If, then

Ekev means, IF, as in “If you do obey these rules and observe them carefully your God will maintain faithfully the covenant made on oath with your fathers.”

This parsha is basically an algorithm. If this, than this. Rabbi Lippmann tells me that this is the origin of the name Jacob, the ekev can mean heel, as in Jacob holding on to Esau’s heel at birth, then supplants him. If Esau, then Jacob. If this condition is met, this this result will ensue. For every action, there is a reaction.

This entire parsha is about God’s reaction to Hebrew actions. Do the right actions and the rewards are many. The land of Israel, prosperity, happiness. The parsha even cites God’s resume as proof, goodies already received: freedom from slavery, water and manna in the desert and my personal favorite, after walking for forty years in the desert, no swollen feet. Clearly, this is a God who knows how to deliver. And punish. If you don’t obey commandments then you will lose everything. Live stock will die, mothers will be barren, plagues, famine, all the bad things that can happen will happen. If, then.

So if God is If and people are then and Judaism is about how Jewish people mold that action, so what are the actions that God requires? Here’s the basic plan, Ekev 10:12, in Robert Alter’s translation, “And now, O Israel, what does your God ask of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, paths, to love him, and to worship the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your being, to keep the Lord’s commands and His statutes which I charge you today for your own good?”
So there it is. We are required to Fear, Walk, Love, Worship and Keep.

Fear God, Walk in God's ways, Love God, Worship/Serve god, Keep God's laws

Fear. What does that mean, Fear God? I fear many things but God isn’t one of them. God isn’t some inexplicable divine being looking to punish me personally. I fear random acts of cruelty, I fear unemployment, I fear loneliness, I fear lack of meaning, I fear death, but God? God is an abstraction, most of the time, or God is Ultimate Connection, That which is Before, During, After and not In time, God is beyond my petty ability to comprehend, how can I fear that which is so completely and utterly beyond what I could ever hope to understand but which I firmly believe is not a being, not something that takes a personal interest in me, not something that wants to punish and reward me and yet, during the silent Amidah, I pray to that God. I do. I don’t want to, I don’t think I’m every going to get an answer, but I pray to that god who rewards and punishes. Go figure. Plaut translates this word not as fear but as revere. And somehow, fear and revere, turn into respect for me. Healthy respect. Hmm.

Walk. Walk in God’s way. What way, the way of the torah, Derekh Torah? I’m not sure that’s God’s way. I don’t think God, whatever God is, is Jewish, but my way is Jewish, if I walk that path, will God, whatever that is, see I’m headed in the right direction? Kindness, Healing, Compassion, I try for those, is that the way. Yes, but also all these obligations and laws. Does God really care if I wear tzitzit or eat bacon? I mean, really? Really. The Jewish way, the way of my people, a lasting way, often a good way, but is it God’s? and if not God’s, then whose? The American Way? The Kolot Chayeinu way? Do I walk the Kolot Chayeinu walk, and when I do, is that godly? Or is it just loop thinking, us sitting around congratulating ourselves on how clever and good we are.

Love. Love God. Again, too abstract. I love my friends, sometimes I love my family, I love my pets, I love vintage costume jewelry, I love Lost and Mad Men, I love Brooklyn. I love to learn, I love to laugh, I love Kolot Chayeinu. When I love all these things, because all these things are God, if they are, do I love God? Or must I obey these commandments to love God?
Worship. Worship God? That sounds like idolatry, to my modern self, like worshipping crossed sticks, or Zion, or Baal or America Love it or leave it. Golly, I don’t begin to know where to go with that. I don’t even know what it means to worship. What is that? Like the way I felt about the Beatles when I was nine? Or is if blind faith, complete belief? My first reaction is to scorn blind faith, but if I think about it for even a second I realize I have blind faith in a zillion things. I believe my computer will work, the TV will come on, that the internet exists. I have no real actual idea how any of these things work, but I believe they will work and most of the time they do. I believe in the shining ideal of America. I know much of the time it’s a farce, but dammit I believe in it, I do. So if I can believe in technology and America, why can’t I believe in God? And maybe I do, I think I sort of do, actually. But with all my heart? All? The mind boggles. Part of me aspires to that. But it seems beyone possibility or maybe even to be desired. And yet, there’s a part of me that knows, I have been in God’s presence, I have been in the overwhelming Is and Was and Will Be for a secnd or two, and I know it’s there, I do know it’s there, but worship it? Worship? The very essence of God’s presence is that it just…Is. that’s not something to worship. Worship separates you from God, I think.

