Simchat Torah: Dance Me to the End of Love

I remember the time when I carried the sefer Torah on some festive day in the Jewish calendar and I felt like David dancing before the Ark. My first experience of the deep love of Torah was on the face of a man who was cradling it to his cheek as he sat and held it on the bimah.

I see that love more in the faces of men. I hear the men who sing lustily at minyan, I notice the men who attend regularly, some so quietly, and the men who make a special effort to attend for a yahrzeit. I have known the passionate faces of the founders of this congregation and I have known some of their deaths. I see that love, also, in the faces of the gabbaim (sextons) who, business-like, bop on up to the bimah for Torah readings, and in the face of the men, constant and true in service, who hand out aliyot (honours), though some women do it, too.

I have recently seen men who have embraced a male convert and stayed with him and nurtured and mentored him throughout the cycle of Jewish days. I have also known male converts who went Orthodox because they were not embraced and mentored. Men provide the fun in Purim shenanigans, they build the sukkah, whip out the Torah seferim on Simchat Torah for the rest of us to hold and raise and spin. They barbecue, and make drinks to increase our joy. Even in this egalitarian, Conservative shul, it is the men who sustain the heart of religious devotion- and joy.

Women wander in and wander out. They quietly sustain us with food at kiddushim and onegs (celebratory meals), make all of our simchas truly abundant, and our beings replete, support the bowed and the stricken, without a face, and without fanfare. They provide scholarships. I have not seen a single woman from the group ever mentor a convert. I have never seen a female convert embraced and nurtured and mentored in temple by the women. If you are a woman you can serve and you can be domestic, but there are almost no women to mentor you intellectually or ritually or halachically unless it is domestic. Few women dance with the Torah. Few women shake the lulav. Few women (make that 1 or 2) wear tefillin. I have served behind the table. But I have also danced with the Torah.

Most of what I have known or learned has been from the faces of men. In Israel, men prayed together at the Kotel (Western Wall). Women prayed separately, reciting the Psalms or whatever. How passionate those women were! How intense and focussed! But, still, isolated unto themselves, apart. I think it must be my fault for not noticing the women. Some of them also sit together at services but they are more likely to ask you to serve at an oneg than lead prayers.

Having said all that, have I missed their faces? Do the women cradle the sefer Torah to themselves in other ways? My experience hasn't been terribly enlightening in that area. I think I must be missing something.

Tomorrow evening, erev (eve of) Simchat Torah, I so look forward to grabbing a gorgeous Torah scroll and parading it up and down for smiling faces to touch and to kiss, and dancing away. Oddly, I carry with me the faces of all the men I have seen dance with utter joy and utter embrace. I am waiting for the faces of many women. The public face, the public expression matters deeply; I long to see the connection. Because as far as I know, Simchat Torah describes the faces of all the true dancers I have known who would never dare say it even to their wives (and, sometimes, their husbands), yet somehow can express it all to G-d :

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
~Leonard Cohen

Shaken, Not Stirred

L and I were in an accident on an LA freeway, last Shabbat. At 60 miles per hour it is hard to grasp that all 3 of us, from two vehicles, survived intact, with no one else involved, but we did. For me it was akin to watching a pool shot, watching the ball miss the pocket (i.e., missing crashing head on into the wall), bank, and bounce back into traffic, rolling out of control. The other car (SUV), that is. It fluttered on 2 wheels and ricocheted. While we were minding our own business in the slow lane.

My life did not flash before my eyes. My thoughts were disappointingly ordinary- I was especially irked at the looming inconvenience if we crashed. Thoughts of sick kitties, and a big chunk of time gobbled up in this disaster filled me with annoyance There was no time for fear, and that, I feel, is a total gift from G-d. L (my heroine) finally had to put on the brakes when it was clear that we would not miss the SUV, and we crunched into it, met at our respective corners, and we all survived. By the way, the SUV was looking to rollover but it came to a dead stop as we did. The execution was a dizzying cosmic display while the laws of physics, in simple truth, stood as witness to beauty and deliverance, of the logical and scientific kind. G-d resides in physics.

