Reading:
April 28, 2024
Cold Feet
They say cold feet are a sign of turning back,
The failure of internal will -
But I say it can be the other way,
The body’s anticipation of things to come.
Whether demons are nipping at your heels
Or gnawing within, here’s the thing:
Settle quietly, close your eyes,
Then take the most deliberate, deep breath,
As though it were the very first (God’s breath) -
And when you can feel it penetrate every bit of your being,
Making the rest of your life possible,
You open your eyes
And take that first step out into the sea of reeds.
Watered feet are just the price of coming home.
from Siddur Sha’ar Zahav
April 22, 2024
Aurora Levins Morales, “Red Sea: April 2002”
This Passover, who reclines?
Only the dead, their cupped hands filling slowly
with the red wine of war. We are not free.
The blood on the doorposts does not protect anyone.
They say that other country over there
dim blue in the twilight
farther than the orange stars exploding over our roofs
is called peace.
The bread of affliction snaps in our hands like bones,
is dust in our mouths. This bitterness brings tears to our eyes.
The figs and apples are sour. We have many more
than four questions. We dip and dip,
salt stinging our fingers.
Unbearable griefs braided into a rope so tight
we can hardly breathe,
Whether we bless or curse,
this is captivity.
We would cross the water if we knew how.
Everyone blames everyone else for barring the way.
Listen, they say there is honey swelling in golden combs, over there,
dates as sweet and brown as lovers' cheekbones,
bread as fragrant as rest,
but the turbulent water will not part for us.
We've lost the trick of it.
Back then, one man's faith opened the way.
He stepped in, we were released, our enemies drowned.
This time we're tied at the ankles.
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history's wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.
This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.
This time it's all of us or none.
April 15, 2024
The Seder as a spiritual practice
The Seder mnemonic is an outline both for the Seder and for a spiritual practice of striving toward freedom:
Kadesh: We begin with a sense of holiness, not just the holiness in the world but most importantly the holiness found within. Each of us is created in the image of God.
Urehatz: Our first sense of cleansing--of the possibility of moving out of mitzrayim/the narrow place. The Hebrew root can also mean to lean on/to trust for these first steps require a trust in the universe and a willingness to lean on the other divine images around us as well as to trust ourselves.
Karpas: The green of spring to remind us that renewal is always possible. Life/the universe is in a constant cycle of change as represented by God’s name ehyeh asher ehyeh/I will be what I will be, ----of birth, growth and death and then birth again.
Yahatz: With the reminders that we are part of the holiness of the world and the indications that change and renewal are possible, then we can confront that which is broken. We can even break that which seems whole and yet in truth needs to be first broken to allow for the necessary change and growth.
Magid: Confronting the broken, we tell our story. In that telling we hope to understand it clearly. Even if we have told it to our selves so many times before, we still must tell it. The more you expand upon the telling, the more you focus upon it, the more clarity you may attain.
Rohtzah: We wash again to cleanse ourselves of the mire of our past. Yet, this second washing is different for we have added a "heh" to the end of the word. We can now bless this washing for we have come some distance on our path. We feel more connected to the holiness in the world, more trusting, more connected to the Holy One, the “heh”.
Motzi matzah: Then our task is to find/motzi the matzah. To discover the plain simple truths of our lives. To discover that just those middot/qualities, which we considered, our bread of affliction keeping us in mitzrayim---just those qualities could serve as the way out. They become the matzah they we carry on our shoulders, no longer a burden but a symbol of freedom and redemption.
Maror: Having tasted of freedom, we return once again to the bitter herbs of our lives. These bitter herbs are at times the work of our own hands and at times the illnesses and losses of mortal life. For the spiritual life is an ebb and flow between slavery and freedom. For the reality is we never leave Egypt nor make it to the Promised Land. We are always on the way. Yet, tasting matzah, we are better equipped to confront the bitterness that is our lot.
Korekh: The deeper truth is that there is no slavery and no freedom distinct from each other. There is only a deep oneness underlying the universe. They are not separate realms. Thus we take matzah and maror and eat them together, no longer imagining that we can separate them. Korekh means entwined together. It also means to embrace---to embrace it all.
Tzafun: Before the oneness of the universe, we discover how much we don't know. We discover tzafun that which is hidden. We acknowledge the limitations of our understanding of ourselves and the universe. In so doing we can achieve the blessings of unknowing, of being the child who does not know how to ask. We can accept and thus rest in the place of unknowing by ceasing to strive for that which is hidden.
Barekh: Without that incessant striving, we can experience all the blessings life has to offer.
Hallel: And express gratitude for those blessings and most of all for the blessing of life itself.
Nirtzah: Then our lives will be lives lived closer to our will (ratzon) and the will of the Holy One, meaning we will be the person that deep down we really want to be.
It is no co-incidence that there are 14 stages in the mnemonic.14=the Hebrew letters "dalet" and "yod". For when God (as Shaddai) created the world, God said "dai" (enough—the letters dalet and yod) to create particularity amidst the universal oneness. We live in that world of dayyenu—“enoughness”. Yet it is our challenge to make the world and our internal universe more whole and holy. How? Through our outstretched arm (yad—the same letters in the opposite order) we can reverse the flow of creation---striving toward unity with deeds of loving kindness and compassion to others and to ourselves.
Rabbi Michael Strassfeld
April 8, 2024
MEET THE WORLD
Existence will remain meaningless for you if you yourself do not penetrate
into it with active love and if you do not in this way discover its meaning for
yourself. Everything is waiting to be hallowed by you; it is waiting to be
disclosed in its meaning and to be realized in it by you. For the sake of this
your beginning, God created the world. God has drawn it out of the Divine
Essence so that you may bring it back to God. Meet the world with the
fullness of your being and you shall meet God. That God...accepts from your
hands what you have to give to the world, is Divine mercy. If you wish to
believe, love!
One who loves brings God and the world together.
Martin Buber (adapted)
April 1. 2024
I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
- Elie Wiesel
March 25, 2024
Be Who You Want to Be
Happiness is possible when you are capable of doing the things and being the things you want to do and to be. When we walk for the sake of walking, when we sit for the sake of sitting, when we drink for the sake of drinking tea, we don't do it for something or someone else. Awakening means to see that truth—that you want to know how to enjoy, how to live deeply, in a very simple way. You don't want to waste your time anymore. Cherish the time that you are given.
–Thich Nhat Hanh, from Answers from the Heart (Parallax Press)
March 18, 2024
Joy
The Renaissance conception of laughter can be roughly
described as follows: Laughter has a deep philosophical
meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth
concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and
man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the
world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly
than when seen from the serious standpoint. Therefore,
laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing
universal problems, as seriousness. Certain essential aspects
of the universe are accessible only to laughter.
Mikhael Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World, p. 66
March 11, 2024
One day you finally know
what you have to do, and begin,
though the voices around you
keep shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
begins to tremble
and you feel the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cries.
But you don’t stop.
You know what you have to do,
though the wind pries
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations -
though their melancholy
is terrible.
It is already late
late enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you leave their voices behind,
the stars begin to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there is a new voice,
which you slowly
recognize as your own,
that keeps you company
as you stride deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you can do,
determined to save
the only life you can save -
Yours.
Mary Oliver. “The Journey” in Dreamwork
March 4, 2024
Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
- Groucho Marx
Don't postpone joy until you have learned all of your lessons. Joy is your lesson.
- Alan Cohen
Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Feb.26, 2024
“You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
“One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn't exist.....Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist”
― Stephen Hawking
“Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words
Feb. 19, 2024
This week’s parsha is all about the garments of the priests. Clothes can mark a person as special or help identify a person’s role (e.g. a firefighter). Clothes can help us feel good about ourselves and our bodies. Clothes can also help hide our bodies if we are unhappy with how we look. Most of all clothes cover our nakedness.
One of the early morning blessings praises God for clothing the naked. Originally, this blessing was recited while getting dressed in the morning. Yet, we are not thanking God for giving us clothes. We speak about clothing the naked. This reminds us to care about those with inadequate clothing in the world. Yet it is also a blessing we are saying to ourselves. Why?
