On Shabbat HaGadol we read a line from Malachi in which we envision the heart of parents turning to the children, and the hearts of children to their parents. How do we create meaningful inter-generationality in our own communities and lives? How do continuity and change dance together?

and a new song to go with this text . . .

I had not been excited about going to the Reconstructionist convention. In this divisive climate I have felt rather isolated among rabbis, I didn’t know what it would be like to be in a rabbinical scene. Spoiler: it was good. 

This audio includes a performance of Ashirah Ladonai by Irwin Keller, featuring Suzanne Shanbaum on guitar, Sheridan Gold and Rhonda Findling on drums, and Congregation Ner Shalom on vocals.

All these feelings – the fears, the desire for things to be quiet, for Jews to be quiet, this whole tangle of ancestral anxiety inside of me  – it all comes into view at Purim time when we read the Book of Esther. This ancient book of ours is a symphony of anxiety. 

This is what I want for all of us — Jews and everyone else living in this time — to survive the terrible and to keep flourishing through it. . .

So much is demanded of us now but I, for one, have been feeling inert, immobile. Tu Bishvat reminds us to have patience – the sap will again rise.

In this week's Torah, Joseph is thrown into a pit, bullied by a gang of brothers, because of his difference. And also this week Sutter Health has similarly tossed to their fate our transgender children, doing the bully's work even before the bully asked them to do it. How will we respond?

Gone a dozen years now, the flavor of my grief has changed, and memory is sweet.

We offer our teshuvah not out of obligation but because we love. It is because I love you that I want to be clean with you. It is because I love this world and the people in it that I want to make good on all the ways I have failed it and them. 

It seems I had to come to Ireland to be reintroduced to the prophet Elijah. For more than a week this summer, I have been on retreat at a Catholic hermitage in County Sligo run by a tiny community of Carmelite sisters and brothers. The Carmelites see the prophet Elijah as their spiritual inspiration and as the founder of their order. They call him Saint Elijah, and I happened to be there on Saint Elijah’s day.

What is the kind of prophet we need now? Can we find that prophet? Can we be that prophet?

An essay for My Jewish Learning’s Recharge Blog.

What if Torah tells it wrong? What if wandering in the desert was not a punishment but a chosen path for a people who did not want to become Pharaoh? An alternative take on Shlach Lekha.

It feels like there is so much being lost right now. But we still carry those things in us. Like Levites carrying crates of holy regalia. A consideration of Parashat Bamidbar.

I wake up every day in fear. But I am not in any personal, imminent danger. This is the conditioning of my past and the dread of the future. But I am not the captive of my conditioning, and dread is not destiny. In this moment I am strong. In this moment I am needed. May I be of use.

Even if we believe that the Divine is all around us and in us, it's hard to shake loose the metaphor of verticality. What do you do to ascend to celestial heights? And how do you pour that back into the everyday?

We are at a crossroads: one path moving forward and one circling back. Thankfully, we are very good at circles. Some thoughts coming out of Sukkot, Hoshanah Rabbah, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah.

Spending a month alone in Worms was an unresearched, romantic idea. It wasn't what I was looking for. But maybe it was what I needed.

In this moment of crisis, we need to let things arise and evaporate, leaving us unburdened enough to do the work of peace. Dew Season can suggest how.

On a trek to 15,000 feet, my greatest companion was Psalm 121. (The other companions were pretty amazing too.) A report-back on a struggle, a summit, and a psalm.

A vision isn't moot just because there isn't currently the will and skill to carry it off. There will be. A drash on Parashat Pekudei, plus a musical setting of Vihi Noam. (And an extra opening story in this audio version.)

How is it that we can listen to a voice in our ear, directing us on paths that we know will lead to disaster, and still not question? Two weeks in Israel: war, rain, sorrow, and a GPS disaster.

The war in Israel and Gaza has, I notice, offered to Supporters of Israel and Supporters of Palestine proof of what they already believed. And our city councils have become the proxy battleground. Righteousness is easy. Blame is easy. But empathy is hard and will break us open. If we can't manage some empathy here, what hope is there for reconciliation in the land we all love? This is a Come-to-Pharaoh Moment.

Nations have a life of their own, behaving in ways few individuals would. Maybe remembering the angel of the collective can bring out our best.

