Velveteen Rabbi

This morning the alarm went off at seven. I made breakfast for my sleepy kid, finished packing his lunchbox, reminded him to put things in his backpack. A few minutes after eight I drove him to school. All of this used to be our ordinary routine. Today everything about it felt surreal. It's been more than a year since our school mornings followed this pattern. 

A few things are different than they were last time he was going to all-day, every-day, in-person school. Masks, of course. The Chromebook and charger that he now carries to and from school, lent to him by the school at the remote start of this school year. Today each kid brought a large towel, because lunch will be picnic-style, seated on their towels six feet apart. 

This is the fifth paradigm shift in his fifth grade year so far. (Two weeks of remote school to begin the year; then some weeks of hybrid learning; then all-remote for a while in the winter; then back to hybrid; and now this.) Will this "stick," or will rising cases change things yet again? It's hard to trust that he'll really be in school every day. I don't believe it yet. 

It feels strange to be working from home without him in the next room. It feels strange that I can't overhear his schooling anymore. I won't know what book his teacher is using for read-aloud now, or listen to his bass lesson, or hear him grumbling about group projects. Now all I'll know about his days will be whatever little he tells me when I pick him up.

A year ago when school closed for (what we thought would be) two weeks, being with my kid all the time felt overwhelming. Now that he's back in full-time in-person school, being apart is what's overwhelming. It's like when he first went to preschool at not-quite-three and suddenly my days opened up. The condo feels like an empty nest this morning.  

A crisp sprig of Italian parsley dipped in salt water. Vibrant and green, salt giving way to savory as the stem crunches. It's the third step of the seder, karpas: greens representing spring and new life, salt water representing the tears of slavery in ancient days and our tears at injustice even now. It's a gustatory hyperlink. The minute that first bite hits my tongue, I feel it in my bones: change is coming. If we wait until we feel fully ready we might never take the leap at all. It's time to go.

Storebought matzah spread with horseradish is another one. Matzah, at once the humble hardtack of our affliction and the hasty waybread of our freedom. Maror, evoking the bitterness of slavery, the sharpness of oppression. The cracker shatters with a crunch, the horseradish stings the nose. This year, its sharp scent is another reason for gratitude: I don't have anosmia, I don't have COVID-19. It's a humble taste, a simple taste, and one that speaks volumes. We're leaving this narrow place.

My spoon carves through a matzah ball: light and fluffy, resting in hot broth. My grandfather taught me to make them years ago: beating the egg whites until fluffy, then folding in the egg yolks and oil, the matzah meal and white pepper. Every year after I've made the batter I panic, fearing that I mixed it too much and it's become dense. I chill it, already planning how I'll make a second batch if I need to. Every year after twenty minutes of simmering, the kneidlach float like soft clouds.

This year I added a new-old flavor to my table. I think my father's mother (peace be upon her) used to make home-made gefilte fish. The stuff in jars is unappealing, but I wanted to try it from scratch, remembering generations who stretched what little they had to make a feast worthy of Shabbat or seder. I didn't bring home a live carp; I used a recipe from the Times. The delicate quenelles of minced tilapia and salmon, simmered in a light broth of fennel and aromatics, are a revelation.

These are some of the most evocative flavors I know. They link me with last year's seder, and the year before, and my childhood seders at my aunt and uncle's house in Dallas, and their childhood seders...all the way back to the sages in the second century who asked why this night is different from all other nights. They too ate unleavened bread, and dipped herbs in salt water tears, and let the maror of their era shock their sinuses and their hearts into readiness to go free.

See also: Parsley dipped in tears, 2017

I was humbled and honored to be invited to contribute an essay on allyship to this new daily Omer series... also soon to be a book, featuring a spectacular range of voices, which will become available on Wednesday / Trans Day of Visibility.

Deep thanks to Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (and their scholar-in-residence R. Mike Moskowitz, my dear friend and Bayit cofounder) for putting this together and for inviting me to take part. Here's how my essay begins:

Allyship means placing myself in the shoes of someone experiencing marginalization or oppression, “taking on their struggle as my own,” recognizing where and how today's structures give me privilege that they don't have, and trying to transfer the benefits of my privilege to them. Allyship asks me to be active in standing up for those who are oppressed or marginalized. And allyship asks me, when I inevitably err, to take responsibility, to apologize, and to learn better and try better next time.

