Velveteen Rabbi Progressive Conference

I'm starting the blogging year off with...ten days of very little blogging!

As regular readers know, every January I go to the annual meeting of Ohalah, the Renewal rabbinic association, which is preceded by a student Shabbaton (weekend retreat). This year I'm beginning ALEPH's three-year training program in Hashpa'ah (spiritual direction), which will kick off with three days of classes before the Shabbaton. The long and the short of it is, I'm off to Boulder today to spend a delicious ten days learning, schmoozing, davening, and connecting with the students and teachers who make up my community.

The ALEPH student community meets twice a year for residency periods, but I missed our summer 2008 students' week because I was in Jerusalem. I did see a handful of my classmates there, which was wonderful, but I missed being with the rest of my colleagues and friends. I haven't seen most of them since last year's Ohalah drew to a close, and I've been missing everyone tremendously. As wonderful as teleclasses and phone calls and emails and and Skype hevruta are, none is quite the same as seeing people in person.

So my blogging is likely to be relatively low-volume until later this month when I get home again. I look forward to seeing some of you in Colorado, and the rest of you online when I am home again!

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, hashpaah, Ohalah.

A few days ago I posted a list of my top ten nonfiction posts from 2008: essays about prayer, Torah, my time in Israel and the West Bank, midrash. Here's the companion list I promised: links to my ten favorites among the poems that I posted here this year.

• Return (Shabbat mincha poem)

• Command (Tzav)

• Ten years in (anniversary poem)

• Sandals (Balak)

• Red heifer (Chukat)

• Not empty-handed (Re'eh)

• Accounting (Rosh Hashanah poem)

• Mobius (V'zot ha-brakha)

• Hineni (High Holiday musaf prayer)

• First step (Lech Lecha)

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Torah, poetry, top10.

KIN (VAYIGASH)

Understand: we sat shiva.
Every moment of that week
I ached with what we had done.

Our father began moving slowly
as though he no longer trusted his feet.
His hair paled and thinned.

Remorse settled on my heart
like a clenched fist
constricting every beat.

Mine is the third generation
estranged, brotherhood buried
beneath years of angry silt...

When the vizier sent his courtiers away
I thought he was going to kill us
and my heart flew to our father.

But now our sons and Joseph's sons
will play together
on the stony Egyptian sands.

In this week's portion, Vayigash, Joseph's brother Judah appeals to him not to seize Benjamin. My father, he pleads, will die if he loses his second-most-beloved son (the subtext being, of course, that he has already lost his most beloved.) Take me instead, Judah says.

And Joseph is overcome with emotion, and sends his attendants out of the room so that he can make himself known to his brothers -- who are so dumbfounded that they cannot speak. Not until he kisses his brothers and weeps upon them are they able to respond to this revelation.

This year I've been struck by how dysfunctional the families of the patriarchs seem. Abraham's two sons led disconnected lives; Isaac's two sons had a troubled relationship at best; and Jacob's sons sold one of their own into slavery. The families of the patriarchs are -- sometimes troublingly -- recognizable as flawed human families, for sure.

But I'm struck also by the way this story encapsulates the teaching that teshuvah and tikkun -- repentance/returning and repair -- are always possible. Maybe Joseph's children were able to repair the pattern of alienation that had been passed down in their family since their grandfather's generation. In that sense, the text continues to speak to us today, no matter what our own family structures may be.

I've always wondered whether Joseph's brothers truly didn't recognize him. Maybe they knew to whom they were speaking, but never expected him to acknowledge them, much less rescue them. Or maybe they really were shocked to discover that their brother yet lived -- that they could stop beating themselves up for their rashness and their cruelty, which Joseph has put long behind him.

This week's poem arises out of all of those thoughts. No recording this week; sorry, folks, life is just too chaotic in the last days of the old year! (If any of you wants to record it, feel free.) I'll hope to return to recording my poems next week. Wishing everyone a happy end of December and of 2008.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Torah, poetry, Vayigash.

Now that I've lived a summer in Jerusalem, Middle East news feels more immediate to me than it used to. This week, that truth has been a painful one. It's been heartbreaking to watch the news pour forth from Gaza these last few days. And the vitriol I'm seeing across the blogosphere, and on several of the e-mail lists to which I belong, leaves me almost as heartsick as the news.

So what can I offer? Via Sustainable Judaism comes this YouTube video of "The Jewish-Arab Peace Song" (not the most creative title ever, though I guess at least it's informative) -- a song celebrating the shared wish for peace, in Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles:

I like the oud line, the doumbek, and (for lack of a better term) the feel of the song; this couldn't have come out of anywhere but Israel, and I love that about it. I also love its message -- and how its very existence reminds me that there are Israelis and Palestinians who share the vision of a just peace between their two peoples, no matter what either government does or says.

The song was commissioned by Peace Child Israel, an organization which aims to teach coexistence to Israeli and Palestinian teens through theater and the arts. It was written by Israeli artist Shlomo Gronich and is performed by Gronich, Leah Shabat, Mizrahi singer Zehava Ben, and Eli Luzon alongside Palestinian artists Sahmir Shukri, Nivine Jaabri, Elias Julianos, and Lubna Salame. (Read more, including a list of supporting instrumentalists, here.)

Feeling saddened by the flood of news, I opened a book of psalms; I landed on psalm 122, which contains the line  לְמַעַן אַחַי וְרֵעָי, אֲדַבְּרָה-נָּא שָׁלוֹם בָּךְ, "For the sake of my brothers and friends, I pray, peace to you." If only we could see one another, across these various borders, as brothers and friends.

