parsha

I’d Like A Double Water On The Rocks With A Twist Please

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Hi everyone,

Hope you had a good week.  I’ve been having interesting conversations this week about technology and the generation that’s trying to find partners through it.  My kids and their friends have learned to navigate relationships by ‘swiping left or right’. The first time someone explained the term ‘ghosting’ to me, I was shocked.  Rather than having to find words to explain to someone why you’re not interested, you simply ignore them and, in fact, they will go away.

Everything seems to happen online and I can’t find the virtual ‘watering hole’ where singles can meet each other.  I remember going to pubs on dates and when I was a student I worked at pubs and watched others on their dates. Today, people still meet on dates, but first they have googled each other, so first dates are not a discovery of the other person but rather a validation of what they found online.  Everyone is at a distinct disadvantage.

I spent time in Israel as a student and I have interesting memories of dating there.  One date involved mulled wine in a unique hovel in the old city of Jaffa. There was no indoor plumbing, the bathroom was outside in a tiny closet shared by a courtyard of studio apartments.  I loved that nothing like that existed in Toronto. There were no seats, there were benches covered with blankets from the old city.

I was enjoying the wine and trying to look mysterious (I wanted to fit the atmosphere and perhaps have a second date) when I excused myself to find the washroom.  I found the outdoor ‘closet’ and squeezed myself in. As I was using the facility, I noticed there was a knob on the wall right in front of me. I am not one to ignore things I don’t know so, of course, I turned the knob. It activated the shower head that was directly above where I was sitting. The shared bathroom I was in doubled as a shower and I couldn’t turn it off for a few seconds until the shock of the moment passed and I realized how to turn it off.  I was drenched…and I was on a date.

I couldn’t leave without explaining why, since I didn’t want to offend my date, he had done nothing wrong (except taking me to a place with a bathroom from hell – yes, I blamed him for a few seconds there).  So I grabbed my sweater from my bag, bunned my hair and went back to the table as if nothing happened. He simply asked me if everything was ok and I said ‘yes, why?’

There was no second date.

In-person encounters are indispensable.  The Torah is full of couples meeting at watering holes.  Rebecca meets Eliezer at a well when she offers to draw water for his camels, as he is on a long journey.  He arranges for her to marry Isaac, who she first meets at a well where he has gone to get away from people for a bit.  And in this week’s Parshah, Vayetzei, Jacob meets Rachel at a well when he opens the well and draws water for her sheep.  The text tells us she is a shepherd (her day job) so essentially, Jacob meets her at the watering hole at work. Eventually, Moses will also meet his wife, Tziporah, at a well and she will bring him home with her.  It becomes tried and true.

Today, in the complex world of technological advancements and societal transformations, where is the virtual well, the watering hole?  Rebecca offered to help someone on their journey and Jacob offered to help someone with their job. Isaac goes to the well to find some quiet when he meets Rebecca and Moses is fleeing from harm when he meets his wife who brings him to family.  These ancient moments show us the complexities of those first few moments – the endless possibilities when we first meet someone unknown to us.

I never explained to my date why my hair was dripping and he never asked what happened.  We were not a good match since my curiosity would do that to me often. There’s only so long he could pretend not to notice.  

So perhaps dating should involve that leap of faith in allowing that people are more complex than their online profiles could ever capture.  If it’s someone you don’t know then there are definite realities in today’s world that need to be considered. There are safety concerns and the true sense that people can more easily misrepresent themselves today. So, as someone who didn’t have to deal with this ‘in my day’, I offer these words: try and focus on the real concerns when investigating a potential date online and leave latitude for the possibility of a wonderful surprise if you accept an offer to meet. Take advice from the ancient world: meet at a public watering hole, watch how they interact with strangers, people who are tired from their day at work or looking for a quiet moment.  

The internet allows us to accept or reject someone based only on what we see.  Whether it’s to meet a partner, a new friend or someone we’re considering for a job, the parshah reminds us that often what attracts us to each other is the chemistry in the air – but we have to sit together to feel it.

But If I Know That You Know That I Know…

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Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  This week I had an interesting conversation with some of my kids about their friends who are expecting babies.  I realized childbirth stories that have passed down through the generations for countless millennia are somehow irrelevant to the childbearing families of today.  

Gone are the days when a woman would suspect she’s pregnant but have to wait for weeks before she could take a test to be certain.  The big innovation was that we no longer killed rabbits to diagnose a pregnancy. I learned the phrase ‘the rabbit died’ is now a gruesome and twisted image to an expectant couple. 

Today, pregnancies are announced on Facebook hours after conception.  The entire pregnancy is catalogued online, complete with regular baby bump selfies, diets, questions and suggestions.  It no longer takes a village to raise a child, apparently it takes a village to gestate one as well.

When I was pregnant with my first child I had an ultrasound (a new-fangled test in my day).  I was shown a black and white image of shapes and shadows that everyone called ‘the baby’. Technology developed quickly and by my fifth child I was given an ultrasound picture to take home with me.  It was a picture of shapes and shadows with a circle drawn on it and handwriting outside the circle that said ‘the baby’. I showed everyone the picture with joy and when a few people asked me if I could show them exactly where the baby was I would always point to the circle drawn around a blob.  In truth, I could have been holding an ultrasound of my left kidney.

