Torah for now

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Singing at the Shores of Release & Black History month (and psalm 13)

Sometimes things feel so bleak, you feel squeezed on all sides between a “Rock and a hard place”. But you are here today you made it: the baby was born, you recovered from that breakup, disease, accident: you were redeemed, and life felt suddenly new and shiny again. (I ‘m a big fan of the Pixar movie Soul, which acts out such a scenario!) Remember that feeling, the inspiration? One of the names for G8d is Rock, “tzur” in Hebrew. And the word for Egypt, “Mitzrayim” has the same root as Tsures – squeezed, troubles all around. (Funny, I never noticed the homonym there!) This week’s Torah reading, named Beshalach, referring to Pharoah sending the Israelites out of Egypt. This is the first climactic moment of the Passover story, of the Exodus. What is the response of the Israelites to freedom after 400 years of slavery? It is to sing! Does that seem likely to you? One day this past year, after I had been holding in frustrations, I rode my bike to an abandoned field. I tried to scream, but what actually emerged from my body was song. Maybe not so weird! This beautiful poem, the Singing by Rick Barot speaks of the power of a woman’s song. I wonder what the black woman in the poem saw on her phone that brought on the song? Announcement of a birth? a death? the daily news? a memory? A woman’s voice, in mourning, in lullaby, in despair, it seems like her song has all of these. She sings. she sings. she sings. she sings.

This is also Black History month in the US. There are many powerful songs that emerged from African slavery here in America, including “Swing low, sweet Chariot” The Chariot is code for the Underground Railroad! Many of these songs are still sung in churches today. They help deal with being overwhelmed and oppressed: squeezed with tzurus.

The first sound the Biblical slaves made in Exodus was groaning or crying out. They had been silenced, to repressed to make any sound until now, taking their condition as “the way it was” It was this primal cry that brought G8d into their midst. But their second was song. When did they sing and what did their song sound like? The answer in the text is that there were two times of singing: First Moses and the sons of Israel sang aspirationally: I will sing. Then Miryam, whose name I share, sang with the instruments brought along for just such a miracle and sang, dancing a circle dance. Many commentators put the women second, but the chasidic S’fat Emet explains that Moses song is aspirational in the world of our dreams, but Miryam sings for all both men and women in the now, dancing the circle, in which all are equal in their relationship to G8d who is in the center.

Miryam my biblical namesake, is derived from Mar (bitter) and yam, meaning sea. From the bitterness of slavery her song brought sweetness to the Israelites. Directly after freedom the Israelites become bitter again, concluding that G8d hates them. A living well of water follows them through the wilderness, which according to midrash is Miryam’s well – a rock that yields water! Connecting all those places and stories in the wilderness, creating a song which lasts all of Miryam’s life. The Israelite people now read the song of songs as an emotional description of the Exodus, and of G8d’s love. Perhaps the song was a love song. There is disagreement on whether the song began while crossing or after, but according to Chizkuni, Miryam began her song while the Israelites were still crossing! (source 7) This song is the moment of awareness of the immanent presence of the Holy one – the moment of falling in love. Song is the most appropriate sound!

Remembering: a postscript

For a long time the stories of enslaved people were not told. Here in Florida, it recently became illegal to teach those stories again in the public schools, and a young professor who happens to share my last name lost her post from a public college because she taught the history of slavery. As Isabel Wilkerson teaches so powerfully in her Pulitzer prize winning book Caste to deny this history is like denying your family history of disease when you go to the doctor, or to deny old damage in a house. It doesn’t work. The Biblical psalms are a study in Crying out to G8d, Here is a setting of psalm 13. In this psalm the poet despairs of G8d forgetting them – lets go all those emotions. But then remembers: Oh yeah, remember that time I was redeemed, you were there G8d and can be there again for me in love.

