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One of my mentors and comrades, Claudia Horowitz, has had the same signature on her email for the decades that I have known her. It reads, “Don't push the river; it flows by itself.” Every time I encounter this wisdom, I think of skipping rock from the sandy banks, wading into to feel the strong current, the way a river bends, the continuous and determined flow of water, uninterruptible.
I recalled the phrase yesterday when a beloved friend gave me some honest feedback. Reflecting on recent interactions, they felt I was being too pushy. Being the generous friend they are, they said it was part chutzpah and part pushy. What arose was shame, some embarrassment and some sadness (including some tender tears). I don’t mean to be pushy and I don’t want to be pushy. I also know that pushiness, on some deep level, is what allowed me to become myself. It can be hard to know when to assert, when to push, when to allow, when to trust. After talking with my friend, I went for a run to help the feedback settle. As I watched the sun set in the Woodlands, I considered the time of year. We are in the second week of the Omer. A time of spiritual awakening and consciousness raising that follows the liberation of Passover. Everything is possible again. Flowers are blooming, leaves are unfurling, the days are longer. The earth’s resilience can inspire our own. In the mystical tradition, each of the seven weeks of the omer corresponds to each of the seven lower sefirot. Sefirot are portals for different aspects of the Divine which manifest in the natural world, in Torah and in us! So for example, the first week is the week of Hesed, which relates to the right hand, to water, Abraham, and kindness. Hesed flows. It dawned on me, in the counting of the omer, we were in the second week, the week of Gevurah. Gevurah is Hesed’s counterpart. It is strength and discipline, courage and boundaries. Not only that but yesterday was the fourth day of the second week, which corresponds to Netzach sh’be’Gevurah, the day of enduring strength, aka pushiness. I chuckled to myself, this would be the day to reflect on pushiness. I have no doubt that there are times when my own capacity for netzach sh’be’gevurah is an asset. And also no doubt it is a liability. The omer is a reminder that like the Divine, we contain it all. Nothing is inherently good or inherently bad. The work of the omer is to come into balance with each of these aspects of ourselves. The last 100 days have been dysregulating, and I am appreciative of the Omer’s invitation to rebalance. In my case to encourage today’s sefirot - hod sh’be’gevurah - acceptance rather than insistence. I know in my heart the good that can come from gevurah, but I also know when overused it can turn into a strong arm, which I do not want. If you have been on the receiving end of my pushiness, I sincerely apologize. I am already looking forward to week three, the week of Tiferet - a week devoted to cultivating beauty, compassion and integrity. I invite you to take a moment to pause and acknowledge today is the 12th day of the Omer, which makes one week and five days of the Omer. Hod Sh’be’gevurah. The day when we remind ourselves we don’t have to push the river, it flows by itself. Strong currents and all. What a relief! With gratitude to Claudia’s practice and wisdom, I offer you her 100 days of meditation. When I was parenting toddlers one of the most delicate determinants of my days was how well I managed to get my kids through a transition from one activity to another. From having breakfast to going to school or dinnertime to tubtime. In order to soothe myself and cope with what were some very difficult transitions, I started singing a parody of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof in my head, “Transitions! Transitions!” This made me chuckle and helped soften me to the challenges of transitioning. (Which you would think as a trans person I would be familiar with).
But the truth is, transitions are most enjoyable when there is spaciousness. The clutter of daily activities seeps into the moments between them, which minimizes necessary time to integrate, arrive, pivot, be present. Which is why I think Judaism calls our attention to transitions. Judaism sees transitions as holy carve outs. Our prayer services mark transitions in time. The reddening of the morning sky. Twilight. The moment the sun dips below the horizon. The first three stars in the night sky. Our festivals mark transitions in seasons and the natural cycles. Sukkot brings on the rainy season in the Fall and Passover the dry season in the Spring. And our lifecycles call attention to personal transitions. The onset of puberty with B’nei Mitzvah, the time between the death of a loved one and burial known as aninut, to name just a few. This Saturday night we get to make one of the most sacred and storied transitions, from havdalah to seder. Much rabbinic ink has been spilled about the holy handoff between Shabbat and Passover, notably how do we honor both sacred times as we end shabbat and begin Pesach. “Transitions! Transitions!” I love to imagine the delicacy of trying to avoid our sacred holidays from getting cranky. We must both sanctify the new holiday and separate between Shabbat and the weekday using the same ritual act of drinking wine. The Havdalah cup does double duty as the Kiddush cup. But how do we manage these simultaneous obligations? Or, more precisely, in what order ought we combine all the necessary blessings? It's a tricky spiritual transition. Both shabbes and Passover want our undivided attention. But the truth is, I am realistically going to be preparing for seder on Shabbat afternoon. How do we offer each the kavod they deserve, and how might we learn to offer that to ourselves? In the Babylonian Talmud, the rabbis imagine this moment with royal hospitality. In masechet Pesachim, Rabbi Hanina teaches that this is comparable to a queen who is exiting a city and a governor is entering. Etiquette dictates that the inhabitants of the city first escort the queen out of the city to take leave of her in a dignified fashion, and afterward they go out to greet the governor. Similarly, one should first recite havdala, to take leave of Shabbat, and only then recite kiddush over the Festival, whose sanctity is lesser than that of Shabbat. Now mind you, I am not so deferential to queens and governors as these texts suggest. But I do love considering the social etiquette of sacred time and how to be most hospitable to the flow of honored guests in our home. The answer the rabbis offer is my favorite acronym: יקנה״ז, pronounced YaKNeHaZ: יין (yayin) for the blessing over the wine; קידוש (kiddush) for the blessing over the new holiday just beginning; נר (ner) for the blessing over the flame; הבדלה (havdalah) for the blessing Hamavdil; and זמן (zman) for Shehechiyanu. May we be blessed in our comings and our goings. My father’s charoset and matzah ball soup, afikomen fondue and the full moon. These are a few of my favorite (Passover) things. Part of me is very much looking forward to the songs and flavors of seder season. But another part of me is feeling quite anxious and avoidant, even fearful. (I have uncharacteristically not started my Pesach cleaning).
