Tisha B’Av: Remembering Those who “Saved” Judaism (Not the Rabbis)

Every year, rabbis across the country approach Tisha B’av by reciting the same narrative. The destruction of the Second Temple in the first century inflicted a horrific trauma on Jews everywhere; we must remember and thank the rabbis for saving Judaism by gathering in the enclave of Yavneh to reconstruct it.

Wrong. And wrong.

There can be no doubt that Jews who lived in the war zone experienced the horrors of a brutal war. There can be no doubt that those who witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem would have been profoundly traumatized. There is no reason to mitigate or downplay the anguish of human beings who were caught in the conflagration. War has its victims, and they must be honored.

But I want to revisit the history of this time (yes, again). Most Jews were not living in the war zone. By the time the Second Temple was destroyed, Jews had been living in the Diaspora for centuries. They created communities everywhere they went—in Egypt, in Rome, on the North African coast, in Cyprus, Greece, the Aegean Islands, in Asia Minor. Synagogues and other community institutions served a wide range of functions: from fundraising to adjudicating the emancipation of slaves to offering meeting space for burial societies. The Temple in Jerusalem and its sacrificial rites were far away and had almost no impact on individual Jews or the communities they belong to.

Second Temple Jews paid their half-shekel to the Temple; that was an important obligation worth fulfilling and defending. But almost all diaspora literature leaves the Temple wholly unmentioned for a reason: the Temple was not central to Jewish writers — biblical characters were.

Rabbis neither invented synagogues nor appear in the record as synagogue leaders. The rosh of a synagogue could be a woman. Or a non-Jew. In short: thriving Jewish communities existed across the Roman Empire and they found a multitude of ways to express their identity, to practice their rituals, to study their texts, and to celebrate their festivals. They did all these things without any rabbis in attendance. The rabbis didn’t need to “save” Judaism. Jews were happily practicing it.

Jews of the so-called “rabbinic period” of the post-Second Temple period were hardly influenced by the rabbis. Archival records of the period do not refer to Jewish law. Neither do they indicate that rabbis were called upon for either officiating at life-cycle events or solving legal matters.

Jewish parents in the Roman Empire mostly gave their children Greek names and wrote their legal documents in Greek. Synagogues were not always built so that worshippers would be facing Jerusalem as they recited prayers, and they featured imagery based on pagan motifs and alluding to pagan deities. Jews were living Jewish lives, all right, but those lives were not subject to rabbinic definitions or rabbinic authority.

Jewish identity was then, as it is today across North America, diverse and multifaceted. There is no evidence of the deep and lasting fear of assimilation so often expressed by the rabbis of the modern era. Rather, Jewish life demonstrates a wholehearted embrace of creative Jewish experience in the light of what was—at that time—global culture.

Berel Lang notes that Jews of our own time are “hyphenated creatures.” Yes, they are often intermarried. Yes, they may come in various ethnic iterations. The diversity of Judaism can and should not be contained or qualified: it is enhancing and expanding us.

So what might we tell ourselves at this time of year, which is devoted to acknowledging the painful aspects of our history. Jews were expelled from England and from Spain on Tisha B’Av. The Warsaw ghetto was liquidated on this day. The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple is one of many catastrophes we mark.

Many of us have been overcome in recent months and even in recent years by a profound hopelessness and deep despair. We have seen plentiful evidence of the sinat hanim, baseless hatred at work, a hatred the rabbis claim caused the catastrophe of the first century.

We could – and should — honor our grief: we have lost millions to the pandemic, we have experienced disruption and dislocation, we are challenged by multiple assaults on our freedoms. We cannot unsee the devastation of civilian life in Gaza at Israel’s hands. The list of painful realities is a long one.

Still, as it was for the Jews of the first century, the capacity to save Judaism and ourselves remains ours to realize.

July 24, 2024July 24, 2024

Holding Biblical Scholars (and Spiritual Leaders) Accountable: On Rape and Rape Culture in the Hebrew Bible

It was another morning with scholars of Tanakh (what academics call the Hebrew Bible). I was reading the work of a sober scholar, or so it seemed, when I came across these two sentences:

“While David remains in exile outside of Jerusalem, Absalom sleeps with his father’s concubines as an expression of royal authority. He performs this act to show all Israel he is in charge in place of his father.”

Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

David leaves Jerusalem with “a small nation of thousands,” as another sober scholar, J.P. Fokkelman, puts it. David takes “all the people,” all his servants and followers, all the Cherethites, the Pelethites, and the Gittites (2 Sam. 15:17-8). Even children are part of the king’s entourage (2 Sam. 15:22).

He also decides to leave ten of his “secondary wives” in Jerusalem, charged with the obligation to “protect” the palace (2 Sam. 15:16). When a king commands, you must obey. Unlike David, and his enormous retinue, these women may not flee from an invading army.

Absalom rapes each one of them. On the roof where David once ogled Bathsheba. In public, before all of his men (2 Sam. 16: 20-22).

Absalom sleeps with his father’s concubines?

The words scholars choose are important.

I tried to explain why, in my article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, “Taking Biblical Authors at Their Word: On Scholarly Ethics, Sexual Violence, and Rape Culture in the Hebrew Bible.” In it, I attempt to analyze why scholars avoid using the terms rape and rape culture. Here are some of their arguments:

We must understand the world biblical authors describe on their terms, in “historical context.” This is the way things were “back then.”
Biblical authors do not understand taking a woman as a violent act but rather as a male right, one only limited by the rights of other men. Their legal world excludes rape because they have no concept of the same.
There is no “lexical equivalent” in biblical Hebrew to the word rape. One cannot use a modern term to describe the ancient texts. (A side note: never mind the fact that scholars have been using the term “marriage” in their discussions of biblical texts for millennia, despite the fact that there is no “lexical equivalent” to be found here, either.)

Here are some of my arguments:

Are any ideologies which justify or rationalize oppression, enslavement, sexual assault, or wholesale destruction, off bounds to interrogation? Simply reproducing toxic ideas is an act of collusion.
Denying a woman power of any kind of consent is a defining feature of rape culture.
Likewise, the very lack of a specific term for rape is evidence of a rape culture par excellence, not of its absence. Not having a name for sexual assault ensures that it cannot be challenged.

Of all the things I have written, this piece may remain the most important to me personally. I wrote about the ethical project we engage in as scholars. I spoke to our obligations. We must hold academics to account; they must be able to interrogate biblical literature and call out the many ways in which it has contributed to toxic hegemonic masculine systems.

Feminist research is about resisting and naming what is wrong. It is about giving every victim of sexual harassment and sexual assault their due. Whether they exist in the pages of our Bibles or in the offices next to ours, whether they are next to us or across the globe, whether they belong to our time or some other, their suffering and their pain may not be ignored.

Thiede, Barbara. 2024. “Taking Biblical Authors at Their Word: On Scholarly Ethics, Sexual Violence, and Rape Culture in the Hebrew Bible.” Journal of Biblical Literature 143.2: 185–205. DOI: 10.15699/jbl.1432.2024.1.

* Thanks to Erik Henning Thiede who told me back in 2024: “You have to write this thing.”

June 16, 2024June 16, 2024

Sinai, Tanakh, and the Teaching of Humility

It was our last service before Shavuot. We spoke about Sinai moments. Then I asked my husband, Ralf, to pick up one end of the tallit; I took the other.

We raised the tallit above our heads. Outstretched above us was a soft silk sky of teal blue shot through with lines of sapphire. A gold border shimmered on each side. The colors of sunset and morning sky and the dark of night rippled overhead.

Folks gathered beneath our chuppah. It was very quiet. Each person was praying.

Thus, each soul was singing.

Later, a congregant wrote to me: “I couldn’t help but bring to mind our Sinai moment underneath the beautiful tallit… I will carry that memory with me for the rest of the year, and beyond!”

There is nothing so real as the certainty of spiritual wholeness. It is a thing that cannot be described without tripping over the inadequacy of words.

I live for these moments however impossible it is to describe them. Time does not seem to pass; I am inhabiting a space that is singular. It will never come in that form again.

That was Friday night.

On Sunday morning, I sat at my desk and wrote about Hannah.