Technorati tags: Israel, Palestine, Gaza, peace.

Here's the d'var Torah I wrote for this week's portion in 2006 for the now-defunct Radical Torah. Please note: I wrote this two years ago! The medical misfortune to which this post alludes is, thankfully, old news now.

And He said, "I am God, the God of your father. Fear not to go down to Egypt, for I will make you there into a great nation. I Myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I Myself will bring you back, and Joseph's hand shall close your eyes."

When I first began studying Vayigash to prepare for writing this d'var, I was struck by this passage. It amazes me to think of God descending with Jacob into Egypt -- into Mitzrayim, the Narrow Place -- and then bringing Jacob out again. It's the story we retell each year at Pesach, of course: how God brought us out of that tight spot with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

I find myself on Friday morning with a new interpretation of the verse. This week I had my own yeridah, my own descent, into an unexpected hospital stay. This isn't the place to tell that story. What I want to say here is that the need to trust in God despite the many unknowns in my situation gives me, perhaps, a hint of how Jacob might have felt at this moment in our story.

God promised Jacob that God would descend with him, and that God would bring him forth again. I can relate to that today. As I look around my home, I am swept with gratitude for these ordinary surroundings. I feel that God was with me in the hospital, and that God brought me forth again.

Of course, that doesn't make me special or unique. God is with everyone in that hospital, whether patient or caregiver. Regardless of symptom or prognosis, regardless of pain or lack thereof, regardless of whether that person recognizes God's presence or rails against it, that Presence is with all of us wherever we go.

God is with us even when our circumstances seem bleak. That's a lesson from earlier in the Joseph story. God was with Joseph even in the Egyptian jail where he was wrongfully imprisoned; just so, God can be with us, if we open our eyes and hearts. That's true when we're suffering, and that's true when we feel released from suffering. It's a constant.

It's a little bit remarkable, when I stop to think about it, that God descends with us into uncertainty. God descends with us into the unknown, into the fears that clench our hearts. God descends with us into the tight spots, the narrow places, the birth canals through which we have to pass in order to become who we're becoming. No matter what we're dealing with, this is blessing indeed.

May we enter the secular New Year with a firm sense of God's presence alongside us and within us, no matter what descents we find ourselves making. And may we be able to embody our ancestors' trust in the journey...and in its destination.

For the first 5+ years of this blog's existence, there has been no official comments policy. I have trusted in the general good intentions of my readers, and on the whole, that's worked pretty well.

But over the years, the community of folks reading this blog has expanded. So I decided that the turn of the (secular) year was a good time to post a comments policy. Here are five simple rules for being a part of this blog.

Rules of engagement at Velveteen Rabbi:

• 1) Be polite

  I consider my blog to be an extension of my living room. Whatever you're going to say in response to my posts, please consider whether it's the sort of thing you would say to your host or fellow guests if you'd been invited to someone's home for tea. If it isn't, then please don't say it here.

• 2) Be open-minded

  I write for a broad audience. Sometimes I may say things with which you disagree. If that happens, take a deep breath and enjoy the delicious diversity of human experience and opinion! I aim to foster an environment of pluralism, where multiple perspectives can coexist. I hope that everyone who hangs out at this blog can join me in celebrating that.

• 3) Stay on-topic

  The comments which follow posts here are a part of a conversation. So please, when you comment on a post, keep your comment germane to the subject at hand.

• 4) Own your words

When you comment here, I hope you'll do all of us the courtesy of including your name, your blog URL, and your own valid email address with your comment. (The email address will not be displayed, but it allows me to respond to you personally off-blog if I want to continue the conversation in that way.) The words you post here are yours; be willing to stand behind them. (And if your words are inappropriate, I reserve the right to delete them.)

• 5) Treat people with respect

  It is a tenet of my faith that we are all created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. Every human being is worthy of respect. I expect everyone who comments here to show that respect, to everyone.

I'm adding a "comments policy" link to the sidebar, so if you ever want to refresh your memory about what the comments policy is, it will be readily available for you.Thank you, everyone, for your willingness to abide by these rules of discourse. And thanks for being a part of Velveteen Rabbi! I look forward to our many conversations in the year to come.

Technorati tags: velveteenrabbi.

Every year at the end of December I post a list of my ten favorite blog posts from the year now ending. This year I've compiled two such lists: one of my favorite nonfiction posts, another of my favorite poems. (Here's the first one; I'll post the second one in a day or two.) [ETA: Top ten poetry posts of 2008.]

Rereading the year-in-blog-posts, I'm reminded of what a rollercoaster this year has been. Thanks for being part of the conversation here during 2008; here's to 2009!

A place where prayer can dwell. "I think our multifaceted nature is both our boon and our greatest challenge. We're a patchwork religious movement. My other Jewish identity, Jewish Renewal, is also a many-splendored thing, a patchwork quilt of ideas and practices and teachings; of course, Renewal is actively transdenominational, so a certain patchwork nature is presumed. Reform Judaism aims to be a single unitary denomination -- though one which can include, for instance, my parents' congregation (historically a classical Reform institution) and mine (which lives out Reform values in a decidedly nontraditional way.) My guess is that this siddur will challenge both of our communities, though in different ways. Maybe that's a sign that its creators have crafted something interesting and complex."

