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October 9, 2012

Simchat Torah – Our Last Dance with the Temple Emanu-El Torah

A small and slender woman danced the opening cross-steps of the hora. A mother and her eight-year-old son did high kicks while holding tightly to the etzim, the Torah’s wooden posts. The tallest man in the room whirled and turned with her high in his arms, his face glowing with affection.

Our Temple’s president, Judah Malin, later told me that when he carefully placed our scroll in the arms of a Christian friend of mine who is now confined to a wheelchair, her face was alive with light and excitement.

Each had taken a turn holding our Torah in their arms, and for the very last time.

Our Torah is beloved by everyone in our congregation. We have many Christian friends who love her with just as much honor and respect as any Jew.

I have never seen it fail: Whenever I brought our Torah to a church community and spoke about secrets of her especially small or large letters or the noticeable change in calligraphy as one portion of her parchment gave way to the next, those with me were moved to smiles, to joy, even to tears.

There is something exquisite in the moment you know this fact for certain: Revelation comes in many, many forms. True revelation comes from light and joy and it transcends everything – gender and sexual identity, ethnicity, faith tradition, belief systems.

In the end, it must be about love. We were all meant to be about love.

Our Torah is a work of love and an encounter with love.

We struggle with its prohibitions and its commandments. Some are kind and some are incomprehensible. We are challenged by its beautiful and terrible passages. We worry over frightening scenes and are comforted by stories of compassion.

We read tales of God trying to understand humanity and humanity searching for God.

In the Mekhilta de R. Yishmael, a midrash likely composed in the mid- to late-third century C.E., Rabbi Yishmael writes:

‘They encamped in the Wilderness’ (Ex. 19:2): The Torah was given in a free place. Because if the Torah had been given in the land of Israel, the Israelites could have said to the nations of the world, ‘You have no share in it.’ But because it was given in the wilderness, publicly and openly, in a place free for all, everyone wishing to accept it could come and accept it.

Avoda Zara compares the non-Jew who loves Torah to the High Priest.

R. Meir used to say, ‘Whence do we know that even an idolator who studies the Torah is equal to a High Priest? From the following verse: Ye shall therefore keep My statutes and My ordinances which, if a man do, he shall live by them (Leviticus 18:5). It does not say, “If a Priest, Levite, or Israelite do, he shall live by them,” but “a man”; here, then, you can learn that even a heathen who studies the Torah is equal to a High Priest!’

My congregation does not fear placing our Torah into the arms of a non-Jewish spouse or partner; they are part of our community, too. I do not hesitate to have my dear Christian friends hold her either – they love her and revere her.

It was to be the last time our congregation saw our first Torah unfurled. She is headed for retirement in a little more than one month. We are, with all that we have, raising the funds for a new Torah in part to do our first Torah this honor. She has served us well and with great grace. Our Torah represents Jewish communities utterly destroyed in the Holocaust, and our obligation to remember them.

And yet: She has had the courage to stand for the reconciliation, the understanding, the love that human beings of different faiths and beliefs can hold for one another.

May we be blessed with that kind of courage – each and every one of us.

September 21, 2012

It’s Easier to Give :-)

Angela Hodges, our congregational webmaven, is a person of many talents. She sings gentle harmonies to every melody I give her, teaches our children Hebrew, and takes amazing pictures.

She also understands technology.

If you want to give any kind of a donation to help us purchase a new Torah scroll, you now have only to go here and click on a handy-dandy PayPal button:

http://www.or-olam.org/?page_id=17380

Please feel free to forward this link to anyone who might be moved by our story. And again, our thanks.

L’shana tova and Shabbat Shalom!

September 21, 2012

A Survivor Must Rest: The Temple Emanu-El Torah

Well over a century ago, a scribe in Macedonia rose early in the morning to pray. He went to the mikveh, prayed again, and immersed himself in living waters. He walked back to his workshop, mixed the ink, sharpened his quills, and began to write: Bereishit bara Elohim et hashamayim v’et ha’aretz. When all began, God created the heavens and the earth.

