And here's the poem in plaintext for those who prefer it that way:

Chord

Grief hums constantly
like cicadas.
It's silt clogging
the storm drains.
It's a bad penny
landing same side up.

Grief says
the poem ends here.

And still
there are cornflowers
amidst the froth
of Queen Anne's Lace,
the moon peeking
through cotton candy clouds,
your voice in my ear.

Give the penny away.
Dredge the streambed clear.
Take up your instrument
and turn the doleful hum
into a chord.

This week’s Torah portion, Hukat, begins with the parah adumah. The Israelites are instructed to bring a red heifer who has never borne a yoke. The priest takes it outside the camp and offers it, burning it along with hyssop, cedar wood, and something crimson. Its ashes are kept for making mei niddah hatat, “waters of lustration,” used to “purify” someone after contact with death. (More on that in a moment.) 

This is weird, and not just to us. Rashi observed that the nations of the world would taunt us about the oddity of this law, which is why it’s called a hok. Hukim are the category of mitzvot that may not make logical sense, like kashrut. We observe them as a spiritual discipline, part of accepting “the yoke of heaven,” tradition’s way of saying there’s something in the universe more mysterious than we can grasp.

I see hukim the way I see poetry that’s allusive and evocative. If I approach this like a poem or a piece of visual art, I notice how this parsha is shot through with the recurring theme of death. Immediately after the parah adumah, we read that someone who touches a dead body becomes tamei for seven days. Tum’ah is Torah’s term for the spiritual condition of having coming into contact with life or death. 

In Torah's understanding we become tamei upon encountering a dead body, menstrual blood or semen, certain forms of illness. I follow R. Rachel Adler in understanding tum’ah as a kind of spiritual-electrical charge. Someone who’s tamei is temporarily vibrating at a different frequency than everyone else. This is the spiritual state that the waters of lustration were used, in Torah times, to wash away. 

The first time I served on our hevra kadisha I understood this in a new way. It’s not that touching the bodies of our dead is somehow “unclean.” It’s more like: once I had helped to wash and dress and bless the body that had once held the soul of a human being, I felt changed. The world outside the funeral home felt weird. I felt spiritually out of phase, not quite in normal time, for a little while. 

I remember feeling that way after late-night shifts when I was a student chaplain at Albany Medical Center, too. After holding the hand of someone who was dying, or praying with someone headed into emergency surgery, nothing felt the same. As I learned much later, it's also how I felt after giving birth: I felt fragile, precarious, both heightened and dissociated, temporary and eternal all at once.

Today the parah adumah ritual is impossible. There is no high priest to make a sacrifice in the appointed place in the appropriate ways. Rambam even suggested that only one more parah adumah will ever be born, to be brought by the messiah. There are no waters of lustration anymore. Especially now that the ritual literally can’t be performed, we grow and learn through studying it rather than actually doing it. 

In place of the waters of lustration, we’ve evolved other rituals to close shiva. For instance, walking around the block and going back in through a different door: embodying both our readiness to re-enter the world, and also how mourning has made us different than whoever we were before. But the central idea that death impacts us and we need a transition to return to normalcy still rings true. 

Reading about death and tum’ah this year I can’t help thinking about Israel and Palestine. I think about the violent deaths of Israelis at the Nova music festival and the kibbutzim that were attacked on October 7. I think about the violent deaths of Palestinians in Gaza over the last 281 days. Everyone there has touched death, and no one has had the luxury of time to mourn, nor closure for their grief.

I yearn for waters of lustration that could wash away their vast grief (and ours) and soften the hearts of those who have power to create change. I wish we had a way to balm every wounded soul and body in Israel and Palestine. Healing feels impossible – as impossible as a ritual that demands a place and a role that haven’t existed in 2000 years and a sacrificial modality of prayer we no longer use.