Brokenness and purity. "Why did the children of Israel save the shards of the broken tablets? Why not destroy them, or leave them behind in the desert? Surely no one there wanted to keep them as mementos of one of the community's strongest lapses of faith? But the tradition teaches us that the broken tablets were preserved as a sign that holiness persists even in our brokenness. Sometimes our brokenness, our mistakes, are what we have to offer to God...and that's worthy of preservation along with the aspects of us which are whole."

Beginning to wrestle. "During the first few years of this blog's existence, I didn't write about Israel. Because I wanted to quietly challenge the assumption that a Judaism-focused blog must necessarily be Israel-focused. Because I figured the last thing the internet needs is another person pontificating about a place she barely knows. Because most online discourse about Israel and Palestine is hotheaded and partisan. Because time and energy and passion are limited resources, and it often seems that so much of these go to Israel that little is left for other aspects of Jewish identity and experience. // All of those reasons still hold. And yet I'm beginning to grapple with what it will mean to shift this unofficial blog policy (and, more importantly, to shift the internal focus behind it) because this summer I'm going to spend seven weeks in Jerusalem."

To market, to market. "As soon as I stepped past the security guard at the gate I was grinning. The market is covered by translucent greenhouse-style ceilings, and everywhere are piles of beautiful vegetables: peppers, eggplants, leeks, potatoes. (It reminded me a little bit of the Hungarian indoor farmer's market where Janet took us last year.) The air is redolent with parsley and mint and cilantro, with spices and fish scales and baked goods. I walked past spice merchants (burlap sacks filled with brilliant colored powders), tea merchants (rooibos and green tea speckled with flowers), piles of honeyed baklava. Glass cases containing cheeses. Chickens and hunks of beef and piles upon piles of whole glistening fish."

A day in Bethlehem and Hebron. "The Palestinian community isn't a monolith, any more than the Israeli community is. Still, it's hard for me to bump up against these stark differences in perspective. According to one narrative, the settlers are justified in their actions because God promised all of this land to the Jews, and anyway the Palestinians are untrustworthy partners in the so-called peace process. According to another, the settlers are destroying any chance of a just peace because their settlements are turning the West Bank into Swiss cheese (thereby putting an end to the dream of two viable states.) I don't really know what to do with the clash between those two stories. The real question for me is, how will the peoples of this place ever break out of the cycle of trauma in which they are collectively enmeshed?"

The All Nations Café. "A doumbek and oud materialized, and there was some singing. Pots of strong coffee were made over the fire, and Abed made sure I was given a glass, which I sipped gratefully. Then Daphna suggested we go around the circle and each share a word or two about who we are and what we are feeling. Though someone complained half-jokingly that music is the true universal language, the instruments were set aside for the moment so we could each speak. About twenty of us were present at that point, and it took a while to go around the tent. Some of the Palestinians translated their own remarks into English, and some of the Israelis translated their own remarks into Arabic; Hamdan translated graciously for everyone else. 

So long, farewell. "The primary thing I've learned about Jerusalem is that it's always more complicated than one might imagine. Even the topography is complicated. Every place seems to be at least two things at once: where the Dome of the Rock now stands is where the Temple once stood. Where a house now stands, an orchard once stood. Where a pile of rubble now stands, a house once stood. Every place means something to somebody -- usually to at least two somebodies who don't agree. Even maps have an agenda, because if a map is using one set of names, it's not using the others. Nothing here is simple."

My first Yom Kippur. "Ask any rabbi about their first time leading High Holiday services, and I'm guessing you'll get a wry smile and memories of an emotional rollercoaster. It's easy to get overwhelmed with preparations. The High Holiday liturgy is rich and dense. And we know, as clergy, that it's our job to facilitate what's supposed to be one of the most intense spiritual experiences of the year -- but who can guarantee what kind of experience the members of a community will have, no matter how good the shaliach tzibbur's intentions may be or how hard she works at preparing the service she thinks the community wants and needs?"

On Transformative Works. "Active Jewishness is a writerly thing. We're obsessed with texts, and our tradition includes the strong expectation that each of us will be in conversation with those texts all our lives. Sometimes that conversation takes highly creative forms, so there's a sense that creativity is a legitimate way to respond to the texts we hold dear. All of this was fermenting in me in 1999, the year I was first introduced to fanfiction and fanvids: transformative works of a different kind."

Mai Chanukah. "Chanukah has been different things to different people over time; it's different things to different people even now. That's a lot of layers of context for what is, in the grand scheme of things, a fairly minor Jewish holiday. But the multivalent character of the holiday speaks to something I deeply love about Judaism: that the tradition is always multivocal. That there's always more than one answer to every question. That our interpretations change over time, as our understandings of God and Torah and our relationship with the world change over time. That a holiday which could start out as a commemoration of military victory could turn into a holiday celebrating a leap of faith, into a holiday inviting us to purify our hearts, into a chance to hang out and eat fried foods and sing songs and exchange presents, into all of the above at the same time."

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, top10.

This morning I arrived at shul a couple of minutes before 9:30, rainbow tallit under my arm. I missed going last week, so it felt really nice to walk in the door -- and even more so when one of the congregation's co-presidents greeted me at the door with an effervescent "Rachel! I'm so happy to see you!"

How nice it is to be appreciated, I thought, beaming at her and at the room. Then she continued, "The rabbi's car is in a ditch!"

