Rabbi Barbara Thiede

August 18, 2013August 18, 2013

The Revolving Door

I know. You think I’ve forgotten you. You think I have no more adrenaline, let alone drash. You have given up.

Little do you know how often I have thought of you these past months. Scraps of paper with things I wanted to say, things I wanted to tell you, have long since turned into scribbles that are longer comprehensible to me. I have had to throw out many such notes in the past weeks.

Let me explain. It was a spring and summer in which I lived life in a revolving door. On the one side, life. On the other side, death.

Judaism allows me to honor this fact: Death of a beloved leaves an indelible mark.

Death has a sting; it transforms the living. Judaism asks us to remember the dead as a matter of course. Remembering is built into our liturgical year.

I think we do this, in part, to invite transformation. We sit shiva, we mark shloshim, we travel through a year of Kaddish, we acknowledge yahrzeits, we attend Yizkor services.

Today, a grieving husband told me: “It creeps up on you. You never know when it is going to strike.” Yesterday, he said, he sat down to dinner alone. “She wasn’t there. I cried.”

That terrible wave of recognition can stop your breath at any time. It can freeze life inside the reality of death.

On April 28, my friend Anne went to the doctor for a stomach problem; she was told cancer had run amuck in five organs. She died within weeks.

She had decided to forego treatments that could give her more time.

“What do I want to do,” she asked me. “Throw up all the time? Be too sick to talk or think? I’ve seen friends do that. Not me.”

Anne was one of the most irreverent, acerbic Christians I ever knew. She complained that God was taking too much time to take her. She told me she wanted visitors who could tell her a good joke. She said she’d wanted doctors with a sense of humor.

“So much for that,” she remarked dryly.

Anne left this word with grace. She filled it with grace.

We lost Ruth, too, after years of struggle with ever more regular blood transfusions. The last time I saw her, I fed her mashed bananas to mask the bitterness of the medication she had just taken.

In those last days she reached out to me like a child. I wasn’t always sure she knew what she was doing. I responded as if she needed me to hold her, just in case she did.

It was a spring and summer of loss and life.

One of our congregants is quite unexpectedly expecting again. We named her first child a little more than a year ago. Now her son, Anderson, is walking, a sturdy blond boy.

His mother, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, is a woman whose ebullience and generosity heals. Alone her presence gives life. Her children, I think and pray, will take after her.

Forgive me my absence; I was learning lessons about death and life.

April 7, 2013

On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day: Contending, Again, with the Road to Hell

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be that man,” one of my students said.

“No, look,” I said. “I didn’t say anything. Why should I? He was doing what he thought is right. He was trying to save souls.”

But even as I said it, I knew I was still angry.

That day, a lovely spring day, I’d gone to get some groceries. On the way back to my car, a well-dressed man of around thirty-something approached me with a flyer. The flyer depicted Jesus carrying a cross, bleeding, in pain. The next picture showed Jesus nailed to it. Bleeding, in pain. It advertised a local passion play production.

“I’m Jewish,” I said. And for the first time ever, I pulled out the heavy stuff. “And a rabbi, to boot.”

“We don’t make any distinctions,” he said. “We reach out to everyone.”

I made a polite mumble out of “thanks, but no thanks,” and got into my car. But I couldn’t even leave the parking lot. I had to drive to its outskirts and call my husband, Ralf.

“I told him I was Jewish,” I said. “He makes no distinctions. When can we have some distinctions, please? After almost two thousand years of eviction, oppression, and forcible conversion, can we not have some distinctions? We’ve been strung up and nailed up and gassed. Hell,” I said. “Oh, hell.”

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions.

Even now, after years of loving and intense interfaith work in the South, I find the Easter season the most difficult time of the year. The crosses on the church lawns, the purple fabrics, and the signs and billboards announcing theatrical renditions of the last hours of Christ—they trigger an old exhaustion in me. I see them and think of the history I teach.

Easter, after all, was historically a dangerous time of the year for European Jews. Easter was often accompanied by accusations of host desecration, claims of blood libel, the replay of the “Christ-killers” epithets and of the attendant mob violence.

Every year I teach mostly Christian students about the history of antisemitism. I also go to one church after another each year. I keep hoping to establish relationships based on understanding that God does not and will not ever need a translator. (If God couldn’t hear humanity pray in any language, then I would have nothing to say to Her.)

Each and every semester I am appalled at the apparent ignorance of my own students, who claim, that all this is completely, utterly new to them. Can it be?

