Completely out of season

In going through a Random Pile O' Stuff, I found this paragraph. I'm not sure where it came from, since it looks like it was cut out of a larger piece of paper, and I don't remember having seen it before. I also can't credit it. It has to do with Tashlich, the Jewish custom practiced on Rosh Hashanah afternoon of casting our sins away in the form of throwing bread into a moving body of water.

"Each quality, even those that seem bad, contributed somehow to our self-preservation. It had a good life-affirming purpose at one point, even this that is now no longer true. In order to let go of such a habit, I need to give it a 'testimonal' to send it away with my thanks. 'I needed you, and there you were, and I thank you for it. And now, with full appreciation, I know that I no longer need you and I can send you away.' This is different from trying to stamp it out. We no longer say, 'I'm sorry I did this. I'm throwing that behavior away.' We say, 'Thank you, God, for this gift. I needed it then; I no longer need it now. I am returning it to the universe in the hope that it can help generate life elsewhere as it did for me.' And this needs to be true for all the things we want to say good-bye to at Tashlikh. This is what we mean by biodegradable."

I suppose one hardly needs to wait for Tashlich for this, and I suppose Pesach is also a particularly good time to think of those habits and ways of thinking which we could stand to cast off. And considering shedding those habits as regifting rather than destroying may come in great use.

Baruch who? Aror who?

This is the first year we've actually celebrated Purim. While we did not get too drunk to differentiate between Mordechai and Haman (and there's an intriguing analysis of that mitzvah here), we did go to the PurimShpiel at our synagogue. Although I was slightly disappointed that this year did not feature rabbis cross-dressing, I enjoyed the improv troupe they had instead. Also free snacks. Afterwards, we went out for sushi with several friends, and our conversation devolved into "making beef stroganoff" as a euphemism for other activities.

This is probably why the rabbis who taught our Intro to Judaism class recommended Purim or Chanukah rather than the High Holy Days as one's first Jewish holiday. Oops.

Helpful Hint

I was talking to my friend Esther about my anxiety concerning the Beit Din, and she said, "If they ask you what Jewish person you most admire, just don't say Jesus Christ. Otherwise, you can't really screw up a Beit Din."

And now for something completely different

A friend of mine posted a link to this article about why Jews don't write fantasy literature (as differentiated from science fiction). Narnia* and Middle Earth, Prydain and Oz played a large role in my childhood (some who know me would ask if anything's changed), and I had noticed a lack of Jewish representation in the genre. The article helps explain why.

*I didn't realize for years after I read the Chronicles of Narnia that they're a Christian allegory. That helped explain why I had such a hard time handling the last book, The Last Battle, since from what I understand, it's based on the Book of Revelation. I found it confusing and unsettling, in a way that the other books weren't. I read the other six over and over, but I think I only read The Last Battle once. I should probably read it again; I think it would make more sense to me now.

Also, I become cranky at the sets of the Chronicles of Narnia that reorder the books to be in chronological order. If Lewis had wanted them that way, he would have ordered them that way himself. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while chronologically second, is intended to be the reader's introduction to Narnia. By the time you get to The Magician's Nephew, chronologically first, but sixth in the series, you should have five books worth of Narnian background, so you have the knowledge of what's going to happen to the country in its future.

And at this point, C would be teasing me with something like "There's no such thing as chronological order for things that didn't happen." C prefers to read books based in reality. I think reality is overrated.

Un-boring Exodus

So we're in the portion of Exodus which goes into long and painful...I mean painstaking...detail about the construction of the Tabernacle and the priestly garments and every little thing.

The cantor ran last Shabbat's Torah study, and he brought to us a text from Rabbi Arthur Waskow. I excerpt it here, but it really should be read in its entirety.

*****

"For twenty-five years, week in, week out, I have danced and wrestled with the Torah. I have always found new life in the weekly reading. Never, never, have I found a portion boring....

-- except for the string of readings near the end of Exodus. T'rumah (Exodus 25-27:19). On how to build the Mishkan, that portable golden sanctuary in the desert. And Tetzaveh (Exodus 27:20-30:10), on exactly how the high priest should dress.

Not to speak of their twins soon afterward, on the very same subjects all over again -- Vayak'heyl (Exodus 35-38:20) and Pekudeh (Exodus 38:21-40).

I confess. If it hadn't been for the Golden Calf in the middle, if there had been four weeks in a row of this drivel, I might have run wild-eyed out of shul, I might have forgotten to come back again.

