Prayer in a Time of War

Image: from http://pixabay.com.

Holy One of Blessing, we pray for all those who feel trapped,
those who long to live in freedom and peace,

who find only imprisonment and violence,
those who are wounded, those whose wounds fester,
those who have lost loved ones, and

those who do not know where their loved ones are held.

Please comfort the frightened, strengthen the fearful, and

give nourishment to the hungry:
whether they are hungry for food or for the gifts of the spirit.

Grant us the courage to speak up, and the restraint to be silent,
and the wisdom to know when each is best.

When the day is done, may we lie down in peace,
so that we may rise in the bright morning to make peace on this earth.

Choices Have Consequences: Behar-Bechukotai

Image: An Antarctic glacier calves into the surrounding sea, as even the coldest places in the world warm and cause the ocean to rise. Image under copyright.

Parashat Bechukotai records blessings and curses for keeping or breaking the commandments. At first blush this is oversimplified Deuteronomic theology: “Be good, and good things will happen. Be bad, and you will be sorry.” This theology does not bear the strain of ordinary experience: we see bad things happen to good people every day.

However, if we look more closely at the passage, there is more to discuss. The “you” is plural: these are corporate blessings and curses that fall not upon single lives but upon the whole of the people. Bechukotai warns us that if we as a people disregard Torah we can expect consequences.

The sages taught that we should treat others decently even if only to keep the peace: “Our rabbis taught: we provide for the gentiles’ poor with Israel’s poor, we visit gentiles’ sick with Israel’s sick, and we bury the gentiles’ dead with Israel’s dead, due to the ways of peace.”  (Gittin 61a) As a result, most Jewish service organizations serve not only Jews but anyone in need who applies.

Another example: If we abuse creation, we can expect nature to go awry. Midrash teaches: When God created the first human beings, God led them around the Garden of Eden and said: “Look at my works! See how beautiful they are—how excellent! For your sake I created them all. See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one to repair it (l’takein).”  (Midrash Kohelet Rabbah 1 on Ecclesiastes 7:13) I feel this midrash every time I see another way that climate change is upending our lives. I can make the greenest choices possible for myself, but without the actions of others, I cannot make enough of a difference. We are commanded as a people to take these things seriously. As a people, we need to make better choices.

Ask the Rabbi: Why did my bishop ban Christian Seders?

Image: A Seder in a private home. People are talking animatedly around a large silver Seder plate, books and papers everywhere. Photo by Rabbi Ruth Adar.

I recently received a very nice letter from an Episcopalian friend asking why her bishop had banned the practice of Christian Seder meals. This is my reply, with a few edits:

Dear Friend, great question.

I have mixed feelings about bans, too, but I appreciate your bishop’s support on this matter. The issue is that “Christian Seders” have become fashionable in some circles and too often are performed by people who are ignorant about Seders and Judaism and in some cases hold beliefs that are antisemitic.

Before 70 CE Jews observed Passover with Temple sacrifices. Each household traveled to Jerusalem, and each head of household took a lamb to the priests to shecht (butcher.) Some parts went on the altar for God, some went to the Temple workers, and the largest part was taken back to the hotel or camp where the family was staying. Then, as the lamb roasted, the story of Exodus was told as the family munched on greens and matzah. 

When Jesus observed Passover, that would have been what he did, too, because the Temple was still standing. 

After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, there was a huge problem for the Jews: without the Temple we could not observe the holiday. We needed a way to keep the commandments, the intent of which was to create a learning experience that would keep the story alive for each new generation. 

What the rabbis did was look for the top educational methods of the time for models. Ultimately they chose the Greek symposium banquet as their framework. It combined learning and food and questioning. Hence the reclining, the fixed order of events, and the Afikomen. For the Greeks, the Afikomen was a dessert course accompanied by tasteful music and dancers.

Unfortunately the Romans had already copied the Greeks, but where the Greeks used it for scholarly inquiry, the Romans turned it into a gluttonous display of wealth and decadence. Each such Roman banquet ended with the Afikomen, a dessert/orgy combo. 

