Jewish Renewal, II

Maybe a bunch of Jews are longing for sweet and crazy-joyful celebration of who they are and what they do (and what God might have to do with all that). Or perhaps lots of people just find red boots fascinating. Another possibility? Jewish Renewal readers are out there just waiting to see something more about their own movement available on the world-wide web.

My posting on Jewish Renewal’s red boots produced more reader comments and more subscriptions to this blog than any other I’ve written – including the one on male lactation in the Talmud.

I mused about this some as I heard my Inbox bing and bing and bing again with comments and subscriptions and suchlike. Clearly, I had hardly begun nourishing the longing out there for Stuff on Jewish Renewal. I like to cook, after all, and I know that a good meal includes more than the main course.

My favorite dessert is dark chocolate mousse. I make it frequently. So, for a little textual dessert…

Jewish Renewal is an evening of Shefa Gold chants. One verse becomes the rich exploration of soul, of the Holy Breath that sustains our lives. Rabbi Shefa’s melodies and harmonies become mantras to live by; their beautiful repetition engraves them on the heart. Her Torah commentaries stretch the spirit. In them, she gives her readers the right to honor their own knowledge, their inner Torah, and to see it revealed in texts written thousands of years ago.

Jewish Renewal celebrates spontaneity, an in-the-moment approach to prayer as well as attention and intention to our deep roots and history.  Spontaneity: At Temple Or Olam’s Shabbat services I will happily sing in rhyme about the folks walking through the door, the children dancing in our midst, or matriarch Ruth Kingberg’s loving hugs.  Whatever is happening is a happening thing.

Here are the deep roots of Jewish tradition: We know that our relationships and friendships are about godding the world toward a meshiachzeit we long for, a time of real and lasting peace.

I like to sing about that, too, and my liturgy gives me age-old ways to do just that.

Jewish Renewal is the way our mashpi’ahs (spiritual directors) begin reflecting, considering, and even crafting healing rituals when they identify yearning for shleimut, wholeness. It is the way Rabbi Burt Jacobson brings us to Baal Shem Tov text study by beginning with meditation. It is the way we soak ourselves in the richness of tradition and Torah, the liturgical year and the practice of Shabbat.

It is the kippot on my congregation’s welcome table at every service.

I began making kippot years ago, and started mostly with pretty head coverings for all the girls of our congregation. I love to sew as I love to cook. Pink and purple and blue, beaded and braided and trimmed – I added some every year. I began finding little animal appliqués and made kippot for our toddlers. Ducks, alligators, donkeys, giraffes. I started making some for my colleagues and friendswith rich colors, with sparkles and beads and flowers.

I’d sewn blessings into each one.

God knows, we need blessings. We are wounded and small in so many ways, cut off from our own richly attired texts and traditions

How do we connect with a language we don’t understand but still use to sing our prayers? How do we find meaning in all the acts that seemed inexplicable to us in our youth? In what ways can we nourish our Judaism while enriching the world?

By renewing our understanding, our connections, our love of who we are, where we have been, and where we must go to make this world the one we hope and long for. We of Jewish Renewal can and long to do just that among fellow Jews and Muslims and Christians and Buddhists and agnostics and atheists and all the rest of humanity who are in pursuit of that thing we call a better world, a world renewed.

Keyn y’hi ratzon. May it be so.

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The Cries of our Soul

Tekiah! I was whole.
Shevarim I grew scattered…
Teru’ah …even shattered.
Teki’ahgedolah And nonetheless: I again knew moments of wholeness. 

 

Just last weekend, my husband, Ralf, and I were out at an office supply store, buying little gifts for my congregants. When we came home, Ralf checked, as he does several times a day, a website with breaking news. There’d been a shooting at the home improvement store around the corner, just minutes away from where we had been shopping. No details yet.

The next day, I wrote a column for the Charlotte Observer’s Neighbors section for my region. I’ve written my column, “On Common Ground” for seventeen years.

I wrote about CVAN, the Cabarrus Victims Assistance Network. I’ve written about CVAN regularly over the years – it is a respected institution in my home town, one which has helped battered women and their children start lives afresh for two decades.

I quoted statistics – in particular, the sad fact of how many women are killed at work by partners and husbands. I sent off the column.

I learned the details of the shooting two days later.

Zoua “Vivian” Xiong, 25, mother of three, was killed at the Lowe’s Home Improvement Store. Police say that her husband, Por Ye Lor, 31, shot his wife during an argument. Then he killed himself.

Next week, my own husband will lift our five-foot shofar and sound its cries at our High Holy Day services. I will sing out the sounds of wholeness, pausing, breaking, recovery.

The sounds of the shofar are the calls – and the cries of our soul. So taught the seventeenth-century Rabbi Isaac Horowitz.

First, the shofar calls out to us first in affirmation, with the long whole note of tekiah, a clear and simple blast. Tekiah reminds us of our wholeness; it makes the sound of shleimut.  

Shleimut comes from the same root as the word shalom. We associate shalom with peace, with safety. When are we most peaceful, safest for everyone around us? When can we care for a troubled world? When we ourselves feel whole.

We all know what it is to lose our center, to find ourselves scattered and upset. Shevarim, the shofar’s second call, is a broken sound. The shofar sighs. It pauses three times, in sadness and regret. We have lost our balance.

Teruah, the alarm, comes next in a rapid-fire series of nine or more sharp notes. We hear the sound of shattering, of destruction. A note has fallen into pieces. So, too, our hearts.

Finally, in a redeeming moment, tekiah g’dolah. The shofar calls us back. The extended, long sweet note, the one that fills us up again, heals our pain. The deep and primal sound of tekiah g’dolah insists: Despite everything, we can be whole again.

What are our lives if not an endless recurring cycle of wholeness and brokenness? We feel strong, purposeful, filled with hope. We do not anticipate the blow, the terror, the loss. But it comes. We meet with hypocrisy and cruelty. We encounter the lying tongue, the slanderous talk, the small-minded daily evils human beings inflict on one another.

Perhaps fate strikes. We lose a beloved, the doctor has bad news.

Or maybe it is the simple and daily act of living in this world that breaks and shatters our peace. We open the paper or turn on the news and (can we avoid it?) face the pain of countless human beings living in despair, without jobs, without dignity, without homes, without food. We read of a young woman, only 25, with three children, murdered at work.

Living gives us pause because so many are dying without cause.

How can we mend? How can we find peace and wholeness again? What endures all the ills of humanity, the pain we inflict and the pain we feel?

If I glance out my office window to the right: I look into the light of the five-fingered green leaves of my gumball tree. The heart-shaped leaves of the redbud at the far left of the yard fairly flow off the branches. The thin, long willow oak leaves just ahead make lacy patterns against the sky. There is peace in the shape of nature that will outlast me.

I look out and I pray. I pray the broken sounds and the scattered ones. I pray out shattered, piecemeal horrors and griefs. I list all that I can think of, all that weigh upon me. I ask for help.

For myself, I ask: May I hear all the cries of the shofar, of the souls around me in some way each day. May I do something this day that counts for wholeness. May I find a way to sound a soft but sure tekiah g’dolah. May my work mirror that primal, healing sound of the shofar’s sweetest call.

For the world, I ask for wholeness, shleimut. May we reach out and not turn away. May we love. May we choose life, not death.

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