Torah

Omer’s Where The Art Is

“Meanwhile, we dig.”
— Big X (Richard Attenborough), The Great Escape

Pesach is over, the last of the matza crumbs have been vacuumed up, and our stomachs have finally returned to normal (or soon will).

Now what?

When we were kids, we thought (well, I thought) that freedom was a “done deal.” Freedom was the be-all and end-all of existence. If I could only be 18, thought I, I would be free to do whatever I wanted: bounce on the bed, eat cookies for dinner, shout fire in a crowded theater.

Of course, the realities of post-adolescent life soon disabused me of those notions. Bouncing on the bed meant I had to buy a new one when it broke. Eating cookies for dinner made me sicker than the smiling faces on the box had led me to believe. And shouting fire in a crowded theater, even metaphorically, meant hurting innocent people.

Hence, a lesson: Freedom implies responsibility. The ability to act implies — rather, demands — that we act with an eye toward consequences.

By the Jewish calendar, we’re now in the Omer period, the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot. The first festival celebrates the going-out from Egypt, from the narrow confines and blind thralldom which keeps us from living to our full measure. The second celebrates the Sinai Event and the acceptance that endless and unforseeable permutations arise from even the simplest of our actions: whether thought, or speech, or deed.

The Omer period teaches us that freedom and responsibility are not binary exclusives, but endpoints on the scale by which we weigh our lives. May we all find — or help each other acquire — the perfect balance for every challenge.

Torah

Thanksgiving v. Thanks Giving

During the course of an online discussion of Jewish practice in the United States, someone asked the resident rabbi if it was “kosher” for Jews to celebrate Thanksgiving. His terse but memorable reply: “Sure — but we do that every day.”

His point, of course, was that gratitude is not only an essential part of the Jewish daily liturgy, but also of our lives. However, like most ideals, many of us find ourselves honoring gratitude more in the breach than in the moment; we face so many irritations (exacerbated by email, cellphones, Blackberries, traffic, infotainment, talking-heads, talking points and static cling) that the end of any given day often finds us more grumbly than grateful.

But the ability to look past all that is crucial — to put aside inconvenience and indifference, to appreciate the countless miracles (astronomical, geological, meteorological, biological and technological) which have seamlessly and inexorably combined to bring us to this moment. So as we gather tomorrow for the feast modeled by its founders on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot*, in addition to giving thanks for the One who taught us about turkey (and the skill with which to cook it), let’s also give thanks for our ability to give thanks.

And if one day of gratitude leads to another, and another … we’ll have that much more to be thankful for at this time next year.

Be well.

* No, really — for example, see about midway down this page (just under the first blessing).

Torah

Feel The Fear

When Ann and I joined the small synagogue in our Northern California town back in 1998, it was with the understanding that we would get involved.

Neither of us had been, when we were younger. But especially since 2000, when I started teaching the b’nei mitzvah class and occasionally leading services, that involvement has (as anyone involved in congregational life can tell you) brought both heartwarmth and headaches. It’s nice to be part of a big happy squabbling extended family, but also sad sometimes to see and be part of the behind-the-scenes politics — especially if you’re something of a mildly bipolar idealist.

(Bit of background: our congregation — since its 1995 inception an informal, do-it-yourself kind of place — last year engaged a rabbi who liked to teach that “compassion” was not a Jewish value. Things got very bad for a while, but he quit earlier this year, and now things are better. We’re a community of smart and good-hearted people who like to learn and hang out together — and that brings its own blessing.)

Anyway, yesterday was the annual congregational sukkah-decorating party. As usual, it was mostly the schoolkids and their parents; but attendance was larger than I remember it being, and there was a nice intimate vibe that hasn’t been there before (or at least not as obvious). Everybody got to take the lulav — even some of the adults who had never before done so — and ate snacks and hung the world’s longest paper chain.

It was great, but for me also scary. I’m fairly enthusiastic about Judaism and enjoy leading services and teaching, but yesterday was One Of Those Days; sometimes my self-doubt divides me from the world, and I was looking forward to someone else leading the blessings.

That didn’t happen, though, because the someone else in question — a big enthusiastic guy who’s on his own Jewish rediscovery path, and a frequent attendee at our apartment every Shabbat morning for Torah study — handed me the lulav and etrog and said “Teach us.”

