Velveteen Rabbi

Reb Zalman on morning prayer

Many of us think of prayer as a religious duty. Some take this seriously, loping smoothly through the well-worn formulas as a daily obligation. Others draw the line at an hour or two of synagogue on High Holidays. Both approaches have lost contact with the original prayer urge, the irrepressible surge of gratitude or the crushing hopelessness that brings forth true prayer. The idea that we ourselves might stand before God and pray from the heart is almost unthinkable.

But our souls accept only one outcome when it comes to prayer: transformation. We do not wish just to spin our mental wheels: We want to be changed. We want to be moved. We want to end in a better place than where we started. Our souls yearn for this. If we really mean the words we say, how can we help but be moved?

That's why davening takes us on a journey. This is especially true in the morning prayers. The Rabbis imagined us starting the minute we swing our feet over the side of the bed. We may wake up stiff and rumpled and bleary-eyed; we might feel cranky and old, already dreading half the tasks we have to do today. No matter: the invitation to prayer says "come as you are." We will start slowly, rise and go deeper, and return in a better frame of mind and spirit. Prayer properly and truly done -- even if we only spend twenty good minutes -- will leave us feeling cleansed and at peace, ready to greet the day with gratitude, energy, and purpose.

-- Reb Zalman (Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi), in Davening: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Prayer

When I'm leading prayer at my shul and we reach the round of daily morning blessings -- usually called birchot ha-shachar, "blessings of the morning;" the current Reform siddur calls them Nisim She'b'chol Yom, the Miracles of Each Day -- I usually pause and note that these blessings were originally designed to be said at home, organically, as we're waking up.

We hear the rooster crow (or, more likely, the alarm clock or the footfalls of the small child padding up the stairs) and instead of thinking "oy, time to get up already?" -- or, perhaps, after thinking that! -- we think, "Oh! Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Source of all being, Who gives the bird of dawn the discernment to tell day from night!"

And then, getting up out of bed and stretching, we think: Oh! Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Source of all being, Who straightens the bent!

And then, as we take our first steps away from bed, we think: Oh! Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Source of all being, Who makes firm our steps! And so on, and so on.

"On the off-chance that perhaps you woke up this morning and didn't automatically pray these blessings," (I say, and usually people chuckle, which is exactly what I'm hoping for), "the creators of our siddur wisely added these blessings to the siddur, so that we can say them together this morning, with heart and with intention."

Prayer can be a lot of different things. But one of the modalities of prayer which I love best is this one: the chance to imbue ordinary moments with a consciousness of what's holy. The chance to offer gratitude. To rub the crust out of our eyes and thank God Who removes sleep from the eyes and slumber from the eyelids. To say: no matter who I am, or where I am, or what's going on with me today, I'm grateful to have woken up this morning, and to be alive.

A Prayer After the Boston Marathon Bombing

PRAYER AFTER THE BOMBING


Plant your feet firmly on the ground, your head
held high as though by a string.

Listen to the red-winged blackbirds, the spring frogs.
There is an aquifer in your heart: send a dipper down.

What have you drawn forth? Send it
out of this room like waves of song.

Float it around the Hairpin Turn, along
the old Mohawk Trail. Direct it toward the rising sun.

Our hearts are in the east though we are in the west.
Blanket the wounded city with melody.

Sing to the runners with aching hamstrings
to the bewildered families who lined the marathon route

to the children who are trying to make sense
to the adults who are trying to make sense

to the EMTs and policemen who ran
not away from the suffering, but into the fire

sing to the grieving families, here and everywhere.
Inhale again, reach into your well:

is there light even for the twisted soul of the bomber?
Now sing to yourself, sluice your own wounds.

We are loved by an unending love.
Listen to the birds again, and remember.

 

---

 

I wrote this a few days after the Boston Marathon bombing. It arose out of a meditation service which I led at my synagogue. The doors to our sanctuary were open, so we had the sounds of the nearby wetland in our ears, and I invited the meditators to join me in cultivating compassion and sending it toward Boston.

The line "My heart is in the east and I am in the west" is borrowed from the medieval Spanish poet Judah haLevi; it comes from his poem My Heart is In the East.

Alternating stanzas of the poem are italicized to facilitate reading the poem as a responsive reading. Please feel free to use this however is meaningful to you, and to share it with others.

(Edited to add: in as my About page indicates, work on this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons license which grants permission to share and remix my work as long as you maintain attribution, don't make a profit, and share your remixed work in the same fashion.)

To those for whom it is meaningful, I wish a Shabbat shalom, a Shabbat of peace and healing.

(Also posted at Kol ALEPH.)

Another morning-blessings poem

DAILY MIRACLES

You bring my son's footfalls to my door
and shock me awake with his cold heels against my ribs.

You teach me to distinguish waking life from dreaming.
You press the wooden floor against the soles of my feet.