“Can it be?” I ask. According to the Gospel of Matthew, the Jewish crowd willingly accepted the blood of Jesus on their heads and the heads of their children (27:25). Has anyone counted the churches that don’t quote Matthew during Easter as the story is retold? How many churches in America actively, openly name and repudiate this verse for the immeasurable harm it has done for centuries? Which of my Christian students have never, ever heard or read the verses in John in which Jews are labeled the children of the devil?

I know, I know. We bypass, don’t feel, ignore. Most of our living lives, we are completely indifferent to the pain of others. Me, too.

The verses I’ve quoted don’t feel all that real to my students. They don’t associate their texts with Jews they might know. And when they get exposed to the history of antisemitism, they want – badly – to disconnect that tale of woe from any implications where their own religious training has been concerned. I would probably do the same in their shoes.

Typically, our semesters are challenging. Just as typically, we get where I hope we will go. Whatever I teach always has the same agendas anyway: To demonstrate to my students how little we know about each other (that “each other” includes all of humanity, by the by). To teach them that humility is – devoutly – wished for in this or any world. To become better people as a result of our education. That is the only education that matters.

Whether they are studying biblical scripture or biblical times, whether we are looking at Jewish feminism or antisemitism, whether we are confronted with the beautiful, the bad, or the ugly, does not matter. We can all do with regular does of humility. We can all be reminded to try and love each other in a way that does not insist on eradicating our diversity.

And yet, if I am honest, I am tired. I am tired of the facts, of the evidence. Six million Jews died within living memory and swastikas still adorn shirts and flags. There are those who still claim Hitler never killed anyone. One million Jewish children were mercilessly murdered and churches around the world still quote Matthew. Passion plays in Europe still depict Jews as Christ-killers and all the old stereotypes and clichés are alive both there and across the Middle East.

The man in the parking lot meant well. But some of the roads to hell are paved with good intentions. Someday, the hell that has resulted from centuries of so many well-intentioned Christians trying to eradicate any belief but theirs must itself be acknowledged.

How will we make real peace on earth otherwise? And is that not the truest and best intention – for all of us?

March 11, 2013March 12, 2013

Little Torah

Every year, I read The Tattooed Torah by Marvell Ginsburg to the children of our Religious School.

“It’s a true story,” I say.

Of course, as a historian, I also know we argue all day about what makes for a “true” story. We can argue about what the word “truth” really means. But any story can tell a truth. This one does.

The Tattooed Torah is based on a rare thing: A genuine piece of redemptive history.

Almost half a century ago, two trucks rolled up to the Westminster Synagogue in London, England. They were carrying precious cargo: 1564 Torah scrolls.

The scrolls, confiscated by the Nazis from Jewish communities in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, had been labeled and cataloged during World War II, each “tattooed” with a number. Jews of Prague were first forced to sort and pack up the collection for the Reich. Once finished with the labor, those same Jews were sent to concentration camps and murdered.

After the war, the Torahs were rediscovered and eventually donated to the Westminster Synagogue. Over the years, the scrolls were painstakingly restored and allocated on permanent loan to newly established synagogues, retirement homes, hospitals, and youth groups around the world.

The Tattooed Torah tells the story of just such a Torah – a small one from Brno, Czechoslovakia. In the book, the “Little Torah” is restored, given a new mantle and lovingly presented to the children of an American congregation.

When I tell this story to our schoolchildren, it never fails: One of the children shyly raises a hand.

“I wish we had a Little Torah,” she (or he) says.

This spring, I found something as close as I could get and our congregation could afford – the Five Books of Moses printed on paper made to look like parchment, rolled on two decorated posts, and given an embroidered mantle just like a real scroll. Our Little Torah would be about 14 inches long. It came with a small yad (pointer) and a miniature breastplate.

I ordered. Admittedly, I was rather nonplussed when I unpacked the little Torah. It had been wrapped in newspaper. The headline that wound around the Torah (in bright pink letters): “Sex and the Modern Woman.” Above the headline was the teaser: “Bold female-oriented erotica breaks out of its brown paper wrapping.”

I had to laugh. My students come into my classes thinking that biblical scripture is a made of stories about ancient ancestor-heroes, lots of fuddy-duddy laws about skin diseases, and religious poetry punctuated by plenty of “thee’s” and “thou’s.” Maybe they are aware that the Song of Songs is replete with sexual imagery, but if so, it is regarded as an anomaly.

