More Like a Person

The following was preached at Kol Nidre services at Kolot Chayeinu.

I grew up at Jewish summer camp. My childhood sky is speckled with constellations of the great counselors who came before me—legends, as we thought of them, almost gods. The stories we told about them: how one of them hit a half-court shot at the buzzer to win the staff basketball game against our rival camp; how another one was almost struck by lightening, and subsequently shaved a lightening bolt into the side of his head. They were our heroes; we worshipped them; and to some extent, we still do to this day.

Years later, I and my friends became the counselors, and like the legends who came before us, we reveled in the larger-than-life tales that sprouted up around us.

One of my campers, of whom I was quite fond, was a young man named Aaron.[1] He and I were similar: we were both kind of bookish, but also at camp, somehow kind of cool; we were both into jazz; we even kind of looked alike. And so, people started to refer to Aaron as my Mini Me. And I loved it.

Eventually, Aaron himself became a counselor, and one summer, we were on staff together. Suddenly, the curtain was lifted; I was no longer a legend and he was no longer my Mini Me. We were both just staff members, trying to create a fun and safe summer.

One night during staff training week, there was a conversation about role models who had made a difference in our lives. Aaron’s parents had divorced the previous year, and so when it was his turn to talk about a role model, Aaron said of his dad: “I learned this year that he’s not a god, he’s just a man.”

I’ve never forgotten those words: “He’s not a god, he’s just a man.” Cause while I know that Aaron was talking about his dad, I also know that on some level, Aaron was talking about me—about the legends; about the summer camp sky, so full god-like heroes; about our expectation that the world is full of beauty, and our inevitable discovery that the world is also full of disappointment.

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The past several months, I’ve found myself wrestling not with the god-like heroes of my childhood summers, but with God. This world, so full of natural beauty—where a sequoia tree can live for 2,000 years, or a trickle of water can carve out the Grand Canyon—is at the same time so full of natural suffering—where illness strikes so arbitrarily, where merit isn’t always rewarded, where love is inevitably met by death. What is this God—or whatever else we might call it: this mystery, this force, this unfolding process—what is this anomaly that caused the world to be so full of beauty and yet at the same time so full of suffering?

===

I’ll save you the anticipation: I don’t have an answer. We’ll come back to this question in a little bit. For now, I want to approach a different anomaly—this one not coming from the world, but from our High Holiday prayer book.

Kol nidre ve-esarei [v’charamei] … u-sh’vu’ot … la sharirin v-la kayamin. Nidrana la nidrei, ve-esarana la esarei, u-sh’vu’atana la sh’vu-ot. / “All our vows, and all our promises … and all our oaths [that we have sworn or will swear],[2] … they are not valid and they are not in force. Our vows are not vows; our promises are not promises; our oaths are not oaths.”

Anomalous, indeed, to find in our tradition this declaration that our promises should not be considered reliable. Indeed, European Jews in the early modern period sought to remove Kol Nidre from the Yom Kippur liturgy, fearing that it would undermine the Jews’ “newly won acceptance within [non-Jewish] society.”[3]

In our professional and personal lives, we and others depend upon the reliability of our promises. “I do.” “Yes, I will.” “I’ll be there at noon.” “You can count on me.” “I love you.” [4] These are but a few of the vows, oaths, and promises we swear in our everyday lives. We live in an economy of words: we buy other people’s trust with our words, and our line of credit depends on the regularity with which our words can be trusted.

While we may speak of an economy of words, our ancient near eastern forebears thought of words as being powered by angels, demons, and spirits. In their metaphor, every word that a human being uttered commissioned an angel or a demon into action, to carry out the content of that word. Historian Stuart Weinberg Gershon notes, that, “having set demons into motion, rash words could not be taken back. ... When a person swore an oath, … it was considered as if the [spirits] themselves had simultaneously undertaken an oath to carry out the curses attached to them.”[5]

Hence, we find in the Hebrew Bible the troubling story[6] of Yiftach and his daughter. Yiftach was a commander in the Israelite army, and on the eve of a great battle, he made a careless vow to God, saying: “If You deliver the enemy into my hands, then I will sacrifice to You the first thing I see upon returning home.” Sure enough, Yiftach won the battle; but the first thing he saw upon returning home was his daughter. And so, Yiftach did the terrible thing and sacrificed his daughter—not from piety or zeal, but rather for fear of what kind of spirit might strike down his daughter if he didn’t fulfill his vow.