As one of the three pilgrimage festivals, Passover is designed to bring us all together, across time and space. That is its legacy. Seder night connects me to all the other seders I have been at and all the people I have told this sacred story with. The year I wandered Istanbul searching for matzah, the year I dressed up as a wild beast, the years we were in quarantine. Perhaps one of the most profound moments for me as a Jew is sitting down to seder on Erev Pesach and imagining a web of Jews all over the world also sitting down to their seders. On every continent (except maybe Antarctica), tables will be set, stories will be told, questions will be asked. Even Jews who consider themselves secular find themselves celebrating Passover. Even under duress, even during the Holocaust, Jews found ways to make seder. Passover traditions are one of the most palpable expressions of clal yisrael / the entity, the entirety of Israel. But this year I am really struggling. The concept of clal yisrael has never been easy for me to swallow whole, but these days it feels indigestible. The chasm is deep and so painful. The image of settlers sitting down to seder in the West Bank, rifles around their chests, young Jewish soldiers at checkpoints, Palestinians captive in their homes on their ancestral lands, I can’t stomach it. Death of the first born, death of 10,000 children in Gaza. Will they use the plagues to justify it? Will they claim them as liberation casualties? And then there is the rising fascism here in the US, and its manipulation of antisemitism to silence free speech, deport immigrants and disrupt democracy. I am sick watching so much of clal Israel respond with indifference and in some cases actively cheering on extralegal deportations of people for writing op eds. This administration's explicit manipulation of antisemitism to undermine democracy and the Jewish establishment’s collusion with it is deplorable and dangerous (I highly recommend Rabbi Sharon Brous’ Purim Sermon: I am not your pawn! on this topic.) On April 12 1941, 84 seder years ago to the (seder) day, Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, known as the Esh Kodesh, the rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto, was teaching about exactly this. He wrote, “No Jew is a separate individual. He belongs to the entirety of the congregation of the Jewish people. Thus when one person learns Torah and worships God, he thereby illuminates all Jewish people.” He explains that when one Jew does teshuvah, it benefits all Jewish people. But then I suppose the inverse also applies, when one Jew strays horribly from the path of righteousness, it affects all of us. On my recent road trip to Detroit for Shosh’s grandma’s funeral, I opted to take off my kippa at the rest stop. I am still unsure, did I not feel safe or did I not feel proud? The Esh Kodesh goes on to explain that there is a kind of clal in which the whole is composed of separate parts. As any whole thing, take a car or a book, is made up of many smaller parts (metal, words, etc). But then, he elaborates, “There is another kind of clal that constitutes an essential, simple unity from which the details are branches that diverge…When we reach the source or root of such a clal, everything has become one. An example of this is fruit that has fallen from a tree. When we cut it off from its source, we watch it decay. The germ of the tree unifies and sustains all the disparate parts…” For the Esh Kodesh, this is how it is with the congregation of israel. The whole is not comprised of individuals. On the contrary, the individuals are branches of the whole. “The Congregation of Israel exists not because of a decision to join together and unify, but because the germ is the Jewish soul that includes all Jews and from which individual Jews branch out.” As I read this I felt so much grief and disconnect from his romantic vision of clal yisrael. This year, we are more like a broken down car than a tree of life. For the Esh Kodesh, it turns out Passover is also a pinnacle moment for clal yisrael. The Haggadah explains that the wicked child is wicked because he excluded himself from the clal. He asks, “What does this ritual mean for you?” and not “for us?” And the Esh Kodesh takes that to mean that the wicked child has cut himself off from his source, he is like a piece of fruit fallen from the tree, rotting on the forest floor. I am in a bit of an existential spiritual crisis, imagining seders across the Jewish world. This year I’m feeling both part of them and not part of them. I want to feel connected to them, and I want not to feel connected to them. All of this has me wondering, am I the wicked child? Are they? What might it take to feel part of the whole? What might I risk? What might I lose? It is yet unclear to me if I believe in an essential Jewish soul, though it's a soothing image to see us as connected in such a Sinai way. I know it feels bad to fray from my Source, to fear my own people, even my own family. I know I am not alone in this existential discomfort. I know that a big part of what keeps me tethered to clal yisrael is you all. This community makes me believe in a Judaism worthy of our children’s children and the earth itself. I can tell you I plan to clean for passover and brave seder night. To sing songs that have been sung for more than a thousand years. To allow myself to hope it might be healing. To hope it might widen the narrow places in my heart, to taste the tears and bless them. |
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General Questions: (267) 702-6187 or [email protected]
Shabbat Services: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #1, Philadelphia, PA 19143