Velveteen Rabbi

At an unveiling, a moment of grace

First I was distracted because I didn't have a cemetery map.

There's a custom in Jewish tradition of having an unveiling of the matzevah, the grave marker / headstone, usually a year after burial. I was privileged to do an unveiling this weekend -- my first, actually, so I'd spent some time in recent weeks reading up on the ceremony and how it evolved. I felt certain that I had put together good materials (including R' Brant Rosen's beautiful interpretation of Psalm 23). But I realized, when I woke this morning, that I wasn't exactly certain where in our cemetery I would find this headstone. I should have thought of it sooner, but I was so focused on the ritual that I forgot to think about the physical place in which the ritual would unfold. Grumbling at myself, I went to shul early to look for a cemetery map.

I thought I knew where such a map would be. I was wrong. And I had just finished my search for the map when my cellphone rang. It was my husband, calling to ask where his carseat was. I clapped my hand to my mouth, realizing all in a flash: oh, no, it was in my car, with me. I had driven away with both carseats. I'd had the spare one in the back of the car in case it was needed for our son's most recent playdate, and I'd forgotten to remove it. And by the time he called, I needed to dash to the cemetery to stroll the aisles in search of the headstone which needed to be dedicated. There was nothing I could do; he and our son would be stuck at home until I was done. I grumbled at myself some more.

When I arrived at the cemetery my distraction took a partial backseat to beauty. We're having a spectacular May weekend. All the trees are bursting into unbelievable chartreuse leaf. The grass at our cemetery is carpeted with tiny violets. I could hear a rooster crowing nearby. The horses stabled across the street whinnied and snorted. And, thank God, I found the headstone right away, and was able to drape it with a white linen cloth before the family arrived. Once people started arriving, I was able to focus on them; the morning's distractions and my exasperation with myself receded into a dull buzz at the back of my consciousness.

But what really shook me out of my distraction and brought me square into the present moment was the music. The daughter of the deceased stood before his stone and sang L'dor vador. "From generation to generation we shall tell of Your greatness..." Her voice was pure and quavered slightly. Time slowed down, and I could feel that moment as a pause, a pearl, strung in a string of moments stretching back to time immemorial and forward forever. The whole world seemed hushed and still, listening. The words come from the daily amidah prayer, and the song evokes our generations -- what connects us to our ancestors, and to our children -- the melodies, the heritage, the love which bind us to each other and to our tradition. By the time she had finished singing, my day was transformed.

It's those little moments of grace which make everything worthwhile. They can't be planned or presumed-upon; they come when they come. I don't know if she knew she was giving me such a gift, but she did. I am endlessly grateful.

---

The daughter who sang so gloriously was Gloria Lenhoff. She's the subject of the PBS documentary Bravo Gloria; you can hear her on YouTube, though not singing "L'dor Vador." For more: For woman with Williams Syndrome, music was the key.

Things I love about b'nei mitzvah

I love the excited buzz in the synagogue before Shabbat morning services when one of our kids is going to be called to the Torah as b'nei mitzvah.

I love the eager, nervous energy I feel emanating from the family. The parents, caught between the mundane organizational details they were worrying about yesterday and the growing awareness that today is something different, a different kind of time. The younger sibling, if there is one, rolling their eyes but also realizing that this is going to be them someday.

I love standing outside in the field behind our sanctuary, listening to the wild tapestry of birdsong, while the photographer adjusts: you put your arm around her, there, okay, turn a little bit this way, look at me, smile! The family always makes such a beautiful tableau, and I know they'll look at these photographs for the rest of their lives.

I love running through the Torah portion with the bat mitzvah girl one last time before services begin. Her voice is a little bit higher, her pace faster, today than ever before. By now I've practiced chanting this Torah portion with her so many times that I know it by heart, too.

I love the feeling of standing before the assembled community -- members of our congregation; our small core of Shabbat morning regulars; visiting family and friends -- and welcoming them into this place and this moment, this celebration of Shabbat and this celebration of a young person taking their place in our community.

I love inviting anyone who's never seen the inside of a Torah scroll up to the bimah, and unrolling it. Asking them to say, aloud, what makes it different from the books they usually read. It's in Hebrew; it's on parchment; it's a scroll; it's handwritten. Then I point out things they might not have noticed: there's no punctuation. There are no vowels. There are no musical notations.

I love seeing one of our kids shine. Hearing them read from Torah, and offer blessings, and teach something of what they've learned to the entire congregation.

I love hearing the blessing the parent(s) offer. Without fail, hearing the earnest words of love and pride they offer to their child is one of the most moving moments of my day, and reminds me of my own place in the chain of generations, between my parents and my son.

And I love chatting with people after the service, finding out what moved them and what spoke to them. It can be hard for me to gauge, when a lot of people have assembled who maybe aren't necessarily singing along, whether the service is reaching them. But every time, I hear from someone who didn't expect to be moved, or who didn't expect the service to be accessible, and was pleasantly surprised.

Mostly I love knowing that we've co-created a beautiful memory for the new young adult and for their family, and that our community is now one adult Jew richer.

Blessed are You, Adonai our God, source of all being, who has kept us alive, and sustained us, and enabled us to reach this moment.

Daily April poem: lifecycle event

BAR MITZVAH


The family huddles close together.
The mountain beams, now devoid of snow.
The tasseled fringes of prayer shawls flutter.

The photographer calls encouragement --
turn toward him, that's right; adjust
the lapel, good, now smile, look at me

-- and all I can imagine is our own son
awkward and gangly at thirteen, draped
in a loose and flowing brand-new tallit

the opposite of the swaddling blankets
we pulled tight around his flailing limbs
just now before I blinked my teary eyes.

 

---

 

I wrote this poem on a Shabbat afternoon after presiding over the bar mitzvah of a young man in my congregation. I've been part of many b'nei mitzvah ceremonies before, but this was the first bar mitzvah I've done since our son was born, and the realization that someday it'll be our kid up there was poignant for me.

A bar mitzvah gift for the rabbi

Somehow I always forget that I'm going to be moved.

