation of psalm 20. Please note that where the original text features the tetragrammaton, I've replaced that Name with יה, because this is my working copy of the psalm designed to be printed and there are Jewish traditions which prohibit writing the four-letter Name on anything which might be treated carelessly or thrown away.

Psalm 20

תהילים פרק כ

א  לַמְנַצֵּחַ, מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד.

For the leader: a psalm of David.


ב  יַעַנְךָ יה, בְּיוֹם צָרָה;    יְשַׂגֶּבְךָ, שֵׁם אֱלֹהֵי יַעֲקֹב.

May God answer you in your day of trouble,
May the name of the God of Jacob place you in safe shelter,

ג  יִשְׁלַח-עֶזְרְךָ מִקֹּדֶשׁ;    וּמִצִּיּוֹן, יִסְעָדֶךָּ.

Send forth help for you from the holy place,
And support for you from Zion.

This week's portion: birthings

BIRTHINGS (TOLDOT)

Eleh tol'dot Yitzchak

these are Isaac's generations
this is the history

but generations
shares a root with birthings

seems to me
this portion ought to begin

these are the birthings
of Rivka, tales of pregnancy

and uncertainty
a belly slowly swelling

twins jostling for space
in the family they share

someone reframed it
so that Isaac comes first

but Rivka's tale persists
she asks her own questions

I do too

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This week we're in parashat Toldot, which begins וְאֵלֶּה תּוֹלְדֹת יִצְחָק / v'eleh tol'dot Yitzchak, usually translated as "these are the generations of Isaac" or "this is the history of Isaac." Intriguingly, though, there's another way to read that word-root, and the story quickly moves from the initial mention of Isaac to its preoccupation with Rebecca and the twins. It's out of that disjunction that this week's Torah poem arose.

By the by, I feel I ought to mention a brief personal note: as regular readers are aware, Ethan and I are expecting our first child pretty soon. ("Soon" as in "the end of next week.") At some point in the not-so-distant future, I will stop writing and posting Torah poems, at least for a while. If you find that you miss them, of course, you can always check out my index of divrei Torah -- all of my Torah poems from the last few years are posted there.

This week's readwritepoem prompt was a word cloud filled with "p" words. I didn't manage to write to the prompt, but if you're curious to know what others did with it, you can check out this week's get your poem on post.

[birthings.mp3]

Paradigm shifting and Hasidut

Part 3 of a series of blog posts arising out of final reflections on the class Moadim l'Simcha, "Seasons of Our Rejoicing," which I recently completed. Part 1 can be found here and part 2 can be found here.

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Paradigm shifting: How might we/you draw on these sources for our own spiritual path? For the world of Jewish Renewal? What teachings/practices might be adapted/surrendered to? What might be creatively recast? Are there elements that can’t be (easily) absorbed? What do we learn from these "unassimilable" elements (or roughage)? Why study them nonetheless?

There's much in the sources we've studied which speaks to me. There's also some material here which doesn't speak to me (yet), or which requires the kind of reading that Wendy Doniger describes in her convocation address [.pdf] -- a "hermeneutics of retrieval, or even of reconciliation."

What speaks to me most plainly is the passion for God, the yearning for devequt (cleaving-to-God), the often intricate pathways toward sanctifying holidays which might otherwise slip by unheralded. I know that having studied these texts will change my relationship with Purim next year, with Pesach, with Shavuot, with the Three Weeks and Tisha b'Av, with the Days of Awe and Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret. As my relationship with the wheel of the year is deepened, I am more invested in learning, and in teaching what I've learned.

What challenge me most strongly are these texts' occasional assumptions about non-Jews and about women. (They were clearly written by, and for, Jewish men whose views on women and outsiders don't match mine.) But this challenges me in almost all of my immersion in Jewish texts, from Tanakh through Talmud straight through the Hasidic masters. I'm with Wendy on this one: we owe it to our texts to read them first with an eye to what they are, then we owe it to our political and personal sensibilities to wrestle with the texts, and then we owe it to the texts to find a way to return to them and read them not blindly, but still with love. That I read these texts with love is always a given.

