Daily April poem: ottava rima

WETLAND ASHREI


Pass old cornstalks, the sukkah's sad debris.
The wetland's dull, dead stalks washed out by snow
but some stems gleam with red. What vibrancy,
the gold-as-tinsel fronds of the willow.
Grey pussywillows' pearls, woodsy jewelry
against this backdrop where no leaves yet grow.
Happy are we who make Your house our home!
Birdsong fills this robin's-egg-blue dome.

 


 

Monday's prompt at NaPoWriMo invited us to experiment with ottava rima, an Italian verse form which usually appears, in English, as eight-line stanzas in iambic pentameter with an a/b/a/b/a/b/c/c rhyme scheme. I wrote mine on a short afternoon break from work before Hebrew school on Monday. I stepped outside the synagogue and sat with my laptop in the small gazebo, and the poem arose out of what I observed in the small wetland behind the shul.

The penultimate line is a reference to the ashrei prayer, which begins "Happy are they who dwell in Your house." (I first blogged about that prayer here in 2004, and did so again in 2007.) Traditionally Jews daven the ashrei three times a day, one of those times being mincha, the short afternoon prayer service. (Writing this poem became my mincha for Monday.)

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Daily April poem: declarative sentences capped with a question

MORNING WITH THREE-YEAR-OLD


Our son stands in the doorway in bear pyjamas.
A soft blue teddy peeks from under his arm.
His cheeks are scaly with the night's dried snot.
He clambers into our bed and squirms onto my pillow.
This smile, sweet as strawberries, is just for me.

He cups my face with his grubby palm.
I brush his hair back from his forehead.
Small feet probe my ribs, testing boundaries.
Soon he is poking my mouth, covering my eyes.
Deep breath: I roll to sitting, I enfold in my robe.

We pad down the stairs holding hands.
Unzip the blanket sleeper, yank the nighttime diaper.
Our struggle for dominance evokes the Nature Channel.
I manage to aim his feet into sweatpants and socks.
I yield and relinquish my hopes of a clean shirt.

Finally I reach the Promised Land.
The refrigerator hums its quiet song.
Clean pots weigh down the dish drainer.
I stand in the middle of the floor, waiting.
Does a watched coffee pot refuse to boil?

 


 

Sunday's NaPoWriMo prompt invited us to write poems in which each line is a short declarative sentence, and the final line is a question. In response to that prompt, I wrote this poem on Sunday morning, sipping coffee while our son watched cartoons. I have two versions of it: one where the poem is all one long stanza, and another where the poem is broken into 5-line stanzas. I think I like this version better, but I'm still not sure.

There's a way in which this is a sequel to the Toddler House poems I was writing a while back -- and a way in which those were the next chapter of the weekly mother poems I wrote during my first year of motherhood.

I spent some of last week proofreading the digital galleys of Waiting to Unfold, due out from Phoenicia Publishing in a few weeks. I'm so grateful now to have those poems -- and to have a publisher who's excited about bringing them into the world. Anyway: stay tuned for more intel on that collection!

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Daily April poem: valley

PROJECTS


Tiny trebuchet, sized
for dolls or possibly hobbits,
chucked eggs halfway down the hill.

We counterpoised our second try
with free weights, strong enough
to loft pumpkins.

For a finale we pondered
air cannons to send buckets of paint
soaring into the valley

strangers waking to find
their houses garbed in unfamiliar
technicolor dreamcoats, but

by then we were building
round Mongolian dwellings
out of sticks and string instead.

What the neighbors thought
as gers sprouted like slow mushrooms
atop our hill, we'll never know

as they'll never know
how lucky they are we got bored
and let their house stay blue.

 


 

This was written to the 30/30 prompt "valley."

We never really intended to build the air cannon, but it made for fun conversations. (And yes, this is the kind of thing our circle of friends does for fun when we get together -- we make things. For a few years, there were trebuchets.)

Ger is the Mongolian word for what most of us know as a yurt. Starting in 2004, we built one in our backyard every winter with friends for many years. Last year we got one from Mongolia, which has replaced the various iterations we built. (For more on that: Loving the ger, May 2012.)

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Daily April poem: a cinquain

CINQUAIN FOR A CARDINAL

 

Redbird
atop the pine:
you sing that liquid tune
my mother's mother used to love.
Don't stop.

 


 

For the fifth day of National Poetry Month, the folks at NaPoWriMo challenged us to write a cinquain. So I wrote this poem on Friday, but am only posting it today, since on Friday I posted a poem derived from a 30/30 prompt instead.

