When a Tree Falls

On August ninth, a big oak tree fell on my house. It destroyed the kitchen, garage, laundry room, and a storage room, and damaged three other rooms. 

the ceiling's on the floor...
with a lot of other stuff

We were out of town at the time, which was both good and bad. The cat sitter alerted us first. The cats were fine, and taken by dear friends and neighbors to safe temporary homes. The same friends and neighbors moved things (books, art, musical instruments), without ever being asked, out of danger from further water damage.  The house was uninhabitable, but other friends immediately took us in when we returned (earlier than planned!) to Jackson. Four of us, plus one of the cats. 

We rent, so we decided to find a new place and move once instead of twice.  

We signed a new lease one week after the tree fell, but we couldn't move in right away, so the girls set out for their first day of school from our temporary home. We had stayed eleven nights by the time we moved out. Some of our stuff is still there (we've got just about everything out of our treed home), and Jeannie, co-owner and permanent resident of our temporary home, has given me an open invitation to use their laundry room anytime (we don't yet have a washer/dryer at our new place). This is a woman with a full-time professional job, a toddler and an infant, and a husband who works long hours as an elementary school principal. I am in awe.

Times like these help put things in perspective. They show the true value of community and friendship. We see this from the outside whenever disaster hits anywhere—from Katrina nine years ago to the recent earthquake in California. Experiencing it from the inside brings this awareness to a whole new level, with regard to both the hardship of displacement and the holiness of human connections. 

As we journey through these last weeks before the high holy days, I am reading Isaiah's consoling words in an entirely new light: 

I, I am the one who comforts you!

...Arise, shake off the dust,

Sit [on your throne], Jerusalem!

When life knocks us down, our faith and our friends will lift us back up, if we let them. So it is for me and my family, and we have all witnessed others (or perhaps you're one) who recovered spectacularly from much greater calamities than mine. We are all children of God, and our thrones await the time when we feel ready to resume our rightful places. May that time be coming soon.

Thank you to all who have helped, in whatever way, even if it has been as simple as keeping my family in your prayers. You have kept us afloat, body and spirit, in a time of crisis. I am so grateful for our blessings.

The final hours of Av are upon us. Here's to a safe, dry, and holy month of Elul.

Another Time, Another Place

"Shabbat Cotton." Photo by Bill Aron.Courtesy Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of 

Southern Jewish Life. Do not reprint without permission.

Another place: not here, but here, I've finally posted something new, as a guest blogger for RavBlog: Reform Rabbis Speak.

Another time: it's a memory from fourteen years ago, containing within it memories from fifty and sixty years ago.

And yet, it's a story set in this place where I live now, and it's part of what has made me, in time, the person I am today.

Funny stuff, time and place.

Why I Am Shaving My Head

In honor memory of Sam Sommer, Shmuel Asher Uzziel ben haRav Michael Aharon v’haRav Pesach Esther, 8 November 2005-14 December 2013

Monday, December 16, 2013

Sammy’s parents, Phyllis and Michael, were my classmates all the way through rabbinic school, from our first day in Jerusalem to ordination day in Cincinnati. Michael and I met during our interview process on the HUC-JIR campus in Cincinnati. I remember Michael cracking jokes as we chatted nervously before our Hebrew language exam. That was a long time ago. Phyllis was one of the very first people from our class whom I met after arriving in Israel; she was certainly the first to invite me to her home for Shabbat dinner. I can still recall that Shabbat gathering vividly—most of our class was there, and friendships begun that night I cherish to this day.

Phyllis’s gift for convening people into meaningful community was evident from that first encounter. She’s been bringing people together ever since. It’s part of who she is, as a rabbi and a parent and a human being. Because we were classmates, and because she is a generous and virtuosic blogger, and because a handful of times over the years we have seen one another or spoken by phone, I’ve been able to learn a great deal from Phyllis: as a rabbi, a parent, and a human being.

When Sammy was born, I was pregnant with my first child. I’ve watched Phyllis's kids grow up next to mine through the stories and pictures she’s shared online. When Sammy’s cancer was diagnosed, I felt a cold shadow of what it would be like to hear that news about a child of my own. Because it could just as easily be my child, or yours, if you have one. Every day it isn’t my child is a blessing for which I give thanks, but I’m done with gambling.

It’s time to find a cure. For Sammy, who is gone and has left us breathless and broken, and for Phyllis and Michael and Sammy’s siblings and their whole family. For the college acquaintances and neighbors and friends and millions of people I’ll never know whose children have died of cancer, for the people I have known without knowing they’d lost a child to cancer. Yes, for all those, but also for me, and for my child and my parents, and for you, and for all the children and parents now living and still waiting to be born.

Save a life, and you save an entire world. We lost the world this Shabbat, Sammy. Let’s try not to do that again.  