These days I see ultrasound pictures of babies that are 3D with everything visible, including facial expression, hair and gender.  I’ve seen families gush over the pictures and comment on things like ‘he has the hands of a musician’ or ‘the legs of an athlete’.   There is an expectation that we rise to the challenge of having the most up to date, the latest and the greatest.  

My husband and I bought a swing for our first baby.  It was the ‘first generation’ of swings and needed to be wound up.  Everyone was discussing the latest information about how swings sooth the baby and will teach the baby to calm itself.  The swing’s mechanical casing sat just above the baby’s head. We somehow always managed to bean the baby in the head with it when carefully lifting her out of the swing.  Swing casing hits baby, baby wakes and screams, parent searches for head injury, baby goes back into swing, rinse and repeat…

We never stop to consider that the latest and greatest might not be the best.  So much information comes our way, we don’t have a chance to ask ourselves what kind of information is it?  Information that educates us is different than information that informs us which is different than information we should consider and, finally, information we should implement.  At first glance, we think it’s obvious, but information filters change everything.

As parents, we feel vulnerable and we default to thinking that the more information the better.  We feel most secure when we think we can choose our children’s destinies. Woody Allen used to say his birth announcement read: Mr. & Mrs. Allen are proud to announce the birth of their son, Dr. Woodrow Allen.

But we must never know our children’s destinies or we will raise them toward it.  In Judaism, our destinies are areas of negotiation – that is the meaning of Yom Kippur.  Locking into a vision of destiny creates a narrow view with no free will.

In this week’s parshah, Toldot, Rebecca is pregnant with twins and they are waging a war within her.  She seeks God to find out what is happening. God tells her that she is not carrying two babies but two nations who will live apart.  God tells her one will be mightier than the other and the elder will serve the younger. God tells her their destinies.

For the rest of her life Rebecca is left to wonder if God was describing the future or prescribing it.  Was she supposed to sit and watch it happen or was she supposed to actively make it happen?  In desperation, as time ticks away, she decides she must fulfill God’s words and enacts a plan to make it happen.  Rebecca doesn’t realize her sons had already traded their birthrights, it had already happened. Not knowing how to read the information she was given, Rebecca instructs Jacob to trick his father and a family will be torn apart.  The consequence of the wrong information filter causes Isaac to bestow ancient blessings, with national and land ownership implications of the region, that can still be felt in today’s world. When Isaac has full knowledge of what happened, he affirms his blessings but the family rift is complete.

The Torah commands us to behave a certain way and we take that information as authoritative and instructional.  But what do we do with the information that is more descriptive? When we are told we will be ‘a light onto the nations’, or ‘a holy people’, are we to understand that as our inevitable destiny (descriptive) or as a goal to actively journey toward (prescriptive)?  Do we consider it a birthright or a vision of possibility?

Rebecca prayed for information and God answered her prayer.  But the information alone resulted in divisiveness and enmity.  Not that long ago, fathers weren’t allowed in birthing rooms, it was considered information for women only.  Today, technology invites the world into every moment. The age of information triggers the need to understand that we know very little about how to use the information we access.  

So even when I know something in today’s world, I have to think back to our most ancient of texts and question if I actually know anything about what I know.

‘Pinky Swear’ Has Nothing On This 

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Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  I had an interesting adventure this week that involved a trip to Ikea, a 4 year old girl and confronting my own integrity.  It happened within seconds of entering an Ikea store. Between you and me, it happens to me within seconds every time I go into an Ikea store…I get lost.  To be clear, I enjoy the bright colours and the way things are set up so that I can leave the outside world outside for the time I spend in Ikea.  The problem is that the time I spend in Ikea gets longer and longer because I’m trying to find my way through the labyrinth of aisles and displays.  I follow the arrows on the floor and try and see the number codes hanging from the ceiling all at the same time. It results in my eyes quickly moving from floor to ceiling and back and forth until I wonder if it got dark outside yet.

A few days ago I had to take a family member with me, a little 4 year old girl.  I picked her up from school and we merrily sang of our ‘girl adventure’ to the furniture store.  I had pretzels waiting in the car for a fun snack and we held hands as we skipped into Ikea (ok, we didn’t really skip but you get the picture).

This Ikea was the same as any Ikea I’ve ever gone into in my city.  The ground entryway immediately leads to a staircase to the floor where the furniture displays begin.  We walked up the stairs and I stopped to get my bearings. I’m not sure what my facial expression was or if my hand stiffened as I held hers but something prompted this little cherubic 4 year old to tug on my hand and say: ‘are we lost?’

I immediately lied and said, ‘of course not’.  That’s when I confronted my own integrity and realized she deserved the truth.  I looked at her and said, ‘I’m always lost’ followed by a realization that I needed to provide context and added ‘in this store’.  I told her I would watch the signs on the ceiling if she could keep us going in the direction of the arrows on the floor. Team work, I thought – maybe I should tell her ‘team work makes the dream work’, or maybe I should just zip it and focus on the signs above.  Everything was working beautifully until I heard those dreaded words from her, ‘I need to pee’. I felt the blood drain to my feet.

