Walking the Thin Line: Elul 5773

 

“I, I Am the One that comforts you; who are you, to be afraid of man that shall die, and of the son of man that shall be made as grass. . .?”

--Haftorah Shoftim, Isaiah 51:12

 

“Righteousness, righteousness shall you pursue . . .”

--Parashat Shoftim, Devarim 16:20

 

“Walking the thin line, between fear and the call; one learns to bend and finally depend on the Love of it all.”

--Noel Paul Stookey, For the Love of It All

The month of Elul started last Monday at sundown, on Rosh Chodesh, the sixth New Moon from the New Year for months.

My Elul dream this year came late, on Wednesday night, and without clarity or drama. In fact, I really don’t remember it at all, except that I dreamed of the current rabbi at our former synagogue, and of a neighbor in need of help finding a lost cat. I awoke to Tippy, my guardian Border Collie cross, pawing at my shoulder in the middle of the night. She feels it is important to awaken me when something unusual is going on. I went out to see an elk buck with eight points standing in the meadow in the deep darkness under a setting Big Dipper handle. Tippy did not bark at the elk this time; she seemed to think the elk belonged exactly in that place. She just wanted me to know he was there and awakened me to see him standing.

 

I don’t have a ready interpretation for the fragment of a dream or the meaning of seeing the elk standing in his place. Their significance escapes me, except that as I stood gazing at the elk in the starlight, I remembered that it was now Elul. 

This Shabbat, as the Engineering Geek and I sat down to study Torah, I was struck by two statements that jumped off the pages and into my mind, one from the beginning of the Parashat of the week, and one from its Haftorah. As I turned them over in my mind, I realized that the two of them together represent that place I have been for the last half-decade: I have been “walking the thin line between fear and the call” as Emmy Lou Harris sings in the Paul Stookey song, The Love of it All.

 

The Torah portion for the first Shabbat in Elul is Shoftim, which means “judges” or “chieftans” in Hebrew. In the first paragraph, which deals with how judgment must conform to justice, we read:

“You shall make for yourselves judges and officers in all your gates, which Adonai your G-d gives you, tribe by tribe; and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment: you shall not pervert justice; you shall not respect persons; neither shall you take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the  eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous. Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live and possess the land that Adonai your G-d is giving to you.”

 

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדּף Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof

The call at the beginning of the Month of Elul—the beginning of the season of our turning, is to pursue justice or righteousness. In Hebrew, the words are the same. Justice means to make a judgment according to honor, standards or the law, meting out to every individual what is right according to his or her rights and actions. Our rabbis taught that there is the justice of the streets—the righteousness with which we must treat every person—and the justice of the courts. If we fail to act with justice in all of our dealings on the streets, then justice must be adjudicated in the courts. In his commentary on the Torah, Joseph Hertz, Ph.D., who was the Chief Rabbi of Britain in the early 20th century, points out that in this sense, the Hebrew understanding of justice differs from the Greek. He wrote that in the Greek, justice implies:

“[A] harmonious arrangement of society, by which every human peg is put into its appropriate hole, so that those who perform humble functions shall be content to perform them in due subservience to their betters. It stresses the inequalities of human nature, whereas in the Hebrew conception of justice, the equality is stressed.”

--Soncino Press Pentateuch and Haftorahs: Hebrew Text, English Translation and Commentary, J.H. Hersch, Ed., p. 821

This is the case because in Hebrew thought, every human being is made in the image of the Eternal, and his life is unique and precious, possessing, as he does, a spark of Infinity. Therefore, as Hersch continues, every person has “the right to life, honor and all the fruits of his labor,” (p. 821). For this reason, Jewish Law demands that every human being be treated with honor in the streets, and with righteousness in the courts.

But if the call of Elul is to justice, then the burden of answering it is fearful, as the prophets show us. For to behave with righteousness towards everyone in the streets and to mete out equal justice in the courts, flies in the face of social conventions and political correctness. One must honor truth, consider the facts, and render judgment accordingly in all dealings. One may not condemn the rich man because he is rich nor excuse the poor man because he is poor (“you shall not respect persons”), and one may not base how one treats another on gifts or flattery (“you shall not take a bribe”). For this reason, acting with righteousness and justice is likely to get a person in trouble socially and legally in an unjust society. And as we currently live in a society that no longer makes judgments based on righteousness and law, but does so on the exigencies of political correctness and the whims of men, acting with justice is a difficult and dangerous thing.

 

And herein lies how I, among others, have been “walking the thin line between fear and the call” as we recognize the truth of what is being done to our civil society and to its values and law. For in my determination—made every Rosh Hashanah for the past four years—to honor the truth and act righteously, I have said and done things that have earned me the anger and contempt of friends and acquaintances. Sadly, this has ended many friendships that were based on my former habit of ignoring the reality of growing differences between our worldviews. Some of the ways in which those friendships were ended, and the accusations leveled against me, have cut me to the core of my being.

 
And in my weaker moments, I am afraid that in stepping out beyond the lines of political correctness and social  and legal convention, I will be harmed not only socially, but financially and/or physically. Because making a stand for plain old justice in a world of collectivist notions of “social justice” is no longer simply bad form, but with the oppression of the surveillance state and the police state being created and solidifying with terrifying rapidity, it is downright dangerous. Speech and action that now can cost one her dignity, property and perhaps, her liberty, may soon cost one her life.


