Author: Rabbi Barbara Thiede

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.”

 

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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.

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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.

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Walk This Way

For most Jews, halakha, Jewish law, is associated with incomprehensible and rule-bound behavior that largely resides in the care and under the watchful eyes of Orthodox Jews. Some Jews worry about the extent to which they have (they believe), abandoned halakha. Some of those selfsame Jews worry about the way Orthodox Jews purport to preserve it.

 The gentile world has been inclined to believe that Jews engage in picky and legalistic discussions about everything under the sun. The Jews, they say, care only for the form of things. They forget the heart in a desperate and fruitless search for Right Behavior.

 Jews and gentiles are missing an opportunity: Halakha is the intelligent, compassionate, heart-filled search for the most ethical interpretation we can find to any question before us. Really good halakhists aim to uncover the humane, the kind, the giving answer.

The word “halakha” comes from the Hebrew root that means “to go, walk.” Let’s follow just one halakhicpathway, the one about the wayward and rebellious son.

 Biblical prohibitions against dishonoring parents are to be found in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. Exodus 21:17 reads: “He who insults his father or his mother shall be put to death.” Deuteronomy 21:18-21 adds: “If a man has a wayward and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of the town, ‘This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Thereupon all the men of his town shall stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst: all Israel will hear and be afraid.”

Everyone raise their hand if they have ever witnessed a son acting rebelliously.

 The rabbis believed, rightly so, that there was something in these passages that deserved close attention and careful interpretation. Confronted with a biblical law that was unreasonably harsh by any measure, they set to work to find the best possible reading of those self-same laws.

Step 1: Define a “son.” First, the rabbis decided that a minor could not be liable to the penalty of the stubborn and rebellious son. (I imagine they knew what the terrible twos are like.) Then the rabbis got to work on defining the exact period after a boy ceases to be a minor and before he becomes a man. Torah implies that a son is a son until his parents die, but biblical texts leave room for rabbinical texts to decide otherwise.

 A halakhic conclusion: There is about a three-month period between the growth of two hairs on the chin and the growth of a beard (among other things) which clearly designates the man. It turns out that you can be culpable to the law of the rebellious and stubborn son for only 120 days.

 Step 2: Take a really close look at the text. According to Deuteronomy, father and mother are to say: “He does not heed us.” A more literal translation would be: “He does not hearken to our voice.” Koleynu, “our voice,” is critical textual evidence for the rabbis: Father and mother must speak with one voice.

 The rabbis mean this quite literally, and the text does not need to be bent out of shape to come to such a conclusion. Kol, “voice” is a singular noun. The pronominal suffix for “us” is plural. Two people, one voice.

 But no two people on this earth are able to speak with exactly the same voice. Thus, the rabbis agree: The likelihood that any rebellious son will ever be stoned is nil.

 Just to drive home the point, the rabbis bring up the matter of the idolatrous city. Such cities, according to Deuteronomy 13:13-17, should be destroyed. But where can you find a city without a Jewish family somewhere in it? And where can you find a Jewish home without a mezuzah?

You may not destroy the name of God, after all, which is part of the Shema which is written on the parchment which is contained in the mezuzah which is hung on the doorway of a Jewish home. No city, however idolatrous, may be destroyed because every city, somewhere, will contain the name of God.

 You get the idea, I am sure. Read an ancient text that is beloved and precious, understanding that there must be a way to interpret it in a way that offers the best possible conclusion for the human beings who claim it as theirs.

Let’s face it: There are verses in Torah that would be heartless and incomprehensible and impossible to accept otherwise; we cannot, and will not conceive of putting to death a misbehaving child, and for all we know, those who wrote such verses found themselves subject to immediate reinterpretation in their very own time. After all, is there any evidence that a rebellious son was actually stoned to death for dishonoring his parents anywhere in Tanakh?

 Halakha is a source of ongoing revelation. It has the power to define and redefine Jewish thinking, Jewish practice, Jewish purpose. Because we know that halakha itself invites change for the better, we have, in recent decades, invited women, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Jews to the bimah. We were able to reconsider what was presented to us as the law and to reread the texts in a way that offered new pathways, new halakha.

 Halakha is, literally, the path that one walks. It turns and bends and rises and falls. It takes us to new country, offers new vistas.

Walk this way…

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Amendment One: Vote Against

At Pesach, I hold an orange aloft and ask: “Why is this on the  seder plate?”

Inevitably, someone will say that a man once said that a woman belongs on the bimah about as much as an orange on the seder plate. The response? Jewish communities began adding an orange to the seder plate.

That’s not how it happened.

It was scholar and feminist Susannah Heschel who presented the orange as a new Pesach symbol—as a symbol of the fruitfulness we gain when lesbians and gay men are accepted, welcomed and valued as contributing and active members of Jewish life. The orange is about the freedom we must offer every member of our community.