All of this happened yesterday and since then I’ve been thinking about my moments of honesty and judgment in securing a little 4 year old without lying to her.  Then I wondered about what circumstances might indeed prompt me to lie to anyone and then I thought about being a woman in Judaism today and that I could never be called as a witness in an Orthodox court because women cannot be witnesses.  I can never sign as a witness on a Ketubah, as my signature would invalidate the document if it were ever needed in an Orthodox court. ‘But’, I said in my heart, ‘I tell the truth in Ikea! Why can’t I be a witness?’ And then I thought of this week’s parshah: Chayei Sarah.

In the parshah, Abraham makes his servant, Eliezer, take an oath.  In order to take the oath, Abraham tells him to place his hand under his thigh.  The oath is administered in that position. I remember learning this portion as a little girl in school and wondering what on earth could be so important about grabbing the back of your thigh.  I thought it made you look ridiculous. How much more noble to ‘raise your right hand’ like they did on the Perry Mason shows. I had one of my first questions of Jewish difference at that moment: just because we’re Jews doesn’t mean we have to do EVERYTHING so differently!  It wasn’t until decades later that I realized ‘under the thigh’ is where the testicles are – a nuance completely lost in my little girl Jewish world.

Taking an oath in the ancient world meant that a man would hold his manhood and symbolically put it on the line if he should break the oath.  He is now risking everything to fulfill the vow and therefore I can believe he will move heaven and earth to get it done. He is believed because he placed his hand ‘under his thigh’.  It certainly beats the childhood oath of ‘cross my heart and hope to die’ – a phrase every parent is horrified by. (By the way, as a child in a Jewish school we were all making ‘x’ signs on our hearts, it’s actually supposed to be a Christian cross on the heart – boy did we get that one wrong).

So, if a man takes an oath by risking his external maleness, how could a woman do anything comparable?  How would you believe a woman taking an oath, in the ancient world, if she cannot put up collateral to hold her to her word the way a man can?  It is a biologically skewed system of exclusion. But it’s not saying a woman can’t be believed, it’s saying we don’t have a comparable mechanism to administer.  That should all have changed in the modern world.

Today, no one goes into a court of law and grabs their genitals.  I dare say they might be found in contempt of court if they tried.  Women in a secular court are administered an oath the same way a man is and are held to the same legal standards.  But the Jewish courts never equalized things when the rabbinic courts introduced oath taking in God’s name. Clearly, no one goes into a Jewish court with the biblical ‘under the thigh’ gesture, everyone invokes God’s name to tell the truth.  Lying under those circumstances is the definition of “taking God’s Name in vain’, a commandment equally binding on men and women.

It’s time for women’s equal oath taking status to move through the Jewish world.  If a woman can bear witness without restriction in Judaism, then she can hold leadership roles without restriction as well, and that, I believe, is the political issue at stake that impedes this.

And just before we conclude how wonderfully modern and egalitarian our western secular world is, let’s not forget that a witness in our courts is called to ‘testify’ as they give their ‘testimony’, words that root back to a man being believed in his words because of what he holds in his hands under his thigh.

See?  I told you trips to Ikea are never as simple as they seem.

I Don’t Think We Could Ever Solve This One – Parshat Vayera

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Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  This week’s parshah is Vayerah and it’s filled with controversy and some of the most challenging concepts in Judaism.  It contains the narrative of the binding of Isaac, the test that shatters all relationships, and it contains the Sodom narrative.

I think Jews will struggle with the binding of Isaac narrative for all time.  How could God ask Abraham to kill his son? How could Abraham have been willing to do so?  In willing to do so, does Abraham pass or fail the test? A labyrinth of theological dilemmas with no way out.  But on the other end of it is an outcome we must all be grateful for: Jewish children will be saved forever from ending up on religious altars.  Abraham introduces the sacrificial substitute of a ram and never again could a Jewish child end up on the altar of its parents.

But it costs everything.  The Torah doesn’t hide that God and Abraham never speak again.  Abraham and Isaac also never speak again and Sarah dies as a result of that moment on the mountain.  In one midrash, Isaac speaks his last words to his father, Abraham, and asks that after all is done and he is burned to ashes, he wants Abraham to collect his ashes and place them in a jar in his parent’s bed so he can sleep next to them forever.  Abraham asks his son, ‘what makes you think I’ll live through this?’  

That says it all.

But as a result of that heartbreaking moment, all Jewish children are forever safe from the altars of their parents.

And the Sodom narrative is no less challenging.  The brutality of the populace of Sodom is juxtaposed with the hospitality of Abraham’s tent.  The same strangers (angels) who are treated so beautifully in Abraham’s household are mistreated so horribly in Sodom, in Lot’s household.  The fact that the men of Sodom demand Lot’s guests be brought out so they may sexually abuse them is horribly answered by Lot offering his virgin daughters to the rape mob.  Another father thinking to sacrifice his children.  

