Ki Tissa

Art by Mike Cockrill

 

There’s a tradition of doing learning in honor of someone who has died, so I’d like to do this drash in honor of the memory of Rabbi Jeff Marker.  

So Ki Tissa.  This is a fabulous parsha, my favorite by far and it’s an honor to do a drash on it. A lot happens in this parsha, but I’d like to concentrate this week on two parts of it,  the story of the Golden Calf, and the moment when Moses asks to see God.

Moses is up on Mount Sinai, getting the Torah and the laws from God, and this is a task that takes time.  The people are just recently out of slavery, and they’re still used to living under authoritarians who discourage critical thinking, to put it nicely, but they have learned to trust Moses, who has delivered them out of Egypt, across the Sea of Reeds, made sure they were fed and led them to where they expect to hear from their God.  Moses sees them, he knows them and they know him.  But then he’s gone, for weeks, and they are afraid.  Their lives in Eqypt were awful  but at least they knew who they were and where they belonged.  Now here, at the foot of a mountain in a scary desert, everything they knew is no more. And the one person who they had faith in, gone. 

They are alone.  They don’t yet understand the idea of God’s presence, how that can be with them even if they can’t see it in a concrete form like an idol.  So they ask Aaron to create a substitute, something they can see, which can be worshipped the way gods are worshipped in Egypt, and for a moment they experience relief.  It feels like home.

I’ve been there.  Doubt was definitely not an act of faith at the Westbury Hebrew Congregation back in the day.  So I declared myself an atheist at 14 and ran screaming from it all.  But I had believed it when I was little.  And I liked it, even loved it.  I mean, I read the books they gave us cover to cover and I even had a crush on David the king and Rabbi Akiva, god I was such a nerd.  But they reached in with their illogical sexist dogma and scooped my love for Judaism out of me and put nothing in its place.  So, in me there was a hole where faith had been. But it wanted to be filled, which I did, sort of, with various ideologies and causes, but never enough.   I wanted to feel God’s presence.    I moved to Seattle and built my own Golden Calf as I tried to morph into a blonde scandanavian.  Yeah.  It didn’t work. I simply didn’t know yet that if I wanted to, I could find a life that was Jewish, where I could ask questions, where I could be an artist and a socialist and a feminist and a mystic and a Jew all at the same.  But eventually I found my way out of Egypt.  And I came to the promised land: Brooklyn. 

A little later in the parsha, after the debacle of the Golden Calf, in Chapter 33, verse 18, Moses speaks to God and says,

“Oh let me behold your presence!”

And God answers, “I will make all my goodness pass before you.”, continuing, but you cannot see my face, for a human being may not see my face and live.

So God had Moses position himself in a cleft of a rock and shields him with God’s metaphorical hand as God passes by.

The torah does not record what Moses thought of what he saw, which is the most mindblowing part of Ki Tissa, in my opinion. So much of this parsha, including other stuff in Ki Tissa I’m not talking about today, is about seeing or being seen by your leaders or by God or by what you hope is God, (and when I say God I mean whatever that means for you, it might be a concept, a metaphor, a myth, a connection, an inner knowingness, an old man with a white beard sitting on a throne in the clouds, indescribable, unnameable) and more relevant, vitally important and central to Moses in every way, yet in the one passage in which Moses actually sort of sees God, we don’t hear a word about the experience.  Nothing from torah, not a word from Moses.  Perhaps experiencing God or Godness or connection doesn’t always need to be described?  I will have to look into this   

Then this makes me think about the Kaddish, which is used in many different forms and on many more occasions than as the mourner’s kaddish, which is probably how most of you know it.  I’m teaching a class in it right now so it’s on my mind, particularly the fact that it doesn’t name or address God directly, that all its praise is directed at God’s name, a name that is invented to use instead of Adonai or Elohim, which are names invented to use instead of the name spelled, Yud Hey Vuv Hey, that we’re not supposed to say out loud but which kind of means, I Am That I Am, but is also a substitute for the real name of God which nobody knows anymore because we’re not supposed to know it so we forgot it.    And yet this Kaddish, is used, among other things,  to comfort us after a death, though there is absolutely no mention of death in it.  I used to think this was bizarre, but now I see it as beautiful, as a way to remind us that no matter how sad we are, we are all still connected to God’s presence, through praise and mindfulness, that in our most lonely times we can be in conversation with our history and our spirituality, and that that holy connection can be found in a cleft of a rock, at the foot of Sinai, or a shul in Brooklyn, sitting together in community, like right now.  God is passing over us.  We just have to pay attention.  

Shema! 

Adonai Echad,

Baruch HaShem

Yud Hey Vuv Hey

Shechinah

Yah

El Shaddai

Fierce Mystery

Holy Wholeness

One-ness 

Is us. 

With our eyes closed

We see and we are seen

As God’s presence passes over us.

Open your eyes. 

Amen

 

 

 

Join me at KALLAH!

 Join me at Kallah this July for a deep writing dive into the many uses and meanings of the Kaddish: Naming God, Praise/Mindfulness, Wholeness, Learning, Holy Separation, Mourning and Healing.

http://aleph.org/kallah/

Lucky Esther. Chapter 2 of the Megillah

Lucky Hadassah,

She won a beauty contest!

Which is nice

Every girl 

Should own at least one tiara. 

The food is good at the palace

And there’s probably other perks.  

But she has to sleep 

(That’s putting it nicely)

With that grotesque,

That drunk, that autocrat,

That screamer, that narcissist,

That wastrel, that misogynist,

That idiot who will say yes to

Whoever  

Is the last person he talked to:

Kill the Jews

Don’t kill the Jews 

Whatever. 