We are all naked and embarrassed. We try to hide those parts of our character of which we are ashamed. Perhaps then the blessing encourages us to move beyond our “nakedness.” We see our bodies and ourselves as gifts. We celebrate those gifts even as we struggle to improve ourselves. When we move beyond embarrassment, our clothes become a reflection of who we are instead of being a disguise. Our clothes become the garb of our soul.
Rabbi Michael Strassfeld
Feb. 12, 2024
Almighty God, you bring morning light
Into the place of darkest night.
All creation delights in dawn’s brilliance
And exults in the rediscovery of life.
All nature becomes a holy sanctuary, resounding
With the joyous hymns and exultant hallelujahs
It offers up to you, awesome Creator of Worlds.
In the depths, rivers burble their song to you.
From the mountains, mists rise toward you
Like incense from colossal altars.
And so I – but one small being in this vast universe –
Fold my hands in gratitude to you…
Fanny Neuda
Feb. 5, 2024
You do not learn non-attachment by disengaging and avoiding the intensity of
relationships, their joy and their pain. It is easy to disguise as
non-attachment what is not non-attachment at all, but your fear of attachment.
When you really care about someone and you are willing to commit to that
friendship, then you have fertile ground to learn about both attachment and
non-attachment. That is what makes the marriage relationship so rich.
Judy Lief, "Tying the Knot"
Jan. 29, 2024
Inexhaustible
Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible
wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men,
as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every
language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does
not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains
pure, inexhaustible and complete. In three thousand years it
has not aged a day. It is a book that cannot die. Oblivion
shuns its pages. Its power is not subsiding. In fact, it is still
at the very beginning of its career, the full meaning of its
content having hardly touched the threshold of our minds;
like an ocean at the bottom of which countless pearls lie,
waiting to be discovered, its spirit is still to be unfolded.
Though its words seem plain and its idiom translucent,
unnoticed meanings, undreamed-of intimations break forth
constantly. More than two thousand years of reading and
research have not succeeded in exploring its full meaning.
Today it is as if it had never been touched, never been seen,
as if we had not even begun to read it. Abraham Joshua Heschel
Jan. 22, 2024
Years ago, at the end of the Song of Deborah,
I heard the quiet of Sisera’s chariots, which were late in coming,
As I looked at Sisera’s mother watching at the window,
A woman whose hair is a streak of silver.
A spoil of diverse colors of needlework
Diverse colors of needlework on both sides meet for the necks of them that take the
spoil (Judges 5:30),
the maidens saw;
At that very moment he lay like a sleeper in the tent;
His hands were very empty.
On his chin, traces of milk, butter, and blood.
The quiet was not shattered by the horses and the chariots;
The maidens also fell silent; one after the other.
My silence touched their silence.
After a while, the sun set.
After a while, the twilight went out.
Forty years---the land was calm. Forty years
Horses did not gallop and dead horseman did not stare with glassy eyes.
But she died a short time after her son’s death.
Haim Gury
Adapted From the Modern Hebrew Poem Itself
Jan. 15, 2024
Rebbe Nahman is supposed to have said: The whole world is only a very narrow bridge and the essential thing is not to be afraid at all. (kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar me’od ve-ha-ikkar lo le-faheid klal). His teaching is understood to mean that despite the difficulties of this world, we should not succumb to fear. But there is another way to read this. The beginning of the phrase literally means the whole world is only a bridge, meaning that all of existence is ultimately only a bridge. A bridge allows you to cross the void. Instead of being blocked on your journey you can move ahead to encounter what is on the other side. Life then is only about one thing—encounter with yourself, encounter with others, and encounter with the Other or the universe. These encounters don’t have to be grand or transformative. Their width or depth are not critical. It is the encounter that makes all the difference.
I am struck by the unrealistic idea found in the second half of Nahman’s teaching. We should not be afraid; in fact, we should not be afraid at all. Really? Is there anyone who is never afraid? But I read this differently. We are actually being told not to be afraid of the klal. Klal can mean the general rule. Don’t be afraid of the common wisdom that tells you: “you won’t succeed,” “it is an unsolvable problem,” or “what difference will your small effort make.” We live in a world of change. Nahman asks us not to be afraid to take the path less trodden or even to make a path where none existed before. The Torah is a Torah of freedom that urges us to strive to see clearly and wisely as we encounter life on our journey.
The whole world is an encounter. Don’t be afraid of the possible.
an excerpt from Judaism Disrupted
Jan. 8, 2024
I was not born with a hunger to be free. I was born free -- free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother's hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls. As long as I obeyed my father and abided by the customs of my tribe, I was not troubled by the laws of man or God.
It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion, when I discovered as a young man that my freedom had already been taken from me, that I began to hunger for it. At first, as a student, I wanted freedom only for myself, the transitory freedoms of being able to stay out of night, read what I pleased, and go where I chose. Later, as a young man in Johannesburg, I yearned for the basic and honorable freedoms of achieving my potential, or earning my keep, of marrying and having a family -- the freedom not to be obstructed in a lawful life.
But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free. I saw that it was not just my freedom that was curtailed, but the freedom of everyone who looked like I did. That is when I joined the African National Congress, and that is when the hunger for my own freedom became the greater hunger for the freedom of my people. It was this desire for freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life, that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to live like a monk. I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next man, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free. Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.
Nelson Mandela
Jan. 1, 2024
Each of us has a name
Each of us has a name
given by God
and given by our parents
Each of us has a name
given by our stature and our smile
and given by what we wear
Each of us has a name
given by the mountains
and given by our walls
Each of us has a name
given by the stars
and given by our neighbors
Each of us has a name
given by our sins
and given by our longing
Each of us has a name
given by our enemies
and given by our love
Each of us has a name
given by our celebrations
and given by our work
Each of us has a name
given by the seasons
and given by our blindness
Each of us has a name
given by the sea
and given by
our death.
© Translation: 2004, Marcia Lee Falk
From: The Spectacular Difference
Publisher: Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, 2004
Dec. 25, 2023
Make Peace with Your Mind
For the spiritual power of peace to touch every person on this earth, it must radiate out from a profound peace within our own mind: across political and religious barriers, and across the barriers of ego and self-righteousness. To this end, we should seek an inner peace so pure and stable that we cannot be moved to anger by violence or to selfish attachment and fear by those who view or confront us with contempt and hatred. We can achieve such stability only by purifying the mind's poisons—ignorance, anger, attachment, jealousy, and pride; then we can clearly see that war and suffering are but their outer reflections. The essential difference between true peacemakers and those who wage war of any sort is the presence of extraordinary patience and discipline in the minds of the peacemakers as they work with these pervasive poisons. If we truly understand this, we will never allow ourselves to be defeated from within or without.
–Lama Shenpen Drolma, from Change of Heart
Dec. 18, 2023
“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
“Being his real brother I could feel I live in his shadows, but I never have and I do not now. I live in his glow.”
― Michael Morpurgo, Private Peaceful
“I love you, my brother, whoever you are - whether you worship in a church, kneel in your temple, or pray in your mosque. You and I are children of one faith, for the diverse paths of religion are fingers of the loving hand of the one supreme being, a hand extended to all, offering completeness of spirit to all, eager to receive all.”
― Kahlil Gibran
“God did not make this person as I would have made him. God did not give him to me as a brother for me to dominate and control, but in order that I might find above him the Creator. Now the other person, in the freedom with which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction. I can never know beforehand how God's image should appear in others. That image always manifests a completely new and unique form that comes solely from God's free and sovereign creation. To me the sight may seem strange, even ungodly. ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dec. 11, 2023
PSALM FIFTY-NINE
Rosh Chodesh Kislev
by Debbie Perlman, z”l
Slowly, You ease the chill upon us,
Sending midday sun to warm us;
Through the shattered glass of yesterday’s pain,
You move us ahead into winter’s dark.
Balance the dark with Your light, O Eternal;
Balance the cold with the warmth of Your care.
You train us to look at both sides;
You give us a month of duality to contemplate:
Two wives, twin sons, a man with two names,
A nation not knowing its own identity.
