Torah thoughts on pluralism for Shavuot

This week we celebrate the giving of Torah at Sinai, and it’s traditional to study Torah all night in celebration.  I’ll just make a start here and get some sleep.

The portion this week is B’Midbar, and in it we read about the various tribes of Israelites  arrayed around the Tabernacle.  Each tribe has an assigned place, with the Tabernacle in the center.  It occurs to me that if the physical representation of holiness is in the center, with all the people circled around it, each individual has equal access to the center.  Each of the tribes — each of us — has the right to call G-d his or her own, and each of us is right, individually and collectively.  Those who see the Tabernacle from the east will see it in a certain light, while those who see it from the north will see it differently.  From every vantage point, the holy center is available, and from every vantage point it looks different.

In Deuteronomy 30:14 (Nitzavim) we read that the Word, “is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.”  The voice of G-d is audible to us all, and it is located in our hearts.  And when we are lined up, tuned to the right frequency, we can observe the commandments, each of us within the bounds of his or her conscience.  The commandment is not beyond reach but in our hearts.  Go and learn it.

The Bread of Affliction

Two years ago I wrote this about cleaning for Pesach.  It should surprise you not even a bit that I am still procrastinating, still arguing, still searching.  I once heard someone say, “Some people are born knowing, while others die searching.”

The thing is, because I am all in-betweensies in my Jewish practice — because my kashrut, like my spiritual life, is a work in progress — I have dear friends who won’t eat in my home during Pesach no matter how well I clean.  I don’t blame them.  Look, not even I am confident that all the chametz will be duly removed from my home.  They are honoring the holiday the way it makes sense for them.  They don’t ask me to change, I don’t ask them to change.  (So they invite me, lucky for me!)

For me, the cleaning is a hassle, a chore, a reminder of how little I know.  Another dear friend regards the process of cleaning as transformational; as she cleans her home, she is also — purposefully, mindfully — cleaning her soul.  She is a brilliant, creative homeschooling mother of three who has organized her life’s work around her home and family.  In her, it makes perfect sense to me, this pairing of spirituality and Pesach cleaning.

For me, though, the path is elsewhere.  Matzo is also called the bread of affliction — lachma aniya.  When I eat matzo during Pesach, it calls to mind the injustice of slavery, the terror of escape, the insecurity of wandering.  It asks me to wrestle with the slaveries, physical and metaphorical, that exist today, even in my own life.  The bread of affliction reminds me that I have a role to play in diminishing the afflictions of others, and that I am responsible for freeing myself from that which enslaves me.

Ultimately, this is not Lent.  During Pesach, we are not giving up chametz.  Instead, we are embracing the bread of affliction, allying ourselves with the afflicted of this world and asking ourselves the hard questions.

Wondering and wandering

It dawned on me yesterday that there is a narrative arc to the fall chaggim (holidays) that echoes parts of the story of the Jewish people.

At Rosh Hashanah we celebrate the beginning of the world, G-d’s creation.  (Dinosaurs notwithstanding.)  Our story starts alongside everyone else’s, and every year we celebrate the birthday of the world, the place and time that began it all.

Yom Kippur resonates with the expulsion from Eden, as we contemplate error, sin, and the eternal incompleteness of teshuvah (return).  Our atonement begins with Kol Nidrei, the acknowledgement that though we will do our best, we expect to fall short.  We acclaim our humanity while embracing the striving for improvement.

Just four days later we choose exile, building our sukkot and dwelling in them.  We embody the desert wanderings that our people endured for forty years, sharing meals in uncomfortable chairs and batting away the bugs, inviting strangers and friends alike to join us in our sukkot — we make the best of it, together.   The company makes it better than bearable, but still we are in the thrall of the elements and the mosquitoes.

The end of Sukkot braids into Simchat Torah, when we rejoice at having the Torah in our midst.  We sing and dance with the scrolls; we end our cycle of annual readings and in the same breath begin again.  All that desert wandering culminates in the gift of the Tree of Life, whose branches we hope to become.