You slip my eyeglasses into my questing hand
and the world comes into focus again.

In the time before time You collected hydrogen and oxygen
into molecules which stream now from my showerhead.

You enfold me in this bathtowel.
You enliven me with coffee.

Every morning you remake me in your image
and free me to push back against my fears.

You are the balance that holds up my spine,
the light in my gritty, grateful eyes.

---

I drafted this prayer/poem while preparing for the National Poetry Month Shabbat service I'm leading at my shul this weekend. I'll be pairing each of our morning prayers with an English-language poem which will hopefully illuminate the prayer in some way. I was looking for a poem to go with the birchot ha-shachar (morning blessings, which Mishkan T'filah calls nisim she'b'chol yom, blessings for the miracles of each day.) So I wrote this one.

Then I decided that my outline featured too many of my own poems, and struck this one from the plan in favor of a terrific poem by Adam Sol. But I still like this variation on the round of morning blessings, so I'm sharing it here. If you actually daven it, I'd love to hear how / whether it works for you! I suspect the opening couplet may be too me-specific to be workable for anyone else, but if I'm wrong about that, let me know.

Also: if you like these, you might like my morning blessings poem cycle, which features variations on Elohai Neshama (the blessing for the soul), Asher Yatzar (the blessing for the body), Baruch she'amar (the blessing for God Who speaks the world into being), and Nishmat kol chai ("The breath of all life"), originally drafted around 2002-2004.

NaPoWriMo 2013

Tefillin and manicures

Me, in microcosm.

My mother always has beautiful nails. I'm not sure I've ever seen her without nail polish on. In recent years there are certain colors she favors -- a kind of creamy ivory, a deep maroon -- and I've come to expect one of those rather than anything else in the rainbow of available options. But her nails are always manicured. It's just part of being put-together. I don't remember my first manicure (though I remember the first one I had after my summer of backcountry camping when I was fourteen -- it felt positively sybaritic.) But getting my nails done is an ordinary, and sweet, part of my life.

The manicure I'm wearing now wasn't done by a professional. I painted my nails last night while my son splashed in the bathtub. He had chosen to color his bath water a brilliant turquoise blue (with a dissolving bath tablet which, amazingly enough, doesn't leave our bathtub stained when the water drains away.) He stomped and splashed, rocking his little duckies and boats, while I sat on the floor and painted my fingertips. Then he helped me blow on them to get them dry before I lifted him out of the tub.

I don't think anyone else in my immediate family wears tefillin. Scratch that: I'm pretty certain no one does. If I had to guess, I'd imagine that some of my Dallas cousins do, and possibly some of their sons. But I'd be surprised to discover any other women in my family who put on tefillin in the morning to pray. I became interested in tefillin the first time I went on a Jewish Renewal retreat at Elat Chayyim. Knowing that I'd been yearning for some, my dear friend David gave me my set of tefillin when I turned thirty.

In fairness: I don't always manage to lay tefillin. Life gets in the way. And, for that matter, I don't always manage to have my nails painted. But when I pause to put color on my fingertips, I feel like I'm treating myself to something special, and I remember again some of the many cherished ways in which I am my mother's daughter. And when I pause to lay tefillin, even if I only say one prayer before taking them back off again, I remember again some of the many cherished ways in which I am connected with God and with my tradition, with something bigger than myself.

My first video vort: on the bedtime shema

One of the things we did together at the second meeting of my Rabbis Without Borders fellows cohort was work together, in small groups, on making video vorts. "Vort" is the Yiddish word for "word;" a vort, in this context, is a word of Torah, a wee spoken-word teaching.

I haven't experimented with video. The other social media we'd been talking about -- twitter, Facebook, etc -- are pretty solidly in my wheelhouse, but video is a new one for me. And it turned out to be fun. Maybe because we were doing it together, as friends and colleagues, and all of us were stretching ourselves in one way or another.

Several of us showed our videos to our cohort, and talked about them -- who we thought the audience of each one was meant to be, what worked and what we could do better next time, etc.  Showing my video to my cohort emboldened me, so I decided to share it here, too, even though it isn't perfect.

Embedded below: Two minutes of me talking about one of my favorite mitzvot, the bedtime shema. I describe the mitzvah, explain how it manifests in my life, and talk about how I know when it's working.

If you can't see the embedded video, above, you can watch the video here at YouTube. Let me know what you think: is this a useful way for me to share occasional very short teachings here?

Bedtime prayers and the alphabet

My mother taught me to say my prayers before I went to sleep. She would sit by my bedside, and every night, I would recite "God bless Mom and Dad, Lali and Eppie" -- my grandparents, of blessed memory, who were then living -- and then go on to mention all of my siblings (and, in time, their spouses), and Eloisa (one of my childhood caregivers), and "my aunts, and uncles, and cousins, and friends, and everybody else, amen." And then I would say, or sing, the one-line shema.

