In the week leading up to Hanukkah 2020, I invited people to respond to two questions:
What is your source of light in the darkness?
How will you bring light to others in the days to come?
I received 105 responses on social media.These are some of the results. Our world is in darkness, but there is light inside each of us. Happy Hanukkah, everyone. Thanks to all who share their light with the world.
Created by Heather Paul with music, “Yedid Nefesh,” by Geo Poor
Video of my monologue from Lot’s wife for parshat vayeira, with art and music by Geo Poor – for those of us who sometimes live looking back.
God, You scattered the divine sparks
so that we may find them in each other,
but sometimes, we forget to look.
We are Your glittering fragments,
Your shards, Your stars.
We stand here before You,
ready to gather the sparks,
ready to illuminate the world
like One holy campfire.
We may be scattered, shattered
but we will glow together, grow together,
we will see each other’s shine
and maybe then, dear God,
we will finally be ready
for peace.
Barukh Atah Adonai, mevarech et kol ha’olam b’shalom
Blessed are You, God, who blesses the world with peace.
I made another video this week, featuring my poem, “History of Languages.” This poem imagines the experience of the Tower of Babel, a story we find in this week’s Torah portion. Grateful as always to Geo Poor for providing the beautiful music. Please feel free to share!
Very excited to share a video of my Creation poem, “History of Loneliness” just in time for us to start at the beginning with Parashat B’reishit. Thanks to Geo Poor for providing the beautiful music and art. Please feel free to share!
Sukkot, the joyous Festival of Booths, started last night – five days after Yom Kippur. We face our mortality on Yom Kippur each year, and this year’s Yom Kippur was even more existential than usual. Sukkot always comes on Yom Kippur’s heels, and it makes sense: After we face our mortality, Sukkot is a celebration of the temporary. We are each getting closer to death every day. So we sit, eat, sleep, and pray in huts that we build with meticulous care and then tear down one week later. Like our lives right now – these huts are anything but stable. They only have three walls, and by law, we must be able to see the sky through its roof made of branches. If Yom Kippur’s message is “We are going to die, and that’s terrifying,” Sukkot’s message is “We are going to die, so let’s celebrate while we can.” The five days between the two are a path paved with meaning. If we find meaning in the days we have left, we can celebrate them, even – or especially – if we don’t know how many more we’ve got
This is a hard Sukkot for many of us because it’s a lonely one. But Sukkot teaches us that this loneliness – the loneliness of the pandemic – is also temporary. Shelter-in-Place is just another temporary shelter. We don’t know when it will end, but we have to trust that it will. “To everything there is a season,” Kohelet writes, in the book we read on this holiday. The pandemic season, the election season, the holiday season – all of it is temporary.
Tomorrow I will visit a friend’s sukkah and I will wrap myself in prayer beneath her branches. It won’t be a sukkah overflowing with friends, food, and song this year. I will be alone and masked, and I will only be there for the 20 minute time slot I booked before the next person arrives to fulfill the mitzvah. But I will be sheltered, I will be present, and I will breathe deeply. I will hold each second closely before I release it. To everything there is a season. Sukkot is a reminder that even this one can’t last forever.
Shabbat Shalom and Hag Sukkot Sameach. May we find meaning and joy in this season, as we celebrate all that is temporary.
A Shofar Offering – Shofar’s Cry: Sarah and Hagar Speak
This is an interpretive Torah experience for Rosh Hashanah, incorporating Hagar’s story from the Torah reading on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and the Akedah, which we read on the second day. This is designed to be read aloud by two people, each taking one of the parts. It would work well on Zoom as well as in person. Please feel free to use it with attribution.
A Haftarah Offering – Hearing in our Hearts: Hannah’s Story
Some prayers are spoken and some are silent. Our Amidah, our private prayer to God, is distinctive. It is whispered because it is based on the prayers of Hannah, who was infertile. Hannah ached so desperately for a child that she couldn’t voice her pleas to God. In Tosefta Brachot, the rabbis said, “Hannah spoke in her heart,” meaning that her lips moved, but sound did not escape them.
We read Hannah’s story on Rosh Hashanah. There are times when it hurts too much for me to hear it, and there are times when hearing it makes me feel less alone, and reminds me that this suffering links me to generations of ancestors who dealt with the same thing.
