My brain is always going: a near-constant stream of words and thoughts, snippets of melodies, images of family, sudden flashes of Hebrew, lists of tasks I need to accomplish. In moments when I can find it, I really appreciate quiet—in Hebrew, sheket.
This morning I was awakened by a whistling noise I can’t quite identify or locate—I’ve narrowed it down to either the old radiator in my Jerusalem apartment or a bird nesting directly outside my window. Occasional traffic up and down nearby Keren HaYesod buzzed up and down the hill. My roommates, as usual, rose earlier than I, making their morning preparations. And then there were the nervous and excited conversations, sporadic because many of us are not used to rising at such an early hour, of my classmates and I as we made our way to the Kotel.
Today is Rosh Hodesh Adar, the new moon of Adar, the beginning of this Hebrew month. This morning, the Women of the Wall met, as they do every Rosh Hodesh, to pray the morning prayer and to sing the celebratory verses of Hallel, songs of praise to God.
At the Kotel, there was sheket. It was the quiet I always feel by the ancient stones—the quiet hum of history, the supplication of the prayers stuffed into the cracks, the voices of Jews of the past and the present expressed in whispers and in wails. Normally, it is a quiet, on the women’s side, only occasionally broken by the recitation of Hebrew verses, while the men’s side more regularly includes chanting and communal prayer. But when the Women of the Wall meet, their voices echo off the stones in joy, and in protest, sometimes in fear and pain, and always in praise of God.
As you can read in an Israeli news source, our group this morning included dozens of Reform women rabbis from North America, but the core of Women of the Wall is a small group of Israeli women who come here each month without the comfort of such a large, joyous crowd. Donning tallitot (prayer shawls) and bringing our own prayer books, we huddled together at the back of the women’s section of the main prayer plaza at the Western Wall. Most of our prayer happened very quietly, barely audibly, as each woman chanted the words to herself. But, sometimes, we sang aloud.
I took a deep breath in the quiet before we began each communally sung piece. We sang verses of joy and gratitude that declare God’s desire for song: God is “the one who chooses songs and hymns.” We chanted, as all Jews pray every morning, “All that has breath shall praise God.” And so we did, b’kol ram, in a loud voice—mostly loud because there were so many of us, standing there so close together on the hard Jerusalem stone, with the wall, the place where God’s Presence is said to dwell, magnifying our voices. I closed my eyes, and I felt that God was listening, rejoicing in the gratitude of the Jewish people for having reached this season, the month of Adar, a time of celebration.
“Sheket! Lo lashir!”—“Quiet! No singing!” Our voices angered some of the Orthodox men and women gathered that day to pray. And I have to admit, I remain ambivalent about that anger and about my own reaction. In the moment of praying, I felt sadness and fear, though I understand, too, that these people spoke out of the fear that women’s voices threaten their religious and spiritual reality. But the Wall is a powerful place in Judaism, and Judaism includes all Jews. How can we ensure that all Jews feel welcome expressing their relationship to Jewish history, the Jewish people, and, most crucially, to God, at this emotionally charged site? Shouting that our way of prayer is a "desecration," spitting at us, and throwing pebbles our way ensures only division.
Ultimately, I keep coming back to the words we sang: Sing to God, praise God with verse and hymns, all that has breath shall praise God. Our prayer didn’t last very long, and for the most part it happened in quiet, personal moments. But in reciting verses of praise and celebration, verses about the collective joy of the Jewish people in reaching this season, the month of Adar, in which we will celebrate the festival of Purim, a topsy-turvy day when the persecuted Jews triumph over their would-be-annihilators, it just seemed right to sing out b’kol ram.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Obama's New Era of Responsibility
A few years ago, my sister and I took a (nerdy) vacation together to Colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum that embodies the everyday existence and historical significance of Williamsburg, Virginia, during the period surrounding the American Revolution. Walking along the cobblestone streets, viewing the restored homes and public buildings, I enjoyed the educational foray into the daily lives of eighteenth century colonists. But my favorite part of the day was witnessing a speech by “Thomas Jefferson.”
Peppered with quotes from actual letters, publications, and speeches of Jefferson’s, the performance addressed the crowd as colonists and argued for rebellion against the British Crown. With sweeping rhetoric and grand ideas, “Jefferson” called for a new political union, a new country and a new government unlike any preceding it, one that required bravery and vision, audacity and hopefulness. When I clapped and cheered “Huzzah!” I did so not as an audience to a convincing performance (thought it was) but as an enthusiastic supporter of Jefferson’s call to a new kind of nationhood—a government of the people, for the people, and by the people that would require hard work, education, dedication, and sacrifice.