Because we must offer that freedom, I am praying (really) that the citizens of North Carolina reject Amendment One.

For thirty years I have met with GLBT students who struggle with the bitter reality that they are condemned and despised. I met with suicidal students who had tried every method they could find to become “normal,” students who would have done anything to be like the majority that rejected them.

Twenty years ago, when my son was born, I resolved to make it clear that whoever he turned out to be, whether he wanted to spend his life with a man or a woman, he could count on unqualified love and acceptance from me.

If parents can’t offer that much, they shouldn’t be parents.

Today I find people living in the state I love prepared to make a hash of hard-won legal protections domestic partners have earned in past decades – whether straight or homosexual. Parents could lose custody rights to their children. Domestic violence protection could be withdrawn from unmarried couples.

Does anyone want to increase the ability of one human to brutalize another?

Just imagine that you can no longer visit a beloved partner in the hospital, make decisions if your partner is incapacitated, dispose of his or her remains. What kind of world – what kind of people would prevent anyone from helping a loved one in illness or death?

The present legal state of affairs restricts marriage to one man and one woman. We should be working to overturn the existing law, not struggling against additional discriminatory amendments.

Our Torah has nothing to say against the love of two women. What it says about homosexuality is frequently read out of historical context and—as my students at UNCC discover—learning more deeply about that context can alter the reading significantly.

“You shall love your neighbor (your friend, your associate) as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). When a non-Jew asked Rabbi Hillel to tell him the very essence of Torah, Hillel alluded, Talmud tells us, to this very verse: If you wouldn’t want someone to do something to you, he explained, then don’t do it to someone else.

Jews know what it is to live with constraints on their movements, on their free expression, on their very lives. Heterosexual Jews ought to know that it is wrong – just plain wrong – to refuse GLBT citizens access to ceremonies, rituals, and rights that they enjoy.

Oranges belong on the seder plate and GLBT citizens belong in our communities and in our state – with the same rights as any other human being.

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A Plague Upon My House

It began harmlessly enough.

An itsy-bitsy inchworm planted itself on my sleeve. It crawled up my arm to get a good look at me and decide whether any part of my human self was edible.

I disappointed my little friend, however. Apparently, I was not carrying the sort of inchworm that is carnivorous. (Some members of the species do enjoy dining on meat. They live in Hawaii.)

All my life, the sight of an inchworm has called to mind the idyllic scene and the innocuous, unforgettable tune delivered in the movie Hans Christian Anderson. In the film, Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminski in Brooklyn to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants) plays the famous Danish fairy tale author. Jewish boys play Aryan boys more often than you might imagine.

In the scene that comes inevitably to my mind, David Daniel Kaminski sings sweetly at marigolds (and worms) in the company of a young boy who looks with adoration at all three.

I placed the inchworm on our porch, entered our humble home, and sang:

Inchworm, Inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see
How beautiful they are.

I had no idea.

Just days later, I noted that there were a good many inchworms about the trees and house. A mere forty-eight hours later, there was no part of yard, gardens, car or home that was not covered in their stringy detritus. We couldn’t go out the house or into it without carrying the critters with us. We found them in our hair, in our collars, down our backs, underneath our pant cuffs.

My office window was so bedecked in strings and webs it looked like Halloween had taken up residence in my nicely modest Jewish home as a belated April Fool’s joke. The only thing missing were the skeletons issuing battery-powered screams.

According to the all-purpose Wikipedia article on inchworms, the creatures “hide from predators by fading into the background or resembling twigs.”

Ha. These guys were taking over the world. Narf.

As the next two days passed, hundreds of inchworms gave way to thousands and ten thousands. It reminded me of plague of frogs which begins, according to Torah, with the appearance of one single amphibian. (Yes, I know the English translations gloss over this fact, but after God commands Aaron to haul the frogs out of the water in Ex. 8:1 only one frog actually appears in 8:2. Rabbis have had a wonderful time trying to explain the appearance of the singular beast for many centuries.)

It was my last cleaning and cooking day before Pesach was to begin. We were having guests for first night seder. I imagined my friends entering our abode covered in inchworm weavings. Even Elijah would not have set one mystical foot on our deck.

My husband, Ralf, and I began cleaning.

There was no place free of the inchworms. Thousands of the beasties were crawling about the door frames, the soffits, the windows, the deck flooring and fencing, the patio chairs…

For the next three hours we used a hose and a hard bristle brush to clean off the doors, the narrow front patio, and the deck. After a while, the sludge of dead or dying inchworms grew to almost three inches high. The task had the same appeal as cleaning a dormitory toilet – on the men’s side.

As we hosed and brushed and hosed again, I alternated between the guilt that rises whenever a creature of nature dies and the horror of the muck, the grunge and the gross before me. Predictably, the guilt subsided under the weight of the horror.

Over the years, I have come to see Pesach as my annual attempt at liberation from some piece of the muck and the grunge and the unwanted stuff I have accumulated and carried around with me.