Like the Nazirite offering her hair at the end of her vow, like the captive foreign women who must shave their heads before joining the Jewish community, so I after learning that Sammy’s cancer was incurable, and now upon his death, will make a new start, in a world I would not have chosen, a world without Sammy, a world in which I can no longer pretend that childhood cancer has no dominion over me and my loved ones. That is why I’m shaving my head, and that’s why I’m asking everyone I know to support this cause. The first miracle I was praying for is lost. The next is still within our reach.

Learn more, and donate, at http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/mypage/660886/2014

Hanukkah in Egypt

Standing on the parted shores of history

we still believe…

that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt

that there is a better place, a promised land;

that the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness.

That there is no way to get from here to there

except by joining hands, marching

together.

—from Mishkan T’filah: A Reform Siddur

It has been a tough couple of weeks at my house.

First, on November 13th, four days after his eighth birthday, Samuel “Superman Sam” Sommer’s family, and the world, received the devastating news that his leukemia had returned, and that it is incurable. The little boy who inspired our Yom Kippur bone marrow donor drive, son of my friends and colleagues Rabbis Phyllis and Michael Sommer, is dying.

Then, early on November 17th, our cousin’s 20-year-old daughter was killed in a traffic accident. We heard this stunningly bad news on the 18th. As I write this, I am returning with Alec and our girls from Anna’s funeral in Illinois. Our hearts have broken. Just like every minute of every day, somewhere, someone’s hopes are destroyed, someone’s heart is broken.

If I weren’t already committed to an awareness of life’s uncertainty and fragility, and therefore to a life lived in faith, I would be now. The God I believe in neither causes car wrecks nor allows them to happen; my God does not determine who gets cancer and who survives. But I do believe, as a wise layperson once reminded me, that “God provides”; I would only add, “for those who have faith.” Call it God, the universe, or one’s own best judgment: whatever we feel is guiding our steps, we can only trust in it and walk bravely into the future—or risk paralysis by pain, fear, and doubt. Life is fragile, but resilient. It stubbornly persists wherever it can, though separated from death, its own destruction, by nothing more than a hair’s breadth. Somehow, Anna’s sister and her parents will go on. Sammy’s family will go on, and Sammy too, as far as he can. We all will.

With the gathering darkness heading into midwinter, we increase our Hanukkah lights each night. We acknowledge our reality, yet we neither despair nor surrender. We pray for miracles. In nature, light and life will return. It will catch us by surprise, and bless us.

Until then, the only thing any of us can do is to join hands, marching together, trusting that we will somehow get from here to our better place. Though it so often turns out not to be where, or what, we expected.

Thanksgivukkah: What Makes This Night Different From All Other Nights?

 In case you’ve tuned out Facebook, Stephen Colbert, and all the Jewish and mainstream press for the last six months and so hadn’t heard: the first day of Hanukkah falls on Thanksgiving this year. Jewish entrepreneurs are printing t-shirts and crafting turkey shaped Hanukkah menorahs (“Menurkeys”). Bloggers and publicists alike are creating new names for this phenomenon: Thanksgivukkah. Thanukkah. Hanukkagiving. That’s because…

…This is a highly unusual phenomenon. Depending on who you ask and how carefully you read, Thanksgiving coinciding with the first day of Hanukkah is a once-in-eternity occurrence; or it will happen again, but not for over 70,000years; or it hasn’t happened for about 125 years and won’t happen again foranother 150 years.

By the way, if you’re thinking, “Wait! The first day of Hanukkah on Thanksgiving means we’ll light the first candle the night before Thanksgiving,” you’re right. According to Jewish practice, days begin at sunset, so we’ll light the first candle Wednesday evening as we begin prepping all the make-ahead parts of the Thanksgivukkah feast, or shlepping to our out-of-state destinations, and the second candle on Thursday night, over the ravaged remains of the fried turkey—or tofurkey, or turkey latkes, or whatever.

And that’s before we expand the calendrical search to years when the first night of Hanukkah falls on Thanksgiving (placing the first day of Hanukkah on the Friday after Thanksgiving, a somewhat more frequent occurrence).  In any case, it’s still a highly unusual phenomenon, and kind of cool.

What’s most interesting to me, though, is the way in which this overlap is highlighting some common themes that run through the two holidays—and always have (always since the invention of Thanksgiving, anyway)—whether or not they overlap.

Hanukkah is a holiday that celebrates survival, and religious freedom. Say what we will about the Puritan Pilgrims and their behavior toward the Native Americans, we cannot deny that they sought and found religious freedom in the New World, nor that, notwithstanding a few setbacks along the way, the nation their descendants, and others, later founded has been a place of unparalleled religious freedoms for Jews.

And then there’s this business of giving: giving thanks, giving gifts.  Thanukkah, Hanukkah: we don’t need our festival to coincide with Thanksgiving to make these connections.

“Hanukkah,” after all, is the Hebrew word for “dedication,” as in the re-dedication of the Temple after its desecration by the Syrian-Greeks in the 2nd century B.C.E., and that re-dedication, after years of punishing occupation and war, would have required the mustering of every gift at the Jewish people’s disposal. How thankful do we imagine our ancient ancestors felt on this occasion?