Standing there in Colonial Williamsburg, I thought, and not for the first time, that the United States needs to revitalize its ideal of public service. In an age of increasing individualism, an age in which everyone and his blog is “famous,” we need a call to collective responsibility as a nation. We need a reminder that the founders of our nation, though marred by their own prejudices and biases, ultimately called themselves and future generations to strive to improve the life, the liberty, and the happiness of the many, not the one.
In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama made such a call, honoring the memory and the legacy of countless Americans who “struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions, greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.” Through remarkable acts of self-sacrifice by our military personnel to the seemingly simple and too often ignored moral dedication of a parent, Americans, President Obama argued, have served their country and through it the human good through a “spirit of service, a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.”
“What is required of us now,” the President urged, “is a new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”
In Hebrew, the word for responsibility is acharayut. Its first three letters also spell achier, “other” or “one who comes after.” I like to think about this connection between responsibility and the Other—the one who is different from us, the one we think we will never understand. I like to remind myself that my responsibility—to the Jewish community, to the Jewish people, to the nation of America, and to the world—is not only to myself or even to those I love, but to future generations. In Judaism, we share countless stories, prayers, and obligations about tze’etzaeinu v’tze’etzaei tze’etzaeinu, “our descendants and our descendants’ descendants.” The new era of responsibility that President Obama wants to catalyze is one that will weather us through the crisis, hopefully in our own lifetimes, but its focus and its riches will truly reach future generations: “Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end” and that “we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.”
May we remember that our acharayut, our responsibility, is to those who come after us, the other, acheir.
Peppered with quotes from actual letters, publications, and speeches of Jefferson’s, the performance addressed the crowd as colonists and argued for rebellion against the British Crown. With sweeping rhetoric and grand ideas, “Jefferson” called for a new political union, a new country and a new government unlike any preceding it, one that required bravery and vision, audacity and hopefulness. When I clapped and cheered “Huzzah!” I did so not as an audience to a convincing performance (thought it was) but as an enthusiastic supporter of Jefferson’s call to a new kind of nationhood—a government of the people, for the people, and by the people that would require hard work, education, dedication, and sacrifice.
Standing there in Colonial Williamsburg, I thought, and not for the first time, that the United States needs to revitalize its ideal of public service. In an age of increasing individualism, an age in which everyone and his blog is “famous,” we need a call to collective responsibility as a nation. We need a reminder that the founders of our nation, though marred by their own prejudices and biases, ultimately called themselves and future generations to strive to improve the life, the liberty, and the happiness of the many, not the one.
In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama made such a call, honoring the memory and the legacy of countless Americans who “struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions, greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.” Through remarkable acts of self-sacrifice by our military personnel to the seemingly simple and too often ignored moral dedication of a parent, Americans, President Obama argued, have served their country and through it the human good through a “spirit of service, a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.”
“What is required of us now,” the President urged, “is a new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”
In Hebrew, the word for responsibility is acharayut. Its first three letters also spell achier, “other” or “one who comes after.” I like to think about this connection between responsibility and the Other—the one who is different from us, the one we think we will never understand. I like to remind myself that my responsibility—to the Jewish community, to the Jewish people, to the nation of America, and to the world—is not only to myself or even to those I love, but to future generations. In Judaism, we share countless stories, prayers, and obligations about tze’etzaeinu v’tze’etzaei tze’etzaeinu, “our descendants and our descendants’ descendants.” The new era of responsibility that President Obama wants to catalyze is one that will weather us through the crisis, hopefully in our own lifetimes, but its focus and its riches will truly reach future generations: “Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end” and that “we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.”
May we remember that our acharayut, our responsibility, is to those who come after us, the other, acheir.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Bringing Home the Bones
"Joseph adjured Israel’s children, saying 'God will surely take care of you; bring my bones up from this place!' Joseph died at the age of 110 years. They embalmed him and he was put into a coffin in Egypt." (Bereshit 50: 25-26). Thus the Book of Genesis concludes, the children of Israel—for now—prosperous and well in Egypt, the patriarch Jacob buried in the land of his fathers, and in a coffin uniquely described as an aron (like the ark that will hold the tablets of the covenant), Joseph’s bones in Egypt, waiting to be returned home.
