Velveteen Rabbi

Tal Ben-Shahar on cultivating happiness

We can always be happier; no person experiences perfect bliss at all times and has nothing more to which he can aspire. Therefore, rather than asking myself whether I am happy or not, a more helpful question is, "How can I become happier?" This question acknowledges the nature of happiness and the fact that its pursuit is an ongoing process best represented by an infinite continuum, not by a finite point.

That's author Tal Ben-Shahar in his book Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. Intriguingly, this book is the homework for this week's Rabbis Without Borders Fellows meeting. When our cohort of rabbis meets for the final time, we're going to be talking about happiness. I've written before about cultivating joy, but happiness and joy aren't quite the same. This book is the first real reading I've done in the field of hedonics.

What rituals would make you happier? What would you like to introduce to your life?

...In research done by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, those who kept a daily gratitude journal -- writing down at least five things for which they were grateful -- enjoyed higher levels of emotional and physical well-being.

Each night before going to sleep, write down at least five things that made or make you happy -- things for which you are grateful...

When I reached this section, in one of the early chapters, I felt a zing of recognition. Gratitude in each day -- articulating gratitude for the day's blessings -- these are among the most central spiritual practices of my tradition. When I say the modah ani each morning in the shower; when I pray the morning blessings (in either the traditional or alternative form); when I lie in bed at night and silently thank God for my home, my spouse, my child, my family and friends, my meaningful work; when I ask our son at the dinner table what was his favorite thing that happened that day -- these are daily gratitude practices. As far as I'm concerned, Ben-Shahar's right on.

This book does a nice job of balancing citations and references with actual practices for cultivating practices. Among the practices, Ben-Shahar suggests meditation, along with exercises such as mapping one's life (how do I actually spend my time) and creating an integrity mirror (a list of the things which are most meaningful and pleasurable to me, annotated with how much time I actually spend on each of these things each month.) He draws both on Freud (who argued that we are fundamentally driven by the need for pleasure) and on Victor Frankl (who argued that we are motivated by a will to meaning, and that striving to find / make meaning in life is the primary motivating force of human life.) He writes:

While the happy person experiences highs and lows, his overall state of being is positive. Most of the time he is propelled by positive emotions such as joy and affection rather than negative ones such as anger and guilt. Pleasure is the rule; pain, the exception. To be happy, we have to feel that, on the whole, whatever sorrows, trials, and tribulations we may encounter, we still experience the joy of being alive.

Whatever sorrows we may encounter, we still experience the joy of being alive. Yes; I resemble that remark. This is more or less my base state; anything other than this is a deviation, for me. (For instance, those months of postpartum depression early in my journey into motherhood.) On the whole, I operate from a place of good will and good feeling, rather than the opposite. Is this why I feel pretty happy, most of the time? Or do I generally feel happy because I'm operating from a place of good will and good feeling? (Or am I able to operate from that place of good will and good feeling because I'm generally happy?) I'm not sure which way the arrow of causality points, and I'm aware that privilege plays into my ability to feel this way (I don't have to deal, e.g., with being short on spoons.) Regardless, I'm grateful to fit Ben-Shahar's description of someone who's happy.

April Daily: a chapbook of 30 poems

National Poetry (Writing) Month was fun this year. Over the course of April I wrote 30 poems: about parenthood, morning prayer, a rooftop New York city bar, a walk to the beaver dam, Iron Man and the golem of Prague, and more. The vast majority are poems I never would have written if I hadn't been doing the NaPoWriMo experiment this year.

Earlyish in the month, my mother emailed me and asked if I could make all of the poems available to her in one file, easy to read, with the commentaries alongside -- maybe even in hard copy, something easy for her to thumb through? I said sure, I'd be happy to do that.

And then I realized that as long as I was making a single file with all 30 poems and all 30 commentaries, I might as well make it look pretty and make it available to anyone else who wants it, too. So I asked Twitter for help coming up with a chapbook title, and, well, here you go.

I feel a little bit silly sharing a new chapbook when I've just announced the release of a new book. Let me be clear: April Daily is the result of a month's worth of play; Waiting to Unfold is a real book, the product of years of work and hours of editorial back-and-forth!

So, y'know -- if you're just going to buy one, get the real book. Seriously. But if you're into daily poems, or if you participated in NaPoWriMo and you're curious to see what I did with the product of the month's work, or if you're just a completist, here it is. (And Mom, don't bother ordering a copy -- one's already on its way to you, just as I promised.)

April Daily: 30 poems in 30 days

$3.59
978-1484841402

April 2013

 

With deep thanks to 30/30 poetry and NaPoWriMo for the prompts. Here's to National Poetry Month!

Announcing Waiting to Unfold, new from Phoenicia!

I could not be more delighted to announce this news:

Waiting to Unfold has been published by Phoenicia Publishing, and its launch date is today!

it costs a mere $13.95 (US, CAN) / £9.10 / €10.66 and is available at Phoenicia Publishing and on Amazon (and Amazon UK and Amazon Europe) -- though twice as much goes to publisher and author if you buy it directly from Phoenicia.

 

Waiting to Unfold offers an unflinching and honest look at the challenges and blessings of early parenthood.

Poet and rabbi Rachel Barenblat wrote one poem during each week of her son's first year of life, chronicling the wonder and the delight along with the pain of learning to nurse, the exhaustion of sleep deprivation, and the dark descent into -- and eventual ascent out of -- postpartum depression.

Barenblat brings her rabbinic training and deep spirituality to bear on this quintessential human experience. She also resists sentimentality or rosy soft-focus. While some of these are poems of wonder, others were written in the trenches.

These poems resist and refute the notion that anyone who doesn't savor every instant of exalted motherhood deserves stigma and shame. And they uncover the sweetness folded in with the bitter.

By turns serious and funny, aching and transcendent, these poems take an unflinching look at one woman's experience of becoming a mother.