And that fear causes me temporary confusion and wrong action. It creates doubt in my mind and silence in my mouth. And so the Haftorah Shoftim, the fourth in the seven Haftorot of Comfort, also comforts me:

“I, I Am the One that comforts you; who are you to be afraid . . ?

“. . . And where is the fury of the oppressor? He that is bent down shall speedily be loosed; and he shall not go down dying into the pit. Neither shall his bread fail.”

I know that I am one small person. I know that I can err in knowledge, and that I have indeed done so, espousing bad causes and supporting bad means in the name of what seemed to me at the time to be good ends. Moreover, I have obstinately continued in bad courses because I did not have the courage to admit that I was confused, or lacking in knowledge, or that I was downright wrong. And in so doing, I have excused the guilty and harmed the innocent. Of this, I am not proud. 

But to paraphrase Julian of Norwich:

He did not say “You shall not screw up.” He did not say “You shall not be discouraged.” He did not say:\ “You shall not be harmed.” But he said: “You shall not be overcome.”

I suppose what that means is open to interpretation. To me, it means that trials and troubles, and even harm are not the worst thing. The worst thing is to lose one’s honor and integrity; to lose one’s identity and one’s very soul. And if I persist in finding righteousness and doing justice, turning and returning again to walk the thin line, then despite any shame or harm done to me, I will remain who I am, and that is the greatest value to me.

The name of the month of Elul is an acronym in Hebrew that stands for Ani l’dodi, v’dodi li—I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. Elul is the point of turning and returning again in the dance of Shekinah, She who dwells with Israel in our exile, in our eternal betrothal with the Master of the Universe. And here, in my own dwelling place, Elul is the point of turning and returning again in my dance as a Jew, longing all my life for that moment of loving kindness, that betrothal of righteousness and justice, that Place, that shelter in the rock, where I get a glimpse of all of G-d’s goodness passing before me.

 

“For the Love of it all, I would go anywhere; to the ends of the earth, Oh, what is it worth, if Love would be there?

Walking the thin line, between fear and the call; one learns to bend and finally depend on the Love of it all.”

 

It is the love of it all—of life and being—that unites the call to justice and righteousness with the will to overcome fear and fills my heart with strength for the journey. And year after year, I turn and return again to the call in the dance of Elul. I come again to Makom, the Dwelling Place of Israel, only to know that I have been here, walking the thin line, day after day, year after year.

 

So. Maybe I can construct the meaning of Tippy’s silence as she brought me to see the elk. He was standing within his place, his Makom. And so am I, walking the thin line. Here, in this place between fear and the call, is Makom, the Presence of the Eternal. As Israel learned in her exile, as Isaiah reminds Jews to this day in the first Haftorah of Comfort:

הִנֵּה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם

Hinei eloheichem

Here is your G-d.
 

Technorati Tags: Elul,Jewish Identity,Torah Study,T'shuvah

Yom Kippur: The Day of Decision

“This is the Day of Decision . . .”

“ . . . in the camps and streets of Europe mother and father and child lay dying, and many looked away. To look away from evil: Is this not the sin of all “good” people?”

“Turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why should you choose to die, O House of Israel?”

--Sha’arei T’shuvah: The Reform Machzor

 

Our lives are fleeting, like a leaf that rides on the river of time, for a while, and then subsides, while the river flows on. This is one theme of Yom Kippur and the High Holy Days in general, timed as they are in the month of autumn, from the dark of the moon to its waxing. This year the Engineering Geek and I felt this acutely, as our daily household has shrunk to just the two of us, with both children up and out.

This gives us both pause about where we are in our lives, with more years behind us than ahead, but it also confers a certain freedom, and one way that we expressed it was to choose to spend Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur differently, cutting ties to the synagogue where the children were raised. We went to the small, eclectic and egalitarian shul in Flagstaff, taking a hotel room in order to experience Yom Kippur free of the distraction of long distance driving. Of course, in the odd way of the Jewish world, where smaller degrees of separation abound and bind across continents, we found connections with the president of the congregation, another member who remembers me as a very pregnant cantorial soloist, and the rabbi herself, with whom I share a mentor, a study partner, and a course of study.  

And for the first time in our ten years of marriage, the EG and I also were free to really spend some time on the Day of Atonement studying the Machzor—the High Holy Day Prayer Book—free of distractions. This was a boon we had not counted upon, and it worked out because the little shul has an organized morning service followed immediately by Yizkor (the Memorial Service), after which there is a long break until Neilah, the evening service just before breaking the fast. Not wanting to put ourselves in places of commerce nor to go back to the hotel, we went instead to Buffalo Park—a huge open space under the San Francisco Peaks—and there we found a lone marble bench facing the mountains, cloud-shadowed beyond a field of yellow daisies, where we prayed the afternoon service for ourselves, stopping to discuss and comment upon it along the way. And as is always true for me, themes that match what is going on in my inner and outer life fairly jumped out of the pages of the Machzor, demanding to be confronted.

