God Is Not My Mom or Dad

So much has been said in the wake of the terrible shootings of children, teachers, and firefighters that have lately filled the news (I want to mention, too, the hundreds of Chicago children who have been the victims of gun violence this year). One theme has been cropping up that I finally felt I must address. I keep hearing commentators from NPR and the New York Times to Facebook memes asking, "Where is God?" Sometimes the questioner is sincere, and sometimes snarky, but the God-concept underlying the question is always the same: that God's role is to prevent evil, to protect humanity from itself and clean up its messes. The implication is that God is some sort of cosmic parent, and while that image is certainly prevalent in many faiths, like any analogy, it doesn't give you the whole picture.

Any parent will tell you the heartbreaking truth: no matter how much you want to protect your children, sometimes all you can do is suffer alongside them. In addition, the older they get, the less able you are to intervene directly in their choices and to pick them up, dust them off, and set them right again when they fall, because the situations facing them are more complex, and because they understandably want to live their own lives. So anyone who evokes God as a parent should do so recognizing that this role has its limits, perhaps even necessary ones, if children are ever to become adults.

This brings me to what I think is the even more important point: that asking God to act as a protecting parent is tantamount to asking to be infantilized. Comforting as that might seem in the short term, that state doesn't push us to claim our full role and responsibility as active agents in the world in which we live. Jewish tradition claims that human beings are b'tzelem elohim, created in the image of God, charged with the mission to choose life and increase holiness, to act as God's partner in perfecting creation. To me, this means that we should not retreat from the challenges posed by human evil, beseeching God to sort it out for us. Instead, we should shoulder that burden ourselves, with humility and resolve, and hear God's answers in the actions that we take. Any mature understanding of faith should teach us this.

Surely we can cry out in grief and seek comfort in the wake of horrific tragedies. I can only imagine how those personally affected by them must feel consumed by pain. But those bystanders who are appalled by these events should take responsibility for spreading healing and pushing back against the darkness. As the posters created after the 1989 shooting of 14 women at the University of Montreal stated, "First, mourn. Then work for change." Yes, let's have nuanced, intelligent discussions about the accessibility of high-powered weaponry and effective mental health care, and about our society's fascination with virtual violence and the vicarious thrills it can bring -- and take action based on those deliberations. Let's also recognize that every day brings with it the challenges of living with a mindful commitment to one another, and to the earth which we share for the short time we are here. Like Rabbi Menachem Mendel said, God dwells wherever we let God in. This is our source of hope to keep going and our goad to do better. At least, that is what I keep reminding myself.

Controlled Burn

Another Rosh Hashanah sermon from the files. May the new year bring us a rich harvest of joy and reflection.

Controlled Burn

Creating a prairie required an acre of dead grass, apparently. Somehow the trees survived whatever killing agent the Chicago Park District had laid down; they remained broad and green despite the dry, brown lawn stretching out around them. The same paths wound through the dead zone as through the untouched landscape. Only a big sign announcing the inception of the Burnham Prairie Project let you know that this acre of partial death was premedtiated, and geared toward some greater end.

Once prairie covered most of what is now called Illinois. Now, prairie must be installed, after erasing whatever was there before. Was this exact parcel of land once a prairie, or was it a swamp full of stinking onion? Could this truly be called restoration? Glancing at the project as my bus rumbled by on Lake Shore Drive, I found it hard not be cynical, not to dismiss the project as a Disneyland of flora, simulating what could never be again or maybe never was.

I was not opposed to landscaping with prairie plants. I had ripped out my own little patch of urban lawn and replaced it with native perennials once it was clear that the gas company, after running a new meter line underground, had patched up our yard with grub-infested sod. I had always wanted to get rid of the grass anyway: it took more time to drag the mower up front from the garage than it did to mow. Now I had weeding to do, mostly in the spring, but the plants would reestablish their residency soon enough. They were dependable ornaments, requiring no feeding or other fussing. They knew how to take care of themselves in the summer heat, letting their leaves droop during the dry spells, guarding their moisture inside their hard, fuzzy stems. They also looked right for this flat, Midwestern locale: quietly pretty, sometimes a bit ungainly or informal, but pleasant for all that.