The rabbis carefully set boundaries on the Seder so that it would be a learning event. They composed the outline of the Haggadah to keep us on track with plenty of room for improvisation. They designated some elements to encourage questioning. Finally, they prescribed that the final course of the meal, the Afikomen, was to consist of a broken piece of matza and a cup of wine. Those, and ONLY those, would be the close of the banquet. Later, singing became part of that final course as well.

(I teach this in the name of Rabbi Noam Zion, from whom I learned about the origins of the Seder in 2002 in Jerusalem.)

For Jews, this is one of the holiest events of the year. It is the cornerstone of Jewish education. We practically deconstruct our kitchens and our homes to observe it properly. 

For someone to partially copy it feels to some of us as if this holy event has been used as a toy or a curiosity. A real Passover Seder is made in a home that has been prepared for Passover: if there’s any chametz left on the premises it has been confined and ritually nullified. The ritual is a combination of ancient traditions, family traditions, and this generation’s experiments. A real Seder requires real Jews.

(Imagine a group of non-Christians playing baptism or communion.)

Many Jewish congregations offer interfaith Seders or learners’ Seders at which participants learn about the Seder and about Judaism. Christians are welcome there. Christians are welcome at many real Seder tables. It’s only a problem when it is a pretend Seder, with no Jews involved, and especially when it is used as a vehicle for teaching a fantasy about “Jesus’s Seder.”

I’m sorry for the long winded reply; I hope I’ve answered your excellent question. 

I wish you and your family a blessed Easter!

Our Holy Places: Parashat Terumah

Image: Two birds sit on the edge of a birdbath. It looks as if they are communicating.

Many synagogues have words from Parashat Terumah somewhere in their structure:

“Let them build me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.” (Exodus 25:8) or, to incorporate the Hebrew more directly: “Let them build me a mikdash, so that I may use it as a mishkan.”

The Mishkan in Torah is a visible sign for the Israelites of the covenant between the People Israel and God. The structure is both a mikdash, a holy place, and a mishkan, a dwelling place. We read endless building specifications in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. That may seem mysterious until we consider that every detail is a commandment of God. One message we might take from it is that holiness is not easily achieved.

Judah Halevi takes the point a step further in the Kuzari, 3:23. He writes, “One cannot approach God except by God’s commands.” If we seek connection with the Holy One of Israel, then it is by the commandments that connection is possible.

The commandments matter in making a place that is truly holy. When we inhabit our synagogues, God will only be among us if it is truly a mikdash, a holy place. The same applies to our homes: they can be holy places, but only if we preserve them as such. When we allow things that do not belong there (racism, sexism, selfishness, xenophobia, baseless hatred, to name but a few) then it cannot be a holy place and God will not dwell among us.

Let us build our sanctuaries, so that God may dwell among us.

This d’var Torah appeared previously in the CCAR Newsletter.

Grief

Image: Gabi and I at the computer in 2013.

I have started to write a new message 25 times, and I keep stalling out. The only thing I know to do is to write about the thing that is keeping me from writing: my dog died.

Many of you who follow the blog have followed our adventures over the years. I joked about the “rabbinic assistant” who would sit by my side as I wrote and taught but the truth is that there was something to it: I’ve been a mess ever since she died. I cannot seem to write original material, and my sleep is badly disrupted.

Gabi picked me out one Friday afternoon right before Passover in 2009. I stopped by the home of a congregant who fostered adoptable poodles. Gabi climbed into my arms, and howled when I left. That night, at services, Julie informed me that the dog was still howling, hours later: “I think she might be your dog.” I took her home with me a week later.

We didn’t know much about her history: she’d been found barely surviving on the Las Vegas Strip, a tiny toy poodle with a huge tumor under one leg. Our vet speculated her age at 13, and said that the type of tumor was typical of dogs who had had too many litters of puppies. We speculated that maybe she had been fired from a puppy mill, but we never really knew. The estimate about her age was a bit high: she lived another 13 years, and it defies belief that a toy poodle survived to 26. Mostly, she was a mystery.

She loved me and I loved her.