For Jacob, home—the place that defines the core of him—begins in Luz, the spot where he dreamed of a ladder reaching from the earth into the heavens, the place he called a Beit Elohim, a house of God. On his deathbed, when Jacob hears that his beloved son Joseph has arrived, he gathers up all his strength and sits up in bed. "El Shaddai appeared to me in Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me," he says, and relates the promise God made to him (48:5). Jacob is not only giving Joseph crucial information about the covenant between God and Israel, but offering his son his own origin story. This is where I come from, Jacob excitedly reports, and this is who I am. That place, that dream, that covenant—that’s home.
Just about two weeks ago, I was happily eating shish kebab in Jerusalem with a group of Beth Elohim members. Everyone wanted to know how the first year of rabbinical school is going, what I have been learning, how I have been coping with being so far away from home. A new city, a new language, a new academic program, a new career path—of course I have felt, at times, overwhelmed and homesick. But I honestly did not realize how much I missed this place— this Beit Elohim—until I saw the familiar faces from this community, in many ways the birthplace of my Judaism, a source of my dreaming, and a familiar ground. Back here tonight, in the same room where I converted, I feel comforted, sure, but I want to ask, what do we do with this feeling of home? What do we do with our origin stories? Most of us cannot and will not (and really, if we want to grow as human beings, should not) stay in one place forever. I know this acutely as I feel, now, a tug toward Jerusalem, City of Gold, its stones and its narrow streets, the rhythm of Hebrew, the hot and crispy falafel. When we return home, what do we bring from our other experiences? When we go out into the world, how do we reveal our origins to those we encounter?
For Jacob, his burial place marks a crucial tie to home. He tells Joseph, "When I rest with my ancestors [in death], carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burial-place." Concerned that his request be carried out, Jacob ignores Joseph’s willing reply and insists, "Swear it to me!" (47:29-31). Later in the paresha, Jacob again repeats his request to be buried in Canaan to all his sons, specifically mentioning the Cave of Machpelah, the burial place of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, and Leah (49:29-31). Jacob wants the place where future generations will specially recall his memory to be a place linked to his ancestors, not the foreign soil of Egypt. And when he dies, Jacob’s sons fulfill his wish and bury him in Canaan.
But something else happens first. Having lived in Egypt for the better part of his life, Joseph—successful, important, acculturated to Pharaoh’s court—honors his father with some Egyptian customs. At the moment of his father’s death, Joseph follows his personal instincts: "Joseph threw himself upon his father and wept over him and kissed him" (50:1). Then, he has his father’s body embalmed and the whole of Egypt wept for Jacob for seventy days (50:2-3). After receiving permission to leave Egypt from Pharaoh, Joseph then journeys with his brothers to fulfill their promise to bury their father in Canaan. "When they reached Goren ha-Arad on the other side of the Jordan, they held there a great and solemn lamentation,” we read. Joseph “mourned his father for seven days" (50:10). This second period of lamentation is a shiva, a Jewish custom Joseph performs despite the long Egyptian mourning period, despite his distance from his brothers and from his father’s land and customs. When he crosses into the land of his ancestors, when he comes home, Joseph enacts his Jewish identity.
Joseph’s life in Egypt is not a life lived "on hold," simply waiting to return to the land of his fathers. Rather, Joseph thrives in Egypt, establishing a family there, engaging in a lucrative and important career, adopting Egyptian customs, learning the local language. He retains his personal character and instincts—crying at his father’s bedside, weeping just before he finally reveals his identity to his brothers—but also incorporates lessons learned from his Egyptian peers and colleagues. Ultimately, when he returns to his origins, he realizes that he retains, too, Jewish values—sitting shiva for his father. And it is by the names of Joseph’s Egyptian-born sons that Jews bless our children on Erev Shabbat: ישמך אלוהים כאפרים וכמנשה, Yismcha elohim k’efraim u-k’menasheh "May God make you like Ephraim and like Menasheh."
It is important to value our homes, our places of origin. But it is crucial, too, to retain all the parts of ourselves as we move from place to place, from experience to experience. Joseph brings his personal character, his Egyptian ways, and his Jewish heritage with him around the ancient world. Returning to Beth Elohim, I hope I have brought with me a bit of Jerusalem: the complicated political balance, the Jewish rhythm of the days, the richness of the Hebrew language.