What I see as the essential truths in these texts are truths that I desperately need. I believe they are truths that the people I teach desperately need, too, whether or not that need is clear to them. (It's my job to make that need clear even as I work to fill it.) We need to enliven our holiday practices, to access these deep meanings which are hidden in plain sight. Jewish Renewal is experiential; we can offer profound encounters with the tradition and with God, but in order to do that, we need to know (to borrow a classic Hasidic metaphor) the keys to the doors of God's palace. These texts can be some of those keys, and to discard the keyring because some of what it holds doesn't accord with contemporary post-triumphalist or gender/sexuality sensibilities would be short-sighted.

My challenge as a Jewish Renewal rabbi is to continue to plumb these wells for the profound spiritual sustenance they can offer, and then to give over these teachings in a way which neither does violence to the original texts nor to the audience before whom I place the words. One way I hope to do that is by studying the texts myself, generating my own translations, and teaching them in my congregation at appropriate moments. Another method of integrating these texts into my spiritual life and my teaching is the process of turning them into poems, and sharing those with as wide an audience as my poems can reach.

Ultimately, the process of wrestling with complicated texts can also yield its own rewards. As the Me'or Eynayim has written, "You struggle and find the light that God has hidden in God's Torah. After a person has truly worked at such searching, it comes to be called her Torah." (Okay, he didn't phrase it in quite those words. But I'm pretty sure it's what he was saying.) That's a life's work, and it's work I'm grateful to be beginning to do.

Morning

I wake on my own time, when my pregnant bladder demands. I doze some more. I decide to rise. I check blood pressure, shower, take my morning meds, and putter my way down to the kitchen, pausing to retrieve the two Boppy slipcovers from the dryer and to place one on the pillow which waits in the silent nursery. I go into the garage, which is deliciously cold, and retrieve a Honeycrisp apple from the old wooden box which serves as our root cellar. Diced, it goes into a little pot with oats and raisins and a dash of cinnamon.

Once I'm fed, I put on tallit and tefillin and spend a little bit of time with the siddur. This morning I am drawn to the first two lines of the ashrei, which translate to,"Happy are those who dwell in Your house; they will praise you forever, selah." The small being in my womb seems excited by these lines; the whole time I'm reciting them, he's twitching and kicking and squirming around. Or maybe he's just enjoying the infusion of blood sugar from my breakfast, who can say? I stick with the ashrei for a while, though, enjoying contemplating what it means to dwell in God's house. I am in God's house. My son is, too.

And then I settle in to my desk to prepare for today's two classes: a session of Torah Journeys with R' Shefa Gold and a study session with one of my classmates on parashat Toldot seen through feminist lenses.

How many mornings like this one remain to me?

Reflecting on study of the Baal Shem Tov

How would you integrate the teachings of the Ba'al Shem Tov into your thought, your life, and into your work as a rabbi?

One answer is that I hope to continue studying the Besht's teachings. Despite their relative textual simplicity, there's a depth to them, and they speak to me deeply. Another answer is that I hope to continue teaching the Besht's teachings, on the theory that the best way to learn something is to give it over to someone else in turn.

I've found great value in [what my teacher Reb Burt calls] the Sacred Study Process. I've found the practice of asking "what is my immediate personal response to the teaching?" and "what underlying question do I think the teaching seeks to answer?" to be incredibly helpful, and I'd like to share those with others.

Still a third answer is that I know I will have to take a step back from active text study and teaching in the coming year, as I allow myself to immerse in parenthood. So then how will I integrate the Baal Shem Tov's teachings into my life as a new mother? My hope is that the learning we've done will germinate in me, yielding new insights.

Perhaps when I find myself frustrated with changing diapers, I'll remember the Besht's injunction to create a dwelling-place for God by doing whatever work is at hand with holy consciousness and full attention.

Perhaps when I am feeling overwhelmed with love for my son -- or when I am feeling overwhelmed and unable access that overflow of emotion -- I will remember the Besht's teaching that when we love our fellow human beings we are loving the spark of God which enlivens each of us, and in that way loving my son will become a path to (or a manner of) loving God.

It may be that I won't know how the Besht's teachings will ripen and bear fruit in me until a year has gone by, or two, or ten. But I'm committed to continuing to delve into them. I see myself (and my chevre / classmates) as new buds on the tree which he planted, and I aspire to live up to his teaching as my rabbinate unfolds.