Balance our questions with Your clues, O Eternal;
Balance our fears with Your comforting hand.
And in the grip of Kislev‘s deepest cold,
Light so brief we could swallow it in one gulp,
Balance the darkness with shining eyes,
Smoothed windows cleared
To broadcast the growing light,
Pinpoints of Your living flame,
Answers to our winter yearning.
Dec. 4, 2023
Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Light tomorrow with today!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
Albert Schweitzer
Sharon Salzberg
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.
Hafiz of Persia
Nov. 27, 2023
The Foundation of Generosity
Gratitude, the simple and profound feeling of being thankful, is the foundation of all generosity. I am generous when I believe that right now, right here, in this form and this place, I am myself being given what I need. Generosity requires that we relinquish something, and this is impossible if we are not glad for what we have. Otherwise, the giving hand closes into a fist and won’t let go.
Sallie Jiko Tisdale
The Possibility of Kindness
We must realize, if tomorrow is going to look any better than today, that the currency for compassion isn't what someone else does, right or wrong—it is the very fact that that person exists. Commitment to the possibility of kindness cannot be discarded as foolish or irrelevant, even in troubling times when we often can't find easy answers. If we abandon the force of kindness as we confront cruelty, we won't learn anything to take into tomorrow—not from history, not from one another, not from life.
- Sharon Salzberg
Nov. 20, 2023
Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season.
- Heraklietos of Ephesos
- Heraclitus
I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.
- Joni Mitchell
Nov. 13, 2023
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Nov. 6, 2023
The Window
Irene Klepfisz
She looks out the window.
All is present.
The shadows of the past
fall elsewhere.
This is the wilderness
she thinks.
And our tongues have become
dry the wilderness has
dried out our tongues and
we have forgotten speech.
She looks out the window.
All is present.
Oct. 30, 2023
Each of us can only seize by the scruff whoever happens to be closest to him in the mire. This is the “neighbour” the Bible speaks of. And the miraculous thing is that, although each of us stands in the mire himself, we can each pull out our neighbour, or at least keep him from drowning. None of us has solid ground under his feet; each of us is only held up by the neighbourly hands grasping him by the scruff, with the result that we are each held up by the next man, and often, indeed most of the time (quite naturally, since we are neighbours mutually), hold each other up mutually. All this mutual upholding (a physical impossibility) becomes possible only because the great hand from above supports all these holding hands by their wrists. It is this, and not some non-existent ‘solid ground under one’s feet’, that enables all the human hands to hold and to help. There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up.
Franz Rosenzweig
Oct. 23, 2023
אני ואתה נשנה את העולם
אני ואתה אז יבואו כבר כולם
אמרו את זה קודם לפני
לא משנה - אני ואתה נשנה את העולם
אני ואתה ננסה מהתחלה
יהיה לנו רע, אין דבר זה לא נורא
אמרו את זה קודם לפני
זה לא משנה - אני ואתה נשנה את העולם
אני ואתה נשנה את העולם
אני ואתה אז יבואו כבר כולם
אמרו את זה קודם לפני
לא משנה - אני ואתה נשנה את העולם
You and I we'll change the world
you and I by then all will follow
Others have said it before me but
doesn't matter you and I we'll change the world.
You and I we'll try from the beginning
it will be tough for us, no matter, it's not too bad!
Others have said it before me but it
doesn't matter you and I we'll change the world.
Arik Einstein and Miki Gavrielov
Oct. 2, 2023
FRIEND, WHEN YOU SPEAK
Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don’t know
what to say. I listen in such a way so as not to add to your confusion. I make
some reply at every opportunity so as not to compound your loneliness. Thus
the conversation continues under an umbrella of optimism. If you suggest a
feeling, I affirm it. If you provoke, I accept the challenge. The surface is thick,
but it has its flaws, and hopefully we will trip on one of them. Now, we can
order a meat sandwich for the protein, or we can take our places in the
Sanhedrin and determine what it is to be done with those great cubes of
diamond that our teacher Moses shouldered down the mountain. You want
to place them in such a way that the sun by day, and the moon and stars by
night, will shine through them. I suggest another perspective which would
include the light of the celestial bodies within the supernal radiance of the
cubes. We lean toward each other over the table. The dust mingles with the
mist, our nostrils widen. We are definitely interested; now we can get down
to a Jew’s business.
Leonard Cohen
Sept. 25, 2023
Now is the time to free the heart,
Let all intentions and worries stop,
Free the joy inside the self,
Awaken to the wonder of your life.
Open your eyes and see the friends
Whose hearts recognize your face as kin,
Those whose kindness watchful and near,
Encourages you to live everything here.
See the gifts the years have given,
Things your effort could never earn,
The health to enjoy who you want to be
And the mind to mirror mystery.
-John O’Donohue
Sept. 18, 2023
notice the rage
notice the silence –
silence and the presence
of everything:
small truths
and other surprises
what we nurture
how we live with loss
saved by the beauty of the world
seeking language
large enough
a life worthy of our breath
when no question
seems big enough:
what if we get this right?
this tiny slice of eternity –
mathematics, mystery,
and the universe –
this fantastic argument
of being alive.
Maria Papova, “Twenty Reasons for Being,” published in The Marginalism, (15 June 2022)
Sept. 11, 2023
TURNING
We spend all our lives trying to get
somewhere, to work or the store
or graduation, and we look back
only to remind ourselves
of where we need to be.
Sometimes we remember
not to go anywhere, but
the hardest place to travel
is inside, folding into ourselves,
seeing if where we’re trying to get
is where we want to go,
spinning if we can
with our arms open wide,
letting the world rush by.
Nancie S. Martin
Sept. 5, 2023
A NEW YEAR
Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.
On other days we misinterpret time,
Pretending that we live the present moment.
But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,
This tiny fissure where the future drips
Into the past, this flyspeck we call now
Be our true habitat? The present is
The leakly palm of water that we skim
From the swift, silent river slipping by.
The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along – to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
[Like] a field of snow without a single footprint.
Dana Gioia, “New Year’s,” published in 99 Poems: New & Selected,
(Minneapolis, MI: Graywolf Press, 2016), [edited]
June 19, 2023
Tammuz is interlude, reiteration, steady growth:
Setting sprinklers, pulling weeds, nourishment
That signals the start of culmination.
Guide us, Eternal One, as we move in our tasks.
No longer wanderers, we have planted our
fields,
We have set our fruit tress.
Now we contemplate Your care for us
As we wait for consolidation of further growth.
The longer days wind in on themselves,
Longer sunlight erases the hurry;
Longer moments to linger; a book, an embrace,
To listen to children’s voices calling in the twilight.
Hear us in the longer days, Source of Growth,
Calling us as our fathers and mothers called,
Calling as we summon our children home from
play.
Hear us as we call You in truth.
Hear us as move into this time of increase,
As we gather up sunlight and breezes and rains
To lay aside against the unknowns ahead.
Hear us as we call You in truth.
Debbie Perlman
June 12, 2023
It is I Who Must Begin
It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try –
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
- to live in harmony
with the “voice of Being,” as I
understand it within myself
- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
not the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.
Whether all is really lost
Or not depends entirely on
Whether or not I am lost.
--Vaclav Havel
June 5, 2023
Drop the Past
If a misfortune has already occurred, it is best not to worry about it, so we do not add fuel to the problem. Don’t ally yourself with past events by lingering on them and exaggerating them. Let the past take care of itself, and transport yourself to the present while taking whatever measures are necessary to ensure that such a misfortune never occurs again, now or in the future.
–His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV
May 29, 2023
Starting Over with Ourselves
We need to be able to forgive ourselves when we stumble or forget, and based on that forgiveness, be able to reconnect to our basic intention. One of the primary tools we have in spiritual life is the understanding that everything is changing all of the time, that nothing is fixed, and nothing is permanent. Because of that truth, when we make a mistake we realize that we can begin again.