In Jerusalem, it’s been easy for me to have a "traditional" and personally fulfilling Shabbat. Stores close on Friday afternoon, forcing me to prepare early. My Friday ritual usually involves frantically completing my homework in the morning hours, cleaning my house, preparing a meal to share with friends later, and finally, dressing up before heading to shul. I have rarely spent a Shabbat in Jerusalem where I wasn’t surrounded by friends, eating challah, drinking wine, and putting aside the worries of the week. The rhythm of Saturday in Jerusalem is calm and quiet and slow. There are few cars on the streets. There are families picnicking in the parks. In Brooklyn, making Shabbat becomes more of a choice. The rhythm of the secular world continues here in a way that it doesn’t in Jerusalem. I don’t want to change Brooklyn into Jerusalem. But I think it’s important, like Joseph’s preserving his Jewishness even in Egypt, to carry back to Brooklyn the crucial values of a Jerusalem shabbas.
Even just last year, my Shabbat only began when Cantor Leuchter began a nigun. Holding on to the cares of the week until the absolute last moment, I was carried into Shabbat. Rather than actively welcoming, through my own preparations, I was almost surprised by this weekly opportunity to rest. Our Shabbat observance at Beth Elohim has changed over the 4 years that I’ve been a member of this community, from including more of the psalms for kabbalat Shabbat, incorporating new melodies, and changing the Friday night service time. We have been seeking ways both to make Shabbat more personally meaningful and also to remain firmly rooted in Jewish tradition. For how many of us does Shabbat only begin in this room? Learning from my Shabbat preparation ritual, a personally new tradition that I have adopted in Jerusalem, I want to encourage each of us to consider how we make Shabbat. What tasks and concerns do we leave aside? What family traditions have we preserved or should we establish? When Shabbat truly means a rest from all labor, one is forced to pay closer attention to the moments before its arrival— after all, it’s impossible to pick something up at the Jerusalem equivalent of Union Market on Saturday afternoon. When Shabbat truly differs from the rest of the week, we welcome the Shabbat bride, not only into our synagogue, but into our homes. For me, home is now both Jerusalem and Park Slope. Home is singing in a community on erev Shabbat and hurrying to complete the mundane tasks on Friday mornings. I will strive to live my Brooklyn self in Jerusalem and my Jerusalem self in Brooklyn.
This week’s paresha, ויחי, deals mostly with death, but it begins "and he lived." Let this serve as a reminder that we ought to truly live in the places we find ourselves, carrying with us always the bones of our ancestors, the places we call home, the customs that link us to Jewish tradition, and the stories that reveal who we truly are.
For Jacob, home—the place that defines the core of him—begins in Luz, the spot where he dreamed of a ladder reaching from the earth into the heavens, the place he called a Beit Elohim, a house of God. On his deathbed, when Jacob hears that his beloved son Joseph has arrived, he gathers up all his strength and sits up in bed. "El Shaddai appeared to me in Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me," he says, and relates the promise God made to him (48:5). Jacob is not only giving Joseph crucial information about the covenant between God and Israel, but offering his son his own origin story. This is where I come from, Jacob excitedly reports, and this is who I am. That place, that dream, that covenant—that’s home.
Just about two weeks ago, I was happily eating shish kebab in Jerusalem with a group of Beth Elohim members. Everyone wanted to know how the first year of rabbinical school is going, what I have been learning, how I have been coping with being so far away from home. A new city, a new language, a new academic program, a new career path—of course I have felt, at times, overwhelmed and homesick. But I honestly did not realize how much I missed this place— this Beit Elohim—until I saw the familiar faces from this community, in many ways the birthplace of my Judaism, a source of my dreaming, and a familiar ground. Back here tonight, in the same room where I converted, I feel comforted, sure, but I want to ask, what do we do with this feeling of home? What do we do with our origin stories? Most of us cannot and will not (and really, if we want to grow as human beings, should not) stay in one place forever. I know this acutely as I feel, now, a tug toward Jerusalem, City of Gold, its stones and its narrow streets, the rhythm of Hebrew, the hot and crispy falafel. When we return home, what do we bring from our other experiences? When we go out into the world, how do we reveal our origins to those we encounter?
For Jacob, his burial place marks a crucial tie to home. He tells Joseph, "When I rest with my ancestors [in death], carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burial-place." Concerned that his request be carried out, Jacob ignores Joseph’s willing reply and insists, "Swear it to me!" (47:29-31). Later in the paresha, Jacob again repeats his request to be buried in Canaan to all his sons, specifically mentioning the Cave of Machpelah, the burial place of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, and Leah (49:29-31). Jacob wants the place where future generations will specially recall his memory to be a place linked to his ancestors, not the foreign soil of Egypt. And when he dies, Jacob’s sons fulfill his wish and bury him in Canaan.