Still, as the bus rolled past this blighted stretch of as-yet unrestored landscape, I was struck more by the evidence of eradication, undistinguished as this grassy area had been, than by the sign’s promise of a more decorative future. On the other side of the road, a ragged line of trees hid the vacant lots created when the projects were imploded but nothing was put in their place. After the leaves came down, in winter, you could see the rubble and naked dirt. This city knows all too well about renewal as a euphemism for erasure.

I had been pondering the nature of renewal during my commutes, reading texts about it from the mystical tradition in Judaism; when I looked up from my book, I also found a lesson in scene on the side of the road. My reading of these texts and my viewing of the prairie’s unfolding taught me that whether renewal takes the form of encouraging the return of what once was, or the emergence of what should have been, those undertaking the process must recognize that it is an act of creation, requiring care and commitment to an ongoing process of growth. True renewal must be undertaken with humility and sensitivity, because it requires the destruction of what was there before. It must involve risk and perhaps even pain, no matter how untenable the situation might be that needs changing.

The prairie itself embodies renewal, especially in the guise of transformation through destruction. During a springtime visit, a notice inside the Trailside Museum in the Cook County Forest Preserve warned visitors about controlled burns in the area. Another notice in the flower beds just outside the door explained that, here too, a controlled burn had taken place. You could see the black marks where some flammable liquid had been poured in neat, curving lines, and then lit. Prairies need fire, the notice explained. Old or invasive growth needs to be cleared away. Some native plant seeds even need the scorching to germinate.

Trained professionals start these fires now, we were told, not lightening in the dry grass; they keep them from getting out of hand. Do not try this at home, was the implicit warning, although I was tempted to squirt curving lines into my own garden. I wanted to see if I could make new life out of burning. I wanted to be the one who made the flames rise, who watched them do their work, and then squelched them when the time was right, smoke rising from the smoldering flowerbed. To be honest, I was also hoping that the clover and crabgrass and other weeds that I was always battling would have the kind of seeds that are not encouraged by fire. I really hate weeding. Fortunately for our neighbors and for the underwriter on our homeowners’ insurance, my partner convinced me to leave my pyromaniacal urges unfulfilled.

Fortunate, too, as I learned from my textual explorations, because true renewal does not assert power, but relinquishes it; it requires the “I” to exist in conversation with the “thou,” to use Martin Buber’s terms. As Adin Steinsaltz says when writing about the Jewish concept of t’shuvah (literally “turning”; often translated as repentance), it “does not bring a sense of serenity or of completion but stimulates a reaching out in further effort” (The Thirteen Petalled Rose, p. 132). For Steinsaltz, t’shuvah is “a constant process of going toward,” the ultimate goal of which “lies beyond the correction of sinful deeds and the creation of independent, new patterns,” but “is reached when the change and the correction penetrate the very essence of the sins once committed and, as the sages say, create the condition in which a man’s transgressions become his merits” (p. 135). Inspired by Steinsaltz’s comments, Lawrence Kushner claims:

Ultimately, teshuvah is nothing less than a willingness to die and become one again with one’s Creator. It is clicking on the computer software button that says, “Restore default configuration.” (The Way into Jewish Mystical Tradition, p. 110)

This default configuration is oneness with God: to perform true t’shuvah is to connect with the Source of all creation and possibility, and make that connection manifest in the world. Or, as Steinsaltz puts it, “The penitent thus does more than return to his proper place. He performs an act of amendment of cosmic significance; he restores the sparks of holiness which had been captured by the powers of evil” (Thirteen, p. 136).