One of the downsides of living in a beautiful semi-rural area, as we do, is that winter weather can get in one's way from time to time. The rabbi lives on a dirt road which twists up and down some hills. It's been raining lately, then freezing at night (joy.) On his way to shul this morning, his car slid backwards into a ditch.

Baruch Hashem, no one was hurt -- not even the car. But it would take a while for AAA to arrive. So he'd called the co-president to dash to shul and open up shop. She had left a house full of guests to come and make sure we were able to get into the building! The only thing she'd been missing was a shaliach tzibbur. Until I arrived.

Actually, the rabbi emerita was there, too, it turned out. So we had a gracious plenty of options. I led the davenen, which was a treat for me as always. I missed having my guitar, and I really missed having my own siddur (which is aflutter with colored tabs and thick with penciled notes which remind me how to direct everyone smoothly to new pages as needed.) But it was fun to invent the service as I went along, choosing this poem or that tune on the fly. The rabbi emerita led an awesome Hallel.

And then, just as I was preparing to do a creative Torah service pinch-hit (as I've seen done elsewhere: we were going to open the scroll and have someone follow along with a yad as I read from the chumash, since I didn't want to accidentally mangle a Torah reading I hadn't practiced aloud) the rabbi walked in the door of the shul!

"Baruch ha-ba b'shem Adonai," I said -- "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord" (Psalm 118:26) -- and he laughed.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Shabbat.

Here's the d'var Torah I posted for this week's portion two years ago at the now-defunct Radical Torah.

Late in this week's portion, Mikets, there is an intriguing conversation between Joseph -- by now, in command of Egypt's storehouses, and second only to Pharaoh in the power structure of the land -- and his brothers.

The first time the brothers visit Egypt in search of food, Joseph gives a secret order that their money-bags be returned to them along with their grain. Upon their next journey there, they go immediately to Joseph and protest that they don't know how they managed to leave without paying him last time. "Peace be with you," he responds, "Do not be afraid. Your God, the God of your father, must have put treasure in your bags for you. I got your payment."

We, the readers, know perfectly well that the money was returned to them by Joseph. But he chooses to let them believe it is a gift from God. What gives?

One answer can be found by looking at the brothers' response to the unexpected windfall, and what their response tells us about their theology and their sense of themselves in the world. In Genesis 42:27, as the brothers are on their way home from Egypt, one of them opens his sack and finds his money there. The brothers' hearts sink, the text tells us, and they turn to one another trembling, saying, "What is this that God has done to us?"

In this light, Joseph's statement about the money -- that God must have given it to them -- is a kind of gentle rebuke of their theology. The brothers leap immediately to anger with God instead of taking responsibility for their own actions or opening themselves to the possibility that this is a blessing in disguise. In return, Joseph takes care to credit God, as if to remind them of the Source from Whom all blessings flow.

Where Joseph sees blessing, the brothers see themselves being thwarted. These responses aren't innate, but rather learned...and they offer insight into the way that the inability to forgive oneself, and to seek God's forgiveness, can block one to blessing.

Joseph's brothers did a dreadful thing when they were young. They made a terrible mistake, which caused profound suffering -- especially for their father, who was inconsolable at losing Joseph. But it has been years, and they have grown. By now they regret what they did, and wish to move beyond it. And yet they feel plagued by misfortune. The famine, the arduous journey to Egypt, and then the startling discovery that their money had been replaced in their bags: being who they are, they can't help suspecting some kind of plot. They mistrust the world, because they mistrust themselves.

Joseph, on the other hand, has grown into a model of faith in Providence. Despite the dire straits he has often found himself in, God's name has been ever on his lips. In fact, one might argue that his misfortunes have been his best schooling. Having taken a few knocks, he becomes able to recognize God as the source of his dream-interpreting talents -- and having made that recognition, he never again fails to give credit where it's due. When he interprets Pharaoh's dreams, he begins by asserting that not he but God will see to Pharaoh's welfare. As a result of his faith and his humility, Pharaoh promotes him to vizier on the spot.

Joseph's brothers respond to this new twist in their story with fear and blame, signs of their guilty consciences. Perhaps their ambivalent feelings about their brother have metamorphosed, with time, into regret and remorse. They're caught in the past; they can't let go of what they did, which means they can't ask God for forgiveness, which means they can't know themselves to be forgiven. They're stuck, stunted by the moment of their worst collective transgression.

Joseph, in contrast, responds to uncertainty with calm faith. He knows that God is with him, and because he knows it, it is manifestly true. He trusts that things are unfolding as they should, that everything is happening for a reason -- as, indeed, our perspective on the story tells us that it is. He was brought down to Egypt in order to be able to rise up; the Israelites will descend into Egypt in order to be freed; and in both the individual case and the national one, what's important is the moral and spiritual valance of the journey, and the process of transformation that it entails.

Many of us may recognize something of ourselves in Joseph's brothers. We have made mistakes -- perhaps none so weighty as selling a bratty sibling into slavery, but mistakes all the same -- and we are always in danger of forgetting the spiritual leap of teshuvah that leads to forgiveness. When we feel distant from forgiveness, every setback feels like a conspiracy against us, and the easiest response is fear and blame.

But we may also recognize something of ourselves in Joseph, too. This week's portion invites us to find ourselves in the story's hero: to have enough humility to credit our Source for our insight and understanding, and enough wisdom to navigate challenges on even the broadest of scales. To recognize blessings -- even those which we ourselves had a hand in bringing about -- as ultimately a gift from God, abundance flowing from the Source of All. As we meditate on this story this week, may we be truly able to recognize our misdeeds, make teshuvah with whole and open hearts, and relinquish our attachments to who we've been in the past...and may we be able too to mirror Joseph's faith, trust, and benevolence in the face of whatever comes our way.