We're a small synagogue, so every time a kid becomes b'nei mitzvah, it feels like a big deal. I imagine that in some big-city shuls, where there might be one or more bar or bat mitzvah celebrations each week, maybe it becomes a little bit ho-hum. But not here. Here we only have one or two a year, and each one stands  out.

I always love looking out into the sanctuary and seeing the expectant faces of those who have gathered to celebrate Shabbat and to celebrate a young person's coming-of-age. I love leading us through Shabbat morning prayer, offering words of explanation to string the prayers together like pearls in a necklace.

I love inviting people up to see the Torah scroll in all of its unique handwritten beauty. I love singing English words to Torah trope and surprising people with hidden meanings. I love the laughter which erupts as we sing Siman Tov u-Mazal Tov and people throw candy at the b'nei mitzvah kid who has jubilantly finished the d'var Torah.

But I'm typically so focused on the service, on keeping things running smoothly, on trying to facilitate genuine prayer both for myself and for all who've assembled, that I forget that the morning always turns out to hold a gift for me, too. This time what made my heart catch in my throat was hearing one of the mothers of the bar mitzvah boy offer him a blessing she has spoken to him countless times over the course of his life: the priestly blessing, "May God bless you and keep you..."

As soon as she began, I felt tears banging at the back of my eyes. I say those words to our son every week too, punctuating each English and Hebrew phrase with a kiss to his forehead. And it hadn't occurred to me until today that someday I'll say those same words to him in front of our community, as he stands tall in a brand-new tallit -- maybe awkward and gangly, maybe bashful and beaming -- and steps over the threshold into Jewish adulthood. Right now our guy is only three, but I remember when this bar mitzvah boy was only three, too. The days are long but the years are short.

As the mother of the bar mitzvah blessed her son, I pressed my hand to my lips and blinked a lot, really fast, to clear my eyes. By the time I returned to the bimah, my emotions were under control and I was able to speak and sing clearly. But that moment of realization, that glimpse of the future, is still reverberating in me. An unexpected gift.

Accompanying mourners, with gratitude

When I walk out of a mourner's home, having spent an hour or two listening to stories about the person who has died, I feel unspeakably lucky to be doing this work.

It's an incredible honor to be able to walk beside people in their mourning. To bear witness to their emotions and their memories.

Sometimes we look at old photographs or newspaper clippings. Sometimes one story leads to the next and suddenly everyone's talking over each other, eager to reminisce.

Sometimes the relationships were healthy and sweet, and the grief has the flavor of mourning something beautiful which has moved into memory.

Sometimes the relationships were painful or broken, and the grief has the flavor of mourning something which wasn't what it needed to be.

I try to take notes as unobtrusively as I can, asking questions -- if I need to -- to spark more stories. Bit by bit, anecdote by anecdote, a picture emerges.

Sometimes people ask me about Jewish ideas of the soul and the afterlife, wanting to know where (I think) their loved one is now, what comes next.

Sometimes people tell me stories about being present at the moment of death, the luminous quality that may accompany that transition into what we can't know.

Always when I make my farewells, even if I feel daunted by the task of writing a eulogy which will live up to their memories, I'm grateful to be able to try.

VR at Reform Judaism and at Ritualwell

My thanks go to the editors at the Reform Judaism blog for reprinting my post Every body is a reflection of God. I serve a Reform shul and I'm delighted to have that post circulating to the broad Reform community.

And my thanks are also due to the editors at Ritualwell, who asked me to write a short essay about miscarriage, spirituality, and ritual. It's here: Through (Ritualwell). Here's how it begins:

Some years ago I flew to Colorado for OHALAH, the annual gathering of Jewish Renewal clergy and student clergy, carrying a dazzling secret: I was newly-pregnant. When I danced at kabbalat Shabbat services, I was already imagining what it would be like to bring an infant with me the following year. And then I went to bed feeling uneasy with cramps, and woke to blood everywhere.

That Shabbat was endless, and it was awful. What I remember most about that terrible day was the way that—as word spread—woman after woman came up to me to tell me it had happened to her, too. I had unknowingly joined a club of which many of my friends and teachers were already members. Once, twice, three times … Each of them had stories to tell, and though they could not offer healing, there was comfort in knowing that I was not alone—that so many other women carried this invisible scar.

You can read the whole thing at Ritualwell, along with a variety of other resources for pregnancy loss. They also linked to my free chapbook of miscarriage poems, Through. Thanks, Ritualwell editors. May all who suffer that grief find comfort, speedily and soon.

After the week of shiva, what then?

This is something I've been working on in my capacity as a congregational rabbi. I'll be sharing it with my synagogue community. But I wanted to share it here too. This blog is part of my rabbinate, and I'm blessed to be in relationship with "internet congregants" who are spread pretty far and wide.

If you've just found this blog through searching for resources for the end of shiva, I welcome you to Velveteen Rabbi, and I hope that what follows is helpful to you.

---

So you're approaching the end of shiva. That first week of mourning after the funeral, after the first mourner's kaddish, after the unthinkable act of shoveling a spade-ful of earth and hearing it thud on unvarnished wood. Shiva means seven, the number of days of this first stage of grieving. One week: the most basic unit of Jewish time. After those seven days, a mourner enters the stage called shloshim, "thirty," which lasts through the first month after burial. But what does entering into shloshim mean? How does it, might it, have an impact on your life?

In the tangible world, the move from shiva to shloshim can have palpable implications. Traditional Jewish practice places a variety of restrictions on mourners during shiva -- for instance: not wearing leather shoes, sitting on the ground or on a low stool (closeness to the earth is a sign of humility and mourning), not going to work, not engaging in physical intimacy. All of these restrictions are lifted during shloshim.

For contemporary liberal Jews who do not consider themselves bound by traditional halakhot (laws / ways-of-walking), the restrictions and their abeyance may or may not have meaning. You may not have given up leather or sex or anointing yourself with perfume or listening to music this week. But the psycho-spiritual shift of moving from shiva to shloshim is still significant. The shift from shiva to shloshim is all about expansion.