According to the Jewish mystical tradition, creation by its very nature depends upon dissolution. The Maggid of Mezeritch argues:

Nothing is able to change from one form to another – for example, an egg that would hatch into a chick, without first completely nullifying its present form, which is to say, the egg. Only then will another form be able to come forth from it. It is this way with everything in the world: it must attain the level of Ayin, Nothingness. Then it will be able to become something else. (Maggid Devarav Le-Yaakov, sec. 30; quoted in Kushner, p. 33)

In the Jewish mystical understanding, creation did not happen once and for all; it happens continually, every moment. The world that we see, Yesh, or Somethingness, came into being at one point, but it would cease to exist without the sustaining energy of Ayin, or Nothingness – not an empty nothingness, but a complete No-one-thingness, the ocean that at every moment can become, is, and has been individual waves, but is not merely the particular waves themselves. When we become aware of Ayin, Levi Ytizchak teaches, “then the Name of God, as it were, enters the present tense and God’s Name becomes the One who creates, even at this very moment!” When we “[return] to the level of Yesh,” however, “the Name of the Creator then reverts to [the past tense] “…the One who created” (Levi Yitzchak, 1:1, quoted in Kushner, p. 22). The prairie blooms, dries up, and comes to life again through the application of both fire and water; this cycle parallels the way in which t’shuvah creates new life: cleansing fire and healing water create new structures which embody Creation, a continually renewing force.

In time, the dead grass of the Prairie Project was succeeded by naked earth marked with an array of red, pink, and yellow flags. I saw an elderly man there one afternoon, sitting in a metal folding chair at the edge of the field of markers, most likely just taking some air and enjoying the late summer sun, but looking to me like he was keeping this expanse of earth company while it waited for its (re)new(ed) state to become visible. And it did, slowly: green growth filled in around the little flags, so that even when plain dirt could still be seen, and the plants had not yet reached their mature height and bloomed, I had to strain to remember what the scene looked like before.

This unassuming pageant of prairie restoration reminded me that its human planners could take advantage of a capacity for growth which they – I – did not share. At the “L” station where I started and ended my daily commute, spindly stands of Queen Anne’s Lace, unafraid to blossom anywhere, graced the cracks along the concrete abutment that separated the train tracks from the Eisenhower Expressway. With some plants, bidden or unbidden, their seeds are present, and they grow. How much more so when they are planted and tended?

Prairie plants are unself-consciously hardy, engineered for renewal, even seeking the aid of a great consuming fire toward that end; human beings must struggle with fear, complacency, vanity, solipsism, and the human mind’s many other blocks to releasing oneself into a mindful process of change. We must seek out renewal, actively engage it, all the while making sure that our intention is not merely to improve the self, but to reach out beyond the self, to make our words, thoughts, and deeds reflect the not-one-thingness which is the Source of creation as it happens every moment. That is our burning, the fire which sets us free to become what we once were, or should have been: the very embodiment of change.

...and Letting Go (part II)

The Saturday following the three-year-old’s close encounter with the nightstand, the eight-year-old leyned Torah for the first time. We go to a monthly family minyan, at which kids lead most of the service, and read from the Torah as well. After a kid reads six times, he or she is presented with a yad, and after twelve times, a shofar. The promise of the latter pushed the eight-year-old to put aside her shyness about chanting in front of everybody. One of her best friends would also be chanting for the first time that same day, which sweetened the pot even more.

She read beautifully – such naches! I had the honor and pleasure of teaching her and her friend to leyn – more naches! What a sweet way to end a week that started with a terrible ordeal, you might say, and you would be right, but both incidents presented me with the same challenge: how do you balance the demands of letting your kids be who they are and encouraging who they could be?