But something else happens first. Having lived in Egypt for the better part of his life, Joseph—successful, important, acculturated to Pharaoh’s court—honors his father with some Egyptian customs. At the moment of his father’s death, Joseph follows his personal instincts: "Joseph threw himself upon his father and wept over him and kissed him" (50:1). Then, he has his father’s body embalmed and the whole of Egypt wept for Jacob for seventy days (50:2-3). After receiving permission to leave Egypt from Pharaoh, Joseph then journeys with his brothers to fulfill their promise to bury their father in Canaan. "When they reached Goren ha-Arad on the other side of the Jordan, they held there a great and solemn lamentation,” we read. Joseph “mourned his father for seven days" (50:10). This second period of lamentation is a shiva, a Jewish custom Joseph performs despite the long Egyptian mourning period, despite his distance from his brothers and from his father’s land and customs. When he crosses into the land of his ancestors, when he comes home, Joseph enacts his Jewish identity.
Joseph’s life in Egypt is not a life lived "on hold," simply waiting to return to the land of his fathers. Rather, Joseph thrives in Egypt, establishing a family there, engaging in a lucrative and important career, adopting Egyptian customs, learning the local language. He retains his personal character and instincts—crying at his father’s bedside, weeping just before he finally reveals his identity to his brothers—but also incorporates lessons learned from his Egyptian peers and colleagues. Ultimately, when he returns to his origins, he realizes that he retains, too, Jewish values—sitting shiva for his father. And it is by the names of Joseph’s Egyptian-born sons that Jews bless our children on Erev Shabbat: ישמך אלוהים כאפרים וכמנשה, Yismcha elohim k’efraim u-k’menasheh "May God make you like Ephraim and like Menasheh."
It is important to value our homes, our places of origin. But it is crucial, too, to retain all the parts of ourselves as we move from place to place, from experience to experience. Joseph brings his personal character, his Egyptian ways, and his Jewish heritage with him around the ancient world. Returning to Beth Elohim, I hope I have brought with me a bit of Jerusalem: the complicated political balance, the Jewish rhythm of the days, the richness of the Hebrew language.
In Jerusalem, it’s been easy for me to have a "traditional" and personally fulfilling Shabbat. Stores close on Friday afternoon, forcing me to prepare early. My Friday ritual usually involves frantically completing my homework in the morning hours, cleaning my house, preparing a meal to share with friends later, and finally, dressing up before heading to shul. I have rarely spent a Shabbat in Jerusalem where I wasn’t surrounded by friends, eating challah, drinking wine, and putting aside the worries of the week. The rhythm of Saturday in Jerusalem is calm and quiet and slow. There are few cars on the streets. There are families picnicking in the parks. In Brooklyn, making Shabbat becomes more of a choice. The rhythm of the secular world continues here in a way that it doesn’t in Jerusalem. I don’t want to change Brooklyn into Jerusalem. But I think it’s important, like Joseph’s preserving his Jewishness even in Egypt, to carry back to Brooklyn the crucial values of a Jerusalem shabbas.
Even just last year, my Shabbat only began when Cantor Leuchter began a nigun. Holding on to the cares of the week until the absolute last moment, I was carried into Shabbat. Rather than actively welcoming, through my own preparations, I was almost surprised by this weekly opportunity to rest. Our Shabbat observance at Beth Elohim has changed over the 4 years that I’ve been a member of this community, from including more of the psalms for kabbalat Shabbat, incorporating new melodies, and changing the Friday night service time. We have been seeking ways both to make Shabbat more personally meaningful and also to remain firmly rooted in Jewish tradition. For how many of us does Shabbat only begin in this room? Learning from my Shabbat preparation ritual, a personally new tradition that I have adopted in Jerusalem, I want to encourage each of us to consider how we make Shabbat. What tasks and concerns do we leave aside? What family traditions have we preserved or should we establish? When Shabbat truly means a rest from all labor, one is forced to pay closer attention to the moments before its arrival— after all, it’s impossible to pick something up at the Jerusalem equivalent of Union Market on Saturday afternoon. When Shabbat truly differs from the rest of the week, we welcome the Shabbat bride, not only into our synagogue, but into our homes. For me, home is now both Jerusalem and Park Slope. Home is singing in a community on erev Shabbat and hurrying to complete the mundane tasks on Friday mornings. I will strive to live my Brooklyn self in Jerusalem and my Jerusalem self in Brooklyn.
This week’s paresha, ויחי, deals mostly with death, but it begins "and he lived." Let this serve as a reminder that we ought to truly live in the places we find ourselves, carrying with us always the bones of our ancestors, the places we call home, the customs that link us to Jewish tradition, and the stories that reveal who we truly are.
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