All the details about how and when and where to design, and carve, and sculpt, and sew, and erect. Obsessive. Niggling. Petty. And then to repeat the whole thing, all over again in the later weekly portions!

Who cares where the grommets went? What were grommets anyway? Aha -- those connector loops and rings! But now that I know, I still don't know who cares. Who cares how long the hinges were? Who cares whether the skins were dolphin fur or badger fur, who cares whether the dyes were scarlet or purple or indigo?"

. . .

"Until the year that a friend of mine came back from the first great march on Washington for gay rights -- the largest march in fifteen years, she said.

She spoke on a Friday night in my congregation. She talked about the sense of joyful self-discovery, the liberation from years of secrecy, the tears of welcome that gay people gave their non-gay families and friends who marched alongside them in love and solidarity.

And then she talked about the enormous quilt, more than two blocks square, that the gay community had come to make together.

It was a Quilt of Names, a memorial for the thousands of people who had already died of AIDS. Each square was made by the friends and family of one person who had suffered and died -- most of them young, full of excitement and energy and hope until the disease laid hold of them.

A few of the squares were in dark and mournful colors. Many more were bright, crimson and purple and indigo, crocheted and knitted and embroidered with flowers and symbols and words and names. Each one a tombstone in cloth. There on the grass of the Mall in Washington, a whole graveyard in cloth. Thousands of squares.

And now the time had come, she said, to join these squares together in one gigantic quilt. Each one had been made with grommets so that it could be connected to the ones around it. Those who remembered each person who had died, those who had celebrated and remembered and memorialized each life, began to tie one grommet to another.

When the quilt was completed, she said, it was ready to be carried from city to city. A holy memorial to life much more than death, to hope much more than fear, to courage much more than pain.

The third time she mentioned "grommets," it came like a rush to me. The Mishkan, the golden Shrine. The great portable sanctuary in the wilderness, to be carried from place to place as the people journeyed. The people had come to build it with so much love, so many gifts, so much excitement, that Moses had needed to call a halt to the outpouring."

. . .

"The Quilt of Names was a Mishkan, I realized with a rush.

The newly free community of gay men and lesbians were celebrating their first taste of freedom with a first act of communal responsibility -- making sure that their dead were not forgotten. Making sure that the world turned its attention to ending this plague and curing its victims. Turning what the world called their "transgressions" into freedom and community.

Building. Creating. Sewing. Weaving. Carrying. Connecting.

A Mishkan not only in the sense of a portable shrine.

A Mishkan in the sense of a Place where the Shekhinah dwells, a Place where God's presence can be felt in our very midst.

God dwells where the newly free remember their pain with tears and create their future in joy."

*****

Amein.

QotD #1

"Religion is man's effort to elicit meaning and value from confrontation with the holy." -- Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought, p. 47

This breaks down, of course, when dealing with those who don't believe in "the holy". I haven't read anything by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, not because I'm against atheism (I was, after all, raised atheist), but because I resent being told that because I'm not an atheist, I must necessarily be stupid or deluded or both.

There is a whole long rambling post in my opinion of the nature of the divine...actually, there are probably several, since said opinion tends to fluctuate. I really hope my Beit Din doesn't ask me about my relationship to God, since I'm afraid I'll end up stuttering and flailing and having no answer whatsoever.

Only the Jews...

From our synagogue's perpetual library sale, I acquired a book of Yiddish short stories (in translation, of course).

I've read a lot of short story collections. Never before have I read one which had a seventy-page introduction apologizing for its existence.

"One could not say of Yiddish literature, as the critic Chernyshevsky has said of the Russian, that it 'constitutes the sum total of our intellectual life', but one can say that the Yiddish writers came before their audience, as did the Russian writers of the nineteenh century, with an instinctive conviction that their purpose was something other than merely to entertain and amuse. The achievements of Russian literature are obviously greater than that of the Yiddish, but both share the assumption that the one subject truly worthy of serious writers is the problem of collective destiny, the fate of a people. " (30)

"Only if they took the myth of the Chosen People with the utmost seriousness, yet simultaneously mocked their pretensions to being anything but the most wretched people on earth, could the Jews survive. " (26)

(From A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, eds. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg)

Yes of course, the introduction is more than an apologia. I know very little of Yiddish, and what I know of life in the shtetl comes mostly from Fiddler on the Roof, so it's very educational. Every time I read about an aspect of Judaism, I'm reminded how very much I don't know. Baby steps, baby steps.