These rich poems will carry you into the great timeless miracle and mystery of unfolding littleness, nonstop maternal alertness, beauty and exhaustion and amazing, exquisite tenderness, oh yes. -- Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Fuel and The Words Under the Words

The intense observation of the poet and the intense observation of the mother unite in a celebration of what is new and newborn, what is intensely felt and cherished and what is lost and mourned. Rachel Barenblat's poems are easy to enter into, and they carry both the uniqueness of her persona as poet and serious Jew and the universality of love that has made us all. There's a subversive wit here too, -- a changing table that's also a throne of glory, or the baby chewing on his mother's tefillin -- that speaks to a newly emerging sensibility about what is reverent and what is holy. It's in the everyday as our best American poets have taught us, and as Rachel Barenblat teaches us in a new way too. -- Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and the lowercase jew

In these remarkable poems Rachel Barenblat traverses the world of first-time parenthood with insight, generosity, rare courage. She shares first innocent awe, then unexpected darkness as a winter of the soul claims squatter's rights in the nursery, and finally, aching, yearning, growing toward hope, a relearning of holy presence in small things. We ascend and plummet on the rollercoaster with her, terror in the pit of the stomach, knuckles white, and then -- unparalleled joy. "Daily I expand how much I can love/ your toes, your cough, your raised eyebrow... Each day your glee polishes my rough edges/ and I shine[.]" New parents will be astonished that someone has found words for their deepest secrets, parents long past these early months will gratefully nod -- yes, I remember, this is true. -- Merle Feld, author of A Spiritual Life: Exploring the Heart and Jewish Tradition and Finding Words

The book was designed by publisher Beth Adams; the cover art is a detail from "Creation," a mixed-media collage by the wonderful Mary Bullington.

Every book's launch feels a bit like a birth, but this one perhaps more than most. I'll have more to say later about the book and how it came into being, but for now, please join me in popping the cork on some virtual champagne.

And I hope you'll buy a copy for yourself -- for your mom (Mother's Day is coming soon in a lot of countries, including mine) -- for every pregnant woman you know -- for every parent you know, whether their kids are babies or senior citizens  -- for anyone you know who has struggled with depression  -- for anyone you know who loves poetry -- and for anyone you know who's interested in the implausible and amazing transformations entailed in a baby's first year of life, and a woman's first year of becoming something new.

(Phoenicia also published 70 faces in 2011. And they've published many other fantastic books of poetry, many of which I've reviewed here over the years. Support independent publishing! Buy copies for your friends!)

You Don't Have To Be Wrong for Me To Be Right: R' Brad Hirschfield on faith without fanaticism

We need to see that everyone who is not just like us is not some kind of restoration project, just waiting for us to "fix" them and turn them into poor imitations of ourselves. Do we really want a world of people who look, think, and act just like we do? That's not spiritual depth or religious growth, but simply narcisissm with lots of footnotes.

That's the kind of wisdom I've come to expect from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield is one of the co-presidents of Clal, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Along with the other co-president, Rabbi Irwin Kula, he teaches at our Rabbis Without Borders fellows retreats. On my way home from our most recent retreat, I started reading his book You Don't Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism.

I knew that R' Brad identifies as Orthodox, and I had a vague sense that his spiritual trajectory had been quite a journey. But I didn't realize quite how broad that journey was until I began reading this book. In the early chapters he describes his falling-in-love with Orthodoxy; his desire, as a senior in high school, to study for a year in Israel; and his immersion in the culture of the settlers of Hebron.

I visited Hebron back in 2008 (see A day in Bethlehem and Hebron), but I didn't go into the settlement, and I didn't meet anyone who lived in that part of the city. Early in this book, R' Brad offers a stark and unflinching description both of what drew him into the movement -- and what caused him to leave. This is the longest quote I'll offer, but I don't want to abridge it any further, because this is such a powerful recounting, and it's a voice I haven't seen in print elsewhere. R' Brad writes:

I was a pilgrim who had finally reached his destination. I felt whole. Complete. This was what God wanted. This was what God had commanded: Brad Hirschfield, nice Jewish boy from the North Shore, standing at a tomb in Hebron, surrounded by one hundred thousand Palestinians who hated my presence there, singing Hebrew prayers.

I know it may sound ridiculous now, but then I didn't question it for one moment. There was not an inkling of doubt.

[The settle underground] began advocating for an increasingly harsh response against violence directed at Jews....Most of this made sense to me. Jews were being killed for settling in what had once been Jewish homes. This was our land, given to us by God.

For two years I gave myself over to Levinger and his group and the militant arm of the settlers' movement. When settlers Menachem Livni, Shauli Nir, and Uzi Shabaraf (whom I knew, although I was not in Hebron that day) fired into the Hebron Islamic College and killed two Palestinian children, I really felt sick...

Most of my group felt it was a tragic mistake, but they also thought it a natural result of continuous violence against us...No one questioned the wisdom of building the Hebron community in light of what had happened.

I found myself outside the fold. I stopped going to Hebron. I had no idea how to discuss how I felt with anyone within the settlers' movement. And I had no desire to talk to anyone outside about it, either... I was no longer a pilgrim. I didn't quiet know what I was.

It's so easy for those of us outside of a particular fold to castigate those within, and vice versa. And that's true whether the fold is the settler movement, a religious denomination, a community, a subculture, a nation. This book opened up for me both some of what might draw a person into religious fanaticism -- and also the unique lessons such a person could bring with them upon, mercifully, exiting that world for one which is more expansive and pluralistic.

After 9/11, he writes, he realized that he needed to confront his own past, to begin writing and speaking about his experiences as an ardent young settler. "Religion had flown those planes into the Twin Towers, and I had practiced a form of that religion. It is the religion of pilgrims, of people who see no way but their own way, and treat people who do not support them as mistakes that need to be erased," writes R' Brad. Near as I can tell, he's dedicated his rabbinate to teaching that there is another way.

Jews and Words, by Oz-Salzberger and Oz

Jewish continuity has always hinged on uttered and written words, on an expanding maze of interruptions, debates, and disagreements, and on a unique human rapport. In synagogue, at school, and most of all in the home, it has always involved two or three generations deep in conversation.

Ours is not a bloodline but a textline.

That's the opening of Jews and Words, by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger. Amos Oz is a novelist whose works are read around the world; he teaches at Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva. Fania Oz-Salzberger, his daughter, is a writer and history professor at the University of Haifa. Together they have authored a short nonfiction book -- you might think of it as a very long essay in four chapters -- called Jews and Words, which I am just beginning to read.

Thus far I've read the first chapter, out of four, and it's already given me plenty I want to share with y'all.

Oz and Oz-Salzberger identify themselves upfront as secular Jewish Israelis. They unpack that statement into three components: they do not believe in God; Hebrew is their mother tongue; and their Jewish identity is not faith-powered. None of these things is true for me (well -- I'm not sure what's at the deepest root of my Jewish identity, though that identity currently plays out in ways which are integrated with faith) and yet none of our differences get in the way of my finding their writing compelling and beautiful.