The pandemic came, and she was pleased: finally, she had trained me not to leave the house! It suited her for me to tap away at the computer or knit, with her nearby. Then she developed another tumor, this one cancerous, and they told me she had six months, tops. She had surgery to remove the tumor and lived for another two years.

About a year after the cancer scare, old age finally began to slow her down. By the time I called the hospice vet, she’d been blind for a couple of years, and deaf, and her sense of smell seemed to be going, too. She was still the house Alpha, bossing any dogs who visited no matter their size, but then she’d collapse and sleep for hours.

The last couple of days and nights were bad. I had made an appointment for the hospice vet to come euthanize her on Dec 30, but I had to move it up, because she went suddenly from decline to misery. On Dec 29 Dr. Taddy Fick from BluePearl Pet Hospice came to the house and administered the two injections while I held Gabi in my arms. In a few minutes, she was gone.

What have I learned? I have learned that losing a pet can be profoundly disruptive. It hurts. Jewish mourning rituals don’t apply to animals, and I’ve come to the conclusion that that is appropriate. Pets are not people. Loss of a beloved person includes a lot of ambiguity: words not said, issues unresolved, unfinished business. Gabi and I had none of that: it was all affection, all the time, for thirteen and a half years. The grief for her is uncomplicated; I just miss my dog.

I did my own rituals: mostly, I assembled a keepsake box with her collar, a pawprint, and a lock of her hair. I put it on the shelf and it will gather dust. We got a new dog and he is completely different from her: a senior male, a Maltese, with no teeth at all. Ginsberg is noisy and sometimes a pain in the neck, but I can feel myself growing fond of him.

That’s where I’ve been. In the past, writing about the source of my writer’s block has proven to be the cure for it. Here’s hoping for a good result.

Adventures on the Internet

Image: A compass stands upright on a map of the world. There are pins in the map, as if someone is marking a journey. (Shutterstock, all rights reserved.)

I haven’t had this kind of fun in a long time, since the early crazy days of the Internet. Twitter went over to the sitra achra, aka the Dark Side, and I skedaddled (see Bye, Bye, Birdie if you want details.) Found my way to Mastodon, a decentralized, all volunteer, nobody’s-making-a-buck-on-me sort of affair, where you can find me at adar -at- babka -dot- social. Moderation is done by volunteers who wrangle the servers, and each server/instance has its own rules and standards.

If none of that makes any sense, don’t worry about it. The “fun” I mentioned is that I’m learning a new system, and this one is less polished but so far quite a bit nicer than Twitter. Learning unfamiliar things and mapping new territory makes my brain happy. I’ve located some old friends and made some new ones.

In other news:

Today I stumbled upon a real treasure, Stories from Jewish History, a substack written by Dr. Tamar Ron Marvin. She describes herself thusly:

I’m an intellectual historian with a PhD in Medieval & Early Modern Jewish Studies and currently a student at Yeshivat Maharat. Some of my best friends are medieval rabbis. Want me to introduce you?

https://trmarvin.substack.com/about

She posts articles about the rabbis, the Rishonim and early Achronim, the rabbis from about the 11th century to the early modern period. I can recommend a nice video by Henry Abramson at the Jewish History Lab to explain the concept of the Rishonim, and the “generations” of rabbis, generally.

Dr. Marvin is a real-deal scholar, but also funny, and her love for the rabbis shines through every article. I hope you’ll take a look. Enjoy!

Vayera: Dysfunction in the Family?

Image: It is said that the tent of Abraham was open on all four sides. This is the tent of a modern bedouin household, also open on four sides to the desert around. (Pixabay)

A candidate for conversion once said to me, “I am glad that my name will be ‘bat Avraham v’Sarah,’ because my family of origin was so dysfunctional. It’s like I get a new family.” We had an interesting discussion.

That comment comes to mind every time I read Parashat Vayera, because it is difficult to imagine a family story more troubling than that of the extended family of Abraham.  In this parashah alone, Lot offers his young daughters for rape, Abraham offers Sarah to Abimelech as a concubine, Sarah demands that Hagar and Ishmael be tossed out to die, and Abraham acquiesces to her demand. For a finale, Abraham meekly accepts the command to take a knife to his son Isaac. Next to this stuff, the soaps are tame.