Yom Kippur is, as the prayer book says, a day of decision. The image is the Book of Life being open at the Seat of Judgment, as every human being chooses between good and evil, life and death:

You open the book of our days and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being. . . This is the Day of Judgment . . .”

But the problem for many Jews is that we have taken a concept of judgment from the dominant culture, one that is foreign to our own world view. This idea is that human beings should eschew judgment altogether, that it is wrong to make a judgment—which I cannot help but point out, is a judgment itself. For because human being have the capacity to make decisions, we must necessarily make judgments between good and evil, between right and wrong, between life and death. Judgment is not an option, and it is also not something to be feared:

Your love is steadfast on Judgment day, and you keep your covenant in judgment . . .

You penetrate mysteries on Judgment Day, and you free your children in judgment . . .

You uphold all who live with integrity on Judgment Day . . .

On Yom Kippur, we take the time to ponder, to burn away the clouds of mystery, and to make judgments about ourselves, determining where we have failed in judgment and where we have gone beyond our own boundaries, in order to restore integrity to our lives.

Beyond our own lives, we must make judgments about our world. We cannot say: Who am I to judge this policy, this action, these people and their behaviors? We Jews know what the sin of silence and the sin of indifference mean.To refuse to judge evil as evil, and evil doers as evil doers is to allow it and to become a part of it. There are no innocent bystanders. And those who claim to desire peace but refuse to confront evil cannot create peace, rather they will bring death and destruction upon themselves and upon those who excuse them, for to excuse the guilty is an injustice waged upon the innocent.

In the praying of the services, in the thoughts that the words in the Machzor inspire, and in our discussion of them, I have made some decisions for myself, or I have set the standards and benchmarks for decisions that I expect to need to make this year. Over the years of my upbringing and education, and on into young adulthood, I had developed the habit of self-censorship in response to a great many things, and over the last 11 years I have made a concerted effort to rid myself of this habit, for it is a dangerous abdication of the mind and heart. I will continue to root this out of my life, and replace such fears and hesitations as I may have with reliance on making judgments that are just and true. This year, more than ever, as our world spirals out of control and our civilization seems bent on suicide, this emphasis on truth and justice as the basis of judgment becomes more important than ever, and that integrity is something I want to restore in small ways as well as large, and in my personal as well as any public life I might have.

There are other conclusions that I have come to in order to fulfill my desire to mend my errors and to  be proud of what I have written in my book of life, and perhaps I will share more of them at another time, but I know that confronting untruth will be my greatest challenge. The Hebrew word for truth is EMET and the Hebrew word for justice is TZEDEK. EMET and TZEDEK will be my words for 5773. These are big words, and knowing my own weaknesses regarding them, I take pause before them. They require great  courage and discernment both, and i tend to err on both. And yet I long to come closer to these marks. I may not have the power to change the world that seems to be hell-bent on destruction, but creating an island of order and sanity within the chaos is a worthy goal.

 

Technorati Tags: Judaism,Times and Seasons,Yom Kippur

Shabbat Shuvah: The Foreign Gods of Today

Technorati Tags: Times and Seasons,High Holy Days,American Exceptionalism,Torah Study

“The Eternal said to Moses:

You are about to sleep with your fathers,

and this people will rise up and go astray

after foreign gods, where they will go to be

among them, and break my Covenant . . .

and many troubles and evils shall befall them.”

Devarim 31: 16, 17

As Jews, we are now in the midst of the Ten Days of Turning, the days between Rosh Hashanah, when we celebrate the Birthday of the World, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn holy day of the year. The Sabbath that falls between these two holy days is Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath on which rabbis and maggids (preachers) commonly give a sermon on the art of turning and returning to the path of righteousness.

When the Engineering Geek and I took a few moments for Torah Study on Shabbat, with all of what had happened in the past weeks in mind, we noticed a part of Parashat Vayelich that the Women of Reform Judaism’s Torah Commentary remained silent about. Devarim  (Deuteronomy) is set as Moses’ last speech, with some interpolations that move the story along. In Vayelich (He Went), Moses learns that he has reached the end of his long life, and that he will die before the people Israel enter the promised land. The Women’s Commentary therefore focuses on what this means for Moses, and the reasons given and implied for his death at the moment of his people’s freedom.

But given the stark choices that confront us all in the world today, and the contradictory and craven behavior of our Executive  Branch in the face of the renewed attacks on the United States through our embassies--attacks used to threaten our most basic freedoms--the Engineering Geek and I focused on the passage that the commentary passed over. In it, a prediction is made by the Eternal. The people will cross over, and they will build lives in the land, and become complacent (“. . . they shall have eaten their fill and waxed fat. . .”, 31:20), and that is when they will be vulnerable to turning away from their heritage and their purpose, and follow after foreign gods that they have not experienced. When this happens they will, the story predicts, forsake the Covenant, and bring upon themselves many “troubles and evils.”

In encountering this story, we ask ourselves, what are foreign gods in the context of our identity as Americans today? Most of us do not literally bow down to idols of wood and stone made by our own hands. And many of us bow down to no gods at all. Further, this passage is about what happens when many members of a society make a choice to change their basic beliefs about their civil identity, and forsake the heritage given them by previous generations.