And I can't help loving the fact that these two self-identified atheists still begin the book's first chapter, "Continuity," with a quote from the anonymous medieval Sefer Yetzirah. In my general experience, people who toss around ideas from the Sefer Yetzirah tend to be rabbis or kabbalists of some stripe, not self-identified atheists. Then again: what writer, anywhere, could fail to find resonant the idea that the very universe came into being through text, and that the letters of the alphabet are the foundation of all things?

While Abraham argued with God and Moses reiterated God's words, the Mishnaic and Talmudic rabbis are in the business of unraveling, elucidating, explaining, and counter-explaining God and Abraham and Moses. Prophecy is mystical, but exegesis is human.

Unraveling, elucidating, explaining and counter-explaining: these acts are central to the whole business of being Jewish. I make this argument every time I teach about midrash -- that in some ways, what makes us Jews is our perennial engagement with these texts and with each others' interpretations of these texts. We weave ourselves into the fabric of tradition when we interact with previous generations' interpretations of the texts with which we still wrestle. (I often make this case alongside a case that fandom operates in a similar way. Fans, like Jews, constitute community through engaging with shared source-texts together, and through responding to one anothers' responses.) Unraveling, elucidating, explaining, and counter-explaining make us who we are.

The Jewish calendar lays down its daily, weekly, monthly, and annually recurring texts. Repetition can drain creativity, for sure, but it also has the strange ability to anchor, nurture, and even surprise. Reiterated lines sometimes beget music[.]

As I continue to interact with our texts on daily and weekly and monthly and annual levels, I recognize that there are moments when the repetition is numbing and moments when the repetition is uplifting and surprising. When I daven the same prayer day after day or week after week, it changes -- sometimes it changes me; sometimes it changes in me. And as far as reiterated lines, or reiterated words, begetting music -- that's exactly what sparked Command (Tzav) and Naked (Acharei Mot). When I open myself to them, the repeated words of our texts "anchor, nurture, and even surprise" me, time after time, year after year.

For Jews, the authors argue, "[d]ebate and dispute are ingrained onto the process of reading." And, they note, from Mishnaic times through the now-vanished world of the Eastern European shtetl, even the poorest Jewish children learned Hebrew from the age of three until thirteen. (Male children, generally, though in wealthier families the girls sometimes learned too. The paradigm shift involved in regarding women as men's intellectual and spiritual equals wasn't much faster in our community than anywhere else in human history.) But the point stands that, by and large, Jewish children have long been taught to read and to engage with texts. Reading, learning, and questioning are at the heart of our tradition.

Some hold that the Torah guards us as long as we guard the Torah, or that Shabbat keeps the Jews healthy and whole when we keep Shabbat in the same way. "Our own take is not radically different," father and daughter write. "What kept the Jews going were the books." Are the books inherently holy, or do we consecrate them through our study? "We hold one answer, and the faithful hold another," they note. (For my own part, I'm inclined to believe both of those stances at the same time.)

[I]f there is any chain at all between Abraham and us, it is made of written words. Like our ancestors, we are texted. And -- if one further liberty with the English language is permitted -- we are texted to our ancestors.

I love this wordplay. We are texted to our ancestors. Yes, indeed.

Here's one more quote to whet your appetite:

There is something singular in the past-gazing creativeness of those multitudes of literate Jews, their cumulative records, and their capacity to keep talking and making sense to each other across vast stretches of time, across languages and across cultures. They are all talking to one another. Like a constant argument at a never-ending Sabbath meal, it is not likeability or like-mindedness that keeps the flame alive; it is the lexicon of great issues and deep familiarities.

This short book is dense. I find that I want to read it in brief bursts and then spend time reflecting on what I have read. I expect that at this pace, it will take me a while to move all the way through it. But I am loving it, so far, and if these themes and subjects matter to you, I commend the book to you as well.

---

For more:

• A Compelling, Chutzpadik History Of 'Jews And Words' at NPR.org
• Jews and Words at Yale University Press
• Keeping it in the family, The Economist's interview (audio) with Oz and Oz-Salzberger

Another mother poem in print

I'm delighted to be able to announce that another one of my mother poems, "The Permeable World," has been accepted for publication -- it will appear in The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home, which will be published by Holy Cow! Press in October, 2013.

Holy Cow! Press has been around for a while -- they started publishing in 1977, and I respect their work tremendously. This is the press which published Beloved on the Earth (which I reviewed here last year), and I'm delighted that they'll be publishing one of my poems this year too.

Once the anthology is available for pre-order, I'll post here again to let y'all know how you can buy a copy. Thanks, Holy Cow! editors.

Marly Youmans' Thaliad

I eagerly anticipated my copy of Marly Youmans' Thaliad. Thaliad is the newest title out from Phoenicia Publishing, the same house which brought out my collection 70 faces, and just based on its editor (Beth) and its author (Marly) I knew it would be excellent. As an added bonus, I knew it was illustrated by the Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, whose work I also admire.

Here's how the press describes the book:

Thaliad is a book-length epic poem written in accessible, beautiful language that reads like a novel. It tells the story of a group of children, survivors of an apocalypse, who make an arduous journey of escape and then settle in a deserted rural town on the shores of a beautiful lake. There, they must learn how to survive, using tools and knowledge they discover in the ruins of the town, but also how to live together. At the heart of the story is the young girl Thalia, who gradually grows to womanhood, and into the spiritual role for which she was destined.

But for all that I couldn't wait to receive my copy, once it arrived, I found myself reading it slowly, drop by drop, and pausing frequently. Not only because each page is so rich with images, but also because its subject matter turns out to be difficult for me to take in. I keep needing to pause to breathe and to soothe my own heart.

Thaliad begins with an invocation to the muse, as any epic poem ought to do; and then it dives headfirst into the tale of the seven children who survived nuclear apocalypse. They were on a field trip, in a cave, and although rocks fell and they were trapped there, the cave itself protected them. Once they found their way free from their unintentional second womb, they found the world forever changed. This is our narrator, Emma, telling the story of Thalia:

In later years, she never would describe
Her feelings, finding streets emptied of life,
Where shadows of a tree, a woman's hand,
The reaching arm of a young child were burned
Onto sidewalks and walls -- not one of them
Found family at home, unless they were
Corpses, and the rest evaporated
As if they'd flown to some bad fairyland.
I do not know, but Thalia became
The one who urged them through the town to search,
Who had them raid a shop that stank of meat
And threw a picnic underneath a tree,
Who hijacked grocery carts to gather food,
Who kept them close, who made them hide and seek
On commons ground that once had been alive
With daily to and fro but now was gloom --
And then she told them that the act was done,
How they'd no time to wail below the lour
Of skies that wept in ash and turned the day
To twilight, an uneasy, changeless dusk.
If we stay here, we will die, she said,
As everyone we ever loved has died.