The giving of Hanukkah gelt, a Yiddish term for “coins” or “money,” especially to children, is a tradition whose origins are lost to history. Some say it’s related to the Hasmoneans’ newly won right to strike their own national coins following their victory. Others trace it back to the Talmudic dictum that every Jewish household must light Hanukkah candles all eight nights, even if they must take up a collection in order to do so. And so on. Today we enjoy foil-wrapped chocolate “gelt” on Hanukkah, and many families have made it a Hanukkah custom to give tzedakah, sometimes to a different recipient for each of the eight nights.

On Hanukkah, we give thanks for our survival (so far!) as a people and a tradition in the face of repeated attempts to destroy us and our faith. We give thanks for the prosperity and freedom we enjoy today. We give, as much as we can, to those less fortunate than ourselves. Not just this year, when Hanukkah falls on Thanksgiving, but every year.

Happy Hanukkah. And pass the cranberry chutney. (Try it on the latkes. Trust me.)

Songs of Love, Fields of Cotton

Cotton Harvest, by Kimberly Vardeman, via Wikimedia Commons

[First published in the October edition of the Hebrew Union Congregation Temple Topics (our monthly newsletter): seasonal images, a favorite poem, repairing the world with a little self-love.]

It is so unusual to find ourselves at the beginning of October and already the whole cycle of fall holidays behind us—not only Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but Sukkot and Simchat Torah as well. It’s all gone by so quickly, I can’t help the feeling that I’m still processing all the ideas and spiritual work of the season.

Or perhaps this is no different than any year—the High Holy Days are supposed to inspire us to carry these elevated patterns of thought and action into all the days and months that follow, as best we can. When “the gates close” on another Yom Kippur, we remember, in words found elsewhere in our liturgy: the gates of repentance are never closed. Not only may we continue the next morning in our quest to know ourselves better, to turn a better aspect of ourselves toward the world; we must. The next morning, and every morning after that.

Yet, so often, we fail. We forget. We grow complacent. That’s why we need Yom Kippur, the great Day of Atonement, though God and the universe stand open to our efforts at repentance and repair in every moment.

Perhaps after so many years of associating the onset of the holidays with the cotton harvest, the snowy white softness spilling over the edges of everything, lining the roads, collecting in corners of buildings, even insinuating its way indoors, stowing away on the soles of our shoes—we can’t help now but take note of our own souls, straying already from our Holy Days’ intentions, like so many scraps of cotton fiber caught on the breeze.

Perhaps we should collect a few scraps of cotton this year, keep them by us as a reminder, like the notes we are supposed to carry always in our two pockets: “I am but dust and ashes” at one hand, and “The world was created for my sake” on the other.

The cotton does this for us, like a song from the earth.

I offer you here another song, a poem, to carry you through the end of this year’s harvest and beyond:

Love After Love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

by Derek Walcott

*****

The seeds of goodness you were born with are still there. Remove the hard shell you have allowed life’s hardships to deposit upon you. Search out what’s beneath. “Take down the love letters,” and read them again.

Keep at it.

Dig deep.

Find that lovely, true self; “peel your own image from the mirror” of your true soul, and hold it fast. It is you.

Fall in love with yourself again, as Mr. Walcott suggests. Now allow that love and compassion to overflow the banks of yourself, to embrace the entire world.

Preparing for Passover, the Spiritual Edition

courtesy of Stephen Ticehurst

Look up “preparing for Passover” on your favorite internet search engine, and you’ll find lots of advice. Cleaning, shopping, cooking, even napping gets its due. But it takes some digging down to find any reference to what I’d suggest is the most important aspect of Passover preparation: attending to the needs of the spirit.

Just as we have a period of preparation leading to the High Holy Days in the fall, it is appropriate that we spend some time getting ready for our spring festivals: Passover and, seven weeks later, Shavuot, are the “high holy days” of the second half of the Jewish year. We are now about as far as we can get in the calendar from Yom Kippur and the spiritual reckoning that comes with it; after the release and ribaldry of Purim, it is time to reset our internal compass, to focus once again on questions of ultimate importance.  Spring cleaning isn’t only for the insides of our homes; stripping away the hametz, the leavening or puffiness, of our spirits brings its own considerable rewards.

Passover recounts the ancient tale of our people’s redemption from slavery in Egypt; our re-enactment of this tale each year in the form of the Passover Seder makes this the annual season of our redemption, too.  Mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt, also means “narrow places.” From what mitzrayim do we wish to free ourselves, and others? What changes must we make in order to get from here, to there?

This year, I thought it might facilitate the journey to create a course of study or meditation in the three weeks or so leading up to Passover. (I was directly inspired in this by my friend and colleague Rabbi Michael Holzman, spiritual leader of Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, who for the last few years has developed a similar practice during the month of Elul, leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.) I shared this guide with my congregants in Mississippi and Colorado earlier this week, and now I share it with you. During these final days of Adar and as we enter the holy month of Nisan, as the moon wanes and then waxes again to its Passover fullness, I invite you to join me in engaging with and reflecting on words of wisdom from Torah and our sages, both ancient and contemporary. 