- Sharon Salzberg, The Force of Kindness
May 22, 2023
Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible
wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men,
as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every
language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does
not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains
pure, inexhaustible and complete. In three thousand years it
has not aged a day. It is a book that cannot die. Oblivion
shuns its pages. Its power is not subsiding. In fact, it is still
at the very beginning of its career, the full meaning of its
content having hardly touched the threshold of our minds;
like an ocean at the bottom of which countless pearls lie,
waiting to be discovered, its spirit is still to be unfolded.
Though its words seem plain and its idiom translucent,
unnoticed meanings, undreamed-of intimations break forth
constantly. More than two thousand years of reading and
research have not succeeded in exploring its full meaning.
Today it is as if it had never been touched, never been seen,
as if we had not even begun to read it.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
May 15, 2023
The Window
She looks out the window.
All is present.
The shadows of the past
fall elsewhere.
This is the wilderness
she thinks.
And our tongues have become
dry the wilderness has
dried out our tongues and
we have forgotten speech.
She looks out the window,
All is present.
Irena Klepfisz
May 8, 2023
I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair
I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see
For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green
I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know
But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
May 1, 2023
The Place Where We Are Right
by Yehuda Amichai
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
April 27, 2023
All Together Now
The more you can come to see everyone as yourself, the more you will be able to use everything around you to learn about who you are, and the more you will be able to transform yourself and be an occasion for everyone else's transformation. We are all sentient beings, and we are all capable of experiencing one another's salvation. If you are only involved in protecting your small self, you are in constant peril!
–Michael Wenger
April 17, 2023
“Awareness of the multiplicity of human ways is also the necessary precondition for the active search for the better or best way. Discovering the partiality of one’s own truths and standards invites the active search for truths and standards beyond one’s making.” (From The Beginning of Wisdom by Leon Kass).
April 10, 2023
Cold Feet
They say cold feet are a sign of turning back,
The failure of internal will -
But I say it can be the other way,
The body’s anticipation of things to come.
Whether demons are nipping at your heels
Or gnawing within, here’s the thing:
Settle quietly, close your eyes,
Then take the most deliberate, deep breath,
As though it were the very first (God’s breath) -
And when you can feel it penetrate every bit of your being,
Making the rest of your life possible,
You open your eyes
And take that first step out into the sea of reeds.
Watered feet are just the price of coming home.
from Siddur Sha’ar Zahav
April 3, 2023
A Reflection on Matzah
by Rabbi Michael Strassfeld
We meet again after another year. You look much the same. With so many wrinkles in your face, you never seem to get any older. You never gain any weight either, but then again, I couldn’t imagine a fat matzah.
What is your secret? Why do we make a fuss about you? Unlike other mitzvot, it is not enough just to eat you, we must explain the whys and wherefores of matzah à la Rabbi Gamliel.
You seem so simple, plain and flat. You would have been ignored by the palates of humankind except for your role in history. Your secret cannot be hidden inside of you for there is no room, and with all those holes, everything is revealed. Your outsides and your insides are the same.
For a symbol of freedom, you are not very impressive. You do not sparkle like wine, you are not sweet like haroset, or delicious and sumptuous like the festive meal. On a night of sumptuous rejoicing, you are just your simple self. Shouldn’t freedom have a more striking representative than you?
And even that symbolism is confusing. For you are not only the dough which our ancestors did not have the time to let rise as they left Egypt. You are also the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate as slaves. You were the cheap but filling food given to satisfy the masses.
You were there from the beginning to end. You who were the bread of slaves became the sustenance of a free people. From lehem oni to afikomen, from slave past to messianic future. All the blows of the taskmasters can be seen on your pockmarked surface. Fragile as you are, you have survived unbroken. You remind us of our humble beginnings as slaves, and yet you show that the lowly can also become free. You are the symbol of the possibility of change for us all. You are the focal point of the Haggadah, for freedom is the dominion of the free--its gates open to all. Yet, free as you are, changed as you are, you are exactly the same as your slave self. For you watched yourself to prevent contamination with the yeast of pride, the lust for wealth, the thirst for praise. No leavening was allowed to puff you up artificially, to make you appear more than your naturally self. Simple, plain, and flat. Matzah, the eternal symbol of freedom, is the antithesis of fine food and wine, for freedom lies in intoxication with the idea, not with the self.
March 27, 2023
Peace is Possible
The overarching goal of practice, habituating the mind to equanimity, wisdom, and kindness subsumes, I believe, any specific theme of study or technique of meditation. I think of my ongoing daily practice as mindfully attending to everything that startles my mind into a confused energetic response, even a small one, and gracefully attending to it. I tell people that “my practice is confirming, in my mind, the promise of the Buddha’s third noble truth, “Peace is possible,” confident that the clarity of that peace will support all my subsequent actions.
Sylvia Boorstein
March 20, 2023
Sabbath Prayer
God, help us now to make this new Shabbat.
After noise, we seek quiet;
after crowds of indifferent strangers,
we seek to touch those we love;
after concentration on work and responsibility,
we seek freedom to meditate, to listen to our inward selves.
We open our eyes to the hidden beauties
and the infinite possibilities in the world You are creating;
we break open the gates of the reservoirs
of goodness and kindness in ourselves and in others;
we reach toward one holy moment of Shabbat.
From Siddur Shaar Zahav
March 13, 2023
MUTUAL UPHOLDING
Each of us can only seize by the scruff whoever happens to be closest to us in the mire. This is the “neighbor” the Bible speaks of. And the miraculous thing is that, although each of us stands in the mire ourself, we can each pull out our neighbor, or at least keep him from drowning. None of us has solid ground under our feet; each of us is only held up by the neighborly hands grasping us by the scruff, with the result that we are each held up by the next one, and often, indeed most of the time…hold each other up mutually. All this mutual upholding (a physical impossibility) becomes possible only because the great hand from above supports all these holding human hands by their wrists. It is this, and not some nonexistent “solid ground under one’s feet” that enables all the human hands to hold and to help. There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up. “As an eagle…hovereth over her young”
(Deuteronomy 32:11).
Franz Rosenzweig
March 6, 2023
If you banish oppression from your midst,
The menacing hand and tainted speech,
If you give of yourself to the hungry,
Fulfilling the needs of the poor—
Then shall your light shine in darkness,
And your darkness shall be like the noon.
God will guide you always,
Will satisfy your thirst in desert wastes,
Will give your bones new life,
And you will be like a well-watered garden,
Like a spring whose waters do not fail.
And those among you will rebuild ancient ruins,
Foundations long dormant you’ll restore.
You shall be called the repairer of bridges,
The restorer of roads for habitation.
(Isaiah 58:9b-12)
Feb. 27, 2023
Note: The desert sanctuary was made to be portable. The Levites would carry its components as the Israelites traveled for forty years in the desert.
The poles of the ark symbolize, on the physical plane, the ubiquitous mission of the ark and what it housed—to be carried beyond its place to wherever circumstances demanded. The commandment: “the poles shall not be removed” embodied the eternal message that the Torah is not parochial, restricted to the particular country where the Temple is situated. Independence of place is an essential characteristic of the Torah.
Samson Raphael Hirsch
Feb. 20, 2023
FRIEND, WHEN YOU SPEAK
Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don’t know
what to say. I listen in such a way so as not to add to your confusion. I make
some reply at every opportunity so as not to compound your loneliness. Thus
the conversation continues under an umbrella of optimism. If you suggest a
feeling, I affirm it. If you provoke, I accept the challenge. The surface is thick,
but it has its flaws, and hopefully we will trip on one of them. Now, we can
order a meat sandwich for the protein, or we can take our places in the
Sanhedrin and determine what it is to be done with those great cubes of
diamond that our teacher Moses shouldered down the mountain. You want
to place them in such a way that the sun by day, and the moon and stars by
night, will shine through them. I suggest another perspective which would
include the light of the celestial bodies within the supernal radiance of the
cubes. We lean toward each other over the table. The dust mingles with the
mist, our nostrils widen. We are definitely interested; now we can get down
to a Jew’s business.
Leonard Cohen
Feb. 13, 2023
Love
“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
Feb. 6, 2023
Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible
wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men,
as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every
language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does
not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains
pure, inexhaustible and complete. In three thousand years it
has not aged a day. It is a book that cannot die. Oblivion
shuns its pages. Its power is not subsiding. In fact, it is still
at the very beginning of its career, the full meaning of its
content having hardly touched the threshold of our minds;
like an ocean at the bottom of which countless pearls lie,
waiting to be discovered, its spirit is still to be unfolded.