Can you see why, as the mother of a three-year-old, I might quail at such description? I'm not generally conscious of the shadow of the fear of nuclear annihilation, but Marly's powerful verse makes this horrific scenario all too real. The world reduced to ash, and children caring for children. Some tender part of me wants to turn away.

Rodger Kamenetz's the lowercase jew

A book of poems nine years old still deserves to be written about and to be read. This is true as a general statement, I think, though I'm saying it now with a specific title in mind: Rodger Kamenetz's the lowercase jew.

Maybe you know Rodger Kamenetz's book The Jew in the Lotus, the true story of the group of rabbis who went to Dharamsala, India, to meet with the Dalai Lama and offer him wisdom about surviving as a people in Diaspora. (When I first read that book, some 20 years ago, I remember thinking: wow, they took a poet along to tell the tale! I want to grow up to get that job.)

Maybe you know his The History of Last Night's Dream. (I interviewed him after that came out -- Dreaming with Rodger Kamenetz, Zeek magazine, 2008.) Or his more recent Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav and Franz Kafka. But unless you're a lover of Jewish poetry -- which, given that you're reading this blog, you might be -- you may or may not know his poetry. And you should know it, because it's really good.

I read his The Missing Jew: New and Selected Poems years ago, I think shortly after getting out of college. (I thought I'd reviewed it somewhere, but can't seem to dig up a link; I guess I just wrote about it in my paper about what makes Jewish literature Jewish, back when I was getting my MFA at Bennington.) But somehow I failed to pick up a copy of the lowercase jew until this fall. Nu, the good news is, poetry ages well. So it came out in 2003 and now it's almost 2013 -- big deal. The psalms were written God-knows-how-long-ago, and we still read them, don't we?

Charlotte Mandel's The Marriages of Jacob

Charlotte Mandel's The Marriages of Jacob (Micah Publications, 1991) is a "poem-novella" which explores the story of the Biblical patriarch Jacob and his wives, and it is extraordinary.

As a reader, I relate to this volume on at least two levels. It's been more than thirteen years since I finished my MFA at Bennington, but I'm still interested and invested in contemporary poetry. So on the one hand, I approach this collection as a poet and a reader of poetry.

And my other set of lenses is my love of Torah and of the midrash which flowers-forth from Torah.  I cherish our stories and the wealth of commentary which form the core of our tradition. I'm interested and invested in stories from Torah and in their various retellings.

This collection moves me and inspires me on both of these levels. I appreciate the craft of this poetry, Mandel's choices of word and turn of phrase. And I appreciate the love of this scriptural story which led her to write these poems, and the ways in which she fleshes out Torah's sparse narrative into something multifaceted, three-dimensional, and real.

Longtime readers know that writing Torah poems is part of both my creative and my spiritual practice; I wrote one every week for a few years, and collected the best poem for each parsha into 70 faces (Phoenicia, 2011). But I've never gone as deeply into a single story, a single Biblical narrative, as Mandel does here. Here's how the collection begins:

Silence veils this bride
no less than her lowered hood
sewn with seven stems of silver wheat

Seven years this virgin groom
has buried his fists in her father's harvests,
bound sheep's wool into humps

A bargain -- the heat of his body
for the fragrance of Rachel,
Laban's daughter.
                      A swollen moon,
thorned stars and fruitful vines
pattern the roof of the wedding tent

loomed by the hummingbird fingers
of girls too young to have bled.
Her bearded brothers are grinning

with closed lips at their father's wit:
"Did he not ask
for my daughter, and do I not give him

my daughter Leah?"

I like the alliteration and assonance of "sewn with seven stems of silver wheat," of "buried his fists in her father's harvests," of "loomed by the hummingbird fingers." (And what images! Fists buried in the thick springiness of wool, weaving fingers flying fast as tiny birds.) And I like the visual prosody of the turn at the middle of the poem, the indented line a hinge between the first half and the second, between one part of the story and the next.

Insights on Babel: how groupthink damages our relationship with God

This year my clergy Torah study group is reading Judy Klitsner's Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other. We've begun with the chapter which links the Tower of Babel with the story of the Exodus. So far we're still working our way through the first half of the chapter, which explores the Babel story. (Need a refresher? Babel on Wikipedia; Genesis 11:1-9 at Mechon-Mamre.)

The primary thing which has struck me, as we've been reading this commentary, is the extent to which the Babel story can be read as a commentary on the dangers of groupthink. "And all the earth was of one language and of one set of words..."

The commentator Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, known as the Netziv, writes:

We must understand why they [the builders of Babel] feared some people leaving for another land. This was certainly related to the devarim ahadim, the "one speech" among them. They feared that since not all human thoughts are identical, if some would leave they might adopt different thoughts. And so they saw to it that no one left their enclave. Anyone who deviated from the devarim ahadim, the "one speech" that was among them would be sentenced to burning...What emerges is...they decided to kill anyone who did not think as they did.

It's easy to think of this mythical era when all the earth was of one language and one set of words as a time of peaceful agreement. But the Netziv is drawing out what's sinister here.

Expanding on this theme, Klitsner writes:

There is much literary evidence for Netziv's hypothesis that the sin at Babel was the creation of a coercively conformist society... The insistently repetitive rhythms of the text point to a generation's intellectual and ideological homogeneity, in which every element of culture is mandated, from language and thought to meter and melody. Through structure and sound, this passage informs us that the sin at Babel is the achievement of consensus at the expense of individuality.

This isn't a matter of people finding consensus and agreement. It's more like being assimilated into the Borg, or the creepy unison ball-bouncing of the children of Camazotz (A Wrinkle in Time.) I'd never thought of the beginning of the Babel story in this way. The notion that God is somehow threatened by the people's intention to build a tower reaching the heavens has always seemed a little bit overblown to me, but the notion that God is troubled by the suppression of individuality -- that's a powerful idea.

Klitsner continues:

One aspect of the people's rebellion against God lies in their attempts at effacing the individual. Their attempts constitute a negation of God's plan for humanity to be unique as God is unique. But there is another facet to their mutiny. By quashing freedom of thought, the tower builders preclude any human-divine engagement...While religious behavior may be coerced or feigned, such acts by definition are meaningless. Religious worship has meaning only when the individual freely and sincerely chooses to submit to God's authority. By eroding the individual, the builders at Babel render impossible any hope of a human-divine covenant.