Hence, the Book of Ecclesiastes declares: “It is better not to make a vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it.”[7] In the ancient metaphor of angels and demons, an unfulfilled vow was a safety hazard; in our contemporary metaphor, an unfulfilled vow is like bad credit. In either metaphor, an unfulfilled vow is a liability.

This liability arises from the fact that a word, once it’s uttered, takes on a life of its own. The Talmud[8] declares that verbal wrongdoing is more grievous than financial wrongdoing—because while misused financial property may be restored to its rightful owner, an ill-used word can never be restored to the mouth from which it came.

Words have a life of their own. This may be exactly what our biblical tradition is trying to express when we read: “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.” That verse is less about the origins of the world than it is about the creative power of words. We create God in our image: just as our words take on a life of their own, so too do we imaginatively propose that this universe is the faint, distant echo of a divine speech-act.

So why, then, on this night, of all nights, does our tradition—which so thoroughly affirms the irrevocable creative power of words—declare that “our vows are not vows; our promises are not promises; and our oaths are not oaths”? Why, then, this anomaly?

To approach the anomaly of Kol Nidre—and also the anomaly of our beautiful world, so full of suffering—we travel to meet the ancient sage Rav Abba bar Bar Channah.

The very name Rav Abba bar Bar Channah is already something of anomaly. Without going into the mechanics of it all, suffice it to say his parents named him something like: “My father, the grandson of his grandfather.” Rav Abba bar Bar Channah is something like a Mini Me of his grandfather.

Rav Abba lived in Babylon in the 3^rd century CE, and he travelled often to the land of Israel to study in an academy there. The Talmud tells fantastical stories about Rav Abba’s many travels. In one set of stories,[9] Rav Abba hires an otherworldly guide to take him on a mystical tour of the Sinai desert—to see the many locations where the Israelites encamped during their 40 years of wandering in the desert. The tour guide takes Rav Abba to the place where many among the generation of Moses and Miriam are buried. Their corpses are giant, such that Rav Abba can walk underneath the bend in a corpse’s knee without having to duck. The tour guide takes Rav Abba to the place where Korach and his gang of rebels were swallowed up by the mouth of the earth. The crack in the ground is still there, hissing out white steam and the faint voice of Korach, croaking, “Moses spoke the truth; we all spoke in lies.” The tour guide takes Rav Abba to the very place where heaven and earth kiss, where the wheels of eternity grind—the place from which the sun rises and into which the moon sets.

At last, the tour guide takes Rav Abba to the base of Mount Sinai. But the place appears not as it is described in the biblical account—no fire upon the mountain, no violent trembling of the earth, no blast of the shofar. No—today, all is quiet. A pack of giant white scorpions, each one the size of a donkey, guards the base of the mountain, such that Rav Abba and his guide cannot approach.

From a distance, discreetly, Rav Abba hears a voice. Not the thunderous Anochi that erupted from the mountain in the days of Moses, but rather, a faint cry, soft, mournful, feminine in tone. It is the voice of God, and she is weeping: “Woe is Me!” the voice cries out, “Woe is Me! For I regret the oath I made to exile the people of Israel. And alas, now that I have made that oath, who could release me from it?”

Rav Abba hears the voice of God, however we understand that—the mystery, the force, the unfolding process—the voice of the universe saying: “Woe is Me! I spoke a word that I cannot un-speak. I created a world that I cannot un-create. I regret that this universe so full of suffering. I regret that illness strikes so arbitrarily. I regret that merit isn’t always rewarded. I regret that love is inevitably met by death. But alas—now that the universe has turned out this way, who could ever un-speak the world that I have spoken?”

When Rav Abba returns to Babylon and tells his colleagues about Mount Sinai, they say to him: “Rav Abba, you fool! You should have responded and said: ‘Your vow is not a vow. Your promise is not a promise. Your oath is not an oath.’ You should have said: ‘Kol nidre ve-esarei [v’charamei]….’”