As Judith Plaskow points out in The Torah, a Women’s Commentary, God is implicated in the violence in the text, commanding it, supporting it, or failing to comment. She asks, can we read these stories to strengthen our resolve to hold both ourselves and God accountable?

The lone voice against violence in this portion is that of Abraham, who advocates for hypothetical good people in Sodom. Abraham is abundantly imperfect – he did not choose to advocate for Sarah, or Hagar, or Ishmael, or even Isaac. Abraham could and did speak up for strangers, even though his track record at home wasn’t very good.

Abraham was imperfect. We’re all imperfect. Some of us come from wonderful families, and some of us don’t. However, we don’t have to come from perfectly happy backgrounds to speak up for those who are suffering or under attack.

Each of us faces choices about what we will allow to go unchallenged, and when we will speak up. May we be inspired by our imperfect ancestor to stand up for what is right and good when our time of testing comes.

This d’var Torah appeared in the CCAR Newsletter in a slightly different form.

Bye, Bye, Birdie!

Image: A pretty blue bird. (Pixabay)

I just deactivated @CoffeeShopRabbi on Twitter. I’ve been an enthusiastic Twitter user since 2006, when I got an account on my son’s recommendation. I networked with rabbis there, and followed news sources I trusted there, and got the all-important California fire and earthquake info there. I advertised my classes and blog posts. People would say, “It’s a cesspool” and I would say, “Yeah, but it works for me.”

I was nervous when Elon Musk bought it, but the last straw came in a one-two punch. First, I had a conversation with my son in which he argued that there is a moral problem with giving income to billionaire bad boys, especially when they use their power and influence to spread lies. Then I heard about Musk’s tweet in which he helped to spread a vicious lie about the attack on Paul Pelosi.

I have been a great believer in social media. The thing I loved most about Twitter was that I could find someone whose point of view was different from mine, and follow them, and learn more about their lives. It was particularly helpful in expanding my understanding of people who are different from me. I found others who were doing the same thing: Christian clergy who were following me in order to learn about Judaism. We had conversations, but mostly we just quietly watched and learned.

I met some cherished students via Twitter, and I most miss the opportunity to stay in touch with them. I hope they’ll follow me here, and leave comments when the spirit moves them. Some old friends too — Cheryl in Birmingham, I’m looking at you. You’ve kept my economics education going for 34 years after I last set foot in an econ classroom, and you’ve changed my mind more than once. I will miss chatting with beloved colleagues from other movements — it’s easy to stay in touch with my Reform colleagues, but there are Conservative and Orthodox rabbis I knew only through Twitter.

I hope that Mr. Musk will grow up, but I’m not holding my breath.

Watch this space.

Prayers for June 24, 2022

Image: A table ready for Shabbat blessings, with candlestick, challah wine and salt. (Shutterstock)

I facilitate a Kabbalat Shabbat minyan (welcoming Shabbat prayer group) on Friday evenings for Jewish Gateways. This week there were special challenges since we had prepared for a LGBTQ Pride Shabbat, and this morning the news of the Supreme Court decision came down. Folks in the minyan asked me to share the texts of the prayers I brought them this evening.

A Prayer for Pride Month

Blessed are You, Eternal our God, Creator of Time and Space, Ruler of all that is,

Who created this world and all the wonders within it,

You created the first person, Adam, in Your Image. Our Torah says:

“So God created humankind in the Divine Image,

Creating it in the Image of God.” (Genesis 1:27)

You taught us to look for your Image in every face,

to seek out the spark of divinity in every soul, to trust

That differences are both holy, and part of a greater Unity,

The Unity of You.

Binary and non-binary, male and female, gay and lesbian, transgender, bisexual and queer,

We each reflect an essential aspect of the Divine.

What links us all is love, the Love at the heart of the world,

You, O Holy One,

Wonder of wonders, Who made a world full of wonders.