Well over a century ago, a scribe in a Lithuanian town rose early in the morning to pray. He went to the mikveh, prayed again, and immersed himself in living waters. He walked back to his workshop, mixed the ink, sharpened his quills, and began to write: Vayomer Elohim el Moshe: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. And God said to Moses, “I Will Be Who I Will Be.”

A scribe in a little shtetl in Moravia. A scribe somewhere, perhaps, in Germany. One wrote in Vellish script. The other, in Ari. One had a strong right-handed tendency.

At some point, my congregation’s Torah was pieced together from remnants of many Torahs whose several parts date back as far as the late 1800’s. The people who heard this Torah read all over Europe were decimated by the Final Solution. Few of them survived the Shoah.

Somehow, parts of their Torah did.

Each time I read from the Torah, I pause between the time the blessing is chanted and I begin. I am remembering – invoking, really – the Jews from across Europe who knew and revered and loved this Torah for decades. Jews in Macedonia, Moravia, Germany, Lithuania: I imagine them around me, joining me at the Torah.

Our Torah has her name from a more recent past. She is the Temple Emanu-El Torah. She came to Temple Or Olam when that congregation of Weldon, North Carolina, had to close its doors. The first time we read from our Torah was at my son, Erik’s bar mitzvah. Many who knew the Torah came to Concord for the service and watched as the heart of their congregation was transplanted into ours.

For nine years our children have chanted from this Torah. Our people have raised this Torah high for us all to see. Some of our women first held a Torah scroll after I put this one into their arms.

Our Torah, which is mostly between 100 and perhaps 125 years old, has been pristinely restored for a second time. She came home just before the New Year. In her old age, she has the radiance Sarah must hadwhen she learned she was pregnant. Her letters sparkle, her parchment is clear.

Nine years ago, when our sofer, Neil Yerman, first restored our Torah, he told me she was not a healthy scroll. Who knows how she survived the conflagrations in Europe? Torahs, we now know, need to be kept in climate-controlled conditions, tightly wound, surrounded by cedar and humidity absorbing granules.

Still, we hoped she might have thirty more years of life to give.

Scrolls are organic things. They are made of the things of this world. They live, they die, and when the latter occurs and they absolutely can no longer be maintained, they are ritually buried.

Over the last century, our Torah has suffered irreparable damage. The parchment is unyielding to quill and ink. She is no longer able to hold the letters. Many that Neil has lovingly refinished will chip and flake off her surface within this very year. Her beauty cannot be sustained if we rely on her; she cannot be kept kosher for reading without ongoing and expensive attention.

We need to care for her now as we would an elder. We need to hold her tenderly and let her rest. At this point, we must face this fact: My little congregation must now fund her retirement by raising the money for a new Torah, and that means many, many thousands of dollars.

All these years I have chanted from this Torah conscious of all the people who loved her and knew her in her youth. Their communities were decimated and their people slaughtered. I have made my chanting into another way to say Kaddish for them, to mourn them and to honor them and – most importantly – to remember them.

I will need to bring them with me to the new scroll that I will read from someday. I do not yet know how I will do that.

On Rosh Hashanah Shacharit, I broke a vow. I had never made any fundraising pitch during these Days of Awe. I never thought I would.

And yet, even the smallest community has two essential obligations. To be able to bury its dead with honor, and to keep and maintain a Torah scroll. Every community must be responsible for making sure that our heart beats. That heart is the Torah.

I do not fear to ask wherever I go. I do not fear to ask here, either. Please help us spread the word by letting others know our story. Perhaps they will reach out.

If you would like to help our community raise the funds we will need for a new Torah, please send your tax-deductible contribution to the following address:

Treasurer
Temple Or Olam, Treasurer
PO Box 362
Huntersville, NC 28070-0362

May you all be blessed with a healthy and happy New Year.