Test run

The late-night drive to the hospital sometime before one's child is born is a rite of passage. Almost every pair of expectant parents I know has done it. Maybe there's a preterm labor scare, or the mother starts having contractions which seem to be trending longer, stronger, and closer together and the parents-to-be dash to the hospital to see if this is "really it," bringing their already-packed labor suitcase and strange new carseat along for the ride just in case. In our case it was some blood pressure readings which led us to call the Mother-Baby Unit late at night; their instructions were to come in immediately, so we did, and we wound up staying for a while.

There's no cause for alarm; baby and I are fine, though the staff there kept us for observation (and to work on titration of blood pressure medication) for a few days. The first night at the hospital I dozed a scant few hours of sleep, interrupted by the sounds of laboring women down the hall and the sudden startling (and startled) cries of newborns. The second night, although nurses woke me every few hours to check my BP, I was so exhausted from that first night that I actually slept in between the checks. Being able to get reasonably satisfying sleep in short snatches seems like good preparation for the early weeks of parenthood.

There were things about this adventure which reminded me of my stroke hospitalization a few years ago. This is the same hospital where I was a patient then. (Indeed: the stroke center is right down the hall from the wing where laboring mothers and their babies stay.) And there are elements of the hospital experience which feel the same no matter what one's in for -- the sounds and scents, the beeping of monitors, the tactile experience of getting an IV port or feeling an automatic blood pressure cuff inflate. Since I just recorded a podcast of a stroke poem for Qarrtsiluni's upcoming health issue, it's been surreal to revisit those memories.

Of course, in other ways this experience is entirely different from that one. Where the strokes came out of the blue, these late-term pregnancy complications are not a big surprise. (My history of hypertension all but guaranteed that this, or something like it, would arise.) And there's the awareness that at the end of this journey, God willing, we'll come home with a tiny person: that changes everything.

This week's portion: departure

DEPARTURE (CHAYYEI SARAH)

I'd never been further from home
than Aram of Two Rivers
where the Tigris and Euphrates
flow together in a muddy swirl

sometimes on market day
I'd buy figs, shallots, garlic
sometimes there were traders
with bolts of indigo

but mostly I knew our homestead
the smoke-stained oven, the paddocks
where we penned the goats
to stay safe overnight

and now this camel's steady gait
rocks me step by step across the scrub
toward a distant cousin, a stranger
who will welcome me into his tent

my father and brother blessed me
that I might grow into myriads
I can hardly imagine
another heart beneath my own

---

This week we're reading parashat Chayyei Sarah, the parsha with the ironic name: though its first two words mean "Sarah's lifetime" (or "the lives of Sarah"), the parsha begins with her death. The woman for whom the parsha is named appears in these columns of text only to be buried.

One of the central stories of this parsha is the story of how Abraham's servant (commonly known as Eliezer) goes back to the land where Abraham came from in order to find a wife for Isaac. That's the story I chose to focus on for this week's parsha poem.

The text doesn't give us many details about Rebecca. Eliezer prays that the woman who offers him water and offers to water his camels be the one he's looking for, which raises fascinating questions of how we discern the right course of action in an unknown situation. We know that she is beautiful, and she is generous with water and with her time. Once her father and brother agree that she should go with Eliezer, her brother and mother ask that she allowed to remain for ten days, but Eliezer asks to leave right away, and Rebecca acquiesces.

That's pretty much all we get, so this week's Torah poem explores some of what might have been going on in her mind as this story unfolds. What resonates for you, reading the story of Rebecca's departure from home?

I didn't manage to write to this week's ReadWritePoem prompt, which has to do with repurposing images from dreams, but here's a link to this week's Get Your Poem On post in case you'd like to see what other RWP folks wrote this week.

[departure.mp3]

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By the way, if you enjoy these Torah poems: allow me to recommend Awkward Offerings. Sue Swartz offers a variety of musings on Torah, including a series of Torah poems which are very different from mine and also quite wonderful. You can subscribe to the blog, or check out her index of Torah/Poetry, as you prefer.

Childbirth psalms

One of my favorite classes this (brief but intense) term has been a tutorial in psalms, which I'm taking with one fellow student, taught by Norman Shore. Each week he assigns us a few psalms to translate, and also some secondary material -- sometimes Midrash Tehillim, other times Talmud, sometimes chapters from books in English (I've become quite a fan of Kugel's The Great Poems of the Bible), sometimes assignments which ask us to make mental leaps between the psalms we're studying and various bits of liturgy and practice. I love being in a two-person class. It's like hevruta study, with the added benefit of an instructor who can guide us in our learning.