This Sukkot the guys and I are in a new congregation, having left the familiar comfort of Reform practice and begun moving toward a more traditional practice that doesn’t quite feel like it belongs to us yet.  We  keep checking the web site of our new synagogue, making sure we know the right time to show up — and still arriving early or late according to how it’s actually done.  When, rarely, I get the chance to go to the adult service, I stand hesitantly around the edges, worried that if I sit, I’ll get called on.  Someone will realize I don’t know my stuff (yet) and point and laugh, call me a fraud, confirm what I already know, that this is not yet mine.  It’s mostly moot, since Gideon is loath to let me go anywhere without him (in shul or anywhere else) and cannot, will not stay quiet in the adult service.

I feel the wandering more acutely than ever.

I sit in my sukkah as I write this, knowing that many in my new congregation would frown upon my using the computer on chag, on my not being at shul right now.  Although I seek a more traditional lifestyle in some ways, I bring with me a Reform frame of mind, which emphasizes a personal quest for meaning and which empowers the individual to make the choices that sing G-d’s song to her.  In this moment I feel more compelled to write, to explore my soul, than to wrestle my kids into wearing decent clothes and participating respectfully.  The boys are playing in their pajamas, the sun is shining through the gauze walls of my sukkah, and I am wondering and searching.

I am searching for my own spiritual core, and for my family’s practice.  We don’t yet have our own traditions, and I don’t know where to get them.  My parents didn’t do much in the way of traditions, at least none I recognize as such.  Bill became Jewish in adulthood so he has no roots to draw water from.  We go visiting our friends or go to synagogue, and everything is lovely and strange.  Nothing yet fits.  We are  searching, we are wandering.

A reading from my old siddur, adapted from the Marge Piercy poem Maggid, describes this moment.

BLESSED IS the courage to let go of the door, the handle. Blessed is the courage to leave the place whose language you learned as early as your own.

Blessed the courage to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain that cannot be imagined, mapless, walking into the wilderness, going barefoot with a canteen into the desert. Bless us all, born wanderers, with shoes under our pillows…

And blessed are those Jews who changed tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage, who walked into the strange and became strangers, and gave birth to children who could look down on them, standing on their shoulders, for having been slaves.

Blessed are those who let go of everything but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought, who became other by saving themselves.

For courage, for freedom, sing and rejoice!

Tashlich

Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, we are called to go to a body of water and toss in bread crumbs, symbolically letting go of the sins and errors of the year just past.  I hadn’t had the chance to do so until this afternoon — just hours before Kol Nidrei, which marks the beginning of Yom Kippur.

I went with Gideon, while Akiva, who had made Tashlich at school earlier today, was at a friend’s house.  We walked a while along the Charles River till we found a nice spot overlooking a small dam — more of a waterslide for ducks, really.  When we arrived the sun was casting a brilliant glint over the water and in the blaze we could just make out a heron standing tall on the rocks.  I stared at it for a while, pointed it out to Gideon.

We talked a bit about mistakes we’d made in the past year that we wanted to fix.  He didn’t understand a word I said, but he was pretty excited about throwing the bread into the water.  We went to the edge and started breaking off chunks to throw in.  We tossed and tossed and tossed.  Eventually some ducks came to eat up our sins.  Hungry ducks, they don’t care about the ways we’ve hurt others or been thoughtless.  They just like the bread.  Home baked, no less.  At first it was two ducks, then several followed along.

When I next looked, the heron was gone.

I think it’s a pretty good metaphor for life.  How many times have I meant to keep my attention on the herons of life — family, friends, spiritual pursuits — only to be distracted by the ducklings of cooking dinner and filling out paperwork and getting people where they need to be on time?

I’m sure the heron is somewhere, and the next time I go to that spot maybe I’ll see it again.  I just wish I could keep my attention on it while also taking care of the ducks.

Emily Boyd Lowe 1926-2012

My father took a job at Eastern Michigan University in 1967.  It was his first steady job, and shortly after he and my mother and their two young children set up shop in sleepy Ypsilanti, Michigan, my mother became pregnant with me.  Toward the end of Dad’s first year at EMU, I was born and mere weeks later, I first met Emily Lowe.  It’s facile to say we were fast friends, but I never knew a time when Emily and I didn’t know and adore each other.