Keep. Keep God’s laws. I keep human laws, mostly. And I think Halacha is made by humans, but I don’t keep those. How do I answer to these rules which can seem so arbitrary and absurd, how can I keep God, or my conscience, or my community, or myself, from punishing me when I’m too lazy or indifferent or bored or angry to even think about a way of life that has served my people for thousands of years? How do I fear, walk, love, worshp and keep as an individualist mindful progressive Brooklyn Kolot Chayeinu Lippmanner Jew?

Weirdly, I find that the more I learn Jewishly, the more I want to explore these obligations and perhaps, maybe, find an individualistic progressive Brooklyn Kolot Chayeinu Lippmanner Jewish way to obligate myself, to walk the Derekh Torah.
What are the obligations? What are the choices? What does halakhah mean for me? Do I imbue the legalistic requirements with meaning, do they already have all the meaning they need and I just need to discover it? Do I have the discipline for those obligations? If I don’t, would I if I believed it to be derived from revelation? Would I, if I immersed myself in a community where they are followed without question? Is there any universe that exists where I would actually choose that life?

Hell no, and yet. If then.

Fruit Flies

A Prayer for Birkat HaChammah


God: Eternal, Infinite, Awesome, and Vast Unknowable!
Is/Was/Will Be
That which is before everything I think of as real was here.
That which is now whether I understand it or not.
And that which is left after all that I think will last forever is gone.

The fruit fly lives a lifetime in a day and says its Shabbat prayers every half hour.
We get our three score and ten and we say our Shabbat prayers once a week.
The sun lives billions of years and we say a prayer on its behalf once every twenty-eight years.

So Eternal….how often do you say your prayers?

Speaking of which, God, if I haven’t mentioned it before? I'm really scared. I need something to hold on to, something really big and solid
But also small enough for me to comprehend.
So this morning I gratefully pray with the sun, precisely because, like me, it is not eternal.

It just looks that way to us fruit flies. Amen.

Vayigash - Then Judah approached Joseph

In the first part of Vigash, Judah begs Joseph not to punish Benjamin because of the pain it will cause their father who has still not gotten over the loss of Rachel’s other son. This causes Joseph to break down and confess who he is to his brothers.
When Joseph sends his brothers back home to bring Jacob and the entire family back to Eqypt so he can take care of them, he says to them just as they are leaving, according to your Plaut translation, instead of Bye Bye, have a nice trip, he says, “Do not be quarrelsome along the way.”

Do not be quarrelsome? What is that about? They’ve had this great reconciliation, everything is hunky dory love fest, and by the way, don’t fight on the way home? I love this. This line justifies the whole parsha for me, this line is as human a line in the Torah as I have ever read. I love you and all is forgiven and no fighting in the car! Does Joseph know his brothers, or what?
Now Rashi, according to the Jewish Study Bible, says that the plain sense of this line, do not quarrel amongst yourselves, is that the brothers should refrain from blaming each other for the sale of Joseph which would eventually make them resent Joseph.