I’m not just responding to the current belief that anything your kid does his or her whole life long, good or bad, is a reflection on you and your parenting, so you’d better make sure you never screw up, ever, meaning your kid can’t screw up, ever, although I’m sure I’m not unaffected by that malaise.  My study of the practice of Mussar tells me that everyone has their own spiritual curriculum, dictated by their own mix of characteristics that they must bring into balance in their own way, and learn to use to help bring holiness into the world through their everyday actions. As a parent, I would hope that I would be able to recognize my children’s traits and help them harness them for good while working against or around their ill effects. The three-year-old, for example, clearly has the trait of zerizut (often translated as “zeal” or “alacrity”) in spades; the trick will be to keep her zerizut from flinging her against hard, pointy surfaces without discouraging her from throwing herself against obstacles that can and should be brought down. I’ve got my own curriculum to follow, of course – I keep failing Patience 101, for example – which complicates matters.

When the eight-year-old told me that she wanted to leyn at family minyan, we sat down on the futon and looked through Lech Lecha, the portion of the Torah that would be read the following month. After reading a few different spots, we settled on the three verses where Abram receives the new name of Abraham – they were meaningful and interesting, and not that complicated phonetically and melodically. Since she does half her school day in Hebrew, getting comfortable reading the words was enviably easy for her, and we were soon getting to the trope, the little marks that let you know how to chant each word.

 “I’m so glad that I get to share this with you,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s something that I love to do, and now we’ll be able to do it together.” I was feeling that surge which meant I was captivated by my own thoughts, always a dangerous proposition. My mind roiled with things I could tell her, if only I could express them in a way she could understand: how putting the words and the trope together gave the Torah verses meaning through music, how leyning made the verses sing through me, how it made me feel like a vessel filled with light and energy that poured out with the words. “It makes me feel close to the Torah, to the words as I sing them,” was all I could say.

“Oh.” I could see that mixture of skepticism, sympathy, and confusion in her eyes, the look that makes me feel as if my rationalist eight-year-old is thinking, “Poor Mama. Sometimes you don’t make any sense.”

While I was given a grounding in Jewish history and culture, especially of the Eastern European via Brooklyn-Lower East Side variety, I didn’t grow up with much in the way of Jewish religious observance. As I used to say, my father is a Jewish Atheist: he doesn’t believe in God out of spite. I never stepped inside a synagogue until I was in my twenties. I don’t have many personal experiences that I can draw on in terms of how to live a Jewishly engaged life with kids, or more importantly, as a kid, beyond reading the All-of-a-Kind Family books (the eight-year-old has done that) listening to my grandparents’ Yiddish-inflected kibitzing (sadly, no longer possible), and eating certain foods (we're in the Midwest here, but I do what I can). Basically, I make things up as I go along, and hope I’m doing it right. That’s parenting in a nutshell, I suppose, but sometimes I feel my lack in this area very keenly.

My partner and I both know what a struggle it is to try to pick up knowledge about the liturgy, practices, and most of all, Hebrew, as an adult, and we send our kids to Jewish day school so that they will grow up with everything we continue to acquire piecemeal. Their school is a lovely community as well as a sound center of learning; I am happy to bring them there every day, and they are happy to go. What I worry about, however, is whether I am getting across to them the fact that Jewishness isn’t just about knowing and doing, but about feeling. I especially worry about this with the child whose idea of fun is to see if she can break her own record for how many multiplication flash cards she can do in a minute (right now, she’s at 30; her goal is 50).

I would hope that I can get across my own commitment to living a Jewish life, and why it matters to me. I picked up something precious that could have been left on the side of the road, and I hope that my children will continue to carry it forward.

On the other hand, I know that you can’t force someone to love something. I know what it is like to frustrate an award-winning math teacher with my inability to balance quadratic equations (sorry, Mom). I know what it is like to be made to run laps on a Sunday afternoon for a stopwatch-wielding track coach, struggling to run a twelve-minute mile while wishing more than anything that I could be left alone to read a book under the bleachers instead (sorry, Dad).

She liked fitting the trope to the words, like a puzzle. She could appreciate how the trope could help you remember the words, and helped make the dramatic bits sound even better. Did she feel what I feel when I leyn? Not so far as I could tell. Maybe she will someday. Or maybe not. She is her own person, and will come to craft her own Jewishness, her own way to relating to the history, culture, and practices that are our heritage. Why should she get to do any less than I have done – continue to do – myself?