The star embedded in the floor in the spot where Jesus is said to have been born. Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem.

Christmas, too, has something to teach us. Every Christmas I get a real yearning for the Christian ability to imagine God as a baby. Seeing God as a newborn babe, you begin to understand that even God needs to grow, just as we do! And that this really may be the purpose of the universe -- that we ourselves are God growing Godself, and that the task of every person and faith community is to collaborate in that process.

-- Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish With Feeling

Wishing my Christian friends and readers a Christmas that is merry and bright!

UNRECOGNIZABLE (MIKETZ)

When Pharaoh placed his signet
on my hand, dressed me in gold
and cloaked me in new syllables

I became unrecognizable
even to my own brothers
who prostrated before me.

All these years I'd imagined
reunion, though in my wildest dreams
I never pictured it like this

how my brothers tore into dinner
as though they feared deep down
there wouldn't be enough...

I turned away and wept
but I hid my sorrow, not ready
to show my true face

or how I had yearned
for the relationship we still
didn't know how to have.

In this week's portion, Miketz, Pharaoh dreams dreams of cattle and of ears of grain. When no one else can interpret them, the cupbearer remembers Joseph who had interpreted his dreams in prison. Joseph is sent-for and when he successfully interprets Pharaoh's dreams, he impressed Pharaoh so much that he is made vizier of Egypt on the spot.

I love the repeated symbolism of clothing in the Joseph novella. Joseph has that multicolored tunic, which is then torn away from him and dipped in blood to fool his father; Potiphar's wife tears at his clothing when he refuses to accede to her sexual demands, and uses the scrap to "prove" his guilt. Then, in this week's portion, when Pharoah calls for Joseph the servants hurry to cut his hair and change his clothes; and once Joseph enters Pharaoh's employ, he is adorned with gold and linen and with Pharaoh's own signet ring.

Clothes can manifest our sense of ourselves, or they can disguise who we truly are. Just so, the faces we choose to present to the world. In this week's portion, I see Joseph choosing to hide his true face from his brothers just a little while longer. How do we hide our faces from each other in our daily lives? In what do we cloak ourselves: for protection, for concealment, for pretense, for beauty? What are we afraid would happen if we let one another see?

[miketz.mp3]

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Torah, poetry, Miketz.

Here are five Chanukah-themed gems from my delicious feed:

• Rabbi Debra Orenstein has posted a set of Eight meditations for Chanukah, one for each night of the festival. Really worth reading. (Hat tip Sustainable Judaism.)

• The Droidl: Star Wars' R2D2-themed make-your-own paper dreidl. Because I am just that much of a geek.

• An oldie but a goodie: Stories of Miracles, Moments of Being: A Skeptic’s Hanukah by my friend Jay Michaelson. "For me, however, miracles were an obstruction to faith, not an aid to it..."

• Poems for Chanukah at the Academy of American Poets: Amichai, Kunitz, Reznikoff and more. Their list doesn't include David Lehman's Christmas defeated Chanukah, though personally I think it should.

• But probably my favorite Chanukah link this year is this Hallel using Christmas carol melodies. Hallel is the set of psalms recited on festivals and holidays (including this one); this rendition  sets the classic psalms, in Hebrew, to a variety of familiar Christmas carol tunes.

That last one probably only appeals to the limited subset of people who recite Hallel regularly enough to know it well, and who know and like a bunch of Christmas carols, but since I'm smack in the middle of that demographic, it's perfect for me.

(For a more serious take on Chanukah, I'm pretty happy with yesterday's Mai Chanukah; if you haven't read it yet, I hope you will.)

On a completely unrelated note:

The folks at blogs.com invited me to contribute a list of my top ten religion blogs to their topten section. I chose ten blogs which are among my regular reads; I think it's an eclectic list and hopefully an interesting one! The list is here: Velveteen Rabbi's Top Ten Religion Blogs.

If yours is one of the blogs I listed, you're entitled to one of these badges, by the way. Thanks for putting your words out there! And thanks for the invite, blogs.com folks.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Chanukah.

This is the time of year when people argue about the meaning of Chanukah.

It's an old question. Mai chanukah? is how the rabbis begin the Talmud's discussion of the holiday: "What is Chanukah?" Maybe the simplest answer is, it's a multivalent holiday; it always has been.

There are of course many ways to tell the Chanukah story and the ways we do are not unrelated to who we are. Every community and generation interprets Chanukah in its own image. For us there are a number of obvious contenders. For American Jews it is most often about religious freedom from tyrants. For Israelis it is about routing the armies of a dominating empire and winning back Jewish sovereignty. For traditional Jews it is about a fight against assimilation. Hasidic Jews take another path and read the story allegorically as a story about seeking one's inner life and rededicating oneself to that small burning candle. Indeed, every generation asks what the Rabbis ask when they open their short conversation on the holiday... "Mai Chanukah?" -- What is Chanukah?

(So writes Rabbi Steve Greenberg in a d'var Torah which is available online here.)

