Velveteen Rabbi

Rivka's questions, our answers (Radical Torah repost)

Here's the d'var Torah I wrote for this week's portion in 2006, originally published at the now-defunct Radical Torah.

In the early lines of parashat Toledot, Yitzchak pleads with God because his wife Rivka has not yet conceived. God responds, the text tells us, to this plea; Rikva does conceive -- but she feels the dangerous struggle in her womb, and she says, "If so, why do I exist?"

The story continues from there in the way we have all come to recognize: the promise that her younger son will rule over the elder, the birth of hairy Esau and grasping Jacob, the twin birthright stories, the trickery.

But as a reader I'm reluctant to move on, caught by the moment of Rivka's anguished cry. I imagine her tossing and turning on a bed of blankets, trying to find comfort despite the palpable struggle of the child (she does not yet know there are two) in her womb. Perhaps she fears miscarriage, or that her baby will tangle itself in the umbilical cord as it thrashes inside her.

And so she cries out. If this is happening -- and it is happening; the struggle inside her feels like it may kill her -- then why does she exist? Why has her life led her to this moment?

Thanksgiving

A tray of pumpkin challah rolls, rising.

I try to begin and end every day with gratitude: for whatever the day may hold, and then has held. Modah ani l'fanecha: I am grateful before You, living and enduring God. That's the most basic daily prayer I know.

As a fan of ritual I enjoy the many rituals of Thanksgiving in our house, starting with spending Thanksgiving Eve peeling potatoes and baking challah rolls. But beyond that, and beyond the pleasure of setting a pretty table and filling it with family and friends, I love also that we take a day off from our ordinary lives just to focus on being thankful.

And, yes, to eat (widely and well!) and schmooze, to drink wine by the fire, to watch football, eventually to simmer turkey carcasses into soup as the evening wanes. But even more than fine dining or hospitality, gratitude -- thankfulness -- is at Thanksgiving's heart.

I'm thankful for the food we're preparing, for the many hands which labored to bring it forth (and the  hands laboring now to get it the final steps of the way from supermarket to table!) I'm thankful for the sunlight and the soil and the divine abundance that came together to produce every potato and butternut squash and brussels sprout.

I'm thankful for my family and friends, for our home, for our sustenance on every level of being. I'm thankful for my colleagues and teachers, in ALEPH and elsewhere. "For my teachers, and my students, and the students of my students," as we say in the kaddish d'rabanan -- and for the teachers of my teachers, too.

I'm thankful for all of you who read this blog; for those who comment often, and those who comment rarely, and those who comment never at all. I'm thankful for all of you who keep blogs of your own, some of which I read daily and some of which I read from time to time and all of which enrich our world.

Happy Thanksgiving, gang. May your tomorrow (and all the days that follow) be filled with abundance of all kinds.

---

If you're looking for a creative Thanksgiving prayer of gratitude, Reb Zalman has revised his short and sweet Thanksgiving prayer, which can be downloaded as a pdf from this post on his blog.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Thanksgiving.

GVO and RHR on Israel

Some powerful (if difficult) Israel stories have come across my aggregator today. At Global Voices Online there's a roundup of posts about the impending demolition of a straw and mud mosque built by an Israeli Bedouin. Not for the first time I'm struck by how politicized the question of building permits inevitably becomes.

International and local activists spent the night waiting for demolition crew to come and destroy a new straw and mud mosque built in an unrecognised village of Wadi el-Naam, Israel.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Interior Ministry officials say the structure, built by an Israeli Bedoiun and other volunteers, is illegal since it was built without permission and in a place not designated for construction...

The post features a quote from blogger Jerusalem Gypsy which I found particularly resonant. (Looks like JG is a regular at the Jewish Renewal minyan in Jerusalem, Nava Tehila, about which I've blogged before...) Anyway, read the Global Voices post here: Israel: Straw and Mud Mosque to be Demolished.

Meanwhile, Margery G., one of the participants in the Rabbis for Human Rights Human Rights Trip to Israel, has a post called Instructions for Planting which juxtaposes a description of the experience of planting trees on Palestinian land with a description of the experience of planting trees in Israel. Her post begins with instructions for planting in the Occupied Territories:

1. Find a non-profit, like Rabbis for Human Rights, that can buy the trees.

2. Scrounge up whatever hand tools you can find.

3. Bring out a group of Israelis and Internationals who can help Palestinians plant and shield them from harassment by the settlers and the army

4. Be on time. The separation barrier now separates many villages from their land and the Palestinians can only get through to their fields at certain times of the day...

These instructions are juxtaposed with instructions for planting in Israel, and the difference between the first set of instructions and the second set of instructions is stark and powerful.

On a slightly more hopeful note, my friend David forwarded me the New York Times article Palestinian Forces Dilute Hebron's Volatile Brew. May the peacemaking continue.

Technorati tags: Israel, Palestine.

This week's portion: pulling the strings

PULLING THE STRINGS

Trickster Rebecca, I wish you'd known better
than to pit your sons one against the other

like Isaac and Ishmael, jostling and angling
for the lone blessing in their father's hands.