September 7, 2012

Forgiving Others, Forgiving Ourselves

Beloved, show me the way out of this prison.
Make me needless of both worlds.
Pray, erase from mind all
that is not You.

Have mercy Beloved,
though I am nothing but forgetfulness,
You are the essence of forgiveness.
Make me needless of all but You.
Abu Saeed Abil Kheir

What, then, do we long for? Not to forget all the times we have missed the mark, but to be granted understanding for our clumsiness.

What do we crave? Not to harbor rage and anger, but to grow our capacity for compassion and understanding.

What do we need? To forgive ourselves.

Each of these is difficult, painful. Jewish law does not allow us to ask God for forgiveness for our sins against one another. The one you have hurt is the one you must honestly, openly, and humbly ask for forgiveness. Love does mean having to say you are sorry. Your atonement must extend beyond words to actions and deeds; you must show in tangible ways that your apology means a commitment – to change your behavior, to alter your mindset, to become the better person you long to be.

We are not granted forgiveness from God for our cruelties and misunderstandings. Only the people we have hurt by our actions can grant us that gift.

To be able to forgive those who have hurt us demands that we achieve the highest levels of understanding regarding our common humanity. Still, Jewish law does not demand that we achieve that level regardless of cause. There is no insistence that murderers be forgiven. Victims of rape, sexual abuse, and violence are not required to do anything but tend to their own healing.

So often, when we want to forgive our hearts harden and resist. The colleague’s ethnic slur, the neighbor’s intolerance of one’s personal choice in love, the family member who condemns and attacks and seems unable to listen to any kind of reason – it is hard to forgive insult and aggression.

To forgive ourselves can be the most difficult of all. I still remember the only time I struck anyone. I was twelve. A neighborhood boy of seven or eight was bullying my little brother, who was six, and small for his age. Enraged, I took that kid off his bicycle and I hit him. Hard. Forty years later, I still remember the moment I struck another person with more shame than I can describe.

Tomorrow night is Selichot. My congregants will write down the the things they need to forgive in themselves. For this, they may openly ask for God’s help.

We will take the paper we have written on and toss each scrap, each act, into a bowl of water. Then, we will watch those burdens dissolve.

So may our pain.

September 3, 2012September 3, 2012

All We Need Is Love…

Have I told You lately that I love You? Have I told You? There’s no one else above You.

This past summer, I asked my congregants: Send me the love song you would sing to God. My plan was to create a service from their suggestions.

One congregant surprised me with an Elvis Presley tune. For several weeks, I had fun making my voice deep and round. I went about the house singing “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” while making beds and doing laundry.

I fell in love with tunes I had not known. “You Are Not Alone” by the Eagles became a personal favorite. I sang it as if God were singing to me, as the congregant had suggested. I rediscovered melodies and recast them from my knowledge of the particular person who had suggested the tune.

We sang a version of “Light My Fire” by the Doors for candle-lighting. We rewrote the lyrics just a bit:

The time to hesitate is through.
There’s no need to wallow in the mire.
Bring some matches with you, too.
The lighting situation’s dire.
Come on baby, light my fire…

I played electric guitar publicly for the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Something’s Always Wrong.” (Our relationships with God aren’t always easy and sweet, after all.)

Folks showed up to the service in tie-dyed clothing and beaded headbands. The room was filled with color and light.

We went through the service. I took a little time to walk us through the placement of each song. “Feelin’ Groovy” seemed like the perfect Kabbalat Shabbat tune. We might read Mourner’s Kaddish as a sweet opportunity to remember what a “Time It Was.”

A roomful of people were reading and understanding our Shabbat services in a whole new way.

Prayer is about love. It is about doubt. It is about anguish and passion and joy.

What we sing in Hebrew is about all those things. Mi Chamocha, understood on its own terms, fairly invites us to stand and celebrate the freedom we have been granted, the security of solid ground underneath our feet. Aleynu can be read as “Imagine” – who among us has not dreamed of the world being as one, without greed or hunger plaguing anyone?