In Hebrew, the United States is known as Artzot ha-Brit shel Amerika, ( ארצות הברית של אמריקה) the Land of the Covenant in America. This is a recognition that our unique identity is forged not by blood ties, but that who we are is based on our choice to abide by a set of ideas that are protected by an contract, the Constitution of the United States.

On September 11, 2001, many of us were rudely made aware for the first time in a generation that our ideas about who human beings are and what we define as the good life in our civilization were under attack; that another set of ideas opposes ours, and that proponents of those alien ideas are willing to make war upon us, and to fight and die to see that their ideas prevail in the world. On that day, as the towers fell, we instinctively drew together, and the day after, we put up our flags and remembered that we were Americans.

As the EG and I talked about all this, we realized that we Americans had grown complacent indeed, and that we have been in the process of forsaking our Covenant of respect for individual rights, thereby giving up cherishing the uniqueness of each individual, and had begun to turn away toward concepts foreign to our native values. This hankering after dependency and collectivism, the easing of responsibility and individual liberty, was possible because we forgot the origin of the wealth and innovation that made our comfort and ease possible. In so doing, we were turning to foreign gods, ideas that are in opposition to our Covenant, and cannot possible co-exist with it.

Islamic thought, with its focus on totalitarian submission to a theocratic state, has developed from premises alien to our enlightenment values, and is driven by a civilization that is not at all complacent or passive. Islamic teaching emphasizes the necessity of bringing the whole world into submission to ideas that are incompatible with our own. Our Western forbearers have resisted these idols before, at Tours with Charles Martel, and twice at the Gates of Vienna. 

But now, with our Covenant weakened by dreams of collectivist utopias, we see our leaders actively chasing after alien ideas, appeasing our enemies with apologies, and proclaiming a willingness to surrender our basic rights to foreign gods. We must rethink our liberties, they say, in the face of the Ba’al of the Riot and the Mob. It is our children whose birthright of freedom is to be sacrificed to satisfy the insatiable fires of the barbarian hordes.

And yet, there are those among us who have sounded the alarm that there can be no compromise with those who wish to supplant our values with their own, and no surrender without the total loss of our American identity. Like the prophet in the Haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, they tell us:

“Asshur shall not save us . . .neither will we call anymore the work of our hands our gods . . .”

“Give not your heritage up to reproach, that the nations should make you a byword; Should they say among the peoples: Where is their G-d?”

We cannot make treaties with the alien thought of Egypt and Libya and at the same time retain our own unique identity. Foreign ideas and values cannot be assimilated without destroying our own. Oil and water do not mix, and nobody can compromise with poison and live.
It is one or the other, and we must not listen to those who would so lightly surrender our liberty, our values and principles to those who would destroy us. 

It is amazing how the struggles of old, couched in religious language, are relevant still, and tell the same stories that we experience, although we tell of them differently. 
Just as Israel of old had to choose or be broken on the contradiction between her identity and that of the idols, the same is true for us today. We must choose rightly or be broken on the contradiction between our own values and those of Egypt and Libya and the whole of the Muslim Brotherhood with its Islamist nightmare. Liberty and submission cannot be combined. Individual rights will not co-exist with the Ummah, the collective nation of the Islamic State. 

It is my hope that in this season of turning we gather the courage to say what is real, and  to acknowledge the truth in our hearts. And that we do not close our eyes to the troubles and evils that are about to befall us, and that we recognize that they are a consequence of the fact that we are in the act of forsaking our Covenant, the one that has made us the envy of the world and an inspiration to among the nations.

We need to wake up and to recognize how greatly we have prospered by the values and principles bequeathed to us by our founders, so that we can preserve our liberties and bequeath our inheritance—the Covenant of Rights and Liberties—to our posterity.

This remains my hope in the face of growing darkness.

Eleven Years Later: My September 10th Persona

“Oh beautiful for Patriot’s dream that sees beyond the years;
Whose alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.
America, America, God mend thy every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy Liberty in Law.”

As I write tonight, two shafts of blue light rise into the Manhattan sky. Three quarters of a continent away, they commemorate the last time that September 11 fell on a Tuesday, when our country was attacked out of a clear, blue sky, and when a generation lost its innocence.

I was teaching that morning, and my car pool driver and I were very nearly late for work. I had a head-ache and a heart-ache after a weekend of conflict with my sixteen year old daughter, and we had agreed not to listen to the radio, so the drive in was peaceful that morning as we listened to Vivaldi’s Autumn. I remember thinking that our fellow Albuquerque drivers were unusually polite that morning, as my friend skillfully maneuvered in traffic, and parked so that we could each dash to our respective classrooms. Stopping by my own classroom to pick up my lesson plans and basket, I arrived at the demo bench for my Physics for Poet’s class just as the final bell sounded. I put my basket of teaching materials on the bench and remained standing as the intercom clicked on, and I expected to hear a Senior’s voice say: “Please stand for the prayer and the Pledge . . .” (I was teaching science in a Catholic High School at that time). Instead, I heard the chaplain across the air, his voice shaking as he said: “Because our country is under attack, I have been asked to give the prayer. . .” I remember looking questioningly at my students, who looked back at me, big-eyed and solemn. And I knew that we had all turned a corner at that moment, although I had no idea at all what had happened.