During the first week of mourning one's life may contract to a very small space. Perhaps you haven't left the shiva house at all. Or even if you've gone in and out of your home, you may have felt constricted, your life seemingly shrunken. Once shiva has ended, it is time to start expanding again. Open yourself to seeing more people. Allow yourself to immerse in your work life again. Expand your self-perception: you are not only a mourner, not only someone who grieves, but also someone who lives, works, struggles, and loves.

This may feel impossible. If it does, that's okay. Just know that our tradition believes that it is good for a mourner to try to open themselves to life again after that first most-intense week of grief. Your sorrow may ebb and flow. You may experience times when you think you're close to okay again, and times when the floodwaters of emotion threaten to swamp you. Keep breathing. The emotional rollercoaster is normal. You won't always feel this way, but -- as the saying goes -- the only way out is through.

If you've been burning a shiva candle all week, your candle will naturally flicker and gutter and run out of fuel as the week of shiva ends. (The candle is designed to last for seven days; that's what makes it a shiva candle.) When the candle extinguishes itself, that may feel like another blow, another loss. Remember that the candle is only a candle: a symbol of your mourning, but not a barometer of your spiritual state or of your loved one's presence.

You can still talk to your loved one, if there is meaning for you in that practice. You can talk to God. You can pray or meditate or sit in your silent car and wail -- however you can best express whatever you're feeling. You might try writing a letter to your loved one at the end of shiva, telling them where you are and how you are as the first week of active mourning comes to its end. (What you do with the letter is up to you: save it? burn it? shred it and use the paper to mulch a new tree?)

Above all, be kind to yourself. Pay attention to what your heart needs.

This second stage of mourning lasts for one month, the time it takes for the moon to wax and become full and then wane again. This is an organic cycle, a mode of measuring time through observing the ebb and flow of the natural world. Just as the moon grows and shrinks, so our spirits and our hearts experience times of fullness and times of contraction. The end of shloshim is a time to begin looking toward fullness again. We trust that after the moon has disappeared, she will return; we trust that after our lives have been diminished by loss, light and meaning will flow into them again.

If you are moving from shiva into shloshim: I bless you that the transition should be what you need it to be. May this ancient way of thinking about mourning and the passage of time be meaningful for you; may time soothe your grief. One traditional practice is to mark the end of shiva by going for a walk around the block -- a symbolic step out of the closeness of your home, into the wide world around you. (See Ending Shiva by Rabbi Peretz Rodman.)

If you are moving out of shloshim, I offer you the same blessing: may this transition be what you most need. For those who feel the need for a ritual to mark that shift, I recommend this Leaving Shloshim Ritual by Rabbi Janet Madden. (Ritualwell has a wide variety of materials relating to mourning and bereavement, so if that ritual isn't what you need, feel free to browse.)

May the Source of Mercy bring you comfort along with all who mourn.

---

Cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.

Eulogy for a child with Canavan's

I don't usually share eulogies here. They are personal, and this blog is public. But this is an unusual situation, and I think the eulogy might be helpful to others, so I've removed identifying material in order to share the essence of what I offered at a funeral a few days ago. If these words are useful to you, you are welcome to adapt them.

If you got here by googling Canavan's Disease, please know that there are informational links at the bottom of this post.

When a child is born, we rejoice. We imagine possibilities. Our minds run away with us, providing us with dreams and imaginings of wonders we hope the child's life will hold.

When this child was born, no one imagined that his life, and his parents' lives, would be circumscribed by a neurodegenerative disorder... nor that he would come to be such a ineffable presence in the lives of those who knew him, cared for him, and loved him.

Because of the dangers of Canavan's, this boy was never alone. His parents, and later his nurses, took constant shifts in caring for him. He communicated with his eyes and, for a time, with sounds. When he was in his parents' arms or enjoying therapy his smiles and laughter brightened the room.

His was not the life his parents might have dreamed before he was born, but it was his own, and he lived it wholly. He experienced love in the touch of caring hands and the attention diligently paid to the apparatus of his care.

His parents, and his caregivers, experienced a deep connection with him. And they knew that connection was reciprocated, and they knew that connection was real. Every time he fought his way back from another illness, another hospitalization, they knew that -- in his mother's words -- "he still wanted to be here."

His parents knew him without words. They teach us that we can know each other beyond words, and listen deeply past the words we do hear, to something deeper, more ineffable and more lasting.

The same was true of his nurses, his caregivers, physical therapists, music therapists, those who lovingly massaged his body to help preserve his muscle tone, the teachers who came to offer him a window into the wider world. When he lay on his bed in the sun, his parents called it "his beach." Once his health became too poor for him to risk the trip to these hills, his parents preserved his room here intact, a place for their son in this town they called "the home of their hearts."

I was blessed to spend an afternoon with this young man and his family last month. I sang him the lullabies I sing to my own son, and his eyes stayed on mine. I experienced his quiet presence in the room, and the sweetness of his neshama -- his soul -- was clear without any words at all.

I am humbled by this child's life, and by the boundless well of love and compassion which his parents and his caregivers expressed every day through a million acts of caring and nurturing.

He  lived, and struggled, and was loved. He experienced the world from his own unique vantage. In the wake of his death, there is grief. Nothing we can offer will soothe the empty place where he used to be.

May his soul soar free, no longer fettered by limitations or by suffering. And may those who loved him find comfort in the knowledge that his suffering has ended, and that in caring for him so lovingly, they epitomized some of the best of what humanity can be.

 

---

For more information:

About Canavan Disease

National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases

Center for Jewish Genetics: Canavan's Disease

Jewish Genetic Disorders

Support for Families With Canavan's

On preparing a nondenominational funeral

It was a challenge I had not sufficiently pondered: how to create a meaningful nondenominational (read: non-Jewish) funeral service which would serve its ritual purpose, bring comfort to the mourners, and use language familiar and accessible to those assembled, without taking me out of the comfort zone of what I can authentically pray as a rabbi and as a Jew?