But Robert Alter takes a different tack, he translates this line as, “And he sent off his brothers and they went and he said, Do not be perturbed on the journey.” Perturbed? Another translation says, Anxious.
Alter explains, “there has been some dispute about the meaning of the verb here. It is occasionally used in context that associate it with anger and so many interpreters have imagined that Joseph is warning his brothers not to yield to mutual recrimination and perhaps fall to blows on the way home. But, says Alter, the primary meaning of the verb is ‘to quake’ or ‘shake’, either physically or emotionally, and it is the antonym”, the opposite, “ of being tranquil or at peace. Alter thinks it more likely that this is Joseph reassuring his brothers that he won’t take vengence on him.
I…don’t think so. Like I said, Joseph, he knows his brothers. He knows how they react to stress. Those guys, when things are weird or go bad, they panic.

When Joseph threatened the brothers’ sense of superiority, they panicked and threw him in a hole. When Jacob went into continuous mourning, they panicked and continued the lie. They panicked when famine struck their land, when the Pharaoh’s viceroy took a bizarre interest in them and when that viceroy accused them of theft.
I know all about panic. My mother’s father was well to do. In the 1920’s he owned what was then called a department store in Western Pennsylvania. They had cars, they took vacations, his oldest child was in college and the youngest, my mother, was pampered in every way. Then, in 1932 during the Depression, my grandfather lost his business and he and his family went from having everything to having absolutely nothing. My grandfather panicked and he killed himself. He shot himself. And the person who found the body first was his eleven-year old daughter, my mother. My mother never really recovered from this and, through her, neither have I. She lived in a continual state of panic or panic-induced depression most of the time I knew her.

This current economic crisis has me in a panic. I am unemployed and I see no sign of getting a job any time soon. I wake up in the middle of the night worrying. And I’m not just panicking for myself. I’m worried about the the well being of my friends, my family, my community, my country, Israel, the world, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, everywhere. Global Warming, paying off my credit cards, bailing out the auto industry, rockets in Southern Israel,. I mean, c’mon! I want to lash out, I want to punish someone, I don’t know who and I don’t care! I’m freaked out! Aren’t you?
But then I think about my grandmother. She was one tough cookie. After her husband’s death, she picked up her kids and moved back to Queens where she was from, and she started a business installing and servicing laundry machines in apartment building basements. She started with one machine and by the time she died I 1966 she was well off and had started a business that her son and son-in-law kept going for many years. I went to college on those washing machines. My grandmother survived and flourished.

So I know, I assume, I will get another job, eventually. Barack Obama is going to be president soon and he will get done what needs to be done.

Joseph, when he matures, is calm and a thinker always guided by his principles and his brain. When faced by catastrophe he survives and flourishes. Even at his most emotional moments, when he sees his brothers after so many years, he plans and he tests and he doesn’t act until he is sure that they, in the person of Judah, are truly sorry for what they did and that they are ready for his help.

Intellect and heart don’t work when they are separated. Joseph as an intellect alone is not enough. Later in the parsha, when the free peasants of Egypt beg him to feed them during the famine he logically and horrifically turns them all into serfs. Judah as a feeling man is not enough. His anger at Joseph’s youthful arrogances and his love oforhis brothers stop him from helping Joseph when he needs it the most.

So Joseph cries when he sees his brothers again and when he makes himself known to them. And he cries when he sees his father after so many years. He feels deeply, and acts on those feelings, but not impulsively and not with anger and hate. And it is Judah’s intellectual realization that he most take responsibility for his own actions that finally sets off the catharsis that allows this family to come to resolution. It is when Judah approaches Joseph, when the calm of one brother combines with the emotional action of the other that they are returned to their true future and our covenant with connection. It is their duality that allows us to become one.

Ha'azinu

I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted by obsessing about the economic crisis and how it will affect me and those I care about. I’m exhausted by months of worrying about who will be elected President. I’m exhausted by Selichot and Elul and Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur and self-examination and apologizing and forgiving.

But after a month of prayer, reflection, music, stories, sermons and meditation, I’m also relieved. I’m relieved because I might have a line on some freelance work. I’m relieved because I think Barack Obama is going to win. And I’m relieved because I have come out the other end of the holidays filled with peace, a small amount of self-acceptance and a whole lot of love for my community.

