Standing At Sinai

Look at us

Standing at Sinai

Gathered together at the foot of a mountain to meet God.

Seriously?

It's too much to take in

Too big to describe

Like this mountain.

Maybe it's just a useful metaphor:

A mountain of the needy and the suffering

that we ignore every day?

Or a mountain of guilt, a mountain of debt?

Or maybe it's all of the knowledge we've yet to learn?

Or a mountain of fear, 
a mountain of the unknown, 
a mountain of uncertainty and procrastination and failure.

A mountain to roll a stone up, a mountain of opposition, 
Oy vey iz mere.

God is in the Law, in the right and the wrong of our choices,

This mountain is huge!

Or maybe it's just a regular old mountain, 

A very large pile of dirt and vegetation,

merely geology.

With trails to climb and

Rocks to stand on to take in the view.

Animals and bugs living in hidden places

Forming their own perfect worlds with no reference to us whatsoever, 
As long as we leave them alone.

Maybe this mountain is our earth, our world, 

To cherish and take care of or 

To abuse and ignore.

God is everywhere in nature and

We are only one small speck on the mountain.

Maybe this mountain is Mount Sinai

And we are waiting for revelation

Because God, the actual God of Torah and Talmud and Tikkun Olam

Is getting ready to show God's self to us.

Maybe all the truth and love in the world is actually making itself available to us,

We who have done nothing but cry and complain.

Poor hungry, scared us!

And this is more special and holy than we can take in.

So we look away and cover our ears

And God is in the marvelous silence.

So let us step up to the metaphors!

Step up to the dirt and the mysteries!

We are standing at Sinai

And it is all for us

However we experience it.

Baruch Atah Adonai, Ruach Ha Olam

Blessed One-ness, Breath of the Universe

We are humble in your presence

However you manifest.

And let us say,

Amen.

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A Verb Is A Noun: A Psalm

(inspired by Arthur Green, SEEK MY FACE)

Maybe
God is a gerund, a verb ending in 'ing', 
a verb that has become a noun.
Always doing, always being.  
And Being.
Never starting, never ending.  
But real and solid, 
a thing made of action.

Selah:  Pause and think.

I want always to be in the image of that Noun, 
A believer and doer and caretaker,
As my true self
In prayer and social action and conscious living,
I want to be in full connection with that Verb, 
Believing and doing and caring, 
In the truth, whether I call it God or not,
And regardless of the payoff.   
I want that Gerund, the noun that is a verb.

Selah: Lift up and exalt.

I construct descriptions and meanings
Or attach myself to rituals and history.
My weakness becomes my strength
My solitude becomes community.
This helps me get through my life
And I am comforted.
The universe is vast and incomprehensible.
I need to find joy in my lack of understanding.
I yearn for God’s goodness to pass over me,
Making the intangible, tangible.
Imagining the unimaginable.
God is a gerund: a verb and a noun.

Selah:  Stop and listen.  

God’s Back: A Drash for Sukkot

Exod 33:12-34:26

This is one of those holiday Shabbats when a special Torah portion is read.  In ancient times, Succot was THE holiday, of all the festivals this was the most important one.  And if that is so, then one must wonder why, out of the entire chumash, this passage was chosen.  It’s from Exodus, after Moses has come down from his first visit to Sinai, and he’s seen the golden calf, broken the first set of tablets, and then had to deal with a furious God and talk God out of killing everyone. 

So when this portion starts, God and Moses are having relationship troubles.  I’m not exaggerating, that’s just exactly how it reads.  So, God and Moses are in one to one conversation and Moses is saying to God, 'look you’ve set up all these difficult conditions for what I have to do, you set this gigantic task for the people, and then you tell me how fabulous I am, but you won’t show yourself to me, to the people, to the outsiders we have to pass amongst so they’ll know we’re special.   Sure we talk, and that’s great, but what are you?  Where's the intimacy?  What is your essence? I haven’t seen you.  I don’t feel like you’re fully sharing yourself with me.'  

So God realizes he’s taken Moses for granted, and suddenly he gets very understanding, he loves Moses, maybe he has been a little withholding, so he promises to be a presence at the Mishkan and when they go out in public, he’ll make himself known amongst foreigners.  Which is great, but Moses wants the personal God, not just the public God. 

So Moses asks to know God’s ways, Moses wants to truly know God.  So God, who is usually very angry, vengeful and jealous and who has just killed a whole lot of idol-worshipping Hebrews, does a 180 and suggest that he show Moses his goodness, yes his goodness, and he will pass God’s goodness in front of Moses and show God's grace and compassion.  But, Moses can’t look at God’s face, and the full truth of what God is, because all that awesomeness would kill him, so God shows Moses God’s back, which I take as a metaphor for the most tangible part of the most intangible infinite, God’s back is the part of the unimaginable that we can imagine.

Then God sends Moses back up the mountain and Moses fetches the tablets and there’s a bunch of laws and the usual obligations and the covenant between the Hebrews and this God. Etcetera.