Most challenging of all is the fact that it is the Lot narrative that will eventually give us final redemption, a messiah.  After Sodom is destroyed, Lot’s daughters believe God destroyed the world again (this is only 10 generations after the Flood of Noah’s ark).  Just like in the Noah story, the daughters believe God only saved 1 family (them) and therefore it is up to them to save humanity. Except…the only male left alive, they believe, is Lot, their father.  Thinking they have no choice and that this must be what God wants, they plan to become pregnant by their father. With God on their side (or so they believe), they get Lot drunk, lay with him and both become pregnant. In today’s world, when someone gets someone else drunk, with the intention of taking advantage of them, it’s called rape.  The irony is not lost on us that they do to Lot what he had offered that the mob do to them.  

One of the daughters bears a son named Moab.  The Moabite people will come from that baby and the Moabites will eventually give us Ruth.  Ruth gives us David and eventually David will give us the messiah. It all starts in Sodom – the epitome of the worst of human brutalities.  The Sages ask how such potential redemption can result from such terrible action. The answer lies in the intention of these women. With erroneous information they still intended to save everyone they could. Redemption begins with intention.

In another midrash, that always impacted me, God is speaking with Abraham and telling him that while searching the world entire, God has finally found the seeds of redemption.  Abraham says ‘tell me’ and God replies ‘they lay buried in Sodom’- they are deep within the intention and action of 2 young women.

Years ago, I was driving with one of my sons north of the city.  He was about 7 or 8 years old and we were talking about God. He was asking me where God lives and I was explaining how God could live everywhere.  We broke it down to his world and were finally concluding that, yes, God also lived in pockets. Suddenly he pointed at something outside and said that God lives everywhere but he thinks God lives mostly there.  He was pointing at an abandoned, broken down, dirty school bus sitting in a derelict field. I was baffled and asked him why God lives mostly there and he said: ‘because I would never go there, it’s too scary’.

Parshat Vayerah is filled with those scary places and scary moments and then shows us that God lives there.  We feel trapped by those theologies and our minds reel, but in the end we emerge knowing that on the other side of Abraham’s nightmare lies the safety of all our children.  

The Torah shows us again ‘that which enslaves us, redeems us.’

Don’t Make Me Turn This Car Around

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Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  This morning I woke up a little more stiff than usual.  There’s snow on the ground, I thought, there’s pressure in the air.  Maybe I slept in a strange position or maybe I twisted awkwardly yesterday…

…or maybe it’s the result of waking up a day older.  In the words of that famous rock and roll visionary legend: ‘what a drag it is getting old.’

Actually, I believe that age is a state of mind (as the cliche goes).  Though I’m the first to admit that I believe this because I often forget how old everyone in my family is, so as age affects my memory, I opt to believe it’s a state of mind – and round I go.  

The movement forward, the aging process, the journey of a life.

In this week’s parshah, Lech Lecha, we are introduced to a journey that will seed covenant and begin the Jewish people.  God approaches Abraham to accompany God toward…? He is told they are moving toward a place God will show him, in other words, an unknown destiny.  That means he doesn’t know where he’s going, so he won’t know when he gets there – a journey of life.

Not once does Abraham ask ‘are we there yet’, as none of us would ask that question of our life journey, though we always try and imagine the next stage.  I remember being a little girl and getting so excited as every birthday approached because I was getting closer to being a grown up. I remember thinking that when I become a grown up, everything will make sense.  Grown ups have it all figured out and never feel confused. I couldn’t wait to join that club. The journey of life is realizing I’m still waiting to find that club and ultimately understanding that this elusive club doesn’t exist.

Hundreds of years ago, a Protestant minister wrote about his belief that children blame themselves for everything that goes wrong because they understand that the world is run by adults.  Everything wrong in the world must be the result of demons (thinks the child) and if the adults are responsible, then the adults are demons and the world is run by the devil. But, if the child blames themselves for all the problems, then the world, which is run by adults (who are now angels) is a safe place.  Children must blame themselves and think they are the sinful ones or they will never believe the world could be a safe place.

But we know the child is wrong, the world is a confusing and often painful place and it has been impacted tremendously by terrible people.

So it seems that the words of Mick Jagger ring sadly relevant – what a drag indeed.

But then a curious and quirky moment of Torah catches my attention.  

Sarah and Abraham are about to enter Egypt and they are both in their 80s.  Abraham worries that Sarah will be taken into Pharaoh’s harem because of her beauty.  In fact, she is indeed taken into the harem because of her beauty. We all pause and wonder if 80 years old means something different in those days.  What is the average age of the women in this harem?

And then I remember the cover of a newsmagazine I saw years ago.  It was the face of a woman in her 80s, her face, etched with wrinkles, looked like a roadmap of her life.  The headline indicated she was an African woman and considered the most beautiful woman in the region. The article discussed how beauty was defined by life experience and not youth.  In a second I understood that anyone would be honoured and flattered to be chosen by this woman as a partner since she had so much experience she could quickly discern who was an exceptional partner.  Beauty is in the gathering of experiences – the more wrinkles the more beautiful.