The ubiquitous “they” say that now that we have passed the tenth anniversary of that day, we need to get over it, to move on. But every year, when I tune into the morning radio show I listen to, I hear a montage of the sounds of that day, and I know that “getting over it” is not something that I want to do, or could if I tried. Moving on is something that we have all done, although that movement has been a journey down an unfamiliar road, to a different trajectory. There are some moments that bind us together, that change us irrevocably, that replace the easy familiarity of how we think things will always be in the instant that a plane struck a tower on a clear, blue Tuesday morning.

Today, some of us across the country have chosen to use this day as a day to reflect on who we were on September 10, 2001, and on how the events of that day, seared into our brains, have changed us, spun us around on our paths, and put us on a path to become September 12 people. So tonight, as the rain falls on the metal roof of a house in a place that I had never expected to live, I resolved to do this, to begin to sort out how I got from there to here. September 11 did not sweep me from one reality to another; that process had already begun, brought about by a more personal crisis a few years before. But it did irrevocably change so many things, although those changes were gradual and hard won.  

On September 10, 2001, my life was already in flux. A cancer had already turned my head around and caused to me question the choices that I had made and was making. In the two years since I had a lump removed and prophylactic radiation done, I had chosen to buy a house for me and my two kids and to leave my marriage. It was not that life was easy before. I had taken sole responsibility for the support of my kids and their dad, and working two and three jobs at a time, and I had burned myself out getting a teaching certificate because I knew that life as a field biologist was not going to work for us, and that chasing research and post-docs and professional appointments was not going to put food on the table and clothes on my children’s backs. I had responsibilities, and it had been clear since before the birth of my son that I had no partner in those responsibilities.

On September 10, 2001, I had found my bashert—my beloved Engineering Geek--and our relationship was strengthening, solidifying, I had found my Baruch, my blessing; the one that I craved and was too afraid to ask for. I was ready to let myself be loved, to let myself be taken care of in a way that I had never had during all the years of my first marriage: my childbearing and rearing, worrying and working years, years in which my children were born and nursed in between classes and jobs, and in which I watched a darkness grow in my first husband, until it consumed him and me, but not the kids—thank goodness, not the kids (or so I thought)—and I was left with a broken man and a broken marriage.

So much was my joy at finding a man—a real man—who wanted to share my life, take care of my kids, make a home together, that I was utterly consumed. And so on September 10, 2001, I was coming off of the weekend of my daughter’s 16th birthday. Sweet 16, and I disappointed her greatly, because I wasn’t able to give her the fantasies that she and I had dreamed up during the hard times. I didn’t rent a hotel room for her and her friends (hotels were frowning more and more on those kinds of teen parties) and during the sleepover she had with her friends, I left them alone to entertain themselves (as I had done with great pleasure at her age), never realizing that she wanted me as June Cleaver —apron and all—to serve the snacks and make a general nuisance of myself. I have no excuse to offer really, except that my generation had rejected poor June Cleaver as the epitome of The Feminine Mystique, and I was head-over-heels in love at the time in my daughter’s life when she was most embarrassed by adult love and, well, by parental adults and their weird behavior in general.  

On September 10, 2001--the day after my daughter’s Sweet Sixteenth, the day that would have been my 19th wedding anniversary to her father—on that evening, my daughter and I had a knock-down drag out argument, complete with frustrated yelling (on my part), angry yelling and door slamming (on hers), and  hormones and tears (on both our parts), asthe tension that had been building between us all weekend created a storm that shattered my sense of efficacy as a mother and sent her to bed with a blinding migraine.

And so on the morning of September 11, I was a chastened mother with a headache, contemplating for the first time my failures as a mother—for it Betty Friedan was right about nothing else, she knew this: it’s always the mother’s fault. And I was still a woman in love, a woman wanting badly to have her new love and her most precious loves all come together to make a family, and maybe this time it would all work out.

And on the morning of September 11, I was also a woman who had sworn off politics. Raised by a libertarian and an Objectivist, I had made a left turn in my first marriage, only to find that all the virtues I thought were there were not, and all the vices—the hatreds and anti-Semitism, the uncaring inhumanity—that I thought were with the conservatives and the libertarians, were present in the watermelon pink of the Greens. So I had recently vowed—I who had never voted for a major party for president in my voting life—that I would be normal and live my life without thinking about politics. Much. Growing up Libertarian was exciting and confusing and exhausting. And it wasn’t easy being Green, either, and rather awkward, really, for someone brought up on Ayn Rand. (Ayn Rand did NOT ruin my life, by the way. But that’s another story . . .)

On the morning of September 11 I was a woman with a life already in the process of change. I was a woman trying to figure out how to create the family I had forgotten I wanted with the very real children I had and a new man who had never changed a diaper or walked the floor with a colicky baby. I was a woman who was trying to figure it out, but I already had felt the cold wind blow, and I had already heard the question, old as Gan Eden: Ayecha! Where are you?