Rabbis, ministers, and scholars praise Hannah for her faithful prayers. They laud YHVH for granting her a miracle in the form of her son Samuel.

But those accolades are misplaced. It is YHVH who inflicts barrenness on Hannah, and for no reason. She has done nothing wrong; there is no punishment befitting some imagined failing. How many readers notice how long Hannah endures divinely induced infertility? Hannah must endure the taunts of Elkanah’s other wife, Penina, who reminds Hannah that YHVH has closed her womb. Year after dreadful year (1 Samuel 1:6-7).

YHVH does nothing. There is no communication. There is no explanation. Each year, Hannah weeps. Each year she fasts. There is no answer, no divine response. YHVH reacts only when she vows that if she is given a (male) child, she will return him to serve YHVH.

Perhaps this was YHVH’s plan all along? Perhaps this was a way to find a surrogate mother for a child YYHVH could take for his own, train for his own, and control on his own. For that is what happens to Samuel, who is forced to leave his family as a child. The repeated use of hiphil forms make clear that Hannah “causes” the child to be brought to Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:24).

To erase difficult texts only inflicts a second erasure. I can’t do it. Those readers who know what it is to be taunted and tormented, abused in body and soul — those readers would know me for a fraud.

There is no way to contend with the cruelty and violence of our own time with honesty and clarity while simultaneously privileging sacred texts and shielding them from accountability. The ethics we claim we bring to the present cannot be discarded when we address the past.

Sometimes, I inhabit that silence within which I sing. I know that space is inspired by Jewish practice, by Jewish experience, and by Jewish inheritance. Sometimes, I live inside the texts – biblical or rabbinic. They demand that I am honest and true – even to what is painful therein.

Both locations teach humility because neither space can be ignored.

I cannot pretend that all is well because I know it can’t be. That is arrogance, an arrogance that harms those who suffer. Nor can I authorize an uncritical belief in the sanctity of texts that valorize cruelty, or rewrite them to erase what hurts. That, too, would be arrogant; that, too, only harms.

I stand below the sky, which is the greatest chuppah. It makes us all small things, but, I hope, honest ones.

March 8, 2024March 8, 2024

Purim and Amalek: Bible as Propaganda

We are approaching Purim, a holiday we associate with laughter, with turning authority on its head, with upending power, with the mirth that comes from contrasting the ridiculous with the sublime.

But the text we read in celebration, the Book of Esther, is not without its darker aspects. One is its reliance on the Amalek narrative.

Haman, after all, is the descendant of King Agag, himself descendant of the Amalekites who attacked the Israelites as they fled Egypt (Exodus 17:8-16). During Purim, we blot out Haman’s memory (often by rubbing out his name), symbolically enacting the commandment in Deuteronomy 25:19: “you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you must not forget.” On Shabbat Zachor, just before Purim, we read this passage in synagogue.

Deuteronomy appears to command the Israelites to destroy an entire people, to commit genocide, in fact.

Or not?

Rabbinic tradition has repeatedly addressed this question, often with surprising results.

The Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael insists that Jews themselves should not be engaging in a battle against Amalek. Quoting Exodus 17:14-16, in which YHVH himself says he will blot out Amalek, the Mekhilta states: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, will sit upon the throne of His kingdom and His reign will prevail, at that time ‘the Lord will have war with Amalek.’” The responsibility for genocide is conveniently left to God.

A midrash in Pesikta d’Rav Kahana suggests that Amalek’s attack was punishment for unethical behavior on the part of the Israelites. Thus, the message of the story is not hatred but repentance. In order to prevent another Amalek, we must behave ethically.

In Tractate Yoma (22b), the rabbis imagine Saul directly questioning YHVH’s command to blot out Amalek:

Saul countered and said: Now, if on account of one life that is taken, in a case where a slain person’s body is found and the murderer is unknown, the Torah said to bring a heifer whose neck is broken to a barren valley, in the atonement ritual described in Deuteronomy 21:1–9, all the more so must I have pity and not take all these Amalekite lives. And he further reasoned: If the men have sinned, in what way have the animals sinned? Why, then, should the Amalekites’ livestock be destroyed? And if the adults have sinned, in what way have the children sinned?