A cinquain is a tightly-constrained form. It has five lines. The first line has two syllables (one of which is accented), the second line four syllables (and two accents), the third line six syllables (three accents), the fourth line eight syllables (four accents), and the fifth line two syllables (and one accent) again.

Mine was inspired by the cardinal I've been seeing when I arrive at the synagogue in the mornings. Cornell tells me that these are year-round birds both here and where I grew up. Lately he's been perched at the top of one of the trees near our building, singing lustily when I arrive at work. I love that these brilliant birds, which were a part of my south Texas childhood, live here in New England too.

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Daily April poem: named after a spaceship

A Series of Unlikely Explanations


I expected invisible ink.
The walls are prettier this way.
It wasn't me, it was a ghost
who followed us from Houston.
Look, mom, turtles!
Haven't you been wanting to repaint?
We've been practicing calligraphy
at preschool and this was my homework.
This is a memorial wall
for the stuffed animals I've lost.
Those aren't scribbles, it's a fresco.
Someday you'll peel away this wallboard
and sell it to MASS MoCA
to hang alongside the LeWitts.


I'm playing with two different sets of poetry prompts this month -- 30/30 and NaPoWriMo -- and I also wrote a poem this week which wasn't to any prompt. As a result, I'm posting some poems here a few days after they're written.

The day four prompt at NaPoWriMo was to write a poem to fit an unusual title -- one of the fantastical spaceship names used by science fiction writer Iain M. Banks (who recently announced that he has terminal cancer, sorry to say.) I love his ship names; I chose this one.

The ensuing poem was partially inspired by my own son, and partially by the delightful Honest Toddler. (Thankfully our son has not yet gotten the notion of scrawling on the walls; here's hoping he isn't secretly reading this blog.)

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Daily April poem: Word to the Wise

WORD TO THE WISE


here: click on the X
to close the browser window,
clap the clamshell laptop shut

resist the twitching impulse
to open up Facebook
in search of one more pellet

remember that in public spaces
the comments are a hive
of stinging wasps

take three deep breaths
all the way to your diaphragm
lower your clenched shoulders

steep your mind's tofu
in a gentle bath of poetry
seasoned with psalms

savor all five tastes
with no danger of sickness
in the hard drive or the heart

 


 

This was written for the "sometimes you have to walk away" prompt at 30x30. If you're interested in other people's responses to the prompt, you can check out each day's submissions by clicking on each prompt link, here.

The idea that the mind is like tofu, and takes on the flavor of whatever it steeps in, is one I first heard from Rabbi Jeff Roth, who attributed it to Reb Zalman.

And, of course, others are writing to the daily prompts at NaPoWriMo. (I did attempt their sea chanty prompt, but wasn't happy enough with the results to share them here, so -- you get another 30/30-inspired poem instead!)

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Daily April poem: out of luck

SPRING


April does the cha-cha
with my expectations.

I'm ready to pop champagne
and declare the glacier

in front of the garage
melted for the season

when I wake
inside a snow globe again.

Pity the robins,
returned too soon

and forced to squabble
with the angry chickadees

for scarce barstools
at the birsdseed diner.

Fortunate worms, granted
a temporary reprieve.

 


 

The third 30x30 poem prompt was "out of luck."

Yesterday morning we enjoyed a bit of spring snow, and I couldn't help wondering -- as I do every year -- what becomes of the robins who return to New England before the snow has entirely relinquished us. This poem arose out of that wondering.

If you're interested in other people's responses to these prompts, you can check out each day's submissions by clicking on each prompt link, here. Feedback is always welcome!

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NaPoWriMo 2013


Daily April poem: on the couch

POST-OP


You're pale against the red velour
and where your moose pyjamas gape
your belly is jaundiced
the curry-powder yellow of betadine.

They promised you a popsicle,
pressed a berry-scented mask
to your struggling face
and then you woke

to uncooperative legs and tender tummy,
a tube biting your hand like a snake
and monitor cables streaming
from your skinny ribcage.

Now you lie limp as the blanket
draped over your knees.
When you try to move, confusion
blooms: why does it hurt?

And clustered like ghosts
in the back of my heart:
all of the children who won't
be fully recovered tomorrow

all the parents who've learned
to mask oxycodone with honey,
who shave their own heads bare
in powerless solidarity...

How does God bear it?
Maybe the same way we do.
The heart shatters, but keeps beating
just love, just love, just love.