If you had taught your bookish son, the one
who stayed in the tent weaving stories

and your rough red-bearded hunter
whose heart chafed against being indoors

to see one another as sides of the same coin
think how much drama we could have been spared!

Then again, blind Isaac may have seen more
than we know. He tried twice to shame Jacob into truth.

God must have told you we need this tension
to shape the Israel we're meant to become.

---

In this week's portion, Toldot, Rebecca feels her sons quarreling in her womb. They quarrel once they're out of the womb, too: Jacob tricks Esau first out of his birthright, then out of the blessing rightfully due him as the elder son.

The younger brother getting the blessing that ought to have been due the elder is a theme in the book of Bereshit. Apparently God favors the underdog, and acts to subvert the dominant power structures of the day. In this case, God hints to Rebecca before the boys are even born that "the older shall serve the younger" -- making her, perhaps, culpable for Jacob's trickster behavior as this story unfolds.

Reading this today, I find myself thinking about expectations and blessings, parents and sons. To what extent were, and are, Jacob and Esau externalizations of their parents' various qualities? Torah tells us that one parent favored one son and the other parent favored the other: apparently that dynamic is as old as the stars. What does it mean that our tradition has for so long valued the intellectual accomplishments of Jacob, and spurned the earthy offerings of Esau?

I'd like to think that some good came out of Rebecca's subterfuges -- at least for Jacob and his progeny. But I flinch at the parental favoritism, and I wonder how Esau's children would tell the tale.

[strings.mp3]

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Torah, Toldot.

What if we give it away?

Last week's Sunday Times magazine featured a profile of Lewis Hyde written by Daniel B. Smith, called What is Art For? Lewis Hyde is a colleague of Ethan's at the Berkman Center. He's a poet (I especially like his This error is the sign of love) and he's written a few books, among them The Gift, which came out in 1983 and has never been out of print. That book "tries to reconcile the value of doing creative work with the exigencies of a market economy." Hyde was inspired to write The Gift by the experience of reading the anthropologist Marcel Mauss:

Mauss was a scholar of the old polymathic sort -- a sociologist, a linguist, a historian of religion, a Sanskrit expert, a philosopher. His essay on gift exchange drew on the work of the seminal turn-of-the-century ethnographers Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski to explore aboriginal societies in which the person of consequence -- the man or woman who is deemed worthy of adulation, respect and emulation -- is not the one who accumulates the most goods but the one who disperses them. Gift economies, as Mauss defines them, are marked by circulation and connectivity: goods have value only insofar as they are treated as gifts, and gifts can remain gifts only if they are continually given away. This results in a kind of engine of community cohesion, in which objects create social, psychological, emotional and spiritual bonds as they pass from hand to hand.

The blogosphere is a gift economy: we share our words and ideas freely, and "repay" one another with hat tips and links and comments back and forth between our online spaces. (This is hardly a new idea; smart people have been writing about the high-tech/online gift economy at least since 1998.) So is media fandom (I'm thinking both about story exchanges and overt gifts of vids or podfic recordings, and in a broader sense about the whole phenomenon of creating fanworks in a community context). So is the online poetry/literary world, from prompt communities like ReadWritePoem and Totally Optional Prompts to collaborative 'zines like Qarrtsiluni. In all of these worlds, we create and strengthen community by sharing our creativity.

Faith[Works] and me

I'll be ringing in Shabbat tonight in an unusual way: by reading poems, and telling the story of how Judaism and poetry come together in my life and work, as part of the Faith[Works] lecture series at Bay Path College.

My sense is that this will be a coffeehouse kind of atmosphere; we're meeting in a fireplace lounge on campus. So my intention is to speak pretty informally about the things I've done -- journalism, poetry, the feminist seder project, Inkberry, ALEPH -- and how they fit together in my life. And, every few minutes, I'll pause and read a poem that comes out of that period of my life or speaks to the themes I'm trying to highlight. Poems from/about Texas, and from/about Massachusetts. Poems from What Stays, my second chapbook (which came out of my time at Bennington.) Poems which arise out of my immersion in Jewish Renewal. Chaplaincy poems from chaplainbook. The Torah poems I'm writing now.

It's a fun way to plan a talk. Or a poetry reading. I think what I'm doing will be a little bit of each -- hopefully with enough narrative throughline to be informative for those who are considering working in any of the fields I've known, and enough poetry to make the evening feel like the kind of dip into creativity which will feel appropriately Shabbosdik to me. (In service of that goal, I'm planning to take a travel Shabbat candlestick set along, too.)

The talk is intended for the Bay Path community, and hasn't been promoted off-campus, so I probably shouldn't send a flood of readers their way. (How many of y'all live in/around Western Mass, anyway?) But I'm looking forward to the chance to share some of my work -- and to meet the students who will be there, and to find out how religion and creativity and vocation matter to each of them.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, poetry.

Knowledge

Over the last few days I've drafted a few different blog posts about things I'm studying now -- Rambam's Mishneh Torah and the ins and outs of the obligation to recite the shema; assorted historians talking about the Deuteronomists -- but have discarded them as insufficiently interesting to post. So you're getting a poem, instead, arising out of my Qur'an class.

