Velveteen Rabbi

Psalm 20: a psalm for childbirth

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

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

Psalm 20

תהילים פרק כ

א  לַמְנַצֵּחַ, מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד.

For the leader: a psalm of David.


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

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

ג  יִשְׁלַח-עֶזְרְךָ מִקֹּדֶשׁ;    וּמִצִּיּוֹן, יִסְעָדֶךָּ.

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

Childbirth psalms

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

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

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

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

A tefillin meditation

This morning I opened the מטא–סדור / Meta-Siddur created by R' David Wolfe-Blank, of blessed memory. The name is something of a pun. In English, the name "Meta-Siddur" suggests that this text transcends the prayerbook, offering commentary on it. The Aramaic word meta means "to reach towards," and this loose collection of teachings, arranged according to a four-worlds understanding of the journey of Jewish prayer, "is intended as a 'reaching' toward a more evolved siddur." This isn't a siddur one can use to pray with; it's an amazing collection of resources to dip into, which will inform how I engage with more traditional siddurim over time. Anyway, I was looking for inspiration, something to carry with me into my morning practice.

The page that drew me was page 82.1, which has two columns of text. In the right-hand column are the words from Hosea which we recite as we wind the straps of tefillin around the hand: "I betroth you to me forever, I betroth you to me with righteousness and with justice, with lovingkindness and compassion; I betroth you to me with faith, and you shall know God." (I wrote recently about how the Hebrew is unclear: are we speaking to God? Is God speaking to us? The words can mean both at once.) The left-hand column of text contains a series of assertions, which R' Wolfe-Blank calls "Partnership Vows:"

I will defend you, in private and in public.
I will not speak ill of you behind your back.
I will champion you.
I will cheerlead you.
I will struggle to achieve physical well-being to ensure that I spend my maximum lifespan with you.
I will struggle to achieve emotional well-being to ensure that I spend my maximum happiness with you.
If I find myself becoming judgmental I will speak with you honestly and clearly so that we can sort out what is yours and what is mine to own so that together we can learn and grow.
I will watch my withdrawals.
I will never cut you off from me abruptly or absolutely.
I will never suddenly walk away from you.
I will walk with you...

I love the way these vows preserve the ambiguity I like so much in the original Hebrew. I can speak these words to my partner, and I can speak them to God -- and I can imagine God speaking them to me. Each of these options challenges me in a different way. Speaking them to my partner would be the easiest of the three; speaking them to God honestly is harder. What would it mean to defend God? To speak with God honestly and clearly about my judgments and my baggage so that I can discern my own issues and move them out of the way of our relationship?

I'm not looking for another daily practice to add to my list -- I have enough trouble maintaining the ones I've already committed to doing! -- but I can imagine reading this list of vows some mornings as I lay tefillin. I'm curious to see whether and how doing that would change my relationship with the words, or with the act of putting on my tefillin, over time. Thanks, R' Wolfe-Blank.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, tefillin.

Tefillin davening

I went this morning to an incredibly sweet service led by my friend Simcha. The service was designed to highlight the mitzvah of tefillin, which I first took on when I turned thirty.

We entered the little chapel on the third floor of the student center (big windows painted with stained-glass patterns) to the sound of Simcha and her husband Reb Shawn singing "Kamti ani liftoach l'dodi / I will open to You, my Beloved / Will you open, open to me?" in a beautiful two-part round. Then Simcha spoke briefly about tefillin. She talked about how the line we recite while wrapping around the hand (from Hosea: "I betroth you to me forever, I betroth you to me with righteousness, justice, kindness, and mercy...") is sometimes written in English with a capital-Y You (so: it's us speaking to God) and sometimes written in English with a capital-M Me (so: it's God speaking to us.) The Hebrew, of course, connotes both at once. There's a reciprocity, Simcha said; tefillin call us to awareness of the reciprocal relationship of love between us and the universe.