One of my dearest teachers, when I was in rabbinic school, taught me that a funeral is the one time when we always say yes. If someone asks me to do a wedding, and I say no -- because the date isn't convenient, or because I'm not comfortable with their stipulations, or for whatever reason -- they can always find another officiant. There are a lot of rabbis who do weddings, and generally speaking, a nuptial couple approaches potential clergy well in advance of the blessed date. But if someone needs a funeral, the need is immediate, and it is incumbent on me as a rabbi to say yes. It's my job to be there for them and to use the prayers, skills, and teachings at my disposal to help them navigate the shoals of grief.

So when I was asked to officiate at the funeral of a congregant's loved one, I said yes without hesitation. The only question in my mind was what words, exactly, might be appropriate to the situation, because this family member was not Jewish. I have a fair number of dual-faith-heritage families in my community, which means I have a lot of congregants who have Christian family members. When those family members belong to their own faith-communities, then their funerals are a matter for their clergy. But when they're unaffiliated -- "unchurched," in Christian parlance -- a different situation arises. (Other liberal Jewish clergy, I expect you've run into this situation too; I'd love to hear from others about how you've handled it.)

I knew that most of the family members who would be gathering to mourn would not be Jewish. But all of them were grieving a loss, and all of them were in need of a liturgy which would create a safe container to hold them in their grief. This was a new spiritual assignment for me, and an opportunity to think about how I understand funerals to work and what I understand my role at a funeral to be.

First I looked to the funeral liturgy I usually use, which is based in Ma'aglei Tzedek, the Reform Rabbi's Manual, though has grown from there. (I've adapted my practices over the years, drawing on Orthodox, Reconstructionist, and Renewal liturgies and teachings.) I turned also to poetry, thumbing my copy of Beloved on the Earth, which I reviewed here some time ago. I knew I wanted some things which the assembled could read or recite together, ideally familiar words and cadences. Psalms, then: I chose parts of Psalm 90, and Psalm 23, and also the Lord's Prayer. (For all that it's a Christian prayer, there's nothing in it which is uncomfortable for me as a Jew -- actually when I've heard it rendered in Hebrew I've been amazed and moved by just how familiar its turns of phrase are, and how similar to the liturgy I love and know.)

What might the mourners be expecting, what forms and structures would be most comforting to them in their grief? I consulted Google to see what I could learn about Christian funeral liturgies. (I'm grateful to those who've put the Book of Common Prayer online!) Of course, there are certain central elements of Christian funeral ritual which are foreign to me. Christians and Jews have different teachings about what happens to our souls after death, and I can't in good faith affirm Jesus as the resurrection and the life or as the only path to God. But I fashioned a prayer of committal to recite at graveside, which I hoped would serve to sanctify, with our words and intentions, this place in the earth into which this beloved body would be returned.

I hope and pray that the words I assembled were the right ones, and that my presence was a comfort. For those who are interested in the end result of my labors, two short services are enclosed here: a memorial service intended for use in the funeral home, and a graveside service intended for interment. (Neither includes any identifying information or anything specific to this family.) I welcome your thoughts, questions, and feedback in response. And if these liturgies are useful to someone else, by all means, use them elsewhere; I share them freely, with hope that all who are bereaved will find comfort.

Memorial [pdf]

Interment [pdf]

What I cherish about shiva

Is it strange to say that I cherish shiva minyans? Of course, a shiva minyan means that people are grieving. In that sense, I can't say that I look forward to them. But loss and death are a natural part of every life. We can't imagine them away, no matter how we might want to try. And given that reality, I find the custom of sitting shiva, and of convening a shiva minyan, to be both meaningful and sweet.

The custom of the shiva minyan originated at a moment in time when it was presumed that all Jews prayed three times a day. Imagine that you're in the habit of daily prayer, and then you lose a loved one. There's a gaping hole in your life. Your heart and soul feel raw and bruised. You don't want to put on a fancy suit and high heels (or whatever your version of getting all dressed up might be) and venture out of your house in order to daven in community.

So we come to you, and you get to daven weekday prayers and say kaddish for your loved one, and while we're there, we also do our best to take care of you. Usually, in my experience, people brings food. There are hugs. People will sit together with the mourner(s) and listen to them talk about the person who has died. Sometimes we look through photo albums and we tell stories. We cry and we laugh in remembrance. And -- traditionally -- the next night, we gather and we do it again. And again, until the first week of mourning after the burial is through. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we sit in companionable silence. The conversation ebbs and flows. And at the appointed time, we pray.

Ma'ariv, the evening service, is short and sweet. It's very like the morning service, though there's an extra blessing after the shema, the hashkivenu prayer, in which we bless God who spreads a shelter of peace over us at evening when we go to sleep. There is something particularly poignant, I think, about davening the evening service (including that hashkivenu prayer) in a shiva house. Sleep, says the Talmud, is 1/60th of death; every night when we recite the bedtime shema and its prayer for forgiveness, we are clearing our spiritual slates in preparation for death. And there's a parallel between the way that we ask God to spread a shelter of peace over us as we sleep, and the way that we ask God to spread a shelter of peace over our loved one who has entered eternity.

Most of all, I just love that this is our custom when someone is mourning. We come to them. We comfort them with our presence as best we can. We pray with them. We give them the witnessing-community in which they can recite the mourner's kaddish, which never once mentions death, but which has rhythm and cadences which take me (take many of us, I suspect) into a different headspace and heartspace than we otherwise inhabit. There's nothing else one has to "do" during a shiva call, no fancy rituals or elaborate social expectations. It's really mostly about presence, about being present with and present to the person who has suffered a loss.

I find the shiva journey meaningful in all four worlds. In assiyah, the world of action and physicality, it's about being there, sitting with the person who has experienced the loss. (And in today's increasingly interconnected world, when we may have loved ones around the globe, I've known people to pay shiva calls via Skype. Telepresence is meaningful, too.) In yetzirah, the world of emotions, it's a chance to connect heart-to-heart. To open ourselves to someone else's loss, and to create a safe container in which the person who has experienced the loss can grieve. In briyah, the world of thought, shiva is an opportunity to reflect and remember together. And in atzilut, the world of essence, it's an opportunity to connect with the ineffable.