My final project for that class is a paper on psalms 20 and 113, both of which are classically associated with childbirth. I chose these two psalms on the theory of "whatever gets in the way of the work, is the work" -- a mantra I got from one of my old poetry mentors, Jason Shinder (of blessed memory.) What Jason meant was, whatever emotional or intellectual or spiritual stuff was getting in the way of one's ability to work on poems, that is precisely the stuff that ought to be feeding the poems. But I figure it's a good approach to this semester, too: instead of worrying that my increasing focus on childbirth and impending parenthood is getting in the way of my rabbinic learning, I should find a way to make my rabbinic learning dovetail with the major life event that's on its way.

I've done a preliminary translation of my two psalms (which I hope to share here once I've workshopped them with my fellow classmate and my teacher) and I've done some reading in classical sources, Midrash Tehillim, and Yalkut Shimoni which mostly recapitulates what's already in the midrash. I've got a few more classical sources to translate. But in addition to the oldschool material, I'm also interested in how these psalms are used in contemporary life. It's easy to find Chabad resources for the recitation of psalms during childbirth -- though many of the resources I've seen seem to presume that the husband of the laboring woman is the one who recites, and that's not the paradigm in which I live.

Which is part of why I'm interested in contemporary liberal religious practices relating to childbirth and psalms (especially psalms 20 and 113), too. I've gotten some great suggestions from my rabbinic school classmates, but figured I'd throw the question open here, too: do you have any anecdotes to offer on this? If you've been part of a labor and delivery experience (as the laboring mother, or her partner; as a labor coach or doula; as a doctor or nurse or chaplain) have you used these psalms, and what was that experience like for you? For the purposes of my paper, I'd like to hear from those who self-identify as Jews; for the purposes of good conversation, I'd be happy to hear from anyone of any religious tradition. If you have stories to share about childbirth and psalms, especially psalms 20 and 113, please drop a comment or an email!

This week's portion: aftermath

AFTERMATH (VAYERA)

The oaks touch branches
like a gaggle of old women
taking comfort in fingers brushing
as they stand and sway.

A man sits in the entrance
of his tent. Heat shimmers
though beneath the trees
if he holds still, it's not so bad.

Hours later, the rug
is littered with tufts of flatbread
tipped with labneh and zaatar
and shreds of meat left behind.

Outside the door, brass basins
for the washing of feet
shimmer, their water cloudy
from recent use.

Behind the tent, in the grove
a woman leans against a tree
and blinks away tears
but doesn't speak.

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This week we're in parashat Vayera, which contains a number of powerful stories: Abraham's visit from the angels beneath the oaks of Mamre, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the birth of Isaac and eventual exile of Hagar and Ishmael, the akedah (binding of Isaac.) Any one of these narratives could give rise to endless commentaries and poems. I chose a piece of the story which spoke particularly to me this year.

This week's prompt at ReadWritePoem is setting the scene, so I aimed to hint at one of the stories in this week's parsha through showing the scene without any of the dialogue or action. I'm curious to know whether the poem makes sense to those who don't intimately know this section of Genesis, or whether it requires familiarity with the text at which it hints.

It's a fascinating story: God appears to Abraham, then three mysterious strangers appear (always understood in Jewish tradition to be malachim, "messengers" or "angels"), then there's the feast and the promise that despite their mutual advanced age, Abraham and Sarah will have a son within one year's time. This year I'm particularly struck by what it must have felt like for them to learn that news -- to know that their lives were going to change irrevocably in ways they couldn't yet imagine.

Other people's responses to this week's RWP prompt will be linked at this week's Get Your Poem On post. Enjoy!

[aftermath.mp3]

Reaching a different readership

A few weeks ago I participated in a rabbinic conference call with Judge Goldstone, of the Goldstone Report, and shared a transcript of that call along with some reflections here on this blog (A conference call with Judge Goldstone.) That post got linked pretty widely, and Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of Online at Al-Jazeera English, contacted me to ask whether I would consider writing something for them about the report and its reception in my community.

The Israeli government and the American government have done their best to quash the Goldstone report. Many Jewish organizations have joined them. But that's by no means the only extant opinion in the Jewish community. It's important to me that the world know that there are Jews who receive the report in a different way. So I wrote an essay for Al-Jazeera English, which went live there today. It's called The Goldstone Report: A Jewish View.