Everyone adored Emily.  She was impossible not to adore.  She had more zest in one momentary smile than most of us have across all dimensions of time and space.  She sang like a bird, taught with blazing enthusiasm, and wrote the most beautiful letters and inscriptions.  (“Yes, wistful, impish dear, I still love you,” she wrote in a score she gave me.)  I can imagine her beloved husband Don weeping with gratitude at having had 63 years worth of her phone messages and to-do lists, so soulful and bright was she with words.

Unencumbered by worry, she faced trials with faith, warmth and lively intelligence.  Her life held more trials than most, including a few hurricanes and a devastating injury to her son that left him paralyzed.  Through all these events, her sense of humor remained and her kindness was only strengthened.

She also had style.  Her fashion sense was the perfect combination of flamboyant and dignified.  It’s hard to describe.  She was always “put together” but never dull.  Maybe the skirt suit was the color of a bright tropical fish.  Or maybe the blouse looked like plain black and white from a distance but had jungle animals on it up close.  She found a way to express her individuality within the rather confined standards of professional women of the 1980s.  And no shoulder pads either.

Her singing was beautiful and heartfelt, her voice clear like a bell.  She conducted with passion and verve, and her musicianship was something I aspire to match.  Even her piano playing was good, not requiring the usual disclaimer, “good, for a singer.”

Dad says Emily was a key factor in his getting the job in the first place.  The morning portion of his audition day consisted of accompanying her students in lessons and studio class.  The two of them hit it off, and by the time the music faculty took him to lunch, things were already looking up for him.  (He found out later that the faculty were also impressed that he ate a good lunch.)  He played some Bach for the faculty in the afternoon, and by day’s end the job was his.  They were to be colleagues and friends for decades, and when I took up singing, Emily was thrilled.

I sang for her in a high school workshop and she encouraged me to come to EMU and study with her.  I wouldn’t consider it because I was a big fancy opera singer and had to go someplace prestigious.  And when I quit school and quit singing two years later out of discouragement and disillusionment, she did not say, “I told you so.”

Instead she asked me to stop by and see her in her office sometime.  Because I loved her company, I did.  I could not have imagined that by the end of that afternoon I would be singing again, with abandon and enthusiasm and sheer joy.  She suggested I take some lessons with her, unofficially, just to keep myself fresh.  I agreed, knowing that if I could trust anyone with my insecurity and heartache it was her.  The first few weeks, I tried to pay her.  (I found myself chasing her around the desk with a check in hand.  I wasn’t fast enough.)  She invited me to perform in her studio class.  She gave me two-hour lessons.  When she was out of town and had someone come in to teach her college kids, she asked that person to teach me as well.  In all, she taught me for nearly three years and never accepted a penny for it.

After a time, I regained some confidence, and she included me in her delegation at the statewide NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) competition.  When I won, she acted like the credit was all mine.  She invited me to join on a recording project which turned out to be a thrilling experience and my first exposure to the contemporary music which would later become so important to me.

When she decided to retire from EMU I was devastated.  She had been there thirty years, and she and Donald were ready for something new.  They moved to the Florida Keys, where she started a new amateur chorus.  She brought her new group the same energy and opportunity that she had once lavished on her Michigan folk.  I was a little jealous, and when she invited me down to participate in a master class she was organizing with Benjamin Luxon as master teacher, I couldn’t wait to go!  Although she was busy that weekend hosting the Luxons and running the various logistics of the classes, she found time to invite me to lunch at her home and spend some time with me.

She had a way of making me feel like the most important person in the room.  Although I realize I wasn’t, I know she loved me.  I am feeling more wistful and impish than usual tonight, but I take comfort in knowing how much she did love me.  She was a rare treasure and I am so grateful that she was my teacher.

May her memory be for a blessing.  It already is.

