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Believe in No-thing

10/12/2014

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Yom Kippur Shachrit, October 4, 2014/10 Tishrei 5775

This morning’s Torah reading begins with the words: “Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem lifnai Adonai Eloheichem, y’all are standing attentively today before the Eternal your God.” A familiar, prepositional (“before”), dualistic image of our relationship to the Holy One.  We stand here; God faces us, apart and outside.  It’s certainly fair to ask: before whom do we think we stand?  This reasonable question underscores the experience of Judaism as a dualistic – not to mention hierarchical – faith path.  As ever, though, our tradition offers us alternatives and paradox, enough of both to sustain faith in a non-dual divinity, a God from whom we are never separated, a no-thing-ness that is the ultimate source of all Being.

Many of us associate “nothingness” with a shorthand understanding of Buddhist teaching, as well as finding it difficult to associate Judaism with such practices as silence, abstraction, stillness, non-attachment.  It’s not that various Buddhisms (they being no more monolithic than we) don’t account for the advantageous aspects of duality, of awareness of a separate self: To the question “how much ego do we need?,” teacher Shunryu Suzuki replied: “just enough so that you don’t step in front of a bus.”  I vividly recall a radio interview with a Thai Buddhist priest in Los Angeles, whose community was preparing relief supplies after the 2004 tsunami.  The reporter suggested that the Buddhist concept of non-attachment must make dealing with such disaster less burdensome.  The priest responded that such a teaching cannot be helpful to people who are drowning, to people already under the bus.

The internet, bless its heart, holds a treasure trove of supposed Jewish-Buddhist citations:

The hungry man in the street asking the hot-dog vendor to “make me one with everything.”

The deep question: “If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?”

The reminder: “Breathe in, breathe out: forget this, and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.”

The unassailable truth: “Wherever you go, there you are.  Your luggage is another story.”

The temptation: “Torah says, ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ The Buddha says, ‘there is no self.’ Maybe we’re off the hook.”

In fact, mystical Judaism includes an ancient, well-established concept of a sacred Nothingness – hear No-thing-ness – which challenges liturgical, poetic, and everyday language that relies on familiar dualistic forms, such as ruler, parent, creator.  Prof. Daniel Matt, translator of the The Zohar , a 13th-century mystical Torah commentary, teaches extensively about Jewish nothingness.  He starts with the axiom that we cannot define God, because divine infinity exceeds the realm of language.  Our mystics, he notes, delight in the impossibility of trapping God with words.  Yet, even the mystics must resort to language if they wish to refer to divinity or to share even a bit of what they have experienced.

One strategy is simply to call God “Nothing,” not to suggest negativity or non-being, but to point to God being greater than anything one can imagine: God is like no thing.  The medieval kabbalists largely derived this negative theology from Moses Maimonides, who taught that God has nothing in common with other forms of being, that God “exists but not through existence.”  (Put that in your dualistic pipe and smoke carefully.)  Maimonides encouraged the theologically curious to approach divinity by accumulating insights into all that God is not.

Later mystics considered Nothingness as the only name appropriate to the divine essence.  One proof text for this transformation appears in Job (28:12): “V’ha-chochma mei’ayin timatzeh, Where – mei’ayin – is wisdom to be found?,” or, “wisdom emerges out of nothingness,” ayin.  This reading identifies no-thing-ness as Keter Elyon, the crown sephirah at the top of the Tree of Life – nicely illustrated by our congregational logo on the Torah-reading table.

And we, along with all forms of being, emanate from Keter Elyon. Moses de Leon, to whom The Zohar is attributed, defines Keter Elyon as “the totality of all existance, and all have wearied in their search for it . . . , for it brings all into being. . . . Anything sealed and concealed, totally unknown to anyone, is called ayin, meaning that no one knows anything about it.  Similarly, no one knows anything at all about the human soul; she [too] stands in the status of nothingness.”  Thus, God and our souls share an infinite, inherent no-thing-ness, accounting for our capacity to express the divine image and likeness.  By our essential nature, we participate in the no-thing that is God, in the formless source of all form.

By the late middle ages, Jewish mystics counseled their students to understand the vulnerability of searching too eagerly for the essence of ayin, no-thing.  One teacher describes devekut, cleaving to God, as “pouring a jug of water into a flowing spring, so that all becomes one,” and warns his disciples not to sink too far into the boundless ocean: “The endeavor should be to contemplate, but to escape drowning.”  On the other hand, the depths of nothingness also serve as a reservoir of power.  Mystically understood, “Out of the depths I call you, YHVH” (Ps. 130:1) may describe not only a cry from one’s own state of despair, but also to the divine depths from which God can be called forth.  Adversity can lead us to appreciate the resource of ayin, for “I lift up my eyes to the mountains”; my help comes from ayin, no-thing: “esah einai el he-harim, mei-ayin yavoh ezri.” (Ps. 121:1)

Our hasidic masters direct our attention to the experiential, psychological aspect of engaging with no-thing.  They evolve contemplative practices by which skilled practitioners subsume the ego – the “Ani” – into the ayin, in order to see through the illusion that we are separate from God.  In humility, we are to understand ourselves and all being as channels for the divine attributes.  This awe-induced understanding transforms our thought processes, so that we become aware that divine energy underlies material existence, and this awareness permits us to participate in the reciprocal flow back and forth from the source, ayin, to its manifestations in all forms of being.  (See Daniel C. Matt, “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism,” Tikkun 3, no. 3, 1987, pp. 43 -7.)  