We looked at some of the traditional texts related to donning tefillin (which you can find in the Artscroll siddur on pp 6-7.) Simcha talked about the texts in the box of the arm-tefillin and the head-tefillin, which remind us of God's unity, of the relationship of love between us, and also of how God brought us out from slavery in order to be in relationship with God. The arm-tefillin are next to the heart to remind us of the centrality of our loving relationship with God. We bind them on the hand to sanctify the work of our hands, and we bind them on our foreheads, near the seat of our consciousness, in order that the soul which is within our consciousness might be aligned with divine will. And after telling a few stories about her own relationship with the practice (and acknowledging that this, like every spiritual practice, ebbs and flows in our lives -- but, Simcha said, tefillin is a practice which calls us back to relationship) we returned to song.

I helped two women put on tefillin for the first time, showing them how I learned to wrap the binding around my arm and hand. Together we recited the blessing. All over the room were little clusters of people like us, gesturing and wrapping amid the buzz of low conversation. And then we davened a short morning service. After modah ani (the blessing for gratitude) we sang a line from psalm 42: "K'ayal ta'arog al afikay mayim, ken nafshi ta'arog elecha elohim (As the deer longs for water, so my soul longs for You)," which is a beautiful expression of longing for the relationship which the tefillin represent. The service itself was lovely; I was especially moved by the chanting of the ahavah rabbah blessing, which speaks of God's love for us. Most of the room chanted one line over and over in impromptu harmony while Simcha chanted the English translation over the top.

After the service I had the chance to chat briefly with a few people, and then came to class, where I spent 15 minutes or so doing "spirit buddy" time (one-on-one connection, talking about where we are and how we're doing) with a friend, and then it was time to begin Eco-Judaism class! From one gem in the setting of the morning to the next.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, tefillin, Kallah, JewishRenewal.

Getting back on the wagon

I don't know how it happened, exactly, but this spring I fell off the prayer wagon.

Not wholly, you understand. I was still making it to Shabbat services, and still sanctifying my day with a myriad of tiny prayer practices: waking up with the blessing for gratitude, saying the blessing for the body as I tend to my morning medical needs, blessing the food that I eat, saying a prayer of gratitude each night for the day now ending. But the discipline of regular daily prayer fell away from me, or I from it, somehow.

My schedule changed and I was no longer able to make it to the weekly telephone minyan with my classmates. My life intensified and I started scrambling to get things done. I can offer explanations and excuses, but what they boil down to is this: I let it slide one day, and the next, and soon that new state of being (not-praying, and feeling vaguely guilty about it) came to seem normal.

Regular prayer is like regular exercise, in that when I'm doing it I feel great about doing it and I want to continue...and when I've lapsed from doing it, the effort of beginning the regimen again can seem insurmountable. Spiritual muscles need stretching as much as physical ones do, and when I fell out of the habit of working them, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the fact that I'm not managing to do it anymore... instead of taking the simple step of just starting again.

It took a phone call last week with two of my classmates to jolt me out of my spiritual lethargy. We got to talking about spiritual practice and how to rejuvenate it -- how to bring it back to life if it becomes stale, and how to jumpstart it if the rhythm has lapsed -- and one of my friends reminded me not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just put on tefillin and say a prayer or two, she urged.

So I did. And just like that, I was back in the swing of it again.

I haven't picked my siddur back up. Not yet. What I've been doing is putting on my tallit and tefillin and stepping outside on the deck. I sit on one of the purple wooden Adirondack chairs that Ethan built a few years ago, and I look out over the valley, and I let the prayers rise up in me naturally. This morning it was a handful of the morning blessings, the prayer which praises God Who speaks the world into being, a psalm, and then short chant versions of the three blessings surrounding the shema (and the shema itself) and a walking-meditation amidah during which I walked slowly out to our lilac bush and back, speaking quietly with God as I went.

It's a stripped-down service, but the matbeah tefilah (the structure or frame of the liturgy) is there. It gives me tangible, embodied connection with God again, in the whisper of my summer tallit against my skin and the comforting wrap of my tefillin straps. And it reminds me to take a few minutes out of my day to mindfully connect with gratitude, with wonder at light and love and redemption, and with the God Who is always there to listen if I'll just pick up the metaphysical phone and give a call.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, prayer.

Why innovative prayer isn't "strange fire" (Radical Torah repost)

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

Parashat Shemini contains one of the most striking short stories in all of Torah: the death of Nadab and Abihu.