I was shaken afterwards, physically, emotionally, though neither driver was. Perhaps that was because they had to concentrate on keeping control while I had nothing to occupy me but the slowly unfolding scenario before me. The other driver stated later, in insurance talks, that she was a Christian and she is convinced tht angels surrounded her, and I can't disagree with her because she should have been so dead. I was shaking and shaken and I wondered what it all meant. It was dramatic, this experience, but perhaps a little diminished by the fact that so many highway accidents happen each day, and because we came out of it without any visible injury.

I relived it for a couple of days, and I cried. When I cried, it felt like awe. It felt like I, and everyone else, had been plucked out of danger by The Hand of G-d. You go into another space, for a while. And everything is so beautiful.

So, I was expecting a revelation. Expecting something to change. Nothing was happening. Meanwhile, I attended Sunday minyan and mentioned my ordeal to LARabbi™. I asked him (and I was quivering) if I could say the "blessing for getting out of danger". He pointed out that to "bentsch (pray) HaGomel" (thanksgiving for deliverance from danger) one needs a day where the Torah is read. Okay, the next day was Monday, when traditionally the Torah is read if we have a minyan. Oh, yes!

And these are the words:

hagomel l'chayavim tovot shegmalani kol tov, "who grants favor to the undeserving, that He has shown me kindness"; and the congregation responds: mi shegmalkha kol tov hu yigmalkha kol tov selah, "He who has shown you kindness, may He deal kindly with you forever" (O.H. 219:2). Guide to Jewish Religious Practice

On that day, preliminary prayers sported no minyan, but by the time of the Amidah, all was copacetic, coalesced. I can't begin to describe the relief, the comfort, the warmth that flooded through me, in knowing we had a minyan, even though most of the attendees were strangers to me. I was honoured with an aliyah, I said the blessings over the Torah, I bentsched HaGomel. And then somehow everything fell into place, somehow everything became complete, okay. The agitation fled. The world had righted itself.

In minyan I reconnected with the the self I knew. Was anchored. And filled with gratitude. I cannot begin to stress how completely healing this was for me- a refuah shlemah. LARabbi™ spoke last night about sukkot- fragile, evanescent shelters that are our lives- spoke about 9/11 and how those icons of America's power, the twin towers, ended up being so fragile, and so vulnerable. So it is with trucks and with SUVs and all the armour that we imagine protects us.

Later, oh, drama queen that I am, damn, I was not stirred. I have been waiting for great revelations given the grandness of the encounter with death, and they have failed to arrive. Can anyone help? I find myself not particularly stirred by this encounter with death and life, knowing full well that it was G-d that made all the difference. Life goes on, and I am forgetting. I go on, as well. I am rather thrown by it all.

Is that all there is?

And yet, I suspect, that G-d had a message for me, even though I feel so dense. And yes, I believe we can be so blessed.

The Word G-d Dares To Utter

Are personal events in the world rooted in a G-d source, a G-d machination? Or are our attempts at teleology merely post facto forays into guessing/explaining G-d's motives? These are the questions that LARabbi ™ raised in this Shabbat's Torah portion, Vayelekh. I no longer recall the verse, or, perhaps it was the commentary to which he was referring. It was a fabulous question, nevertheless, given the Days of Awe that we are living at this time. Especially in consideration of the accounting to which we hold G-d, as well as ourselves.

And what about that description, "Days of Awe"? Okay, these days are solemn and scary, if you take such things to heart. These are the days for teshuvah (repentance), tefillah (prayer), tzedakah (charity), to mitigate G-d's judgment of our lives and His original decree. Add the hair-raising alarm of the shofar, and then, fear "concentrates the mind wonderfully".

During the Days of Awe (or any other day in the Jewish calendar), perhaps there is more wonder than we ever imagined. And perhaps, most of us never imagined that there is wonder, but that is surely true for me. All of Judaism is a great wondering. And that wondering especially stands in stark relief, graceful and true, at this time of year. This is the time of year to wonder about G-d's presence, and why He hides, it seems, when we most need Him in our lives.

During the discussion of the parsha, questions of life and death and suffering were not answered. However, someone did submit this analogy: During Passover, children search for the Afikoman (nominally, the dessert matzah, ), in a game of hide and seek. The Afikoman cannot be hidden too cleverly or obscurely. It is hidden, yes, but not out of reach of discovery, or else it would be too discouraging. And so it is with G-d, it was said. G-d may hide Himself, but always in such a way that He can be found.