Here is one to start on, from Rabbi Kerry Olitzky’s Preparing Your Heart for Passover:

The rabbis suggest that … leaven [the stuff that makes bread rise, the stuff we don’t eat during Passover] transcends the physical world. This leaven, this hametz, also symbolizes a puffiness of self, an inflated personality, an egocentricity that threatens to eclipse the essential personality of the individual. Ironically, it is what prevents the individual from rising spiritually and moving closer to holiness. Thus, what hametz effectively does in the material world is exactly what it precludes in the realm of the spirit. That’s why it has to be removed. Rabbi Arthur Waskow calls this kind of hametz the “swollen sourness in our lives.”

And a few questions to send you on your way:  Where is the hametz, the “swollen sourness” in your spiritual life? Why might hametz, which causes bread to rise, cause the spirit to shrink away from holiness and God? How might you begin to search out this metaphysical hametz of the spirit? 

Masks and Miracles

Women of the Wall celebrating Rosh Hodesh Adar.
By Tal King Photographer

Purim's over, but not for my friends at Temple Or Hadash in Fort Collins, Colorado, where it has been rescheduled for this coming Sunday, due to snow. So even as my thoughts turn to Passover, I'm still not quite finished with Purim. I first shared a version of these thoughts this past Shabbat at Hebrew Union Congregation in Greenville, Mississippi. 

Purim is the festival on which we celebrate the power and the pleasure of masks and unmasking. We play with fixing and unfixing our identities in order to figure out, at the deepest level, who and what we are, what we stand for, where we will bend and where we draw the line.

In the story we tell about this raucous, playful day, Esther and Mordecai are willing to compromise away much of Esther’s Jewish identity—external observances, certainly any public statements of faith or affinity—in order to secure her position as Queen of Persia. But we see Mordecai literally standing up for his faith in his refusal to bow to Haman (Jews are forbidden to bow not to other people as a sign of respect but rather to other gods; Jewish tradition suggests that perhaps Haman presented himself as a demigod, much as Egyptian pharaohs were considered to be part divine). And of course the climax of our tale comes when Esther finds the courage to “out” herself as a Jew to King Ahashverosh under perilous circumstances—for should the King find her uninvited presence in his throne room irksome (much less her surprising revelation), it could cost Esther her life!

Indeed, there would be no Megillat Esther (scroll of Esther) at all had Queen Vashti not spurned the King’s request that she provide lewd entertainment for his drunken guests. In this story, every major character save Haman appears to have his or her breaking point, beyond which principle outweighs material self-interest.

How appropriate (if ironic), then, that the story of Jewish women getting arrested at the Kotel for the crime of wearing tallit and praying aloud has resurfaced with new vigor in this season of Purim. Jewish women, practicing their faith as God calls them to, are once again being detained, fingerprinted, and charged with criminal activities by the Jewish government of Israel.

Israel, as we know, has its share of problems. And far be it from me to present any of you with a reason not to love Israel with all your heart, as I do—after all, we love our families, with all their problems. To be honest, it would be far too easy to take from this story a depressing lesson about sinat hinam—senseless hatred—among Jews. This is most definitely not why I’m sharing this story with you today.

Rather, I share it now because this week I read two pieces about the arrests of women at the wall that, explicitly or implicitly, connect these events with Purim in an instructive way, and offer inspiration as we, members of the gorgeously diverse tapestry that is the Jewish people, travel this rocky and even fractious road toward identity, self-determination, and ultimately, we pray (as we will celebrate one month from now with the festival of Pesach, Passover), to redemption.

First, on Wednesday, I encountered JordanaHorn’s Kveller post, “What’s Truly Holy About the Western Wall?” She had me from the first line, but she really caught me with her last paragraph:

On Friday night, let’s light the candles and think about that which is truly holy: the people of Israel, surviving years of persecution and praying according to different customs and traditions, but praying with devotion and love to the same God. I believe in a God who expects more from us.

Yes, let’s, I thought. For what is Purim if not a celebration of Jewish survival in exile, Jewish survival as a value above the letter of the law, and certainly above sectarianism.  As Horn points out, the stones of the Kotel are not holy. They are made holy by people, who have gathered near them over the millennia in service of “the same God.” And people are holy, not inherently, not all the time, but when we see and honor what connects us above what divides us. Take off the “masks”—the shifting externals of religious garb and ritual practice—and we just might (we might!) recognize in one another—feminists and traditionalists, progressive Jews and fundamentalists—a common love for justice and peace, and a desire for the wholeness and healing of all God’s creatures, and all of God’s creation. 