Now Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before Adonai alien fire, which He had not enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from Adonai and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of Adonai. Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what Adonai meant when He said: / Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, / And assert My authority before all the people.” / And Aaron was silent. (Leviticus 10:1-3)

It’s a harrowing tale, particularly for those of us who favor the occasional liturgical innovation. Orthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch famously drew an analogy between Nadab and Abihu and Reform and Conservative leaders who presume to make changes in Jewish tradition. It’s easy to read this as a parable of why Jewish religious practice needs to stay the same: because the Holy Blessed One smites those who dare to make changes in the determined order of things. Easy…but simplistic. And limited. And arguably incorrect.

It’s disingenuous to claim that there’s only one way to reach out to God in Judaism when even the most cursory glance at the tradition shows this isn’t so. Prayer, the “service of the heart,” long ago replaced the old sacrificial system as our primary mode of drawing-near to God. Change is possible, because change has come to pass. What’s more, change can be fruitful. There may have been only one correct way to offer sacrifices, but there are a great many valid and appropriate ways to pray.

Meditation on dew

Image courtesy of flickr user PentaxFanatiK

On the first day of Pesach, our daily liturgy changes subtly. There's a place in the amidah -- the standing prayer central to every Jewish service -- where we recite a one-line prayer for rain during the winter, and a one-line prayer for dew during the summer. This is the day when we mark that shift, and we commemorate it by reciting a special prayer called tefilat tal, the prayer for dew.

What follows is a tiny meditation on tefilat tal, the prayer for dew.

In my community we no longer daven musaf on Shabbat or festivals. Today this will be our musaf: this chance to stand before God -- whatever we understand that term to mean: God far above, or God deep within -- and together recite tefilat tal, the prayer for dew.

Geshem and tal: rain and dew. We pray for each in its season, geshem all winter and tal as summer approaches...not here in the Berkshires, necessarily, but in the land of Israel where our prayers have their roots.

In a desert climate, water is clearly a gift from God. It's easy for us to forget that, here with all of this rain and snow. But our liturgy reminds us.

Through the winter months, during our daily amidah we've prayed "mashiv ha-ruach u-morid ha-gashem" -- You cause the winds to blow and the rains to fall! We only pray for rain during the rainy season, because it is frustrating both to us and to God when we pray for impossibilities.

Today we recite a special prayer for dew -- and from here on out, during the daily amidah we pray "morid ha-tal," praising God for creating life-giving dew. As we daven this prayer, notice how it feels to return to the word "tal" which ends each line; this prayer mirrors the Arabic poetic form called ghazal, and that repeated end-word is like a refrain.

Throughout the Psalms, dew represents blessing, a gift from God.

Dew is sustenance which arises as if by magic. Overnight, something mysterious occurs and when we wake water gilds the grasses and the fields. (Of course, the scientific processes are well-understood -- I'm sure it has something to do with temperatures and condensation -- but I prefer to think of dew as a mystery.) Dew represents divine grace: omnipresent, mysterious, blessing everyone equally no matter who we are.

The imagery of tefilat tal is sweet. We ask God to let dew drop sweetly on the blessed land, to let dew sweeten the honey of the hills. Sweet water is required in order for us to inhabit the land -- both the land of Israel, and this land of the Berkshires where we have made our home.

I see the prayer for dew as a chance to practice gratitude for everything necessary and wonderful and ineffable which sustains us. Maybe it's the literal dew you'll find in a few months on the strawberry leaves at Caretaker Farm, where I see so many friends on Shabbat once summer gets underway; maybe it's something more metaphorical. What is the dew for which you are most grateful?

What does it mean to you to rise and be grateful for dew?

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, dew, Pesach.

Praise, poetry, and prayer at the inauguration

That's a YouTube video of the prayer offered by the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, at the beginning of the inauguration festivities on Sunday. From his prayer on Sunday to today's inaugural poem, it's been an amazing few days for me as someone who cherishes the transformative potential of language. In this post I want to explore the poetry and prayer of the various invocations and benedictions, President Obama's inaugural address, and Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem.