Mystics of all traditions understand the risk associated with seeking devekut, of cleaving to the ineffable without adequate spiritual preparation.  The very language of no-thing-ness tempts us with beautiful metaphor.  Imagery intended only to hint sometimes ends in certitude and arrogance; we sometimes insist on making literal what is only meant to suggest.

The Indian sage Jiddu Krishnamurti used to tell this story: Once Satan and his demon sidekick were walking down the street, closely watching a man 20 yards ahead who was on the verge of realizing Supreme Truth.  The demon grew worried, and began to nudge Satan, but Satan remained quite calm.  Sure enough, the man did, in fact, soon realize the deepest spiritual big-T Truth.  Yet, Satan still did nothing about it.  Losing control, the demon blurted out: “Don’t you see? That man has realized the Truth!  And you are doing nothing to stop him!”  Satan smiled slyly and replied, “Yes, he has realized the Truth.  And now, I am going to help him organize the Truth.”

In this spirit, trying to hold lightly the mystical insights concerning a non-dual Jewish theology, let us consider a couple of the consequences of such a God-idea. First, it draws us to an appreciation of the overwhelming diversity of being emerging from unity.  In the words of our teacher Moses Cordovero: “The essence of divinity is found in every single thing – nothing but it exists.  Since it causes every thing to be, no thing can live by anything else. . . . Do not attribute duality to God.  . . . Do not say, ‘This is a stone and not God.’  God forbide! Rather, all existence is God, and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity.” (Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah, p. 24.)

This insight can only heighten our personal and collective response to climate change, for we cannot give spiritual credit to Cordovero’s pervasive, non-dual divinity without examining our culture’s dualistic relationship to creation itself.  Jewish Renewal came early to the environmental movement, largely because of the influence of Jewish mystical teachings about absolute interdependence.  Some of the earliest religious inquiries concerning environmental challenges come from Renewal publications, including the very concept of eco-kashrut – the obligation to consider the exposure of farm workers to toxins, the mistreatment of animals raised to provide food, the power sources on which we depend.

Second, reflecting on non-dual divinity undoes binaries.  If all existence derives from the same source, how we understand apparent distinctions comes into question.  Light/dark no longer aligns automatically with good/bad, or large/small with powerful/weak, or male/female as an accurate shorthand for gender variability.  If all existence derives from the same source, then every aspect of existence – even, or perhaps, especially – those aspects we would prefer to reject as “outside” the good or the godly, every aspect of existence must be recognized as serving the entirety.  This recognition may not shield us from suffering, though it does reconfirm for us the absolute value of each form of being and experience in the evolution of the Sacred Whole.

In spite of seemingly dualistic scriptural and liturgical language, our texts and tradition are awash in hints pointing to underlying unity.  We sing at the end of Aleinu, “Bayom ha’hu yiyeh Adonai echad u’shmo echad.” On that day, we will see it manifest that the Eternal is One and the divine name we use is “One.”  We read in Torah, “Ayn ohd milvado.” “There is no-thing besides God.” (“Aleinu,” Zech. 14:9; Deut. 4:35)  One might even say, the theme at Yavneh for these High Holy days has been the power of diversity within unity.

On erev Rosh haShanah, we heard Reb Zalman’s (zt”l) admonition to pay attention to the inter-relational nature of being – “But even in the atom, the nucleus
and the electrons that dance around it are in relationship with each other.  We believed we couldn’t know anything until we got to the smallest component, and so we forgot to seek what binds things together.” – along with his transmission of the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching
“that God so loved the world that She gave Herself to be the Earth.” To which I would add Isaiah’s confirmation: meloh kol ha’aretz k’vodo, God’s glory pervades the Earth. (6:4)

Rosh haShanah morning challenged us to renounce polarization – a dualistic impulse – in favor of a radical understanding of all humanity as deriving from the same divine source, so that we are less likely to miss the mark in seeking to love one another as ourselves, because we are all a part of the same ultimate Self.  This effort requires us to become disruptors of categories, searchers for common ground.

Yesterday evening, I invited us to cultivate a more gentle and consistent process of self-evaluation and transformation, of ongoing t’shuvah.  If there is but one Source of Being, then everything we manifest, even those traits or behaviors we wish or need to change, expresses some necessary aspect of the cosmic totality. It’s not that we are looking for a path away from our errors or transgressions, a dualistic highway between good and evil.  Instead, our every awareness of an opportunity for transformation helps us deepen into our essential divine nature.  We can take joy in stringing pearls for heaven where we are, instead of excessively berating ourselves for unfinished evolution.

This morning, we are called to commit ourselves to a process of spiritual creativity.  On the one hand, we remember that when the Holy One commands the Israelites to build a tabernacle, the reward for doing so is that Divine Being, God’s immanence, the Shekhinah, dwells b’tocheinu, amongst and within the people.  We learn from the Piezetner Rebbe, “not only does God hear our prayers, God prays them through us,” for in our praying we enter the flow of abundance and being that is our source, and become channels for “the ever-proclaiming praise of God.” (See Lawrence Kushner, God was in this Place, p. 135.)

On the other hand, we build the Mishkan, on which the divine presence visibly rests, so that we might have a physical focus point for our religious life.  The Mishkan – shorthand for sanctuary, ritual, and liturgy – stands before us in what we experience as a physical world, a world of objects and actions.  We gaze upon it, walk toward it, enter it.  Prepositionally, it rests before and apart from us. 