But this isn’t what Rav Abba said. He remains silent. Because Kol Nidre is, after all, only wishful thinking. A word is a word; and it can’t be taken back. And the world is the world; and it can’t be taken back. At the end of it all, the anomaly of Kol Nidre is that does not and cannot annul our vows, no matter how much we might wish it could. What Kol Nidre does give to us, and to others—and perhaps most importantly, to God—is the space to say: “Woe is me! I have regrets that I cannot un-make.”

And by giving others the space to say, “I have regrets,” Kol Nidre allows us to look up into that summer camp sky—so speckled with constellations—and let those god-like legends down from the pedestals on which we’ve placed them.

And by giving ourselves the space to say, “I have regrets,” Kol Nidre allows a Rav Abba bar Bar Channah—who had only ever been known as a Mini Me of his grandfather—to step out of that shadow and be known for his own story.

And by giving God the space to say, “I have regrets,” Kol Nidre allows us to live in this world—so full of beauty and yet so full of suffering—without wrestling every minute with all the anomaly.

This Kol Nidre, I’ll echo the words of my camper—my friend—Aaron: “Not even God is a god; much more like a person.”

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[1] Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.

[2] I have intentionally chosen neither the Ashkenazi/Mizrachi future-tense nor the Sephardi past-tense rendering of this verb. The difference in tenses between these texts, while interesting to study, is not relevant to our current discussion.

[3] Gershon, Stuart Weinberg. Kol Nidre: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1994. p. 130.

[4] This list is based on: Wenig, Margaret Moers. “All Vows? No! Then, Which Vows?” All These Vows: Kol Nidre. Ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011. p. 218

[5] Gershon, p. 119

[6] Judges 11

[7] Ecclesiastes 5:4

[8] Bava Metzia 58b

[9] Bava Batra 74a

Laughter and Ambiguity

The following was preached on the second morning of Rosh HaShanah at Kolot Chayeinu.

This morning, we’ll be reading the story of the birth of Isaac and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael.

Let’s consider first the birth of Isaac. The birth of Isaac represents one of the most critical moments in our Biblical myth. God has already fulfilled one part of God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: God has blessed them and made their name great—their bravery in leaving behind their home country to start in a new life in a new land, their perilous encounters with kings up and down the Mediterranean coast, their arguments with God to do justice for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the hospitality they show to wanderers in the desert. But the other part of God’s promise—and perhaps, the more important part—remains as yet unfulfilled: to make of Abraham and Sarah a great nation, so that the blessing that they’ve brought into the world might be shared with future generations.

Twice before in our story, messengers of God have come to Abraham and Sarah to inform them that they will have a child. And in both these instances, Abraham and Sarah laugh at the possibility of such an idea. After all, they are both quite advanced in years—Abraham 100 years old, and Sarah 90. We might characterize their laughter as a kind of bemused skepticism. And such a reaction is warranted. After a life committed to the pursuit of truth, having born witness to the random and sometimes absurd way in which suffering manifests itself, Abraham and Sarah carry with them a healthy dose of realism. Their laughter serves as a safety valve. Like any good satirists, they take a look at their own particular slice of suffering, and rather than sinking into despair or denial, they speak the absurd truth by pointing at it with a joke. We might call this brand of humor: “It’s funny because it’s true.” We might associate it with the work of Jon Stewart or Amy Schumer.

In the verses we’ll read this morning, laughter once again plays a central role. Abraham and Sarah’s fortunes are reversed. The seemingly impossible comes to be, and the child they’ve always dreamed of is born. Now, a different kind of laughter is heard in their camp, a sort of delighted surprise. It’s a simpler kind of laughter—without the dark undertones of the laughter they’d known before. It’s the kind of laughter we might imagine coming from the mouth of a toddler in a game of peek-a-boo: you thought one thing was going to happen, but look!, something else did. We might call this brand of humor: It’s funny because we didn’t expect it to happen. As it goes in the joke: Why did the chicken cross the road? We expect to hear about a deep motivation, not a simple explanation of the cause. This unexpected outcome is funny.