The room was simultaneously filled with the wonder of realization and a joyful, happy ease. We sang love songs and we allowed ourselves to experience the depth of our prayer.

Later, a Christian friend of mine who had attended the service said, simply, “God was in that room.”

I long for such moments. In this regard, I am spoiled by my congregation. I believe our members long for the same thing.

Was there one love song we all sang together?

Have I told You lately that I love You? Have I told You? There’s no one else above You.

August 14, 2012September 7, 2012

A Tree of Life

Leaves are already beginning to fall outside my office window — even before they have turned. They fall because we have had another dry summer, another series of parched months.

They are dying before their time.

Every summer, as the Jewish Year ends, I sew new leaves of many colors onto our congregational chuppah.

I started making the chuppah many years ago. For months I did nothing more than pull threads to make fringes on both ends. My first designs did not satisfy. I discarded one based on the sefirot. I removed a second try at the same theme. Finally, I discovered an abstract tree-of-life menorah on the Internet and used that as my inspiration.

The chuppah features, at this point in time, twenty green-gold-orange-brown leaves. There are two for every one of the nine years we’ve existed. The year I was ordained as a rabbi, I sewed on one brown and gold leaf from the same material I used to make my tallit for the ordination ceremony. This past year, I sewed on an extra leaf for the smicha I received as a spiritual director.

All the others are meant to represent the children of Temple Or Olam. Every year, two new new leaves. One for the boys and one for the girls. Every year there were new children.

I sewed this year just after a baby naming for our newest member: Anderson Storch Everhart.

I sewed, thinking about Anderson’s heritage. One side of his family goes way back in North Carolina’s history. Jonas, Anderson’s father, was born and raised first Lutheran, then Methodist.

Shannon, Anderson’s mother, comes from Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Her grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Her grandmother, interned at Auschwitz Birkenau, managed to hold on to life with a fierce, lion-like determination. After the war, Shannon’s gentle grandfather spoke about the Shoah. At every opportunity, he asked people to love – not to hate.

Jonas and Shannon named their child Ariel, lion of God.

I chose the fabric for the boy’s leaf thinking about Ariel – about our people’s losses and our fragile gains. Our gains are – in my community – supported by many individuals who are not themselves Jewish but who are lovingly committed to our synagogue and our goals. I cut and appliqued the leaf for the girls and thought of Kalilah, who also joined us this past year.

Kalilah dances at every service. Her hands lift and fall with regal delicacy. She is carrying heritage of many kinds in her richly dark hair, in her almond eyes, in her slim, tall body.

Our children are the most eclectic mix I could have imagined for such a small congregation. Asian, African, European. Though they are being raised Jewishly, their parents include people who are Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists. The families I serve are as varied as the leaves on the trees in my backyard. Gold, orange, red, pale green, purple.

I sewed the leaves on our chuppah wondering what I would do when we suffer our first loss. Perhaps I would sew a leaf at the bottom of the design, a fallen leaf for us to remember a loved one by.

Someday, our chuppah will feature a veritable explosion of leaves at the top of the tree for all our children, all our years together. Would I begin a soft, small pile of leaves at the bottom of the chuppah to remember our lost loved ones?

How could any one chuppah contain so much love and hope, so much sorrow and grief?

I prayed over the chuppah this year. I prayed that when we hold it above our Torah at High Holy Days and gather under and around it that we will be blessed with all that it represents: Our diverse people and open community. May we in turn, bless, and may our blessings rise like warm air to help hold our chuppah high above us.

In the face of all that has happened, after parched years and early death, we have grown back. We are, now, a tree of life.

July 26, 2012

Tisha B’Av: Ask the Laity

Jewish religious leaders I know struggle for three weeks every summer. These are the three weeks that span the time between the day the walls of Jerusalem were breached by Nebuchadnezzar on the 17th of Tammuz, 586 BCE and the 9th of Av, when the First Temple was destroyed.