The second 30x30 poem prompt was "on the couch." I immediately thought of our son on the couch when he was recuperating from (perfectly ordinary, unremarkable) hernia surgery. Then I thought of the recent tough news at Superman Sam (The post you didn't want to read), and of all of the kids who are recuperating -- or not recuperating -- from infinitely more terrifying medical adventures than ours. The reality that children suffer is almost more than the heart can bear. Of course, we ache, and then we keep on loving; and in that, I think we mirror God, the cosmic Parent Who does the same.

If you want to send a note to Sam, you can write to him at Sam Sommer, E584 / Children's Hospital of Wisconsin / P.O. Box 1997 / Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-1997. Receiving notes, cards, etc (many featuring superheroes in some way) cheered him last time they were in the hospital for an extended stay.

On the 30 poems / 30 days front: some of us who are writing poems in response to these prompts are submitting them to the 30x30 website. If you're interested in other people's responses to these prompts, you can check out each day's submissions by clicking on each prompt link, here. And if you're interested in other folks who are attempting this same daily poem feat during National Poetry Month, don't miss NaPoWriMo, now in its tenth year!

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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.

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NaPoWriMo 2013


Returning to leaven

Breads
Breads and doughs. Photos taken over the years.

We don't cleanse our house of hametz (leaven) as thoroughly as many of my friends do. (I wrote a poem about that last year -- Bedikat chametz in the toddler house.) Still, after a week of dining on matzah brei (matzah, soaked in hot water and wrung out, then scrambled with eggs and milk and salt and pepper) and matzah spread with cream cheese, that first leavened meal after Pesach is always a treat. As much as I love the first tastes of matzah at the seder, the familiar scents and textures of haroset and horseradish and matzah's crunch, I also love that first sandwich once I'm back in the land of the leaven-eating again.

Hametz and matzah are made of the same ingredients: flour and water. (I've written about this before -- hametz and matzah, 2006.) What makes matzah matzah is that it is baked speedily, so that the natural yeasts which abound don't have time to begin to ferment and inflate the dough. The two words have almost the same letters in Hebrew. Hametz is spelled חמץ, matzah is spelled מצה -- the only difference is between the ח and the ה, in that little open space in the letter ה. Hametz is spacious because the bread is risen; matzah is flat, so its spaciousness is spiritual rather than physical. Or, maybe the space in that ה is what lets God in...

The challenge, for me, is holding on to the spiritual spaciousness of Pesach once I'm no longer experiencing the reminder of matzah at every meal. That's one of the reasons I so love counting the Omer: it gives me a way to hold on to the sweetness, and the spiritual spaciousness, of Pesach long after the festival is past. For seven weeks, I have a built-in practice to help keep me mindful: of the passing of time, of the journey from freedom to revelation, of the lessons of Pesach which I want to carry with me into the year to come. Freedom all by itself is -- not meaningless, to be sure, but only a first step. The next step is getting ready to enter into covenant, into relationship.

Imagine what it might have been like for our ancestors, wandering during this time. They'd left the harsh labor of Pharaoh's brick-making camps, left a world in which a ruler could decree that all Hebrew boy-children be slaughtered at birth. They'd crossed the Sea of Reeds, walking miraculously on dry sand, maybe with walls of gleaming water suspended impossibly on each side. Signs and wonders, miracles like no one had ever imagined! And now they were camping in the desert, free and probably frightened. So they were free of Pharaoh: now what? To whom would they declare their allegiance? Whom would they serve?

The Jewish answer, of course, is God. Everybody serves someone or something. We choose to be avdei Adonai, servants of the Most High.

Did we ever truly wander in the wilderness? Who knows. I can't say that I care much, one way or the other. What I love is that this is the story we tell about ourselves. We left the dehumanizing servitude of a tyrant, and instead of finding another earthly power to yoke ourselves to, entered into relationship with the source of compassion and blessing in the world. That's what we serve: not Pharaoh, not a boss, but the One Who asks us to partner in the work of healing the brokenness in creation.

In the hamotzi blessing, we bless God Who brings forth bread from the earth. Of course, God doesn't bring forth bread, per se; what God brings forth from the earth is grain. We have to do our part: milling the grain into flour, mixing and kneading the flour into dough, letting the dough rise, shaping and baking it. In Genesis 3 this is framed as a response to the first humans' choice to pursue knowledge -- now we'll earn bread with the sweat of our brows, working to till the earth and tend it and to turn the grain into something we can consume. But that shift is also a kind of growing-up. In the Eden story, we were like children, and everything was provided for us. Post-Eden, we're more mature beings, and we're able to do some of the work to feed ourselves -- and to experience the satisfaction of making bread with our own hands.

