Tag: There’s a God in My Soup

Religious experience, or at least the experience of religion.

Sometimes I Hate This Job

I’M PUTTING OFF WRITING A eulogy. Doesn’t everyone?

Linda Tomback is a good friend who used to attend our Saturday morning Torah study. Her death is the eighth in our congregation in the past two years; the first two were also regular members of our study group — a cantankerously proud “old-school Reform Jew” named Larry Giller, and big enthusiastic ba’al teshuvah (returnee to Judaism) Steve Surtshin.

Then Richard Bien, with whom I enjoyed some intense Torah and life discussions but didn’t know as well as I would have liked; Esther Norton, whip-tough and smart and motherly generous; Paul Habas, tall and formal, devastating sense of humor; Margaret Laybourn, cherished by many friends but someone I only saw across the oneg table; and the gentle yet formidable Richard Newman, who taught me why we have principles — and how to live by them.

“Each man’s death diminishes me,” John Donne wrote. True, it’s our common fate — less evitable even than taxes, since we share it with everyone fish or plant or fungus — but when it happens within a small social group within a small historical moment, Donne’s truth rattles rather loudly.

Linda’s funeral is this afternoon. I have not attended any of the above friends’ funerals either due to medical complications (mine), privacy (the family’s), or ignorance (again mine); in fact the last funeral I attended was Jim “Sputnik” Gjerde‘s in 2003. He was about the best friend I had, of 24 years through high school and young manhood and whatever our particular manhood is; as Shakespeare might have said, our lives were seated on the ground telling ribald stories of the lives of kings until we rang the chimes at midnight. His death undid me, and frankly rather soured me on the whole prospect. “Death? Pfffft. What else is on?”

Funnily enough, I said a few words at Sputnik’s funeral too.

Torah study is a lot like golf, in that you can really get to know someone while you’re doing it; it demands openness and honesty and the sort of integrity that’s perhaps better called consistency. I didn’t know Linda long — only two years or somewhat less — but she was a lot like Sputnik: intense, smart, funny, kind, instantly easy to hang out with, generous beyond measure, unselfconscious in her approach to God and Its mysterious ways.

Maybe those ways are less mysterious to her now, and she’s hanging out with Sputnik and Larry and Steve and Richard and Esther and Paul and Margaret and Richard and whoever it is that you miss, when you think of conversations you can’t have. I don’t know; I don’t think I will know until my own death, and perhaps not even then. But I have told you their names because, according to one voice of Jewish tradition, they contain our souls, and thus live on with each mention, and who knows but that might be true, in some sense. May we all partake of this, or similar, immortality, or at least the comfort that pondering it may bring.

This Week In Torah: Vayak’hel/Pekudei

VAYAK’HEL/PEKUDEI (Exodus 35:1-40:38; haftarot I Kings 7:51-8:21 and, because Nisan starts on Tuesday making this a special Rosh Chodesh Shabbat, Ezekiel 45:16-46:18) WRAPS UP THE BOOK of Exodus by building the Tabernacle: the traveling God-tent whose structure and contents are so lovingly detailed in the previous four portions. After making certain that all the parts are laid out and accounted for, Moses proceeds to assemble the people’s manifold contributions into a single coherent whole — after which “the kavod (honor, glory, gravitas) of Adonai filled the Tabernacle.”

At the beginning of Vayakhel, God asks Moses to assemble “the generous-hearted … the wise-hearted … all of the Israelite community” — the distinction being that the generous provide the materials and the wise shape them into meaning. Earlier commentators might see this “those who can, do — those who can’t, contribute” metaphor as a prooftext for community support of Torah scholars (or one’s synagogue!). But another meaning might be that building the sacred — especially sacred community — requires each member to provide the raw ingredients and wrestle them into place; to be and to become; bumping along together, shaping each other and being shaped into something that (we hope) looks a little more like God than it did before.

Shavua tov, gut woch and have a nice week,

Reb Neal (from our synagogue e-letter)

Minute Mitzvah: Praise Wow

And now, another Monday Mitzvah with a side of motivation.

Today: Hold God in awe.

