PunkTorah

Independent Jewish Spirituality

Full of Awesome

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(originally posted on The EdibleTorah)

I was inspired this morning by a post over on Redefine Girly. (“Waking Up Full of Awesome“). It reads (in part):

There was a time when you were five years old,
and you woke up full of awesome.
You knew you were awesome.
You loved yourself.
You thought you were beautiful,
even with missing teeth and messy hair and mismatched socks inside your grubby sneakers.
You loved your body, and the things it could do.
You thought you were strong.
You knew you were smart.
Do you still have it?
The awesome.
Did someone take it from you?
Did you let them?
Did you hand it over, because someone told you weren’t beautiful enough, thin enough, smart enough, good enough?
Why the hell would you listen to them?
Did you consider they might be full of shit?

Here in the month of Elul, we stand before true awesomeness – God – and try to honestly assess our work this past year. We ask forgiveness for the times we fell short of the best person we could be.

But do we also celebrate those moments when we measured up? Made in the image of our Awesome Creator, do we take a minute to say “Hey, I was awesome too! Thanks for giving me the ability and the opportunity to be ‘all that’. I totally rocked that time. I hope you are proud of me, because I am!”

We probably don’t. Because it’s not politically correct. Because we’re taught not to blow our own horn. Because we are told to be humble.

I think we need to rethink that. I’ll write more on that tomorrow.

But for today, I’ve got an assignment:

  1. Go back to bed. Not really. Just GET back in bed.
  2. Spend 5 uninterrupted minutes remembering times you were awesome this year.
  3. Get out of bed.
  4. Take another full minute to thank God for giving you those chances to be awesome, and for giving you the ability to take hold of those moments and be your best self in them
  5. Carry around that feeling – of self worth and gratitude – for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow, and for the rest of the month of Elul, you have the same homework. It’s OK to copy from yesterday’s homework.

Because that’s how Awesome works.

When You Have Nobody to Pray For

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At some point during the Shabbat service there comes a moment when the leader stops and invites the congregation to speak the names of people in need of healing. The congregation, having heard those names, keeps those people in their thoughts as a prayer is spoken.

The prayer is the Mi Sheberach. It is based on a tersely worded entreaty to God by Moses himself – the shortest supplication recorded in Torah: “El na refa na la” (Please God, heal her now!”). It appears in Parsha Beha’alotcha, which we’ll read this comming Shabbat.

There is, of course, something every exposing about the whole process. I know people who would be horrified to know that they had been “outed” in this way.

I don’t believe the tradition developed as a way to satisfy the voyeuristic impulse. I believe that the mi sheberach is a communal experience. We say the names out loud and in the public of our chosen community so that everyone can know when someone needs support without the need for the suffer-er to ask people directly, or to have someone ask on their behalf.

This week, I realized that having this moment during the service accomplishes another important task: it’s a good indicator of how self-absorbed you are.

There are plenty of good reasons not to speak someone’s name: you know someone else is in the congregation is going to do it, you don’t know their Hebrew name and your congregation prefers it, etc. But even so, you have have a name in mind. Your intention is clear.

This week – as most weeks – I sat silently as those around me spoke the names of those they knew who needed healing. I marveled at the 3 people who each held a list of a dozen (or more) names to recite. And that’s when it struck me:

If you have nobody in your life who needs healing on some level; nobody in such a condition – whom you know well enough to want to say their name out loud in the congregation – then there are really only two explanations:

  • Either you are remarkably blessed to be surrounded by incredibly healthy people…
  • Or you are so wrapped up in your own life that you aren’t paying attention to those around you. You aren’t part of your community at all.

So… which is it, and what are you going to do about it?

Originally posted at EdibleTorah:

http://www.edibletorah.com/2011/06/10/when-you-have-nobody-to-pray-for/

Meditation on the Omer

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49, 48, 47…

The opening moments of Passover are behind me, and I’m left with a sense of something momentous having passed with it. There’s a dryness in my mouth and heaviness in my gut that has nothing to do with the matza I’ve consumed.