Saul argues with God just as Abraham argued with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:20–33). He loses, as we might expect. “A Divine Voice then came forth and said to him: ‘Do not be overly righteous’” (Ecclesiastes 7:16). Still, protest is articulated.

As it should be: we may not accept any command blindly if we hope to live an ethical life.

In the past many decades, the Amalek narrative has become a propaganda tool in the hands of Jewish leaders: Joseph Soloveitchik equated the Arab world with Amalek. Meir Kahane repeatedly used the Amalek trope to construct an endless battle between Jews and the evil Other, whom he defined as gentiles and Arabs. In 1980, Rabbi Israel Hess published an article entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” in which he asserted that the Palestinians deserved the fate of Amalek. The battle ahead, he claimed, would ensure “racial purity.”

Israeli extremists have regularly repeated and amplified such statements.

In our time, Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have repeatedly invoked Amalek. And what are we now witnessing? The destruction of Gaza and the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians. One in six Palestinian children under the age of two is at risk of dying of starvation.

Could we ask with Saul: Hamas has committed an unimaginable horror. And… how do Palestinian children, women, elderly – civilians, in fact – deserve to be killed en masse as a consequence? Why are holy sites and heritage sites demolished? Animal life destroyed? How is it that families are made to subsist on one meal a day and children left to starve? How do children with burns all over their bodies deserve a world in which they have nothing more than two aspirins for their pain? How have doctors deserved conditions in which they must decide who shall live and who shall die because medical resources have been decimated?

In Esther 9:13, Esther asks for a second day to attack the Persians; 75,000 are slaughtered as a result. When members of my community read this verse, they are appalled. Every year we struggle with this awful depiction of wholesale, overwhelming slaughter.

This Shabbat Zachor and this Purim, can we ask as many in our tradition have: May biblical texts ever be used to justify the decimation of a people?

February 21, 2024February 23, 2024

T’rumah and the Making of Beautiful Things

Last week, we read one of my favorite passages in Torah – T’rumah. I fell in love with this parsha over fifteen years ago. I remember that my enthusiasm and delight surprised most of my then congregants, who complained when we met for Torah study that the text was repetitive and boring.

“It’s magical,” I insisted. “It is filled with color and scents. Everything, everything is made by human beings who long to engage in a delightful excess of thanks, of creative energy. It’s inspiring!”

The tabernacle, I would point out, is made of every single kind of art. Who created a lampstand fashioned in metal and adorned in nature – petals winding about its seven branches and cups fashioned in the form of almond blossoms? Who stitched draperies made of fine twisted linen, in the richest and deepest shades of purple and blue and wine-red? Who hammered out the gold clasps used to hold cloth together? The work of our ancestors’ hands is described here, and it is amazing.

Once my son, Erik, told me that my little business on Etsy, Not My Brother’s Kippah, was one of the most powerful parts of my rabbinic calling.

The most magical havdalah tallit I ever made…using a vintage sari!

Certainly, almost as soon as I entered rabbinical school, I started making kippot, and then tallitot. My first efforts were all gifts. They were meant to redress a problem: in those days, my fellow female students mostly purchased either a flimsy wire kippah or wrapped their heads in a scarf.

The most magical Star of David I ever found…

Since then, though, I’ve made a number of tallitot for transgender teenagers who otherwise felt confined in a market that catered entirely to a binary reading of human needs – products that were clearly marked for “boys” or “girls.” Gender is no longer defining who visits my site or purchases my work.

Among all those kippot, tallitot, tallit bags, and the like that I have made, I have loved most the sense of magic in the making. There is always a dance going on, a dance of light, of color, of touch, of symbol in every stitch. When I reuse fabrics or scraps of the same, or otherwise rely on recycled materials, I know that my making can respond to the needs of a planet suffering from the horrific waste and pollution the fashion industry engenders. If I am going to create, I want to think about how to do that sustainably.

No one ever told me that selling things I made could actually offer spiritual benefits – for me or for my clients. Recently, I had a client who had recently lost her mother; when we settled on a sunset orange sari as the base for her tallit, she told me: “that was my mother’s favorite color.”