Blessings

Two amazing things have already happened to me today. One was leading shacharit with my friend Deb. We began planning the service at the Rabbis for Human Rights conference last month, and worked together over email and phone and then in person yesterday afternoon. Our service felt very deep to me, and very sweet. Because of some physical stuff that's been going on, chanting the blessing for God Who makes our bodies with their many openings and closings was a powerful experience for me. So was offering, as our word of Torah learning, this week's Torah poem. There was a lot of weekday nusach (which I love!), many rounds (in which Deb and I both revel), and a lot of beaming. Afterwards people said incredibly kind things, which has left me a little bit reeling.

Then came the celebration of liminality -- the private ceremony for incoming students and outgoing students. Our circle has grown in the years I've been here; today we were at least seventy people, maybe more, and it was extraordinary to sing the new students in, watching each of them progress beneath the chuppah held by four of our colleagues and then join us in the circle. The ceremony is private -- for students only -- and it always involves the giving of blessings to the new students and to the musmachim (those who will be receiving smicha later today). Every year, each smicha student asks a current student to come and offer a personal blessing just for them.

My first year here, when I was new to the program, this ceremony blew me away. And I remember being a little bit awed by the personalized blessings which were offered by current students to the outgoing musmachim. I didn't really know the folks who were getting smicha in 2006, and I yearned for the kind of closeness I saw between the musmachim and the friends they had asked to offer blessings on their behalf. Today I had my first chance to serve in that role: I entered the circle and gave a blessing to my dear friend Miri (soon to be Reb Miri!) and both of us wept tears of joy. She was one of my room-mates at Elat Chayyim during the summer of 2005 when I attended smicha students' week as a prospective student. It is amazing to watch her step over this threshold -- to watch all of my dear chevre crossing over, becoming who they are becoming.

The smicha ceremony will be in half an hour. I can't wait to be there -- to watch the magic of transformative language do its work as each of my friends truly becomes something new -- to cry and sing and dance and rejoice as the Jewish community gains ten extraordinary new spiritual leaders. It hasn't been an entirely easy weekend, but being here with my community is a real blessing.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Ohalah.

Top 10 Nonfiction Posts of 2008

Every year at the end of December I post a list of my ten favorite blog posts from the year now ending. This year I've compiled two such lists: one of my favorite nonfiction posts, another of my favorite poems. (Here's the first one; I'll post the second one in a day or two.) [ETA: Top ten poetry posts of 2008.]

Rereading the year-in-blog-posts, I'm reminded of what a rollercoaster this year has been. Thanks for being part of the conversation here during 2008; here's to 2009!

---

A place where prayer can dwell. "I think our multifaceted nature is both our boon and our greatest challenge. We're a patchwork religious movement. My other Jewish identity, Jewish Renewal, is also a many-splendored thing, a patchwork quilt of ideas and practices and teachings; of course, Renewal is actively transdenominational, so a certain patchwork nature is presumed. Reform Judaism aims to be a single unitary denomination -- though one which can include, for instance, my parents' congregation (historically a classical Reform institution) and mine (which lives out Reform values in a decidedly nontraditional way.) My guess is that this siddur will challenge both of our communities, though in different ways. Maybe that's a sign that its creators have crafted something interesting and complex."

Brokenness and purity. "Why did the children of Israel save the shards of the broken tablets? Why not destroy them, or leave them behind in the desert? Surely no one there wanted to keep them as mementos of one of the community's strongest lapses of faith? But the tradition teaches us that the broken tablets were preserved as a sign that holiness persists even in our brokenness. Sometimes our brokenness, our mistakes, are what we have to offer to God...and that's worthy of preservation along with the aspects of us which are whole."

Beginning to wrestle. "During the first few years of this blog's existence, I didn't write about Israel. Because I wanted to quietly challenge the assumption that a Judaism-focused blog must necessarily be Israel-focused. Because I figured the last thing the internet needs is another person pontificating about a place she barely knows. Because most online discourse about Israel and Palestine is hotheaded and partisan. Because time and energy and passion are limited resources, and it often seems that so much of these go to Israel that little is left for other aspects of Jewish identity and experience. // All of those reasons still hold. And yet I'm beginning to grapple with what it will mean to shift this unofficial blog policy (and, more importantly, to shift the internal focus behind it) because this summer I'm going to spend seven weeks in Jerusalem."