Without freedom of thought, no relationship with God is possible. I keep returning to that idea. We're called to live in relationship, in engagement, with the divine -- and we can't do that without choice and diversity and difference. Coercion and groupthink make connection with God impossible.

I resonate with the idea that in order for religious practice to have meaning, it has to be something we enter into willingly. Of course, I'm speaking in terms of practice and meaning, not in the terms she used (submission to divine authority). I think for many liberal Jews today, the language of practice and meaning is more accessible than the language of commandedness, much less the language of submission to something greater than ourselves. My question is always, how can I help open up the richness of the tradition such that more people will want to understand themselves as choosing to enter into relationship with God?

Anyway, I'm finding a lot of richness in this approach to the Babel story, and I'm looking forward to seeing how she reads Exodus as a commentary on, and/or a subversion of, the Babel narrative. If you've read Klitsner and want to share your response, or if you want to natter about these interpretations of the Babel story, feel free to chime in.

 

Susan Palwick's "Brief Visits"

I think I started reading Susan Palwick's blog after I finished my intensive unit of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) at Albany Medical Center. I did my unit of CPE during my first year of rabbinic school, so this was a while ago. I remember that I came to hospital chaplaincy work with deep trepidation: would I be up to the task? What if I couldn't do, or be, what was needed? To my surprise, the work transformed and uplifted me, maybe especially my nighttime visits to the emergency department or E.D.

And then a friend pointed me to Susan's work, and in reading her poems, I was thrust right back into the hospital experience again, with both awe and joy. After finding her blog, I wrote here:

A friend pointed me to a blog post I'm profoundly glad to have read: The first four ED sonnets, a quartet of sonnets written by Susan Palwick about hospital chaplaincy work. If you enjoy formal poetry -- and especially if you have any connection with chaplaincy work, or its cousins social work, counseling, and medicine -- don't miss these.

(Here's my whole 2006 post about Susan's poems: poems from the E.D.)

Some six years later, those sonnets -- part of an extraordinary book-length sonnet cycle -- form the collection Brief Visits: Sonnets from a Volunteer Chaplain, published by the Texas Review Press.

I was blessed to be asked to offer a blurb for the back of the book, perhaps because of my own (far less ambitious) small booklet of hospital chaplaincy poems chaplainbook (laupe house press, 2006.) For the back of Susan's book, I wrote:

Susan Palwick's poems remind me what I most love about hospital ministry -- in her words, 'story understood / as sacrament.' Here are the small mercies and outsized emotions of a night in the E.D., the infinity of human stories unfolding. 'These small rooms bestow / huge gifts,' she writes, 'God's strangeness shining from each tale(.)' These patients are fortunate to have Susan's presence, a manifestation of God's caring hands and listening ear; and we are fortunate to have her poems, which encapsulate our sweet, painful, poignant human lives.

I'm not sure I can offer a better review than what I said in that paragraph. There are so many shining moments of laughter and grief in this collection: the patient admitting "I don't know how to pray / right now," the realization that in the emergency room people suddenly become grateful for outcomes they would never have wished for ("'he's on a ventilator' better news / than 'nothing worked,'") her description of the hospital chapel ("it's almost always empty when I come/ I'm almost always empty, which is why / I come") which reminds me so much of the hospital chapel I used to visit sometimes at AMC.

These are powerful and poignant poems. Reading them, I feel lifted out of myself in much the way I used to feel when I walked the hospital's halls, in much the way I feel when I enter into real I/Thou relationship with a congregant or a stranger who seeks pastoral care. I recommend this collection highly. If you're clergy, if you're a chaplain -- or if you've ever felt mortal, alone, uplifted, or afraid. Hospitals are holy places because there we connect with some of our deepest human experiences: birth and death, mortality and fear, joy and exaltation. These poems bring all of those to life.

Get the book online: Brief Visits on Amazon.

Claudia Serea's Angels & Beasts

Angels & Beasts, the newest release from Phoenicia Publishing, is a strange and wondrous collection. Here's how the publisher describes the collection:

 

In this largely autobiographical collection of 74 short prose poems, the poet presents her life in three sections. "Angels & Beasts" recalls her early years under the regime of Nicolae Ceasescu, a world of secret terror in which the child interweaves reality and malevolent creatures from Romanian folklore. "The Little Book of Answers" covers the years between the Romanian Revolution (1989) and Serea's emigration to America in 1995. Finally, "The Bank Teller's Name is Jesus" involves the immigrant's impressions of her new home, always colored by the past she carries with her. Serea's masterful use of brevity, surrealism, irony, and black humor allow her to express -- and the reader to confront -- unspeakable horrors. She is a survivor, but a survivor with wide-open eyes, determined to move forward holding the darkness and light together."

 

That's the book jacket text. But as descriptive as it is, it doesn't do these prose poems justice. Here's one of my early favorites -- one of the lighter ones, I think:

Some angels walk among us looking just like regular people. Sometimes they even play football, like this guy with a sweaty t-shirt. He takes a long drink of water and looks at me knowingly. When he pulls his shirt overhead, I can see the scars where the wings fasten. I'll bet he has them neatly folded in the duffle bag he carries after the game.

I love the image of the sweaty footballer whose scars suggest the temporary amputation of great beating wings.

This is real, and I want to be prepared: Elul, Selichot, and Rosh Hashanah

This coming Shabbat at my shul we'll continue discussing one of my favorite books: This Is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew. I've posted about it several times before. I try to make a practice of rereading it each year as we move through this season. This year, I'm sharing that practice with my community.

If you live locally, I hope you'll join us at CBI this Shabbat for a discussion of the middle three chapters of this book (come at 11am -- or join us at 9:30 for davenen first!) We'll be discussing chapters 4-6: "The Horn Blew and I Began to Wake Up: Elul," "This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: Selichot," and "The Horn Blows, the Gates Swing Open, and We Feel the Winds of Heaven: Rosh Hashanah." (Even if you don't have a copy, or haven't done the reading, you're welcome to join us; I've put together a handout of choice quotes from these chapters which should give us plenty to talk about.)

And for those who don't live nearby, I thought I might share those choice quotes here, along with a few thoughts about them. I hope you'll find these passages as thought-provoking and inspiring as I do.