So I sit down to work on this dvar torah. I’m feeling good. And Then, I read the parsha, Ha’azinu. Oh My (as Joe Biden would say, literally) God.

The parsha, ha’azinu, “meaning “give ear”, listen, is an archaic and strangely beautiful poem, known as Shira Ha’azinu, the Song of Moses, and it’s ostensibly one of the last things Moses says to the Hebrews before he dies. In it Moses tells the tale of a wonderful generous awesome God who saved the Hebrews from the Egyptians and then gave them everything they could possibly want and then is horrified and really pissed off when they ungratefully screw things up. They become an idol-worshipping, treacherous nation of fools.

Much of the poem is taken up with the various ways God intends to punish these ingrates, with wasting famine, ravaging plague, deadly pestilence, fanged beasts, venomous snakes and much more. And the only thing that stops God from wiping these irksome people off the face of the earth is the fear of what it would do to God’s reputation if the other nations of the world see what a failure God’s chosen people have been. God decides it would be more embarrassing to kill us than to let us live. So God brings the Children of Israel low but promises to watch over them and eventually save them from their enemies, transformed though they may be by their suffering.

Happy New Year!

So what is one to make of this? For me, there are two possible explanations. One, this is Moses speaking to the Hebrews who are about to cross over to Israel. He’s dying, he knows it, this is his last chance to speak and he’s telling them everything he thinks they need to know before they leave him. He reiterates all the rules and regulations, and in the next parsha he blesses them before they go, but here he gives in to his anger and sadness and disappointment that he will not be going with them. After everything he has done for them, they are not thinking of him, they are only thinking of the future. Without him, they are sure to make many. many mistakes. And he so wants to be with them when they do. It’s sad.

Then God reminds Moses that he is dying before he can go to Israel because of his own mistake in the desert. So perhaps Moses was only yelling at himself.

Another explanation of this poem is perhaps to be found in its placement in our calendar, occurring right after Yom Kippur. This year you get all of two whole days before your inner peace is shattered. This parsha is a direct challenge to any complacent serenity you may have managed to achieve. Have you repented of your sins? Is your slate clean? Is God smiling down on you? Well, don’t go counting any of those chickens, because you are bound to make many mistakes, sooner rather than later. Sin and repentence, happiness and grief, prosperity and recession, triumph and defeat, it never stands still.
In her sermons this year, Rabbi Lippmann’s overarching theme was, in many ways, change. Some things we change on purpose, some things change on us, but everything changes: Our economy, our political situation, our mortality. We can’t stop it, but our connection to our community and to the oneness that that we might call God, this may somehow save us, transformed though we may be by our suffering.

(Deut. 32:45-47) “And when Moses finished reciting all these words to all Israel, he said to them: Set your hearts upon all these words with which I bear witness against you today, that you charge your children with them to do all the words of this teaching. For it is not an empty thing for you, but it is your life”

EKEV

Because if you do obey these rules and observe then carefully, God will maintain faithfully for you the covenant that God made on oath with your ancestors.

Mutual obligation. Why? Because that’s the deal.

There’s no archeological evidence that any group of Jewish ex-slaves made the Exodus journey, in fact the evidence points to something that should comfort those of you who hate all the invasions and slaughtering in the Torah, because the evidence indicates that in fact the kingdoms of Judah and Israel rose up organically, from Canaan, that Jews were in fact Canaanites . And they differentiated themselves from their neighbors with their God and with their stories, Jews like stories. And this parsha, Ekev, comes near the climax of one of their better ones, with a great hero and a happy ending. Well, happy if you end it before the Tanach continues because lots of people get killed and everybody screws up.