In times like these I’m grateful that our tradition is built on hope that no matter how broken our world has been, and this year we’re all aware that it is plenty broken, a better future is possible. Even if I don’t know how we’re going to get there. The truth is, it’s not my job to know how the world is going to get there. It’s my job to care for y’all. And it's aleinu, on all of us, to do what we can to build better. 

One of my most profound memories of hospital chaplaincy is the night a kid was hit by a train. I wasn’t yet a parent, and I remember saying to my chaplaincy supervisor that I don’t know how I could have borne the parents' grief if I were. He told me that no matter what, faced with this kind of grief, all we can really give is our heart, our presence, our care. It’s the holiest gift human beings have to give.

I can’t make sense out of the magnitude of loss in Gaza and Israel. Any single person’s grief can be infinite. The grief of whole peoples…? There are no words. And that brings me back to the idea of a hok, a mitzvah we can’t explain. Accepting the “yoke of heaven” means accepting that we can't always make sense of the world. In the face of this much grief, we may not be able to make anything “okay.” 

But we can feel-with one another, and we can insist on empathy for every Israeli and every Palestinian. I know that some people think my empathy is misplaced, or that it benefits the wrong people. For me, empathy is a core spiritual discipline, and part of that discipline is extending it to everyone. Faced with inconceivable loss, our hearts and our care are all we have; they are the holiest gift we have to give.

May this Shabbat Parah bring peace to all who mourn, and comfort to all who are bereaved. 

This is the d'var Torah that I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

How to describe the particular joy of convening with fellow-builders and friends? The annual Bayit board retreat is a time for brainstorming, visioning, looking back and looking forward, adjusting course. Conversations weave and flow. We riff off of each other, ideas sparking. We go from tachlis / practical questions to deep spiritual work. It's like making jazz, and it reminds me why I love what I do.

We oscillate between board meetings (some of us joining remotely via Zoom), meetings of various working groups, and downtime. We talk about organizational structure and what will best serve us going forward. We re-examine Bayit's mission and vision. We revise our website so it better reflects us. We look at the organic evolution of our organization and our build projects and what might come next.

In quiet moments on the living room couches or on the mirpesset or up on the roof we work together on the manuscript for Judith Schmidt's Blessing from Broken. We read particularly great lines out loud to each other, marveling at how good this work is and how lucky we feel to be midwifing it into the world. We talk about how and why our organizational values support collaborative co-creation.

We daven every morning, and sometimes afternoon and evening. What a profound gift that is for me. Often we pray on the roof deck of our rented house under the tent of the big open sky. It's different every time, an impromptu interweaving of melodies and nusach: sometimes a cappella, sometimes with a nylon-stringed guitar or two, a quick familiar glide through liturgy or a slow luxurious stroll.

One morning we pray-test a new-old melody for Modah Ani, singing the first line to the tune of the Mingulay Boat Song. Another morning we pray Psalm 136 to the tune of the Banana Boat Song. On the 4th of July we interweave the Declaration of Independence into morning prayers, and sing Mi Chamocha to the Star-Spangled Banner -- and reflect on our aspirations for this place where we live.

We talk about congregational service, tools for supporting shul boards, games that could lift up spiritual meanings of Purim. Together we think through how to structure the Visual Mahzor we're publishing, and we work on a curriculum we'll be releasing soon, for a high holiday prep course on teshuvah. We make many pots of coffee. We walk to the ocean and marvel at its perpetual motion and beauty.

We hone in on why we do what we do. There are great conversations about the spiritual importance of uplifting others' voices, about games and card decks and publications, bench marks and evaluation, how we know when something "works," new ways of engaging with familiar texts, organizational structures and modalities, Agile coaching and design thought, working groups and leadership ladders.

And then we set aside our work and spend a precious Shabbat together. As always, it's both beautiful and bittersweet because it means the week will end! We dine and bless and sing and pray (and read and nap and play board games -- summer Shabbats are luxuriously long.) Now it's time to return home... and to keep creating, testing, refining, and sharing tools for a Jewish future always under construction.