Of course Sarah would now be in the harem.  Imagine what the challenges of an uncharted relationship with God would do to her countenance, to her eyes.

The Torah unapologetically shows us that getting older is getting more beautiful because wisdom is beauty.

And so we read of their journey with God, with each other and with the people around them.  As Jews we are taught that everything begins with Lech Lecha, God approaching Abraham to take a journey.  Interestingly, we disconnect this parshah from what happened immediately before it. Abraham did not begin a journey, it is his father, Terach, who began the journey.  His father took the whole family and left the Chaldeans and began a journey of discovery. Then, in the midst of the journey, Terach died and the family stagnated. They dwelled in the place of his death and did not move forward.  That’s when God approaches Abraham and tells him he must journey forward. It is both a statement pulling toward movement as much as a statement objecting to stagnation.

It’s a parallel concept to Shabbat.  We are equally commanded to be productive for 6 days as we are commanded to refrain on Shabbat.  The positive and the negative balancing each other.

So when I wake up stiff in the morning and the words from Mick Jagger enter my mind, I stretch and get the blood flowing.  I remind myself that I can hum the tune and smile at the words, but getting old only gives me more insight to the new travels I will begin.

Abraham and Sarah dislodge themselves, late in their lives, and begin their journey from where Terach left off.  Every Jewish person inherits their own version of the ‘lech lecha’ journey, but we do not set our feet on a newly created road made just for us.  If we glance backward we will see the road has been paved behind us. Abraham and Sarah continue the journey begun by Terach.  

God has told them they must never stagnate as we learn that the journey of a life takes longer than a lifetime.

Standing Together

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Hi everyone

Hope the week was good.  My thoughts this week moved between the Torah portion and the upcoming High Holidays.  Then, I realized how much they speak to each other. This week’s parshah is Nitzavim and it starts with Moses as he declares to Israel: ‘Here you all stand’ – all of Israel standing before God, and I can’t help but think of the High Holidays.

Nitzavim – here we all stand.  We bring with us the truth of who we are, in all our strengths and our weaknesses.

Moses stands facing his imminent death and Israel stands looking at an unknown future – here we all stand.

Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of our Jewish new year, is not always remembered as our Day of Judgment.  However, another name for the holiday is: Yom Hadin, the Day of Judgment. God makes decisions about humanity that will then be sealed on Yom Kippur.  I find myself caught between the daunting aspects of the holiday and the celebration of sitting with my family.  

We stand together under the umbrella of Rosh Hashanah, with its major Divine decisions that sit above us, while we celebrate with each other down below.  I cannot tell you the number of times I have dipped a piece of apple in honey, only to have the apple slip from my fingers into the honey bowl. It’s not like I could ignore that I just dropped my apple into the communal honey, but digging my fingers into the honey to retrieve my apple will only make it worse. The truth is, I actually don’t like honey.  I love the concept of honey, the sweetness that comes as a result of the collective hive; the purity of it, the solid/liquid hybrid of it; the fact that it will inevitably end up in some little person’s hair… I love it all.  The only thing I don’t like is the taste.

So I celebrate that the holiday revolves around honey, because for me it represents the wonderful, funny, and symbolic things that are less than perfect.

I remember, as a little girl, anticipating hearing the shofar.  My teachers emphasized how important it is and my parents always made sure I came into the sanctuary especially to hear it.  I also remember hearing it and thinking a cow was baying at the moon. I didn’t find it a strange sound, strange would be an understatement.  I found it weird and jarring. The sound of a shofar is an acquired taste. But the more I acquire it, the more I love it.

The midrash tells us that the sound of the shofar is the matriarch, Sarah, crying and sobbing before God.  She believes her son has been killed and so she cries, and then she sobs and then she hyperventilates and then she screams the most gut wrenching and soul wringing scream imaginable and those are the sounds of the shofar.  They are strange, they are soulful and jarring and I love them.

The Rabbis also tell us that the physical sight of the shofar is our remembrance of the patriarch, Abraham.  He brought the vision of a partnership between God and humanity to the world. He contracted his relationship with God to create an eternal inheritance for the Jewish people – and it cost him everything.  He lost his wife, Sarah, and the relationship with his son, Isaac. His communication with God, toward the end of his life, is all but non-existent. What he gave the world is priceless, while the price he paid is unimaginable.  The bent and curved appearance of the shofar is the bent and curved back of Abraham as he bears the price he paid.

I celebrate that the shofar brings me to my ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, in their glory and their humanity.  I celebrate that they continue to lead us, through the shofar. It is magnificently strange and its sound is beautifully imperfect, as are we all.

Whether it is spelunking for my apple in the caverns of the honey bowl, or surrounding myself with everyone who makes the decision to go to shul, Rosh Hashanah will bring me to a moment of celebration.  Yet, with all that, the most powerful spiritual moment will lead me back to this week’s parshah, as I remember Moses’ declaration:

Here we stand.