"Look! I put before you this day a blessing and a curse." So begins parshat Re'eh, the weekly Torah portion we read as the month of Elul begins. Look. Pay attention to your life. Every moment in it is profoundly mixed. Every moment contains a blessing and a curse. Everything depends on our seeing our lives with clear eyes, seeing the potential blessing in each moment as well as the potential curse, choosing the former, forswearing the latter. (pp. 65-66)

I really like the way R' Lew connects his Elul teachings with the flow of the Torah portions we're reading this month, and I like what he has to say about this blessing-and-curse passage (which is, as it happens, also the portion my community reads on Yom Kippur morning.)

    [T]he month of Elul -- a time to gaze upon the inner mountains, to devote serious attention to bringing our lives into focus; a time to clarify the distinction between the will of God and our own willfulness, to identify that in us which yearns for life and that which clings to death, that which seeks good and that which is fatally attracted to the perverse, to find out who we are and where we are going.
    All the rabbis who comment on this period make it clear that we must do these things during the month of Elul. We must set aside time each day of Elul to look at ourselves, to engage in self-evaluation and self-judgement, to engage in cheshbon ha-nefesh, literally a spiritual accounting. But we get very little in the way of practical advice as to how we might do this. So allow me to make some suggestions.
    * Prayer -- The Hebrew word for prayer is tefilah. The infinite form of this verb is l'hitpalel -- to pray -- a reflexive form denoting action that one performs on oneself. Many scholars believe that the root of this word comes from a Ugaritic verb for judgment, and that the reflexive verb l'hitpalel originally must have meant to judge oneself. This is not the usual way we think of prayer. Ordinarily we think we should pray to ask for things, or to bend God's will to our own. But it is no secret to those who pray regularly and with conviction that one of the deepest potentials of prayer is that it can be a way we come to know ourselves. (pp. 67-68)

I love the fact that our Hebrew word for prayer connotes judging oneself, looking inward, coming to know oneself. Because boy, do I agree with Rabbi Lew on this one: regular prayer, like regular meditation practice, is a way of coming to know my own internal landscape and coming to understand myself in a deeper way.

* Focus on one thing -- It may not be realistic to expect a significant number of people to suddenly begin showing up at prayer minyans or meditation groups during the month of Elul -- some of us are simply not made to engage in these activities; not in Elul, not ever. Many will never get over finding the daily prayer service tedious and opaque. Many others will always either be frightened to death or bored to tears by the prospect of meditation and the blank wall of self it keeps throwing us up against so relentlessly. So I am pleased to inform you that it is perfectly possible to fulfill this ancient imperative to begin becoming more self-aware during this time without doing these things... Just choose one simple and fundamental aspect of your life and commit yourself to being totally conscious and honest about it for the thirty days of Elul. (p. 72)

I love the way that, after spending many paragraphs describing prayer and meditation and how valuable they can be, he acknowledges without judgement that for many people, they just don't work. Daily prayer can be tedious and opaque; meditation can be either terrifying or deadly dull. But, he says, that's okay! You don't actually have to do those things! What Elul calls us to do is to be conscious, to be present, to be awake. Just choose one aspect of your life (he suggests a few, among them eating, sex, and money) and be totally conscious and honest about it for thirty days. Easy, right?

Susannah Dainow's "Fallow"

The envelope was surprisingly small and decorated with stamps. Inside was a copy of a wee chapbook of poems, Fallow by Susannah Dainow. I started reading it with a pile of mail wedged beneath one arm, walking from the post office to my car, and then I sat in the parked car and kept reading until I was done.

These poems are sharp and evocative. Here there are relationships made out of silence and shared choices, a city where even the snow speaks Anglo, sisters who rarely speak, an angry father's fist, illicit sexual thrills turned to blood and rubble, pigeons like grey rats and a murder of crows, moments of insight and memory and sorrow pressed between the pages like dry flowers.

Probably my favorite poem in the collection is "Whalebone Corset." Here is a taste:

I was born asleep, slid
into a corset
of tapestry and whalebone,
invisible to the world, save
for my women -

mother and grandmother pulled and pulled
both sides to tighten me, evening
through the fight, wrench
out one side, then caress,
stretching the other -- I
came to crave the tug, the yank,
the spin-round push-pull as affection...

I especially love the way the poem ends. These are among the most hopeful lines in the collection, for me.

we are
decorseting -- peeling off
the skins and bones, one strip
at a time, we are taking
the echoes of whalesong and building
her back from memory, the record whole
and shaking oceans

An earlier version of this chapbook was a finalist in the 2011 Qarrtsiluni chapbook contest. Susannah Dainow's collection Fallow can be purchased for $14 by emailing the author directly: fallowthechapbook@yahoo.com.

Rabbi Brant Rosen's "Wrestling In the Daylight"

I've identified deeply with Israel all my life. I first visited at a very young age and have been back to visit more times than I can even count. In my early twenties, I spent two years there studying, working, and living on kibbutzim. I have family members and many dear friends who live in Israel. My Jewish identity has been profoundly informed by the classic Zionist narrative: the story of a small underdog nation forging a national and cultural rebirth out of the ashes of its near-destruction. The redemptive nature of this narrative has at times assumed a quasi-sacred status for me, as it has for many American Jews of my generation and older...

So writes Rabbi Brant Rosen of the blog Shalom Rav in the introduction to his new book, Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity, recently released by Just World Books.

In that introduction Rabbi Brant writes about his longstanding liberal Zionism, about his slowly-creeping doubts about Israel's treatment of Palestinians (and his awareness that his concerns arose more out of concern that the occupation was "corrupting Israel's soul" than out of concern for Palestinians per se), about the horrors of the Second Intifada and then Israel's military campaign in Lebanon in 2006.

It was that campaign in Lebanon which began to shake the foundations of his Zionism. "Although I certainly felt compassion for -- along with a certain tribal solidarity with -- the citizens of Northern Israel suffering under Hezbollah rocket fire, I was unable to accept the utter destruction the IDF was inflicting upon Lebanon in the name of national security," he writes.

And then came Operation Cast Lead. Rabbi Brant writes:

On December 28, 2008, I read the first news report of Israel's military assault on Gaza -- a campaign that would soon be well-known as Operation Cast Lead. On the first day of operations, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Hamas security facilities in Gaza, killing more than 225 people, most of whom were new police cadets participating in a graduation ceremony. Numerous civilians, including children, were also among the dead. By the end of the day, it was clear we were only witnessing the beginning of a much longer and even more violent military campaign that would drive much farther into Gaza.

I remember reading this news with utter anguish. At the same time, oddly enough, I realized that I was finally observing this issue with something approaching true clarity: This is not about security at all -- this is about bringing the Palestinian people to their knees.