It's a new kind of partnership. Just as we partner with God in making the world a better place, we also partner with God in turning the raw materials of our world into something sophisticated and new. God is still the One Who brings forth the grain from the earth, Who causes blessings to flow into creation, Who caused the grains to evolve in all of their beautiful and diverse forms. And we're the ones who get to turn those grains into a wealth of beautiful and diverse breads...which, after Pesach (whenever that is for you, depending on whether you celebrate for seven days or for eight), we once again get to eat.


30/30 poem 1: from start to finish

SEVEN BY SEVEN

Jewish math moves in multiples of seven:
six days of creation and then Shabbat
six years of farming, then the sabbatical
seven times seven years, then the jubilee
seven times seven days for the journey
between Pesach and Shavuot, freedom and revelation --
each day a facet which we polish
on this bright gem with 49 sides
and as we count we ascend slowly
to Sinai's dry foothills where we'll camp:
see thunder, hear shofar, await further instructions


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The folks at the Word by Word festival are doing a 30 poems / 30 days challenge during April (National Poetry Month), and they're emailing out daily prompts. I can't promise that I'll write 30 poems this month (nor that I'll post all of them here, even if I do), but I figured I'd at least post the first one. The first prompt was from start to finish.

Since we're in the period of the Counting of the Omer, that was the start-to-finish which immediately came to mind. The Omer lasts for seven weeks, seven sets of seven days. As I wrote and revised, the poem took on the ad hoc form of seven words per line. Enjoy! (ETA: here are all of the poems written / submitted for this prompt...)

And another ETA: don't miss NaPoWriMo 2013 if daily April poems are your cup of tea!


Happy Easter to those who celebrate!

To my Christian friends and loved ones, I wish a Happy Easter! May your day be filled with alleluias.

In honor of the season, I'll link back to something I wrote and shared here in 2009, a post about two Easter services (one in 2003, one in 2009) at a local Episcopal church. Here's a taste:

What I remember of that Easter service: one of the acolytes had bright yellow streamers on a tall bendy rod, which he waved over the community as he processed down the aisle. Everyone wore their Easter best, including pastel hats on some of the ladies and frilly dresses on some of the little girls. The rector's sermon included verses from Rumi, and at the end, when he concluded with the words "will you rise?" we were all so moved that we took his question as a rhetorical/spiritual one, not a literal invitation to stand.

Many Jews have inchoate feelings of apprehension about Easter. The liturgy of Holy Week (with its story of Jesus' death, blamed on the Jews until the late 20th century) has historically sparked anti-Jewish violence at this season. Accusations that Jews tortured Christian children and/or used their blood for making our Passover matzot resulted in Eastertide violence against Jews in England in the twelfth century (see The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich), Lisbon in the sixteenth century (the Easter Massacre) and the twentieth century (the First Kishinev Pogrom.) (For more on this history, read Why Some Jews Fear the Passion at Christianity Today.) It can be hard to shed the collective memory of these stories.

But whatever of that was dormant in me, six years ago, was washed away that Easter morning and replaced with a renewed awareness of how sweet it can be to be (in Reb Zalman's terms) a "spiritual peeping Tom," looking to see how other people "get it on with God."

You can read the whole post here: A field trip into Easter.


A Sestina for Counting the Omer

We mark the Omer day
by day, spring unfolding light
as snowflakes in the breeze. One
follows another; we measure each week
of this dusty journey through
wild unknowing. Come and count.

Time to make our qualities count.
The kaleidoscope shifts every day,
each dawn a lens that God shines through.
What in me will be revealed as light
streams into me each week?
Seven colors of the rainbow make one

beam of white. God is One
and God's in everything we count.
Lovingkindness permeates the first week,
then boundaries, harmony, each day
a different lens for light
to warm our hearts as it glows through.

And when the Omer count is through?
We'll stand at Sinai, every one
-- every soul that's ever been -- light
as Chagall's floating angels. Count
with me, and treasure each day.
A holy pause caps every week.

Endurance comes into play: week
four. We wonder, will we make it through?
Humility and splendor in a single day,
two opposites folded into one.
Roots strengthen us as we count.
Every day, more work to do and stronger light.

Torah is black fire on white, light
of our lives. In the seventh week
time warps and ripples as we count.
Kingship and presence come through,
transcendence and immanence bundled as one,
wholly revealed on the forty-ninth day...

Feel the light now pouring through.
Each week the seven sefirot become one.
It's time to count the Omer, now, today.


