Tag: There’s a God in My Soup

Religious experience, or at least the experience of religion.

Double Identity

IN ADDITION TO what else one may find in a wallet (money, DL, &c.), mine contains two cards that license me as a member of the clergy.

They’re neither what you think – I’m not a rabbi, nor will I likely become one in this life – but they do tell a semi-religious story nonetheless.

The first came c. 1999, after a friend who was a member of the Universal Life Church asked me if I too wanted to be ordained. “Sure! What do I need to do?” I asked him. After anointing my head with a frosty cold one (it was a very hot day, in the way that only Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire days can be very hot), he declared, “You’re in.” He then told me where to write and receive my free ordination credentials.

ULC espouses a single creed: “Know your beliefs and be true to them.” And because ULC is legally recognized in California (and other enlightened states) for solemnizing weddings, I have since married a handful of friends – which was, really, why I wanted ordainment in the first place.

The other ordination, also legally recognized in some places, belongs to the Church of the SubGenius. Those behind that inexplicable parody religion/religious parody/living art project published a trade paperback in 1983 which – much like science-fiction conventions and DEVO – assured lonely misfits that they too had a place, and a people, they could call their own. Of course, I took to it in a big, enthusiastic way.

Unlike the ULC, the CotS then charged $20 for an ordination kit. So, justifying it as for a good cause, I mailed a Jackson to their Dallas, Texas headquarters. Within a week I received an ordination card, a poster of Church frontman J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, and various pieces of SubG propaganda (some of which I distributed in the summer of 1985 at 2 a.m. in Times Square – but that story is classified.)

For a long time, my ULC and CotS “ministries” helped me feel as though I belonged somewhere spiritually important. I am grateful to be able to do that now in other ways. But I will always be respectfully grateful to the Revs. Kirby Hensley and Ivan Stang for opening their secretly famous doors and inviting me in.

Portable Holiness

ONE OF THE more mysterious details of this week’s Torah portion, Naso (Numbers 4:21–7:89), concerns the “nazirite” – someone who decides to swear off of wine and other grape products, haircuts, and engaging with the deceased.

Why would anyone do such a thing?

The Torah doesn’t explain, but Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz offers three traditional viewpoints:

1. Out of gratitude for a gift or blessing from G?d.

2. To fulfill a vow to G?d.

3. To draw nearer the Divine by achieving a measure of personal holiness.

That last point takes a bit of unpacking. For our ancestors, closeness to G?d could normally be achieved in only two ways – either through bringing a sacrifice to the Tabernacle or Temple, or by being born into one of the Levitical families who serve in it.

However, not everyone could afford a sacrifice. And while not everyone had the privilege of inheriting a sacred status, anyone could be as holy as someone who did. Being a nazirite took a dedication to principles, vigilance over one’s behavior, and a certain amount of self-sacrifice.

Though there’s no longer a Tabernacle or Temple, we call someone who holds and exemplifies those qualities a “mensch.”

Sounds a lot like holiness to me.

Put Your Hand on the Radio

A RABBINICAL ASSISTANT, two deacons, and a lay mystic walk into a radio studio.

Seriously.

Welcome to the Sonoma Valley Interfaith Radio Hour, a years-old, live and lively round-robin every Thursday afternoon from 3-4pm Pacific Time on Sonoma Valley’s independent station KSVY (91.3 FM and streaming/archived at ksvy.org). It features one Jew (me), the deacons (Presbyterian and Roman Catholic), and a Christian Science practitioner. (With occasional guesting by my rabbi, by an Irish Catholic priest, and by whoever else we can grab from our local ecumenical Cobb salad.)

Our informal discussions cover broad ground: e.g., different faith traditions’ understandings and manifestations of moral and ethical ideals; life-cycle events such as birth, coming of age, marriage and divorce, and dying/mourning; the multiform flavors of our worship services; observing holidays and holy days; encounters with the Bible and other holy books; and how we ourselves each came to our respective “ministries.” We have deep respect for each other’s religious backgrounds and deep attachments to our own – as our Presbyterian emcee puts it, “We’re all swimming in the same direction” – and are on the air not to convert or proselytize, but to educate, enlighten, and (we hope) edify.

What also makes the show work, I think, is that outside of our collegial collective, the Valley prides itself on a thriving interfaith fellowship; we’re so geographically isolated, it’s to our evolutionary advantage to get along as well as we do. It helps, too, that through our long association we have become quite close – itself a byproduct of sharing intensely real conversations every week. And speaking personally, I find that learning about others’ sacred practices makes me understand and appreciate my own that much more. Tune us in and see if that’s true for you!