Those who made the tabernacle knew that the making of beautiful things is a tikkun. They knew that their endeavors were magical, and thus spiritual. They made things from the earth, reflecting the earth, and for the express purpose of connecting the earth with its divine source.

I will never read T’rumah without thanking them.

January 3, 2024January 3, 2024

Acknowledging History’s Harm: Sexual Abuse and Harassment in Jewish Renewal

How is history remade?

Jewish Renewal’s 2006 ban against Mordechai Gafni is a salient example. This ban is frequently mentioned as proof of Jewish Renewal’s credentials when it comes to dealing with sexual predators.

But history is messy. As a historian, I have not found any recorded evidence to support any claims of “pathfinding” Jewish Renewal responses to the many women who had, for twenty years, anonymously informed a range of Jewish leaders about the abuse they endured at Gafni’s hands. The record suggests otherwise: Reb Zalman and other Jewish Renewal leaders resisted taking action against Gafni.

For decades, Gafni moved from one position to another amid a swirl of rumors and allegations. Nevertheless, Jewish Renewal leaders embraced Gafni and they defended him.

In 2004, Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of The Jewish Week interviewed three women, who were aged 13, 16, and 22 when Gafni assaulted them (for a searing account from one of those women, who went public years later, click here). Rosenblatt consulted Zalman; after all, Gafni had just found a home in Jewish Renewal and was considered a rising star by many in the movement.

Rosenblatt wrote: “Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the acknowledged leader of the Renewal movement, said he is aware of the allegations against Rabbi Gafni but supports him. ‘If you want to find fly specks in the pepper, you can always find them,’ Reb Schachter-Shalomi said. ‘But I’ve watched him teach. He is learned, exciting and charismatic. A good teacher is one who gets people excited.’”

It would take two more years before Reb Zalman issued a herem against Gafni. Though Jewish Renewal leaders had long known about the rumors and allegations, the ban was only filed after three women filed an official complaint with Israeli police accusing Gafni of rape, harassment, and indecent assault in May of 2006.

Why?

Charismatic leaders are often protected (enabled) by their followers. Reverence and deference can prevent followers from acknowledging harmful behaviors. It can silence those who try to speak out.

Charismatic leaders often become pristine characters in the minds of their devotees. Jewish Renewal leaders rely on the phrase “Reb Zalman said…” either to support an idea or to quash it.

Charismatic leadership remains prioritized in Jewish Renewal. Sadly, the lack of oversight and accountability for such leaders has also been a feature of its institutions.

Given this legacy, it is unsurprising that sexual harassment and other abuses of power continue to be normalized and excused. Uninformed leaders have preferred, like so many before them, to enable and protect predatorial behavior. Perpetrators have been protected. Even when appeals committees have noted gross failures on the part of past Ethics Committees, failures that included not only frightening ignorance about the matters under concern, but conflicts of interest and even bias in favor of the accused, there has been no accountability for such failures, much less any teshuva of any kind. Complainants have been brushed aside.

Recently, I learned from a former student of the ALEPH Ordination Program (AOP) that when she was sent her application packet in 2016, it included a 2003 article by Rami Shapiro entitled “The Three-Fold Torah.” Shapiro highlighted the “revolutionaries” of the Jewish Renewal movement, among them, Mordechai Gafni.

That AOP’s administration did not think to consider what message was being sent to prospective students is deeply disturbing. Is Gafni’s history as a sexual predator – or Jewish Renewal’s late response to that history – irrelevant?

Someone will surely claim this was an “oversight.” We should ask, however, whether such an “oversight” is rather a symptom part of the longstanding tendency to downplay or brush aside evidence of bullying, sexual harassment, and abuse in Jewish Renewal settings.

As a former AOP student, then a faculty member, then a Vaad member, and then AOP’s first Dean of Faculty, I can say this much: sexual harassment and bullying were not exceptional behaviors but (and not infrequently), tolerated ones. Student complaints were generally met with “Oh, that’s just….. (fill in a name).” Boundary breaking, bullying, and sexually abusive behavior was a quirk of character and didn’t need to be taken seriously.