…46, 45, 44…

I’ve traveled out of Mitzrayim (“the narrow place”, the place which may once have been big enough for me, but which became constricting); I’ve run pell-mell through the gauntlet of nature’s forces, chased by the demons of my past to emerge out into vast unknown desert where I apparently must wander. Without a guide, I will easily lose my way.

…43, 42, 41, 40, 39…

Each day, each step, is a single drum beat, counting out a steady rhythm of moments. The days of the Omer, marking time from Pesach to Shavuot, also note the potential for the transformation of the rough, low-quality barley of my soul into a pure, humble, chometz-free offering.

…38, 37, 36…

Where will these days take me? I feel like I need to have a plan, even as I know that anything I expect to happen most likely won’t. But without a goal, what would keep me moving at all?

…35, 34, 33…

Do I know where I want to be? Is it even possible for me to imagine how this geography and community will shape me? What opportunities will be presented to me? Which ones I’ll be brave enough to take advantage of? Who, of those around me will be persistent enough to overcome my fear and doubt?

…32, 31,…

Still…
Even if, 49 days from now, I look back and say “I had no idea I’d end up here”, I still must start the process, if I expect to get anywhere.

…30, 29, 28, 27…

Originally posted here.

 

You Were Only Waiting

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For a long time, I carried around with me a very depressing mental image for the Beatles song “Blackbird”. I would relate it here, but I’ve been told by enough people that it ruined their enjoyment of the song so I usually just keep it to myself.

Not that my mental image inhibited my own love of the song. I took a fond, if somewhat morbidly melancholy, pleasure in singing it and hearing it performed. But it was never a happy song.

Then, when my son Joram (who is now 10) was a baby we had this routine. He was hard to put to sleep, so we would rock in the chair and I would pat his back. With significant force. No namby-pamby girly-man taps for him. He would only settle down if you gave him room-echoing “whomps” with your whole hand. And it wasn’t that slow, heartbeat type rhythm that seems so soothing. Joram preferred a medium-to-fast beat. So there I am, pounding out a steady rhythm and rocking him to sleep when I realized:

(pat pat pat pat)
Blackbird singin’ in the dead of night
(pat pat pat pat)
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
(pat pat pat)
All your life
(pat pat pat)
You were only waiting for this moment to arrive

In that moment of discovery, several things came together for me and were resolved – my concern about having a son; the personal upheaval of that time – a job change, a country change, a new child; and so on. And above it all was the immediate and complete transformation of that song into something positive and hopeful. The lyrics took on new and very personal meaning, and I knew I would never hear it the same way again.

It is said that encounters with God (however you envision God) are transformative. Torah shows us this with the many name changes (Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, Jacob (“heel”) becomes Israel (“God wrestler”).) Upon meeting Moses, even God gets a name change (or at least the revealing of a name within the context of the Torah narrative).

What we understand from these episodes in Torah is that meeting God is transformative – once you’ve encountered the Divine, you cannot remain the same. By reverse logic, if you find yourself (inexplicably) transformed, that is evidence of an encounter with God.

In that instant of change for Joram and I, Shechinah (another name for God, meaning “her spirit which surrounds us”) came into the room.

I think Mr. McCartney would be proud.

Originally posted here.

Everything Is NOT Going To Be OK (A Passover D’var)

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In the movie “The Princess Bride”, the heroine Buttercup negotiates what she believes is safety for her true love Wesley before she is whisked off as a prisoner. As she rides away, Wesley looks at his captors (who have no intention of honoring the bargain) with a calm that contradicts his situation and says “We are men of action, lies do not become us”. Whereupon they knock him senseless and drag him to his death. (For those who haven’t seen the movie: Don’t worry, eventually he gets better).

In his essay “No, Everything Is Not Going to Be OK”, author Seth Godin eschewes the trite (and often empty) offer of hope that people seek. We are told by everyone from parents to spouses to managers to people at the other end of the bar that “it’s going to be OK”, when it is obvious that they barely understand our situation; when it is clear to us that it really WON’T be OK. But we choose to accept and believe their words because sometimes we want reassurance more than we want honesty or clarity.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that sometimes – maybe a lot of times – it WILL be OK. Our moment of panic is just that, and once the stress has passed things really will return to the way they were before.