Once I admitted this to myself, I realized how utterly tired I had become. Tired of trying to excuse the inexcusable. Tired of using torturous, exhausting rationalizations to explain away what I knew in my heart was sheer and simple oppression.

Rabbi Brant notes that "rabbis and Jewish leaders are under tremendous pressure by the American organizational establishment to maintain unflagging support for the state of Israel." This is, I think, true -- and it makes his own willingness to publicly chronicle his wrestle with these issues, these stories, and these realities all the more remarkable.

Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity is Rabbi Brant's self-curated compilation of his blog posts from Shalom Rav, so if you've been reading Shalom Rav, this material won't be new to you. But I'm finding, as I read, that reading the posts in this new setting and context -- curated by their author into a narrative which clearly shows the progression of his thinking over time -- is a different experience from reading the blog. And Rabbi Brant has chosen to reprint some of the comments from readers as well as responses he's offered to those comments, which gives the book a bit of the internet's Talmudic multivocality (and offers an example of how one can host difficult conversations in a thoughtful and generous way -- which can be hard to come by on the internet, especially on questions of Israel/Palestine.)

The choice to include commentary makes the book particularly interesting, I think. Some of Rabbi Brant's most frequent commentors disagree with him deeply. Over the course of the book, one can see conversations unfolding. Sometimes they are quite heated. And his responses are always thoughtful and respectful, even as he resists attempts at derailing the conversation. Having hosted some conversations about Israel at this blog over the years, I have a sense for how difficult that can be.

At the end of the book, he reprints an article from the Chicago Jewish News with the wonderful headline of Hell freezes over, Cubs win world series, Jews find way to disagree agreeably, about his congregation and its movement toward a new form of dialogue around Israel. The article notes that many of Rabbi Brant's congregants have children who have made aliyah and grandchildren who are settlers, and that his outspokenness about Israel and how he has come to see Israel is not always easy or comfortable for his community.

Here's an excerpt from that article, which closes out the book:

"I have very strong feelings about Israel and I express them pretty openly. My activism is very public," [Rabbi Brant] says. "That is my own truth as a Jew and a rabbi, and it is very important to me to be true to my private personal conscience."

But as the rabbi of JRC, "I also feel strongly that my job is to create the kind of environment where people, even those who don’t agree with me -- and there are many -- feel welcome to express those views and have those views heard. I respect the diversity of opinion at JRC," he says. "We may be (perceived as) left-leaning, but on the subject of Israel, we are more diverse than people think."

The largest group of congregants, he says, fall somewhere in the middle of a continuum, with some on both ends of the spectrum.

With these thoughts in mind, Rosen says, he and a number of congregants "decided together that rather than raise all this dust, it would be a great opportunity to use these emotions in some kind of constructive way."

Rabbi Brant and his congregants contacted the Jewish Dialogue Group, a nonprofit which works to foster constructive dialogue within Jewish communities about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other controversial issues, and together they developed a program called Sicha (conversation) which has helped his congregation enter a new paradigm in their communal conversations about Israel and Palestine. Reading this article as a congregational rabbi -- aware that within my congregation too there is a wide diversity of experience with and opinion about Israel; aware that I have congregants whose children have made aliyah and whose grandkids have served in the IDF; aware that I need to find a way to minister to my community without my own writing on these issues getting in the way of our relationship -- I'm moved and inspired.

Rabbi Brant Rosen is one of my role models in the difficult but important work of coming to terms with the clash between the classic Zionist narrative (a story which many of us want to continue believing -- I know I still yearn for it to be true) and some of the realities on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories. He models for me not how one would do this internal work despite his ardent Jewishness, but precisely of it; not despite being a rabbi, but precisely because his rabbinate calls him to take seriously the Jewish call to stand with those who are oppressed. And he has also taught me a great deal about how to disagree without falling into the trap of looking down on (or dehumanizing) those with whom one disagrees.

If you're interested in progressive Jewish takes on Israel and Palestine, this book is worth reading, and worth having on your bookshelf to return to again.

Three more from Before There Is Nowhere To Stand

Here are three more poems from Before There Is Nowhere to Stand, a collection of poems arising out of the conflict in Israel / Palestine. (I have two poems in this collection as well; I am honored that my work is in print alongside these varied and powerful voices.) I have read the entire collection through more than once, and every time I open it, a different poem moves me.

My previous post in this series featured one poem by Rick Black and one by Reja-e Busailah. When I made that post, I was asked whether I felt I was equalizing the experiences of the two sides in this conflict. Am I implicitly saying that the each side has suffered the same amount, or that each side is equally righteous? It's not what I mean to be saying. But I'm not particularly interested in rehashing old arguments about which side has committed greater atrocities.

As a poet and as a rabbi, I'm interested in the possibility that poetry might be able to help us hear one another. (If poetry can't, I don't know what can.) Some years ago, when poet Rachel Tzvia Back spoke at Williams, she quoted Susan Sontag, who said -- in accepting the controversial Jerusalem Prize -- that now, more than ever, we need poetry because it is poetry which "will open up avenues of compassion and remind us that we might aspire to be better than we had ever imagined ourselves to be." (By the by, I recently reviewed Rachel's latest collection of poems.)

Perhaps you would never sit down with a settler, or with an Israeli peacenik, or with a Palestinian in a refugee camp, or with someone whose spouse or child was killed in a suicide bombing, or with someone whose spouse or child was killed by the IDF. But I invite you to sit down with these poems, and with the realities to which they bear witness. The first is about the withdrawal from Gaza in 2009; the second speaks of Palestinian resistance; the third is another look at the aftermath of a terror attack. (=

 

Waters of Gaza

June 22, 2009

They moved out of Gaza
not without protest, not without prayer
feeling like ivy ripped off the walls
like irrigation pipes torn from the soil
they moved out on unwilling legs
on buses to nowhere
fathers, mothers, children
and children without fathers
without mothers

They moved into Gaza
not without covet, not without envy
feeling like water released from a dam
bursting into surrendering fields
carrying all before it, trees, houses
places of prayer, fences, gardens
waves breaking over alien temples
again and again til water covered all

After the water came briny hatred
lusting for a redder liquid
and the skies darkened again
lightning and thunder returned to Gaza
rained on this thin strip of unhappiness
writhing between the wrath of history
and the dark depths of the sea

-- Johnmichael Simon

Rachel Tzvia Back's A Messenger Comes

In the beginning
it was sudden --
the world

that wasn't
yet
all at once

emerging
out of formless void --
space

of the infinite
broken
into pieces -- God

retreating
to make way
for perfect human

imperfection...