Marc+Chagall+Floating+Flying+loversThe Counting of the Omer -- as regular readers no doubt know by now! -- is the holy process of marking and counting each of the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot, between liberation and revelation.

In the kabbalistic system, each week represents one of the seven lower sefirot, and so does each day within each week. So the first week is the week of chesed, lovingkindness; week two is gevurah, boundaries; week three is tiferet, harmony; week four is netzach, endurance; week five is hod, humility and splendor; week six is yesod, roots or foundation; and week seven is malchut, kingship / sovereignty / Shekhinah. Within each week, also, the seven qualities play out day by day.

Chagall2"Every day there is more work to do / and stronger light" is a couplet from Marge Piercy's glorious poem "Season of the Egg," which I read every year during my Pesach seder. I abbreviated it slightly to make it work here as a single line. (You can find her poem online in this blog post -- just scroll down a bit.) And as for the reference to Chagall's floating angels, here are thumbnails of two beautiful Marc Chagall paintings which feature people floating. I like to think of them as people whose spirits can't help but soar.


On children, and suffering, and this day of the Omer

Whatever gets in the way of the work, is the work. So taught the poet Jason Shinder, may his memory be a blessing, and that sentence has become one of my mantras. It works for me on both a poetic level (whatever is obscuring the poem I think I need to write, that very thing is probably what I really ought to be writing about) and a spiritual one (whatever life "stuff" is getting in the way of my spiritual practice needs to itself become the spiritual practice.) The work -- of creativity, of spiritual life, of living -- is made of whatever I experience in the moment, not whatever I imagine I ought to be experiencing, or whatever I had planned to experience.

Lately what's getting in the way of (at least some of) the work is latent anxiety about the certainty that our son will experience pain. This has arisen for me because we've had a few medical adventures recently, and as a result I've been newly-confronted with reminders that just as everyone who lives in a body sometimes experiences pain, so will our little boy. Intellectually I can tell you that nothing he's experiencing is a big deal. (Really, really not a big deal.) But emotionally, the prospect of our son suffering stops me in my tracks. I would do anything to forestall or prevent that, if I could. As would any (healthy) parent; the sentiment is so obvious that it's banal. Of course I wish I could protect him from pain. And I can't.

I know that his minor bumps and bruises and routine procedures are vanishingly insignificant, and that not all children are so fortunate. Take those two little boys who are sick, about whom I wrote back in the fall -- a six-year-old with leukemia; a four-year-old with a brain tumor -- just to name two examples from within my online circle of friends. (Sam appears, thankfully, to be doing great. ETA: As of the next day, Sam's leukemia has relapsed. Gus is finishing chemo; please read his mom's latest update, which talks about their journey and the other kids they've met along the way.) There are so many sick kids in the world. I ministered to a few of them when I was a student chaplain. I know that I would have a much harder time with that part of hospital chaplaincy now that I'm someone's mom. I know in my head that children suffer, but I can't bear to know it in my heart. Or: I know it in brief flickers, and then I put at least a partial lid on that knowing, because I can't inhabit that knowledge and also function in the world. My heart feels too tender.

Several of my friends have been reading and discussing Sonali Deraniyagala's book Wave (see, e.g., Lorianne DiSabato's post after Wave at Hoarded Ordinaries, or Teju Cole's review A Better Quality of Agony in the New Yorker.) Deraniyagala lost her entire family in a tsunami: husband, children, parents, everyone she loved. Wave is her memoir and her remembrance of them and of what she lost. I believe that the book is powerful and well-written and important, bit I don't know if I can bear to read it. There, too, I'm operating out of heart rather than head. I'm inhabiting the realm of yetzirah, emotions, rather than briyah, intellect. Intellectually I believe that Deraniyagala's book is tremendous. Emotionally, I don't think I can face it. At least not right now.

"Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." I've seen that quote floating around in various forms for years. (It's attributed to Elizabeth Stone, author of A Boy I Once Knew.) Granted, it's a cliché to say that I didn't wholly understand it until I had a child, but I suppose there's a reason why some clichés endure. Yes: some part of my heart is walking around in the world, learning and trying and striving and falling and laughing and wailing and doing all of the things that children do. A part of my heart is out there, independent, living on his own. And I can't spare him suffering, even though I wish I could. It's a kind of emotional and spiritual exposure, as though some part of my own heart and spirit which had been safely tucked-away were now open to the world, to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to the physical suffering which every body comes to know.