Though its words seem plain and its idiom translucent,
unnoticed meanings, undreamed-of intimations break forth
constantly. More than two thousand years of reading and
research have not succeeded in exploring its full meaning.
Today it is as if it had never been touched, never been seen,
as if we had not even begun to read it.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Jan. 23, 2023
It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try –
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
- to live in harmony
with the “voice of Being,” as I
understand it within myself
- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
not the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.
Whether all is really lost
Or not depends entirely on
Whether or not I am lost.
--Vaclav Havel
Jan. 16, 2023
What I learned about myself is freedom is indivisible. If I am not free, you are not free, and if you are not free, I cannot have freedom either. What happens to the other person happens to me, not in some philosophical sense, but in a very concrete and immediate way. If to keep others down, their freedom must be taken away, then a condition of the system will be that my freedom must also be diminished. If I have to deny myself, then my own condition is a situation of unfreedom.
What I learned about being Jewish is that there are no lines of division, no unmarked boundaries, between my being Jewish and my being human. The one flows into the other and back again. Human beings are suffering. That they have suffered for centuries does not make their suffering any less pressing. The situation is urgent because suffering and oppression always are now, always happen when they happen, however long they already have happened. We cannot stand idly by. We must make the condition of humanity in any country a matter of personal engagement and personal concern. The frontiers of freedom encompass the whole of humanity. We really are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and our brothers and sisters are everyone.
Jacob Neusner
Jan. 9, 2023
Liberation is costly. Even after the Lord had delivered the Israelites from Egypt, they had to travel through the desert. They had to bear the responsibities and difficulties of freedom…Liberation is costly. It needs unity. We must hold hands and refuse to be divided. We must be ready. Some of us will not see the day of our liberation physically. But those people will have contributed to the struggle. Let us be united, let us be filled with hope. Let us be those who respect one another.
Desmond Tutu
Jan. 2, 2023
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been—a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
-Starhawk
Dec. 26, 2022
The older we get, the greater becomes our inclination to give thanks, espe-
cially heavenwards. We feel more strongly than we could possibly have ever
felt before that life is a free gift, and receive every unqualifiedly good hour in
gratefully reaching out hands, as an unexpected gift.
But we also feel, again and again, an urge to thank our fellow, even if he or
she has not done anything special for us. For what, then? For really meeting
me when we met; for opening his eyes, and not mistaking me for someone
else; for opening his ears, and listening carefully to what I had to say to him;
indeed, for opening up to me what I really wanted to address — his securely
locked heart.
Martin Buber
Dec. 18, 2022
Ordinary Miracles
I go into the dark kitchen
and press the switch.
Lights!
I sit on the sofa
near the dog.
He turns on his back,
raises his paws and yawns.
In the bedroom I bend down to my wife.
She smiles in her sleep,
murmurs, dreams again.
Don’t they understand?
Fiery creatures are uttering,
the Angel of Death is in the city,
the altar is crying . . .
and I go from room to room,
night after night,
counting the miracles. T. Carmi
Dec.12, 2022
You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river.
Steven Foster
Dec. 5, 2022
Awakening
in a moment of peace
I give thanks to the source of all peace
as I set forth
into the day
the birds sing
with new voices
and I listen
with new ears and give thanks
nearby
the flower called Angel's Trumpet
blows in the breeze
and I give thanks
my feet touch the grass
still wet with dew
and I give thanks
both to my mother earth
for sustaining my steps
and to the seas
cycling once again
to bring forth new life
the dewdrops
become jewelled
with the morning's sun-fire
and I give thanks
you can see forever
when the vision is clear
in this moment
each moment
I give thanks
Harriet Kofalk
Nov. 28, 2022
Our Father Jacob
Our father Jacob, on the beaten track,
carries a ladder on his back
like a window washer to the VIPs.
He does God’s windows, if you please.
The ladder is all that’s left of his dream;
the angels finally ran out of steam.
He carries the ladder back every night
into his dream and out of sight.
At dawn he wrestles a man to the ground.
That man is a woman. They roll ’round and ’round,
roll till they’re ravished, till both of them reel,
grasping at chest and crotch and heel,
day after day, by the first morning light,
till the angel and Jacob are too weak to fight.
He’ll climb that ladder, if ever he dies,
right out of this world and into the skies,
till the world vanishes into thin air.
For all that we know, he’s still climbing there.
Yehuda Amichai
Nov. 21, 2022
THANKSGIVING
The older we get, the greater becomes our inclination to give thanks, especially heavenwards. We feel more strongly than we could possibly have ever felt before that life is a free gift, and receive every unqualifiedly good hour in gratefully reaching out hands, as an unexpected gift.
But we also feel, again and again, an urge to thank our fellow, even if he or she has not done anything special for us. For what, then? For really meeting me when we met; for opening his eyes, and not mistaking me for someone else; for opening his ears, and listening carefully to what I had to say to him; indeed, for opening up to me what I really wanted to address — his securely locked heart.
Martin Buber
Nov. 14, 2022
“Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
― Bryan Stevenson (social justice activist) from Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
Nov. 7, 2022
Discovery
No one ever told me the coming of the Messiah
could be an inward thing;
no one ever told me a change of heart
may be as quiet as new-fallen snow.
No one ever told me that redemption
was as simple as springtime and was as wonderful
as birds returning after a long winter,
rose-breasted grosbeaks singing in the swaying branches
of a newly budded tree.
No one ever told me that salvation
might be like a fresh spring wind
blowing away the dried withered leaves of another year,
carrying the scent of flowers, the promise of fruition.
What I found for myself I try to tell you:
redemption and salvation are very near,
and the taste of them is in the world
that God created and laid before us.
From Siddur Sha'ar Zahav
Oct. 31, 2022
The Foundation of Generosity
Gratitude, the simple and profound feeling of being thankful, is the foundation of all generosity. I am generous when I believe that right now, right here, in this form and this place, I am myself being given what I need. Generosity requires that we relinquish something, and this is impossible if we are not glad for what we have. Otherwise, the giving hand closes into a fist and won’t let go.
Sallie Jiko Tisdale
Oct. 24, 2022
Responsibility quotes
God is hiding in the world.
Our task is to let the divine emerge from our deeds.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.
Franz Kafka
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
- George Bernard Shaw
Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.
- Vaclav Havel
Oct. 16, 2022
A new “learning” is about to be born — rather, it has been born. It is a learning in reverse order. A learning that no longer starts from the Torah and leads into life, but the other way round: from life, from a world that knows nothing of the Law, or pretends to know nothing, back to the Torah. That is the sign of the time.
It is the sign of the time because it is the mark of the people of the time. There is no one today who is not alienated, or who does not contain within himself or herself some small fraction of alienation. All of us to whom Judaism, to whom being a Jew, has again become the pivot of our lives — and I know that in saying this here I am not speaking for myself alone — we all know that in being Jews we must not give up anything, not renounce anything, but lead everything back to Judaism. From the periphery back to the center; from the outside in.
This is a new sort of learning. A learning for which — in these days — those are the most apt who bring with them the maximum of what is alien....They will succeed, not in the capacity of specialists, but only as Jews who are also alienated, as those who are groping their way home.
It is not a matter of pointing out relations between what is Jewish and what is non-Jewish. There has been enough of that. It is not a matter of apologetics, but rather of finding the way back into the heart of our life. And of being confident that this heart is a Jewish heart. For we are Jews.
Franz Rosenzweig (adapted)
Oct. 9, 2022
A Resurrection of Sorts
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms,” from Rose
Oct. 3, 2022
WAITING FOR MY LIFE
I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.
Sometimes my life coughed and coughed;
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like bird song
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life.
Linda Pastan
Sept. 25, 2022
I like Rosh Hashanah late,
when the leaves are half burnt
umber and scarlet, when sunset
marks the horizon with slow fire
and the black silhouettes
of migrating birds perch
on the wires davening.