The traditional blessing spoken to someone who is grieving is המקום ינחם אתכם (Hamakom yinachem etchem), "May God comfort you." Or המקום ינחם אתכם בתוך שאר אבלי ציון וירושלים (Hamakom yinachem etcham b'toch sha'ar avelei tzion v'Yerushalayim), "May the Holy One comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." Some choose instead to say תנחמו מן השמים (tinechamu min hashamayim), "May your comfort come from heaven." But I appreciate the reminder offered by Rabbi Irwin Kula and Vanessa Ochs in The Book of Jewish Sacred Practices that "The right words -- which may be no words at all, just a rich, holding silence -- will come from our hearts." In a tradition so attached to words, I love this reminder that it's okay that sometimes our words may fail us.

Conversation with a doctor

"Do you smoke?" the doctor asks as he peers into my ears.

"No," I tell him, truthfully.

"What do you do?"

For a moment I wonder: does he mean what are my vices, if smoking isn't one of them? But then I realize he's probably not fishing to find out whether I have a beer with dinner. "You mean, professionally?" I ask. He nods. "I'm a rabbi."

"Really?" He looks surprised.

"Really."

"Good for you," he says, absently, and presses the stethoscope to my back. "Breathe like this," and demonstrates how he wants me to inhale and exhale. So I do.

"My youngest daughter and her friends used to play dress-up," he informs me. "They would go up to the attic and get prom dresses, of which we at one time had quite the collection, and they would play all sorts of games."

I make some noncommittal sound and he continues.

"Sometimes they would play wedding. One of them would be the bride. Another would be the minister. They'd throw flowers. You know how it is."

Perhaps noticing the question in my eyes, he detours for a moment to say, "this has nothing to do with your sinuses," and then he goes on with his story.

"Not long ago I went to a wedding in Lenox, at the little church there. One of my daughter's childhood friends was getting married, and the minister was another one of the girls who used to play wedding in our yard."

Okay, I say, prompting him to continue.

"It was so beautiful," the doctor tells me, earnestly. "The bride was all grown-up. I think she's going to be a lawyer. And the homily was poignant and well-written. And I realized, these aren't little kids playing dress-up anymore! This is real life. And maybe," his voice is wistful now, "they really will carry something forward."

I'm not sure what he means, but I think it's something like: maybe the lessons we hoped we were teaching our children really got through. Maybe they'll make a better world than we did.

I imagine what it will be like when Drew is old enough to be thinking about marriage. When his little buddies from preschool are standing beneath the chuppah or at the altar. It's impossible to picture, but I know the day will come.

"That's beautiful," I tell him.

"Anyway, you're fine," he tells me in response, tone entirely businesslike again. "No sign of anything bacterial. Stick with the over-the-counter stuff."

I shrug. "Okay. I'm mostly just here because I've had a cold for a month and my husband said, 'you've had a cold for a month, go see a doctor!'"

He laughs. "Keep it up," he tells me, and opens the door.

The most amazing lead-up to Yom Kippur

On Monday morning the phone rang. The caller ID showed an unfamiliar number, but something told me I should pick it up. It was a dear friend, calling from a borrowed number. Her parent had just died. After I offered what comfort I could, she asked for my help. As the day unfolded, it became clear to both of us how I could be of service.

This morning -- the day which would become Yom Kippur -- I dropped my son off at preschool and then drove over the mountains. I met my friend there, and embraced her, and embraced the family. In their living room, overlooking beautiful woods and hills, I explained the traditional process of taharah, the bathing and blessing and dressing of the body of someone who has died. (See Facing Impermanence, 2005.) I explained the process as I have learned it, and I explained how we would make it work today here in this private home.

Ordinarily it is the chevra kadisha, the volunteer burial society, who lovingly prepare the body of someone who has died. In my experience, this is done at a local funeral home. In my town we don't have a Jewish funeral home, but we have a very friendly non-Jewish funeral home where the proprietors know our customs and welcome us into their space for this holy work. I suspect the same is true in the Pioneer Valley where I spent this morning. And the local chevra kadisha had offered to provide this service at the funeral home they work with...but the family wanted to do it themselves, at home.

Most sources indicate that family members do not participate in taharah because it would be too difficult, too painful. But this family yearned to do taharah themselves, there in the serene home where their loved one had died and had been kept company ever since. In our chevra kadisha, we have permitted family participation from time to time. When someone feels the deep need to care for their loved one in this way, we do not say no. Particularly in a case where a spouse or child has been caring physically for a loved one during illness, sometimes they need to tenderly offer this one last touch in order to say goodbye.

My friend's family didn't want to involve a funeral home or to enter the impersonal space of whatever room the local chevra kadisha uses for this process, and they didn't want to entrust their loved one to strangers, even the nicest of strangers. So together we centered ourselves, and went up the curving wooden stairs to the bedroom.

We said prayers to prepare ourselves. We spoke to the meit, the body of the person who had died, asking the neshamah -- the soul -- to forgive us if we happened to do anything improper or to offend in any way. Moving slowly and gently we washed the meit clean with washcloths, which we dipped into a beautiful ceramic bowl of warm water. My friend wept, from time to time. We offered one another words of comfort as needed.

We poured a stream of water, our symbolic mikveh, as I spoke the words which remind us that the soul is pure. And then we gently dried and dresssed the body in tachrichim, the white linen shroud in which every Jew is buried. Rich or poor, male or female, we are all alike in the end. Slowly the transformation took place: from the shell of a human body which had contained life to a white-bundled figure, arms and legs and head and torso all covered in white.

The last step was swaddling in a white linen sheet -- like the way parents swaddle newborns, I said, and my friend laughed through her tears, remembering my newborn son and how he would only sleep if swaddled (and sometimes not even then!) With the help of a few local friends, the meit was placed in the beautiful simple pine coffin -- handmade, sanded smooth as silk. A bit of earth from the home garden was sprinkled inside, a connection to the soil in which this beloved soul had thrived.