One way to understand allyship is through a Mussar lens. Mussar is a Jewish practice of self-refinement through focusing on and developing our middot or soul-qualities. When I think of allyship, the middah that comes to mind is achrayut, “responsibility.” The term is related to the word achar, “after.” We need to pay attention to what happens after we act (or refrain from action). If I ignore injustice or power disparity because I’m not the person being harmed, what happens after? If I speak or act (or fail to speak or act) in a way that causes harm, what happens after? Achrayut reminds us of our ethical obligation to keep impacts and outcomes in mind.

But put a different vowel in that word, and achar becomes acher, “other.” That suggests another, equally important, implication of achrayut. When we care for each other, we express and strengthen our achrayut. Achrayut means actively taking the responsibility of caring for another, or an “other.” Achrayut means centering the needs of the other. Unlike the term “allyship,” achrayut doesn't presume a power differential between the person with needs and the person with privilege who's centering those needs. Still, the middah of achrayut can fuel our allyship...

You never removed leaven.
(Salt, sugar, and oil: sure,
but that was different.)

This year the work of
finding every last crumb
is daunting. I take respite

in the seder prep I know
you used to do, polishing
the silver until it gleamed.

Okay, let's be real, you
assigned it to the housekeeper,
but your table shone.

Humming seder psalms,
I rub silver polish into
the pitcher we used for

pouring water on our hands
when we returned from
your funeral. I'll fill it

with ice water, and
your small silver creamer
with our salt water tears.

Removed leaven. Many Jews remove all leaven (or leaven-able material) from our homes during the seven days of Pesach.

Pouring water on our hands. There's a tradition of placing a pitcher outside a shiva home so that when mourners return from the burial, so that we can ritually wash our hands before entering.

Salt water tears. One of the ritual items on the seder table is salt water, representing the tears of our ancestors during slavery. 

This poem is (yet) another in the vein of Crossing the Sea, the collection of poems I wrote during the first year of mourning my mom. It was published in December by Phoenicia Publishing (thanks Beth!) and is available wherever books are sold. 

Mom, I'm using the cocktail napkins
you gave me when I moved out
on my own, simple and grey
with my single name in red, an
echo of the ones you ordered

when I married.
They've been on a shelf
this long pandemic year, but
it's another COVID birthday: time
to celebrate I made it through,

at least so far -- even vaccinated
the virus could strike. This year
I learned the word anosmia.
I breathe deep beside the coffee pot:
I can't take scent for granted.

I still wish I could text you
the seder menu I'm planning,
a photo of the spring flowers
a friend brought me
so my table would shine.

This poem is another in the vein of Crossing the Sea, the collection of poems I wrote during the first year of mourning my mom. It was published in December by Phoenicia Publishing (thanks Beth!) and is available wherever books are sold. 

A slide from Bayit's Pesach offerings this year.

Many of you have heard me say that on Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach, it's customary for the rabbi to give a sermon about how to prepare for Pesach. Traditionally speaking, I'm supposed to give you instructions on how to prepare yourselves and your homes for Passover. You know -- here are the five "leavenable" grains, here's how to remove them from your homes for a week, here's the halakha on how to properly clean to remove every last scrap of hametz.

As we approach our second pandemic Pesach, the idea of preparing for Pesach feels different than it ever has before. I mean, if you remove hametz, you can do that the same as you always have. And even if you've never followed that tradition, you can mark the week by making a conscious choice not to eat bread. A week of mindful eating is a valuable experience and a deep way to connect with our traditions. But that's not the kind of preparation with which I'm grappling this year.

It's the inner preparation that's challenging me. Because the pandemic continues. Last year who could've imagined that we'd be here now: preparing for another Zoom community second night seder? Still staying apart to protect each other and ourselves. Many of us still in lockdown mode, or sheltering in place, to prevent the spread of a virus that's still killing 1200 people each day in this country -- about three times as many as last July 4; the equivalent of a 9/11 every three days.

