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It has been nearly nine and a half years since we moved to Philly (incredible!). I began my tenure at Kol Tzedek one week later.
I still remember the feeling of arriving in the heat of summer, sitting on the couch in our yet unpacked, un-airconditioned living room and thinking, “Take me back to Boston, we have made a grave mistake!” That feeling has nothing to do with Philly. And everything to do with my relationship to change, and moving is among the biggest of changes. I was a ball of resistance. Only now, in a life overflowing with blessings, this community tops among them, can I revisit the courage it took to move our family from Boston to Philadelphia (a relatively small move in the grand scheme of the world). I can hardly imagine the courage of our ancestor Abraham, told explicitly to leave his land, the place he was born, his home, and to go in search of himself. What makes such a journey worthwhile? What makes it possible? Lech Lecha - literally, go towards yourself - are the potent opening words and namesake of this week’s Torah portion. Honestly, accepting the position at Kol Tzedek was a pivotal Lech Lecha moment in my life. I have actually been studying this parsha for weeks in preparation for a class that I am teaching with Dr. Elsie Stern on Theologies of Exile. Elsie has helped me see that Torah is full of stories of migration. Adam and Eve leave the garden. Abraham leaves everything he knows. Joseph and eventually his brother journey to Egypt. The Israelites and the Exodus story. Nevermind 40 years in the wilderness. I have come to appreciate Lech lecha as a core migration story. But the rabbis insist it is also a mystical and inner journey. The alliterative doubling presents a grammatical mystery, one that points to more than physical movement. As if to say, Abraham - Go, Lech! Lecha! - Go, journey inside yourself, become aware of yourself. And in my experience, the inner journey is necessary to make the move possible. Each year Lech Lecha is an invitation to honor the places we have been and left behind, and also a summons to appreciate the journey inward. In my own experience the journey inward can actually be harder to begin. It is one of the reasons we created our new prayerbook, to serve as a starting point for the journey inward. I have sat with so many Kol Tzedek members who bravely confess they don’t know how to pray. Which is so relatable. Prayer is by nature intangible and internal. Especially when the Source of our prayers is ineffable, invisible, infinite. And particularly for our postmodern brains, prone to rationality. Given the depths of chaos and uncertainty in our world, I don’t think we can afford to silence the call of Lech Lecha this week – not as the call to flee, but as an invitation to be more present. I invite you to find a moment to close your eyes, to leave behind your to-do list, your computer, your cell phone, and to journey inward. To let your mind settle and wander and fill with wonder about everything that is unknown. Prayer as a practice begins with curiosity. This Shabbat Lech Lecha, can you find a moment to be curious about the mystery? In the words of Lucille Clifton in her poem “the story thus far”, so they went out clay and morning star following the bright back of the woman as she walked past the cherubim turning their fiery swords past the winged gate into the unborn world chaos fell away before her like a cloud and everywhere seemed light seemed glorious seemed very eden Lech Lecha – Leap, let go, go into the unborn world, encounter the mystery. May it be glorious! This past week, Jewish, trans and queer communities buried two beloved leaders, Ms. Major Griffin-Gracy and Reb Arthur Waskow, both of tremendously blessed memory. To borrow a page from the non-binary Hebrew project, Ms. Major and Reb Arthur are two gedolimot, two giants of our generation, who have been gathered to the ancestors and returned to the earth.
For me personally, they were role models and comrades. As I have been mourning each loss and reflecting on their impacts on my life, I am realizing that my entire path has been possible because each of them walked theirs with integrity, courage, dignity and joy. I am so very grateful to have lived alongside them, to count myself among their generations. While one cannot expect Torah to aptly honor the legacy of every person the week they pass, it is possible to read each of these luminary souls into this week’s Torah portion. Parashat Noah begins: אֵ֚לֶּה תּוֹלְדֹ֣ת נֹ֔חַ נֹ֗חַ אִ֥ישׁ צַדִּ֛יק תָּמִ֥ים הָיָ֖ה בְּדֹֽרֹתָ֑יו אֶת־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֖ים הִֽתְהַלֶּךְ־נֹֽחַ׃ “This is the line of Noah.—Noah was a righteous person; he was wholehearted in his generations; Noah walked with God.—” Reading these words, my heart played spiritual madlibs. As if is said, Ms. Major, a righteous person who was wholehearted in her generations. She certainly walked with God. Reb Arthur, righteous among his generations, he too walked with Yah. The sages zoom in on this verse more closely and notice that it’s not just that Noah was righteous - but he was righteous in his generation. What does it mean to be righteous b’dorotav - in one's generation? Is this coming to qualify or amplify Noah’s nature? In Masechet Sanhedrin, we learn, “Rabbi Yoḥanan says: Relative to the other people of his generation he was righteous and wholehearted, but not relative to those of other generations.” As if to say, the bar was low when Noah lived. He was great, but not that great. On the other hand Reish Lakish says: In his generation he was righteous and wholehearted despite being surrounded by bad influences; all the more so would he have been considered righteous and wholehearted in other generations. As if to say, given better circumstances, one can only imagine how righteous he might have been. Are we today living through a relatively righteous or a relatively selfless generation? It's hard to imagine anyone looking back and saying, The Trump years, that was a righteous time. But as my history buff tween keeps reminding me, when was there really a righteous time? I can’t hardly pick a decade in the 20th century that looks rosy from this vantage point. I think in this case, I may always side