Today is ten years since my mother’s death, and the haunting is sweet. She is gathered into me like Jacob was gathered into his people. The ancestors are in us. We are ancestors too. What traits and traumas, what hope or despair, openness of heart or resilience of spirit, will be gathered from us into those who come after?

Audio below.

I am walking around afraid. Not always afraid of something specific. My body is fueled by adrenaline and programmed by the epigenetics of generations of ancestors whose fear responses enabled their survival and mine. My soul has fluttered right out of my body. Is there any solid place where it can land?

The audio opens with the chant “My Protection” by Rabbi Shefa Gold, sung here by Ner Shalom Chantleader Atzilah Solot.

At the end of Torah, Moshe dies, after much struggle and resistance. Torah seems to take a breath, a long exhale, as we roll back the scroll to the beginning. And so in our lives as well, the exhale after the long-anticipated death of anyone we love. The gasp, the exhale.

For Yom Kippur, I explore what it is in our American Jewish soul – the longing, the fear, and the insecurity – that keeps us silent when Israel (and Palestine) are under discussion. Now is the time to find our voice. 

Moshe is denied entry to the Promised Land. But he is invited to climb the mountain and look to the horizon and see what no one else can.

Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Day – celebrates the reunification of the City. But it feels anything but unified. It can only be honored as a vision, but a vision in need of revision.

The month ahead – the month of Nisan, which begins Wednesday night – is not only the first month of the Hebrew calendar, it also contains all the subsequent months within it as if in utero. It is the Shekhinah, the Divine Mother, birthing time. What do we want to birth in this next year?

Money is power. And the more money you have, the greater your power to do good and the greater your power to do evil. In the Purim story, the Queen Esther story, Haman uses arguments about Jewish disloyalty to convince the king to order the destruction of the Jews. But to clinch the deal, he offers to fund the operation himself. He offers 10,000 talents of silver for the king’s treasury if the king will issue the edict. Haman doesn’t just dream up the destruction of the Jews, Haman buys the destruction of the Jews. How are we ever to prevail against well-funded hate?

Just as the memory of earthquakes is wired into our bodies,  so the memory of earthquakes is wired into our mythologies. Our ancestors understood earthquakes to be the very Earth trembling in God’s presence, as we ourselves certainly would. God is the physics of the earthquake and more than the physics. God is also in our pained experience of the catastrophe. 

We name this not only Shabbat Shirah but Refugee Shabbat, to help us renew our compassion and empathy for the refugees who are right now lodging in tent cities and crossing great waters and wandering from place to place in search of home. We were refugees too. They are our story rewritten in the present tense.

What if at some point the Egyptians had refused to go along with it anymore? What if they had declared a general strike? If they had gathered at the palace in protest? If they had decreed a day of fasting and crying out to their gods or to ours? Would it have made a difference to Pharaoh? Even if it didn’t, mightn’t it have made a difference to us? Introducing Interfaith Public Fast of Sonoma County.

For me, looking back over this year, what stands out most is how many individual stories in our community reached their conclusions. Looking at them, suddenly, everything shifts. A story of individual trauma and triumph gives way to a larger story of life pouring through the details of circumstance. Every act, every turn of the story, is imbued with a greater knowingness. Seeds have borne fruit. Life has had its way.

There is an invitation for collective teshuvah in front of us at this moment of history, being proffered by too many modern-day prophets to count, and by too many to ignore, taking the form of the movement for reparations. This critical piece of teshuvah is an invitation for the collective to develop its moral conscience, to look at how old harms continue to live with us until they are addressed, to notice how we are implicated even in histories we didn’t actively participate in.

Parashat Eikev offers another Jewish entry point to a consideration of reparations. “Beware,” Moshe says, “lest you come to think that your good fortune is of your own doing.”

Prophecy is not dead. But it does require the right conditions to emerge. What are the insights waiting to come from or through us? How can we make it easier to hear them?

Tisha B’Av, coming up in a few weeks, might be a cautionary tale. This is what destruction looks like. This is what it looks like when there’s nothing left to be done. But the 17th of Tammuz is a blueprint for possibility. “Do something now,” it seems to tell us. Fast. Plead. It’s not too late. It’s not over yet. A drash for 17 Tammuz.

Plus a new niggun, “Niggun in the Breach” performed by the Ner Shalom Good Shabbos Band – Suzanne Shanbaum, Sheridan Gold, and Irwin Keller.

A story from the Book of Judges about an angel prophesying the miraculous birth of a child, and the unnamed woman who was to be Samson's mother.