In the Counting of the Omer, today is the day of tiferet she'b'chesed, harmony and balance within lovingkindness. The quality of chesed, of overflowing love, is one that (the kabbalists teach) we and God share. "Parent" is one of our foremost metaphors for God. God is the Parent Who births all of creation, who feels our joys and our sorrows, who suffers when we suffer. And God also manifests through the quality of tiferet, harmony and balance. Today is the day when, as the kaleidoscope of the Omer turns, the two qualities reflect and refract one another. The day of balance within the week of lovingkindness. Lovingkindness filtered and framed through the kind of harmoniousness which arises when everything is in balance.

Maybe my work today is to (re)learn how to imbue chesed with today's quality of tiferet, to temper my overflowing openheartedness with the harmony which arises when good love has good boundaries and balance is reached. Suffering is real, and children experience suffering, and I wouldn't want to be the kind of person who doesn't feel tenderhearted dismay at remembering that reality anew. But today is a day for finding balance within that space of tender heart. Maybe I can find it through celebrating the caregivers, parents and grandparents and nurses and doctors and friends, whose loving hands manifest the presence of God in caring for all of the children in need.


Meeting our children where they are

On Pesach, the child asks the parent: "Why is this night different from all other nights?" The Hasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev sees in this a deep teaching about how to parent and how to be like God.

He begins this teaching in a slightly odd place: by wondering aloud why we have the tradition of ritually asking this question at Pesach and not, for instance, at Sukkot, when we're dwelling in little huts with permeable roofs. He notes that there's a teaching (in the Gemara) that some people say the world was created in Tishri, and others say it was created in Nisan. Some say the new year is in the fall, and others say the new year is in the spring.

Ultimately, his answer to this question ("is the new year in the fall or in the spring?") is "yes." Which is to say: they're both meaningful, though in different ways. In Tishri (the Days of Awe), we celebrate the creation of the universe which happened, he says, through chesed, divine lovingkindness. This is the birthday of creation, the new year for all beings and all things. Creation arose because of God's overflowing compassion and lovingkindness, and that lovingkindness extends to everything.

In Nisan (during Pesach), we celebrate the miracles and wonders which God performed in liberating us from slavery. Both of these are important beginnings: the creation of the world, and the creation of our people as a people. (Indeed -- we mention both in the kiddush, the blessing over wine, every Shabbat.) But they're different in tone. The Tishri new year is a universal new year, a moment of celebration for all existence. The Nisan new year is a particularistic new year, commemorating our community's origins.

And the question "why is this night different from all other nights" isn't asked at that other end of the year, at the universalistic new year of all creation. We ask it at Pesach, our festival of liberation. Here's R' Levi Yitzchak:

The Holy Blessed One constricts God's-self for the sake of God's people Israel, and takes great pleasure in this, and in this God's will is fulfilled. An example of this is the question of the son to the father ["Why is this night different" etc]. For the wisdom of the father is greater than that of the son, and only through his love for his son does the father constrict himself in order to offer a response to the son's question. And this is the example, as is known: the Holy Blessed One constricts God's self in the qualities of Israel and takes pride in them and their doing of God's will.

Or -- phrased in a more contemporary idiom --

On Pesach, it's the child's job to ask, "Why is this night different?" And it's the parent's job to constrict her/himself, and to channel love and knowledge into an answer which the child can process -- and also to take joy and pride in the child's growth and desire to know.

God's wisdom is greater than ours, as a parent's wisdom is greater than their child's. In love, God contracts himself/herself in order to make room for us and to answer us where we are. Just so, we too can pull back  in order to make space for our children, and to answer their questions in a way which will reach them where they are. When we pull back to make space for our children to grow, we follow in God's footsteps.

Kedushat Levi teaches us that God takes great pleasure in this tzimtzum, this process of self-constriction which makes space for us in the world. And God takes pleasure in us and in our questioning and in our growth. Like a loving parent, God holds back some of God's greatness in order to make room for us and to respond in a way that we can hear. And like God, it's our job as parents to gauge where our children are at, and to relate to them where they authentically are.

 

(You can find this teaching in ספר קדשת–לוי השלם; it's the second teaching in his דרוש לפשח / "Pesach teachings" section.)


Today is the First Day of the Omer!

ColorfulOmerChartToday is the first day of the Omer -- the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot, between liberation and revelation!

I'm not going to manage daily Omer posts this year (as I did last year on my congregational blog), but here's my post for Day 1 of the Omer last year -- just ignore the Gregorian date, since the first day of the Omer this year began at sundown on Monday March 25, which is to say, last night.