I didn't know then that what I was doing had a formal name and was part of daily Jewish practice. Saying my prayers before bed and ending with the shema was a shortened version of kriat shema al ha-mitah, the traditional liturgy of the bedtime (or "in bed") recitation of the shema. That's something I've come to know in adulthood, as my study of Judaism has deepened. All I knew, when I was a kid, was that this was what I did every night, with my mother sitting by my bedside.

(I've posted about my favorite prayer from the bedtime shema liturgy before. If you want a beautiful downloadable rendering of that whole set of prayers, with transliteration and meaningful English, you can find one at the end of Rabbi Daniel Siegel's post The Cycles of T'shuvah.)

Saying my prayers before going to sleep was such an ingrained childhood tradition that I've never stopped doing it. Even on my tiredest nights, when I climb into bed, I silently thank God for people in my life, for the blessings of home and bed and enough to eat, and I say the shema. The tradition is more or less unchanged since my mother gave it to me -- though some of the people I used to bless have died, and others (most notably our son) have joined my list.

So it's probably not surprising that as Drew has grown, I've shared this practice with him, as my mother shared it with me. Before he goes to sleep -- as we're sitting in the gliding rocker where we used to nurse, after we've read a book together and turned on the white-noise machine and turned off the lights -- we ask God to bless his parents, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, and everybody else, amen. And then when he's in bed and I'm sitting by his bedside, smoothing the Thomas the Tank Engine fleece blanket over him and nestling all of his stuffed animals by his side, we say the shema. And then I tell him I love him, kiss him goodnight, wish him sweet dreams, and quietly tiptoe out of the room.

Well: that's how it goes some nights. Exactly like that, sweet and serene. But other nights, nothing goes as planned. He giggles his way through putting on pyjamas (often running around the room half-dressed, or pretending he thinks the bottom part of the PJs goes on his head), resists brushing teeth with remarkable stubornness, and when I invite the saying of prayers or singing of the shema, he shouts "no!" On those nights, what he usually wants to do is sing the alphabet song, instead. He sings it to me, then I sing it to him in lieu of a lullaby. (I miss the lullabies I used to sing to him when he was a baby, but I try to respect his desires.)

Anyway, last night was one of the nights when he happily joined me in listing the people we wanted to bless, but didn't want to sing the shema. Instead he sang the alphabet song. And asked me to sing the alphabet song. And then sang the alphabet song to me again. And as I sat on his bed listening to his voice, I remembered the Hasidic story about the little boy who came to synagogue but didn't know any of the prayers. So as the congregation was immersed in prayer, he recited the alef-bet -- the only Hebrew he knew -- in hopes that God would assemble the letters into prayers on high. And it was his sweet, simple recitation which lifted up the prayers of the whole congregation.

(There's a one-paragraph version of that story in a post from Rabbi Phyllis Sommers: Alef Bet. Another version appears in The Hungry Clothes and Other Jewish Folktales, and the story's available online via google books search: the boy who prayed with the alef bet.)

I love the idea that even when he doesn't want to join me in a formal prayer before bed, God can translate his alphabet singing into the most meaningful prayers of his heart.

A daily love song for the body

One of my wintertime rituals is rubbing lotion into my hands and forearms. I keep a little tube of lotion on each of my two desks, the one at home and the one at the synagogue. I don't know whether the dryness stems from living with radiators and fires during the wintertime, or from some natural lack of moisture in the local winter air, but one way or another, my skin is always dry in wintertime. Hand lotion feels like an incredible gift. I can actually see my thirsty skin coming back to life, like a wilted plant becoming vibrant again.

While I'm rubbing the lotion into my palms and the backs of my hands, I say the asher yatzar blessing, praising God Who creates the human body with wisdom. After I had my strokes, I developed a new relationship with the idea that if one of the body's many openings should be accidentally closed, it's no longer possible to stand before God and offer praise.

My relationship with the blessing changed again when I became pregnant and started giving myself daily injections of blood thinner; I recited the blessing every morning as the needle's plunger found its way home. And then I treated my expanding belly to some lotion, both to soothe the sting of the injection and because I couldn't help marveling as my physical form started to shift and change.

Today the blessing has become mundane again. I'm no longer worried about blood clots sneaking their way into my brain; I take my handful of pills every morning, and I trust that they're all doing their jobs and that my blood will continue to flow freely where it ought to be flowing. And I no longer have to steel myself to pinch a generous fold of flesh and guide a needle home. But the habit of reciting the blessing remains, a reminder that my body is a miracle -- that every body is a miracle, always.