Please be aware that I will not be monitoring comments at the Al-Jazeera website. Though I will moderate comments on this post as usual, I may not be able to respond to them -- this is an unusually busy week for me, and because I have multiple doctors' appointments and a ton of coursework to complete, I will have to hope that the essay stands on its own.

Thanks to Mohamed and the other editors at Al-Jazeera English for giving me the chance to speak to their readership.

The view from week 35

Pregnancy, 36 weeks. (I'm not quite there, but I'm close.)

I haven't written much at Velveteen Rabbi about being pregnant, aside from that initial announcement post this summer and a handful of offhand mentions this fall. Those of you who don't know me in person (which is most of you!) could be forgiven for imagining that perhaps the pregnancy hasn't loomed large in my consciousness. Maybe the reason I'm not writing about it is that it's just not a big deal?

That's an erroneous assumption, of course. If anything, pregnancy is such a big deal that I find it hard to write about, at least in prose. I've written half a dozen poems on the subject since I found out I was pregnant last Pesach, but they aren't ready for public consumption. Unlike the Torah poems I often share here, these poems don't feel ready for prime time. There's something intimate about them, about the whole experience. Which is funny, because it's also a very public experience; no one who sees me now can doubt that they know (at least some of) what's going on in my life.

I write here about Judaism, about God, about spiritual life -- a range of subjects which could easily encompass meditations on pregnancy and impending motherhood, if only I could find the way in. Part of the challenge is that the subject is at once so big and so small; it's an enormous life-change and a perennial miracle, and yet it's a perfectly ordinary thing that humanity has done since time immemorial. There's a balancing act here. This is incredibly important, and it's also incredibly mundane. Though I guess the same could be said of daily spiritual practice, too.

The year as spiritual practice

Part 2 of a series of blog posts arising out of final reflections on the class Moadim l'Simcha, "Seasons of Our Rejoicing," which I recently completed. Part 1 can be found here.

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It might be argued that the spiritual year is the “spiritual practice” par excellence of Judaism. Assess this statement. What does it mean 'tzu loyfn mit der tzeit,' to "run" (or live) with the times?

Each year is one long spiritual practice, with inevitable energetic ebbs and flows. We have times of great activity and energy: preparing for Pesach in our homes, preparing for the Days of Awe in our hearts and in our congregations. And we have times of stillness: the mountain-peak of Shavuot, the holy pausing of Shemini Atzeret, the fallow month of Cheshvan. This is the ratzo v'shov (ebb and flow, cf. Ezekiel 1:14) of spiritual life, built in to our seasonal-liturgical cycle.

As the sage Mary Oliver has written, in her poem "Five A.M. in the pinewoods," "So this is how you swim inward. / So this is how you flow outwards. / So this is how you pray." For every inhalation, an exhalation. Lather, rinse, repeat. Spiritual life has peaks and valleys, and we need to be conscious of the everyday practices which will sustain us when we're not riding the rollercoaster of the moadim (festivals.)

To live with the times means being aware of the flow of the year, the way one holiday leads to the next. Our festivals aren't discrete gems studding a crown or individual raisins peeking forth from a loaf of challah; they need to be understood as part of a whole. I experience the moadim (even the sad ones) as high points, extraordinary time, set in the framework of chol (everyday). And we need chol in order to integrate the moadim. Each of the moadim takes us somewhere, and then points us toward our next destination.

Reclaiming Zuleikha

Some of you may remember that back in August I was part of a Retreat for Emerging Jewish and Muslim Leaders. I blogged very briefly from the retreat, and later wrote an essay about the experience, which was published at Zeek: Allah is the Light: Prayer in Ramadan and Elul.

The story we studied that week was the story of Joseph / Yusuf, as he appears in both the Torah (and later Jewish texts) and Qur'an (and later Muslim texts.) One of the most fascinating differences between "our" version of the story and "their" version of the story is the figure of Potiphar's wife, who in later tradition is known as Zuleikha.

One of my fellow retreatants asked me to contribute a brief reflection on Zuleikha as she appears (or doesn't appear) in Jewish text and tradition, for a four-voiced essay which would appear in AltMuslimah, an online magazine which "provides a space for compelling comment on gender in Islam from both the male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim, perspectives." (For more about AltMuslimah, you can read their mission statement and this introductory article.) That essay has now gone live. Here's how it begins:

In August, four scholars and a small group of Jewish and Muslim emerging religious leaders met to discuss the story of Joseph in the Qur’an and in the Bible. Here are four reflections, by two Muslim women and two Jewish women, about the significance of Zuleikha in the story and in their respective traditions...