There are three excellent vaccines out in the world now. There is reason to hope that once the population reaches a certain vaccination threshold, we will be able to be together safely again. Elementary schools are even about to re-open! But we are not "there yet." What does it mean to prepare ourselves for liberation when many of us may still feel constrained: by pandemic, by economic challenges, by racism and all the harm it creates, by the reality of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers?

The haggadah teaches: in every generation one must see oneself as if one had been liberated from Mitzrayim / the Narrow Place -- from tzuris / suffering, from meitzarim / constrictions. How can we see ourselves as if we were going forth from those tight spaces when we are still manifestly living in them? We aren't liberated from COVID. We aren't liberated from racism and hatred. We will celebrate Pesach as a community again via digital means, not "in person." What kind of liberation can this be?

Earlier this winter I worked with a group of poets, artists, rabbis, and liturgists to co-create new materials for the start of seder, recognizing the meitzarim that still bind us so that we can prepare our spirits for the liberation that is not yet quite here. (We'll use those materials at our community seder on Zoom with Rabbi David and the TBE community -- please sign up now, we need your RSVP by Wednesday!) And, there are things we can do practically to prepare our hearts to go free.

Set your seder table with a white tablecloth, if you have one. If not, use a bedsheet... or whatever festive cloth you can find. Make it feel different than on a regular night. It's too early to have spring flowers where we live, but if you can pick up a bouquet at the grocery store, treat yourself: a symbol of spring, something beautiful and festive. Put candles on your festival table: we'll light them to bring the light of the festival into the room and into our hearts.

Create a second seder plate memorializing this COVID year: hand sanitizer, a face mask, a vaccination card if you're fortunate enough to have had a shot. We'll light a memorial candle for the half a million who have died as we move through the door into this year's community seder. And you'll also want a "regular" seder plate symbolizing our ancestral story of freedom: an egg, a roasted shankbone or beet, a sprig of green, haroset, maror. Maybe an orange and an olive.

We'll harness our sensory experiences to bring us into the festival of freedom. The crunch of matzah, the taste of parsley (or whatever you use for karpas, the green vegetable dipped in salt water tears), the sharpness of horseradish and sweetness of haroset... all of these will spiritually hyperlink us with seders past and seders to come. Our people have celebrated Pesach in narrow straits before. Our rituals give us strength, and they connect us with each other and with our Source.

The journey to Passover begins where we are. Not in some imagined reality where the pandemic never happened, but right here and now. And I know with all my heart that when we gather on Zoom for second night seder, the words and the tastes and the rituals will lift us out of where we are and prepare us for the unfolding of something new. The journey to Sinai. The journey to togetherness. The journey to the better world we'll build together on the far side of the sea.

This is the d'varling I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

As we approach our second Zoom Pesach, I'm sharing a set of slides that I created out of the Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach. The slides were made with google slides, and reflect what I've learned over the last year about creating materials to use via slideshare / on Zoom. They also integrate the pre-seder module that the Liturgical Arts Working Group at Bayit just released. 

You can find the slides here on the Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach webpage. 

Two things to note:

1) Bayit's pre-seder materials are intended to flow directly into the karpas step of the seder. The slide deck also includes the "old" karpas slides that were already in the haggadah. So you'll likely want to delete a few slides as you figure out which of the karpas slides you want to keep. 

2) Please, please, PLEASE, download the google slide deck and then re-upload it to your own google drive under a different name before editing it. This way the source slides will remain there for others to download. 

I hope this is helpful -- if you use any part of this slide deck, let me know how it works for you.

The virus was distant, the virus was here.
We learned new language: quarantine, lockdown
bewildered by mourning we didn't see coming.
One hundred thousand deaths: unthinkable.

We learned new language: quarantine, lockdown,
how to be real while together apart.
Two hundred thousand deaths, unthinkable.
Opened our Zoom screens on the Shabbes table.

How to be real while together apart:
singing and grieving in two-by-two boxes,
opening Zoom screens on the seder table.
Touch tzitzit to webcam: is Torah there?

Singing and grieving in two-by-two boxes
and serving with all of our fears and our wailing,
touching tzitzit to webcam, finding Torah there.
What gets in the way of the work is the work

so we serve with all of our fears and our wailing.
with our digital tools and inadequacy.
What gets in the way of the work is the work.
Pandemic feels like a new face of Mitzrayim.