May we all be inscribed for a year of life, health, peace and sweetness.

To Dream My Impossible Dream

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Hi everyone,

Hope everyone had a good week.

I had a week reflecting on fantasies and fairy tales.  I started watching a series about fantasy creatures and the dystopian world they are fighting to survive in.  I believe in fantasies and fairy tales.

To be clear, I don’t believe they’re real, I believe in them.  I believe we create them and then treat them as reality. That makes them very powerful.  I remember the perfect birthday present I ever received as a little girl was a toy spinning wheel.  It had red legs and a brown wheel. I got it as a present at my birthday party where I wore a beautiful dress with a crinoline underneath.  My party shoes were black and shiny with a bow and the dress had white beads on it. And though it is one of my best and favourite memories, I’m not sure if any of it is actually real (though my mother confirmed I once got a spinning wheel and seemed to love it – I think she said I slept with it). 

I love my fantasy moments because they are created by me, shaped by me and I can revisit them at will.  I revisit the first moments I met my newborn children. They were handed to me and birds were singing, the rainbow ended right above us and they smelled so beautifully like my husband and me.  Nothing else about the reality of the moment: the medical stuff, the staff rushing around, the lights, the beeping sounds, nothing about all of that enters my blissful fantasy moment.  

And, unfortunately, I can easily create my worst nightmare.  It will have no limits to the pain, the threat, the unending fear that only I would know how to create for myself, because only I know what will hurt me the most.  No theoretical hell to come could surpass what I could put myself through if I built my own personal one and no heaven afterlife could give me the joy of my fantasy moments.

I believe in fairy tales because I know we make them real.

But, they are the definitions of our personal extremes and deep down we know that both of these extremes could never happen.  We live our lives between our utopia and our dystopia. Jewishly, we know our minds can take us to our extremes and so the Torah and all of our texts always tell us: ‘choose joy’.  

This week’s parshah, Ki Tavo, paints a utopian image of the world if we follow covenant and build the society of values that Judaism outlines.  It is pure bliss, health, prosperity and affluence – we will want for nothing. Conversely, if we stray from covenant and betray the core of who we are, the picture of a cursed world that the parshah describes is bone-chilling.  Moses splits the people in two and while one half describes the horrific curses, the other half must answer ‘amen’ in agreement. Then we do it again with the blessings.  

Yet, the most surprising part of all of this is that both the rewards and punishments are described as implementing in this world.  In other words, if we do good, we are not rewarded with a blessed world to come, a wonderful afterlife. On the contrary, we are blessed with a world here that we would want to live in.  If we destroy everything we stand for, we are not punished with the eternal fires of hell – we are punished by having to live in the hell we created.  

The parshah outlines both a utopia and dystopia and neither one is real.  They are the extremes we have the power to create in our lives with the choices we make.

I used to be afraid of the pictures painted in this week’s parshah.  Would God really deliver the hell that is described? But then I realized we don’t need God to do it, we’ve done pretty good all by ourselves throughout history.  But equally powerful is the reality of the blessings we can create and the world it would bring.

God created the world we live in but we work with God to continue as partners.  We are instrumental in renewing creation every day that we live. We learned that in this week’s parshah, we heard it, we understand it and we answered amen.

Can I Leave My Jewish at Home?

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Hi everyone,

Hope you had a good week.  I was reading this week’s parshah, Ki Teitzei, and how it discusses who you are when you venture out of your home, your community and your comfort zones.  In fact, Ki Teitzei means ‘when you venture out’.

It made me think of questions like whether someone is comfortable showing their identity in the world at large.  Would you wear a Magen David on the outside of your shirt? The parshah tells us that we need to carry our identities with us wherever we go.  When an Israelite soldier is attracted to a war captive, he must allow her time and space to mourn her previous identity. Then he can marry her and she gains full rights as his wife.  Her identity has changed and he remains true to his Jewish identity and its code of ethics.

In today’s world, we’re always sensitive to anti-semitism and the line between the public and the private.  The Torah can tell us that we must be firm in who we are, no matter where we are, but that is far easier said than done.  A few years ago, my family and I vacationed in rural Texas at Christmas time. We didn’t know it was rural Texas, we thought it was a suburb of Austin.  It seems that Texas has quite a bit of open land, so what they consider a suburb is what I would consider ‘the bush’.

But, we only realized that when we arrived at the lovely cabin on the lake…in the middle of nowhere.  There were neighbouring cabins we could see here and there. When we walked around the lake we came across a pick-up truck parked with fishing gear, extra clothes and what looked like a rifle or two.  As it was December, we definitely noticed all the Christmas decorations and lights around us. In fact, the trees in the forests by the highways were decorated as well. It had the appearance of Christmas tree forests that were growing already decorated. 

Living in the city, we’re quite comfortable with the Christmas decorations around this time but we didn’t realize that we are also comforted by the diversity that surrounds us.  There was no diversity in this ‘suburb’ in Texas. And so, we had “the” discussion of what happens if we run into a neighbour who might ask about our lack of Christmas doo-dads. Some of our answers ranged from ‘we’re not Christian right now, but thank you so much for asking’ to ‘airlines are so inconsiderate with your luggage these days, am I right?’  We never considered explaining that we’re Jews.