Most of the time, in our embodied selves, we have to rely on dualistic language and on our apparent differentness from other people, other forms of being, to function safely in a place of material reality.  Even if I know that the car swerving into my lane represents more space than matter, better to get out of the way.  Here, at the level of what we call Assiyah, this apparently hard and fast world, we must speak to one another and to our divine source as if, as if, we were face-to-face, as if we were not of the identical essence.  In this world, we use the language of yearning, of love, of seeking, of praying, to reach out – as if what we are reaching for did not reside within all being.  We use dualistic word and action in the service of a divine unity unbounded by any limits to its joyous diversity.

And, at the same time, when we open our spirits to the other worlds of interconnected being, worlds of emotion, intelligence, and spirit, we find guidance within our tradition in how to approach non-duality, how to experience our fullness of being within the One source of all.  We find what we need to create the spiritual vision to see past surface separation to ultimate union.  And so, my prayer for us all in the unfolding new year is that we may each be blessed to discern the One at the root of the many; to accept our individual deployments in the service of our Source and of all being; and to devote our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual energies to the protection of all life on our threatened planet.  Amen.


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Stringing Pearls for Heaven

10/12/2014

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Erev Yom Kippur, 10 Tishri 5774/October 3, 2014

Al cheit she’chatati!  Beloved Yavneh community, I come before you this Kol Nidre eve stricken with remorse for having failed to convince all of you that Yom Kippur is meant to be a joyous holiday, a guarantor of forgiveness and blessing, rather than a day of suffering, doubt, and anxiety.  J  We have well learned, I believe, that reconciliation between people comes about when we note our errors, offer repentance and restoration, and commit to changed behavior.  Yet, when we arrive at the Days of Awe, my sense is that many of us feel weighed down because we fear we haven’t, perhaps couldn’t, do enough to erase our past transgressions.

The ancient rabbis taught that feasting on erev Yom Kippur was as sacred as fasting not only throughout the day tomorrow, but as meritorious as fasting through both tomorrow and the next day. (BT Yoma 81b)  Our early teachers understood the theme of the holiday as not only about seeking forgiveness, but more importantly, about having faith that forgiveness is forthcoming.  According to the 16th-century scholar and mystic R. Moses Cordovero, “worship comprised of somberness and suffering is not acceptable to God.  Only a worship of joy and celebration.  Therefore, we begin Yom Kippur with festiveness and a lavish feast.”  (See 2006 High Holy Day Message, R. Gershon Winkler.)

Apparently, this viewpoint is a tough sell, as we tend to hold ourselves – and others – to high standards. Not to be picky, of course, merely out of respect for traditional expectations.  And, not just here on Earth.

A prominent rabbi died at the ripe old age of 96 and went straight to the heavenly Gan Eden.  There, in the shade of a luxurious tree, he found a large table surrounded by several learned scholars, some of them his former students, engaged in lively Talmudic debate.  The table was laden with wonderful food, pastries, kugle, the tenderest brisket, steaming chicken soup, soft rolls, and much more, and the men noshed and slurped happily as they disputed the text before them.

One of his students rose to greet his teacher: “Rebbe, we’re so happy you’ve finally joined us!  Come, have something to eat.”  The rabbi looks at the array of food and asks severely, “Who’s the mashgiach, the one who makes sure all this is kosher?”  The surprised student replies, “This is heaven!  God is the mashgiach.”  The old man ponders this for a long time, eyes closed, deep in thought, while his students await his learned conclusion.  At last, he speaks: “Fine, I’ll have some fruit.  On a paper plate.”

A good story, we are told, gives the mind a chance to surprise the heart, so I’m going to take it as a good sign that we find this story funny.  Perhaps, even, see a bit of our own resistance to self-compassion in the old man’s determination not to become lax in his observance, even in the world to come.  Perhaps, to recognize in our capacity for harsh self-judgment permission to judge others harshly as well.

Personally, I like to believe that if I am aware of the benefits of something – a new superfood, exercise, dietary supplement – that is sufficient to receive the benefit, whether or not I change my behavior.  (Stephen, as we all know, not only does the research, but actually follows the recommendations he finds credible.  As his loving spouse, I find this a mixed blessing.)  In the physical world, this attitude only helps me in my imagination; knowing people who run marathons has not loosened my hamstrings, you should pardon the reference.  Spiritually, however, there is something to my fantasy.  Awareness itself counts: while we are taught to use the High Holy Day season to undertake a detailed accounting of our souls, we are also taught that just opening to the possibility that we may need to do some soul work earns a pretty high score.

Constructive criticism, whether of others or of ourselves, most benefits us when it is rooted in the belief that we – and all others – are at one with God.  If there is but one Source of Being, then everything we manifest, even those traits or behaviors we wish or need to change, expresses some aspect of the cosmic totality in which we participate.  We, individually, arise out of divinity’s love of diversity, each of us with our particularities and quirks (some stray quarks, too, no doubt).  As we see in  the constant movement of the divine qualities arrayed on the mystical Tree of Life, no aspect (whether we experience it as good or evil) lacks a role in the eternal dance of balancing and rebalancing. It’s not that we are on a path away from our errors or transgressions.  As soon as we note something we would wish to transform, we deepen into our essential divine nature. Whatever we choose to refine helps us settle more firmly into our divine Source and home.  We come round right to where we need to be, as the Shaker hymn would have it.