The kabbalists of Jewish tradition developed the idea that these seven weeks are a special time for focusing on a set of seven sefirot, seven divine qualities which we share with God: lovingkindness, boundaried strength, harmony and balance, endurance, humility, roots / foundation, and nobility / sovereignty.

I like to think of these qualities as facets of a gem, and during each week of the Omer, a different facet is held up to the light. Or perhaps, lenses / facets of a prism. Shine white light through a prism, and the seven colors of the rainbow emerge. Shine divinity through the prism of these seven weeks, and these seven qualities come into new focus.

And because there are seven days in each week, we rotate through the seven qualities each week, too.

Today is the day of chesed she'b'chesed, lovingkindness within lovingkindness. Abiding love, abounding love, lovingkindness and compassion which overflows our hearts and spills into the world around us. May we embody this quality as we move through the world today, on this first step toward the wonder of the revelation at Sinai.


If you're looking for Omer-counting resources, here are four wonderful books for counting the Omer: one by Shifrah Tobacman, one by Rabbi Min Kantrowitz, one by Rabbi Jill Hammer, and one by Rabbi Yael Levy. Rabbi Levy is at Mishkan Shalom, and each year she sends out daily Omer teachings via email and Facebook -- you can learn more, and sign up, here: Count the Omer with Us from Passover to Shavuot. And the spiraling map of the Omer count which illustrates this post was adapted from the one I found here: Counting of the Omer | Temple B'nai Abraham -- but I added the color-coding and the indications of which qualities are ascendant on each day. Here's a printable pdf if you want it: ColorfulOmerChart [pdf]


First night of Pesach: I don't want to forget

 

The experience of reading my poem "Order" at the start of the seder, and managing for once not to break into tears at reaching the mention of my grandfather, of blessed memory, who taught me how to make matzah balls.

 

 

My son excitedly explaining to his friend that they were going to look for the hidden matzah and then get presents! And then the three kids running around the house looking for the afikoman. Hearing them talking to each other about how they had to just -- keep -- looking.

 

 

Reading R' Lynn Gottlieb's poem about removing the hametz in the month of Nisan, which I've read at my seders for probably 15 years now. Going around the table, stanza by stanza, the familiar words connecting this year with all the years before.

 

 

My son singing the "a-a-men" at the end of each borei pri hagafen blessing, after each of the four traditional cups of wine. No matter where he was when we blessed the wine -- whether at the table, or playing in the living room -- he piped up and sang the amen for us, with obvious pride.

 

 

Beginning the Maggid / Storytelling section of our seder with the "story about stories" -- which ends with "'All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient.' And it was sufficient." Ethan reading the Martín Espada poem during Motzi/Matzah. My mother-in-law reading the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem during Hallel.

 

 

I knew that a few thousand miles away, my extended clan was together at my brother's house, singing all of the prayers which were part of my childhood seder soundtrack. I love those old melodies and those old words, and I'm sorry I didn't get to sing them with my parents and my siblings and my cousins.

But I also love the poems and readings and songs which have become part of our own idiosyncratic household tradition. And I'm so grateful to be able to celebrate Pesach, this year and every year, with family and beloved friends.

Chag sameach to all! I hope your Passover is sweet.


14 Nisan: Being

BlogExodusI always get caught up in the details of Pesach. The recipes, the matzah balls, the groceries, the cooking, the haggadah, the psalms, the songs. I always want to create a perfectly meaningful seder: for myself, for my family, for my guests. I love this holiday so fiercely that I want to share that love with everyone. I want everyone to come away from the table feeling nourished in all four worlds of body, heart, mind, and soul. I want to experience the spiritual peak of being magically swept up to the top of the mountain with God at Pesach -- so that as I begin the long climb back up to the spiritual heights of Shavuot, I'm inspired and enlivened by knowing just what joys await me once I get there again.

In my haggadah there is a poem by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, who is now a friend and colleague but who was known to me only by reputation when I first discovered her work many years ago. That poem speaks of the process of bedikat chametz, removing the leaven from our homes on the eve of Pesach. (Here's a short ritual for bedikat chametz, which also includes that poem: BedikatChametz.pdf) After we read that poem, at my seder, we sometimes go around the table and share an emotional or internal hametz which we want to relinquish as Pesach begins. Often, what I need to relinquish is my fantasy of the perfect seder -- my fantasy that I can create an experience which will sweep everyone up into ecstasy, which will wholly connect all who are present with our ancestors and our community and our God.