So what's the story with Chanukah? One answer can be found in scripture -- though not mine. The apocryphal books of Maccabees (written in Greek) tell the story of the Hasmonean dynasty. (These books are considered part of the Catholic Bible, though not the Protestant Bible or Jewish Tanakh.) Anyway: those books tell the story of the wicked Antiochus IV who looted the Temple, alongside the story of the Israelites who assimilated to Greek ways and the other Israelites who slaughtered them. Matthias and his family destroyed illicit altars and forcibly circumcised babies; his oldest son Judah led the rebels to victory.

Read one way, Maccabees offers a story about freedom fighters casting off religious oppression. Read another way, it's a story about religious extremists slaughtering their accomodationist or assimilationist neighbors. Either way, the odd thing is that although the war ended in the early spring, the Maccabees didn't seek to rededicate the temple until deep midwinter. Apparently they were waiting for divine intervention. When Judah finally did decide to rededicate the temple, he chose 25 Kislev -- the date of the first sacrifice Antiochus had offered to his gods. And just as Solomon had dedicated the First Temple in an eight-day celebration during the festival of Sukkot, so Judah decided to rededicate it during an eight-day celebration which is called, in Maccabees II, "Sukkot in Kislev." Chanukah, in other words, was initially conceived as a kind of second Sukkot. (Sukkot II: Electric Boogaloo?)

I grew up on a sanitized version of the story (minus the bloody massacre of Hellenized Jews) and didn't read the version that's in Maccabees until I was in my thirties. I suspect most Jews are in that same boat, because when the Tanakh was canonized the books of Maccabees didn't make the cut. Why not? One plausible reason is that the rabbis who canonized the Tanakh were already uneasy with the Maccabees' story of military might. The attempted revolt in 70 CE resulted in the destruction of the second Temple; then came the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire in 134-135 CE. By the time the Talmud was compiled, it was clear that resisting imperial power had devastating results. They didn't want to enshrine as holy writ a story which might encourage Jews to resist and be slaughtered.

Once the Diaspora began and the balance of power shifted strongly toward the non-Jews in the many places where Jews were scattered, it became impolitic (not to mention ironic and painful) to celebrate military might which no longer existed. Maybe that's why Chanukah gets only a scant few lines in Talmud -- and what's discussed there is not the military battle but the miracle of the single cruse of sanctified oil which lasted for eight days. Presto: with that reframing, the whole story of Chanukah shifts. It's no longer about a band of freedom fighters (or violent anti-assimilationist guerillas) prevailing against a great army. Now it's about the leap of faith involved in kindling the eternal light in the temple, of trusting that God will provide.

In the Hasidic understanding, Chanukah becomes a festival celebrating the internal redication in which each of us can engage. Hasidic teachers make much of the line from Exodus, "Build Me a temple and I will dwell within them" -- within them, e.g. not in the temple but in our very hearts. Chanukah is the time when we're called to cleanse impurities from our hearts, to rededicate ourselves to the neverending work of making holiness manifest in the world. Nurturing holy sparks, kindling light in the darkness: these take on profound spiritual meaning when we remember that light is associated with chesed, God's abundant lovingkindness -- and that the first thing created, at the beginning of time, was (spiritual/metaphysical) light. Our task is to purify our hearts so that divine light can shine in and through us.

(For another Hasidic interpretation of Chanukah, I point you back to The smallest miracle, a post I made about some of the Sefat Emet's teachings on Chanukah back in 2003.)

Of course, in the American imagination Chanukah has been enlarged so that it can serve as a counterpart to the gift-giving extravaganza that is contemporary Christmas. (For historical perspective on that, I recommend The Comeback Holiday in Reform Judaism Magazine -- I am amazed by lines like "The purchase of Christmas gifts, commented the Jewish Daily Forward in 1904, 'is one of the first things that proves one is no longer a greenhorn.'") Apparently Chanukah began to manifest as a gift-giving holiday in the 1920s, and by the 1940s that minhag was securely lodged in the American Jewish imagination. That Chanukah is a time for giving gifts has become another set of lenses through which to view the festival.

Still another interpretation holds that Chanukah, chag urim (the festival of lights), arose when and how it did out of the natural human need to celebrate light in a time of great (northern hemisphere) darkness. (Sorry, antipodean readers. This interpretation naturally doesn't work so well for y'all.) Reb Arthur Waskow has suggested that Chanukah was rooted in "solstice-festival envy." (He alludes to this in The meaning of the Hanukkah oil, though to read his whole argument you'll need to delve into Seasons of Our Joy.)

Some symbols are so primary that purported "meanings" can only prove inadequate. Light in the dead of winter, victory when it had seemed impossible, more than enough when there had been far too little, few against many, the freedom to be -- these are the essence, and the stories built around them only so much adornment -- and therefore alterable.

So argues Arnold Eisen, in the marginal commentary to the Chanukah chapter in The Jewish Holidays. The whole chapter is good, but I love the marginal notes -- like Rabbi Everett Gendler's wonderings about what would have happened "if the light and vegetation motifs of Hanukkah had early coalesced around those green branches described in 2 Maccabees rather than around clay or cast menorahs. Might our present menorah, rather than being an abstract or stylized tree of light, have been an actual illuminated tree?" (Hee.)

Chanukah has been different things to different people over time; it's different things to different people even now. That's a lot of layers of context for what is, in the grand scheme of things, a fairly minor Jewish holiday. But the multivalent character of the holiday speaks to something I deeply love about Judaism: that the tradition is always multivocal. That there's always more than one answer to every question. That our interpretations change over time, as our understandings of God and Torah and our relationship with the world change over time. That a holiday which could start out as a commemoration of military victory could turn into a holiday celebrating a leap of faith, into a holiday inviting us to purify our hearts, into a chance to hang out and eat fried foods and sing songs and exchange presents, into all of the above at the same time.