Most of those leaders are in some process of mourning for the pain of our past. In the meantime, the laity, temple affiliated or not, are spending these weeks squeezing in their last vacation time. They are going for a swim at a nearby pool, generally relaxing in the steam of a summer’s day.

Most American Jews I have met have never heard of Tisha B’Av (the 9th of Av) and do not know that this day marks not only the destruction of the First Temple, but the destruction of the Second Temple as well by Roman forces in 70 CE. They are unaware that the second destruction destroyed any semblance of Jewish sovereignty (not that there was so very much of that under the Romans) and that the crisis ushered in two thousand years of oppression and homelessness for Europe’s Jews. They do not know the litany of miseries many Jews experienced that occurred on this self-same day – expulsions, massacres, the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

One method of handling the fact that American Jews don’t “relate” to Tisha B’Av, its accompanying reading (the Book of Lamentations), or its rituals (a day long fast, among other things) has begun to drive me crazy.

It goes like this: Look for the light around the edges of the shadow. Find the blessings in the pain.

This approach mostly relies on making the case that if it weren’t for the destruction of the Second Temple, there would be no such thing as rabbinic Judaism, and that without the rabbis, Judaism would have died on the vine.

The argument goes that classical Judaism emerged from the life-saving work of rabbis who wrote down the Oral Tradition, made law into yet more literature in the Mishnah, composed the Tosefta, the Midrash, and the Talmuds that would function as the basis of a reconstituted Judaism, instituted the synagogue worship, and democratized the study of Torah.

But scholars like Seth Schwartz and Daniel Boyarin have long since demonstrated that the rabbis of the first three or four centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple were marginal to Jewish existence. Coinage demonstrates that a number of Jewish communities worshipped Greek gods. Burial sites feature pagan symbols and are nearly bereft of Jewish ones. Documents from the period demonstrate that rabbinical law is not governing marriage or trade agreements. It is not a subject for everyday life. Neither is Torah mentioned.

Archeological remains from synagogues of the first centuries after the destruction demonstrate that rabbis were widely ignored. Synagogues do not face the “correct” direction, entrances are in the wrong location, and the mosaics on the floors and walls demonstrate a remarkable love for pagan motifs. There is little to no evidence of a structured liturgy led by rabbis. Synagogues are used primarily for fundraising and festive meals (efforts mostly led by non-rabbinical village officials). The rabbis themselves don’t seem to be all that sympathetic to synagogal life, in any case, preferring, in the Mishnah, to write about and record a Temple cult that no longer existed.

Historians have known for decades that the rabbis had little to no power to make Jewish communities do much of anything. The rabbis were given their first real power by an institutionalized Christianity of the fourth and fifth centuries. Priests and bishops, now the representatives of the state religion, chose the rabbis as their complimentary functionaries. In significant measure, the rabbis owe their position in Jewish communities to Christian clergy.

So why is the actual material culture of our post-destruction ancestors relevant to our understanding of Tisha B’Av?

The Jews of Late Antiquity are proof that the am ha’aretz can be trusted. We have them to thank for the work of renewal. Somehow, despite giving their children Greek and Roman names, somehow despite their happy recital of incantations that evoked not only Adonai Tzvaot but other area deities, they held on to their ancestral identity.

We have to believe that American Jews at the pool and on vacation will do the same thing. They are, in fact, doing just that. What can Tisha B’Av mean? Let’s ask them. They will have answers. They always do.

We have already met with the worst that can be done to us short of a wholly successful act of genocide. Judaism will survive, no matter how our am ha’aretz morphs and changes and renews what it means to be Jewish and to practice Judaism. Jewish renewal is actually an ancient thing.

It doesn’t depend on rabbis.

July 18, 2012July 18, 2012

To Tell the Truth

I don’t much like being corrected. Who does? But in my family, it’s a constant hazard. I spin stories, my scientifically minded husband and son bring me down to earth. They make claims about something historical, and I gather my authority.

But on Shabbos?

Prepare for a confession.