But, Seth posits, when people need to create, or innovate, or adapt – in those situations, honestly it’s not going to be OK.

It’s going to be different. Some things MIGHT be better, but there’s a good chance that at least some things won’t be better, that some things won’t be the same and that some things could get worse. In fact, when we introduce change, there’s a chance that everything will get worse, at least for a while.

Standing at the edge of the sea – with the vast expanse of water in front of them and the might of the Egyptian army bearing down on them from behind, the Israelites may have realized this.

In that moment of panic, the more analytically minded Israelites might have pondered how they were simply facing one of the many possible bad outcomes of their choices – they could have stayed in Egypt and been killed by harsh labor, they could have failed to follow Moses’ instructions and succumbed to one of the plagues. Heck, they could have stubbed their toe walking out their door on the morning of liberation, gotten an infection, and died on the road to this current predicament.

I’m not going to waste time on pediatric theology. I’m not going to ponder whether the waters really parted, or whether Moses was one historical figure or an amalgamation of many, or any of those “big idea” questions today.

If you spend all your energy trying to figure out how that guy built a great big boat and put all those animals on it, you are missing the point. If you are computing the probability that a tsunami caused a massive low tide, and calculating how long 600,000 people would take to cross the resulting land bridge, you are missing a whole level of thought

Because I think that often (and especially at points in the Torah narrative like this), our holiest of writings is NOT asking us to think so much about what happened, but rather to focus on what people DID about what happened.

So let’s consider how a group of people decided to put one foot in front of the other to leave an abusive situation, a situation that was not healthy for them to be in (even though it may have been “the way things are” or even if others were thriving in that same situation). Consider that they braved blood and vermin and disease and fire and darkness (whether literal or metaphorical) to change their place. They stood up to the powers-that-be and kept demanding what they needed until those powers relented.

And when they stood at the edge of something new and vast, but with Pharaoh ready to drag them back, they may have felt like Al Pacino’s character in “The Godfather” series, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

BUT… rather than sighing and hanging their head and going back to their codependent spouse or overly needy kids or their gang or their toxic workplace or whatever it was – instead of allowing everything to fall back into the status quo – they found that rare courage to keep creating, keep innovating, keep adapting to the REAL situation – not the one they wished it was, not the one they may have been sold. And it also wasn’t their worst fears come to life, either.

Seth states: “No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn’t okay now. Change, by definition, changes things. It makes some things better and some things worse. But everything is never okay. Finding the bravery to shun faux reassurance is a critical step in producing important change. Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it’s a lot easier to launch work that matters”.

Looking at the big picture, Seth is wrong. Really, gigantically, monumentally wrong. It actually *is* going to be OK, at least from God’s perspective. It’s all going to come out just the way it is supposed to. It was OK, it is currently OK and it’s still going to be OK 5 minutes from now. But that’s the long view, the “when we look back on this tomorrow (or next week or maybe in 10 years) we’ll all have a good laugh” view. We can (and should) take comfort knowing that there is a plan and that we are all part of it.

But we should also recognize that feeling OK about things in each and every moment is not a guarantee. It may not even be something we should expect, especially if we want to live creative and energetic lives where we pursue dreams and push limits. If we want that, we should probably figure that this “not-OK” feeling is going to part of our day.

The other point that we can’t overlook – with regard to both our collective Jewish experience and with our individual creative ones – is that we aren’t alone. When we create, we are offering up the service of our heart to those around us and to God. It becomes part of the community. If our community really is OUR community then we and our creations will be accepted and honored and supported for what they are.

As Michael Walzer states in “Exodus and Revolution”,

“Standing on the parted shores of history
We still believe what we were taught
Before ever we stood at Sinai’s foot;
That wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt
That there is a better place, a promised land;
That the winding way to that promise
Passes through the wilderness.
That there is no way to get from here to there
Except by joining hands, marching together.”

This week’s d’var was written by Leon Adato from EdibleTorah.com

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