My friends and colleagues at Romemu made the news recently for their publicly-announced decision to spend the days of Pesach free from the hametz of email. Hametz means leaven. In one popular Hasidic understanding the idea of cleansing one's home of literal leaven (which is to say: getting rid of the bread products and so forth) is transmuted into the idea of cleansing one's soul of metaphorical leaven. The hametz of ego, of puffery and pride. The leap from there to email is an intriguing one.

I find myself wondering whether email -- and the internet writ large -- is a thing to which we are sometimes enslaved. That's a strong word, I know. And usually it's not a term I would use. I rationalize that I come to the internet to communicate with friends and loved ones, and to read and write and converse about Judaism and the festival cycle and healing the world. These are lofty aspirations! On my best days, the internet is a tool which helps me connect.

But I know that sometimes the digital world gets its hooks into me in an unhealthy way. Who among us hasn't known the twitchy temptation to check email / Twitter / Facebook one more time, to make sure that we're not missing anything in anyone's life? Last summer during my week of vacation with my family, I had trouble staying away from high-holiday-related emails. "It's important," I rationalized. "The holidays are so early this year." But did any of those emails really require me to read them right that instant -- couldn't they have waited until I got home? When does the internet become a distraction from the life that's unfolding all around us, and from the holiness which we might find in that life?

That was part of what I was thinking about when I wrote Tele/Presence a few years ago:

I want your presence
twined around my forearm
when I snap open the Times

when I fret over trending topics
when I dream in status updates
scrolling endlessly...

(That poem, lightly revised, will be in my forthcoming collection Open My Lips, due later this year from Ben Yehuda Press.) Maybe when I'm online with awareness of divine presence, that awareness helps me transmute the possibility of enslavement into something redemptive instead. Enslavement is closed, constricted, possibilities shut-off. But the story of this season is the story of moving from slavery to freedom: from closed to open, from channels blocked to open conduits through which blessing can flow.

I think a lot at this time of year about the distinction between slavery and service. At Pesach we commemorate leaving slavery; fifty days later, at Shavuot, we celebrate entering into service. We didn't leave slavery in order to be purely on our own, devoid of obligations and responsibilities. We traded slavery to Pharaoh for service to God. In both cases, we acknowledge that there's a force greater than ourselves. But Pharaoh is the force of power-over; God is the source of power-from-within.

Enslavement means not having a choice. It means being owned. Service, in contrast, means choosing to place ourselves in covenantal relationship. I serve my congregation. I serve my community. I (aspire to) serve God.

When I allow my need for one more metaphorical pellet, one more email check-in, one more glance at the computer, to control me -- then I'm enslaved. When I allow myself the delusion that people need me to answer every single email that comes in, instantly, no matter what time of day or night, no matter whether weekday or Shabbat -- then I'm enslaved. That's when the internet becomes hametz, food for my ego, for the part of me which wants to persist in believing that my response is so critical that no one can get by without me. But when I choose to connect with intentionality and prayerful consciousness, with compassion, and with the good boundaries and good sense to unplug from time to time, then the internet becomes another way I can serve.

This post is part of #blogExodus, a daily carnival of posts / tweets / status updates relating to themes of Passover and Exodus, created by ImaBima. Find other posts via the #blogExodus hashtag.

STRANGER


he doesn't meet my glance, the man
whose tallit is draped like wings

on his way to morning prayer
on my first day back

when I walk round-eyed
into the old neighborhood, greeting

the grandkittens of the feral cats
the three-year-old used to feed

these limestone buildings
are my minyan, witnessing

my murmured prayer of gratitude
for years of absence, and for return

Today's poem was written to a prompt at 3030 poetry -- "faces in the street." It comes out of the experience of waking early, my first morning in Jerusalem, and going for a walk to my old street before breakfast. I love seeing people walking to Shabbat morning prayer with their tallitot flying behind them in the breeze. That never happens where I live, so it's a sight I associate entirely with Jerusalem. I struggled a bit to find the right title for this poem, and settled on "stranger" -- hoping it would reflect both the man in the poem, and the narrator of the poem, which is to say, me.

Pesach is approaching! If you're looking for a haggadah, allow me to humbly recommend the Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach.

2020 Edited to add: you can always find the most up-to-date version of the VR Haggadah by going to velveteenrabbi.com and clicking through to the haggadah page.

 Use it in good health! And, as always, I welcome feedback of all kinds.

Every year at the seder we retell our central story: once we were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, and now we are free. Once we were trapped in the constriction of terrible circumstance, and now we can breathe and stretch and shape our own choices. Once we were forced to live in servitude to an earthly power; now we are free to choose to live in service to the love and the hope and the power which are beyond all earthly imagining.