And all that day, I read Psalm 23 for each class I met, and  I struggled to answer my students’ bewildered questions, and I altered lesson plans because I knew they would not remember anything we said and did that day, but only the image of the towers falling, over and over, burned by retina on the canvas of our minds. All that day I thought about the people who would never go home, and about the people who would wait in vain for their return. I thought about those who jumped to their deaths from the burning towers, and those who watched helpless, and heard the impacts, over and over. They were people who went to work, just like me, on that sunny Tuesday morning, the perfect day. And their families waited, just like mine, for work to be done and to be together again, to fight and make-up, to eat and laugh and play and sleep. They were Americans, just like me, who went to work and now would never come home.

Is it then surprising that the first thing I did was try to call my daughter, home sick with the aftermath of her migraine? I did. I called right from the classroom phone, my students a few feet away, trying to tune in a radio to hear the news. But the circuits were busy. And busy again. “Please try your call again later,” said the computer voice. And the second call I tried was to the Engineering Geek at his office at Sandia National Laboratories. But they were evacuating Sandia because they were closing Kirtland AFB, and the EG was nowhere to be found.
All I wanted to do was to call people I loved and cared about, to hear their voices, to make sure they were safe and whole.

And it was utterly impossible to connect to a website or send an e-mail. Everybody was in the computer. Everybody.

Later, I connected with both of them, the EG and my daughter, but it wasn’t until months later that I learned that the EG was out picking out my diamond engagement ring that day, and wasn’t even at Sandia when the towers fell and the base was evacuated.

And that is what everyone else was doing, too. At the same time. We all needed to reassure and be reassured, to touch something beyond the terrible images we were seeing on our TV screens. The kids at the Catholic school where I was teaching wanted to call their folks, to see the Chaplain, and that afternoon, they called for a school-wide Mass. They needed to see their friends, to come together, to right their rocking world.

That was the first lesson we all learned from the murder of over 3000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93. How much we need to connect to each other, to reassure one another when such dire things happen.

That was the first, but there were others: how beautiful is Old Glory, lighted by candlelight, half-mast on the porch. How precious our peace and freedom are, and what it takes to defend that liberty from those who would disturb it. How aware even little kids like my son was, and how hard they work to make sense of their world. How angry a 16-year old can become, to see her country attacked and how wisely she can direct that anger, once the first grief has passed.How much passion we all have for the country of our birth and of our dreams.

There were many others in the path from being a September 10th person to becoming, very slowly, a September 12th person. Today is for remembering, and for reflecting on the beginning of that journey. Tomorrow, September 12, is for looking at how we have changed and making a commitment to stand up for the principles and values that we’ve always had but only too recently remembered.

Technorati Tags: America,September 11,Patriotism,Times and Seasons,T'shuvah

That's How the Light Gets In: Elul Waning Moon

The moon is waning and we are coming to the last of the four weeks of Elul, the month of turning in the Hebrew calendar. Tonight we begin the season of T'shuvah in earnest with the ceremony S'lichot, when in the middle of the night we stand before the Holy Ark to pray for renewed hearts and a return to the paths that lead to life. I love the moment when the Ark is opened and we see the Torah Scrolls, robed in white for the first time as the High Holy Days begin.

There is a story from Kabbalah, from the Book of Creation. It is said that the Eyn Sof--Eternal, without boundaries--performed tzimtzum, a process of contraction, so that there would be space for matter and for human free will. In the process of tzimtzum, matter and choice were created, the vessels intended to contain the light--the creative power of the universe. But as the light poured into the vessels, they were not able to contain the Eyn Sof--Infinity--and they shattered, spreading the shards of the vessels and the creative sparks across the universe. And it is the job of the human being, who possesses the free will that even the angels do not have, to separate the sparks from the shards and lift them up from world to world. This work is the holy work of Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world.

At the time of my life when I was at the lowest of the low, and suffering from existential angst brought on by cancer, one of my teachers recognized that my perfectionism was at the root of my emptiness. And he gently asked me in Hebrew, "What world are you in, daughter?" And I said that I was at the lowest world. And he said, "Even at the lowest world, there are sparks to lift up." And I was comforted.

It is very tempting still for me to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, thus inducing in myself a paralysis and I sense that I am unworthy to do the work of Tikkun Olam. And as I go about the work of Elul, the work of T'shuvah, it is really easy to go there. But that is a shard of memory from which I must lift the sparks of creative power, for no human being is unworthy of the task, every human being is uniquely powerful and capable of lifting sparks of light.

And this week, again, Leonard Cohen is my guide. It seems fitting, for his is a spirituality of finding the Holy within the imperfect, the ephemeral, but infinitely rare and precious nature of the human.

As I prepare for S'lichot tonight, I will remember the joy in the moment of seeing that it is through the shards, the cracks in the vessels, that the creative power was released into the universe, the power of human free will.

"Ring the bells that still can ring,
forget your perfect offering,
there is a crack in everything,
that's how the light gets in..."


The world that we have is living and beautiful, and infinitely varied. It is alive and ever-changing. It is full of the creative power of energy, and it is therefore not perfect.

Who By Fire? Elul Full Moon

I have been thinking a great deal about how fast the time of my life is passing lately.
Much of the reflection has to do with my kids growing up
and the fact that the big five-oh is coming up in a few years.
Did I say coming up?
It feels like it is racing at me with all the speed and grace of an oncoming train.