“Do you want to leyn again next month?” I asked her recently, chumash in hand. I had already looked up what the portion would be for the first Shabbat in January.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I don’t feel like it.”

I watched her go into the living room to practice flips and backbends on the futon. I stopped myself from asking her why she didn’t want to, if she would ever want to again. I didn’t mention the yad or the shofar. I let go, or at least let the pressure I would have sent in her direction wash against the shores of my own self, and instead watched her flex and spring in ways in which I never could.

New Year, End Times

The new year seemed as good a time as any to start this blog, and the sermon I gave during Kol Nidre services at Congregation Or Chadash seemed as good a first post as any, since it addresses an issue that has been nagging at me lately. I realize this is lengthy for a blog post, but don't worry -- I won't usually go on for this long! As a sermon, this was written for a specific audience, in this case a community of fabulous, caring, intellectually-inclined, mostly LGBTQ Jews, so please bear that in mind when you run into any use of the 1st person plural.
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One evening, Rabbi Israel Salanter passed a tailor still stitching despite the darkened sky, by the light of one candle. When the rabbi asked the man why, the tailor replied, “So long as the candle still burns, it is still possible to do and to mend.” Rabbi Salanter did not sleep himself that night, but paced the floor in a fever of excitement, muttering to himself, “So long as the candle still burns, it is still possible to do and to mend!”

I was reminded of this story when, after novelist David Foster Wallace lost his long battle with depression, a New Yorker article reprinted a point Wallace had made about 10 years earlier:

Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. (http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html)

This quote provided me with my own Salanteresque response, in which I walked around repeating to myself, “these may be dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?” The New Yorker article claimed that this problem drove Wallace as he worked on The Pale King, the novel left unfinished by his suicide, but it matters for anyone trying to “apply CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical, that still live and glow despite the time’s darkness.” How does one see this dark and stupid world in all honesty and clarity but still identify, even act upon, the possibilities for being alive and human in it? 

Gary Shteyngart could have had Wallace’s definition in mind when he wrote Super Sad True Love Story, a satire which imagines the collapse our dark and stupid ways will bring upon us, although its dystopic vision might be too total to illuminate what still glimmers in the darkness. In the novel’s disconcertingly not-too-distant future, conversation has been largely drowned out by the constant stream of data coming over the “äpparäts” people wear around their necks. When people do “verbal” each other, they fend off the embarrassment of “emoting” with glibness and reflexive irony, peppering sentences with acronyms like “JBF” or flat “hahas.” Written communication fares no better: at every National Guard checkpoint, you will find misspelled signs advising you that merely reading the sign means that you have consented to deny that it exists. Our unfashionably bookish hero, Larry Abramov, uses a ruler to help him keep his place as he pores over the pages of obsolete “printed objects,” his lips moving to form each word. Larry manages to find moments where he can connect with others, if imperfectly, in this crass, violent, and soul-deadening world, but there is no stopping or escaping from its bloated sickness.

I can appreciate the fact that Shteyngart wouldn’t pull any punches: he pummeled his target the way he thought it deserved. Even as I found myself deeply affected by the novel, however, I wondered if, in giving his cynicism such free reign, he wasn’t actually engaging in the same sort of hip distancing his novel decries. In the 19^th century, for example, William Morris claimed that he lived his entire life in opposition to modernity; his novel Erehwon was part of that effort, imagining a utopia that corrected all of the wrongs he found in his society and culture. I doubt a utopic novel like Morris’s would get the same critical appreciation today that Shteyngart’s dystopic one did: such an effort would likely be dismissed as sentimental, unserious, or naïve.