With our digital tools and inadequacy
we sit with the trauma, the sirens, the losses.
Pandemic feels like a new face of Mitzrayim.
We ache to lift from constriction to freedom.

We sit with the trauma, the sirens, the losses --
the journey to Pesach begins where we are.
Feel ourselves lift from constriction to freedom.
Someday we'll dance at the shore of the sea.

The journey from COVID begins where we are.
The vaccines were distant. Soon they'll be here.
Someday we'll touch on the shore of the sea,
ready for morning we can almost see coming.

Written for the Lunchtime Program Acknowledging the Covid-19 Anniversary at the Academy for Jewish Religion (NY), where I am blessed to serve as an adjunct instructor.

"The grim realities of covid19 are settling in, and with them, no shortage of anxiety," I wrote in my journal a year ago. I read those words now, and I wonder: what in particular was happening, just then? I remember some of the anxiety I felt. My son's school had just closed down, and I knew that I didn't / couldn't know what was coming. But of what "grim realities" was I really aware, a year ago? The horror stories from the NYC ICUs hadn't happened yet, then. So much hadn't happened yet, then. 

A year ago at this season some people were beginning to predict that 100,000 Americans might die from the virus. I'm pretty sure that prospect seemed horrifying. I don't know how to process the fact that after a year, the reality is half a million souls here so far, and 2.64 million worldwide. I also couldn't have imagined, last spring, that some people would call the virus a hoax, or cry "personal freedom" and refuse masks -- that so many would shrug off our human responsibility to protect others.

I know how fortunate I am: I haven't gotten sick, and neither has anyone in my close sphere. I have a job, and a roof over my head. I'm not food-insecure. For that matter, I like to cook, so the fact that I've made almost all of the meals I've eaten over the last year is not a hardship. My fifth grader has weathered the challenges of Zoom school and hybrid school and being apart from his friends and family as well as any child I can imagine. We're fine...and we're also not fine; no one is really fine.

It's been a year of a lot of pastoral listening: sometimes trying to offer comfort, and sometimes just sitting with people in the low or frightened or anxious or despairing place where we are. It's been a year of learning how to lead services on Zoom, how to facilitate spiritual experience from afar. It's been a year of contactless grocery pickup and staying apart and washing masks. It's been a year of loneliness and solitude and grief and losses -- so many losses, even for those of us who've made it through.

I think it will likely take years for the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to be known. How will this year have shaped us: the loneliness, the loss, the grief -- the science denialism and politicization of masks -- and also the unexpected moments of connection or kindness against the backdrop of so much trauma? Those of us who have made it through will be changed by what this last year has held. I want to believe that we can harness those changes for the good of each other, but I don't know how.

When we planned our first pandemic Zoom seders a year ago, none of us imagined that we would be preparing now for a second "season of our liberation" locked down at home. There's a sense of emotional and spiritual heaviness. We are all so tired, and so grief-soaked, and so ready to be with each other in person again. We yearn to feel free, but we're not "there yet."

"Whatever gets in the way of the work is the work," as my poetry mentor Jason Shinder z"l used to say.

Before we can experience liberation at Pesach, we need to begin where we are. When the Bayit Liturgical Arts Working Group met to begin planning our offering for this second COVID Pesach, we decided to offer materials that could be a bridge or doorway into seder: starting where we are, and bringing us (we hope) to a place of readiness to approach freedom.

What does it mean to approach the season of our liberation when so many of us feel we are still in Mitzrayim / in the Narrow Place of pandemic, economic uncertainty, and global grieving? What do we carry with us on the journey? How will this seder be different from all other seders, even the first pandemic seder we celebrated a year ago? Here are our collaborative answers.

You can find the whole collection here, in google slides form (beautiful!) and PDF form (somewhat more utilitarian): Approaching our second COVID seder. Please use them, excerpt them, adapt them, share them. We hope that they will reach everyone who would find meaning in them. May they make our second COVID Pesach more meaningful and real.

Two years ago this weekend, I was writing about experiencing shiva from the inside. My mother had just died and the world had turned upside-down. I felt tender, thin-skinned, permeated with grief. How could the world keep turning with her gone?