Perhaps it was some variety of this recognition that led Esther and Ahashverosh to their celebrated deeds, their respectively brave and compassionate choices that saved the Jewish people. Persian or Jew, we all seek out love, loyalty, and dignity. (Who knows? Perhaps even Ahashverosh found some dignity in the end!) And another lesson: perhaps only by shedding our pride—even, temporarily at least, letting go of dignity—by immersing ourselves in the masquerade of Purim, say, or by opening ourselves up to police detainment for the sake of our beliefs, only then can we see clearly what is worth fighting for and what isn’t, what is a mask, and what is holy, an integral, permanent and good part of ourselves.

On Thursday I saw another piece, this time at the Jerusalem Post online, written by a very young, impressively wise and articulate woman who was among those detained at the Kotel two weeks ago on Rosh Hodesh Adar. As a condition of her release, she was required to sign an agreement to stay away from the Kotel for 15 days, which would mean she could not join her sisters in reading Megilat Esther there, as they had planned. The author compared her plight to that of both Vashti and Esther, who refused to bow to conventional wisdom, to quietly settle for what was most personally expedient. Just as both Vashti and Esther resisted oppressive decrees, this young woman found the courage to return to the police station where she had been detained and request an exemption for Purim, to hear the megillah read by and with her sisters at the Kotel. “Miraculously,” she writes, “the police…granted it!”

As we celebrate Purim this year, let us think not only of the Women of the Wall, but of all people around the world, of every race, religion, and nation, who seek the strength and courage to strip away the masks—of fear, docility, prejudice—that lead to suffering and oppression. Let us celebrate the potential for holiness that connects all people. Let us celebrate our freedom to hear and recite the Megillah, the story of our deliverance from destruction. Let us celebrate together. Beneath the masks, we have so much in common.

For another Purim reflection on the Women of the Wall, which I read after I wrote this, check out Rabbi Leah R. Berkowitz's sermon from this past Shabbat at her wonderful blog, This is What a Rabbi Looks Like.

Healing and Hope after Sandy Hook?

This letter, written for the congregation I serve part-time in Colorado, says just about everything I have to say right now about last Friday's school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Dear Friends,

Over the weekend, still raw with anger and sadness at recent events, surrounded by the children of our congregation who had come to celebrate Shabbat and Hanukkah with us, we acknowledged briefly, and in general terms, our own pain and confusion. We said prayers for the healing of those families so senselessly made victims in the all-too-human disaster that unfolded Friday in Newtown, Connecticut. We expressed our hopes that the light of the Hanukkah candles, so incongruous with the mood of the day, might inspire us to act, to build a world worthy of the joy they represent.

On Sunday we devoted our weekly adult chat to the question we must all ask at times like this, “where was God?” It was an hour full of emotion. Still the confusion. So many questions, so many different faces of God, hiding from and seeking us; so few real answers.

Now a few days have passed. I have returned home, had the opportunity to fold my own children into my arms with gratitude and relief (relief that once again, this time, by chance, my family had literally dodged the bullets). So many colleagues, friends, and strangers have helped me, in the interim, to process my grief and outrage at this latest national tragedy. Through eloquent prayer, activism, Torah, personal narratives (I was particularly moved by this and this),  and professional opinions, I have slowly begun to piece together my own response, my own answer to the question of where is God, and a sense of what I believe we all must do next.

Through all of this my thoughts were heavily informed by the words of Rabbi Jonathan Blake of Westchester Reform Temple , who has characterized the Newtown massacre as “this most recent image of a world desperately in need of hope and healing.”

I carry Rabbi Blake’s phrase with me everywhere, now.

It lingers in the back of my mind as I read the opinions of those who would direct their anger primarily at Friday’s gunman. A former classmate, whom I love and respect, invokes Jewish custom to support his belief that Adam Lanza, in the company of  “Haman, Hitler, and the like,” should “rot namelessly and unlamented.” I cannot agree.

I do understand the problem with potential copycat murderers witnessing the excessive, obsessive news coverage that in their minds glorifies the perpetrator, and thus the impulse to quiet some of the noise now flooding our global communications networks. I would argue, however, that the young man wielding the guns on Friday was no Haman, no Hitler, no powerful despot with a heart full of calculated hatred and a carefully constructed plan.

He was, rather, a deeply troubled, lonely, misfit child, making desperate and chaotic choices; moreover, a child of God. Without dismissing the notion of personal responsibility, which with the death of the gunman became a moot point in this case, I think it is possible, and perhaps even desirable, to see Adam Lanza as himself a product of “a world desperately in need of hope and healing,” as Rabbi Blake has given it to us. To dismiss this aspect of the truth is to dismiss our hopes of learning from the travesty of life and humanity we have witnessed. If we cannot see that it is the world that needs healing, the way things work in the world, the way we, as a society, have structured our world, I fear there will be no healing.