Liturgically, High Holy Day prayers use a language that, for many of us, masks services’ kavannah, intentionality.  Watch closely this year, as the movement of our prayers shifts from noting, acknowledging, and committing to correct our transgressions to wave after wave of reassurance that our heartfelt t’shuvah, our turning toward God and toward one another, our t’fillah, our yearning for sacred relationship, and our tzedakah, our sharing, have been accepted.  Take to heart that when our rabbis seek to express “bottom line” Jewish teaching, righteous behavior can be netted out in a single Torah verse:

“Rabbi Simlai taught: Six hundred and thirteen commandments were given to Moses.  Then David reduced them to eleven in Psalm 15, beginning, ‘He who follows integrity, who does what is right and speaks the truth in his heart.’  Micah reduced them to three, “Act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. (6:8)’  Then came Isaiah and reduced them to two, “Keep justice and act with integrity. (56:1)’  Amos reduced them to one, ‘Seek Me and live. (5:4)’ . . . And Akiva taught: The great principle of the Torah is expressed in the commandment, ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself; I am the Eternal.’” (Levit. 19:18) 

We only have to begin, where we are, trusting that the only Place in which to do our work is the eternal here, within the eternal time/space of the living God.  A familiar story:

An ascetic, seeking a revelation from Elijah, dressed only in white, was silent except for words of Torah and prayer, drank nothing but water, rolled naked in the snow, and put nails in his shoes.  Yet, he received no vision of the prophet.  Hearing that the Baal Shem Tov had experienced revelations from Elijah, this perush set out one winter’s day for Medzibuz to ask the great teacher why he himself had not succeeded.

The Besht took his visitor out into the courtyard, then told his coach driver to bring his white horse from the stable, along with a bucket of water, and to let the horse run free.  The horse smelled the brisk, fresh air, snorted with delight, took a drink of water from the bucket, and then began to roll in the snow.

“Do you see this horse,” said the Besht to the perush.  “He also wears white, drinks only water, rolls in the snow, has nails in his shoes, and hasn’t spoken a word in ten years, yet he’s never had a revelation of Elijah! [Even though I’m tempted to question how the Besht would know this, I will yield the point for now.]  Why?  Because all these things that you and the horse are both doing are merely external.  Don’t worry about Elijah; worry about revealing your own soul.”

When the visitor departed, the Besht explained to his hasidim: “Being pious is more about attaching yourself to God than about neglecting the body and worldly affairs.  Instead of fasting from food, eat in the presence of God.  Instead of fasting from speech, infuse all of your words with holiness.  I tell you, having heavenly revelations – for which the Besht is renown – is at a lesser spiritual level than having a revelation of your own soul, so that you may be totally authentic and live from your deepest self, your divinely-rooted soul.” (Adapted from Yitzhak Buxbaum, The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov, pp. 258 - 9.)

[Usher passes box of pearls through the congregation. My thanks to the S’fat Emet, via Reb Chava Bahle]

The advice to begin with ourselves in a positive manner may seem to trivialize the importance of t’shuvah, of mindful self-examination and intentional repentance.  Not so.  Even the smallest shifts in awareness entrain others, and we do not have to wait for the High Holy Days to make these shifts.  Contrary to popular comedic convention, Jewish spiritual tradition does not make much of guilt (although, Jewish child-rearing technique might). 

Instead, we are guided to look inside and make the smallest of adjustments from day to day, beginning with a review of the day as we prepare for sleep, setting action directives for correcting what may be off-kilter at the next opportunity.  We are guided to make peace with friends and family before entering into Shabbat, having reviewed the six days of the work week.  We are guided to mark each new moon as a Yom Kippur Katan, “a little Yom Kippur,” to discern – ideally with a spiritual companion – whether there is some aspect of behavior we wish to focus on as the new moon waxes, then wanes.  The entire month of Elul, prior to the Days of Awe, asks us to harvest eleven months of self-refinement, so that we enter the new year joyfully and welcome the certainty of forgiveness on Yom Kippur.  As we read in Talmud, the day itself atones for us. (See BT Yoma 86b.)

Wasting soul power on excessive self-reproach diminishes our capacity to engage with the world according to baseline Jewish teaching: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself; I am the Eternal.” (Levit. 19:18)  Over time, our understanding of “neighbor” has expanded to include all other images of the Holy One, not only the ones living next door or sharing our religious or political views.  Re-membering – pulling ourselves together – to stand in God’s loving Presence, we recognize our soul’s holiness and the equal holiness of every other soul – Elohai, n’shamah she’natata bi, tehorah hi, every morning, every soul returns to its essential purity.  Accepting that we always stand before the throne of glory, surrounded by the gentle wings of Shekhinah, we more easily discern our individual soul mission.

The one who tortures herself incessantly with the idea that she has not yet sufficiently atoned is essentially concerned with the salvation of her soul, . . . not with the work which her soul is deployed to perform in this world.  Focusing excessively on our faults rather than on each opportunity for refinement, however small, robs us of energy for the work of t’shuvah, of return and transformation.  In the time wasted on brooding over the flaws we find in ourselves, we could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven – we could be loving others as we have come to love ourselves, secure in the reality of the Living God. (Adapted from Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, pp. 162 – 7.)