So I opened my mouth, and out popped the teaching that the Four Species — lulav (palm), hadass (myrtle), aravot (willow) and etrog (citron) — respectively stand for Jews who have much Torah learning but few accomplishments in mitzvot, many mitzvot but little Torah, neither mitzvot nor Torah, and both Torah and mitzvot. “And when we bring them together like this, it shows that we all need each other,” I concluded.

It’s not something I had thought to say — in fact, when my friend handed me the lulav I couldn’t think of anything at all but my own fear — but the warm-hearted crowd huddled under the chilly October sky welcomed it with a smile.

One of my favorite teachers, Rebbe Nachman, says “The world is a narrow bridge — the essence is not to fear.” Sometimes, though, the fear reminds you that the bridge is wide enough to cross.

Living, Torah

Home Away

For me, there are five distinct stages involved in the building of our backyard sukkah:

Denial: “Is it Sukkot again already?”
Rage: “Where did I put the $#@! zip-screws?”
Bargaining: “Please don’t make me go to the hardware store again…”
Sadness: “I don’t think this is going to last the week…”
Acceptance: “It’s beautiful!”

Me & our summer cottage
I am a humble Jew (as a blogged statement, this may be self-contradictory), so our backyard sukkah is likewise humble:

  • One 4×6-foot Persian rug
  • Eight cinder blocks
  • Four 2×2-inch posts, six feet in length, with two small L-brackets on one side (six inches from on end and 18 inches from the other)
  • Three 6-1/2′ 1×2″ slats
  • Four 4-1/2′ 1×2″ slats
  • One 7′ aluminum javelin
  • One 12×24′ camo (“mossy bark”) tarpaulin
  • Two dozen 6′ slats (1x.25″)
  • One maroon king-sized bedsheet, pole-stitched on one long side
  • Power drill, zipscrews, cable ties

First, I stretch out the rug (making sure it’s under only bare sky) and stack pairs of cinderblocks in each corner. Then I zipscrew two of the 6-1/2′ slats to two of the 2×2″ posts atop the L-brackets, inserting the latter into the cinder blocks (for the back wall frame); the remaining 6-1/2′ slat joins the other two posts, which go into the remaining cinderblock pairs (for the front wall/door frame). Two 4-1/2′ slats are then zipscrewed into place for each sidewall frames. I carefully slide the bedsheet onto the javelin, cable-tying the latter to the front-wall slat; the sheet’s bottom-right corner is then cable-tied to the frame.

Next, I unroll the tarp (which lives under our bed the rest of the year) and fold it sandwich-wise over the frames, securing the tarp’s grommets to each other along the bottom and sides) with cable-ties. Two dozen slats criss-cross the top, supporting whatever garden greenery I can scrounge (usually ivy, but this year some sort of weird ferny plant which sprouted over the summer). Two patio chairs go inside along with a TV-table (for meals and studying), et voila!

And this was how I spent yesterday afternoon. In many ways, Sukkot is my favorite holiday — I like its emphasis on life’s fragility; that it gets me outside to pray; the way the stars look through the sukkah roof; and the way the sukkah looks with my roommate inside it. There is nothing quite like building your own sukkah — just like there’s no one else like the one who builds it.

Living

… re-echo …

here’s what I wrote in a recent column…

Screaming in the dark
2/14/03
By Neal Ross

If you live among human beings, you must never mention how terribly, nakedly vulnerable we all are ? because we all spend a good deal of our lives trying to pretend we?re not.

I don?t know why that is; I suspect it?s related to our biosurvival imperative, which tries to keep us going against all odds. Intense pain is one of those odds: we humans like to build little consensual hallucinations to overlay and influence our perceptions, and intense pain ? physical, spiritual, or emotional ? shatters our careful efforts like a child?s foot through a sandcastle.

Since Dec. 27, I?ve discovered that the most profound and interesting of these pains is known as “deep grief.” On that day, Jim “Sputnik” Gjerde, my lifelong best friend (read: “psychic twin and other half”), died after spending two weeks in a coma brought on by a genetic-diabetes-related heart attack. And since then, I?ve been sifting sand and wondering what happened.

(I rarely read columns written about best friends who have just died, and writing this I realize why: If you didn?t know the person, or experience first-hand a similar loss, it won?t mean anything to you. But as death is the price of life, so is grief the price of love ? and we will all eventually experience at least one of these, in some flavor or another.)