Literary critic and rabbinical school professor and Wendy Zierler notes that laughter—like birth—is a sort of mysterious outpouring. We don’t really know why it happens; we don’t really control when it happens. It sort of just erupts from within our bellies. You can’t really plan for a laugh, and anyone can tell a forced laugh from a real one.

It’s appropriate, therefore, that Abraham and Sarah should name the child of their bemused skepticism and delighted surprise Isaac—in Hebrew, Yitzchak, meaning, “he will laugh.” Like a laugh, Abraham and Sarah couldn’t really plan for Isaac. He kind of just came out, uncontrolled, mysteriously, unexpectedly.

But so far, we’ve dealt only with the first part of this morning’s Torah reading: the birth of Isaac. Let’s turn now to the second part of our Torah reading, where laughter is a little more complicated: the banishment of Hagar and her son Ishmael.

The text tells us that Sarah saw Ishmael doing something that Sarah didn’t like. What exactly Ishmael was doing is unclear; the Hebrew verb that’s used there—m’tzacheik—is not such a common one. One translation uses the word “playing”—hardly an offense worthy of banishment. To better understand the meaning of this verb, we might looks to other places in the Torah where m’tzacheik is used.

In the incident with the Golden Calf, the Israelites are described as m’tzacheik—suggesting that perhaps Ishmael was engaged in some sort of idol worship. In the Joseph narrative, the nameless Mrs. Potipher wishes Joseph to m’tzacheik with her—suggesting that perhaps Ishmael was engaged in some sort of sexual impropriety. In the court of King David, m’tzacheik is used to describe an assassin’s plot—suggesting that perhaps Ishmael had committed some act of murder.

The classical Rabbinic tradition goes to great lengths to make the case for any one of—and in some cases, all of—these offenses, for which Ishmael and Hagar are banished. After all, the Rabbis were strong moralists and apologists—creating backstories to explain the sometimes-offensive behaviors of our patriarchs and matriarchs.

But, as is often the case in good art—as well as in life—a helpful clue may be hiding in plain sight. The word m’tzacheik shares a root with the word tz’chok—laughter. What’s more, m’tzacheik is different by only one letter from the name Yitzchak.

Was Ishmael Isaac-ing? Was he laughing at Isaac, pretending to be Isaac? Laughter, after all, can carry with it the power to hurt, to mock, to tease, to humiliate. Just as it shakes the belly of the one who laughs, so too can laughter shake the ground upon which the one who is laughed at stands.

But it’s also possible that Ishmael was merely laughing; perhaps someone had just told him a knock-knock joke; perhaps, like Abraham and Sarah, he was surprised and delighted at the arrival of this newest member of the family: “finally—a playmate!” I’ve heard it said that jealousy is when we see that someone else has something that we think rightfully belongs to us. “That’s my thing,” we think to ourselves. Perhaps Sarah thought that she and Abraham had a monopoly on laughter.

Unfortunately for those among us who have a low tolerance for ambiguity, the text isn’t clear. In art as in life, there are no perfect heroes or perfect villains. And it’s this very ambiguity that makes life and art and laughter so difficult to make sense of. It’s almost comic how slippery is this whole enterprise—how every year we come back to read and reread these same stories, and how every year just as we think we’ve got their meaning nailed down, a new year rolls around and with it, a new meaning. How throughout these lifetimes of ours, we find ourselves wrestling with the same core struggles as we wrestled with from childhood. For those of us with a low tolerance for ambiguity, it’s almost enough to make you want to wash your hands of the whole business—to banish ambiguity, with Hagar and Ishmael, into the wilderness.

But we banish at our own risk. We need the Jon Stewarts and Amy Schumers of the world, to keep on us telling the truth. We need that chicken to cross the road, to keep on surprising us about what we had assumed was the truth. And we need Hagar and Ishmael, to keep reminding us that the truth is rarely ever THE truth, but maybe only a truth—loaded with ambiguity, keeping us on our toes, laughing as it darts in and out of focus.

The Everyday Sounds of Shofar

The following was the shofar service on the first morning of Rosh Hashanah at Kolot Chayeinu. It was later submitted to Ritual Well.