On Sunday morning one of you asked whether I thought the events at Sandy Hook were evil. I didn’t have a good answer then. I saw there the results of evil, yes, but what was its source? We live in a country where it is easier to acquire military-grade weapons and ammunition—legally!—than it is to adopt a stray dog, or get a driver license. We live in a country that has shuttered its psychiatric hospitals, slashed funding for public mental health care, and left parents and other caregivers without resources to help those children and adults who struggle with diagnosed or undiagnosed pathological brain chemistry. As a result, the population of mentally ill prison inmates has skyrocketed in recent years, and prisons have become the largest providers of mental health care—such as it is—in this country. This, my friends, is the source of the evil we witnessed on Friday, an evil to which we are all party.

Sensible gun control, adequate mental health care, these are things we can change, and only when we do change these things, will our world receive some of the hope and healing it so desperately needs. In the meantime, I for one do not wish the personal wounds we feel at the carnage we’ve witnessed to heal up too soon.  Forgive me if this seems callous, but the pain we feel now pales in the face of 26 bereaved Connecticut families’ pain. It pales in the face of the pain we will feel when this happens again, the pain we will feel if, God-forbid, it happens again but in our town; in our school or shopping mall or movie theater; in our family. There will be time enough for us to heal from the pain we feel now after we have allowed it to goad us into doing something to promote the healing of our world.

Hope, on the other hand, we’ve got in spades: the hope symbolized by the Hanukkah lights, a light which we must in turn bring into the world; the hope that our democratic institutions may function the way they are intended to if enough of us become unhappy enough about these wounds, our wounds, to speak up and make our voices heard where it will make a difference.  The hope that we can, as President Obama said on Sunday night, do better. My friends, hold onto this hope. And let us act together to make this hope real.

And where was God on Friday morning? God was in the teachers and administrators who gave their lives to protect their schoolchildren. God was in the activists who have for years fought to heal the ills that allow our society to suffer such mass killings so regularly. And God was in the heart of every survivor in Newtown, and in every one of us, who looked on, weeping. God was weeping for what we have not yet done, and God is in us now, spurring us to do everything we can do to heal our world.

This is a conversation we will continue as a community. In the meantime, here’s what you can do:

• Sign the Sandy Hook Elementary School National Sympathy Card
• Sign this petition for people of faith calling for an assault weapons ban and background checks
• Call or write to President Obama
• Call or write to your federal and state representatives
• Visit the National Alliancefor Mental Illness to learn more about how to advocate for better public mental health care

Please let me know what I've left out.

Together, we can make the world better. As Rabbi Tarfon said, It is not up to us to finish the task, but neither are we free to desist from it.

With prayers for strength and the light of dedication (hanukkah) to sacred causes,

Rabbi Debra Kassoff

#BlogElul: A Little Faith

Recently, I was talking with a congregant about a project that she had been working on, long and hard, for months. She had decided on a course of action that might lead to the best possible conclusion of her project, but that also could, just as easily, lead to the undoing of all the effort she had put in. I pointed this out, suggesting that by following this course of action she might find herself quickly back at square one.  I will never forget her reply.

"Oh, but Rabbi," she exclaimed, "I believe God provides! Don't you?"

Instantly, I felt both humbled and grateful for this impromptu lesson in faith. My personal theology does not ever lead me to make statements such as, "I believe God provides." But it does require me to remember, every once in a while, that some things are beyond our control, and that we need to have a little faith that somehow things will work themselves out in the end; that releasing our death-grip on life and giving over a little responsibility to God, or the animating energy of the universe, or whatever (or whomever) it is that you credit for all the world's unsolved mysteries, we will eventually find our way to some meaningful coincidence of events.

I haven't seen the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, but I have heard enough about it to have adopted what is arguably its most famous line:  “Everything will be alright in the end… if it’s not alright then it’s not yet the end.” I have always believed this strongly: somehow, things will work out. We may not love how things work out, we may not have chosen the way things end up working out, but one way or another, we will be alright. We will find our way, our plan B, our new normal. So why not relax, once in a while, into the arms of this...faith?

A friend of mine once told me that when her small granddaughter would cry, whether from a scraped knee or a bruised ego or a frustrated will, she would hold her and rock her and say, "It will be better soon." There are no guarantees that things are going to turn out the way we want or the way we planned, but if we allow ourselves our hurts, our disappointments, and then allow ourselves to heal, well--it will be better soon.

I need to remember all this more often. For example, when I feel beset by bad news, by a proliferation of the ugly side of human nature, whether in world events or at my own dining room table. I need to remember this as I prepare for Yamim Nora'im, the Days of Awe, as I consider all the times I have truly repented and then sinned again. There's still the good. Even if we've failed before, we still might succeed this time. We can make change in the world, even if we can't take responsibility for changing the whole world, all at once.

As for risk-taking? What other option do we have? The most conservative, cautious person in the world still has her plans blow up in her face now and then. The world is unpredictable. Our lives can change in a second. But have a little faith. It will be better, soon.

This post is part of #BlogElul, created and organized by Ima on (and off) the Bima, who writes:

The Jewish month of Elul, which precedes the High Holy Days, is traditionally a time of renewal and reflection. It offers a chance for spiritual preparation for the Days of Awe. It is traditional to begin one’s preparation for the High Holy Days during this month with the Selichot, the prayers of forgiveness. We look to begin the year with a clean slate, starting anew, refreshed.