And we are now beginning the third week of Elul.
The moon is full and Rosh Hashanah is only two weeks away.
And when I go to synagogue to observe the Yom ha-Zikaron, the Day of Remembrance,
I will do so remembering so many people near to my own age who will not be there ever again, to mark the passing of the year, the birthday of the world, and the blowing of the Shofar in the holy assembly.

During this month of Turning and Returning, Jews meditate on the metaphor of the Book of Life. The number of each person's days is inscribed in the book of life, we say, and we recall that life is finite and precious. Thus the importance of making of our lives something wonderful, for the fact that we are mortal makes what we choose and what we do matter.

And thoughts on our lives and the number of our days inevitably also brings us face to face with two realities. One is that we often fall short of the greatness to which we are summoned. We walk, as one poet put it, "sightless among miracles," especially the miracles of our own lives and of those we love.
The other realization is that life is fragile and short.

And so on Rosh Hashannah, as we gather together to pray for a year of prosperity and a year of abundance, and a year of peace, we also confront our own mortality as we listen Un' taneh tokef:

"Let us proclaim the sacred power of this day...
On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many shall pass on and how many shall come to be;
Who shall live and who shall die;
Who shall see ripe age and who shall not,
Who shall die by fire, and who by water..."

I used to chafe against this judgement, that the innocent suffer no less than the guilty, and I still feel the twist of the Damoclean sword at the last line:

"...but repentance, prayer and righteousness temper judgment's severe decree."

Silently, I cry out still in protest at the unfairness of life; that even the most innocent and the most righteous often suffer death by holocaust, their lives cut off with cruel unfairness; and their tormentors die of old age, in bed.

But the author of these words, Rabbi Amnon of Mayence, who died by fire when the Crusaders annihilated the Jews of the Rhineland, surely did not mean that he and his people died because they had not practiced repentance, prayer and righteousness. These were people who lived on the knife-edge of oppression. And they lived well and creatively. No, the judgment he is talking about is the fragility of life. These things--repentance (in Hebrew, the act of turning again toward the good), prayer (in Hebrew, standing in judgment of one's self before what is True and Just), and righteousness (weighing choices by values and acting accordingly)--cannot forever avert death. That is our nature.

But our understanding and knowledge of our mortality is what makes each choice we make important; it is the foundation of our existence as moral beings. Therefore, to live our lives in goodness, weighing our decisions truly, and acting justly; all so that we live lives of purpose, can temper the severe decree of mortality. We stand, as long as we live, on who we are in the profound sense.

And yet again this year, I find my understanding of the Un'tane Tokef enhanced by Leonard Cohen's interpretation, here accompanied by the amazing Sonny Rollins on saxophone.




And Who, Who shall I say is calling?

"See, I set before you this day life and goodness, and death and evil . . .

Choose life, that you and your children may live." (Parashat Nitzavim)

This is how we become real human beings: that we choose between goodness and life or evil and death; that we are aware of the gravity of the choices we are making in full knowledge that each person has this responsibility and the liberty to choose.

NOTE: I posted this entry first on September 14 in the evening. Today, I added a picture and edited for clarity and completeness of thought, so I am reposting to the top of my blog.

Turning: Slipping into Autumn, Pondering Elul

Early Autumn has slipped up on us, here at Sedillo, furtively, amidst the flurry of beginnings: school for the Boychick, UNM responsibilities and courses for me, and the Engineering Geek's remodel of the bedroom floor.

The sunflowers have bloomed riotously in the meadows and along the roadsides. They will be here until October. As they go to seed, an abundance of birds and squirrels can be seen, getting ready for winter.

The arrival of September, the coming of the Chem Geek Princess's Birthday, and the waxing of the Elul moon, all bring to my attention the turning of the wheel of the year; the passage of time becoming clear. With our movement into the season of the High Holy Days, my mood becomes more reflective internally, as I contemplate the ephemeral nature of life. Now is what we have to act upon and none of us knows how long our personal experience will extend into the future.

Perhaps the seasons of our lives influence how we reflect on the seasons of the year. The Chem Geek Princess is in the early summer of her life, but I am nearing the end of the summer of mine. So I am contemplating the harvest of the years. The bittersweet nature of this pondering has been multiplied for me of late by the signs around us of generational change and the coming fourth turning in the saeculum of our civilization.

And this year, as we enter the season of turning, and harvest, I have found myself thinking about Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. His is not the triumphal joy of "one who has seen the light," but rather the quiet joy of finding the sparks of hidden light among the pieces of shattered vessels that could not contain the power of creation. He meditates on a "very broken Hallelujah." The song recalls David's great praise in the psalms, and the human quality of his reach for great holiness, and the times when his grasp slipped, only so that he could reach again.

From the beginning of the reach for holiness:

"Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah "

To an understanding that within the loss of innocence, praise can be found:

"Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you;
She tied you To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah."

To the singer's reach for the Infinite Unspeakable Name:

"You say I took the Name in vain,
I don't even know the Name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah,"

To finding G-d in the imperfect union of lovers:

"There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below,
Ah but now you never show it to me, do you?
Yeah but I remember when I moved in you,
And the holy dove, she was moving too,
Yes every single breath that we drew was Hallelujah."