If there is some balance between human and nature, and between human and Divine, that’s represented in the Book of Leviticus, then these terrible consequences are not a doling out of punishment, but the natural outcome of letting the delicate balance fail.

We understand this now, in a new way, in this time we live in where every year we wonder if the sky will be like iron and the earth like copper. 

It is the moon, not the sun, that governs our dreams. And we needed to dream a different life, to dream a renewed self, before we could even think of putting on our sandals, packing our matzah, and taking our first step toward freedom. So now is the time we are commanded to follow the unfolding of the moons.

Every call happens in a circumstance, and every circumstance has, if we listen for it, a call. We have spent two years refining our ability to live in our conditions while responding to the Divine call arising from them. Let us not stop being prophets just because we are getting some of the goodies back. Let us not sweep the pain we feel or the revelations we’ve received under the rug of normalcy.

We are in a time of general emergency, it seems to me. A time in which we need our hands to be especially skillful. We need our hands to be busy in the work of peacemaking, tending, healing. May it be said that in our time, the hands of peacemakers were blessed. A drash for Parashat Pekudei, plus a new song – Vihi Noam.

It is important to resist any schmaltzy Fiddler-style nostalgia for Jewish life as it was once lived in the Ukraine. But it is also right to notice how that land is imprinted on us, and how we are imprinted on it. There are not many places you can go in the world that doesn’t have some Jewish imprint. In Ukraine it is profound.

Once upon a time we were animals alongside the other animals – before we evolved the self-awareness that cut us off from the others, that got us caught in our heads, in our bodies, in our civilizations; that got us kicked out of Eden. Now we only have a dim memory of what it is like to be the animals that we are. And so we seek out, through our imaginations and our liturgy and our magic, the connection with the animal world that even the ridiculous amount of DNA we share with other creatures can no longer provide.

A prophetic dream helps Jacob recognize the Divine that is immanent in space. What do we need to do to have a zap of realization? It's easy when we're in stunning nature. Harder at the hospital.

After Avram makes a covenant with God, we meet Sarah, then called Sarai, and learn that despite her advanced age, she has not been able to bear children. Discouraged, frustrated, she gives her servant, Hagar, to Avram as a wife and Hagar becomes pregnant and hostility and jealousy breaks out between Sarai and Hagar. Sarai treats Hagar harshly and Hagar flees.

This repost is dedicated to my great uncle Irving Jacobs, who died this year at nearly 103; who, along with his brothers, was a huge Cubs fan; who shared with me vivid recollections of Morris Levin (see infra) to whom he was only related by marriage; and who cried when I first read him this piece. And, of course, dedicated to my teacher, hero, and friend, Rabbi Mark S. Shapiro, of blessed memory.

On the morning of Day Two, you realize there is no shower coming, and there is no mirror to reflect how well you’ve tamed the wild of your face. There is no internet to amuse you, and no savior to bring the important item you forgot. This is when you begin to surrender. Letting your existence, along with your appearance, go fallow. 

This is when I begin to feel all the grief that has welled up inside of me. The sorrow that comes from living in human civilization, in constant battle with nature, even though I’ve mostly, politely, outsourced that battle to food manufacturers and petroleum companies. I begin to see – and grieve – the outrageous complexity of my life; the expense and fossil fuels and other people’s labor required for me to live the way I do. 

Wishing all Itzik’s Well readers a healthy year of holy relinquishment…

Psalm 27, the gorgeous, heart-filled, and raw piece of holy poetry that accompanies the month of Elul, challenges us to ask what our lives would be like if we couldn't see the good, the magic, the Divine, in the world around us. What if I couldn't? It's hard to say...

I am indebted to my friend and mentor Rabbi Eli Cohen, who pointed out the dots, the Elul anagram, and the fact that this is a conditional clause whose conditions are never revealed, and challenged me to imagine why.

The chant of Lulei He’emanti that we sing above is by Rabbi Andrew Hahn, the Kirtan Rabbi. Listen to his recording of the chant on Soundcloud.

For a compendium of scribal anomalies in Torah, click here.

Wishing all readers a happy, healthy, safe year of endurance and awakening.

Ultimately, an ethical will is for us, not for our children or grandchildren. Because we can’t really control what people in the post-us future will do. We can’t force those who follow us into a mold of our devising. The future belongs to them, not to us, and it is a mistake to cling too tightly.