The fact that different Jewish communities have found various meanings in Hanukkah drive home the truth about all religious rituals: They thrive only when they mean something to people, when they externalize deeply felt concerns. Often, when we are attached to a ritual, we will infuse it with special meaning or manifest some latent significance in it. In other cases a ritual may fall out of use for lack of contemporary impact. Yet, the Jews have had the wisdom to keep even underutilized rituals on the books. As circumstances change, we may rediscover their power at some time later on.

That's Rabbi Everett Gendler, writing again in the margins of The Jewish Holidays. I couldn't agree more.

So Mai Chanukah? The question I really want to ask is: what is Chanukah for you?

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Chanukah.

This one comes courtesy of my father, who described it as a truly Texan Chanukah celebration. Gay cowboys singing the dreidl song; what will we think of next? I do love the internet sometimes. (Often, in fact.)

(The cowboys in question go by the name of Captain Smartypants; they're an ensemble of the Seattle Men's Chorus. So, not Texan in actuality, but very Texan in spirit. In my humble diaspora Texan opinion.) Happy Chanukah to all!

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Chanukah, dreidl.

Today is the December solstice: the shortest day of the year here in the northern hemisphere. (A fine day to keep the home fires burning; and, indeed, we are doing just that! Ethan's chopping wood even now.) And today at sundown we'll celebrate the first night of Chanukah -- chag urim, the holiday of lights.

On the first night of Chanukah, the flame of the single festival light (and the single shamash or helper candle) can feel tiny -- maybe especially tonight, against the weight of all that darkness. The solstice and Chanukah always feel congruent to me but it's rare for the festival to begin on the solstice itself. Night falls early in the Berkshires at this time of year. The longest night is long indeed.

It always takes a leap of faith to choose to kindle light in a time of darkness, to trust that our small flames can actually make a difference in the great cold world. But they can, and they do. Lighting the first candle of Chanukah is a chance to affirm our ability to bring light into the world.

As we kindle the holiday lights tonight, may we rededicate ourselves (as our stories tell us the temple was once rededicated at this season) to the work of creating light. Even, or especially, on the longest, darkest night of the calendar year.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Chanukah, solstice.

Global Voices Online is one of the most worthwhile projects I know. Their Rising Voices project offers grant support to blogging groups in developing nations; they do amazing free speech advocacy worldwide; and a team of more than 200 volunteers works tirelessly to amplify the voices of ordinary people around the world (in a whole bunch of different languages.) Want to know what people are thinking and talking about in Albania? Israel and Palestine? Kazakhstan? Zimbabwe? Global Voices is the place to find out.

And they've just launched a donations campaign. Full disclosure: I was there on the day the organization was born, back in December of 2004 (here's my post from that day: Bridge blogs and global voices.) Oh, and the project was co-founded by my husband, so it's possible I'm slightly biased. But this is a project I deeply believe in, and the Global voices manifesto which began to coalesce at that first bloggers' conference still gives me chills. Here's how it begins:

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication. Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world...

(Read the whole thing here -- in English, Arabic, Albanian, Bangla, Chinese, or thirteen other tongues.)

This is exactly the kind of project that makes me hopeful for the internet. Chanukah begins tonight, a fine time for gift-giving. If you've got a few bucks you can throw their way, I hope you'll consider doing so. (They've got cute badges, too. Like the one at the top of this post. You don't want to disappoint the tiny kitten, do you?)

Keep the world talking: donate now.

Technorati tags: tzedakah, GlobalVoicesOnline.

My guest-blogging stint at the Best American Poetry blog ends today, and I just posted my last poem of the week, a tiny meditation on the season in honor of Chanukah beginning tomorrow. It's called Progression.

It's been really fun to blog there this week. It's been years since I've tried on the discipline of writing a daily poem, and this offered me a good excuse to take that on for a while.

To those who've been reading my poems there: thanks for following along! (And to those who maybe don't find poetry so compelling, I promise I'll post fewer poems in the week to come.)

Technorati tags: poetry, BestAmericanPoetry.

I've posted another poem at The Best American Poetry blog, this one a kind of creative version of or contemporary poetic response to psalm 147. The poem is called Seven reasons (Psalm 147.)

Psalm 147 is part of psukei d'zimrah, the collection of psalms recited near the beginning of morning prayer. This section of the service begins with an opening benediction praising God Who speaks creation into being; then comes an interlude of Biblical material; then psalms 145-150; then another interlude of Biblical material; then the closing benediction (yishtabach, also called the "blessing of song.")

There is much which is beautiful in the classical psalm which didn't make it into my poem. I begin with verse two of the Hebrew, about rebuilding Jerusalem, and verse three, about God Who heals the broken-hearted and repairs their sorrow. Then I jump to verse eight, about the One who covers the sky with clouds; then to verse fourteen, about God Who "scatters frost like ashes" and "casts out ice like crumbs." (That's in the traditional rendering.)

In commentary on this psalm (found in Lawrence Hoffman's excellent My People's Prayerbook series -- the volume on Psukei D'zimrah, naturally enough) Ellen Frankel writes, "Blessings flow earthward because of our gratitude, not our pride... What we interpret as impediments to our freedom and ease -- snow, frost, and ice -- are just the opposite in the divine household; they represent the wool, ashes, and crumbs of God's handiwork." I'll try to bear that in mind as the snow continues to fall today...