Recently, a group of Jewish Renewal rabbis, cantors, and rabbinic pastors issued a Call to Action regarding sexual harassment and bullying in our institutions. We have been glad to find that we are being taken very seriously indeed by leaders in Ohalah and, now, in ALEPH. We believe that there may be hope for addressing institutions which have, in the past, featured little to no transparency, no accountability, and no oversight for its leaders, its teachers, and even those it ordains.

There are many steps in this process. One is to address unfortunate legacies of enabling perpetrators and silencing victims.

Efforts to erase or rewrite history are symptomatic of a larger problem: the unwillingness to fully acknowledge past harm. No trust can be built without such honest and frank acknowledgment.

What we do now is a test of our intentions, our integrity, and our ethics.

We must own our history, not rewrite it.

November 11, 2023November 11, 2023

In Sarah’s Honor: Singing our Stories

Singing has had a strangely magical effect on me since I was a small child. Something visceral occurs.

For decades I didn’t speak to anyone about this. I believed that I was imagining the whole thing. Or, at least what happened when I sang.

But I repeatedly found myself helplessly giving in to That Thing That Happens every time I started singing. My surrender was especially marked when I was leading services. I could be cranky, exhausted, or even unwilling; as soon as the service began, I would succumb in the first tender notes of the first prayer.

During High Holy Days, the magical nature of that strange Thing That Happens turns into a kind of sorcery. It would have frightened me all these years if it wasn’t – every time – so beautiful.

Many years ago, I just reached the haftarah for Rosh Hashanah, the story of Hannah, who longs so desperately for a child. Before I began, I asked my congregants to name an ancestress. Predictably, I heard names like Miriam, Sarah, and Leah. My husband, Ralf, who is an expert in throwing intellectual and spiritual curveballs, suggested Lot’s wife.

I sang in Hebrew and then sang spontaneous English translations. At some point I no longer remember, I began singing the stories of all the foremothers my congregants had mentioned. All the trope melodies landed in the right places. Miriam’s joy and power, Leah’s sadness – I composed as I sang, but the text seemed given to me, rather than invented by me.

When I came to Lot’s wife, I sang of her looking back at children she had lost and the neighbors she would never see again. I sang of how she became an inhuman thing – for looking, for longing. She lost everything — including herself.

This will read just as weirdly as it sounds: from the small windows at the very top of the sanctuary, I became aware of soft voices – all seemingly female. “Tell my story,” one said. “Tell my story,” said another. The voices were gentle enough, but they were insistent, clamoring. Countless Jewish women of some ages past were suddenly asking me to tell their stories. And they wouldn’t stop asking – even as I continued singing, inventing, telling the stories I knew from Tanakh.

At some point, I said (thought?) helplessly: “I can’t tell all your stories – I would never have the time to do that.” I paused. “But I will try. I will do my best in the years I have.”

And the voices were still.

Recently, I have realized that my whole life – all my academic research, all of my teaching, any activism I’ve engaged in – has been devoted to telling the stories of those whose voices have been lost or suppressed. The outcome saddens me. I have achieved so little. I have longed for so much.

Am I, in the end, a descendant of the unnamed Lot’s wife? Will I, too, turn into some form that even while it crumbles, can only leave behind near fruitless efforts to combat the toxic uses of power that continue to rain down upon the vulnerable?

But of course, that sort of sadness is a useless exercise. There is a deeper learning here. Whatever that Thing That Happens is, it is for the good and to the good and about the good. I plan to be grateful for that.

And to all those pleading voices, I say: Yes. I am still here, and I will tell your stories.

August 30, 2023September 3, 2023

The Rebbe(s): On Titles, Power, and Ethics

For many years, I taught at the ALEPH Ordination Program, where I had, many years earlier, earned a rabbinic ordination. I did not go by “Rabbi” or “Reb.” My students sometimes used those titles, but not at my request.

I was then and remain now reactive to the idea so often promulgated in Renewal circles: that students need a “rebbe.”

Almost all of the students I taught were in their second careers. They were teachers, social workers, doctors, lawyers, psychologists, psychiatrists, political activists and so, so much more. They brought experience, wisdom, knowledge, and joy to the classroom. They were my emerging colleagues.