I was thinking about how the words of her prayers aren’t written in the text and I realized it’s because we know them by heart too. Every person who has struggled with infertility, who has miscarried, who has yearned that deeply: we know.
If you want to use this in your shul for the holidays, you’re welcome to, with attribution. The quoted pieces are from 1 Samuel. If you’re in the same place as me this year – praying with Hannah – please know that your prayers are mine as well. May the Womb of the World hear our longing this year, and may the new year bring new life to us all.
Thanks to Bury Me in New Jersey for interviewing me about Virtual Memory Circles, the “What Have We Lost?” video, and grief in a virtual world. Check out the podcast episode below by scrolling down to “You Can Close Your Eyes.”
On July 30, 2020, I invited people to share up to five things they’ve lost since COVID-19, in just a few words each, in observance of Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning on the Jewish calendar. Over 25 hours, 95 people shared their losses anonymously in a Google Form. These are some of the results.
Thank you to everyone who contributed. May we swiftly return to a time of life, a time of touch, and a time of healing. If the video moves you, please share.
“Suffering breaks our hearts. But there are two quite different ways for the heart to break. There’s the brittle heart that breaks apart into a thousand shards, a heart that takes us down as it explodes and is sometimes thrown like a grenade at the source of its pain. Then there’s the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, growing into greater capacity for the many forms of love. Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.”
I’ve been thinking about this teaching from Parker Palmer a lot lately. Yesterday was the 17th of Tammuz. Traditionally, this is a Jewish fast day commemorating the breach of the walls of Jerusalem before the destruction of the Second Temple. It also marks the beginning of the three-week mourning period leading up to Tisha b’Av, the day when the first and second Temples were destroyed. These three weeks are known as Bein ha’Metzarim, between the narrows. No Jewish marriages or other celebrations are allowed at this time, since the joy of these occasions conflicts with the mood of mourning.
The 17th of Tammuz also arrives 40 days after Shavuot. This is the day when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai and found that the Israelites had built a golden calf while he was receiving the Torah. Moses was furious and he shattered the tablets. He went back up the mountain, and the Israelites went back to…waiting. Waiting with their grief, their fear, and their brokenness, the shattered tablets laying before them.
We have been sitting in our own waiting place, Bein ha’Metzarim. By my count, it’s been 120 days since the quarantine started. Even if you are numb at this point, the emotions that surfaced at the start of COVID are still there, exacerbated by losses due to racial violence. Some days it might feel like you’re moving through molasses – there’s a fatigue you just can’t sleep off. Maybe you’ve snapped recently at someone who did nothing wrong, or there was a moment when a minor stumble felt like a disaster. All of it is grief – for the 135,000 who have died from COVID-19 in the US alone, for racial violence, for the special moments we’ve had to share on Zoom instead of in-person, and for all the plans we can’t fulfill. In progressive Jewish communities, we don’t often observe the three weeks or Tisha b’Av. However, as we wait at the foot of the mountain, sitting in our collective brokenness, and unsure of what comes next, it may be necessary to engage with this part of our tradition. And we should engage with it, as Parker Palmer has said, with a broken and supple heart.
The Talmud teaches that when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai the second time, with new tablets, the Israelites kept the broken ones. They placed them, along with the new tablets, in the holy ark. Why? Because our ancestors knew brokenness and wholeness live side by side, in the ark and in our hearts. Some even taught that brokenness is not only natural – it’s necessary. The Kotzker Rebbe taught that “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” And in a Hasidic folk tale, a disciple asked a rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to place the words of the V’ahavta upon our hearts instead of in our hearts?” The rebbe answered: “It is because our hearts are closed. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.” The Lurianic kabbalists taught that brokenness itself is holy: When God created the world, God tried to contain God’s light in vessels that shattered into millions of pieces. We each contain a spark of this Divine light, this symbol of God’s own brokenness.
The message from our tradition is clear: Our hearts have to break. We have to feel our grief. And we do not to have experience our brokenness alone. These three weeks are a time when we can grieve with community. When we are Bein ha-Metzarim, we are like the tablets in the holy ark. We are held in our brokenness, we are whole in our holiness, and we are healed when we hold the shattered pieces for those around us.
As we sit with the shattered tablets, as we wait in our brokenness, I want to bless each each of us with a heart that is supple – one that is open to our own suffering and to the suffering of others, so that the words of our prayers fall in, and so that we may we renewed again.
Scattered Leaves 