They find out otherwise. In Proverbs 8:30, for example, Lady Wisdom tells the reader that before the world was created, she was daily God’s “delight.” (Trust me, the word translated as “delight” has erotic overtones.) In Genesis 18:12, Sarah laughs at the idea that her elderly husband could possibly, um, offer her sexual pleasure at his advanced age.

The Torah was and remains, above all, a human creation, a human thing. So having a Bible wrapped in an article about women’s erotica seemed oddly apropos of the human experiment as a whole: Messy, unpredictable, flawed, and funny.

Nevertheless, I rewrapped the Torah in a nice, soft cloth, and brought it to Religious School last Sunday. The children were, in a word, thrilled. Noah immediately asked me if he could take Little Torah to school. Evan suggested that the kids use cones to make finials for the posts. Leta took the pointer and read from the print as if she were practicing for her bat mitzvah this August. John asked if the Religious School could make an ark for Little Torah. Everyone practiced hagbah, lifting the Torah high overhead for the congregation to see.

The kids took turns carrying Little Torah around the room while the rest sang Al Shlosha D’varim. They decided that every Torah service could now include children as well as adults carrying a Torah. We even tried out a novel idea: What if, while I was chanting from the big Torah, one of our older students pointed to the very same passage in little Torah at the side of the leyning table?

I drove home thinking of the original Little Torah of the story, of her tattoos and the marks she bore of a time of destruction and loss. I thought about the way I had become part of a determined effort to help Jews and Judaism – at least in some small way – thrive again. I thought about the way our children cared to hold their heritage in their arms.

It made for a nice story. A true one, too.

February 16, 2013

I Will Lift You Up

Ezra opened the scroll in the sight of all the people,
for he was above all the people; as he opened it,
all the people stood up (Nehemiah 8:5).

Note the “he,” please. That’s how most folks imagine the ritual of hagbah, lifting the Torah. It’s a guy thing, based on a guy story in a mostly guy text.

The first (and only) time I saw a woman perform hagbah, I wanted – immediately and badly – to lift a Torah scroll myself. Lori, after all, was just about my size (very small). If she could do it, I thought, so could I.

Every year, I vowed to do the weight training, strengthen my skinny arms, and lift the Torah. Every year I’d fail to do the training, regret my lack of time and commitment, and renew the vow.

Four years passed. By that time, I’d been diagnosed with osteopenia. I’d been given the wake-up call: Do weight-bearing exercise, take your calcium and magnesium daily, and protect those aging bones.

During those same years, our son, Erik, had been increasingly devoting his exercise regimen to strength training. When I bemoaned my failure to get with any program, he created one specially designed for me (and for hagbah). I need only do four specific exercises two times a week at the gym, increase reps and/or weight as I go and, Erik promised me, I would do hagbah within two months.

I was devoted to the cause. I reported on my progress to my twenty-one year old personal trainer. The ten pounds I could barely move became twenty, thirty, and thirty-five after eight weeks of training. I was pulling up forty percent of my body weight and it was the time of year when the Torah scroll was near center and relatively balanced on both posts. I was ready to give it a try.

“Weak,” my husband Ralf pronounced, as my arms shook.

“Wobbly,” I agreed.

Hagbah, Ashkenazi style, demands that the congregation see three full columns of Torah. The scroll has to be held high and turned so that everyone in the congregation can see it. Drop the Torah, and everyone present is required to fast during the day for 40 days.

Hagbah is serious business.

I wrote my senior thesis for ordination on hagbah. My teshuva, a response to a halakhic question, began with a true story:

A small community has gathered for a Shabbat service. This morning, the rabbi looks around and notes who is in the room. She knows everyone present – who has back problems and who is in ill health, who is mourning, and who is anticipating a life cycle event. This morning, she sees that not a single Jewish person is present who could take on the mitzvah of hagbah.

There is one man in the room who would certainly do so, if she asked. He is married to a Jewish woman and has raised both his children Jewishly. He has lived Jewishly for two decades. He attends services regularly, prays alongside his Jewish friends and family, and supports the small congregation wholeheartedly. He happens to be one of the most morally upstanding members of the congregation, and the rabbi has long appreciated his ethical sensibilities and calm nature.

Can that man perform the mitzvah of hagbah?

It’s a long teshuva, I admit. I wandered through plenty of ancient history and lots of rabbinic writing. In the end, my answer was that halakha permitted the non-Jew to raise the Torah.