This led me to the thought that, G-d's hiding becomes less so during these days leading up to Yom Kippur. It's there, in the Torah, plain as the nose on your face, that G-d has instituted these Yomim Noraim for us to connect with Him. He is hiding in plain sight. Regardless of other questions about why bad things happen to good people, this time of year is a guarantee that He is not hidden, and that the connection is direct, without a whole lot of static. Though He may play hide-and-seek with us the rest of the year, at this time, He is revealing Himself and saying, clearly and immediately, "Hineni", Here I Am.

Jewish Stuff

I'm back at the old LA Jewish homestead, amazed at stuff.

I happened upon a tv program, which happened to be Jewish, about Jewish choral music, a fairly recent phenomenon, having become westernized in the Western world. Within it I discovered the core definition of spirituality, as simple as all truths. One of the choir participants spoke of her intermittent feelings of alienation in the world, how that happens as a matter of life, and how she returns to the choir and she feels "whole and connected". And I'm thinking, that is spirituality in a nutshell.

Davenning here is so different from davenning where I live. The ruach here is deep-seated, hooked onto tradition, whereas, there, the ruach is pretty and pleasant and inviting, but not demanding.

Simple prayer at minyan has been a revelation: who knows a black soul, a less than pristine heart? This year my soul is sootier than the leavings of wildfires along the Chatsworth hills. I'm shocked and appalled. Never mind a surgical analysis of my sins and transgressions. It's really ugly and for me, beauty is truth, and truth, beauty. Clearly, this year, my behaviour exemplifies neither.

Breaking the Tablets: LARabbi™ mentioned how some Biblical exhortations are about a state of mind, like the maftir of the Netzavim parsha (Deuteronomy (Devarim) 29:9 - 30:20). He also mentioned that the 10th commandment, the one about "coveting", also refers to a state of mind. If that is so, if there are no mitigating factors such as not acting on the coveting in any way, such as trashing the covetee, then I am so shockingly guilty, I am actually in awe of the way human beings deceive themselves. Though I must add, envy has been more destructive to me than to anyone else unless you think about how it brings a disconnect to all involved and destroys possibility; how it brings deadliness as an offering. Okay, I get it. Not good, One of the big commandments. Very important. Transcendently important! This is a tough one: to break this commandment is to be a seriously broken human being.

Perfect moments in opera give me goosebumps; the shofar invariably makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I understand that the shofar was used as an alarm in days past. It still is. You have to be there to understand the impact. Scary shows about spirits and poltergeists on tv pale in comparison.

Immerse yourself in a mitzvah and everything is transformed. All faith and belief, and all trust in humanity may crumble, but a mitzvah does indeed lead to another mitzvah. The experience of it is life affirming. Even G-d may let you down, but a mitzvah will not. Such is the genius of Judaism.

However, a mitzvah done in a vacuum must make G-d proud and weepy all at the same time. To be a decent human being, when there are no others, I think, is the ultimate Jewish challenge.

This morning, at minyan, there was an overflow of participants, so unusual. There were more of the devout ones. We all sang quite lustily. It was heaven. Afterwards there was breakfast. The woman sponsoring it, had lost her grandparents and extended family in the Shoah, the first day of Rosh Hashanah. It was a privilege to support her Yarzheit. It was a moment imbued with sorrow as well as pride. It connected us all, mourners, sinners, tzadikim, the guys setting up stuff in the Sanctuary for the Holy Days, afterwards.

LARabbi™ went to Mexico where it turns out that there is a huge community of Jews who keep to themselves right down to their laws (aligned with secular laws). The assimilation rate is 2%, but then, try to marry out and find yourself shunned and excommunicated. Even more so, here is the clincher, and a question we can all ask ourselves:

Jews in Mexico thrive and multiply because they identify themselves as Jews first and foremost. If they would have to leave Mexico it would not grieve them a whole lot. Being a Jew is their primary identity. Whereas a lot of Jews in the rest of the Diaspora perceive themselves as 'X' first, and then as Jews. I don't think it is a matter of insularity, either. I think it comes down to how you perceive yourself, your core identity.

Is your primary identity Jewish or is it other?