I like Rosh Hashanah late
when all living are counting
their days toward death
or sleep or the putting by
of what will sustain them –
when the cold whose tendrils
translucent as a jelly fish
and with a hidden sting
just brush our faces
at twilight. The threat
of frost, a premonition,
a warning, a whisper
whose words we cannot
yet decipher, but will.
I repent better in the waning
season when the blood
runs swiftly and all creatures
look keenly about them
for quickening danger.
Then I study the rock face
of my life, its granite pitted
and pocked and pickaxed,
eroded, discolored by sun
and wind and rain –
my rock emerging
from the veil of greenery
to be mapped, to be
examined, to be judged.
Marge Piercy
Sept. 19, 2022
WAITING FOR MY LIFE
I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.
Sometimes my life coughed and coughed;
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like bird song
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life.
Linda Pastan
Sept. 12, 2022
We have the sins of silence here. Also the sins of loquacity and glibness. We have the sins of moderation, and also of excess. We have the sins of going first, and of “After you, Alphonse.” We have the sins of impatience, and of patience. Of doing nothing and of taking action. Of spontaneity and calculation. Of indecision, and of sitting in judgment on one’s peers. We try to be alert here for infractions, and when we find none, we know we have fallen among the sins of oversight, or else of smugness. We have the sins of disobedience, and of just following orders. Of gravity and levity, of complacency, anxiety, indifference, obsession, interest. We have the sins of insincerity, and of telling unwelcome truths. We have the sins of ingratitude for our many blessings, and of taking joy in any moment of our lives. We have the sins of skepticism, and belief. Of promptness, and of being late. Of hopelessness, and of expecting anything. We have the sins of depression, and of being comforted. Of ignorance, and being well-informed. Of carelessness, and of exactitude. Of leading, following, opposing, taking no part in. Very few of us, it seems fair to say, are morally at ease.
Renata Adler, Pitch Dark, (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), [edited].
Sept. 5, 2022
This moment is the only life we have—the only place we can live our life, feel it, experience it. Sitting still in silence, we feel a sense of timelessness. Present, past, and future dissolve in the eternal present, a boundless field of mind in which we feel our connection to everything in the range of our experience. This boundless, eternal realm is the realm of God. Approaching it, we approach God.
Alan Lew, Be Still & Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life
June 27, 2022
A medical colleague describing his own experience of staying true to himself told me that he thinks of his life as an orchestra. Reclaiming his integrity reminds him of that moment before the concert when the concertmaster asks the oboist to sound an A. “At first there is chaos and noise, as all the parts of the orchestra try to align themselves with that note. But as each instrument moves closer and closer to it, the noise diminishes and when they all finally sound it together, there is a moment of rest, of homecoming.”
“That is how it feels to me,” he told me. “I am always tuning my orchestra. Somewhere deep inside there is a sound that is mine alone, and I struggle daily to hear it and tune my life to it. Sometimes there are people and situations that help me to hear my note more clearly; other times, people and situations make it harder for me to hear. A lot depends on my commitment to listening and my intention to stay coherent with this note. It is only when my life is tuned to my note that I can play life’s mysterious and holy music without tainting it with my own discordance, my own bitterness, resentment, agendas, and fears.”
Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not. It is a note that only we can hear. Eventually, when life makes us ready to listen, it will help us to find our way home.
Rachel Naomi Remen, “My Grandfather’s Blessings”
June 20, 2022
We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no-man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us. This is what existentialists call the anxiety of nothingness…To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and which few people realize.
Rollo May
June 13, 2022
Step out of the Protected Room
Until we turn and face what we've spent our whole lives avoiding, what are we really doing with our lives? Practice is not some pretty thing we do just on a meditation cushion.
–Ezra Bayda, from Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (Shambhala Publications)
Bow to Yourself
We may be adept at bowing to others, yet find it impossible to bow to ourselves, to acknowledge the wholesomeness and sincerity that keep us persevering on this path. Learning to make that first bow to ourselves is perhaps a step to realizing that a bow is just a bow, a simple gesture where all ideas of “self” and “other,” “worthy” and “unworthy,” fall away.
-Christina Feldman, “Long Journey to a Bow”
June 6, 2022
Every human journey contains within it something of Moses’ trek up that mountainside; every human attempt at making meaning, at understanding the purpose of human existence, at rejecting cynicism in quest of truth, has something of Sinai within it. Whenever we assert—by deed as well as word—that life is not absurd, that accident and emptiness are not our only lot, we are climbing up God’s mountain. Believe as we may that it is we who are making for life’s meaning, we who are retrieving human dignity from the abyss of chaos, the religious mind sees such activity as response rather than as human creativity alone. We give meaning all its forms, but the need to do so is an act of responding to the divine image cast into our deepest human selves.
Rabbi Arthur Green
May 30, 2022
How are to hear the voice of Sinai? One possibility is suggested by the puzzling verse describing the experience at Sinai: “and all the people saw the sounds,” (Ex. 20:15). What does it mean that the people saw rather than heard the sounds? Imagine a person who can’t hear entering a room filled with music and dancing people. At first, it might seem that the dancers were crazy. Yet, with some awareness, even that person can realize that the people are dancing to music.
It might be said that we are all deaf when it comes to the voice of Sinai. The first step is to realize that the music is playing, that is, that God is calling us. Looking at the world that way, we can at least see the effects of that voice, in such things as nature and acts of loving-kindness. Perhaps, by seeing the sounds, we may eventually come to hear them, too. [based on the Degel Mahaneh Efraim]
May 23, 2022
Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations"
I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
Francis Cook:
"It is wonderful to learn to do one thing at a time. When we do formal zazen, we just sit; this means we do not add to the sitting any judgments such as how wonderful it is to do zazen, or how badly we are doing at it. We just sit.
When we wash the dishes, we just wash dishes; when we drive on the highway, we just drive. When pain comes, there is just pain, and when pleasure comes, there is just pleasure. A Buddha is someone who is totally at one with his experience at every moment."
May 16, 2022
Compassion vs. Pity and Despair
The near enemy of compassion is pity. Instead of feeling the openness of compassion, pity says, “Oh, that poor person. I feel sorry for people like that.” Pity sees them as different from ourselves. It sets up a separation between ourselves and others, a sense of distance and remoteness from the suffering of others that is affirming and gratifying to the self. Compassion, on the other hand, recognizes the suffering of another as a reflection of our own pain: “I understand this; I suffer the same way.” It is empathetic, a mutual connection with the pain and sorrow of life. Compassion is shared suffering.
Another enemy of compassion is despair. Compassion does not mean immersing ourselves in the suffering of others to the point of anguish. Compassion is the tender readiness of the heart to respond to one’s own or another’s pain without despair, resentment, or aversion. It is the wish to dissipate suffering. Compassion embraces those experiencing sorrow, and eliminates cruelty from the mind.
Joy vs. Comparison
The third quality, sympathetic joy, is the ability to feel joy in the happiness of others. The enemy of shared joy is comparison and jealousy. Jealousy compares our joy to that of another. It separates us and believes that joy is limited. If others have it, there will not be enough for us. True shared joy is joy in being, the aliveness, it is an openhearted celebrating of our life with one another. Shared joy takes delight in the success and happiness of all. It wishes that their and our happiness may increase.
Jack Kornfield from “Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are”
May 9, 2022
A psalm for the journey
I crept upon the trail of my days,
Barely moving, forward then back
With the indecisions of my doubts,
Until I inched into Your light.
Then, casting no shadows, I stood.
Knowing little but believing.
I readied my soul to move into Radiance
That would begin my learning.
For I have stood too long in this place,
Balancing first on one foot, then the other,
Fearful of moving away from this familiar gloom
Into Your light.
Set my foot upon the middle of the path,
Obscure the tangle of my life before,
And guide my steps to the clearing ahead,
Lighting the way.
Burn, O Divine Beacon,
Send Your light
Streaming through the woods,
Turning night into day.