This yearning for seder perfection, bumping up against the inevitable realities of the world's natural imperfection, is something I've wrestled with for years. And it is, if anything, even more true now that we are parents. I want to create the perfect seder -- and I know the odds are good that at some point during the evening, our three-year-old will have an entirely age-appropriate tantrum because his usual routines are disrupted, or because we won't let him watch cartoons during the seder, or because he's overstimulated and up too late. I want to create the perfect seder -- and I know that there is no such thing; that the childhood seders I've enshrined in memory weren't perfect; that even if I could fill my table with scholars and sages who love the tradition even more than I do, the seder wouldn't achieve perfection.

Far better to learn to find the perfection in what is, instead of wishing for a kind of perfection we can never attain. The seder isn't just about doing, although there are certainly a lot of things to do in order for the evening to be complete. (The fifteen steps from kadesh to nirtzah, the songs and prayers and psalms, the food rituals of hardboiled egg and matzah ball soup...) The seder is also about being. It's a chance to experience being free. To be in the moment, to be with friends and family, to be blessed by the light of the full moon of Nisan in 5773 which will never shine again after this night. It's a chance to be joyful even when the glass breaks, or the kugel burns, or the children don't pay attention. After all the flurry of work and preparations -- cleaning, cooking, studying, readying -- it's a chance to just be.

Chag Pesach sameach to one and all. May this holiday be whatever you need it to be.


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13 Nisan: Changing


This is a story about change.
Look: the seas are parting.
It's happening now. Open your eyes.

We were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt
but God brought us out of there.
This is a story about change.

The womb which had kept us alive
became constricting.
It's happening now. Open your eyes.

It's time to forget our anxieties
and leap off the precipice.
This is a story about change.

Even God is all about change --
I Am Becoming Who I Am Becoming.
It's happening now. Open your eyes.

The moon is almost full
to light our wanderings.
This is a story about change.
It's happening now. Open your eyes.


This is not-quite-a-villanelle. (A traditional villanelle rhymes, whereas this does not.) It's inspired by villanelles, anyway, and by their use of repeated lines.

Every year we read the same seder story, and every year we experience it differently -- not because it has changed, but because we have. (The same is true of Torah which we read week by week.) In this poem, the same lines appear, but hopefully mean something slightly different each time they recur.

This post is part of #blogExodus. Follow other posts on the path to Pesach via the #blogExodus and #Exodusgram hashtags!

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12 Nisan: Redeeming

BlogExodusIn our daily liturgy, in one of the blessings surrounding the Shema, we praise God Who redeems us from Egypt, Who makes our transformation possible. That redemption from Egypt is a (arguably the) major theme of the Pesach seder.

For many of us, redemption is a difficult concept to wrap our heads around. We know what it means to redeem a coupon. But what do we mean when we say that God redeems us?

The Pesach story tells us that we were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt and that God redeemed us from slavery. That's one kind of redemption: being rescued from dire straits, from the constriction of Mitzrayim.

The name Mitzrayim stems from the root צר, which means constricted or narrow. Slavery is a form of physical and spiritual constriction. God busted us out of there, bringing us to the sometimes-terrifying wide-open-spaces of freedom, the open spaces of wilderness in which we could actively choose to enter into relationship with something greater than ourselves.

And, of course, the Pesach seder is filled with invocations of a future redemption, the redemption which will mark our entry into the messianic age when the work of perfecting creation is complete. Or the redemption which will arise when Moshiach, the messiah, walks among us bringing transformation. (Depends on how you understand "messiah," among other things. I wrote a somewhat clumsy discursus on that in 2004; really, for a better sense of my understanding of messianic time, read my 2011 poem On that day.)

The symbol of that future redemption is Elijah's Cup, the cup of juice or wine on every seder table from which, tradition says, Elijah invisibly sips at every seder in the world. Elijah is the harbinger of messianic redemption, the prophet who announces the coming of a world transformed and healed.

The seder meal bridges the redemption that happened back then, at the moment of the Exodus, and the redemption which awaits us in days to come. When we call God our Redeemer, we are affirming that God is that force which lifts us out of difficult circumstances, which helps us to become better than we were before, with Whom we partner in trying to heal the broken world.

Each of us is commanded to experience the story of the Exodus as though it had happened to us, ourselves, not to some ancient and possibly imaginary ancestors eons ago. God lifts us out of slavery and constriction every day, if we are willing and able to reach out of ourselves and yearn for more. Redemption isn't just in our distant past and in the unimaginable future. Redemption can be now.

 

For more on this: try Kolel's Reb on the Web article Redemption.


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