Our current moment is beset by dystopic visions: from every point on the ideological spectrum, people seem to be convinced that we have or are coming to the end of something, and whatever comes next won’t be good. Even Christians who embrace rapture theology indulge in lurid fantasies about what will happen to those “left behind” (as the series with that title puts it) more than they seem to look forward to “ten thousand years” of “bright shining like the sun” with the composer of “Amazing Grace.” But eschatology, the belief that history leads toward some end, doesn’t have to breed morbidity and pessimism. Indeed, the Book of Isaiah contains utopic images that have resonated down the centuries:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift sword against nation and they will no longer study warfare. (Isaiah 2:4)

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9)

These days, we can imagine the end but not the new beginning; we are fascinated by the tropes of end times because they provide a way to talk about how lost and stuck and hopeless we feel.

So where do we go from here? What do we do, beyond rail against the dark and stupid times in which we live? How do we approach a new year if we are indeed living during some sort of end, or at least a time when it is very hard to have faith in beginnings?

One clue might be found in Dara Horn’s novel, All Other Nights. After two novels which built bridges between the violent erasures of the Holocaust and the quiet uncertainty of the present day, Horn turned to the Civil War, that nexus of American mythology so beloved by reenacters and romantics, and Judaized it, focusing on real and fictional American Jews who were pivotal in the conflict, and also weaving together Jewish and American symbols and themes in her presentation of the period. The war disintegrates the lives and selves of the novel’s main characters. Even Richmond consumes itself in a great conflagration. For the old Jewish men fleeing the city, however, the disaster is just another chapter in a longer story. As the novel puts it, “They had seen the world end so many times before.” The lesson for the younger characters and civilization is that we are rarely masters of our fate and circumstances, and in such a world sometimes the only recourse is to gather one’s remnant and live on as best as one can.

The last few centuries have shown us that secular eschatology, with its dreams of inevitable progress and human perfectibility, has its limits. When these dreams were made manifest in the world, they wrought changes which, alongside their benefits, have had a human cost, as well as an environmental one: from the Gilded Age to our own, industrialized and now globalized progress has consumed human and material resources as well as produced them. These dreams also ignored the intractability of greed, bloodlust, and other elements of human behavior we like to pretend have no place in civilized society, but which we cannot seem to eradicate with rational analysis or notions of social contracts.

In dark and stupid times such as these, perhaps we can only pick up and carry on, knowing the world will end again and again, but that it will also continue after each ending, so long as we are here to persist. In other words, we should combine an understanding that the worst can happen with a faith that things might be made better, or at least bearable, recalling Hillel’s advice that when everyone around you ceases to be human, you should struggle to remain a human being. To desist from the work does not make us or the world any better off. Because if we now know that human nature is not perfectible, that the human appetite for destruction and power will never go away, we know too, or should recognize, that the human desire to create and to nurture will also never go away. If the light will never completely banish the darkness, so too will the darkness never completely extinguish the light. These may be dark times, and stupid ones, but so long as the candle still burns, it is still possible to do and to mend. What other, better choice do we have? Surrender ensures that culture and society will sink under the weight of the ugliness of which human beings are capable.

A story in the Talmud teaches that The Messiah is already present, and we are the ones who must come to understand how to recognize and heed him. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi once encountered the prophet Elijah, and asked him, “When will the Messiah come?”

“Go and ask him,” Elijah replied. “You will find him at the entrance to the city, sitting among the poor lepers: the rest of them untie their bandages all at once, and rebandage them together, but he unties and then rebandages each of his sores separately, thinking, should I be wanted, I must not be delayed.”

So Rabbi Joshua went to the Messiah and greeted him, and asked, “When will you come, Master?”

“Today,” the Messiah answered.

Rabbi Joshua later returned to Elijah and said, “The Messiah spoke falsely to me: he said that he would come today, but he has not.” Elijah answered, “This is what he said to you: Today, if you will hear his voice.” (adapted from Talmud Sanhedrin 98a)

Though he may tarry, I cannot help but believe, albeit with an imperfect faith, in the promise implicit in the coming of the Messiah. If not now, then someday – I hope, I pray, someday – and until then, without knowing when, I can only continue the work while the candle still burns.