The sanctuary was returned to order. The def, darboukas and even the cowbell were packed up. My guitars were safely stored in the wayback.

We piled into our sea green (yes, it has the woody panels!) 1978 Country Squire station wagon and turned on the air conditioner. The “we” included my gentle and soft-spoken husband, Ralf, our twenty-year-old accordion-playing son, Erik, and our I-can-sing-harmony-to-anything-you-throw-at-me lay cantor, Angela Hodges.

The clacking of buckling seat belts subsided. The inevitable question arose.

“How was the service?”

“I loved the story,” Ralf said.

“I thought the music was right on,” Angela said.

“It was good,” Erik said.

Wait for it…

“But,” Erik added, “when you started talking about the Barchu and the unfathomable force that causes the sun to set I started thinking…”

I interrupted. “Don’t start in on me. I already know what you’re going to say.”

“What unfathomable force?” Erik asked. “Gravitation?”

Angela laughed. Ralf chuckled. I despaired.

Erik studies chemistry, which he claims is the use of the obscure in the pursuit of the irrelevant.

“Every time you are home from college,” I said, “I start worrying about what you are thinking at services. As soon I started speaking about the Barchu I could hear you in my head. ‘It’s the rotation of the earth we’re talking about, mom.”

“Well, it is!” Erik announced.

“When I do spiritual direction,” I said calmly, “the persons I work with often denigrate themselves. Sometimes I ask them to tell me whose voice is telling them that they are crazy, or overemotional, or whatever. It is almost always the mother’s voice they are hearing.”

Erik began laughing.

“But I,” I added, “I suffer because it is my son’s voice in my head telling me I am nuts.” I paused. “You have been doing this since you were about four.”

“Yeah,” Erik admitted. “I was a shmuck.”

“Yeeesss… well no, actually,” I said. “You just loved the truth.”

“Then I loved the truth.” Erik agreed. “Later, I realized there was no such thing as the objective truth. Now I correct people for the heck of it. While we’re on the subject, do you remember the question you asked before Ahavat Olam? You asked us to think about what makes us who we are,” Erik said. He paused.

“And you thought…” I said.

“A featherless biped with flat nails.”

Everyone laughed. Including me.

In case you don’t know the story, it is said that Plato once offered up Socrates’ definition of a man as a “featherless biped” to students of his academy.” In response, the philosopher and all-around snark Diogenes of Sinope plucked all the feathers from a chicken and brought it to Plato, saying, “Behold! I’ve brought you a man.” Possibly missing the point, Plato revised his definition to “a featherless biped with flat nails.”

Our car conversation moved on to new Spanish-speaking guests at the service. I forgot my Spanish (or rather remembered it), and mispronounced one of our visitor’s names. The family origins were in Latin America, not the Iberian peninsula.

“Sorry, folks” I said. “When I studied Spanish I learned the ‘c’ as a ‘th’ sound. In fact, over thirty years ago, Ralf was learning Spanish at the same time and he claimed he spoke Castilian Spanish even though he pronounced the ‘c’ like an ‘s.’ We had a big battle over who spoke Spanish the way they did in Spain.”

“So I got the inclination to correct people from somewhere,” Erik said. “Hmm.”

Everyone but me laughed.

“Oy. Guilty as charged,” I said. “I’ve been hoisted by own petard.”

Ralf, who had quietly listened to everything going down, finally spoke up.

“Actually,” my gentle husband said, “that’s hoist.”

June 28, 2012July 6, 2012

Teaching is Believing

A good portion of most b’nai mitzvah training is, frankly, meshugah.

This is how it’s done (mostly): Jews take a pre-teen or early teen, make them sing a bunch of stuff in a language they don’t understand, and then ask them to do all this in front of family, friends, and congregation. The boys squeak most of the time (we’ve rigged this event to occur just as their voices are breaking) and the girls sing too softly. A goodly percentage of teenagers sing off key. The last verse of Adon Olam is sung, and the community celebrates. Our young’un is now an adult.