Amen.

written by Rabbi Ruth Adar, 25 Sivan, 5782

———————————————

Also, I adapted a prayer from the collection at ritualwell.org. This is the adaptation as I read it, and here is a link to the original. My sincere thanks to Kohenet Ahavah Lilith evershYne for the original prayer!

Mi Shebeirach for the USA

May the Holy One who blessed our ancestors 

bless us at this moment in the “Land of the Free” 

with all of the blessings that we need to heal 

all of the injustices in this nation that are real;

May God awaken and kindle deep inside 

any latent powers we have to heal these divides;

May the Holy One help us to become all we can be –

a nation of true peace, social justice and equality,

where everyone who dwells here receives all that they need

to Live and Love, to grow and thrive, to achieve all their dreams,

where children are safe, nourished, cherished, can grow and learn in peace,

where immigrants are welcomed from places they need to flee,

where people of all colors, statuses, beliefs and identities

are treated equally with great respect and dignity,

where science is listened to,

where treaties are honored and reparations are made immediately,

where we honestly confront our past and teach all who need to see

that our differences are what can make us such a great democracy.

May we put people before profits, and listen only to truth,

May we revere our elders and indigenous ones and listen to our youths,

May we take stands for social justice here and everywhere,

May we lead by example to be compassionate, just and fair,

May we take all the necessary steps to heal our Mother Earth, 

May we midwife our country’s rebirth,

where the Holy One reminds us that labor can also have great pains

Zhe tells us that we have the power to ensure that Love reigns;

May this nation and the world heal its bodies, hearts, minds and souls;

May we all know a complete healing to be truly free and whole.

Now, as we take all our intentions

For those who are sick or suffering

For the healing of our nation,

For the healing of the world

adapted from the work of Kohenet Ahava Lilith evershYne

Chametz Abatement Time!

Image: Person in Hazmat gear by MetsikGarden from Pixabay.com.

Passover is SOON, coming at sundown on April 15, 2022. If you haven’t started preparations, it’s time. If you are not sure what that means, or if it makes your hair stand on end, read this: We Begin in Egypt.

It’s a little different at Beit Adar/Burnett this year: we are preparing for Passover by getting rid of a different kind of chametz. Where usually the definition of chametz is “grain + water = chametz,” one can also look at anything in life that really, really needs to go as a kind of chametz.

This year we tried to replace the kitchen floor by laying a new floor on top of the old. It failed, partly because I use a chair in the kitchen and the wheels on the chair tore up the new nylon tile. The only fix was to remove all the old flooring, then install a sheet vinyl. But: this house was built in 1961. It was highly likely there was asbestos in at least one layer of old flooring. When we got it tested, the verdict was clear: we needed to have asbestos abatement, meaning a three-day sealing of the kitchen and people with hazmat suits cleaning out all the old flooring, plus cleaning the air. Otherwise, somebody might get cancer.

Going deeper: asbestos is like slavery in that it may seem to make life safe and predictable (“fire safety!”) but in fact it does the exact opposite. It’s a horrible poison that takes life in horrible ways. It is hidden in my kitchen floor, and if we want to do something about it, we’re going to have to make a mess.

So we are going to drag all the appliances out, eat, toss, or give away the food, empty the kitchen of dishes and pans, and seal it in plastic for the people to work. We won’t be moving back into the kitchen until the floor can be installed. Let’s hope that doesn’t actually take 40 years, but it still sounds like wilderness (and camping!) to me.

In some ways, this simplifies Passover prep — the actual grain chametz will certainly go — so it’s a good time to do this. At the same time, it’s a nuisance.

Passover is a nuisance. People won’t usually say that so plainly, but the nuisancy part of it is key to the Passover experience. The goal of Passover is for each of us to feel like we’ve personally experienced the Exodus. Leaving Egypt was a lot of trouble, and some of the people who left never stopped complaining that they hated the freedom of the wilderness.

The lesson of Passover is that freedom is hard work, and boring, and icky, and dangerous. Like asbestos abatement, acquiring freedom is a major mess, a major inconvenience, and it is expensive, too.

I wish you a good preparation for Passover, whatever that will mean in your heart and your house.