My poem owes much to zen abbot Norman Fischer's interpretive renderings of the psalms (collected in a book which I reviewed in early 2007.) Though I deliberately didn't check his book to see his version of this psalm before writing my own, I did learn from him the technique of speaking psalms not about God but to God -- embedding the I/Thou relationship in the very shape of the poem at hand.

Technorati tags: psalms, Judaism, Torah, poetry, BestAmericanPoetry.

Here's the d'var Torah I wrote for this week's portion in 2006, originally published at the now-defunct Radical Torah.

This week's Torah portion, Vayeshev, begins the "Joseph novella" -- the surprisingly lengthy story of Joseph, which sets in motion the Israelites' presence in Egypt, which in turn is a precursor to the Israelites' liberation from Egypt. It's a beautifully cyclical story; just like the Israelite people, Joseph has to go down in order to be lifted up.

Twice in this week's Torah portion, Joseph is cast down into dire circumstances. First his brothers cast him into a pit, and sell him into slavery; later, after he's worked his way up the Egyptian status ladder, Potiphar's wife frames him and he is thrown into prison.

The first downfall comes about, in a sense, because of Joseph's dream interpretations. He has two dreams of dominance -- one, that his brothers' sheaves of wheat bow down to his; the other, that the moon and sun and stars all bow down to him -- and these raise his brothers' ire so strongly that they plot against him.

The second downfall comes about because of Joseph's moral scruples. Potiphar's wife tries to seduce him; he fends her off; she tears his cloak off, and uses it as "proof" that he acted improperly. This time, his dream interpretations come to his rescue; he is able to make sense of the dreams of several fellow prisoners, and one of those prisoners ultimately reports this to Pharaoh, who is in need of a good dream interpreter, and next week we'll read about how that gets Joseph out of jail and on the path toward glory.

How is that his dream interpretations get him into trouble at the start of this week's portion, and out of trouble at the end? What has changed?

I think what has changed is Joseph. At the start of the story he is young, arguably a little bit spoiled -- remember that amazing technicolor dreamcoat! no one else in his family has anything like that -- and insensitive to how his dreamy tales might anger or offend his older brothers. He tells his dream stories at the breakfast table, blithely unaware that what he's saying might be hurtful. That doesn't excuse his brothers' actions, but at least it makes some sense out of what they do.

But being cast into a pit, sold into slavery, and taken down into Egypt -- that's how the Hebrew phrases it; he descends into the land -- matures Joseph in a hurry. And once he enters Potiphar's house, a fascinating literary trope arises. We read that YHVH was with Joseph, and we read that line four times: twice in the early Potiphar story, and twice again after Joseph is jailed. The presence of God is with him, and as a result, even his continuing misfortunes don't shake him.

Perhaps because God is with him, or perhaps because he is older and wiser, when he begins interpreting dreams in prison he does so in a way that helps his fellows, instead of angering them. Beyond that, he doesn't take credit for the interpretations; he begins by saying "Surely God can interpret!" -- giving credit for his wisdom to God.

When Joseph interprets his own dreams, insensitive to the needs of those around him, he sets misfortune in motion. But when he interprets the dreams of others, mindful of the Source from Whom his interpretations flow, he begins to rise through the ranks, on the path toward becoming the powerful man whose wisdom will allow the Egyptians, and the Israelites, to survive the famine to come.

What can we learn from this piece of Joseph's story this year? First, that we need to take each others' feelings into account when we open our mouths. Young Joseph's dreams may have been dreams of benevolent dominance -- maybe they foretold how he would someday be the person capable of stewarding the land, and his family, through feast and famine -- but the way he expressed them made his brothers feel inadequate. We can relate both to Joseph's eagerness, and to his brothers' frustrations. This piece of the story is a cautionary tale.

Second, we can learn that, like Joseph, we are capable of change. When his story begins he is brash and a little bit unthinking. After a few hard knocks, he grows more able to bend, capable of putting his talents to work in the service of others, and capable of remaining thankful to God. All of us descend, in one way or another, into difficult circumstances at some times in our lives. If those circumstances help us to grow and mature, then like Joseph we can help others out of their own binds -- which, in turn, means helping ourselves.

And third, we can learn that when God is with us, we can face our fear. At a pivotal moment in Joseph's story, we begin reading the repeated phrase "YHVH was with him." Of course, in an outward sense things seem to be going wrong for Joseph at that point. What can we make of this -- that God is with him, and yet he's thrown into jail again? Perhaps having God be with him doesn't necessarily mean everything goes the way he might wish. Having God with him is a state of mind, a kind of trust that things will unfold as they should, that he can handle -- and learn from -- whatever arises.

That's my prayer for all of us, tonight and in the days and weeks to come.

Another new poem up at the Best American Poetry blog. This one's called Psalm of Assent, and makes use of a line donated by Kate Abbott, who wrote me a beautiful sestina once.

The title is a play on psalm 126, "a song of ascents," which begins "When Adonai returned us to Zion we were as dreamers..." And the third stanza nods to that famous line from Pirkei Avot.

The burly men are real; my friend David and I met for dinner at a pub on rural route 43 this week, and the place was packed both with those who had neither light nor heat at home and by crews of roving electric company workers. Our waitress admitted she had trouble understanding some of the men who'd come from far afield, which I found strangely poignant.

Technorati tags: psalms, poetry, BestAmericanPoetry.