Several years ago I learned how to sing the sheva brachot, the seven blessings which are central to every Jewish wedding ceremony. I learned to sing them from my teacher Hazzan Jack Kessler, who chants them according to the trope (the system of cantillation) used for the Song of Songs. It's a perfect match. I love singing the blessings which sanctify the heart of a wedding using this ancient ancestral melody which is linked with our tradition's greatest text about companionship and love.

One of those blessings begins ברוך אתה ה' אלהינו מלך העולם, אשר יצר את האדם בצלמו -- Blessed are You, Adonai, Sovereign of creation, Who creates humanity in Your image. The asher yatzar blessing begins with those same words, though instead of "in your image," the daily prayer says "with wisdom," and continues on from there. But because I have so frequently sung those opening words to this Shir haShirim melody, that's the melody I naturally hear in my head when I think of the words of the asher yatzar blessing.

And it reminds me to relate to my own body with love. To marvel at the wonder of having a body that works, and to treat my physical form with the love, kindness, and compassion I seek to bring to my marriage and to all of my relationships. Every time I grace my body with lotion, every time I recite the asher yatzar, is a chance to sing a love song to my body. Imperfect though it surely is, this body carries me through the day -- enables me to walk, to touch, to eat, to sleep, to sing -- grew our son from component cells. Yes, this body is worth celebrating. Always.

Morning blessings with Drew

Drew enjoys the snow. Photo taken earlier this month.

As we make our way out to the car, I can't help marveling at the spectacular crisp cold morning. Half an inch of soft snow limns the trees, the sky is bluest blue, the sun is beginning to tip the mountainsides with gold.

"What a beautiful morning," I say aloud as I help Drew into the car.

"It's a beautiful sunny day," he agrees. This is one of his stock phrases; I think he got it from the narrator on Pocoyo.

"Thank you, God, for this beautiful morning!" I say, because that's how I roll.

"Thank you God for the snow," Drew adds.

I'm charmed, so I reply with another blessing. "Thank you God for my coffee." M'chayyei ha-meitim, I think: blessed are You who enlivens the dead.

Drew isn't finished either. "Thank you God for the trees!"

"Right on," I agree, thinking of Tu BiShvat which will be in a few days. "The trees are pretty awesome."

We drive a bit. Drew eats his waffle. I sip my coffee.

"Thank you God for the earth which is sleeping," I say, as we drive past the snow-covered stubble of a cornfield.

"Thank you God for Daddy," Drew says, getting into it now. "Thank you God for my coat! and my shoes!"

"For the clothes we get to wear, yeah, absolutely," I agree. He doesn't know that thanking God Who clothes the naked is part of our liturgy of standard morning blessings, but I do, and it makes me grin.

There's a pause. I think it's my turn. "Thank you God for me and Drew being together," I offer.

Drew's face crinkles into a smile. "Mommy," he chides, "that's silly."

"Okay," I agree, but I'm thinking: maybe to you, kiddo, but not to me.

God, let me cry on your shoulder

A prayer after today's school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. (See also R' Menachem Creditor's Prayer in the wake of a school shooting.)

---

God, let me cry on Your shoulder.
Rock me like a colicky baby.
Promise me You won't forget

each of Your perfect reflections
killed today. Promise me
You won't let me forget, either.

I'm hollow, stricken like a bell.
Make of my emptiness a channel
for Your boundless compassion.

Soothe the children who witnessed
things no child should see,
the teachers who tried to protect them

but couldn't, the parents
who are torn apart with grief,
who will never kiss their beloveds again.

Strengthen the hands and hearts
of Your servants tasked with caring
for those wounded in body and spirit.

Help us to find meaning
in the tiny lights we kindle tonight.
Help us to trust

that our reserves of hope
and healing are enough
to carry us through.

We are Your hands: put us to work.
Ignite in us the unquenchable yearning
to reshape our world

so that violence against children
never happens again, anywhere.
We are Your grieving heart.

 

Three gratitudes

I'm grateful this morning for colleagues who pause our phone calls to make the blessing for Torah study, mindful that the words we're going to exchange are themselves Torah; who remind me to pay attention to the movements and signals of my own heart; who urge me to recognize and to honor both the act of stretching my comfort zone, and the act of remaining safely within it; who offer their own stories and experiences to match mine.

I'm grateful this morning for students who offer me the key to unlock their enthusiasm; who ad-lib interviews with Biblical characters, giggling wildly as they insert cows into scenes where, truth be told, cows were never meant to be; who earnestly ask permission to skip Hebrew this week so they can spend more time with the Torah story; who laugh and shout so loudly I know the whole building must be listening to their glee.

I'm grateful this morning for recordings of my beloved friends singing the morning prayers, with heart and harmony; for their presence, real with me again through the miracle of praying together across the miles and the months; for their reminder that I am most wholly the person I want to be when I take the time and space to enter into our liturgy, to be washed by its waves, to be rooted in its soil; for this ineffable togetherness.