Sometimes we are present to witness the end of a generation. When do history and memory give way to imagination?

The flora and fauna at my house are very, very alive. There are many personalities crowding around our house, and under our house, and sometimes in our house. Each has its own Torah. Each has its unintended teaching for me.

For Parashat Shemini 5781

Oh to be so impervious! To hold the weight of the hardship of the people and for it not to absorb through our skin and into our bones! But no, we are so porous. N’kavim n’kavim chalulim chalulim as we say in our morning prayers. We are porous and penetrable! We were made that way.

This seventh day of Pesach is an intersection of Shabbat time, Passover time, mythic story, Divine names, the coming of dew, and the poetry of our medieval ancestors. It brings to mind obstacles, liberation, and love. (Or just scroll down for the treats.)

Special Pesach 7 Treats:

Lorenzo Valensi’s gorgeous Mi Chamocha, at last recorded this week. Click here.

Alison Luterman’s brilliant poem, “Sometimes Even the Word Obstacle is an Obstacle.” Click here.

Ahuveykha Ahevukha – a piyyut for Shabbat morning during Pesach, incorporating rhyme, acrostics, and lines from Song of Songs. Click here.

“The Name of 72” – a powerful 216-letter Divine Name and how it is derived. Click here.

We tell the old tales not as they-stories but as we-stories, still working through how we carry our enslavement with us and still chewing on what freedom might be. We tell the old stories and let the youngest at the table ask the questions. And we respond as honestly and as carefully as we can, knowing that our answers will have ripples for seven generations…

Why don’t Jews count people? No sooner do we count ourselves than we notice our extreme vulnerability and ephemerality in this life and this world. And thus the inherent bravery implied in the phrase “stand up and be counted.”

Tomorrow is the simcha of my smicha – my rabbinic ordination. It means so much to me after a wait of more than half a century. But history waits for no simcha, and we have to also look at this week’s insurrection in our capital.

One often-overlooked dimension of Joseph’s hiddenness has to do with his gender. Torah keeps pointing to something unusual about it. This includes references to his looks, his emotions, his social role, even his body.

I return from a 6-week leave of absence with questions , raised by an unfortunate meeting of home and car, about my own mind’s sudden leave of absence.

And I return with the desire to honor the beautiful drashing and spiritual leadership brought forward in my absence by Shoshana Fershtman, D’vorah Grenn, Leiah Bowden, Neshamah Faraone, Rinat Abastado, Sally Churgel, Judith Goleman, Basha Hirschfeld, and Shari Brenner, and the Torah poems of Rita Losch.

And here we are, wondering how to be part of this transformation, how to tend and cultivate it; how to keep it from becoming something dreadful and instead inch it toward something beautiful. I somehow picture it like that befuddling Olympic sport, curling. We can't force this rebirthing world to move forward the way we want. But we can skate alongside with brooms, and create the subtle conditions for it to gently incline toward blessing.

(Apologies for having absent-mindedly placed by wristwatch next to my recording device.)

Rosh Hashana Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, 2020/5781

And there it was. My unspoken conviction that all fruition must come before age 60, while I'm still young in my own estimation. That if I didn't achieve whatever on some timeline, then I'd failed, and I might as well give it up. I sat there and laughed at myself, willing to deny my future self all sorts of fulfillment and joy, just because I thought 60 was too old.

For video of a new setting of Psalm 27:1 written in honor of Rabbi Mark S. Shapiro and Rabbi Sarah Tauber, click here and scroll down.

I have nothing to say about it. No way to beautify this extreme weather story. No silver lining to offer. Our species long ago stripped the planet of silver linings, using them as shiny decorations on the edifice of unsustainable living.

We are in many overlapping periods of time – the 22-day "narrow place" as well as the enduring shelter-in-place. Some thoughts on the flow of Jewish time, and on the musical traditions that we employ to accompany us on the journey.

God, you have made the human slightly less than angels. Which is, I'm sure, meant as a compliment. But just under the angels is a bummer of a spot to be in. Not high enough to really get the big picture we need and want. And not rooted in the earth enough to have the ways of knowing that other animals do, who do not have to try to figure out what is motivating them.

It's Pride Season. And even though this is a difficult time, we must become adept at holding successes at the same time that we hold struggle. And so a little piece of celebration called "Gifts of the Queers" – a chance to recognize the role that LGBTQI people have played in our culture, including our Jewish culture, that we don't so often identify and name.