In the traditional haggadah we read:

In every generation a person must see himself as though he himself had been brought forth from Egypt, as it is said: 'And you shall speak to your child on that day, saying, it is because of what God did for me when God brought me out of Egypt. Not for our ancestors alone did the Holy Blessed One wreak this redemption, but we too were redeemed along with them.'

We tell the story as though it had happened to us, because it does happen to us. It is always happening to us.

In every life there are times of constriction and tightness. The name Mitzrayim, "the narrow place," contains the root tzar, narrow. This is the root of the word tzuris, suffering. In every life there is suffering. We all know this, though sometimes we don't want to acknowledge it. (I certainly don't want to acknowledge it most of the time. As though by ignoring it I could make it less true.) But here's the radical part of what our tradition teaches: in every life there is also redemption.

That's the central story we tell, the story which makes us the Jewish people. We tell it each year during the Pesach seder. We tell it each Friday when we remember the Exodus  in the kiddush blessing over wine. We tell it every day when we remember the Exodus in the ge'ulah blessing of daily prayer. We were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, we have been in the narrow place of constriction and suffering, and the Holy One of Blessing brings us out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. We are the people who tell the story which leads from slavery to redemption, from constriction to openness, from sorrow to joy.

 We each have personal stories which we habitually tell. Stories about our childhoods, stories about our families, stories about our choices and our circumstances. What are the stories you tell about your life? What would it take for you to tell a story of wholeness and redemption, like the story our people tells every day, every week, every year -- the story we tell which makes us who we are?

This post is part of #blogExodus, a carnival of posts on themes relating to the Exodus and to Passover, instigated by the ever-wonderful ImaBima. Follow it by searching for the #blogExodus hashtag on Twitter or wherever you habitually look for things.

LEVIATHAN


Vaster than any known creature who lives in the deep!
Prayers encircle your horns. Light shines from your eyes.

Most of all you are lonely: God reconsidered your power
and killed your companion, salting away her flesh

as a feast for the righteous at the end of time.
These are the stories we whisper where you can't hear.

Each day you eat a whale whole and drink the Jordan down.
Maybe it's your fault there isn't enough water anymore.

To the dispossessed, the defending army is a leviathan
destroying homes with a flick of its mighty tail.

To the other side, the riotous rabble are numerous
as the scales on leviathan's back, deadly as its toothy maw.

Can that story change, or are we locked like bullets
into the rifled helix which points to the fearsome day

when the triumphant will stitch a sukkah from your skin
when we will have slain the greatest mystery of the sea?

The April 2 NaPoWriMo prompt suggests the writing of a poem arising out of a non-Greco-Roman myth. I chose Leviathan - drawing on a number of different midrash about the great sea-creature, many of which are cited in its Wikipedia entry (to which I just linked.)

Of course, since I am still processing my recent trip to Israel and the West Bank, thinking about leviathan's might and power led me to thinking about how each side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict sees the other as the powerful aggressor, so that's in this poem too.

I'm delighted to be able to let y'all know that I am the featured poet in the current issue of Soul-Lit, a journal of spiritual poetry.

One of the magazine's editors, Wayne-Daniel Berard, interviewed me for the issue's central feature story. Here's one question-and-answer, to whet your appetite:

Can you describe the relationship between your being a rabbi and being a poet?

For me the two are very consonant. In both professions, words matter. When it comes to Torah and prayer, the words are incredibly important. Our mystics tell us that even individual letters of the Torah have the capacity to contain deep meaning! The words we speak in prayer are polished and honed by years of use. One of our daily prayers tells us that God speaks the world into being in every day. Like God, we too can speak worlds into being, and poetry is one of the ways we do that.

When we speak words during religious ritual -- a baby-naming, for instance, or a wedding, or a funeral -- those words are carefully-chosen and important, and they create change in the world around us. In poetry, too, words matter deeply. I love the way that both of these worlds regard words.

I also think that being a rabbi, being a mother, being part of the wide world -- all of these things make me a better poet, because they keep my eyes and my heart open to the things around me. The more I pay attention, the more engaged I am with my world, the more I have to draw on when I write poems.

And, I think that being engaged with poetry helps me to be a good rabbi. One of my spiritual directors when I was in rabbinic school is a longtime scholar of the Baal Shem Tov, and he always had relevant and meaningful Besht quotes to offer. I do the same with poetry. I often share poems with congregants when I think those poems might speak to where they are or might offer a kind of spiritual medicine which they need.

In a practical sense, my congregational job is technically half-time, which means there is spaciousness in my life for poetry. Of course, congregational obligations sometimes push poetry out of the way; if there is a funeral, for instance, that trumps everything. But I try to maintain space in my life for both of my vocations. I think they enrich each other.