That’s jumping ahead in our story, 

We’re still in Chapter 2,

The one where Hadassah is

Kidnapped  

Trafficked

Objectified

Groomed

Raped. 

The one in which she

Loses her true name

And is used by Cousin Mordecai

To make his.

Lucky Esther,

She won a beauty contest. 

Getting Old

 

Getting old

Is the slow loss of shame,

Especially if you’ve spent your life

Being watched

And judged

And found wanting. 

I wasn’t fat

But I wasn’t skinny. 

So I thought I was huge. 

My entire life was organized around my big ass. 

I dressed in loose clothes,

I didn’t go swimming. 

Young men on the street 

Commented 

On the size of my ass

All the time. 

It never occurred to me 

That they liked my ass. 

It never occurred to me 

That my ass was none of their business. 

When I quit smoking 

I gained more weight. 

I’m told I was voluptuous,

I knew I was fat. 

When I hit my forties

The comments stopped. 

I could be on fire

And no man would see me. 

I missed them

For a while. 

It meant I was too old

To be sexy. 

But in my fifties

I slowly realized I was free!

If no one was looking

Then I could just be me. 

And me said,

No more dieting. 

And then me said,

If you don’t like it don’t look. 

And then me said,

No more hiding. 

And then me said,

No more apologies.  

My hair went gray

And I figured out that

If I used the right tone of voice,

Young men would do my bidding. 

I’m not a grandma. 

I’m not a mommy or an auntie. 

I don’t need them to love me. 

I need them to give me a seat on the subway.  

Except for the poverty

And the wrinkles 

And the impending decrepitude,

Getting old is lovely. 

Listen In Shul

Listen in shul 

To the siddur pages turning; 

To the children squirming; 

To feet stepping back and forward three times; 

To those checking their phones; 

To the familiar tune; 

To the memories of our dead; 

To our worries for the future; 

To the questions and the doubt: 

To our yearning for a nap; 

To the schmoozers in the back row; 

To the silent prayers; 

To us; 

To Shabbat. 

Amen 

Let’s Talk (Adonai S’fatai Tiftach )

 

“Open my lips that my mouth may declare your glory”

Or not. 

I can’t talk to Glory, and

Awesome doesn’t return my calls.  

You’re here every day,

What’s so fearsome about that?

And where’s the dialogue in terror?

You’re not a king,

You’re not even a You. 

Let’s make a hevruta, let’s talk!

Ancestors, power, holiness,

Rest, healing, gratitude, peace,

So interesting. 

I’ll start. 

Laser Fusion (for Tu Bishvat)

 

It’s Tu Bishvat, the New Year of Trees. 

Do not give up!

The forests burn but

Electric vehicles;

The seas rise but

LED lightbulbs;

Species disappear but

Solar power;

Millions starve but

Wind turbines.

We’ll be long dead but

Laser fusion!

Blessed Holy Wholeness,

    Within which lives our ingenuity and hope 

    Alongside our stupidity and despair,

May the solutions scale up and arrive in time 

To save us all from our own greed and folly, Amen. 

Happy New Year, trees! And good luck. 

Blessing for Mourning the Death of a Much Loved Animal

Art by Mike Cockrill

From the collection of Bert Salter Estate 

Blessed Holy Wholeness

Breath of the Universe 

Breathing us in

Breathing us out. 

Remembering us

Remembering our companions

Who let us love them with a full and pure heart

And who loved us back the same way. 

Amen

We were blessed to have them 

As  long as we did

And though I am really sad that they are gone,

I am really glad that they were here. 

Amen

I give thanks to the Holy Connector,

The One-ness that is eternal,

Which I experienced 

Through my sweet beasts. 

Amen

Brucha HaShleimot

Ruach ha Olam,

Breathing us in

Breathing us out.

We remember them,

We mourn their loss

And their memories are a blessing. 

And let us say, Amen

Home(s)

Light candles now,

In your home

For the homeless. 

For the displaced

With no place

They can afford;

For the first peoples

Whose lands and cultures 

Were stolen or degraded;

For the animals

Invading your backyards. 

How dare they walk where they once lived;

For those on islands

Swamped by the rising water,

Ocean where there once was land;

For those who survived a shooting,

There is no more safety,

It is lost forever;

For the addicted whose illness 

Destroys their true selves 

While the greedy make money;

For the warred upon and bombed out,

Starving and hopeless,

Not even a tent to sleep in;

For the houses and habitats

Burnt up in climate change’s fires,

And everything gone;

For the immigrants,

Losing the old lands to violence and poverty

And so violently unwelcome in the new.

Where 

Will they

Light their candles now?

This is our covenant:

Take care of the earth

And it will take care of you.

So It Is Upon Us to—

Build housing;

Make reparations;

Preserve wilderness;

End fossil fuels;

Restrict guns;

Treat addiction;

Cease fire;

Live sustainably;

Welcome immigrants. 

Create new homes

And save the old ones. 

Light candles, 

Now. 

Amen

Pairs (for Hanukkah)

God is a gerund,

A verb and a noun,

Doing and being.

Light is from God,

Both waves and particles,

Radiation and photons. 

Darkness is so full,

Many visions and none at all,

Frightening and safe. 

An event from history 

And the stories of rabbis,

The eight days exist and also evolve. 

Hanukkah is dialectics, between 

Revolution and accommodation,

Identity and assimilation. 

Solstice or Hanukkah?

Let’s not worry about 

Somebody else’s paradigm.

Light and dark are a gerund,

Seeing and not seeing.

Amen v’Amen.