To the reaching and the longing and the acceptance of the sparks that are found among the broken vessels:

"I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah."

The "you" in the song seems to shift from a lover to the sweet singer of the psalms, and to the Eternal One.
There are many verses to this song. Cohen himself has recorded several different versions, and other artists had recorded covers that include different combinations of verses.

Although I am currently partial to the very liturgical interpretation of K.D. Lang, I think that Cohen's own meditative interpretation gives a most powerful voice to the longing and fulfillment found in "standing before the Lord of Song" with nothing on his lips but Hallelujah:




To me, in this season of turning and reflection, occuring in the middle of secular beginnings and the coming of seasonal, personal and saecular autumn and winter, this song is a prayer and a meditation on the balance I try to maintain between "fear and the call" (as Emmy Lou Harris would have it).

In Training: Shifting Time Zones and Back on Track

Remember when your mom would comfort you by saying: "Well, tomorrow is another day?"


Today was a better day. I think I shifted time zones. I am tired enough to go to bed at a reasonable CDT hour, instead of retiring at what feels like 11 PM, but is really 12 Midnight CDT. This morning I had less of the feeling that it was 4:30 AM which is what it was in MDT when I woke up at at 5:30 AM CDT.



I actually enjoyed being in Chicago, even though it was not as clear as it was when this picture of the famous Chicago Watertower was taken. This is the only structure that survived the great Chicago fire.

Although I was still tired today, I managed my congestion with Pseudophedrine rather than Benedryl. And what a difference that made from Monday. I was tired but not foggy.

Training today went better as well. Our trainer put me into a different group--one in which there a fast talker and a slow talker, as well as two people who are more direct and two who are not as direct. I can see my opposites and learn from them, and they can learn from me. It is far more comfortable for me this way, as I know I can learn and I feel like I can contribute as well. And, of course not being in a fog makes that learning much more likely.

And I am getting the wisdom of IRD's very structured program into my head and gut.
I keep reminding myself, this is very scripted because it is not really my classroom this summer--as it would be if I were back teaching my gifted kiddos--but IRD's classroom.

They have worked very hard on the lesson plans so that the teachers need not waste a single word. One downfall of school teachers is that we tend to talk too much. This is especially true when we are nervous and have not yet gelled with a class.

But in the IRD programs, we have only five classes or ten hours to teach the skills we have agreed to get across to the students. The parents, with our coaching, tutor their kids at home for another 20 hours during the session, and continue over the next school year. This is not a lot of time, and yet the program, which teaches certain skills over four levels of reading development--from pre-reader to adult speed reading--is remarkably successful at helping people become skillful and passionate readers. Today I had a sea change in my thinking while listening to two other group members practice the lesson plan for parent coaching in assisted reading for 6-8 year olds. One of my fellow teachers is like me, quite wordy and I realized how snowed under parents must feel with this plethora of information. The other follows the script very well, presenting only the needed information. I said to her, "I just realized from you how much less is more!" That has become my mantra. Less is more.

Another important realization is that I am letting my perfectionist self get in the way of the good teacher I normally am. I let go of the lesson plan way too early, dealing with it like I would the much more free-from suggested plans in the science texts I used when teaching Physical Science, Biology and Chemistry. In those fields, I am very knowledgeable about the content, and have spent years honing my skill in teaching it. But I am a novice at teaching reading. And I know very little about the field. Oh, with my gifted kids, I taught literature--but that is different than teaching reading. So how ridiculous it was of me to think that I could perfect the skills of a good reading teacher in a day! So I let my perfectionism get in my own way. It was really quite painful yesterday, but today sans Benedryl, I can look at it for what it is and move on.

The Hasidic Masters say that the Eternal One endows everyone with a major gift and a persistent flaw. The gifts display the beauty of humanity and the glory of G-d; but the challenges created by the flaw are what drive us to draw near to G-d. Perfectionism is that flaw for me.

So tomorrow is still another day.

Having got myself into a more comfortable place as a student of reading instruction, I can now work on the skills the IRD program requires so that I can teach their curriculum.

I was impressed with the IRD program and philosophy on an intellectual level, but now I am beginning to make connections between the program on a more gut level. Like many Geeks, I tend to live in my head--and I definitely retreat to intellectualization when I am under stress. Getting something on a gut level is good. It means progress on my part.

Now that I have gotten myself out of the way,
I am ready to take on the mission I gave myself when I took this summer job. It is two-fold: to share my love of books with people who want to learn to love them too and to learn as much as I can about reading instruction.

I can see that this training is not only an intellectual challenge, and it is more than the opportunity to learn a new skill. It can also be for me a kind of spiritual boot camp in which I can see clearly the consequences of my perfectionism and develop some strategies for coping with it and growing towards a more gentle approach. (Notice that I did not say "eradicate it from my life." I have learned something in my nearly 50 turns around the sun).


Now, I can also enjoy Chicago.

This picture of the El coming into the Loop is one of my favorites. There is something so cool and unpretentious about a city that names its downtown after a noisy, bustling form of transportation.

I really do like this matter-of-fact city by the lake.

If I had to live in a city, I would probably choose this one.

But cities are not my first preference as a place to call home.

Chicago is a really nice place to visit.