Hold onto the pearl you have chosen (that’s also the advice from our insurance carrier!).  You may already know what gift of individual goodness it represents; if not, you will discover it as the year unfolds.  We have been taught: “This is the secret of the unity of God: no matter where I take hold of a shred of it, I hold the whole of it.” (Buber, The Way of Man/Ten Rungs, p. 76.)   Similarly, the pearl in your hand attaches to some aspect of your own evolving soul, and in touching part of it, you find an attachment to your entire self, to the widest possible range of potential, refinement, joy, and wholeness.  Welcome to the day that atones, and to the awareness that transforms.  Gamreinu chatimah tovah, may we all be sealed for blessing.  Amen.


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The Koan that is Israel

10/12/2014

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Rosh haShanah Shachrit, September 25, 2014/1 Tishri 5775

There’s a theory which posits that if we ever discover the precise origins and meaning of this universe, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.  There’s another theory that states this has already happened.

For me, the process of writing – not just sermon writing – resembles an exercise in just such a multiple universe theory: there is some probability that in at least one universe, the writer will be content, and in another, the audience.  There is also a certainty that in some universe, neither will emerge satisfied with the communication.  No matter how carefully arranged, all communicating with words can lead to something akin to a zen koan, a kind of parable pointing to the absurdity of trying to sort reality into fixed categories.

According to one famous koan, a Zen master lay dying, with his monks gathered around him.  The senior monk leans over and asks the master for final words of wisdom.  The old master weakly says, “Tell them Truth is like a river.” The senior monk relays this message on to the others. The youngest monk is confused: “What does he mean, ‘Truth is like a river?’” The senior monk relays this question to the master, and the dying master replies, “O.K., Truth is not like a river.”

This could as well be a rebbe story: the hearts of great spiritual teachers range far beyond binaries.  Complex reality simply can’t be sorted into neat little boxes.  Truth is and is not like a river; it transcends classification, or, at best, remains classifiable for only an instant.  Yet, we plague ourselves with efforts to arrive at capital “T” Truth, that simultaneous river and non-river, especially about sensitive, or frightening, or challenging, or threatening matters.  For example, the matter of Israel/Palestine, about which I rarely meet an agnostic.  Mostly, I encounter people filled with painful certainties, discomfited by alternative certainties, certainties that pile up into a high and wide wall named “dilemma” – a devastating problem defying resolution.

Last spring, I read My Promised Land: the Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by Ari Shavit, a well-regarded Israeli journalist. Shavit doesn’t offer his memoir as capital “T” truth.  He does, however, make a masterful effort to understand the Jewish state’s evolution from an aspiration of late 19th-century political theorists to its current incarnation as an economically powerful, high-tech, militarily secure (though constantly threatened) political entity.  His analysis carries great weight, alternating between narratives of Zionists and of the Arabs who also live on the land, struggling to  discern the roots of shared suffering and of lost opportunities for peace.  It seemed the perfect choice for a High Holy Day book report: compassionate; fair-minded; keenly aware of errors, misperceptions, and willful deception on all sides; regretful and hopeful.  And then, Gaza exploded – from inside and out.

And the dilemma became unbearable, the issues so fraught with competing elements of physical and spiritual risk, the first risk being that incurred by speaking our individual truths, frustrations, anxieties, and hopes.  As it’s impossible for everyone to begin with the same understanding about the great koan of the meaning and purpose of Israel in the world, the potential for open-hearted dialogue within the Jewish community and beyond lies crushed under the weight of our incompatible categories. 

And, beloveds, this summer’s vitriol makes me cry.  Social media, especially, infiltrate our every moment with conflicting narratives and demands for our assent or objection.  We have learned to harden our hearts and minds to reject rather than process challenging information.  Our modes of argumentation assume that disagreement exposes the moral failure of one side or the other, as if two were the maximum number of viewpoints.  Families, friendships, community groups, congregations shatter against the hard stone of the dilemma before us.

How do we disengage from soul-crushing exercises in competitive suffering?  How do we grieve for ourselves and for “the Other,” without giving up some perceived moral superiority?  How do we escape from our triumphalisms, our powerful conviction that “our worst is better than the Other’s best”?  How do we listen and truly hear one another with compassion – Sh’ma Yisrael – even when we don’t agree and can’t yet imagine ever agreeing? 

How can we come to recognize where we are being triggered by fear?  How can the memory of the Shoah not trump every argument in favor of negotiation over warfare?  How do we deal with the secondary trauma of the Shoah in this moment, the vile resurgence of European anti-Semitism and its step-child, militant Islamic Jew hatred? How can we balance the condemnation of Israeli policies that oppress Palestinians with support of an oppressed people whose own social structures include violent oppression of women, of political dissenters, of minority religious views?    

How do we resist the fearful paralysis that inhibits serious internal reflection and external dialogue?   How do we live the Judaism we espouse, an evolving tradition that insistently moves away from tribalism toward a universalist understanding of human relationships and of human responsibility one for the other?  How do we do the sort of cheshbon ha-nefesh, the accounting of the soul, necessary to clarify our deepest values and strengthen us to accept the challenge of unyielding complexity?  Most important, how may we shape ourselves and our tradition to have the greatest impact for good? 

In an era when polarization has come to dominate our culture, we might be forgiven for accepting it as a fixed attribute. We may overlook the ways in which we suffer from self-inflicted wounds.  As Reb Zalman (z”tl) has noted, we sometimes seek easy answers to relieve the anxiety of being with a problem and fail to look for the upayas – the skillful spiritual means – and the texts that can serve us at a difficult time.