So this parsha, Ekev, this is another one of those Moses standing in front of the Hebrew hordes, giving yet another very long last speech about what happens if you do this, what happens if you do that, blahblah if you’re good, blah blah if you’re bad… it’s a good speech, there’s some very memorable words but it boils down to mutal obligation. Fairly dry, obvious and I gave a dvar torah on this a year or two ago and what more could I say?

Nothing, until Friday morning. I had a dream, this is true, and in my dream Rabbi Ellen Lippmann appeared, and she said,
“I want to hear the desert wind in their hair.”

Whoa. Okay. So inspired by The Dream Rabbi…what was it like to stand there, in the desert, b’midbar, the wind blowing through your hair, poised to cross over and start that new life.

Moses, enough with the speech. We get it and we don’t care about that old stuff, those people you’re yelling at are all dead, talk to us, not them. We’ve signed on to the program, we’re ready, we’re not afraid, but blahdy blah blah, allright already Old Man, we got it…fear God, observe Shabbat, don’t commit adultery…prosperity. Worship idols, disregard Shabbat or fool around..punishment. Yeah, we’ve heard it a thousand times, now let us get on with it., let us get on with the future.

Forty years ago, our parents came to the border, near where we are now, and they were poised to enter Eretz Yisrael, just like we are, so they sent in twelve scouts and two of them came back and told the truth, it was a fantastic country and well within our grasp, we only had to go and take it. And ten were scared and they lied and said the natives were giants and we didn’t stand a chance to get there. And our parents chose to believe the ten, they were frightened and cowardly, slaves to the core, so cause and effect, they have to wander in the desert until the cowards die off. But there are 600, 00 of them, how long is that going to take? Every year, on Tisha B’av, all of them, starting with the 600,000, go out into the desert and dig a grave, each of us digs a grave, our own grave, and each of us lies down in that grave, the desert wind blowing over our open graves and we all fall asleep. And in the morning, the wind wakes us up, hurray, all but 15,000 of us. 15,000 of us are dead, every year, each conveniently already lying in a grave ready to be covered over.

And this goes on for 40 years, 40 times 15,000 equals 600,000, and we never knew if this Tisha B’Av was the year they were going to die, or their mother or their husband, or their sister, until 40 years in, one Tisha B’Av, no one died and they thought they must have the date wrong, so the next night they all went out and dug their graves and slept in them, only that night no one died. They went out again and again, four nights in a row and no one died and on the fifth day, Tu B’av, they realized the punishment was over and it was time to go into Eretz Yisrael. That was last week. We had a party and made Tu B’av the Jewish Valentines Day. But the desert wind, it’ coming from behind us, pushing us away from the wilderness, pointing us to Eretz Yisrael. Which is great, we’re not our parents, we’re not scared. No, we are ready. But Moses, he’s not so ready, he’s putting off the inevitable and he’s an old man, we love him, he’s boring but we love him and so we have listen for the eight millionth time, if you do this, then you get this, if you do that, then God will punish, blah blah blah blah blah. Mutual obligations: Yeah, we get it. But Moses, sweetie…the desert wind is blowing through our hair. It’s time to go home.

Home. A little more than a week ago I was in Israel and now I’m home. But it feels weird to be here. I keep looking around and going, Oh yeah, Brooklyn. I remember. I like Brooklyn, I love Brooklyn but it’s confusing. What’s confusing is that after only five weeks and despite all the mishegas and the pain and the injustice and the racism and the denial, I fell in love with a place where I am not a visitor, not a minority, not in opposition to the culture but an integral part of it, where people look and act like me even when they really piss me off, especially when they piss me off. Because they’re free, from the diaspora anyway. Amazing.

So, without forgetting for a moment all the contradictions and injustices, almost especially because of them, because they are not a light among the nations, but just a nation, at least as flawed as any other, because Israel is not special because it is special, it is special because it is mine and so I love it even when I hate it. As a professor said about the Wailing Wall, the Kotel is the holiest place in Israel until you go there and I loved it. And now, because I love it, I think I’m now obliged to be an activist in its behalf, to make it a better place as best I can which probably isn’t much.