Debbie Perlman, Psalm Eleven
April 11, 2022
The purpose of all the commandments, both positive and negative, that were given to Israel, is so that every person of Israel be free. That is why the liberation from Egypt comes first [before the giving of the Torah]. Torah then teaches the soul how to maintain its freedom, by not becoming attached to material things. These are 613 “counsels.” Every mitzvah in which the liberation from Egypt is mentioned is to tell us yet again that by means of this mitzvah one may cling to freedom. In the commandments regarding [the gifts to the poor of] leftover gleanings, the corners of the fields, and forgotten sheaves, the Torah says: "Remember that you were a slave (Dt. 24:22). In this way your food will have no waste, and you will not become overly attached to wealth. That is why the Torah commanded such things as tithes and gifts to the poor, these guard one from (overattachment to) wealh…
This is the purpose of the entire Torah. That is why they read “engraved on the tablets” (Ex. 32:16), as though it said “freedom on the tablets” [harut/herut]. “The only free person,” they added, “is the one who is engaged in Torah,” for Torah teaches a person the way of freedom.
Sefat Emet on Ki Tetzei, trans. by Arthur Green
April 4, 2022
But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free. I saw that it was not just my freedom that was curtailed, but the freedom of everyone who looked like I did. That is when I joined the African National Congress, and that is when the hunger for my own freedom became the greater hunger for the freedom of my people. It was this desire for freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life, that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to live like a monk. I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next man, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free. Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.
Nelson Mandela
March 28, 2022
Look and See
This morning, at waterside, a sparrow flew
to a water rock and landed, by error, on the back
of an eider duck; lightly it fluttered off, amused.
The duck, too, was not provoked, but, you might say, was
laughing.
This afternoon a gull sailing over
our house was casually scratching
its stomach of white feathers with one
pink foot as it flew.
Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us, if we
only look and see.
Mary Oliver from Why I Wake Early
March 21, 2022
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
- Elie Wiesel
Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.
Albert Schweitzer
March 14, 2022
Rabbah and Rabbi Zera joined together in a Purim feast. They became drunk and Rabbah arose and killed Rabbi Zera. On the next day, he prayed on Rabbi Zera’s behalf and brought him back to life. Next year, Rabbah said: “Will your honor come, and we will have the Purim feast together.” Rabbi Zera replied: “A miracle does not take place on every occasion.” (Tractate Megillah 7b)
March 7, 2022
A Resurrection of Sorts
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms,” from Rose
Feb. 28, 2022
The Foundation of Generosity
Gratitude, the simple and profound feeling of being thankful, is the foundation of all generosity. I am generous when I believe that right now, right here, in this form and this place, I am myself being given what I need. Generosity requires that we relinquish something, and this is impossible if we are not glad for what we have. Otherwise the giving hand closes into a fist and won’t let go.
Sallie Jiko Tisdale
The Possibility of Kindness
We must realize, if tomorrow is going to look any better than today, that the currency for compassion isn't what someone else does, right or wrong—it is the very fact that that person exists. Commitment to the possibility of kindness cannot be discarded as foolish or irrelevant, even in troubling times when we often can't find easy answers. If we abandon the force of kindness as we confront cruelty, we won't learn anything to take into tomorrow—not from history, not from one another, not from life.
- Sharon Salzberg
Feb. 21, 2022
Sabbaths
Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we're asleep.
When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.
-Wendell Berry
Feb. 14, 2022
Idolatry
“Images of the Holy easily become holy images -- sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks His presence?”
― C.S. Lewis
“Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by acceptance. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.”
― Rebecca Pippert, Out of the Saltshaker and Into the World
“When people say, "I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself," they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God's.”
― Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters
“Anxiety is treated by a search for certainty. And certainty – wherever we think we've found it – will lead to dogma. And wherever we have dogma, in time, it leads to rigidity. And that rigidity ultimately leads to idolatry.”
― James Hollis PhD
Feb. 7, 2022
Every Jew must light the ner tamid in one’s heart, a light of God. It must not only be lit in the Tabernacle or the Tent, that is, in synagogue, house of study, or during prayer. It must also be lit ‘outside the curtain’ (Ex. 27:21), in the street and market place, in one’s work, in profane activities, and in all matters regarding relations between one human being and another. Pardes Yosef
Jan. 31, 2022
Note: The desert sanctuary was made to be portable. The Levites would carry its components as the Israelites traveled for forty years in the desert.
The poles of the ark symbolize, on the physical plane, the ubiquitous mission of the ark and what it housed—to be carried beyond its place to wherever circumstances demanded. The commandment: “the poles shall not be removed” embodied the eternal message that the Torah is not parochial, restricted to the particular country where the Temple is situated. Independence of place is an essential characteristic of the Torah.
Samson Raphael Hirsch
Jan. 24, 2022
The Torah is not the wisdom but the destiny of the Jewish people;
not our literature but our essence.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Jan. 17, 2022
To be of use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Marge Piercy
Jan. 10, 2022
We must remember that liberation is costly.
It needs unity.
We must hold hands and refuse to be divided.
We must be ready.
Let us be united,
let us be filled with hope,
let us be those who respect one another.
Desmond Tutu
Dec. 27, 2021
Starting Over with Ourselves
We need to be able to forgive ourselves when we stumble or forget, and based on that forgiveness, be able to reconnect to our basic intention. One of the primary tools we have in spiritual life is the understanding that everything is changing all of the time, that nothing is fixed, and nothing is permanent. Because of that truth, when we make a mistake we realize that we can begin again.
- Sharon Salzberg, The Force of Kindness
Dec. 20, 2021
Standing on the parted shores of history
we still believe what we were taught
before ever we stood at Sinai’s foot;
that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt
that there is a better place, a promised land;
that the winding way to that promise
passes through the wilderness.
That there is no way to get from here to there
except by joining hands, marching
together.
Michael Walzer
Dec. 13, 2021
“We all share a supreme devotion to the hard-won freedom of the American people. Yet to be
worthy of retaining our freedoms we must not lose our understanding of the essential nature of
freedom. Freedom means more than mere emancipation. It is primarily freedom of conscience,
bound up with an inner allegiance. The danger begins when freedom is thought to consist in the
fact that “I can act as I desire.” This definition not only overlooks the compulsions which often
lie behind our desires; it reveals the tragic truth that freedom may develop within itself the seed
of its own destruction. The will is not an ultimate and isolated entity, but determined by motives
beyond its own control. To be what one wants to be is also not freedom, since the wishes of the
ego are largely determined by external factors.
Abraham Joshua Heschel from “Religion in a Free Society”
Dec. 6, 2021
FORGIVENESS: THE ART OF RETURN
Forgiveness is based on the willingness to look at life as a connected whole, a circle of transformation. We are conditioned for the most part to see our lives in terms of “either/or.” Something is either part of us or part of something else; either here or there; for or against; right or wrong. We define ourselves and our environment, and by defining, set things apart. Once they are set apart, we create lines to relate across – straight lines that either connect or further separate. In “either/or” straight-line conditions, we are constantly confronted with the other pressing against our definitions, creating the adversary. We cannot help but be either assaulted or assaulting. Forgiveness is the process that reshapes the line of relationship into the curve of connection, softening the edges of definition. It allows personal expression without the myopic loss of a sense of the whole. It is the art of return.
Colin Berg, “The Art of Return” published in Parabola (Volume XII, Number 3, 1987)
Nov. 29, 2021
Colder, darker, damp in the bones:
It is the last light of Kislev,
The season of miracles,
When You worked wonders.
I stalk the midnight house,
Alone awake in darkness,
And find my miracle:
Sweet love sleeping as I roam.
Here is my miracle, Wonder-Maker:
Not the oil that burned too long,
But this lasting flame of faithfulness
That does not extinguish.
Here is my wonder, Miracle-Maker:
That Your words overwhelm me,
Trouble me, consume me with new wonders,
Even as they struggle for animation.
It is the seasons of wonders,
When Your miracles become comfortable,
The daily gracefulness of life
Belies earthbound discomforts,
It is the season of miracles,
When the wonders that sustain me
Become threads of brilliance, flames
Soaring upwards to honor You.
Debbie Perlman z”l
Nov. 22, 2021
To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.
To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.