One year ago this weekend, I took my son to Boston to see his cousin in the national touring production of Fiddler on the Roof. (She played Chava. She was dazzling.) We had Shabbat dinner with family, then all trooped into the Emerson Theater.

I remember consulting with friends beforehand about whether it was safe to go. Surely we were safe from the virus here? I decided to bring Clorox wipes in my purse, to use on the gas pump handle on the Mass Pike on the way home, just in case.

That was the end of the old normal. I look now at the selfie of my kid, my friend, and me in the theater and I shudder: we were surrounded by so many people! And no one was masked, of course. None of us knew anything about masks, then. Not here.

If someone had told me that half a million people would die in the USA alone, I'm not sure I would have believed them. If someone had told me that there would be three working vaccines within a year, I'm not sure I would have believed them.

Sometimes I can't believe Mom's only been gone for two years. It feels longer. I think because this last year has been interminable, and grief-soaked, and horrifying, and it's almost unthinkable that she never knew anything about any of this. 

Sometimes I can't believe that Mom's been gone for two whole years already. The first year was a fog of grief. The second year was... well, a fog of grief, again: not intimate and personal, but global. Time takes on a strange quality, when there is grief.

This morning I spotted a first brave spring shoot beginning to push up through the frozen soil in my front yard. It was 22 and windy here today: nothing else is beginning to green yet, but this one hyacinth is eager for the growing light. I am, too.

I'm eager for the day when we can shed our winter garb again. When we can greet one another outdoors -- even if it's still masked and at a safe social distance, again. And oh, to think of the day when we will be able to embrace again...! 

Something I used to take so for granted. A simple hug. The clasp of a hand. A tight embrace from a friend. I miss it more than I can say. I miss it the way I miss Mom. I won't see Mom again in this life. But someday, the rest of us will hug again.

A glimpse of the Color The Omer Trello board: the digital "room where it happens."

I can't remember how we initially framed my role. Cat-herder, maybe. I'm the lead architect for Bayit Publishing, so our book projects (and liturgy projects and to some extent blog projects) are in my purview. Last summer, a new idea from Shari Berkowitz reached our doorstep: a contemplative coloring book for the 49 days of the Omer, with illustrations that each user can transform with color, and kavanot / intentions /reflections and questions on each page. The Bayit board approved the Build Plan, and we set the book in motion by creating a Trello board where collaborators could keep track of tasks and chat via digital post-it notes. That was June, and at first, I didn't think I'd be very involved until it was time to bring the book to print.

When Shari brought the concept to Bayit, our #VisualTorah sketchnoter Steve Silbert immediately volunteered to do the illustrations. Right away, they invited me as editor / publisher to partner with them on brainstorming and revising. What an unexpected delight. Over time we refined each page. We brainstormed visual elements and ideas for drawings, far more than the 49 pages that made it into the book. We took turns drafting text for each page, and then editing each others' work (usually a paragraph would get winnowed down to "slim text" which would then get revised a third time once we reached the page layout stage). Steve drew things, and sometimes drew them again and again, revising for visual impact or riffing off of our ideas. 

By the end of the process, Trello had become my daily companion. I kept it open in a tab all the time. (We use it for all Bayit builds, but the Color the Omer board became my default, for a while.) Any time a little red dot appeared on the tab, I knew that Shari or Steve had left a comment, and I'd click through to join the conversation and help however I could. Once all the pages were drafted, Shari put them in order. Then we handed the manuscript over to R. David Markus, who combed through it for misplaced nekudot (vowel markings) and Hebrew typos and asked great questions about text and formatting choices. Draft, refine, draft again. At last, after nine months of collaboration -- just in time for Pesach! -- the book was ready to be born. 

I love the idea of an Omer coloring book: as an Omer practice, an artistic practice, a mindfulness practice. I love the illustrations that Steve drew, and the ideas that Shari brought to the table, and how R. David helped us see beyond our blind spots. And maybe most of all, I love being part of a thoughtful, creative, collaborative build team. We learned to hold our own ideas loosely, to embrace each others' creativity, and to improvise and riff and revise together. All of us deeply respect each other and each others' work, so all of our comments were offered not in a spirit of tearing-down but in a spirit of building-up. We cheered and supported each other as we worked together to build this tool for spiritual life that we wanted to offer to the world.