The desert wind is in my hair and I found another home and home means obligation. Which is kind of a drag because obligation a real pain in the ass, obligation is. But I don’t think I hav

Stuck on a Bus In 1968

My father told me that because and only because I am Jewish, every single solitary gentile, in their heart of hearts, wants me dead and if I'm going to die, I should die in Israel.  So, when my mother announced that we were going on a UJA tour of Israel in August 1968 "whether you like it or not", I was all, what's her problem?  Land of Milk and Honey, Paul Newman in khakis, L'Shana HaBa B'Yerushalayem and the place where I'm supposed to die: hey, what's not to like?  And who knows, maybe I'll have some great super Jew experience, I mean, if you can't find God in Israel, you can't find God, right?

When we landed in Israel and got off the plane, I seriously considered getting down and kissing the hot, black tarmac, but my enthusiasm quickly waned after we got through customs and got on the tour bus.  It was as if we'd never left home, filled as it was with loud middle-aged Long Island Jews, my always-warring parents and an older sister who was pissed off that she’d been dragged along when all she wanted to do was stay home and hang out with her friends.  So mostly my sister sulked, except when she was making out with the only other kid on the tour, Ira, a geeky wiseguy whose main attraction was that he was there. She was seventeen, Ira was sixteen, and I was fourteen so by rights he was mine, but that summer I was still a four-eyed geek and my sister was a high school hippie, so naturally Ira preferred my sister if he could get her, which he sort of could, in a stuck-on-a-bus-with-our-parents kind of way.  It was not fair.

I was 14 and i thought Israel was soooo boring. We didn’t meet any real people or go to anything that wasn’t for the tourists. When we weren't seeing some dreary site with the tour guide yammering away, we were in a hotel or on the bus.  And no matter where we went—to Crusader castles or to a kibbutz, to Roman ruins or to the Negev, to the Galilee or to Yad Vashem—the middle-aged men took photographs of each other in front of the bus and the middle-aged women bought amber beads, the same amber beads at every single stop.  Emmis.

Our tour guide, Rafael, had served in the army during the war, and he spent Day One of our nine days in Israel telling us all about it, and Days Two thru Nine telling us what fat lazy disgusting Americans we were for only sending our money instead of putting our bodies on the line and dying for Israel. The successful middle-aged Long Island Jews, guilty, I’m guessing, about surviving the first half of the 20^th century in relative comfort and safety, loved this manly Sabra and his tips got bigger every time he insulted them.   

But I hated Rafeal.  It's not that I disagreed witH him, like I said I was fourteen, so to me the Long Island Jews WERE big fat lazy disgusting Americans.  But honestly, only sending our money?  Only??  Where would this Manly Jew and his hot boring country be without our money?  And anyway, I was an American and I wasn't going to die for any place but America and even there I had my doubts.  And yeah, maybe they were big fat lazy disgusting Americans but they were MY big fat lazy disgusting Americans, so screw you!

Mommy at The Kotel

Rafeal took us to the Wailing Wall.  I thought, wow, I mean, it was THE Temple, the one in the Torah. For a nice Jewish girl only one year out of her bat mitzvah, this was big, like meeting the Beatles.  If the super Jew experience was going to happen, if God was going to be found, I guessed it would happen there.   So I went with my mother to the women's side, which in those days was the same size as the men's, and I wrote down on a piece of paper what I wanted from God.  I stuck it in a crack in the wall.  

In the summer of 1968, this was what I requested of God:  

1. Safety for Israel
2. End The War In Vietnam Now
3. Ira Will Make Out With Me And Not My Sister

Need I say that none of these wishes came true?

After the Wailing Wall, we went for a walk in East Jerusalem, which had only recently come under the control of Israel. The Long Island Jews were ecstatic. East Jerusalem had been forbidden to Jews since 1948 and now, here we were, at last, face to face with the Arabs who had just tried to push Israel into the sea and failed. 