Daniel: In medieval Spain, two of our greatest sages debated the nature of the shofar ritual. They asked (and I’m paraphrasing): if a shofar blasts in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make it sound? Over the centuries, our tradition decided that no—a shofar blast that goes unheard is no shofar blast at all. The essence of the ritual takes place not in the ram’s horn itself, but rather in the ears of those who hear it.

And so we say—in the middle of p. 142:

Daniel and congregation: Baruch Atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech ha-olam, Asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu lishmoa’ kol shofar.

Daniel: Blessed is our Eternal God, Who causes the air to invisibly vibrate and the three tiny bones in our eardrums to quiver, causing us to hear and to feel the blast of the shofar.

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Something happens in us that wouldn’t happen if a shofar were to blast all alone in a forest with no one around to hear it. Something happens between the conduction of sound in our ear and that moment when the hair on our neck rises, or the bumps on our arms stand, or the heart in our chest sinks, or the knot in our throat tightens. Something in our evolutionary memory recognizes in the sound of the shofar a language that was spoken before there were words:

T’kiyah: a sound of joy—

Sh’varim: a sound of sorrow—

T’ruah: a sound of warning.

I ask you now, if you’re able, to rise. Hear the voice of the shofar, speaking a language that transcends all words.

Nancy:

[Sasha does blasts]

Tekiyah [Sasha blasts]; Shevarim-Teruah [Sasha blasts]; Tekiyah  [Sasha blasts]

Tekiyah [Sasha blasts]; Shevarim [Sasha blasts]; Tekiyah [Sasha blasts]

Tekiyah [Sasha blasts]; Teruah [Sasha blasts]; Tekiyah  [Sasha blasts]

===

Daniel: The sound of the shofar reminds us of a language that was spoken before there were words.

But occasionally, our ears fail us. We hear the sound of joy, or the sound of sorrow, or the sound of warning in everyday places—but we’ve grown desensitized to them.

Time to clean out our spiritual earwax. Hear now the everyday voice of the shofar.

Nancy:

[Jamal plays audio files, available at the bottom of this post]

Tekiyah [Jammal – track A]; Shevarim-Teruah [Jammal – B]; Tekiyah  [Jammal – A]

Tekiyah [Jammal – A]; Shevarim [Jammal – C]; Tekiyah [Jammal – A]

Tekiyah [Jammal – A]; Teruah [Jammal – D]; Tekiyah  [Jammal – A]

===

Daniel: If a shofar blasts in the forest, and there’s someone there to hear it, it makes a sound. If a fire alarm sounds in the firehouse, and there’s someone there to hear it, it saves a life. If a voice cries out in the night, and there’s someone there to hear it, it lessens suffering.

There is no separation between the sound of the shofar and the sounds of our world. The one doesn’t exist “in here” and the other “out there.” Our work is to learn hear the shofar “out there” and to learn to hear world “in here.”

Hear now the sound of the shofar—the voice of a world needing to be heard.

Nancy:

[Sasha blasts while Jammal plays tracks]

Tekiyah [Blast & A]; Shevarim-Teruah [Blast & B]; Tekiyah  [Blast & A]

Tekiyah [Blast & A]; Shevarim [Blast & C]; Tekiyah [Blast & A]

Tekiyah [Blast & A]; Teruah [Blast & D]; TEKIYAH GEDOLAH [Blast & E]

[Audio file fades; Sasha’s shofar blasts remains]

_________
Audio files:
[A] Tekiyah
[B] Shevarim-Teruah
[C] Shevarim
[D] Teruah
[E] Tekiyah Gedolah

"Are You Religious?"

The following was preached at Erev Rosh HaShanah services at Kolot Chayeinu.

At the beginning of every school year, the students and faculty at Hebrew Union College spend three days on retreat. It’s an opportunity to reconnect with one another after a summer apart and to begin the year with fresh, creative thinking. The retreat is held at the IsabellaFreedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut.

On the last day of this year’s retreat, after waiting in the buffet line to get some lunch, I was looking around the dining room for a place to sit. Many of my classmates were at tables that were already full, and I noticed a person sitting alone whom I didn’t recognize. Like many male students at HUC, he had a short-trimmed beard, was wearing an interesting hat, and looked tired. I figured that he was a first year student whom I hadn’t yet met. So I went and sat at his table and introduced myself.