Like the inchworms, the ick that we carry around is resistant. Like the inchworm, it sneaks up on us. They are persistent, those old hurts, the old patterns, the way we shlep stuff from dysfunctional systems that can mark an infant’s soul within days of its arrival on this earth.

The Hebrew for Egypt is mitzrayim. It means “the narrow space.” We all want to be free of narrow spaces, the tight constraints of past patterns and old pains.

I brushed and hosed in the bright spring sunshine, mourning the new leaves the inchworms had so merrily consumed on all the variously beautiful trees around my little home. I resolved to band them, to protect them next fall, so that they could freely unfold in spring.

I asked myself: What could I leave behind me?

For most of my adult life I have worked between ten and fourteen hour days. I have known what it is to balance six part-time jobs to make some excuse for a living. Even now, I have two and a half jobs. One is supposed to be full time and the two others part time, but the hours I put in each week, as I recently measured, come to at least thirty for just one of my part-time jobs. I have been plagued by a never-ending list of tasks scrawled in the middle of the night, collected during the day.

I want to stop working like this.

I want to go outside and take in the sweet clarity of a Carolina spring. I want to have time to rest in my husband’s arms and in my friends’ good company. I want. I want.

The inchworms are gone. Those that survived our onslaught are busy turning into moths, I suppose. I know that despite all my efforts, there are many days in my future which will start around 8 am and end at midnight.

But the longing I feel is not as easily ignored or dismissed as it once was. I feel some fierce desire, some insistence rising. I feel a certainty; I must leave this narrow space.

Check in with me in a year. I’ll let you know if the inchworms came back.

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Esther 1, God 0

I say fie. Fie on all those commentaries trying so hard to find God in the Book of Esther.

We don’t need to spill more ink or exercise more electrons on insisting that God’s absence is really presence. We don’t need to find God in order to justify the time we spend on this book, or on the hilarious holiday that makes it required reading.

Instead, we could delve into a text that is so cleverly designed, so beautifully comic, and so deeply meaningful (without God’s presence) that there is plenty of reason to love it, no matter where we find ourselves on the continuum we call history.

This book is edgy, funny, and truthful. Read it carefully and you will have to rethink who you are. Jewish or not.

Let us imagine reading Esther as one would read Lysistrata.

If we did, we’d have a very good laugh at all the sex in the story. The king, presumably the royal manifestation of virility, can’t say no to anything. Ahaseurus is everyone’s fool. Or tool.

His own is symbolic, and ribaldly so, a golden scepter that he publicly extends. Esther saves her own life by touching its tip (5:2).

Haman has a bigger one, in a manner of speaking. Consider the stake Haman sets up to peg Mordecai upon, one he erects on the advice of his wife, Zeresh (5:14). It’s a very large stake, some seven stories high. (What was she dreaming of, nights?)

Real power is handed over to Haman, and after Haman’s downfall, Esther. Mordecai wins the jackpot in the final chapter. Of course that chapter is a later addition, probably because some ancient Jewish dudes didn’t like the idea of ending the book with a woman holding all the cards. Too bad, since much of the book is all about women holding all the cards.

Then there’s the drinking and the feasting and the drinking.

The killing, too.

To our shock, it would seem that the Jews go on a killing spree in Chapter 9 (though many commentaries insist that the first episode had to be defensive in nature). Esther, our heroine, asks permission for the killing to continue. From a death toll of 510, the story tells us, we advance to one just under one hundred and fifty times higher; by the end of the second day the Jews have killed 75,810 Persians.

Of course, this text is not a history. Of course, this text is a burlesque. Literary conventions as old as writing itself tell stories of the impotent becoming omnipotent. The comedy is cathartic, obviously over the top, clearly part and parcel with the genre: Exaggeration and hyperbole are integral to carnival. The hyperbole in Esther begins in its first verses – in a revelry that lasts six drunken months.

Still, the audience must feel some discomfort. No wonder we would rather ignore the sex, the drugs (alcohol), and the violence in favor of twisting and turning the text to find God somewhere, anywhere. The text uses the word “king” multitudinous times? It must be referring to the real king, the King Above. The name “Esther” comes from a Hebrew root, or “shoresh” that suggests hiddenness – the very name of the book suggests God’s hidden presence!

What if Esther is simply confronting us with the hard reality? Human beings are capable of anything, no matter who they are.  Jews can become aggressors, while Persians are, for fear, “Jewing” (8:16). Jews are behaving like Persians and Persians are behaving like Jews. We can all know what it is to feel impotent. We can all be dishonorable, drunken, and loutish.

We could all even kill.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

Irony, like comedy, demands that we abandon every category. Everything we think we know about the Other and ourselves must be discarded if we are to learn from our laughter (and our tears).

Maybe the lesson we need in what it means to be human should come from other humans, not God. Maybe God wouldn’t find us so very funny.

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