with Reish Lakish - that the challenge is to be righteous regardless of, at times in spite of, others’ choices. I am thinking of Ms. Major, who was among the righteous souls at Stonewall, defending trans visibility before it was even possible to walk the streets as a visibly trans person. At a time when transwomen, as she describes it, were legally required to wear at least three articles of men’s clothing in public. What a disgraceful law so shaped by its time, and undone by the work of Ms. Major’s lifetime. I am thinking of Reb Arthur, who in 1976, nearly 50 years ago, wrote, “When we occupy another people, we risk losing the very soul of what makes us Israel-the people who wrestle with God and ourselves. Our security cannot be built on another’s dispossession.” His commitment to writing and advocating for justice in Israel/Palestine would later cost him his job and lead him to break with the very Jewish institutions he founded. As I reflect on the legacy of my mentors, I realize they were righteous precisely because they were ahead of their times. Because they had the courage to imagine the world transformed, to speak it into existence against all odds, to insist it was possible, to confront the limitations of the law and lean into the power of community. It is from them that I have learned what it means to be tzadik v’tamim b’dorotav. At Reb Arthur’s funeral, Bobbi Brietman, beloved chosen family, shared the poem “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou: “When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. … And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.” Great trees have fallen. May peace blossom. And may we remember that because they existed, we can be better, b’doroteinu, in our generations. On Shabbat morning I will be sharing personal stories about Ms. Major and Reb Arthur, and we will together be asking what it means to be righteous in our generation. Welcome to a new year of Friday emails. Everything is possible again. Thank you for reading these reflections, for writing back on occasion and for choosing to search with me for the undertow of goodness.
Ironically, I am choosing to begin this year with my newfound understanding of the limitations of the written word. Almost exactly a year ago we printed P’tach Libi, our new prayerbook for Shabbat and festival mornings. It was an enormous undertaking that required the labor of dozens of contributors, editors, artists and lawyers. We spent five years dreaming, scheming, editing, revising, designing and finalizing the text. And then we finally went to print. The final product is so beautiful. There is not a single shabbat that I am not grateful to pray from its pages. I knew when it was done it would be imperfect. I was prepared to find mistakes and I had decided in advance to let them go. I did not want perfect to be the enemy of the good. But what I had not anticipated was that as soon as it was done, I would have the desire to update it. And not just because of little typos, though they exist. But because there were things that were missing or misplaced in ways that affect its usage. For example, I can’t believe we don’t have any songs by Aly or Koach. Why didn’t we put “kol Yishmael” in every Kaddish, not just Kaddish Shalem? Why is the little gray box in mourner’s kaddish misaligned with the column? The third line of the priestly blessing for lifecycles is translated the same as the second line, whoops! It is likely you may never have noticed the errors and omissions, but as the person who proofed and approved every single page, I can’t help myself. I didn’t want it to be perfect, but also, I did. I mean, who wouldn’t want that much work to feel as close to perfect as possible. Spending a year praying with our new siddur, in all its glory and imperfection, has taught me that is just not how the written word works. Every single book has typos. The nature of printing is that it is finite, fixed in time, fallible. The written word is a relic. And then I realized the project was never going to be complete. I was merely taking a shabbes from working on it. This helped me understand the words we will chant tomorrow and sing every Friday night in kiddush, וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ הַשָּׁמַ֥יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ וְכׇל־צְבָאָֽם׃ Thus were finished the heavens and the earth, with all of their array (Genesis 2:1). Creation wasn’t perfect, it was just going to print for the first time. And this insight returned to me on Tuesday night at Simchat Torah as we unrolled the Torah scroll, what the rabbis refer to as Torah sh’bikhtav, the written Torah. It's an awesome sight to behold. The black fire on white fire. More than 300,000 Hebrew letters, inked by hand onto parchment. I am the first person to ogle at the sight of the large bet in Bereishit and the tiny aleph in Vayikra. The white columns in the Song of the Sea and the mysterious backwards nuns in Numbers. As awesome as the physical Torah is, as a ritual object that requires care and devotion, the rabbis understood it was also totally imperfect, even insufficient. So too with every book, printed or scribed, including our new siddur. The ink itself makes a lasting impression. It puts us all on the same literal page, but as a result, it doesn’t lend itself to change. Which is why we are ultimately students of Torah sh’be’al’peh, the oral torah, the white fire. precisely because it is alive and changing. The nature of the written word is to be perfect, preserved and static, which renders it ultimately inadequate, imperfect. As we chanted the last words of Devarim, recalling Moses’ final breath, a people bereft, a future uncertain and then in one breath returned to the beginning, to the world of Bereishit, where everything is possible, a world of light and creation, I realized that we read from the scroll but Torah lives through us. This is what it means to cling to the Tree of Life, eitz chayim hi. May this year bring us renewed energy to study, interpret and reclaim Torah so that all her paths lead to peace. |
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General Questions: (267) 702-6187 or [email protected]
Shabbat Services: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #1, Philadelphia, PA 19143