One of Judaism’s skillful practices is listening to the stories of tzaddikim, of people striving for righteousness.  Sometimes, their stories help us take yet another step on the path of personal and communal redemption.  Back in the spring of 2010, Marc J. Rosenstein posted a commentary on Leviticus 19: 17 -18, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall reason with [warn, chastise, “call out”] your neighbor, and not incur guilt on his account.  You shall not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Eternal.” Rosenstein writes:

The Chilazoner Rebbe was sitting with his Hasidim around the holiday table [in the Galilee], and he told the following parable. “Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off.  ‘Damn Arab kids,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws.  They whine about having no rights, but they refuse to accept responsibility!’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me.  The driver was Ultra-Orthodox.


“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off.  ‘Damn Ultra-Orthodox,’ I said.  ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws.  They think they are holier than the rest of us, that they can run the country as they want, forcing everyone else onto the shoulder.’  A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me.  The driver was a settler.

“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off.  ‘Damn settlers,’ I said.  ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws.  They think they can hold the rest of us hostage to their messianic meshuggas – driving us all to disaster.’  A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me.  I recognized the driver from his picture in the business section of the paper, a prominent lawyer from Herzliya.

“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off.  ‘Damn North Tel Aviv snobs,’ I said.  ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws.  They throw around their money and power and treat the whole country as if it were their own private estate.’  A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me.  The driver was my neighbor.

“Once I was driving along the highway, in a hurry to pick up my kid from the Acco train station.  I passed a whole lineup of cars moving irritatingly slowly, and then had to squeeze back into the right lane before the West Acco intersection.  A traffic cop pulled me over after the light.  ‘What, did I do something wrong?’ I asked him incredulously.  ‘Are you kidding?’  You just cut off that whole line of cars – an Arab, an Ultra-Orthodox, a settler, a lawyer, and a local.  You almost caused a serious accident!’  ‘Wow,’ I said.  ‘I didn't see them.  I really didn't see them.’

'There was silence at the table as the Hasidim contemplated their master’s deep wisdom.  Then one spoke up, hesitantly,[a bit like the youngest monk at the deathbed of his teacher]: ‘Perhaps the Master would agree to interpret the parable?’  But the Rebbe would only repeat the last sentence: ‘I didn't see them.  I really didn't see them.’

And those who have understanding will understand.

In spite of the heaviness in our hearts as we face one another feeling stymied by a dilemma, we are people of understanding.  We do hear the entire teaching of the Deuteronomy passage cited above: we are committed to eradicating hatred from our hearts; we recognize our obligation to warn one another against harmful acts – with loving kindness, not so as to incur guilt for failing to warn or guilt for disrespecting another image of God; we accept the challenge to let go of grudges in pursuit of peace; wherever we are, we seek to attune to the best in ourselves and our neighbors.  And we do this because we have been blessed with the sacred opportunity to discern our own holiness in the image of our Source.  We do this because polarization leads to despair, disdain, and destruction – toxins that pollute every aspect of our lives.

Please do not misconstrue what I’m saying as an endorsement of untroubled neutrality; of a naïve acceptance of all views as equally valid; of a mushy-headed “love will find a way” sensibility.  Please hear my call for discernment, which requires patience, and for giving a full hearing to each person we encounter, and for noticing when we reject something without consideration – those rejections are both great indicators of our vulnerabilities and of potential shifts in understanding.  If striving to fulfill the commandment to love one another were easy, it would probably carry much less weight.  It’s not easy.  It challenges us to say honestly to ourselves: “I’ve met my neighbors; don’t care for them at all; yet I will find a way for us to thrive together until we figure out how to love one another.”

At a meeting between the Dalai Lama and Israeli and Palestinian peace activists in 2005, His Holiness – whose Tibetan community-in-exile knows something about facing a Great Wall of oppression – reminded his guests that “regardless of your past history, the current reality is that you have to live side-by-side.”  This is an old small “t” truth begging to emerge.  As far back as our early rabbis, we’ve been warned against claiming primacy over others, because all humanity descends from a single ancestor (Sanhedrin 4:5).

Humanity has been offered Torah and her mitzvot so that we might live by them, that is, in seeking to fulfill them, we find life (Leviticus 18:5).  Over and over, Torah breaks down the very idea of “stranger,” until the word Israel itself barely holds meaning beyond “God fearer.”  Having inherited this radical understanding of the human family, we are covenanted to struggle with the paradox that seemingly opposite things can be simultaneously true, small “t” true.  Perhaps the best we can do is train ourselves to become disruptors of categories.  Anger and resistance bind us tightly and feed our fear that the conditions that create dilemmas can never shift; emotional and spiritual spaciousness opens windows of creativity and potential.  As long as we accept polarization as a normal intellectual, emotional, or spiritual state, we will continue to miss the mark in our efforts to love one another as we are loved by our Source. 

I pray that in the new year we will accustom ourselves to sitting peacefully with internal contradictions, on our way to learning how to accept external contradictions with less fear, less resistance.  I pray we come to understand violent conflict as an attack on our planetary Mother, so that we can embrace a pro-humanity, pro-peace, pro-non-violence worldview.  Within the inexhaustible Source that creates and sustains our being from moment to moment, at this turning of the year, may we find comfort in shared silence, inspiration in the white spaces, redemption in compassion.  Within that inexhaustible Source, may we rest transparently, allowing our pain and fear to be soothed by the Merciful One, in whom we find our eternal home.  Kayn y’hi ratzon, so may this be God’s will and ours.