Visit The Ima or follow her on Twitter to see others' contributions, and please return (!) here, where I plan to share one or two thoughts before the month is through.

#BlogElul: Return In Love

Image shamelessly copied from my blogging mentor Rebecca Einstein Schorr

Today is Rosh Hodesh Elul, the beginning of the month that brings us to the doorstep of the most sacred days in the Jewish calendar, outside of the regular and profound holiness of Shabbat. Yamim Nora’im, or Days of Awe,  begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and end at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, ten days later.

Today also happens to be my eleventh wedding anniversary. Eleven years ago, August 19th fell on the Rosh Hodesh Elul, as well.*

Aleph, lamed, vav, lamed. These are the Hebrew letters that spell the name of the month Elul. Which, in turn, forms an acrostic for “Ani ledodi vedodi li.” I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: words from Tanakh, the Bible, Song of Songs. A passionate poem of love, manifestly describing the relationship of two human lovers, it was read by the sages of our tradition as an allegory, describing the relationship between God and God’s beloved Israel.  Passages from Song of Songs are also traditionally sung at a wedding.

Return, the literal translation of teshuvah, repentance, is the central theme of the season that begins today. It being my anniversary, my thoughts naturally return to that day in August 2001 when I became my beloved’s and he became mine, in holiness, in faith, in the presence of God and our community. I remember the joy of that day, and also the innocence of it. Not only my own, though that was notable, for although Alec and I had known each other over five years by the time we married, had been in a serious relationship with each other for much of that time, and had already helped each other navigate several difficult life passages together, I had no idea of the depth of challenges yet to come that would test us and our love for one another.  

But that was still several years off. As we stood under our huppa, and rejoiced with so many of our dearest friends and family, and flew off to our honeymoon in the Canadian Maritimes (without anyone asking us to take off our shoes or remove liquids from our luggage) a terrible and tremendous loss of innocence loomed for our country, indeed for much of the world. Three weeks later, the world changed, dramatically.

It still amazes me to consider how much has changed since Rosh Hodesh Elul 5761, that August day in 2001. We all have lost so much—individually, as a society, both materially and spiritually—and yet, ineluctably, we have gained. Babies have been born, degrees earned, milestones achieved. Some battles for justice have been won, and new ones taken up. Technology and human knowledge advance at an incredible pace, and yet, at the same time, poverty increases, and freedom by some measures diminishes. Tens of thousands of people still die in hospitals every year because someone neglected to use soap and water between patients; others die because they have no access to medical care in the first place. We gain insight, and yet we continue to have the same arguments with our loved ones, over and over again, about matters large and small. Nation still lifts up sword against nation; every time, humanity and the universe sustain wounds that may never heal, and a path to peace grows ever more elusive. We have gained, and we have lost, greatly.

So here we are, again, at the beginning of this season of repentance, and we are asked, commanded, even, to “return.” Return to our true selves. Return to some sort of original purity. “Renew our days as of old,” we pray.

Is return possible? What would that even look like?

We do not wish to give up some of the ways in which we have changed over time, our increased discernment, even wisdom, hard-won by experience. We cannot erase our scars or others’, though we might wish to. There are things we can never take back, or give back.

When I think of “return” in the context of teshuvah, in the context of Rosh Hodesh  Elul, I think,  perhaps inevitably, of the words “Ani ledodi vedodi li,” I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. There are so many ways in which we cannot recapture our lost innocence. But today I think there is at least one way in which we can. It is the way of love. Of rekindled passion, and compassion. Of renewed hopes.

Just as a long-married couple can, through love and generosity, remorse and forgiveness, feel again the joy and gratitude and excitement they felt on their wedding day at the sheer wonder and blessing of the connection they share, so can we return to the wonder we experienced "of old," with God, however we understand God. Our relationship with God, after all, mirrors our relationship with the rest of creation: the earth and its inhabitants, humanity, the universe. We can return, in love, in compassion, in our commitment to tikkun olam—to making the world a better place. We can return, through forgiveness and love, to a version of ourselves and our relationships that we may have thought lost.

Jewish tradition encourages us to do this every day, every moment: live each day as if it may be your last—because it may be! But as this becomes difficult and exhausting, as we are imperfect and forgetful, our tradition gives us a big wake-up call each year. With the blast of the shofar, with the new moon, with Rosh Hodesh Elul. we are called to return. We are called to return to our beloved: family and friends, God, our self. 

Here is the task, and the promise, of our season of repentance. How will you return? We have 40 days to figure it out.

*Alec and I were married on the 30th of Av, which fell yesterday on this year's secular calendar, but it was, nevertheless, Rosh Hodesh Elul, which is always a two-day celebration.