I did not walk into Jewish Renewal to find myself a “rebbe.” I was instantly wary of the term and of the peculiar glorification of the role. Those then so attached to the term had often been students Reb Zalman. They called him their “rebbe.”

They loved and honored their teacher and, it seemed, many owed him their Jewish lives. Many needed spiritual healing, and from what I could see, they felt he gave them that healing, that wholeness.

I cannot comment on their experience; only my own. What I met was a cadre of human beings who wanted to be rebbes.

A good number (not all) were charismatic individuals; powerful and passionate speakers, charming and witty service leaders. A talented bunch, for the most part.

And just as often capable of using their skills to attain admiration, affirmation, and adoration. I repeatedly saw leaders manipulate their followers in pursuit of those things. Some appeared to get regularly and emotionally drunk on the good feelings their students and congregants gave them about themselves.

Jewish Renewal does more than make a home for such leaders; it seeks them. The charismatic, the gifted, the powerful “rebbes” of Jewish Renewal are valued, admired. But the price their congregants or students pay for their leaders’ needs for affirmation, adoration, and “success” is not minor.

When unhealthy power imbalances govern spiritual relationships, emotional and psychological manipulation, coercion, and sexual harassment can follow. I have seen “spiritual intimacy” at work. I have seen it lead to the abandonment of healthy boundaries in favor of emotional dependency and even, sadly, abuse.

When I taught for one year in Taiwan, my students also had a name for me. They did not call me “Dr. Thiede” or “Professor Thiede.” They called me “Teacher.”

Over the past four decades, this was the only title I loved to hear. To teach is to guide, to hold, to nourish, to lift up. To teach is to learn; students are our colleagues in that endeavor.

We claim a “rebbe” is a teacher. But those we call “rebbe” have been enthusiastically invested with power that no teacher with a modicum of self-awareness would claim.

If Jewish Renewal could reconsider what it values in its spiritual leaders – if we valued ethics more than a lovely voice, a clever stage presence, a charming and spontaneous performance of liturgy – what titles would we choose? Any?

May 8, 2023May 8, 2023

Art by Adamah: Jewish Inheritance, Jewish Future

I asked Clay Adamah Mil, Jewish artist, how they felt their own artwork fit into the lineage and history of Jewish art.*

I received a work of art, one that referenced multiple Jewish artists of the last two millennia. The piece presents the viewer with a midrash on, at the very least, a minyan of creative, brilliant, Jewish minds. It also offers us a Jew of our own time in all their particularity.

Clay’s figure floats in the center of the work, sleeping in a sky filled with triangular stars of many colors. Marc Chagall’s “Over Vitebsk” (1913) comes immediately to mind. In Chagall’s painting an elderly beggar hovers in the sky, a heavy sack slung over his shoulder, a cane in his hand. When that painting was completed, Vitebsk was home to a Jewish community that constituted over half the city’s inhabitants.

It is hard to feel the gut punch of loss when looking at Chagall’s work; that world was destroyed in the Shoah.

Here, Clay’s sleeping figure is peaceful, safe. They dream while surrounded by allusions and reference to the Jewish art of centuries – art made new and original (all over again). It is a kind of tikkun, this commentary.

Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s (1897) work, “Pashal Eve” has contributed the delicate chandelier that Clay Adamah Mil holds over the earth below. In Oppenheim’s painting, the original hangs over a seder table and those gathered around it. It is muted and hard to make out, even though the human faces at the table are so brightly lit.

In Clay’s work, the chandelier lights the dark sky, casting light on the beach that undulates gently to the sea. For Oppenheim, the chandelier illuminates people gathered together; for Clay, the chandelier illuminates the earth – an earth without humans walking, resting, or working in its folds and shadows.

Instead, their resting figure floats above the feathery grass. Only a stone hamsa lying on the beach seems to betray a human presence. But perhaps not.

This too – an earth drawn both at peace and safe from harm, is a tikkun. The human presence above protects, holds, cares for its quiet beauty. No flight from danger or painful labor is evoked; there is no heavy burden on the back of the human figure in this work.

Designs from the works of David Bomberg, El Lissitzky, and Sonia Delaunay, abstract or intricate; bright and fine, are part of the work’s backgrounds, frames, and tender references.