The fellow in the story has long since joined the tribe officially. He is one of our regulars where hagbah is concerned, and his way of lifting the scroll is extraordinarily beautiful. He turns with confidence, the scroll held securely and firmly overhead.

Before services last night, I approached him as he and his wife were setting up for oneg.

“Steve,” I said, “I need help with hagbah.”

He gestured to his clothing. “I didn’t really dress for it,” he said.

“Well actually,” I said, “I need you to be right there when I do it so if I lose the Torah you can catch it! But it’s a secret,” I said quickly. “I want to surprise everyone.”

Steve grinned. “You’re going to do it?” he asked.

“If I feel I can, I will try,” I said.

Before hagbah, I told my congregation about the way I teach this portion of the service to our bar- and bat-mitzvah students. I let them know that the one prayer they can sing with a leetle more speed at their service is the one we sing when the Torah is raised (v’zot). “Be kind to the person doing hagbah,” I say, “and don’t chant too slowly.”

I asked my congregation to be bar- and bat-mitzvah students that night. “Stand,” I said, “when the Torah is raised and feel free to sing that prayer at a nice pace.”

I saw a long-standing member whisper to our temple administrator. Both women knew about my goal. I could practically hear the question: “Is she going to try it?”

I gripped the posts. I told myself that my earlier attempt that same afternoon was mere rehearsal. This was for real. I needed to brace myself and be tough. “I will lift you up,” I thought to myself.

I wanted everyone to see that a woman could be strong enough for hagbah. The Torah is the repository of gorgeous and frightening stories, loving and harsh law, enigmatic and revelatory narratives. When we lift the Torah, we honor and recognize that we humans are those self-same things – beautiful and scary, tender and cruel. We are carriers of secrets and capable of bringing light. Our Torah is our mirror, and to look into it is to look into ourselves.

Black fire on white fire, so the Talmud says. And all colors in between, I think.

“I will lift you up,” I thought.

To see another woman performing hagbah, check out the video on the page below:

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Liturgy_and_Prayers/Siddur_Prayer_Book/Torah_Service/hagbah_gelilah.shtml

January 17, 2013January 17, 2013

Not My Brother’s Kippah

I make kippot. It was a hobby until last weekend. Before I left for the annual Ohala conference, my husband, Ralf, suggested a name for my new business (see title, above).

My business’ name is not simply a clever joke. It’s an answer.

Like so many Jewish women, I know what it is to have Judaism used against me, to crush me and make me small. I have been told to cover my elbows. I have been the victim of angry demands: How dare I continue singing when he walked into the house? Didn’t I know that a woman’s voice seduces?

His brand of Judaism was enraged, extreme. He was, when I knew him, so far right that some family members joked about where he might have been the night Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime minister, was assassinated. He wanted to kill every Palestinian, and said so. He made me want to run screaming in any direction away from anything Jewish that wasn’t academic, and therefore, safe territory for me.

How could I make teshuva when coming back would mean accepting humiliation I had known when I was young?

And yet.

And yet, when we were first married three decades ago, Ralf took my grandmother’s prayerbook out of the discard pile and brought it back to me. In the late 1990’s, my then six-year-old son took to davennen as if he were born inside its cadence when I dared attend services at a nearby havurah. Now and again I’d remember – with a kind of longing – my grandfather’s davenning the Maxwell House haggadah.

What is all that about the journeys that begin with tender, tremulous steps?

The sign on the trail: “Jewish Renewal.” While walking I found men and women opening up the world of halakha and making it more than safe – a source of delight, in fact. I listened to women singing without restraints, teaching with power and humor. We all stood together at Sinai – many of us, women and men, with our elbows uncovered.

I had begun making kippot for friends. I vowed I would only make a kippah when I knew whose head would wear it. I deviated just slightly, making some for my congregation so that children and adults could choose one as they entered services. A kippah with a penguin? Beads and butterflies? Glittery gold fabric?

For years, at every Jewish Renewal event I attended, women asked me if I sold my kippot. I would explain, see the sadness, and persist. I would not sell. I would only give.

Three years ago, Rabbi Nadya Gross, mentor, teacher, and friend, began bugging me. “There are women out there who need your kippot,” she said. “What’s out there for them?”

There are hats that can get too warm and scarves that can look like shmattes. For a while, kippot of beads and wire were in fashion. Pretty, but insubstantial. Frankly, I want to feel my head covered. My kippah is a manifestation of sorts, the hand of the divine cupped over my keppe to bless it.