First we went to an open air market.  I’d only ever seen food laid out in an antiseptic supermarket and it kind of grossed me out to see raw meat in big slabs hanging on hooks, covered in flies.   Fish were laid out in stalls, spices were in open bags, fruit piled up, garbage on the street. Now I glory in such open air markets and shouks, but then all I noticed was that it smelled. My America rarely smelled. It made me a little nauseous.

It wasn't just that.  Ever since I can remember, my father always called all Arabs, “The Animals”. It was like he was talking about anti-Semitic Neanderthals—capricious sub-human beings who hated Jews because they were literally incapable of rational thought and civilized discourse and normal human motivation.  So when we walked into the busy open market place, I was confused.  These Arabs looked like people to me. 

I saw this one old guy wearing a black and white scarf on his head, he was standing by the meat and glaring at us, really angry, maybe even glaring directly at me. I worried that he could tell I thought the market wass smelly.  Then I though, no, he hates me because I’m a Jew, because Israel won the war.  Well, I’m glad he lost, I want Israel to exist but he must think he’s right and we’re wrong, this man who just lost this war and we’re walking around his neighborhood like it’s ours, It IS ours, I guess, now, so he must feel bad, and I’m in his neighborhood, making him feel worse. 

And suddenly I understood, walking around here, lording it over the Arabs of East Jerusalem, taking a tour of their defeat, that we are being very rude.  More than rude, kinda mean.  I wanted us to leave, I asked my mother if we can go.  But my big fat American tourists were laughing and having fun and she ignored me.

I looked around and saw, or thought I saw, that every non-Jew we passed on these streets really, really hated me, hated us, and wanted us dead.  My parents and their friends either couldn't see or didn't care that they were hated, they were in fact glorying in their ability to degrade the locals, and I was not imagining that, because the whole time we were walking through the market, Rafeal was telling stories in a very loud voice of the taking of East Jerusalem by the Israelis, rubbing it in, watching the Arabs' reactions as he boasted of the victories.  But I had eyes and I could see that they’re not animals at all, that this was bad behavior on our part and that we shouldn’t be there.  I was embarrassed for my big fat American Jews, I wanted to dive into the garbage and disappear.

And this moment in East Jerusalem when I smell raw meat and defeat and garbage and poverty and shame and fish and invasion and pain and smugness, when I want to puke from it all, this moment is the actual moment, no joke, the actual moment when my life gets changed forever, the very moment when received truth loses much of its power over me, when I realize that just because my parents or my rabbi or my teacher tells me something is true doesn't make it true and I realize, oh shit I am on my own and moreover, and you may not believe me but it's true, I knew it was that moment and being aware that you have just become aware is very disorienting, a lot to take in when you’re fourteen and stuck on a bus with a bunch of middle-aged Long Island Jews only twenty-three years away from the Holocaust who see themselves as victims in every scenario and there I am, beginning my rejection of my parents' suburban Judaism and Jewishness and having, though I won't realize it until about thirty years later, that super Jew and God moment I was looking for when I landed on that tarmac, that all this emotion and and resentment and fear and shame was only possible because of how much I cared and wanted from and for Israel and my people and my God and somehow, in a line that would end up being extremely jagged and interrupted, this would somehow nevertheless lead to me entering rabbinic school at the age of 58.

I threw up.

Later, in our hotel room, I tried to talk to my father about my revelation that Arabs were people and not animals and he yelled at me, literally foamed at the mouth. For years after that night, he'd introduce me to his friends, “Hello, have you met my daughter, Patricia The Anti-Semite?"

Anway, after that my parents had a screaming fight with my sister and she stomped off somewhere to sulk and they went out to dinner and I was left in the room to think about the error of my ways. Ira came over looking for my sister. She wasn’t there but I was and we spent the evening throwing water balloons off the balcony at passing tourists.

We laughed and laughed and laughed.