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Just Breathe for Qohelet/ Ecclesiastes

I  spent a day last week with one who was dying, body failing, spirit hovering. The hospital machines whirring and spinning, some would soon be removed. “Breathe” urged the loved one to the dying one, when every breath was painful effort. “Breathe” and for him she did for a few more days.

“Hevel, merest breath”, is our life, says Qohelet, (Q1:2) Biblical book of wisdom. Yet merest breath is a Divine gift, and cannot be forced.    “It sucks, said the loved one” “Yes” I replied, validating his sorrow and anger.  “Only love is as strong as death,” (shir ha’shirim 8:6 )I suggested, but his need/desire was too great to let go.

  We seek insights on what it means to be alive and in relationship with others. In the ancient Biblical words of Qohelet we find  wisdom to help us gain perspective and understanding of the enormous issues of where G8d is in the passage of time and mortality, and why bad things happen to good people in the presence of a loving G8d. This gift of wisdom is not unique to Jewish literature and also appears in the ancient Chinese wisdom of Lau Tzu’s Tao te Ching. Of the beloved’s strong need for his wife’s breath “…free from desire, you realize the mystery, caught in desire, you see only the manifestations, Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness, gateway to all understanding” (TTC 1).

The fact that we are here, as unlikely as that is, is a miracle, as are love, and beauty and goodness. These we attribute to a loving G8d.  However, coming to terms with mortality, the inhumanity of some human behavior, illness and suffering can powerfully challenge us. “no amount of effort can make right something truly perverse, and things that are lacking almost never manage to come into existence in a real enough way to count” (Q1:15) says Kohelot, in the gorgeous melody of a trope that paradoxically lifts our spirits. These words validate our fears, acknowledging their weight and their shared human concerns. All people in various cultures who have sought wisdom must deal with such questions. We perhaps reject, as I do, a G8d that micromanages, and can make our team win with supplications or animal sacrifices. Just having lived to pursue goodness may have to be enough. In trying to control and fix the world, we have separated ourselves from it, and created ecological ruin. The technology that protects us, uses resources, creates waste, destroying the natural environment, which we are meant to be a part of, Just as the technology that prolongs death destroys dignity, and we must let go in the end.

In this week’s parashah, Yaakov, who has been the heel-grabber, tries to manipulate things to “win” at life, will finally wrestle with his demons and his intense desires to dominate his brother. He will let his family and wealth  cross over to offer them up to his brother, and there see the face of G8d. Perhaps this can only happen wrestling with the Source  in the darkness. In the mystery he will be blessed with disability and re-Named, yet the Tau warns us. …the Name that can be named is not the eternal Name (TTC:1)

  Qohelet, much like the Tao te Ching, says the world can’t be tampered with, or “you’ll ruin it”,  that the Master sees things as they are without trying to control them (TTC 29)…lets them go their own way. Our technology is “shaping clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds what we want.”  (TTC 11)  Qohelet recognizes the  “helvel/emptiness inside”. The river of time and events “flows into the sea, yet the sea is never filled” (Q 1:7). It cannot be stopped, we cannot fight it. The spectre of death is also a(n) hevel/emptiness, but one which gives life infinite meaning. The value of humans is not what we can get out of one other, but is in their bonding. Qohelet says “two are better than one…if the one should fall down, the other one can at least help him up…if someone attacks two can fight (them) off (Q4:9-12).  It is brothers that we need!

 In Jewish tradition, Qohelet is read during Sukkot, our week-long festival spent outside, in a fragile hut, unprotected, and open enough to see the stars, and find our perspective in the larger world. We read Qohelet to know that life is ephemeral, and precious: “Do whatever you can manage to accomplish in this life, because in Sheol you fill find no activity, no reckoning, no knowledge and no wisdom, and that is precisely where you are going!”(Q9:10) 