It’s the Jewish version of sending a child off into the wild to fight with bears and suchlike.

I know cantors and rabbis who dread the whole experience. But I’ve learned to rely on a strange fact.

Almost every time, no matter the child, grace will descend and we will both understand the purpose of b’nai mitzvah training. We will ask who we are as Jews, and what Judaism can or should mean relative to the terms “human” and “humanity.” We’ll ask who and what God might be and why we pray (if we do).

There are no restrictions or right answers. We will learn something together. We will grow up – together.

Recently, my little congregation has adopted alternative approaches to b’nai mitzvah training. We’ve retained the religious service track, and it’s still the most popular of three. The culminating experience, leading a Shabbat service, is beautiful despite squeaks and shyness and minor keys because we enjoy demonstrating communal pride in our teens.

We also have a Jewish learning track, where the teen in question follows up on a specific area of interest. Just now I’ve got one student, Bryston Spivock, who has been learning Chinese. He also happens to love history. We’ve joined these two interests: Bryston is currently studying the history of Jews in China and will present an educational program to the congregation as his capstone experience.

We also have an intensive tikkun olam track which involves super-extensive hours of social action combined with a learning component.

One of my other students is on that track — Bryston’s sister, Emory. Emory is an animal rights activist who has won awards with her work protecting waterfowl. She and I are making our way through texts on animal treatment in both the Tanakh and in rabbinic texts.

At our last session, we were looking at biblical commands on the treatment of animals, particularly Exodus 23:5 and Deuteronomy 22:4, which enjoin us to relieve animals of onerous burdens even if we do not like the animal’s owner, do not know its owner, or even if it is ownerless.

Emory knows a lot about animal suffering. She knows about the black market that buys and sells products made from endangered species. She knows about the ways in which turkeys and hens are forced to live miserable, even unnatural lives before being slaughtered.

Emory volunteers for hours each week knowing that she will be unable to prevent much of this sort of cruelty.

I asked her: Where did God fit into the picture she was describing?

She struggled to define God’s role in her world. From Emory’s perspective, most animal life is utterly helpless in the face of human agendas. God seems more or less out of the picture. At a loss, she finally asked me what I believed.

Typically, when my teens ask me what I believe, I remind them that we are studying together to find out what they believe. But this time I abandoned my usual pedagogical tricks.

“What do I believe?” I asked.

I told Emory that answers are elusive and fragile. What I believe today I question tomorrow. When I sing, I am filled with God’s presence. When I am silent and observe the world and its pain and sorrows, I often feel isolated, anxious, even abandoned.

God permeates, signals, speaks to me and comforts me. God is absent, unreachable, a creation of my longing and my hope. Sometimes, I wonder if the divine is not my effort to imagine compensation for humanity’s many inhumanities. More times, I am rejoicing in that which feels like God’s grace, riding on the crest of waves of affection and love and joy and compassion I see in those around me. People acting goodly seem godly to me.

At our next Friday night service, Emory and I caught each other in the hallway to the fellowship hall.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about our last conversation,” I said.

“Me, too,” Emory answered.

We both smiled.

“Let’s talk some more about it at our next lesson, okay?” I asked.

I will tell Emory then why she has been so much on my mind since I told her what is on mine. In a way, what she does and who she is teaches me to believe.

June 21, 2012June 28, 2012

Korach: Blast Minute Altar-ations

It is a terrifying story, and beautiful. In one moment, we are exalted beyond measure, standing at Sinai, amazed at the gift we have received. We shout out joyfully; naaseh v’nishma, “we will do and we will hear.” We will do and then we will understand.

We leave those heights for what seems a litany of miserable encounters, terrible challenges. We endure a new sort of darkness where we must wrestle as our ancestor Jacob once did – with a Divine opponent we cannot understand, an opponent who gave us the name Israel, God-wrestlers. There are internal, human enemies, as well.