Let me be clear, no one had made us feel unwelcome or was anything but warm and friendly.  People in the shops, market, on the road or by the lake were all open and lovely. No one ever asked us about our religion but they always wished us a merry Christmas and we always thanked them and wished them the same.  

The question of who we are when we leave our homes, pass the mezuzah on our door, and enter the world, is a real and daily question.  How do we navigate multiple identities? When Superman wants to hide his identity, he puts on a suit and glasses and apparently no one is any the wiser.  But when Clark Kent sees crime happening, why does he have to change into his Superman suit? Why can’t Clark Kent save the innocent? Superman’s vulnerability isn’t kryptonite, it’s someone finding out that he leads two lives – God forbid someone finds out that at home he lies around in a cape and tights.

I made a new friend this summer.  This woman is a devout Christian and her church is central in her life.  We shared time together and enjoyed each other’s company and humour. The more she talked about her church, the more I worried about whether it would matter that there was no church in my life.  She asked me if faith was important to me and I toyed with the answer: ‘airlines are so inconsiderate with your luggage these days, am I right?’ Instead, I made eye contact and said that religion is very much a part of my life, I’m a Jew.

She couldn’t have been more thrilled.  She saw faith as one more thing we had in common.

The parshah this week challenges us about our identities.  Who are we when we go to war? Who are we when we encounter vulnerable people?  Are we ever willing to re-identify our children as criminals and who are we when there are no witnesses to our actions?

But long before we get to those extremes, we can sit every morning with our coffee, think about the day ahead and ask ourselves who we are when we shut the door behind us.

Open Wounds

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Hi everyone,

Picture it:

A dead body found outside city limits with no witnesses and no one to blame.  It means no government is taking responsibility for the crime and no one is attending to the body.  No CSI team is sent and no police tape will cordon off the crime scene. In a very short time, the animals will claim the area and the victim will be forgotten forever.  A crime with a suffering victim and no closure in sight.

And now you have the picture painted in part of this week’s parshah, Shoftim.

Ok, I’m being a bit Hollywood dramatic, but only a bit.  The problem mentioned in the Torah is, in fact, a dead body between cities and no one owning the problem.  But whenever there is suffering involved, the Torah has made it clear that it cannot go unanswered – it must come to a close.

And so we arrive at discussing closure in our lives.  It’s nice when things tie into neat parcels with beginnings and endings.  Whenever something new occurs in our lives, we say a ‘shehecheyanu’, the blessing that acknowledges our gratitude for arriving at that new moment.  But, we don’t say ‘shehecheyanu’ for new things that don’t have endings. For instance, we don’t say a ‘shehecheyanu’ when we get married or at our first intimacies because we intend those relationships to last unendingly.  The blessing is for those moments that have closure: like the beginning of a holiday that will end in a week.

And though we know some things end, that doesn’t mean we’ll find closure.  Closure involves picking up the loose thread and tying it to something.  

But it’s not that simple, because if the loose thread involved our getting hurt, then we might revert to that primal element within ourselves that wants the person who hurt us to be hurt back. 

I saw this play out years ago when I was waiting for a flight at the airport.  I watched two kids playing at the gate. They were clearly brother and sister, around 6 or 7 years old.  The longer we waited, the less they got along (shocker). After about an hour, their now aggressive playing ended with the little boy crying and running to his mother.  Through his tears he told his mother that his sister hit him. “So now I have to hit her back, right? And I have to hit her HARDER, right?”

His words were brilliant.  Of course, she should feel what he felt, so he should hit her back.  But isn’t there a price to be paid for initiating the violence, and shouldn’t there be a deterrent built in to prevent future preemptive hitting – so he should hit her harder.  

His point was driven home to his mother when she told him she would talk to his sister about it immediately.  His response: “TALK to her??? Aren’t you going to YELL at her?!?!”

And there it is: the moment we confuse closure with justice.

And now it’s helpful to go back to that dead body in the Torah.  There will be no justice because there are no witnesses and no possible way to solve the crime.  But having no justice does not mean we cannot have closure. The Torah instructs the two closest cities to measure their distance to the body and the closest one assumes jurisdiction.  Then there is a ceremony performed to symbolically punish the guilty party and bury the dead. It is symbolic justice but effective closure.

But not everything can tie up so meaningfully.  Most of our moments are complex relationships with other people involved.  We feel the loose thread of conversations we didn’t have or injustices that were left unaddressed.  How can we find closure when the other person doesn’t know how wrong they were? If they only realized we were right, then we could finally close the matter.  And, again, we confuse closure with our fantasy of justice and so we go round and round.

How to break the cycle?

I think about the Torah’s statement of symbolic closure.  Once we realize we are not the ultimate Judge and therefore justice alludes us, we can begin to entertain symbolic closures.  There’s a great Yiddish saying that translates as: ‘not everything I think needs to be said; not everything I say needs to be written; not everything I write needs to be sent’.  There are stages of expression and I can choose one for closure.  