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Dancing with Divine Providence

10/12/2014

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Erev Rosh haShanah, September 24, 2014/1 Tishri 5775

Shanah tovah!  What a joy to gather with you once again in this beautiful sacred space we are honored to share with our sisters and brothers in faith here at St. Mark’s.  Our sharing helps us to thrive as a synagogue without walls, and, by so doing, we reduce Yavneh’s environmental impact on our living planet, which suffers under the press of more than enough concrete.  So, again, Rector Ljunggren, thank you and your community for welcoming us with open hearts.

In Judaism there is a concept called “yichus,” which basically means lineage or pedigree.  In popular parlance, the term “good yichus” describes someone with connections to a distinguished family.  In even looser adaptation, “yichus” may loosely apply to the reflected glory one may claim from a connection to a distinguished person, even one you may have merely met – or been in the same zip code with – perhaps no more than once.

Until I investigated the use of yichus in consultation with the all-knowing Google, I was unaware of how much discussion it garners on certain websites.  Apparently, who claims yichus and how s/he may flaunt it generates quite a bit of, shall we say, mildly judgmental commentary. 

From the Yeshivah World News, I gleaned the following: 

“Yichus is like a potato plant. The only good part of it is under the ground.

Yichus is like the lottery. It only makes sense if you're bad at math.

Yichus is like the law of gravity. It doesn't matter how high you started, if your current trajectory is down.

And, from the site, iStehtl (yes, iStehtl – the fiddler’s still on the roof, but with a synthesizer, I guess):

“Yichus is a string of zeros; it’s only worth anything if you have something in front of it” – which has a certain inspirational zing to it.  Which might explain the otherwise (to me) incomprehensible comment: “Judaism . . . making me feel more like a supermodel every day,” signed, aseeker.

With the limitations of yichus in mind, at this confessional time of year, I admit to claiming professional yichus as a student and musmach (ordinee) of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, may his memory be for blessing.  As Yavneh is one of the congregations directly affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement he founded, I’d like to take some time as we begin a new year together to speak about him and his influence.

Beginning with the personal: back in 1998, I applied to the Renewal seminary not only to learn more of what Reb Zalman had to teach, but also because his way of being in the world as a scholar, spiritual explorer, and holy innovator affirmed so much of what my own spiritual evolution had already come to hold true.  Over time, I enjoyed the blessing of a gifted teacher who also honored me as a colleague in spiritual inquiry, who took seriously my leaning into new insight, who greeted me with smiling eyes and called me Rochel Leibn.

Stories are told of rebbes of such sympathetic genius that every hasid in the room thinks each word is directed specifically to him; believe me, what I have just attributed to my relationship with Reb Zalman, every single one of his students, colleagues, neighbors, family members, and friends will also claim.  He mindfully shepherded all of us, individually and in relationship to one another.  At our last encounter, I was sitting next to him awaiting a presentation by Rabbi Chava Bahle, whom we have had the joy of learning with here at Yavneh.  As the room began to fill up, Reb Zalman told me and the others in the row with him to go sit up front, to show Chavaleh the honor her teachings merit.  Reluctant to move, I leaned into my Rebbe and said, “oh, I’d rather sit here and bask in your aura.”  To which he replied, “Rochel Leibn, my aura reaches to Raleigh.”  Even higher, even wider, I would say.

At the memorial weekend about six weeks after Reb Zalman’s passing, participants had an opportunity to sit in small groups to reminisce.  We are taught that hearing stories about tzaddikim, righteous souls, is a sacred activity, a form of Torah study.  One of the men in my group is a distinguished Jewish scholar who had once lived around the corner from Reb Zalman.  Reb Zalman’s across-the-street neighbor was also an academic.  One Sunday morning, Reb Zalman borrowed some tools from his neighbor to work on his car.  When he returned the tools a few hours later, the neighbor was entertaining guests.  Dressed in dirty coveralls and sweating from his exertions, Reb Zalman stood at the door for a few minutes regaling his neighbor with what he had learned about carburaters – with his boundless curiosity, every bit of new information was cherished and integrated with all the rest.  When he departed, the guests wanted to know just how their host had managed to find such an erudite mechanic.

Reb Zalman manifested in our world as an insatiable energy field, constantly seeking out, acquiring, integrating, and reconfiguring what he had learned and experienced.  Not like the Borg, for purposes of control, but as one of the best expressions any of us will ever be privileged to encounter of the human yearning for spiritual understanding. 

Author and photographer Alan Briskin posted the following remembrance on his blog:

“I met Reb Zalman when I first interviewed him for the Collective Wisdom Initiative in August, 2000.  We met at his home in Boulder, and I still recall the instant connection that was made when he first began speaking. Well, maybe not instant. He was telling me a story that began 300 years ago about the Age of Reason, and I wasn’t sure we would have enough time for him to get to the point.

“I was about to interrupt him when he sensed my impatience and held up his hand.  ‘Wait,’ he said. I paused, gathered myself, and had something like an epiphany. He was telling me a story that was critical if I was to have any direction for the work that was still to unfold for me.  I still have my notes from that session and his words read like poetry:

“We have not learned much in our
current conventional morality
and politics about togethering.


“The last century with the
[emphasis on] scientism sought to see everything
in the reductive form. We wanted
to get to the atom and beyond the
atom, to the smallest part.


“But even in the atom, the nucleus
and the electrons that dance
around it are in relationship with
each other.


“We believed we couldn’t know anything
until we got to the smallest
component, and so we forgot to seek


“WHAT BINDS THINGS TOGETHER” – as we will see, a main theme in the evolution of Jewish Renewal’s theological orientation.