“Deep grief” is the term used by my counselor at the Valley of the Moon Hospice Team (935-7504 ? a hard, but important, phone call), who is helping me cope with this first (for me) major loss. Deep grief (or what I?ve been calling “The Gray Sameness”) is when you don?t feel like eating, or sleeping, or working, or playing, or really doing much of anything except gazing blankly into the middle-distance, howling like an animal, and trying to melt into whatever surface is currently holding you up.

It hurts. A lot. More than can be imagined beforehand. But it also feels like an initiation into an exclusive but universal club. And therein lies The Mystery: “It cannot be borne, and yet it must.”

Generally speaking, I enjoy ungraspable mysteries ? I like the fact that the universe is bigger than my head; that some things can only be experienced, not explained. Grief is like that, but amid the rust and ashes there are glimmers of light ? definitely present though not always seen. And that?s exactly as it should be, at least for now.

A longtime friend called the other day to check on me. When he told me that his brother had died five years ago, I stopped in mid-mumble. “You know,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” he replied.

“So I don?t have to explain anything to you,” I said.

“Not one bit,” he said.

He then told me about the day, some time after his brother?s death, when he looked up and realized that he had just had a good hour. Sometime after that, the good time expanded to two hours. Then, eventually, a half-day. Then a whole day, two, a week. And so forth. The pain never left, but it did become manageable.

My friend then apologized for sounding superficial, and I told him there was no need: “You?re someone who?s traveled further down a path I?m currently walking, and telling me what it looks like. So thank you ? because right now, I have no idea how to even get to that first good minute.”

At this writing, I still don?t. But at least I know it?s coming ? and I hope to recognize it when it arrives.

Living, Writing

eulogy

This is what I said about Jim at his funeral:

When studying to be a rabbi, I learned a tradition that says one should begin every public discourse with a jest. So here?s Jim?s and my very favorite shared joke ? at least, the one that?s suitable for mixed company:

A man who had studied much in the schools of wisdom finally died in the fullness of time and found himself at the Gates of Eternity.

An angel of light approached him and said, “Go no further, O mortal, until you have proven to me your worthiness to enter into Paradise!”

But the man answered, “Just a minute now. First of all, can you prove to me this is a real Heaven, and not just the wild fantasy of my disordered mind undergoing death?”

Before the angel could reply, a voice from inside the gates shouted:

“Let him in – he’s one of us!”

The ironic thing about my best friend dying is that he’s the only one with whom I want to discuss it.

This is my first visit to Griefland, and I’m still finding my way around. But “Sputnik” would see the black crushing horror part of it AS WELL AS the intensely spiritual aspect. And know that the one does not preclude the other.

Jim and I were psychic twins for life, even though our 1980s-era experiments at roommate-hood proved that we would viciously murder each other in our sleep if we ever tried living together again. We were that much alike, and when you love someone that deeply it gives them leave to annoy you mightily. And annoy each other we did, though never intentionally.

But what really annoys me is that Jim finally won the game we’d been playing ever since we met in 1978. You see, he now knows something I don’t.

For Sputnik and I, the Alpha Male game was measured not by how big our toys were but by how big our brains and hearts were — and how well we used them. Our serious quest for the Sourceless Source meant we couldn’t afford to mess around with anything less — and even though we freely acknowledged that our quest was ultimately unachievable, we wanted it to be real.

An anthropologist’s skepticism, saint’s reverence and anarchist’s sense of humor, coupled with his amazing memory, made Jim fingertip-familiar with numberless and little-known facts, theories, theologies, philosophies, ontologies, epistemologies, epiphanies, chemical interactions and their results, and strange doings of mutual friends and secretly-famous personalities. As Jim’s psychic twin, I can tell you that this paved the way for inevitable and mutual quasi-macho posturing.

Now, one of the great joys of sharing unshared information is making the other fellow say, “Wow! Where’d you hear that?” During our quarter-century together, I could probably count on one hand the times that actually happened instead of the usual “Right. And have you thought about this or that correlation?”

This unspoken but obvious competition kept us both on the Path, which — for the two of us — was the exact same path with the exact same curves at roughly the same time, exquisitely tailored to our individual hands, accompanied by headshaking laughter at our unswerving devotion to something so obviously arbitrary and wordlessly meaningful as our different religious traditions ? his Christian, mine Jewish. But Jim was always a practical guy, living both in the moment as well as in its multiple interpretations, cheerfully accepting the Mystery even as he poked at its manifestations.

Well, that Mystery is cleared up for one of us. And now that Jim’s life is a closed book, I’m really beginning to see how much we actually were a part of each other — and how much a part we all are of everyone we know, especially if we let each other all the way inside.