365 Names: “The Eternal”

THE ETERNAL is one of the many, many translations for יהוה‎ – a mostly untranslatable Hebrew divine moniker or “theonym” (which term I just now learned – thank you, Wikipedia!) connected with a form of the cognate “to be.” It appears in the Torah (Exodus 3:15) right after another theonym, אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה (“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” or “I Will Be What I Will Be”) in Ex. 3:14, where Moses asks G?d what Name to tell the enslaved Jews who will question his authority to speak on G?d’s behalf. “The Eternal” takes the “to be” ball and runs with it, in the sense/concept of G?d existing forever and ever, outside of spacetime, infinite and unknowable. (We could get all mystical and Qabalistic at this point, nattering on about lofty Ain Sof (transcendence) v. folksy Shekhina (immanence), but let’s save that for another time – no pun intended.)

This is one of my favorite Names for that-which-some-people-call-God: some are creative, others traditional, each unique. If you want to see your favorite here, but haven’t, send it along with the subject line “365 Names” and let us know whether or not you want to be credited.

Time Life

(An adjunct and extension of the previous message, this one is a sermon I delivered Friday night [even though I’m writing this on Friday afternoon] – evidence of Time’s weird curling ways. As always, feel free to skip it if you’re not into this sort of thing.)

TIME. Is it really on our side? According to this week’s Torah portion, that’s all a matter of perspective.

In Exodus 12:2, G?d commands Moses and Aaron: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Having and marking a calendar was the first mitzvah given to us as a nation, even before we left Egyptian slavery.

Why is that important? Because free people need calendars to arrange their lives – slaves don’t.

In his book The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls Judaism “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” But what exactly is time?

On a micro-level, time is a property of the complex and mysterious motions of atoms. Up where we live, however, we need a more useful definition. Enter Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

Rabbi Sacks tells us that time can be conceived in two ways. The first is “cyclical” or “mythic” time. It’s the time referred to by Ecclesiastes: plants and people and weather and seasons pass from being to nonbeing and back again. This is also the time of Fate and Destiny – unchanging, monotonous, predictable.

The second sort of time Rabbi Sacks describes is “historical” time. This is more random and less predictable than the first: An unknown future flows into the present to become fixed in the past. Anything can happen, and often does.

Jews – optimists and outliers that we are – live by a third type of time. It’s helpful to think of it as “spiral” or “corkscrew” time – the latter an appropriate analogy for the wine-rich Valley of the Moon. Every birthday and anniversary, every holiday and Torah reading finds us having grown just a little bit more. Each recurring event brings us farther along from our humble past and, so our tradition teaches us, that much closer to the promise of a glorious future.

Seen this way, the moments of our lives are more like souvenir stands than destinations, more like crossroads than dead ends. So my question tonight is, “What souvenirs have you collected? In other words, what events or moments helped shape you from the person you were to the person you’re becoming?”

[pass mic]

Thank you, everyone. May your road ahead be familiar enough for comfort, yet unusual enough for exploration. Shabbat shalom.

Time Clock

WHY IS A calendar important? (Aside from telling us when to spring forward and fall back, that is.)

One answer comes from our Torah, where G?d tells Moses and Aaron that “this month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Exodus 12:2). The context: Nine plagues have been sent against Pharaoh and his country. Following a hint of the final and most terrible plague – the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn, in direct consequence of Pharaoh’s identical edict against Jewish infants – G?d wants the Jews to mark forever afterward our going-forth from slavery.

But to do that, we first require a calendar – the first mitzvah given to us as a nation.

Slaves don’t need a calendar. They work when ordered to, until commanded to stop. Free people, on the other hand, can organize their time however they wish, so our ancient sages organized the Jewish calendar to be both lunar and solar. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, its months follow the phases of the moon, with seasons following the position of the sun. In seven years out of nineteen, we add an extra month so as not to, for example, eventually celebrate Pesach (Passover) in the wintertime.

The communal Pesach lamb-feast is the second mitzvah given to us as a nation. So important is this event to our identity that this week’s Torah portion also includes four different directives commanding us to tell our children just what happened on this most momentous of dates.

Perhaps that’s why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls Judaism “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” And that’s the perfect kavvanah (intention) to hold as we enter into Shabbat!

More Better

A KEY PHRASE in this week’s Torah portion of Va’eira (Exodus 6:2-9:35) reveals much about the state of mind of our centuries-long Egyptian slavery. It happens after G?d tells Moses to proclaim that G?d will liberate our ancestors and bring them home to the Land of Promise.

However, nobody pays attention: “Moshe spoke to the B’nei Yisrael, but they would not listen to Moshe because of [their] shortness of wind and hard labor” (Exodus 6:9; Metsudah Publications translation).

The Hebrew word translated by Metsudah as “wind” is “ruach,” which can also mean “breath” or “spirit;” Jewish mystical tradition teaches that ruach is the spiritual element connecting our physicality (“nefesh”) to our inner spark of G?dliness (“neshama”). Rabbi Jonathan Sacks translates our verse’s second half as “…but in the brokenness of their spirit and brutal labor they did not listen to him.”