Korach, for example, the lead figure in this week’s Torah portion. He is, it seems, the quintessential rebel, the brazen upstart. A Levite himself, he challenges Moses and Aaron: Who gave you the right to rule? “You have gone too far! All the community is holy – all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why do you raise yourselves above the Lord’s congregation?” (Numbers: 16:3).

Moses falls on his face, prostrating himself and calls for God to decide. Aaron, as representative of the Kohanim, the priesthood Korach seems to covet, is to burn incense in his fire pan. Korach and his followers are to do the same. The Lord appears, and after Moses warns the Israelites to stand aside from the band of rebels, the earth opens and swallows Korach and his family whole. A blazing fire comes forth from the Lord and consumes all two hundred and fifty followers.

As the ashes smoke, God orders Aaron’s son Elazar to gather the fire pans from the charred field and beat them into hammered sheets. These are to be placed on the altar, to serve as a sign, the Hebrew says, though our English translations tend to read “warning.”

Imagine the scene: the charred fields, the screaming, and the cries of grief. More than two hundred and fifty lives had been taken in mere seconds. The earth convulsed, fire immolated human beings. Elazar must traverse the smoking earth to find ritual items used by Korach’s followers for a holy purpose – to make an offering to God. Who is given the task of cleaning those fire pans and beating them into a different form? How does it feel to hammer the copper flat, breathing in the acrid air, hearing the sounds of a terrified people? The tears must have stung as they fell – no matter whose side you were on, what had happened was a disaster. Once again, we lose our own.

According to many commentaries, God appears to have meant for the newly plated altar to remind people of the dangers in arrogance or presumption – this God seems to think such a deterrent is a useful way of regulating the relationship with the people God claims to have chosen. Korach and his band were rebels of the highest order, claiming a purity and holiness the people had hardly begun to achieve. To criticize Moses and Aaron out of envy or arrogance was divisive and destructive. Korach and his followers were trying to tear everything apart; they succeeded in destroying themselves. The fire pans are remade into a warning. Could anyone think to challenge God’s authority again? They need only look at the altar to be reminded of the potential costs.

Perhaps God has yet to learn that humanity cannot be so controlled. Perhaps some of the Israelites watched the altar glitter in the desert sun and came to yet other conclusions. Korach must have been remembered differently than God may have expected, for twelve of our psalms are attributed to the sons of Korach. Midrash claims that the priest and prophet Samuel was one of Korach’s descendents. Somehow, the people did not allow Korach to be erased from memory or history. Today’s parsha, which tells his story, is given his name.

Neither do all commentaries agree (but if they did, that would be a violation of tradition…). Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (1817-1893) suggested that the two hundred and fifty leaders who offered up incense on the fire-pans were well-intentioned Israelites who simply wanted to serve God by performing priestly duties. “They longed to do the will of God,” he said, “and gave their lives for the love of God.” Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate for Palestine, and one of the 20th century’s foremost rabbis, claims that the fire pans were made part of the altar in order to remind us of the dangers of complacency and corruption. Legitimacy – even holiness – can emerge from challenging religion.

One must be grateful for the fact that consensus continues to elude us where Tanakh is concerned.

We no longer conceive a wrathful and authoritarian God. Our own history has demonstrated that such a God cannot be worshipped. Who knows? Maybe God had to learn that lesson, too.

Maybe God demanded those platings to be placed around the altar in order for God to be reminded of the essential conditions of relationship between human and divine. The plating was set against the altar so that we remember Korach’s challenge, and what it cost him and his followers, the text says. But consider: This shining metal encased the altar on which the Israelites made their offerings.

We pray, and not infrequently, without commitment or belief, struggling with rage and rebellion. Offerings on that altar were made with the thin, hard shell of resentment present and accounted for. God, Godself, insisted that the Israelites to wrap their holy prayer in reminders of their holy rebellion.

Perhaps because God is acknowledging that our relationship is complex, marked by alternating states of surety and skepticism. Trust and acceptance give way to doubt and agitation, and vice versa.

The line of Korach endures, as it should.