So, maybe we go somewhere private and say what needs saying, or maybe we write a letter and destroy it when we’re done.  Closure means we acknowledged our ‘jurisdiction’ and finish the loose thread.  

So…picture it:

A dead body found outside city limits with no witnesses and no one to blame but no longer a hanging thread and now it’s a model for the unfinished moments we all carry.

Learning To Listen

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Hope everyone had a great week.  

My brother recently celebrated a birthday which got me thinking about my siblings.  I remember a moment with my brother from our childhood. I was sitting in our kitchen with my father when my brother shouted down from his room: “Hey Rach, grab me some water!”

I was very touched that my older brother would ask me to do something for him, since our relationship to this point mostly consisted of jabbing each other with our elbows at dinner because I’m a righty and he’s a lefty.  The jabbing was obviously deliberate.

So, in my innocence, I thought he was reaching out to me as someone he could rely on for water…silly me.

For anyone who doesn’t remember kitchen sinks from the 1970s, next to every faucet was a spray nozzle that would shoot a strong spray of water directly forward when the handle was squeezed.  Unbeknownst to me, my brother had wrapped an elastic band around the handle so it was depressed and ready to shoot water at whomever turned on the faucet. My brother had moments of evil genius!

But God had a different plan for him.  After he shouted to me asking for water, I immediately said ‘of course’, feeling all grown up and worthy of taking my rightful place as someone he could rely on.  But then my father told me it’s ok, he would pour the water. I watched as my father turned on the faucet. I watched as a shower of water shot out and drenched him completely and I watched it go on and on for what seemed an eternity until my father figured out what was happening and shut the water off.  

That wasn’t the first time I’d ever heard my father yell, but it was the first time I’d heard him yell a curse word over and over…it was the ‘s’ word.

My brother ran into the kitchen, saw our drenched father and went a sickly colour of grey.  Then he kept yelling at me: “I thought YOU were getting me water!!!” I just sat at the table listening to all the yelling and trying to figure out what I had done, since I actually hadn’t done anything.  

My brother and I grew very close over the years and this is one of the memories that we cherish. 

Why do I remember this incident now?  Because this week’s parshah, Vaetchanan, has the verses that contain the prayer ‘Shema’.  It is our proclamation of monotheism and it translates as: “Hear, Israel, my Master, our God, my Master is One.”  We recite it in prayer and we recite it when we go to sleep. We learn to say it out loud and tradition says to cover our eyes when we say it so our ears will hone in.

But it is not a prayer that we direct to God, it is a prayer that we direct to each other.  In fact, we clearly state ‘hear ISRAEL’, and we cover our eyes so we will, in fact, hear ourselves and each other.  It is a moment of unity and commonality that we express to each other and it stands in opposition to any of our divisive moments.  We argue over everything, as siblings do, we compete over attention and justifications, as siblings do, and we tease each other and play pranks, as siblings do, but at the end of the day we unite and affirm our loyalties and our allegiances.

When my kids were little and I would put them to bed, I often stood outside their rooms to hear if they were falling asleep.  Many times I heard them whispering to each other and I would catch the words ‘mama’ or ‘papa’. They were clearly sharing their confusion, angst and frustration about their parents, or perhaps plotting pranks of their own.

Whenever they would get me with a good one, I would wonder if that had been planned in one of their late night secret meetings.  I loved that they shared this with each other because who could better understand it all than a sibling?

Moses has outlived his siblings at this point in the Torah.  He did not have sibling moments and he did not have strong family connections.  The parshah begins with the word ‘vaetchanan’, which means ‘and I pleaded.’ Moses is referring to how he begged that God allow him to enter Israel but God refused.  In fact, God told him not to speak of it anymore, never to ask again. Moses has been told he should no longer pray to God on this matter. Our hearts should break at that moment for the complete ear-shattering silence that God is demanding.  Especially because Moses is the one teaching us to say ‘Shema’: ‘Listen’.

So when we say the Shema, perhaps at that moment we are honouring Moses by acknowledging how well he taught us to hear each other.  Perhaps God told Moses to stop pleading because maybe the moment was difficult for both Moses and God. Maybe to protect Israel and answer its needs, Moses and God endured the difficulty.  If so, our personal moment of Shema is more loaded than we ever knew.

Moses stands alone as the sole survivor of his family.  His parents are long gone and his siblings have all died.  Nature prepares us for the loss of parents but a sibling is a lateral companion, they are meant to stand with us from cradle to grave.

Back in the book of Genesis, when the Torah begins, we meet the first siblings: Cain and Abel.  It ends horribly as Cain kills Abel over the perceived love of God, the Parent. When God questions Cain about it,  Cain asks God a fundamental human question: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper’ and his question is left unanswered in the Torah.  

Ultimately, in this week’s parshah, in the last book of Torah, we learn to say Shema to each other.  We learn to listen to each other, for that brief moment, and to finally understand that God is the Parent, we are all siblings and we can finally answer Cain’s question by saying ‘yes.’