I left that home feeling lighter than I had when I'd entered. Feeling centered and connected. Feeling connected to my friend and her family -- to my own family -- to all the generations of my ancestry, and to my son and the generations I hope will follow -- most of all to God.

Yom Kippur can be understood as a day of rehearsal for one's own death. We wear white, like the shrouds in which we will be buried. We eschew food and drink, as we will do when our physical lives have ended. We recite a vidui prayer very like the one recited on the deathbed.

On Yom Kippur we try as hard as we can to make teshuvah, to correct our course and shift our alignment so that our actions, our emotions, our thoughts, and our spirits are aligned with holiness. We try to repair our relationships with ourselves, with each other, with God. We try to relinquish the emotional and spiritual calluses which protect us in ordinary life, and to go deep into awareness of our mortality and deep into connection with something beyond ourselves.

I can't think of any better way to prepare myself for the awesome task of leading my community in prayer throughout Yom Kippur than what I was blessed to do this morning. When I don my all-white linen garb tonight, I will remember the feeling of these tachrichim beneath my fingers this morning. When I invite my community to join me in experiencing this holiday as a reminder of our mortality, I will think of this family and their encounter with death.

And when I lead us in davenen tonight and tomorrow, I will do so in the hope that our prayers will rise to the Holy Blessed One as do the prayers of these mourners, and that God will grant compassion and healing to them and to us. Kein yehi ratzon -- may it be so.

An unusual wedding

The state park arises out of nowhere. The countryside around it is quite built-up, highways and office parks and car dealerships, but then the road enters a new town, and the trees grow thicker, and suddenly there's an entryway to a state park. I drive in and up and around to the picnic pavillion at the end of the road.

A handful of actors and a musician are moving picnic tables to create the sacred space in which the ceremony will take place. We ponder which direction the sun will be coming from on the morning of the wedding, check weather forecasts on our phones, decide to set things up beneath the pavilion instead of in the field. We practice with the chuppah. I talk through the ceremony: this, then that, then a musical number, then another reading, then this next part...

In some ways this is one of the most informal weddings I've ever done. The brides will simply walk from the campfire circle to the chuppah once everyone is seated; there will be little pomp or circumstance. In other ways, this is among the most complex. There will be guerrilla theatre, performed by a group of friends who do this routinely at weddings in their circle. The brides don't know what exactly they will do, nor when they will do it, but they know an interruption is coming. Every time I think about it, it makes me smile.

Friends who are musicians will provide processional and recessional music, plus three musical numbers during the ceremony itself. In the late afternoon light, as we relax at the picnic tables after our very laissez-faire rehearsal, groups of singers gather with guitar and portable keyboard to practice the music. Even though they start and stop a few times, and they're still working out the details of how their voices will play off of one another, it is surprisingly glorious. I wonder what it will be like when they are singing for the hushed and anticipatory crowd.

In traditional circles where the Three Weeks are considered a period of mourning, weddings are not performed during this time. In Reform circles, as this Ask the Reform Rabbi column notes, some rabbis abstain from weddings at this time, but others don't. I've come to think of the Three Weeks as a time when we are particularly attuned to suffering, and a time for discernment and teshuvah, but for me this isn't a period of mourning per se. I grieve for what is broken, but I also recognize that without the Temple's fall, rabbinic Judaism might never have arisen.

I find that I'm happy to be doing a wedding during this first week of Av. There's been so much sorrow already during these Three Weeks -- the bus bombing which killed Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, the shooting at the movie theatre in Aurora, various personal sorrows among people I know and love -- that this feels like an antidote, a tikkun: a healing. When I sing "soon may we hear, in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of joy and the voice of cheer, the voices of beloveds rejoicing in one another" it will be an extra-fervent prayer this year.

May our sorrow turn to joy, speedily and soon.

Dancing With the Widow (reprint of an essay from 2000)

Like the others, she's clad in skirt and blouse with an extra yard of fabric wrapped shawl-fashion. Unlike the others, she wears a coarse rope around her waist. Sometimes another woman leads her by it, into the dancing, out of the dancing. Sometimes it just dangles. We are in the town of Medie. The bound woman is a new widow: the dancing is her husband’s wake.

Medie is a village not far north of Accra, Ghana's capital city. Medie is not a place many Westerners visit, although that may change in time. We are there because the elder brother of a close friend has died of lung cancer ("He wasn't Y2K-compliant," jokes our friend, familiar with the Y2K bug although he's never used a computer) and we are there for the last six hours of his two-day wake.

Xylophone music in Medie. A few years after this funeral.

For our teachers and our students

This past weekend we had two celebrations of bat mitzvah at my small shul: one at Shabbat morning services, and one at a mincha/maariv/havdalah service. At both services, many of those in the kahal were not Jewish and had never been to a synagogue before. It was a long day for me, and a tiring one both physically and spiritually, but it was also a wonderful day.

I love inviting up anyone who has never seen the inside of a Torah scroll, and asking them how this differs from the books they usually read (it's in Hebrew; it's a scroll; it's handwritten; it's on parchment; oh, and by the way, there are no vowels in this text) before the b'nei mitzvah kid reads from the Torah. I love seeing the parents and grandparents of our b'nei mitzvah kids beaming. Most of all, I love seeing our young people shine.

As it happened, this particular weekend I received some very gratifying feedback. People came up to me after services and told me that the service felt welcoming, that they understood what was going on, that they felt included, that they felt at home. It made me really happy. The desire to help people gain access to some of the beauty of Judaism is one of the reasons I became a rabbi.

Maybe the most powerful response came from a relative of one of the b'nei mitzvah, an older woman who lives in Israel. I could see during the service that she was following me into the prayers -- I saw her nodding, smiling, looking surprised. She came up to me afterwards and said: I have never seen anything like this before. The energy, the warmth, the joy, the understanding of what the prayers really mean. This is extraordinary.

I told her that her words meant the world to me, and that I would pass them up the chain to my teachers, because it is thanks to my teachers that I am able to do what I am able to do. I am able to open the doors of Jewish tradition and share its sweetness because of those who trained me.