I quickly discovered that he was not in fact a first year student. His name was Adam, and he was the mashgiach—or kosher supervisor—for the kitchen and dining room at the retreat center. Now, in case you’ve never been to Isabella Freedman, not only is it a beautiful retreat center, it’s also home to Hazon—a Jewish organization that works on food sustainability issues. On the grounds of Isabella Freedman, Hazon runs an educational farm that provides some of the food for the retreat center’s dining hall.

For a few minutes, Adam and I made polite small-talk, until finally I asked him, in a totally leading way, “So, tell me about the kosher status of this kitchen.” I expected him to enlighten me with a personalized treatise on Eco-Kashrut, the growing movement around developing a new kosher standard that is based upon equal parts traditional Jewish dietary laws on the one hand and sustainable, ethical food concerns on the other. After all, we were at Isabella Freedman.

Instead, Adam smiled and said: “Are you religious?”

“I don’t know how to answer the question,” I responded. “I feel strongly identified with the Jewish people. I love Torah study. Sometimes, I’m really into prayer—although right now I’ve kind of got a problem with God. So yes, I would say I’m religious. But, if you’re asking if I keep kosher, I don’t.”

I was surprised to learn that Adam’s role as kosher supervisor of the kitchen had nothing to do with Eco-Kashrut, and was almost entirely technical. He gave me a thorough explanation of the various types of kosher certificates and levels of stringency, all of which were based on classical Jewish dietary laws. When I asked him how much of the food in the kitchen came from the Farm or from other local sources, he had to flag down someone else on the staff to find out the answer. And even then, he reminded me the locally grown food had to be checked extra-carefully to make sure it met all proper kosher standards.

The conversation wasn’t going as I had expected it to. There were only so many technical details that I could retain at one time, and as a person who doesn’t keep kosher, I didn’t find it all that interesting. Although, come to think of it, as a person who doesn’t practice sustainable eating either, I can’t imagine that I would have found the Eco-Kashrut conversation all that much more interesting. Resigned to my lunch conversation fate, I asked Adam what the training is like to become a kosher supervisor.

He told me that it’s not overly difficult—that you have to study the laws of Kashrut, but that at this point, they’re all compiled in user-friendly guide books. And then he added: “But the most important thing is that you have to be religious.”

“How’s that?” I asked. “I consider myself religious, but I don’t think that it particularly qualifies me to be a kosher supervisor.”

“Let me give you an example,” he said. “Let’s say that dinner is supposed to be served at 6:15. And at 6:00, the chef goes to crack an egg, and he discovers that there’s a drop of blood in the egg—which makes it un-kosher. Now in this circumstance, anybody could tell the difference between kosher and non-kosher. I just told you: if there’s a drop of blood in an egg, it’s not kosher. But the difference is, a person who’s not religious might see that drop of blood in the egg and say to himself: ‘Dinner’s in 15 minutes, we gotta get this food out there. Let’s just cover this up—don’t ask, don’t tell.’ Now, someone who’s religious, she sees that drop of blood in the egg, and although she knows that everyone in that dining room expects dinner in 15 minutes, she also knows that everyone in that dining room expects that the food she calls kosher is actually kosher. So she doesn’t cover it up. She goes outside and she says: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize, dinner is going to be late. We had an unexpected hiccup in the kitchen; something doesn’t look kosher. We’re bringing out some snacks in the meanwhile, and we’ll serve you the kosher food as soon as we can.’”

===

So while one of us keeps kosher and the other one doesn’t, I think Adam and I agree on what it means to be religious. It’s actually not about feeling a strong identification with the Jewish people, or about study, or prayer—or even keeping Kosher. It’s about conviction. It’s about believing in what you do—and just as importantly, not claiming to believe in what you don’t do. Although I could become technically adept, I would make a terrible kosher supervisor. And that’s OK. Good thing Adam’s out there.

In a sense, Rosh Hashanah asks us the same question that Adam asked me. Rosh Hashanah asks us: “Are we religious?” Do we believe in what we do and do we do what we say we believe? “Ayekah? Where are we?”