THIS ONE’S TRICKY FOR ATHEISTS, so in the interests of universality, let’s assume we’re not talking about the Cranky Old Man raining smites and frights whom we learned to scoff at in Hebrew school but rather Something a good deal less childish and not at all definable. Whatever It is, one can only ever relate to the what-some-people-call-“God” on one’s own terms. (Mine are at https://metaphorager.net/2007/12/working-definition/ but also includes That Which Inspires Awe Through Beholding.) My rabbi, Jack Gabriel, likes to call It “God As Context.” A good friend and I have been discussing It since high school; he sees It in the elegance of mathematics and the physical world. Ann once said It’s what compels firefighters and other rescue workers toward situations of unforeseeable survival. Although I’ve never heard a final, explains-everything, non-paradoxical description of It, one thing seems certain — everyone’s an expert.

Exercise: Ponder who it is who is pondering Who “It” is.

Four Points of Contact

“IT IS THE NATURE OF religious belief knowledge to be compelling only to the believer knower.” So said Rabbi Micha Berger some years ago on Usenet’s soc.culture.jewish.moderated, and I have yet to see a better argument for pluralism and against proselytizing. (After all, how can you sell your vision of God when you know It only looks that way to you?)

Seen through the consciousness-shackling lens of Western culture, a popular understanding of religious/spiritual experience generally falls into one of two categories: “faith” or “reason.” Continue reading “Four Points of Contact”

Message From Beyond

NOT ALL MITZVOT TURN INTO ghost stories — but when doing holy work, it’s always a good idea to expect the unexpected.

Ann and I are members of the Sonoma County Chevre Kadisha, which literally means “holy fellowship;” it’s a centuries-old Jewish institution committed to preparing the dead for burial. Doing this is considered to be the most selfless of all mitzvot (commandments), partly because there’s no way the beneficiary can pay you back.

In 2002, we joined a crowd of about 50 at Cotati’s Congregation Ner Shalom where, over the course of an afternoon and under the tutelage of Rabbi Elisheva (Sachs) Salamo, we learned — as one participant put it — to “gift-wrap people for sending them back to God.” Continue reading “Message From Beyond”

Comfort of Nothing

Addressed to a mailing list of old and dear friends, during one of the perennial and genial “Nature of God, or Someone Like Him/Her/It” discussions, and whether Immanence vs. Transcendence helps one sleep better at night:

Back when I first learned the noble trade of printing, I noticed that matchbook covers looked different to me: I could /see/ tightness of registration (e.g., printing a red border around a blue square), or if the press had had too much ink or water in the ink/water mix; soon the entire printed universe looked different too. Similarly, I’ve recently become interested in geology (in a purely amateur, that is to say love-inspired, sense): and thus the hills look different to me now; I can /see/ the slow subduction of the Pacific Plate in the ripples of the surrounding hills, and am beginning to /see/ the two-million-year process which started with the Sonoma Volcanics and, in my brief lifetime, has become a rich winemaking paradise (and, I can /see/ nomadic hominids coalescing into cities whose long and varied line of cultural gestation led some of them to settle here to grow that wine, and others to create the words and technology by which I can type these thoughts and send them to you).

And in all that, there’s only one of me, and of you, and of everyone we know, and those we don’t. The cosmic and infinite seamlessly married to the finite and human: complexly connected, simultaneously ephemeral and eternal, trivial and important. “You may see where I have been, but no man may see My face — and live.” For me, that perspective/experience — the vasty void pinpricked by kindness and curiosity, which are the signs by which “ye shall Know” — is more comforting than the boxed-in Gd painted by human prejudice and predilection.

Circlogics

Circles, by definition, have no ends — each is a continuous line which, as the philosopher Charles Fort tells us, “one measures … beginning anywhere.”

However, like life’s other complexities, not all circles conform to strict definition.

Consider: Earth’s orbit is (mostly) circular, yet because our planet’s rotation is tilted relative to its orbit, the perspective of us surface-dwellers reveals two distinct “ends:” At one, the daily cycle favors light; at the other, darkness. Both make for fine beginnings, even if today’s — which we Northern Hemispherites call “summer solstice” — may be too hot for anything other than thinking.

May the One Who keeps it all in motion favor our undertakings whenever we begin — and so on through their other end.

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.

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).

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