At my first face-to-face meeting with my rebbe, when I was beginning my rabbinic studies, he greeted me on the way to dinner after a kabbalat Shabbat service with a hug, took a step back and touched my birthmark, saying “You know how to dance with divine providence!”  I probably squeeked out “thank you,” all the while wondering “in what universe could that true?”   It took me a while to unpack that message, so, in Reb Zalman style, we’ll come back to it when it fits into a larger context, but, suffice it to say, the import of this quick encounter contributes to the many ways I am bound to my teacher, in whose lineage I gratefully serve this community

Permit me to point to just one of the ways Reb Zalman’s curiosity, erudition, loving-kindness, and holy yearning have influenced not only the Jewish Renewal movement that arose around his teachings and those of his students, but the entire Jewish world.

After the Shoah, the central question “why be Jewish?” ceased being primarily about living as a minority in a majority culture, instead, it confronted skeptic and believer alike with apparent evidence of divine abandonment.  The deep wounding suppressed the necessary emotional processing into near impenetrable silence.  Reb Zalman spoke aloud what many others avoided: the fact that after the Shoah, many Jews were suffering from “post-traumatic God syndrome.”  And so, he turned his attention to renewal instead of restoration: if a Jewish world had been destroyed in the mid-20th century, then what could we learn from the last time that had happened, when the Romans destroyed the institutions of biblical Judaism in 70 C.E.?  What could we bring forward from our rich spiritual past to nurture a Judaism looking toward a transformed future, seeking its growing edge?

Jewish Renewal responds to these questions by providing a trans-denominational Jewish home for the previously disenfranchised, the doubters, the secular and the learned who needed to get far enough out of the head to rediscover the heart, the ones who didn’t know Judaism has an ancient and inspiring mystical center, the ones who had been kept at a distance (including women and non-Jews, from whom many Jews imagined we had nothing to learn).  Reb Zalman cultivated in himself and others a deep and holy curiosity about how Judaism and other faiths can nurture our capacity to live fully, transparently in the Divine Presence. 

And, he encouraged us to discern in our spiritual practice, in our study, in our community-building, reasons to continue along a Jewish path and to create a future together.  To feel, accept, and learn from everyone; to find comfort, laughter, and joy in the tradition as it transformed.  He modeled for us how to do the soul’s work over a long life-time, including how to turn age-ing to sage-ing; he even modeled for us how to meet death, how to roll our individual wave gracefully and gratefully back into the great ocean of being.  He showed us how to find our individual sense of deployment in service to the Holy One and to one another; how to claim our empowerment, to stoke our spiritual fire, to feel our ritual gestures in our bodies.  He taught gratitude as foundational practice, famously reporting that he begins each day saying, “Good morning, God.  Thanks for godding through Zalman for another day – I’ll do my best to give you a good ride!”

During his lifetime, Reb Zalman’s students took great pleasure in the energy of what we call a neo-hasidism.  After all, we were invited to immerse ourselves in the spiritual riches of the Hasidic masters and of the mystical tradition that inspired them, and we had a beloved Rebbe sitting before us, just like all the other Hasidim.  Our Rebbe, however, while enjoying the energetic exchange and the reciprocal love inherent in that model, knew that what he was bringing into being was not a hierarchical lineage, but an organic, distributed, and wide-ranging lineage.  On many instances, he would rise from “the Rebbe chair,” move over one seat, and absorb the “rebbetude” of whoever took his place.  And then that one would move over, and someone else would teach.

This willingness to move away from centralized spiritual control in order to make space for many other teachers – and for their students and the students of their students – this wisdom has bequeathed to Jewish Renewal robust institutions and a healthy future, free of dynastic wrangling and accustomed to innovation, creativity, and responsiveness.  Part of this wisdom might be attributed to something Reb Zalman said he learned from Christian monks: to sit still and let God love him. 

So what about this dancing with divine providence I’m supposed to know how to do?  Six months after receiving this message via Reb Zalman, I asked him why he had said that to me.  He replied that he didn’t know, that sometimes he was impelled to transmit something, and he had learned to do so without massaging the transmission into something that made sense to him.  So, he said, perhaps I should seek the counsel of Chana Rochel of Ludomir, a woman called by her community to serve as their rebbe, even though such a thing was “unacceptable” 200 years ago in a Ukrainian village.  From Chana Rochel – who adapted her holy service to fit the constraints of her times – from my Rebbe, from my family, friends, and community, in the years I’ve been blessed to serve as a spiritual teacher, I eventually recognized that I too had learned to accept the responsibility to receive and to share, to trust my kishkes, to do the work without thinking it’s mine alone. 

The foundational theological teaching of Jewish Renewal arises from an understanding shared by all mystics and certainly by our Hasidic masters:  all being emanates from a single divine Source, and all forms of being manifest inextricably in relation to all others.  When Rabbi Burt Jacobson interviewed Reb Zalman for an essay about the Baal Shem Tov, Reb Burt asked: “What does the BeShT have to teach us now?” The response: “That God so loved the world that She gave Herself to be the Earth.” And, this evening, as we celebrate another year in the life of our beautiful blue ark of a planet, I remind you of what our Rebbe loved to say, “The only way to get it together – spiritually, practically, environmentally – is together!”

Keyn y’hi ratzon, so may this be our will and God’s, and may the soul of our teacher, Reb Mesullam Zalman Chiyyah ben Shlomo haCohen v’Chaya Gittel be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. Amen.


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