We've been reading excerpts from "The Bezels of Wisdom" by Ibn Arabi, a Sufi mystic and philosopher. It's good stuff, though chock-full of mystical allusions. (It helps to read the text along with an interpreter.) The way Ibn Arabi makes use of repeated phrases and ideas put me in mind of one of my favorite poetic forms, the pantoum. So I took the phrases which leapt out at me from his text, and from them wove this poem.

The poem loops back in on itself a lot. If it makes sense, the logic is more associative than discursive -- but read slantwise, for the constellation of ideas and images it contains, I hope there's something interesting and even beautiful there. Those are the characteristics of Ibn Arabi's work I was trying to highlight.

This week's portion: in the same key

IN THE SAME KEY

They come together to bury their father
in the cave where Sarah's body lies.

(No one imagines the vaulted church
turned mosque with painted ceilings

or the synagogue, or metal detectors
to keep armed men from getting through.)

Isaac and Ishmael wash him with water
and sprinkle sand on his eyelids

so his visions in the world to come
will derive from the land he loved.

Isaac's memories of having a brother
and then losing him without explanation

Ishmael's memories of aching thirst
before his mother saw the spring

go unmentioned, the bones of their past
buried beneath the drifting sands.

Outside the cave the women wail
two families grieving in the same key

not yet the ancestors of enemies
Abraham's dark eyes in every face.

---

This week's portion, Chayyei Sarah, begins with the death of Sarah. Abraham purchases the cave of Machpelah in Hebron in order to bury his wife there. At the end of the portion, Abraham himself dies and is buried in that same cave by his sons.

I've been reading reports from the Rabbis for Human Rights North America trip to Israel this week, including accounts of their time in Hebron, which reminds me of my own trip to Hebron this summer.

Atop the cave of Machpelah, a church was built. That church later became a mosque, which now shares the building with a synagogue -- though Jews are not technically allowed to visit the mosque (nor non-Jews to visit the synagogue) since the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.The visit to that space continues to resonate in me, and is at the heart of this week's Torah poem.

This poem let me imagine Isaac and Ishmael coming together to bury their father. It's poignant enough simply as a story of sons experiencing loss. When I overlay that with the knowledge of how history would play out between Ishmael and Isaac's descendants, it becomes even more powerful for me. When you read this story, what do you imagine?

[samekey.mp3]

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Torah, ChayeiSarah, Hebron.

Radical Hospitality (Radical Torah repost)

A d'var Torah on parashat Vayera, written in 2006 for the now-defunct Radical Torah.

At the very beginning of this week's Torah portion, Vayera, God appears to Abraham by the terebinths of Mamre, immediately on the heels of Abraham's circumcision. (Well, we read about one right after the other. Though one exegetical principle holds that Torah needn't necessarily be read in a linear way, the simple linear reading allows for the interpretation that God is here paying the first recorded pastoral care visit, a notion which pleases many of the chaplains I know.)

Then, Torah tells us, Abraham looks up and sees three men standing nearby. Immediately he leaps into action -- apparently whatever discomfort he's still suffering is minimal, or is mitigated by his strong impulse toward hospitality -- and rushes to greet them, bowing low and urging them to come, wash their feet, rest, and dine with him.

Later in the portion (at the beginning of chapter 19) the men are referred to as malachim, angels. But when they first appear to Abraham they have the aspect of ordinary men. Abraham's fervent hospitality, in other words, is his usual modus operandi. He's not offering these guys the royal treatment because he perceives them to be messengers of the Holy Blessed One. He just genuinely wants to make these men feel welcome.

Jewish/Muslim conversation at Islamicate

My friend Hussein is hosting a conversation about Jews, Muslims, and Orthodoxy at his blog Islamicate. His post comes in response to a post by Abu Noor, who spoke first about the notion of reform or reformation within Islam, and then wrote:

The different possible approaches for a religious tradition in coming to terms with modernity are most easily understood by looking to the Jewish tradition of Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative approaches as well as all the various twists on those three main distinctions that have developed.

Hussein agrees that instead of speaking in terms of a Reformation within Islam, it may make sense to use the analogy of the Jewish denominations, though he has interesting qualms with the notion of orthodoxy within Islam. He writes:

I do not think that we can begin using the term "orthodox Muslim" as a descriptor. Where as the Rabbinic tradition in Judaism functions as a way to determine "correct belief," the literal meaning of "orthodox," we have not had that sort of the authority universally recognized in Muslim traditions...

We have a lot to learn about the experience of others, and about our own history and diversity. Once we've begun that level of exploration, as we are now, I think we can decipher what best to call ourselves in our different communities of interpretation.

In a comment on his post, I've made the argument that Judaism is historically more concerned with praxis than with belief (I think of R' Soloveitchik's Halakhic Man and his point that behavior may in time create faith or create a space in which faith can arise.) I also had a few things to say about Orthodoxy and liberal Judaism and the different relationships between them in Israel and in the Diaspora.

If you have thoughts on this, hop over to Islamicate and join the conversation. Hussein's post is here: Jews, Muslims, and Orthodoxy.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Islam.