So why this portion on Sukkot, on the holiday that is supposed to be the happy follow up to all that breast beating and atonement from Yom Kippur?  On Sukkot, the big ole festival of joy?

I think Moses is saying, you want us to worship you and obey you and make a covenant with you, but for the regular people, you’re too abstract.  They’re tired, they’ve been struggling and walking and they’re still worried about where they came from and where they’re going, and, says Moses, ‘I get to talk to you all the time and even I feel like I’m not seeing the real God, so how do you think the people feel?  You want faith and worship? It’s hard to worship an abstract idea.  The people need something they can grasp, no wonder they built an idol!’

And we read this portion now, after Yom Kippur, because we’re tired, we’ve been struggling with hard truths, maybe even with some shame and heartbreak, and maybe we’ve come out the other end but maybe we have some lingering doubts and worries.  And damn, High Holyday services are long.   The rabbi and the cantor know what’s going on, and some of us have some knowledge, but for many of us it’s a mystery, even a tedious mystery.  Wouldn’t it have been much more pleasant to have a nice shiny golden calf to talk to instead of all these prayers to a supernatural being that many of us don’t even believe in?

Now, as many of you may know, for the last few years I have been writing prayers and kavannot, intentions, which are, for me, among other things, one-sided conversations with a supernatural being I don’t believe in.  So, a while back I had an interesting exchange with Rabbi Lippmann.  I had written a prayer for an occasion, the motzi for Lisa and Molly’s Ordination Shabbat, and it had a lot of blessings for God in the chatima, the concluding line, of each verse and I was having a hard time coming up with a way to talk about God without using pronouns, because I didn’t want to be talking to God like I thought I God was a being with a body who deserved a pronoun like you, or him or her, or he or she or even it, so I was writing lines like 


Bless Adonai Echad, that which unites us that we may be one.


instead of 


Bless Adonai Echad, who unites us that we may be one.  

The rabbi read an early draft of the motzi and commented that she missed the pronouns.  Who was I praying to? I dunno, I said, but not a who.  I guess I'm praying to an idea, a concept of unity and connection and one-ness, maybe.  I have such a hard time praying to a being.  The rabbi said she had a hard time praying to a concept. 

She had a point, and I have been struggling with that.   I write prayer.  With who or what am I in holy conversation? It’s hard.  I mean, doesn’t it just make you want to go out and build a Golden Calf?

My current solution to this dilemma is to pray to God’s back, to what’s there when I’m not looking directly at whatever God is.  I can only see what God does, God is the verb to be, god is a gerund, a verb ending in 'ing', always doing and being, never starting, never done.  


Bless Adonai Echad, uniting us that we may be one.

Speaking of gerunds, I’m watching what’s going on with Occupy Wall Street, I think everyone who observed Kol Nidre in Zuccotti Park, is praying, in their own way, to God’s back.  They are in the middle of gerund, believing and acting and caring, finding their true selves in conscious living and social action, in tefillah and tzedukah and teshuva, in full connection with that Verb, To Be, whether they call it God or not, regardless of the outcome.   They yearn for the goodness to pass over them, they want it to be tangible and they believe it can be, and I think they’re seeing it, I think they’re imagining the unimaginable. From their lips to God’s ears.

Again, why do we read this during Sukkot? 

I’m not sure, but maybe when you sit in the sukkah, and you look around at the walls that maybe you built yourself, maybe you can imagine that they are there to remind you of the need for humans to construct descriptions and meaning, golden calves, to help them make it through their lives, which is okay I think. 

And then, maybe, as you sit in the sukkah within these tangible walls, you look up and you can see through to the stars and you can’t help but be reminded how vast and incomprehensible this universe is.  And maybe here you can be joyful, you can understand what all the atonement was about and experience the joy of forgiveness and new beginnings. 

So maybe, when you sit in the sukkah, contemplating God’s back within the walls of the tangible and under the stars of the unimaginable, you will let God be a gerund, that verb ending in ING, never started, never over, always now. 

And may God’s goodness pass over you.

Hag Sameach, Shabbat Shalom.

A Fierce Mystery

“Between the God of the universe and the God of a tribe, between inclusion and exclusion, between the imperative of liberty and the imperative of law, explodes Moses. What we know about him is exactly nothing, exactly everything, he is a fierce mystery.” -- Alicia Ostriker, THE NAKEDNESS OF THE FATHERS

My congregation's mission statement describes Kolot Chayeinu as a community "where doubt can be an act of faith." When that first came out, I thought that meant either, oh goody, I can not believe in God and still join a Jewish community, or, oh fantastic, Kolot is all about truth to power and challenging Pharaoh, or, oh wow, I can join in this place without checking my brains at the door. This is all true, and this is also very limiting.

The God I didn’t believe was a child’s God, learned in a Conservative suburban “temple” of the fifties and sixties that wouldn’t let me, as a girl, have an aliyah, wear a tallit or chant Torah, and which discouraged complexity, at least in its young people. I was right to not believe in that God, but it also never occurred to me that there was an alternative. My Jewish education at my tedious and soul-destroying Hebrew School was so poor that I had no knowledge of or access to the thousands of years of rigorous study of Jewish texts and customs. So I thought being religious, which for me meant being Jewish, was by definition tedious and soul-destroying.