Thank you to everyone with whom I studied during my years as an ALEPH student. Thank you to the teachers at DLTI; thank you to the ALEPH va'ad; thank you to my mentors, both long-distance and (formerly) local. When I am able to lead services in a way that connects people with Jewish tradition, with Torah, with community, and with God, it is because of you.

There is a prayer traditionally recited after the completion of learning. It's called the kaddish d'rabanan: the "kaddish of the rabbis" or "kaddish of the teachers." In the contemporary vernacular version written by Debbie Friedman (may her memory be a blessing), the prayer says:

For my teachers
and my students
and for the students of my students
I ask for peace and lovingkindness
And let us say, amen.

And for those who study Torah
here and everywhere:
May they be blessed with all they need
and let us say, amen.

May there be peace and lovingkindness
and let us say, amen!

I offer this prayer now, in honor of my teachers, with all the gratitude of my heart.

Revised Mincha/Maariv/Havdalah siddur

Five years ago I worked with one of my nieces to put together a siddur for her bat mitzvah celebration -- a siddur for mincha, maariv, and havdalah. That siddur featured my niece's poetry, artwork, and midrash along with the basic liturgy for this time of day and this day of the week. I put the siddur online after her big weekend, and have received many requests to use and adapt it since then.

What I'm sharing now is a revision of that siddur. I've made several changes. Most notably, I've modified how I incorporate Uva L'Tzion, the prayer which speaks about redemption and encourages us to call out like the angels; I've improved the transliterations and the visual balance of English and Hebrew text on the page; and I've added a few simple images to make the pages more beautiful (including a shviti image designed for meditation during the silent amidah). And I've done a bit of abridging here and there to keep the service at a manageable length for my community.

When I use this siddur at my shul, I hand out the b'nei mitzvah's Torah portion on a separate sheet. It's easy to also include other material from the b'nei mitzvah if s/he wants to add any creative work or special readings, and/or to customize the prayers as desired (e.g. using "Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu" or Shayndel Kahn's "It's Upon Us" in lieu of the more traditional Aleinu.)

You're welcome to make use of this siddur if it's helpful to you. I revised it for my own current use in part because my shul owns the two-volume edition of Mishkan T'filah, the Reform siddur: one volume for weekdays and festivals, one volume for Shabbat. Which is great for those with fragile wrists, who wouldn't be comfortable holding a weekday-festival-Shabbat edition all in one book...but since Shabbat mincha is in one book, and weekday ma'ariv is in another book, holding a Shabbat mincha + weekday ma'ariv service is difficult. Asking people to juggle two hardback books seems logistically challenging; handing out a simple 12-page staple-bound siddur is simpler.

This file was created using Mellel version 2.9.1; if you want to edit your own version, and you need the Mellel file, let me know. Comments / reactions welcome, as always!

 

---

 

Mincha / Afternoon Offering

we offer ourselves & our hearts
during the special time of Shabbat afternoon
and we call one of our own to Torah as b'nei mitzvah

Ma'ariv / Evening

a short & sweet evening service

Havdalah

sanctifying the separation between Shabbat
and what comes next

 

 

A new liturgy for Shabbat afternoon and evening
created for Congregation Beth Israel / www.cbiweb.org

ed. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat
velveteenrabbi.com | velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/

      Download MinchaMaarivHavdalahSiddur [pdf], 813 KB

Celebrating marriage

Sometimes I think about what might surprise Drew, later in his life, when we tell him stories about before he was born or about his early years. The first time we ever did a video-skype call with my mother in Texas, she told him a story about being a little girl on a party line, and I thought: wow, we have come an incredibly long way, technologically speaking, since his grandma was a girl. To Drew, the fact that we sometimes "have dinner with" his Texas grandparents via Skype is entirely ordinary. He's never lived in a world where that wasn't possible.

Drew isn't old enough to know what a President is, but someday he'll learn that his parents voted in the historic election in which we elected our first African-American president. (I even wrote a Torah poem about it.) Drew has a deck of Presidential cards (like baseball cards, but featuring Presidents; picked up in the dollar bin at Target, I think) and when he scatters them on the floor, they are a sea of white faces -- all except for one. But maybe by the time my grandchildren are ready to vote, it won't be so remarkable anymore to think that this nation could (begin to) overcome its legacy of racism in this way.

Drew also isn't old enough to know what marriage is, though I'm grateful that he's growing up in a state in which gays and lesbians have the same right to marry as male-female couples do. His lesbian aunties on his dad's side were married here some years ago. His mama the rabbi officiates at gay weddings with great delight. And now we have a President who has openly affirmed his support for gay marriage, too.

I hope that by the time Drew is old enough to understand, the notion of a state passing a law against gay marriage will seem as misguided, plainly hurtful, and outdated as the notion of a state passing a law against someone of one race marrying someone of another. (I'm far from the first to note the painful similarities there.) I don't know who Drew will love; right now I'm pretty sure he loves his family and his friends and Thomas the Tank Engine, and that's as it should be. But I hope and pray that by the time he's ready to marry, if and when that day comes, he (and his generation) will have the right to marry, period. And not just in a handful of states, but anywhere in this country.

Because marriage is awesome. Getting married means standing up beside someone you love and speaking words which change your relationship to one another in a magical, powerful, and honest-to-God holy way. And after you get married, you get to be married, which is even better. Being married means loving someone, growing and changing along with someone, meeting the highs and the lows of a lifetime along with someone, navigating the bills and the laundry and the household chores with someone, discovering how lovemaking changes after ten and fifteen and fifty years with someone, learning from someone, giving to someone, for as much of a lifetime as you can manage.

Of course people can do those things without being married. But being married is is one of humanity's most time-honored ways to do them. And I'm grateful to have a President who supports the ability of my queer friends and loved ones to enjoy the same rights and privileges that my husband and I are blessed to receive. Shehecheyanu, v'kiyimanu, v'higianu lazman hazeh!

Judge of beginnings, middles, and endings

ּ"Blessed is the true Judge."