This is a taste of the beginning of Rachel Tzvia Back's new book of poems A Messenger Comes (Singing Horse Press, 2012.) These short sharp lines are poised in the space between classical kabbalah, Luria's cosmogony and the breaking of the vessels, and Back's own hopeful-sorrowful sense of God.

Later, in that same poem, she writes: "That first day when / he moved / gentle over the face // of turbulent waters / his heart / was breaking --" This is a God Whose heart breaks into pieces, and those pieces become the building-blocks of our creation.

This first long multi-part poem, "The Broken Beginning," is steeped in Torah. This is Bereshit, Genesis, in the beginning: the stories of our patriarchs and matriarchs, reflected through this sparse and spare lens."[T]he giving of names / as in the garden" -- Jacob wrestling with the angel, seeking a blessing, a name, acceptance of his body's brokenness -- what it is like to wake "to something / broken." As we all do.

70 faces featured on How to Blog a Book

My book 70 faces and I have the honor of being featured on Nina Amir's How to Blog a Book today. Nina started that blog as a place to talk about "how to blog a book" -- how to use a blog for the purpose of writing a nonfiction book -- though once the blog was underway, she found herself also posting about blogging and books more generally, as well as "how to book a blog" (how to repurpose existing blog posts into a manuscript.) Anyway, she asked me some fun questions, and I had a good time answering. Here's a taste:

I begin the month with an interview with a blogger I’ve followed for quite some time in the world of Jewish spirituality. Rachel Barenblat is a rabbi and a poet as well a blogger, and in 2008, TIME magazine named her blog one of the top 25 sites on the Internet. Pretty awesome, right? At that time, I said, “I want to figure out what she is doing right.” She was writing poetry and recording it—poetry based on the weekly Torah (or Old Testament) portion read in synagogue each week. And at that time she wasn’t even a rabbi yet!

Anyway, she already had a few chapbooks out, but now she has more published books. So, here’s her blog-to-book story, chock full of great advice on how to blog well, blog a book, book a blog and generally succeed as a blogger and an author or poet...

What advice would you offer to aspiring writers who might want to turn their blogs into books or blog a book?

Set yourself a goal and stick to it. One hundred words a day? One page a day? One post a week? Whatever it is, pick it and stick with it for at least a month—long enough for the habit to begin to become engrained. And cultivate friends (readers, other bloggers who are also writers) who are interested in commenting on your work! A good reader is worth their weight in gold. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found that the best way to interest other writers in my work is to be interested in theirs, and the best way to get other bloggers to read me and comment is for me to read them and respond to what they’re doing. So there’s an investment of time. But hopefully the ensuing relationship is its own reward.)

Read the whole thing here: Rachel Barenblat Speaks About Blogging and Booking Poetry. Thanks, Nina!

Pekar & Waldman: Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me

Harvey Pekar was an American underground comix legend. A lot of people know him for American Splendor, a series of autobiographical comic books. He was a giant, in his own way. He died in 2010, survived by his wife Joyce Brabner.

JT Waldman is the creator of Megillat Esther, which I reviewed here several years ago. It's my favorite edition of the book of Esther, bar none. It contains -- as the saying goes -- the whole megillah; all of Esther, plus all sorts of commentary interwoven throughout the gorgeous artwork.

When Harvey Pekar died, he and JT Waldman were collaborating on a nonfiction graphic novel -- an illustrated memoir with historical divagations -- called Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me. The book follows the two authors through Cleveland as they discuss Pekar's relationship with Israel, from the Zionism he imbibed in childhood through a process of beginning to question Israel's role in the world.

In Megillat Esther, JT Waldman skillfully braids classical commentary on Esther together with the text of the megillah and with his striking and beautiful visual art. He does something similar here, only in this book he's interweaving the story Harvey tells, the experience of hearing that story from Harvey, and Middle East history.

The voices of American Muslim men

"Those who seek the divine want to make this world a better place, which first requires that we communicate." That's Congressman Keith Ellison in his introduction to All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim.

I pre-ordered this book as soon as I heard about it from my friend Ayesha Mattu, co-editor of Love Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women. (Which I thought I had reviewed here, but apparently I didn't; shame on me! I was blessed to receive an advance copy before publication, and in response I wrote to the book's editors that "[t]hese essays are meaningful, poignant, and powerful. I'm so grateful for these glimpses into the lives of American Muslim women, all of whom feel to me now like cousins I'm glad to finally know." The book merits a full review; I'll try to write one soon.)

Anyway: having savored that collection of writings by American Muslim women, I wanted to also read a collection of writings by American Muslim men. (I've since learned that there is a collection of essays by American Muslim women which is more directly parallel to this one -- I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim -- which I suspect I would also enjoy.)

When my copy of the book arrived, I turned immediately to the table of contents, since I knew that at least one of my friends had an essay here: Hussein Rashid of Islamicate, who I first met at the Progressive Faith Blog Con back in 2006. I read his essay first, with great delight. (More about that below.) Then I read the one by Shahed Amanullah of AltMuslim, who I've likewise known for years; he notes that "[i]n the end, all the PR in the world won't convince our fellow Americans of our worth any better than a typical Muslim can do by simply being a friend to their neighbor." Then the one by Svend White of Akram's Razor, about growing up as a white Muslim kid in Boston. The one by Aziz Poonawalla of City of Brass (who writes that "there's more to integration than making Halloween halal.")

And then I started opening the book at random, reading stories which caught my eye. Jason Moy's "Disable Your Cloaking Device," about making wudu (the ablutions required before prayer) as a captain in the Army, deployed in Afghanistan. Shakeer Abdullah's "Memoirs of a Mighty Mite Muslim," in which he explains (humorously but also with obvious truth) the similarities between Islam and football. Tynan Power's "Stepping Across the Gender Divide," which begins with the story of a trans Muslim man going to Friday prayer before having his gender reassignment surgery. Baraka Blue's "Manhood," which explores how interacting with Muslim men around the world empowered him to own his emotions.

This is terrific stuff. Wide-ranging, diverse, heartfelt, often surprising. I would expect nothing less from any collection of essays by any religion's practitioners. But because Islam is so often misunderstood in America -- especially in this post-9/11 era -- this book's variety of voices and experiences becomes all the more valuable to have in print. (If only I thought the people who fear Islam most would pick this volume up!)