None of us will never “get over” Jim’s death, because we will never get over Jim’s life. We can’t help it, because we ultimately live in each other. And while it may take a long time for the pain of Jim’s death to lessen, if it ever does, it won?t take nearly as long for us to understand that he is, and always will be, still with us.

Happy trails, my friend. I hope I’ll see you later.

Living

Two Towers, Two Tasks

FOR SOME REASON, THREE SIGNIFICANT dates fell out fairly close together recently: Sonoma’s first (?) 9/11 commemoration, Simchat Torah and the autumnal equinox. The first marks the end of American innocence; the second, the annual restarting of the synagogic Torah cycle; the third goes on regardless of human observation (unless, of course, Time only exists for those of us who count it). I was privileged to say something public about this in the pieces which follow; the first at Sonoma’s first 9/11 commemoration, the second at a service I led not long after:

D’var 9/11 – Open, Closed, Open (title borrowed from Yehuda Amichai)

I’m Neal Ross Attinson, a lay leader at Congregation Shir Shalom, and first I’d like to ask for a show of hands – On this day last year, how many people felt somewhat unable to get through the day, let alone the coming year?

On that Tuesday afternoon, I put an American flag on my car antenna as a sign of mourning. I’m removing it tomorrow, and I’d like to tell you why.

Jewish tradition recognizes the first year of mourning as an important stage of grief. During that year, we say a special memorial prayer every day. But at the close of the year, we stop – and only say it on each anniversary of the death thereafter.

This doesn’t mean we stop thinking about the person who has died – just as none of us here tonight will stop thinking about what happened a year ago. It means that we have integrated the person’s death, and our own grief, into our lives. We have not put the person behind us. What we have put behind us is the first year of grieving. In effect, we have closed one door and are ready to open another.

The central statement of Jewish faith, which the Torah commands us to say twice daily, is called the Sh’ma. The word “Sh’ma” means “listen,” and the first six words in Hebrew are “Sh’ma Yisroel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.” My favorite interpretation is, “Listen, you who wrestle with the Divine and with yourselves. G-d is simply G-d. G-d is One.”

I’m going to recite the first six words of the Shema, just as we recite it in synagogue – feel free to join me if you know it. As the echoes of this Shema die away, let’s take a few moments to listen – to our hearts, to the sound of our own breathing and that of those here with us – listen to the sound of the future through the open door before us all.

“Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad…”

Dvar Haazinu 5763

An old rabbi once said to a young scholar, “Sogt mir a posek – give me a verse of Torah – tell me what you know.” “But Rabbi,” the student said. “I only know a little Torah.” The rabbi replied, “That is all anyone knows of Torah.”

This week’s Torah portion finds Moses about to die, exhorting the Jews not to forget their heritage when they pass into the Land. “For this is not a trifling thing for you,” Moses says. “It is your very life; through it you shall long endure.”

It’s a fitting portion for this Shabbat – Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Shuvah means return, and on this Shabbat Shuvah I’d like to challenge us all to do just that.

Sunday, September 29 is Simchat Torah. We reach the end of the Torah and immediately begin again at the beginning, just as we’ve done for more than 2,000 years. We’ll then read a little bit each week until October 19, 2003, when we start all over again. We do this because the Torah is THE core document of Judaism – it’s not the only one, but it is why we have all the others.

Here’s the challenge: On September 29, why not come along for the ride?

If you accept this challenge, I personally and absolutely guarantee that three things will happen: You will be profoundly bored by some of what you read. You will be profoundly moved, maybe shocked, by some of it. But most importantly, you yourself will know what the Torah actually says. And using Torah as a door, you may travel a little further down the road to understanding Judaism – and maybe also yourself.

Some things to remember: Don’t get hung up on the “right” way to read the weekly portion. Many people like to read a little every day. Others read the whole portion a couple of times during the week, or on Saturday morning. You also don’t need to agree with or even believe what you’re reading – in fact, you probably won’t – you just have to believe it’s important.

Obviously, you also need a good translation of the text and a schedule of readings. If you don’t have the text, or – worse – if you only have the King James version (a notoriously bad translation), talk to me after the oneg; it’ll be easy to get one before the 29th. There’s a schedule of readings in each temple bulletin, but I will also post them weekly on our congregational email list – and give you any other help you ask for.

So there’s the challenge: Read one book, over the course of a year, a little at a time. What have you got to lose?