It’s very hard for the continually (and generationally) traumatized to work toward, or even hope for, better days. Rabbi Sacks puts it like this: “If you want to improve people’s spiritual situation, you must first improve their physical situation. … Alleviating poverty, curing disease, ensuring the rule of law, and respecting human rights: these are spiritual tasks no less than prayer and Torah study. To be sure, the latter are higher, but the former are prior. People cannot hear G?d’s message if their spirit is broken and their labor harsh.”

Words to ponder as we all continue to hope for, and work toward, a better world.

Home (not) Alone

A d’var Torah – sermon – I delivered at our synagogue yesterday morning. If you’re not into hortatory Jewish fuzzies, better skip it.)

My dad was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, long enough ago for him to have cheered on the Dodgers at the legendary Ebbets Field. My dad’s also the world’s greatest baseball fan – at least the greatest I’ve ever met. He can quote statistics, games, and players like a seasoned sportswriter. I once asked him why the Brooklyn Dodgers’ native stadium had such allure for his ten-year-old self.

He thought for a moment, smiled, and said, “It’s holy ground … and it was my second home.”

The concept of home is important to us. Be it ever so humble, it’s where the heart is, where you hang your hat, and there’s no place like it. A real home is wherever we feel safe to be our best, and even sometimes worst, selves.

Our Torah portion, Shemot, the beginning of Exodus, describes a similar-but-different kind of safety. We find the baby Moses tucked into a basket among the bulrushes of the Nile, escaping Pharaoh’s cruel edict of death for all Jewish first-born males.

The Hebrew word translated here as “basket” is “teivah.” There’s only one other teivah in Torah. It’s found in Genesis, in parashat Noach. There, teivah is translated as “ark” – yes, the one with Noah’s family and all the paired animals. The Talmud calls this juxtaposition – an identical word or phrase occurring in different verses – “gezeirah shava,” Aramaic for “similar verdicts.” A gezeirah shava exists to reveal the word or phrase’s deeper meaning.

So let’s explore this puzzling and holy ark-basket.

Both teivahs are containers. That one is large and one small isn’t as important as their function. For Noah, his pitch-caulked ark carried the world’s wildlife population. In Moses’ case, his pitch-caulked basket carried the leader of a spiritual revolution. Two boxes of life, each floating amidst swirling chaos, each protecting the seeds of new beginnings.

Our world at present can be fairly described as a swirling chaos. Politics, economics, technology, civility, culture, climate – everything seems to be spiraling into some very strange and very scary places. But a teivah can protect us long enough to gather our strength, cope, and continue.

Sonoma has a long-established and vital teivah that does just that. And though small, it contains multitudes.

There’s a Hebrew school. Sisterhood. Men’s club. Book clubs. Adult education. Social action. Care for our physically and spiritually beset. Annual and life-cycle celebrations. Study groups devoted to our most sacred texts. Occasional cooking classes. The welcoming warmth of authentic, heimishe Yiddishkeit. And worship services like these, where we can come together twice-monthly to ritually affirm our religious peoplehood.

Our little Anatevka-among-the-vines offers each of us a little hard-won and welcome shelter from the surrounding storm. So my questions to you today, especially as we enter our 30th year, are, “What’s your Shir Shalom shelter story? How does our do-it-yourself teivah give you strength and support?”

[pass microphone]

Thank you everyone. And thank you for helping each other keep our heads above choppy water – as our people have done for the past 4,000 years and counting. Shabbat shalom.

Rear Window

“Your spirituality is none of my business.” –Anon

How do we understand the Divine in our lives?

That’s the question answered by this week’s Torah portion, Vayigash (Genesis.44.18-47.27). Joseph is reunited with his brothers, and informs them that indirectly selling him into slavery was actually part of G?d’s plan. Without that act, he would not have risen to second-in-command of Egypt and been able to save his family from the seven years’ famine predicted by Pharaoh’s dream.

Torah is teaching us an important point: that spiritual hindsight is 20/20 vision. Only by seeing how events have unfolded can we discern the G?d of our understanding; as G?d is later to tell Moses, “You may see My back … [but] you cannot see My face, for no one may see Me and live.” It was up to Joseph to see G?d’s hand in matters, but as the Torah later tells us, his brothers never accepted that explanation.

When someone in our lives is struggling in any way, it may seem like a kindness to tell them that what they’re going through is “all part of G?d’s plan.” But we know that’s not appropriate. Pirkei Avot tells us not to comfort someone when their dead lies before them; comfort is in the heart of the beholder. Whatever we experience is not for others to interpret as to cause and effect.

After all, all we really know is the G?d of our understanding. And who’s to say we got It right?

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