 This post is part of #BlogElul, created and organized by Ima on (and off) the Bima, who writes: 

The Jewish month of Elul, which precedes the High Holy Days, is traditionally a time of renewal and reflection. It offers a chance for spiritual preparation for the Days of Awe. It is traditional to begin one’s preparation for the High Holy Days during this month with the Selichot, the prayers of forgiveness. We look to begin the year with a clean slate, starting anew, refreshed.

Visit The Ima or follow her on Twitter to see others' contributions, and please return (!) here, where I plan to share one or two thoughts before the month is through.

The Thickening Around Your Hearts

The following is an adaptation of my d'var Torah from this past Shabbat.

Outside the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, last week
image found at msnbc.msn.com

The Sikh Temple shooting has received so much less coverage, so much less outcry, than the mass shooting less than two weeks earlier in Colorado. Is it the Olympics? Compassion fatigue? Or is it plain old racism, or xenophobia?

Or, is it something less sinister but more insidious than that? Is it simply that average Americans can’t relate because, as Robert Wright wrote in The Atlantic, “They can imagine their friends and relatives—and themselves—being at a theater watching a batman movie; they can't imagine being in a Sikh temple.”

As a Jewish community, perhaps we can relate better. We are, after all, a minority people and religion in this nation and all others around the globe but one. And so we have stories like this from JTA, and this press release and blog entries such as this and this from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Still, I wonder how many of us followed the news of the Wisconsin temple shooting with the same level of interest as the Colorado theater shooting coverage.  After all, Jews are not Sikhs. We get top billing in the great “Judeo-Christian tradition” so many Americans are fond of claiming, and thus strike most Americans as not nearly as foreign as our Sikh brothers and sisters, with their turbans and their saris and their little-known eastern faith. The Sikh temple shooting is tragic, sobering, but I can imagine there were a few of us out there getting back to business as usual after breathing a secret prayer of thanks that it wasn’t one of our temples.

Except that, essentially, it was.

The day of the Sikh shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, I wrote a prayer that concluded, “We’re all in this together.”

When things like this happen in our country, a nation that we celebrate for its embrace of “liberty and justice for all,” we’re all implicated. And we’re all in danger. Because when one group in our society becomes the target of hateful acts for who they are, everyone’s rights are in danger. And all of us are responsible for speaking out against such persecution.

Several media outlets and commentators have observed that there has been an increase in attacks on Sikhs and Sikh communities since 9/11, because many people mistake Sikhs for Muslims. Does that mean this shooting would have been less tragic had the white supremacist gunman shot down innocent Muslims instead, the presumed “proper” target of his attack?  

We’re all in this together. On Monday, the day after the Sikh temple shooting, a mosque was burned to the ground in Joplin, Missouri. It hardly received any press. Since then, mosques and Muslim worshipers in California, Rhode Island, and Illinois have been targets of vandalism or violence. I had to search for these stories to find them. It is an outrage, a string of events that should cause us to feel shame—as Americans, but also as Jews. Not because as Jews we are in any way more responsible for these events than anyone else, but because as Jews we are particularly warned against this sort of unconcern and blindness.

This week’s Torah portion, Eikev, chronicles one of Moses’ final speeches to the Israelites as they muster on the east side of the Jordan River, preparing at last to enter the Promised Land. Moses exhorts the people to remember how much they have been given:

When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty...and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” (Dt. 8:12-14,17)

At one point in his discourse, Moses literally tells the people, “don’t think it is because of your virtue that you will possess this land” (Dt. 9:5) rather, he continues, it is because of the virtue of their ancestors, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and, moreover, it’s because of the wickedness of its current inhabitants. Try that on for size, and see how it feels. Did we choose our ancestors? Have we never behaved wickedly? Remember the Golden Calf, Moses reminds the people? See those people you are about to dispossess? See those people less prosperous than you? Poorly housed? Poorly fed? But for the grace of God, we are them. They are us.

Our Torah text continues: what does God want from us? God wants us to do the right thing. To remember that there is, essentially, no ethical difference between ourselves other people. Fortune? Misfortune? The luck of the draw. A turn of the wheel. God wants us to empathize with everyone:

Cut away, therefore, the thickening around your hearts, and stiffen your necks no more. For the Lord your God...shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing.  You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Dt. 10:16-19)

And, as we should well know, we might easily become strangers again. Befriend the stranger.

Can this feel overwhelming? Yes, it can. Can we solve all the world’s problems? Not alone, and not all at once. As Rabbi Tarfon taught, “Yours is not to complete the task; neither are you free to desist from it.” We can send letters of solidarity, letters to the editor, material and monetary donations, to help those suffering all around us. We can ask questions, vote, march, organize. We can talk about things we usually avoid talking about. We can look at faces we usually avoid looking at. We can seek out the stories we might otherwise not hear.

“Cut away...the thickening around your hearts” is a loose translation of the Hebrew umaltem et orlat levavkhem—literally, "circumcise the foreskin of your hearts." Remove that protective layer. Make yourself vulnerable. What have you got to lose? We’re all in this together.

How will you circumcise your heart?