I gave in and began sewing for people I did not know. My son designed some of my work – making my beadwork asymmetrical, surprising. My husband matched fabrics and flowers I would not have put together. I sewed until I woke up at night with my fingers raw and sore.

Then I left for Denver, and the annual conference run by Ohalah, a trans-denominational association of rabbis, cantors, rabbinic pastors, and students of those professions. Later, I will tell you stories. Stories of the way women crowded around the table, the way men bought kippot for female friends. One of the kippot my son designed went to a woman just waking from a coma.

I will tell you the way those men and women nearly cleaned out my stock and asked me for a website, please. I will tell you stories that made me cry with relief and gratitude. Stories of women sitting in rows with feathers, flowers and beads on their heads, walking the hotel corridors wearing the kippot I’d made in ways I had never imagined – rakishly, in different directions, with grace and charm.

I want to thank everyone at Ohalah, in Jewish Renewal, for helping me manifest a peaceful, colorful, gentle answer to any who would crush Jewish women and make them small: These are not my brother’s kippah.

May the palm of God’s hand cup the beautiful keppes they adorn. May those women grow surer and stronger wearing them. May Jewish Renewal’s path widen in yet more welcome, and may we give answers of love and healing to all who walk even the smallest step with us.

November 11, 2012November 11, 2012

Emory Aglow

Please, take a closer look at the picture on the left.

That’s Emory Spivock and her brother Bryston on the day of their combined bar and bat mitzvah.

The sun’s rays stream into the room, illuminating the cymbals. They have become blurry, golden stars in Emory’s hand. Her tallit floats over her shoulders and arms. She is awash in light.

When I first saw that photograph, I turned to my husband, Ralf.

“Honey,” I said, “I need to show you a picture.”

“Beautiful,” he said. “That’s beautiful.”

“I’m giving it a name,” I added. “Emory aglow.”

Emory and Bryston were bar and bat mitzvahed on October 20. The week before, a woman was arrested at the Western Wall for chanting the Shema while wearing a tallit.

That woman was Anat Hoffman, a leader of the Women of the Wall, an organization that has striven, for almost three decades, to get the Israeli government to realize that the Wall should be open to prayer on terms that are not solely defined by Orthodox Judaism.

Currently, women are not allowed to pray at the Wall while wearing a tallit or tefillen. They may not read aloud from Torah.

Hoffman wants Israel’s courts to allow her group to pray for one hour per month at the Wall. She would like for the Wall’s council to allow some time for prayers without a mechitza – the divider separating women and men.

She’s not asking for much.

Hoffman has been detained by police before. This time she was arrested. According to Hoffman, she was strip searched, her legs were chained together, and she was dragged across the floor of a police station before being imprisoned overnight in a cell without a bed. She lay, she says, only in her tallit.

Imagine that somewhere else in the world, somewhere outside Israel, a Jewish woman was arrested for chanting the Shema and wearing a tallit. What images would be evoked? What memories? What ancient anguish?

The morning of Bryston and Emory’s bar and bat mitzvah arrived. Emory’s tallit was made of many brilliant colors. It was a tallit of planets and stars. We wrapped her in the universe.

She was radiant.

For years I have encouraged the women of our congregation to wear tallitot and kippot. Imagine yourselves enclosed God’s wings when you bring it over your shoulders, I would tell them. Let a beautiful kippah be God’s blessing on your head.

My generation was born in the “look, but don’t touch” Jewish world. We were to watch men praying, cloaked in their tallitot. Men shook the lulav. Men gave the sermons. Men led prayers.

But Jewish women have, in recent decades, insisted on their right to reach for Jewish learning and practice that unnecessarily – even cruelly – excluded them for hundreds of years. We want to sing and chant and pray fearlessly. We want to acknowledge the Mother Lodes in our tradition and honor them without fear.

We have gained much – especially in this country. We have much yet to gain – here and elsewhere.

At the beginning of our Shabbat service, after we had celebrated coming together by singing joyous opening prayers, I asked Emory to stand and turn in front of her congregation and guests. I asked everyone to look at her in her tallit.

Then, I asked everyone to pray with me.

May all our daughters experience no restraints, but only joy from their tradition. May they immerse themselves in love of Torah. May all women have the right – no matter their faith tradition – to pray and to learn and to speak freely.

May we all be so aglow.

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.