Read the whole interview here: Soul-Lit Feature. Along with that interview, they published six of my poems: Belief, Baruch She'amar, Meditation on Removing Leaven, No Limit, Word to the Wise, and Standing at the Edge. The issue contains a lot of other wonderful poems as well -- browse the whole listing here.

My thanks to the editors for kindly featuring my work!

HEBRON


    How much is us? Why shall we not
    in such burning place live out our allotments?

    nothing looks good on paper

    if you can tame it, you can have it

    -- from "Not This Mouth" by Jasper Bernes



the heart hot with shrapnel
where a man shot a baby in her carriage
where a man shot a child who held a stone

the belly twisting sour
where those people hung their hateful flag
its colors like a stick in my eye

the mind which insists
there is only one story and it is ours,
lists our traumas, every one their fault

the spirit lofted toward God
by the air of this holy place
which only we should breathe

can we tame our animal hatreds
and escape this constriction
I want to believe

This year, National Poetry Writing Month and #blogExodus start at the same time. This is something of a brain-bender for those of us who are active both in the poetry-writing world and the preparing-for-Pesach world. (It's not like I have anything going on this month or anything.)

Given that these two things are overlapping this year, I don't know that I can promise that I'll manage both on a daily basis. (I don't know that I'll manage either on a daily basis!) But we'll see where things go.

The first NaPoWriMo prompt invited us to click through to the Bibliomancy Oracle and see what quote we got, and then to write a poem sparked by that quotation. The first blogExodus theme is "believe." I just went on a very intense Dual Narrative Trip to Hebron (about which I wrote a rather lengthy post, but which is still on my mind).

Today's poem came out of all of these.

One of the things I knew I wanted to do, upon returning to Israel for the first time in many years, was to go with Eliyahu McLean to Hebron on his Hebron Dual Narrative Tour. I had heard about the trip from a rabbi friend, who wrote to me:

Eliyahu's trip to Hebron is amazing and wonderful and done in tandem with a Palestinian guide. I cannot recommend the experience highly enough... on Eliyahu's trip, one spends 1/2 the day speaking with Jewish settlers, and 1/2 the day speaking with Palestinians. One experiences what is happening on the ground there. It is painful, complex, and not rhetorical or polemical.  It is not either/or to go with Eliyahu, but both/and in every sense of the word.

Not either/or, but both/and: that sounds right up my alley. Eliyahu was the first person ordained by Reb Zalman as a Rodef Shalom, a seeker of peace. (Learn more about his work at Jerusalem PeaceMakers which he co-founded along with the late sheikh Abdul Aziz-Bukhari, may his memory be a blessing. And here's an interview with Eliyahu at JustVision. While I'm at it -- let me mention that Eliyahu and my friend Reuven collaborated on transcribing the story of Reb Zalman Among the Sufis of Hebron, which I have cherished for years.)

I had visited Hebron once, in 2008, but not on this kind of dual-narrative trip. I was eager to see what I would learn. So last Wednesday morning I woke up early at the Ecce Homo convent and made my way through the Old City, out the Damascus Gate, and all the way down Street of the Prophets to meet up with the group. We were a mixed group of internationals: from Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Canada, the United States, and more. As far as I could tell, I was the only Jew on the tour.

(Long post ahead -- more than 4000 words, and many images, too. I hope you'll read the whole thing, despite its length.)

One of the first things that Eliyahu said to us was, "Remember that this trip is about dual narratives. You may feel at times that they are dueling narratives!" The first half of the day was spent with Eliyahu as our guide in the Jewish area of Hebron, which is called H2. H2 consists of about 20% of Hebron, geographically speaking; about 30,000-40,000 Palestinians live there. He reminded us that Hebron is one of Judaism's four holy cities, was the first capital from which King David reigned, and is considered in Jewish tradition to be second only to Jerusalem. 

Eliyahu speaks to our group; two Palestinian women at the edge of Shuhada / King David street.

He pointed out that both sides in this conflict tend to paint themselves as the victims. For instance: the Palestinian narrative holds that the closure of Shuhada street (which Jews call King David street) is a form of apartheid. That street had been a primary market thoroughfare before it was closed by the IDF. Now it is a ghost town of shuttered shops (and Palestinians are forbidden from walking on most of it), which the Palestinian narrative sees as a land grab and an exercise of power and control. The Israeli narrative says that King David street was closed because of suicide bombings and other attacks on Jews, and points out that Palestinians have access to 97% of the city while Jews are confined to a mere 3%, so clearly it's the Jews, not the Palestinians, who are the victims. (That's one example of incompatible narratives; over the course of the day we encountered many others.)