Read the essay here: Zuleikha in the Qur'an and in the Bible.

All four contributors to the essay were participants in the retreat, and I'm honored that my voice appears alongside the voices of Asma T. Uddin, Homayra Ziad, and Marion Lev-Cohen. Thanks, Asma, for inviting me to be a part of this collaboration around our beloved, if sometimes challenging, shared story.

Anna Baltzer and Mustafa Barghouti on the Daily Show

There's an interesting post about Jon Stewart and the Middle East at Talking Points Memo: Jon Stewart Creates Sea Change on Middle East Coverage. (More reasons to love Jon Stewart! Not that I really needed any help in that department.)

On Wednesday night, October 28, as I was on my way home from the JStreet conference, the Daily Show aired an abbreviated interview featuring Mustafa Barghouti and Anna Baltzer, a Palestinian and a Jew who are working together as part of a broad-based movement toward Israeli/Palestinian peace. The full version of the interview can be seen online, and I'm embedding it here beneath the extended-entry link. It's in two parts; they add up to about 15 minutes of conversation.

A round-up of other people's post-JStreet posts

I've been keeping an eye on my corner of the blogosphere in search of interesting reflections on the JStreet conference, and here are a few things I've found which I think are worth reading.

Kung Fu Jew asks Are you here for community or to build an effective lobby? I think he's right that some of us were there for community-building (the conference had almost a coming-out-of-the-closet feeling for many who'd long felt silenced around these issues) and some of us were there for political work and lobbying, and those two things don't always go neatly hand-in-hand, though I'm glad the conference made space for both.

Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz posts Reflections on the J Street Conference, part 1. She writes:

[T]he conference itself was much more than just a platform for advocating a very specific agenda; at this first gathering, there was an attempt to set a new tone and foster and encourage a culture of dialogue that could be taken back to our home communities.

From TPMCafe comes a story of an encounter with a young Palestinian man who despite pretty significant odds is dedicating himself to dialogue and peace. It's one hell of a story.

And the last commentary to which I'll point today comes from someone who wasn't at the conference but who offers rabbinic wisdom in linking the conference and its themes with the parashat ha-shavua (Torah portion of the week), Lech Lecha. This comes from the blog Doreshet, a recent addition to my blogroll and my aggregator. Doreshet notes that there's a kind of cosmic irony in this conference happening during this week:

If I had to point to the one part of the Bible that most explicitly articulated the Jewish people’s spiritual/mythic/emotional/ancestral connection with the Land of Israel, this would be it. God says, over and over and over again, that S/He is giving this land to Abraham and his descendants, forever and ever.

On the one hand, I can read this through my Reconstructionist lens and say that I don’t believe in a God who acts in history, that the stories in Tanakh are holy simply because they are our stories, and not because they document real events or constitute legally binding contracts. My historical-critical brain supports this, and tells me that stories like these were probably written as political propaganda, designed to cement the ascendancy of one group over another.

However. If that’s all I see when I read this, I think I lose something.

Read the whole post here: Lekh Lekha and JStreet.

I welcome links to other post-JStreet reflections -- feel free to share your own in comments.

Roundup of JStreet conference posts

I have nine posts -- roughly 32,000 words -- to offer from my two days of liveblogging the first JStreet conference. You can find all of them in the JStreet category, or use the handy chronological list which appears below:

• West Bank settlements: obstacles on the road to peace

• How Jews, Christians, and Muslims can work together for peace

• Unofficial Israeli-Palestinian Blogger Lunch session

• How we stop talking to ourselves

• Plenary session: view from the hill

• What does it mean to be pro-Israel?

• Dancing on the head of a pin: the role of rabbis in the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement

• Plenary: Why two states? Why now?

• Reflections on the first JStreet conference

Thanks to everyone who worked hard to make the conference a success, and to everyone who's been reading and following along via Velveteen Rabbi!