Similarly, the wisdom of the Tao is reflected in Chinese paintings which offer a different perspective, of human beings as a small part of a much larger creation. We can be liberated by giving up control of things beyond our strength to the heavens, in the words of Qohelet: banish worry from your heart, and regret from your flesh, for childhood (life) lasts as long as a breath. Then when we return to our dwellings, perhaps our roof will be unable to separate us from G8d. Our gratitude will be richer for our blessings, and a full harvest, or even death will not harden our hearts. If he can let her go, their love can survive beyond her body.  Perhaps the harmful dramas will abate as we relinquish control. Rather we can be generous with ourselves and others, to “send our bread out onto the water….(and) sow (all) our seeds and not desist even in evening” And emerge into the day and declare “how sweet the light and how good for the eyes to see the sun!” (Qohelet 11:1,6, 10, 7) .

If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure – if I can let you go.

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CONSTRICTED THROATS: Moses, me and Esther

– Did you ever get emotional, so that there was a lump, a constriction in your throat, and you were temporarily unable to speak? When The Holy One asks Moses to go to Pharoah and demand “Let my people go” Moshe responds “NO, they won’t listen to me! I have a kabed peh, a heavy mouth u’chvad lashon What does it mean to have, like Moses, a heavy tongue?

G8d’s answer: Who but I give a mouth (and speech) to humans, and who makes those who are mute?

But G8d creates all through acts of speech (in what language I’m not sure: math, physics, music, love?) and creates we humans who are partly defined by speech and are Btzelem Elohim In the Divine Image, in that way. Is G8d also the power who creates those who are mute? Many things can make a person mute: being born without hearing, for example. With therapy sign language can be taught. The mind can make you mute: my eldest daughter, so brilliant and super sensitive would lose her voice whenever she became sick! But trauma can make a person mute as well, as the heart wrenching literature of the Shoah attests.  The Slonimer Rebbe speaks of slavery in Egypt as so crushing, that their minds were enslaved, not just their bodies. He explains when finally the slaves were able to get out a geshrei, a good primal cry, it was the first step in their deliverance. That was when G8d heard their voice, their cry and sends Moshe. He speaks of the tightness or constriction in the throat where the soul cannot get out or express itself.  Moshe, the Slonimer continues was actually as an avatar of the Israelite people. Therefore he was unable to speak fluently! The word ּכְבַ֥ד  The shoresh/root also means “honor” Perhaps “k’vad peh uchvod lashon” means a mouth and tongue that honors the people that Moshe serves. There are times when it is inappropriate to be verbose, such as entering a house of mourning.  Until the Israelites could move from the Narrow place of tzuros, Mitzrayim and be free and to SING at the sea, Moshe could not be the orator who would be the channel of Torah from Heaven to earth. I personally found my voice first through teaching, then through singing. I am still finding my voice.  Moshe’s life begins in a similar way. He is born into danger. Zipporah, his mother keeps him hidden and safely for three months. When he is no longer able to be silenced, she trusts him to G8d, fate and the Nile. Now he can cry and win the heart of the Pharoah’s daughter..

In the land of Shushan, Persia, many years following was a beautiful Jewish girl named Haddassah. But when the kings men came to uncle Mordechai’s house looking for the most lovely to be queen, she was silenced, not to reveal her true identity, and given a new name, Esther, from the same root as nistar, hidden.  She hasn’t been paying attention to the happenings of the kingdom when she is told of Mordie in sack cloth and ashes – send him some new clothes. She wants to remain deaf and mute to trouble, hard to blame her, who wants trouble?!  Mordechai then delivers my favorite line of the whole Megillah

Chapter 4:6 “If you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place, while you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have risen royal position for just such a crisis.”

And our unlikely heroine is born. She does not fight hatred with fists, but with seduction and revelation.

What is it in our lives that we’d like to ignore, issues we’d rather not think about. And what is your position of influence, what can YOU do? Moshe’s heavy mouth was a sign of his complete entanglement in the people he served. Esther’s hiddenness, the secret of her success. Perhaps it is your deepest flaw or disability which can actually be your superpower.

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