Artists whose names we do not know appear in this work, too. There are those who created zodiac mosaics in ancient synagogues. A gracious commentary on the traditional Jewish art of paper cutting appears; on one side of the picture we see a papercut as it would look facing forward; on the other side, the paper cut is drawn reversed. The design is evocative: the papercut border features the seven species twining along the frame.

Here is a Jew whose art is an extension, an expansion, a new beginning.

It is Jewish renewal at its very best, and it is the kind of thing that offers hope to those who hope to see what renewal looks like when it is deep, expert, and, above all, honest.

A nineteenth-century haggadah by Charlotte von Rothschild shows up in this work. Leviticus 19:34 appears, too, reminding us of the central commandment to remember that we were strangers and therefore, must love those who are strangers among us.

There are all the regions of the world that were home to Clay’s ancestors.

Who is Clay Adamah Mil?

A Jewish artist in a rich and beautiful line of Jewish artists. A human being whose ancestors lived on many parts of the planet. A human being whose life story inhabits the corners of this work as well as its center.

For those of us who seek the beauty of our inheritance, Clay’s work is both tikkun and hope.

It gives us ourselves, our inheritance, and our future.**

*I ask readers to please pay attention to pronouns.

** To see more of Clay’s work, go here and/or here.

April 19, 2023April 21, 2023

Kaddish for My Imagined Life

“I think it will be sometime this summer,” I said. “By that time, I might have mourned long enough, processed long enough.” I paused. “We say kaddish for eleven months for those we lost. Maybe I am saying a kind of kaddish for the life I’ve lost…?”

I was mourning the life I’d imagined, the future I had celebrated. I lost the innocence I had in such dreaming nine months ago; I cannot recover it.

Last summer, my husband, Ralf and I left for the Blue Ridge Mountains to celebrate our fortieth anniversary.

We spent a week exploring the gardens atop the ridge, the gardens below it. We clambered up one path after another to stand at the feet of waterfalls. We walked through dark forests. Ralf took pictures of mushrooms, insects, and summer flowers. We sat and looked out at the mountains every night from our cabin.

We talked, again and again, about how lucky we were. Aging, together. In love, still, and best friends, still.

As the sun set, we would dream our future, swinging gently to and fro. Our son and daughter-in-love settled and happy. Grandchildren someday. Resting, writing. Gardening, crafting.

We ignore the Damocles sword above our heads so that we can live mindlessly – as we must – until it wavers, drops lightly to prick at us, or falls altogether.

Almost exactly four weeks after those nightly mountain talks, Ralf was in the hospital. Diagnosis: wasting disease, malnutrition, heart failure. The surgeon was blunt; Ralf had days to live without emergency open heart surgery.

Nine months later, Ralf’s heart is doing well. We are mindful that his new atrial valve has a life span that is shorter than he hopes to live. There will be more surgery in his future.

He is also facing another medical concern, one that requires various procedures and tests which elicit predictable scenarios, old associations. Me, in the waiting room. Him, laid out again on some table of some sort or another, some machinery, some surgical implements. Both of us: the Damocles sword glinting above in some dark recess of the mind.

We keep the worst-case scenarios at bay (but still, they crouch, however irrationally, in the corners).

Mourner’s Kaddish is a glorious, gorgeous thank you song. As we grieve – even bitterly – we pronounce our gratitude. In the end, mourning is always an affirmation of life, of love.

The kaddish I must write? A thank you for all that I have and all that I have had. It is an extraordinary, gracious plenty. Gratitude for my heightened consciousness of the fragility of all life. This, too, is a kind of gift.

It is true: if I start dreaming now, my body reminds me with a tender warning: the future will unfold in ways I cannot predict.

But this, too, is something to be thankful for. I must be quiet. I must move more slowly in a world I consciously permit to unfold before me. It never was as possible for me to control it as I would have liked, anyway.

And there is this knowledge, too, and it is just as fine.

I have not yet been shorn of my capacity to dream.

This post is dedicated to Rabbinic Pastor Nancy Shapiro who suggested I write my kaddish for innocent dreaming.