Reflections on the first JStreet conference

I'm writing this post on the train home from the first JStreet conference. Not surprisingly, I'm exhausted. (Oddly, I seem to have been the only very pregnant woman who decided to attend!) Still, I'm really glad to have been there. Like many other participants, I was amazed by the size of the crowd and the excited buzz of energy we generated in coming together. I suspect that most of us had never before been in such a large gathering of people who self-identify as "pro-Israel, pro-peace." It's exciting to think that together we can articulate a different way of relating to Israel.

My time in Israel last year gave me a sense of just how broken the situation is, and how urgent is the need for repair. The Occupation has been disastrous for Israel on levels both practical and spiritual. Unilateral actions like the building of what some call the "separation wall" and others call the "security fence" move the region further away from the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. So does the policy of supporting settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank (there are more than 300,000 settlers in the West Bank alone -- most of whom planted themselves there after the peace process was ostensibly underway, which has not given the Palestinians any trust in Israel's inclination to make peace.) And if a viable Palestinian state cannot arise, Israel herself is in deep trouble which can only worsen.

Primary responsibility for Israel's decisions lies in the hands of the Israeli government. But as a Jew with spiritual connection to the place, its people, and its history, and as an American whose tax dollars provide military support for Israel in its various choices, I feel both entitled and obligated to speak out when I understand that Israel's actions are making matters worse. I believe that a two-state solution is key to the healthy self-determination of both peoples, and that Israel's actions have often run counter to this goal -- as has support from the United States which fails to take these realities into account. It was remarkable to attend such a large gathering where these basic stances were largely shared.

On Tuesday afternoon, Israei politician Haim Ramon argued that the greatest threat to Israel's security is the status quo. If change doesn't come soon, the window for creating a peaceful resolution to this conflict will close, and the resulting "one-state solution" will be disastrous for Israel, which will have to choose between being a "Jewish state" and being a democracy where all citizens are enfranchised to vote. Hearing that was a powerful wake-up call. I suspect it's a message which most Americans, and specifically most American Jews, don't generally hear. I'm grateful to JStreet for creating a context within which these realities can be named.

Zeek moves Forward

Happy news: Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (where I am, as y'all probably know, a contributing editor) has found a new online home with The Jewish Daily Forward, the biggest Jewish newspaper in the United States!

You can find Zeek's newest articles on the right-hand side of The Forward's home page, or you can go directly to zeek.forward.com. In celebration of the launch, we've put up some terrific new content -- which we will naturally continue to do.

We're deeply appreciative of the folks at Jewcy for giving us a temporary online home (to which we bade farewell a few weeks ago.) And our original url, zeek.net, will always point to wherever the magazine lives now.

Anyway: go and read, and enjoy!

[JStreet] Plenary session: Why Two States? Why Now?

I'm blogging this week from Driving Change, Securing Peace, the first JStreet conference in Washington, DC. You can follow my conference posts via the JStreet category. 

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy -- please read it, especially if this is your first time here. Enjoy the conference posts! And regular readers, have no fear: I'll return to my more usual balance of blogging fare in a few days.

I was a few minutes late to this session -- I'm pretty slow-moving at this stage in the pregnancy, and the Brit Tzedek v'Shalom Rabbinic Cabinet lunch was on another floor. By the time I got in, the large ballroom was entirely full; I wound up in an unofficial overflow room with a handful of other laptop users, and I missed the introduction, whatever it may have been. As the (three-hour-long!) session unfolded, it became clear that this is a three-part prorgram: first a keynote address from General Jones, then a panel of speakers offering Israeli perspectives on the need for a two-state solution, then a panel of speakers offering American perspectives on the same theme.

Photo by Dan Sieradski / mobius1ski, used with permission.

General James M. Jones begins by promising us that this administration will be represented at all future JStreet conferences, which draws wild applause from the room.

For going on six decades, General Jones says, the abiding friendship between the United States and Israel has been based on deep connections, "founded as much on personal experience as on geopolitics." Through countless interactions with Israelis in military and in private life, he's been blessed with many Israeli friends; his own exposure to Israel began when he was a young Marine training there in the early 1990s, and he's been impressed with the professionalism of the IDF ever since. He developed an understanding of Israel's unique security concerns and tried to bring that to his work serving as as special envoy for Middle East security.

His dream, he says, is to see peace in the Middle East. He says "without equivocation, Israeli security and Middle East peace are inseparable. Neither can exist without the other, and only a 2-state solution can provide the lasting dignity that people of both sides deserve." But time, he says, is not necessarily on our side. "The imperative for peace is now."