 

In Jewish tradition, when we hear that someone has died, we say a blessing.

Sometimes, when I tell mourners this, I can see in their eyes that they are baffled, or even upset, by this custom. What can it mean to offer words of praise to God upon the occasion of a death? For most of us, in most cases, when someone has died, praise is not what comes first to our lips. And maybe that's part of our tradition's wisdom. When someone has died, we're asked to offer a blessing -- to praise God not despite our sorrow, but in and through that sorrow.

What is the blessing we recite? ברוך אתה ה', אלהינו מלך העולם, דיין האמת / Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha-olam, dayan ha-emet, usually translated "Blessed are you, Adonai our God, ruler of the universe, the true judge." (The full blessing is said by those who have suffered the loss; the rest of us use the first word and the last two words as our response to the news.  ".ברוך דיין האמת / Baruch dayan ha-emet," Blessed is the true judge.)

Whew. That can be a tough one for us to swallow. We moderns don't typically think of God as a judge; we're more comfortable with other metaphors. God as parent, God as Beloved, God as creator, wellspring, source. But Judge? We use judge and king metaphors during the Days of Awe, and often we struggle with them then. How can we relate to this metaphor in our moments of personal mourning? Perhaps especially if the death seems to us to be "unfair"?

Rabbi Marcia Prager teaches that one answer can be found in the very letters of the blessing -- specifically the Hebrew word אמת / emet, truth. The letters of the Hebrew word for "truth" are aleph, mem, and taf -- the first letter of the alef-bet, the middle letter, and the last letter. What is true of every life? Every journey has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

When we read Torah each year, the ending and the beginning kiss (on Simchat Torah, when we read the very end of the scroll and immediately turn around to read the very beginning.) In the lifecycle, too, every ending opens up a new beginning: for the soul of the person who has died, and for we who remain. When we make this blessing, we bless the One Who grants each of us our stories a beginning, a middle, and an end -- or maybe the One Whose presence we strive to discern in our journeys, as they begin, during the great middle of every lifetime (no matter how long or short it may be), and as each journey comes to an end. 

 

Short review of Beloved on the Earth: 150 poems of grief & gratitude

As a rabbi and as a poet, I commend to all of you the collection Beloved on the earth: 150 poems of grief and gratitude, edited by Jim Perlman, Deborah Cooper, Mara Hart and Pamela Mittlefehldt and published by Holy Cow! Press. As the editors write in their preface:

We turn to poems for solace, wisdom, comfort, joy. We wrap ourselves in words -- words of mourning and grief, words of mystery, words of gratitude and remembrance. As unique as each life is, so is each death. And yet, in our isolated grief and mourning, we turn to the comfort, the embrace of the words of others.

Indeed yes.

Some of the poems in this book were known to me before I picked up this anthology -- Jane Kenyon's Let Evening Come (which I just last week resolved to bring to the next shiva minyan I lead), Kay Ryan's Things Shouldn't Be So Hard. And many were unknown to me. All of them move me.

Sheila Golburgh Johnson's concrete poem "Yahrzeit" takes the shape of a flickering memorial candle flame. Maxine Kumin's How it is offers up the experience of wearing the blue jacket of an old friend, now gone. Jane Ellen Glasser's "Sharing Grief" opens the experience of two people comparing grief over the phone, "the forms it takes / in the foreign countries / inside us." With its images of unfilled jars and absence, Natasha Trethewy's After Your Death opens the gaping chasm of emptiness.

Here are two of my favorite poems from the collection, or at least, two of the poems which speak most to me today. This one, which opens the collection:

Late Fragment

Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I love the way the Carver poem feels like a shred of conversation, something we enter in medias res, already unfolding. And what more do any of us yearn for than to be beloved?

And this one, with its echoes of Dylan Thomas:

Go Gentle

Linda Pastan

You have grown wings of pain
and flap around the bed like a wounded gull
calling for water, calling for tea, for grapes
whose skin you cannot penetrate.
Remember when you taught me
how to swim? Let go, you said,
the lake will hold you up.
I long to say, Father let go
and death will hold you up.
Outside the fall goes on without us.
How easily the leaves give in,
I hear them on the last breath of wind,
passing this disappearing place.

Pastan gives voice here to the complicated longing of watching a parent die. And the poem's final images read both as autumnal description and as a wish for what's coming. If only we could let ourselves go as easily as do the falling leaves -- or, in the Talmud's preferred imagery, as gently as a hair lifted out of a bowl of milk. The "last breath of wind" makes me think of the neshama, the soul-breath which enlivens us; the disappearing place is this life which we enter and then leave.

As a clergyperson and pastoral caregiver, and also as a poet and reader of poetry, I am so glad to have this book at hand. My thanks are due to the editors of this collection, for assembling something so poignant and beautiful and profound.

Bedside

It is humbling to sit by the bedside of someone who is transitioning out of this life.

Sometimes their breathing is labored. Sometimes there is the "death rattle," a kind of guttural rasping with each inhalation.

Often their skin begins to seem almost translucent. The Hebrew word for skin and the Hebrew word for light are homonyms.

Often as I touch their arm, or stroke their forehead, I remember extending that same gentleness to someone who has died.

I say, It's Rabbi Rachel. I'm here with you. Your loved ones are here with you.

I say, let go of any old stuff, any anger or frustration, any baggage between you and anyone else. You don't need it anymore.

I say, we're letting go of our issues with you, too. We love you. Whenever you are ready, you're free to go.

I sing the angel song. I think of the illustrations in the bedtime shema book, sweeping watercolors showing Wonder and Strength, Light and Comfort, the angels who accompany each of us into sleep.

I sing the niggun which asks why a soul incarnates in this world, and which answers that we enter this world in order to know God. A funny thing, isn't it? We think of God as being beyond this world, and yet the way to know God is to be in the world. We have to be apart in order to yearn to be together.

When we leave this world, maybe we return to that intimate connection. I believe we do.

May angels accompany you, dear one, through this passage into what's coming. We love you. We're here. You are not alone.