Time, passing

There’s nothing like a life cycle event to get me all wobbly.  My glorious nephew (like I would have any other kind) had his Bar Mitzvah yesterday.  Seeing the slide show at the party last night — pictures of him as a baby, pictures of my boys as babies, pictures of my former sister-in-law, of blessed memory — reminded me so deeply of the passage of time, and of how having children has changed my relationship with the passage of time.  

This frame of mind is helped along by other factors as well.  My beloved voice teacher, Emily Lowe, died this week at age 85.  I drove the kids through my old neighborhood this morning.  Thinking of how many people I used to eat Spaghetti-O’s and listen to Shaun Cassidy with are no longer with us makes my heart sore.  My father, who accompanied Emily many times, is also shaken by her death and talks about the end of life in a different way these days.

I am grateful to have so many interesting memories, some of them lovely, some not.  I didn’t have such a great childhood — I was never a child — but still, it’s mine.  These atoms add up to the story that I tell myself and sometimes I’m shocked to see just how many atoms there are now.  And still I can’t see what shape they make. 

Too frequently I am just getting through: cooking, answering questions, cleaning (well, a little), making plans, packing picnics.  All in the service of checking something off some cosmic list or getting to the next stage.  Maybe this is the next stage.

The Jew has left the choir loft

For nearly four years, I have worked as a singer in the Catholic church.  I sought the job shortly after our financial reversal.  Despite emotional and spiritual misgivings, I stayed with it, greedily taking every opportunity on offer.  I started out as the alto section leader (yes, alto — they already had a soprano) and then was asked to sub as Cantor.  I did well, subbed some more, did some weddings and funerals, singlehandedly saved Good Friday one year.  This particular parish has two campuses, so there were many opportunities.  A lovely priest who comes to help out and study in the summertime saw me so often subbing that he called me “the cork in the bottle”.  Little by little, I became sort of a professional Christian.

Look, some of my best friends are Christians.  But standing in front of a congregation, leading their hymns, acclaiming their gospel, passing their peace — it was both sweet and bitter.  The people I encountered at both campuses were truly lovely and unfailingly kind about my singing and contribution.  I developed a particular fondness for the Vicar, Father Brian, who never missed an opportunity to wish me a happy Chanuka, Passover, you name it, or simply to say Shalom.  He is the one who wore the hat emblazoned with “Patriots” written in Hebrew letters on Super Bowl Sunday.  He is a mensch and I will miss him.

At the same time, the experience of standing by the lectern and singing every week of a theology I don’t hold became more and more untenable.  We read in the Psalms, ”How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil?  If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you.”  As I sang, week after week, words that do not ring in my soul, my voice began to separate from my person.  In order to cope with being there, I thought about anything but the words I was singing.  When the congregation stood to recite a prayer, I mumbled the Sh’ma under my breath over and over.  And still, when I walked out the door, my earworms were hymns.

I was afraid to abandon a steady source of income, but finally decided that the psychic and spiritual cost of continuing was too high.  Yesterday was my last day, and lovely Father B acknowledged me and my Judaism from the pulpit in a thoroughly classy, “Those who understand, understand,” kind of way.  The congregation gave me a warm ovation, and I sang my last hymn.

I am grateful to have had the job.  As my mother-in-law said, it was there when I needed it.  Now I need something else to come, something that will enable me to help support my family and remain clear in my spiritual journey.

Encounters

This morning, having given my notice to my music directors, I started telling selected parishioners that next week would be my last week on the job.  I was surprised by the depth of response.  One man threatened to cry and told me he loved me.  You never know, even when you’re singing like a pig, who might just really have a taste for piggy singing.

After work I rushed to Gideon’s birthday party at the local splash park.  I am not a fancypants hostess and the whole kid birthday party ritual has become something of a factory since the parties of my  long-ago youth.  (Cake, ice cream, play in the backyard.  Done.)  I’d forgotten entirely about the requisite party bags until late last night, when we hastily made baggies of popcorn and trail mix and stuffed them into paper lunch bags stamped with a monkey.  (Yes, I, Mothra Stewart, did the stamping myself.  What a woman.)  The whole experience magnified my ever-present feeling that everyone knows how things are supposed to be but nobody will tell me.  Standing there, squinting in the sun as my sons played in the water was really enough for me.  I didn’t see why I had to be the one to time the serving of the cake.  My favorite part was leaping over the wall to hand off the party bags I forgot to give to the first guests to leave.  Mothra Stewart, meet Queena the Worrier Princess.