As this book enters print, I feel like a proud midwife. I love getting to be a thought partner, a helper in the background: the cat-herder, the holder of the container. This has always been part of our mission at Bayit: we collaborate broadly as we build and test and refine tools for a Jewish future always under construction. And we love lifting up meaningful work so that it can shine.

Order Color The Omer now --

and may it enrich your Omer journey in countless ways!

$13 on Amazon (and Amazon's global affiliates)

The hearse got stuck
in the mud-snow.

I watched from graveside
as they tried reverse

then pushing --
finally backing down

to approach
from the other side.

Mourners in
inappropriate footwear

struggled in icy mud.
I thought of Mom --

her yahrzeit this week.
She died before covid

before masks and distancing,
before half a million dead.

Would she understand
how everything feels

uphill, our wheels
spinning in muddy slush?

Like the hearse
all we can do

is retreat, bearing
grief's heavy load.

The scent
of this covid year:
sour scallion-water
in the kitchen window,

the tail-ends
of green onions
trying to miracle
fresh green from

tap water and sun.
When it catches
in my throat
I choke, then

remember
if my sense of smell
still works,
how lucky

I am.

"I don't know why everything is so hard," you say to me. Everyone's hitting the wall, I point out. We're reaching one year of global pandemic. Even if we're okay, it's okay with an asterisk. Okay within global pandemic parameters. Not the same.

You protest: "but I'm fine. I'm not sick. My family isn't sick. I don't know why I'm struggling so much. I'm healthy, I have a job, I have electricity and internet, I'm as lucky as anyone can be. And yet life still feels like slogging through cold molasses."

I can't tell you how many people have said those things to me. (So if you're reading this and thinking, "Is she blogging about our conversation?" the answer is, I've had this conversation lately more times than I can count.) Almost everyone is struggling.

As longtime readers know, I've lived with grief (the end of my marriage, mourning my mother's death) and I've lived with depression. As we reach the end of the first year of COVID-19, I think a global pandemic is a little bit like both of those. 

The pandemic is a fog: we can't see the future clearly, or plan, or dream, or anticipate. The pandemic is a weight pressing us down, always there. It's a program running in the background, draining resources and slowing processor speed. 

*

Half a million people have died in our nation alone. Five hundred thousand human beings. Remember the horror of learning that 100,000 had died? Now it's 5x that. And then there's "long covid" -- people who survive, but don't get well. 

New and deadlier variants are sprouting. Asymptomatic spread means we never know whether we are carrying a deadly pathogen that might kill the next person we breathe near. That's background noise in our hearts and minds, now, always.

Last spring most of us believed that if we sheltered in place for a few weeks, we could stop the spread and that would be the end of it. And then two weeks of staying apart turned into two months turned into a year and we're still nowhere near done.

Sure, we've grown accustomed to wearing masks, social distancing, not embracing, not shaking hands, not being indoors with other human beings who aren't in our quarantine pods. But it's still impacting us in countless subconscious ways.

Purim is in a few days. Last year, Purim was the last holiday we celebrated with others before lockdown began. Traumaversaries are real. And it's February, which doesn't help anything, at least here where I am. So if you're not okay? You're not alone.

*

There is light at the end of the tunnel. We've made it through the darkest part of the winter. Warmth will come. The ability to see each other outdoors will come, and that will relieve some of our isolation, and some of the feelings of being stuck in place.

Vaccines will come. The rollout has been slower than we might have hoped, and we all know people who are trying to get appointments only to learn that supply has run out again. But vaccines exist, and they work, and they will reach everyone.

We will make it to the other side of this sea. For now, what I can offer is this: it's okay to feel the way you feel. (I mean. It's not okay. It's miserable. But it's normal and human and you are truly not alone in it, even if you feel isolated in every way.)

Be gentle with yourself, and with each other. If you can, seek out little ways to be kind to yourself. For me that means hand lotion as a treat for winter-dry skin, coffee, a bouquet of bright flowers, cooking good food. You'll know how best to take care of you.

Be gentle with yourself. If you're finding that it takes longer to get tasks done, or if you can't get them done at all. If you're forgetting things, or struggling. If you feel hopeless or low. Be gentle with yourself. I promise, life will not always be this.