I was disappointed in that God and that Judaism but I was (and am) a contrary sort so, if only to piss off the powers-that-were, I demanded alternatives. No answers were forthcoming and I didn’t actually expect them. It never actually occurred to me that there actually might be a Judaism that rewarded someone like me whose main talent was an ability to ask the next logical question.

Think about the “god” you don’t believe in. Is it that you don’t believe in God or is it that you are stuck on one particular name, one particular metaphor that doesn’t name your experience of God? Might there be a different metaphor, another name that opens up the possibility of encounter with a power grander than yourself, with a web that can connect every person to every other person? –Rabbi Laura Geller

Then I grew up and asked, what could God mean if I made the same kind of demands of God-ness that I made of anything else? What if truth to power doesn’t just mean truth to the powerful but means truth is power? What does that demand of me? And what the heck is in all those books written in Hebrew and Aramaic? I began to study. Now, with my teensy bit of Jewish knowledge, I try to reconcile the ancient with the modern, I attempt to interpret laws, ethics and stories that come from a culture that shares almost no references or paradigms with the culture I live in and I look for a linear rationality in a people’s creation myth that was never meant to be linear or rational. I accept that I am a religious person, whatever that means, with a desire for faith as strong as my need for doubt.

So, what is to be done? How do I reconcile my doubt with my religiosity? Thus far I have found five possible strategies:

1. Scoff at the contradictions and walk away from the whole thing.
I was fourteen when I invented atheism.

2. Live with inconsistency.
I used to think that the only way to have intellectual integrity was through consistency. I thought that if God as I was taught God as a child was nonsensical, then I had to reject everything else that came along with that God. So at the very beginning of my God-search I decided I could resolve this by giving up consistency. I said, okay, I want rational empirical thinking and transcendent religion and Torah knowledge in my life, I will just wall them all off into their separate worlds, I won’t try to make them gibe and will enjoy them all just as they are but separately.

Question: Am I not capable of holding more than two opposing ideas in my mind at the same time without my head exploding?
Answer: No.

3. Intellectualize the contradictions away.
But then I started to do study, really started to see a glimmer of the coolness of Talmud and Midrash. Those guys, they wanted consistency, too! Who knew? And they were gonna make it work, no matter how tortured the logic got, reasoning their way through all the permutations until they came up with rationales for why the Torah is sometimes inconsistent, nutty and/or creepy. Much of their work is brilliant, some of it is kind of sad and ridiculous but dazzling nonetheless. I love this stuff. I’ve barely dipped my toe into how the rabbis and scholars have worked to understand the anomalies, or as Larry Kushner calls it, the “not fitting of ideas”, but it’s fascinating and deep. I’d happily spend the rest of my life learning this cumulative and associative way of thinking. But it easily becomes nothing more than a mind game, thrilling but devoid of emotion.

4. Use transcendence and feelings to understand intuitively.
Midrashic and folk stories can be the Jewish equivalents of the Zen koan, the sound of one scroll clapping, more or less, and they make intuitive sense that isn’t dependent on logic. Music and poems describe basic human needs and feelings and perceptions within the framework of Jewish thought. They sound right and feel good, capturing the essence of what we know to be true, bypassing the logical next questions by going straight for the heart. Jewish meditation unlocks a spirituality that is Jewish but also universal. All of this is a very acceptable strategy for assimilating basic Jewish values, culture and God-ness and works for many of us lot of the time. But too much intuition without enough rational judgment leads to sloppy thinking and precisely the kind of faith I don’t want.

5. There are no contradictions or inconsistencies.
Clearly what I need to do is to tolerate, intellectualize and intuit the contradictions all at the same time, if possible, and even run away from them when it’s necessary. When this approach is even remotely successful, I then begin to glimpse the possibility that there are actually no contradictions to reconcile. I begin to see that it’s all a part of a larger understanding of connection and learning and yearning, that it’s okay if I can’t always see those connections. I can just let them be there and if at some point I manage to put it together (unlikely, but you never know) that will be great and if not, that’s fine, too.
In other words, I begin to have faith that it all makes a kind of sense, even if I cannot and will never perceive it. Gosh.

“...the sign of wonder can only impress the one who is psychologically prepared to be convinced.” - Neshama Leibowitz

Each approach is just one aspect of a mindful Jewish life. God’s presence, for me, is in the questions not the answers, and in the arguments not the resolutions. This is truly doubt as an act of faith. What a fine life that could be, to scoff, ignore, intellectualize, poeticize and accept it all and live within the connections and contradictions, whether I call that God (however I understand that at any given moment) or not, to give oneself permission to live within the fierce mystery.

Blessed HaMavdeel, that which Divides Time
And separates the whole into increments that we may comprehend it,
Blessed Adonai Echad, that which Unites All Existence
And connects us that we may be one,
Blessed Ruach HaOlam, that which Cannot Be Known
And provides us with so many questions:

Thanks for being so interesting.

Amen.