We had leftover food so we took it to the local hospital.  The ladies all wanted to engage Gideon and ask how old he was, wish him a happy birthday, etc.  He would have none of it.  Like his old mother, that one is.  Talk to me about something that matters.

I paid a visit to a house of mourning today, to sit with a friend whose brother died.  I almost didn’t go, for my usual reasons (shyness, sense of seventh-grade inferiority, fear of saying the wrong thing, it’s late and I’m tired, kids need me, blah blah blah) but then told my boys that when someone’s brother dies, they need their friends to be near them.  I have not had much experience with shiva calls; I wish they could all be so loving and warm.  Although there were tears and sadness, the room was alive with detail, memory, the way he laughed, his long-ago appearance on the David Letterman show (yes, really!).  I left feeling that it was not just any brother who died, but a very specific one.  May his memory be for a blessing.

After that, the grocery seemed too brightly lit.  A slightly sketchy but very funny guy was chatting me up over the mangos.  It was all pleasant and flirtatious until I mentioned I have two small children.  His fingers crossed as if my children were vampires; he said, “I managed to avoid that lifestyle.”  He joked about borrowing children just so he could give them back.  I hate the way I feel when people joke like that, as if they are claiming cool and I’m the old bag who sold out.  That lifestyle you dismiss with a derisive swipe, sir, happens to be my anchor to this sweet, sad, scary planet.

Something missing

This evening I had the privilege of attending a dinner party at the home of some friends from JCDS.  It was a grown-up dinner, and the special guest was Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, who spoke on his work in ethnomusicology with the Abayudaya of Uganda, among other interesting topics.  The other guests were all somehow associated with the school as well, and the conversation was wonderful.

Toward the beginning of dinner, we had the opportunity to introduce ourselves individually around the table and say a little about our connection to JCDS.  When my turn came, I mentioned my sons and how I want them to have a Jewish education so that they can take ownership of their Jewish identities along the way to adulthood.  As I warmed to the topic, I realized that my choice of a Jewish education for them is aspirational.  I want them to have what I don’t: the background and education to live out their Jewish identities as they wish.  In my own life, I frequently feel hampered by my lack of Jewish education.  I feel that there are things about Judaism that don’t truly belong to me.

After dinner, the group began the Birkat haMazon (after-dinner prayer) and after the first paragraph, I had to drop out because I didn’t know the words and couldn’t fake the tune.  It went on for several pages like that, and as it did, the tears came to my eyes.  In a room full of my people, I felt lonely.

As the evening ended, Rabbi Summit approached me and encouraged me to regard the gaps in my Jewish education as remediable — and to get started remedying them.  He said there’s no reason to think of it as this big problem that can never be solved, and as he spoke, my eyes filled again.

I’ve said many times that I want to learn how to daven (pray Jewishly) — and yet something always stops me from following through in an organized fashion.  I might study every day for a few weeks, but then some other project takes precedence and I lose focus.  Yet we are taught that teshuva (return) is always available.  I think I will start on the Birkat haMazon.

Why do I have nothing to say?

It’s been months since I’ve had the motivation to write this blog.  Well not exactly.  I’d love to write it, if only I had something to say.  I feel like my zombie kids have sucked my brains out, and now all that’s left of me is the box ticker.  I drive people where they need to go, cook the food, bake the bread, read the emails, organize the this & that, try to keep little fingers out of noses…

Sometimes I think I write best when I’m blue.  I’m more lyrical, more descriptive, more plaintive.  (Oh, how I love being plaintive.  When I sing, too.)  But lately when I’ve been blue, the subject matter has been too volatile and private to write about in a public forum.  (I mean, there might theoretically be someone who is still reading this…)

Maybe someone could give me  a writing prompt.  I feel like I just have to get purposeful and habitual about writing.  Anyone, anyone?