As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
Nov. 15, 2021
THIRTY-TWO
A Song of Endings and Beginnings
Let us sing of our completions, smooth, round,
Silvered voices to praise Your Name.
Every season holds starts and stops,
Years of trees and spirits and souls,
Circled, cycled, to order our lives.
Inside each completion,
We hear Your creation;
Inside our creations,
We resound with Your voice.
Let us mold a new shape for our completions,
Fluid and longing, subtle limbs
That lead us onward to praise Your Name.
Every season casts away its jagged edges,
Rubs away the torn moments
To rejoice in the realignment
Of old ways made straight.
Inside each refitting,
We renew again Your creation,
Pulling it taut against us,
A firm bound shield of Your affection.
Let us sing of our completions.
Your hand hovers, blesses,
Bids us move to new beginnings.
Your hand moves us forward,
Toward unimagined completions.
Debbie Perlman
Nov. 8, 2021
Lovingkindness on the Long Path
It’s a given that we don’t want to feel the fear of unworthiness, but at some point we have to understand that it’s more painful to try to suppress our fears and self-judgments, thus solidifying them, than it is to actually feel them. This is part of what it means to bring lovingkindness to our practice, because we are no longer viewing our fear as proof that we’re defective. Without cultivating love for ourselves, regardless of how much discipline we have, regardless of how serious we are about practice, we will still stay stuck in the subtle mercilessness of the mind, listening to the voice that tells us we are basically and fundamentally unworthy. We should never underestimate the need for lovingkindness on the long and sometimes daunting path of learning to awaken.
-Ezra Bayda, "The Three Things We Fear Most"
Nov. 1, 2021
The Gift of Connecting
Paying attention provides the gift of noticing, and the gift of connecting. It provides the gift of seeing a little bit of ourselves in others, and of realizing that we’re not so awfully alone. It allows us to let go of the burden of so much of what we habitually carry with us, and receive the gift of the present moment.
-Sharon Salzberg, "A More Complete Attention"
Open to Vulnerability
Relationships work to open us up to ourselves. But first we have to admit how much we don’t want that to happen, because that means opening ourselves to vulnerability. Only then will we begin the true practice of letting ourselves experience all those feelings of vulnerability that we first came to practice to escape.
-Barry Magid, "No Gain"
Oct. 25, 2021
At the Crossroads
At each point in our lives, we are at a crossroads. We are the fruit of our past and we are the architects of our future. When we ask, “Why did this happen to me?” it is because of our limited view. If we throw a stone up in the air and forget about it, when it falls down on our heads, we shouldn't complain, although we usually do. We have this notion that what happens to us is somehow independent of our own actions. We can ask, why did this happen? but the more important question is, what we are going to do about it?
If you want to know your past, look at your present circumstances. If you want to know your future, look at what is in your mind. If we know that our fate is in our hands, then the quality of our actions becomes a central issue. The whole point of karma is to recognize how our actions determine our future, so that we can begin to act properly. It's not just a cosmological or philosophical matter. It's entirely practical. The main point is not to get in trouble again.
-Matthieu Ricard, "Karma Crossroads," from the Fall 2006 Tricycle.
Oct. 18, 2021
I am a Jew because born of Israel and having lost it, I feel it revive within me more alive than I am myself.
I am a Jew because born of Israel and having found it again, I would have it live after me even more alive that it is within me.
I am a Jew because the faith of Israel requires no abdication of my mind.
I am a Jew because the faith of Israel asks any possible sacrifice of my soul.
I am a Jew because in all places where there are tears and suffering the Jew weeps.
I am a Jew because the message of Israel is the most ancient and the most modern.
I am a Jew because Israel’s promise is a universal promise.
I am a Jew because for Israel the world is not finished; humans will complete it.
I am a Jew because for Israel humans are not yet completed; we are completing them.
I am a Jew because Israel places human beings and their unity above nations and above Israel itself.
I am a Jew because in every age when the cry of despair is heard the Jew hopes.
Edmond Fleg (edited)
Oct. 11, 2021
It is I Who Must Begin
It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try –
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
- to live in harmony
with the “voice of Being,” as I
understand it within myself
- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
not the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.
Whether all is really lost
Or not depends entirely on
Whether or not I am lost.
--Vaclav Havel
Oct. 4, 2021
Early this summer, I e-mailed my brother a list of the animals I am raising on my farm. I called it an inventory, but it was really a way of acknowledging that perhaps I had gone too far. There are now five pigs in various stages of growth, and a large, comic parade of ducks and geese that settle onto the lawn like so many ships in a green sea. There are chicks in the basement and chickens in the mulch. And there are the longtime partners in this enterprise, the horses, dogs and cats. My brother wrote back and said, “Wouldn’t it be great to know the real inventory?”
That phrase has stuck in my head for the past few weeks. What I had sent my brother was a list of the animals that I am responsible for – the ones I need to feed and water every day. But I hadn’t even begun to count the creatures here that are responsible for themselves. Even among those, the animals I think of first are the ones that, from my perspective, at least, have a direct relationship with us: the phoebes that nest above the kitchen door, the fox that steals hens from our coop from time to time, the wild turkeys that troop down out of the woods, the red-tailed hawks that screech overhead driving the poultry to cover. There are others, too: hummingbirds in the bee balm and hollyhocks, woodpeckers in the deep woods, catbirds in the elderberry. These too belong to a circle of animals that seem scaled to human powers of observation.
What makes the real inventory interesting is all the rest of the organisms that live on this place, whether I notice them or they notice me. There are times when I get a vague sense of how vast that inventory might be – nights when the crickets sound like a ringing in my ears, evenings when the low sun is refracted in the wings of the thousands of insects in flight over the pasture. But it is still only a vague sense, a catalog of life forms whose numbers I have to guess at. Somehow I instinctively imagine the abundance of life here in the shape of a pyramid – the kind of illustration that might appear in a schoolbook – with a pair of humans at the peak and the legions of soil bacteria at the base.
But one of the things I’ve learned from living in the country is that life is not a pyramid with humans at the peak. It’s an interrelationship that is far too complex to diagram so anthropocentrically and so simply. There is a map of need here that I cannot read but that governs me as well. I go about the endless tasks, the chores, the feeding and grooming of animals, and I pretend that somehow I’m separate and in charge, though the pigs and geese remind me that that is not exactly true. I have to remember that if I wrote up the real inventory, it would include myself as well.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, “The Real Inventory,” (The New York Times, 11 September 2005), [edited]
Sept. 27, 2021
Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible
wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men,
as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every
language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does
not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains
pure, inexhaustible and complete. In three thousand years it
has not aged a day. It is a book that cannot die. Oblivion
shuns its pages. Its power is not subsiding. In fact, it is still
at the very beginning of its career, the full meaning of its
content having hardly touched the threshold of our minds;
like an ocean at the bottom of which countless pearls lie,
waiting to be discovered, its spirit is still to be unfolded.
Though its words seem plain and its idiom translucent,
unnoticed meanings, undreamed-of intimations break forth
constantly. More than two thousand years of reading and
research have not succeeded in exploring its full meaning.
Today it is as if it had never been touched, never been seen,
as if we had not even begun to read it.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Sept. 20, 2021
Silence
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to
the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will
stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and
wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is noth-
ing there. There is nothing but those things only, those
created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or sway-
ing, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or
ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word
as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere
the same. This is it: this hum is the silence . . .
The Silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the
omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters;
it is the blended note of the ten thousand things,
the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction
to pray to this silence, and even to address the
prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents.
Pray without ceasing.
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
Sept 13, 2021
I have a small grain of hope –
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.
I need more.
I break off a fragment
to send you.
Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.
Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division,
will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source –
Clumsy and earth-covered –
of grace.
Denise Levertov, “For the New Year, 1981,” published in Candles in Babylon, (New York, NY: New Directions Books, 1982).
Sept. 6, 2021
SIMPLE TESHUVAH
I’m cleaning the cupboard beside the stove, low to the
floor, where pots and pans hide haphazardly.
Our kitchen is well-used, baker’s rack gleaming with neat
jars of peaches, string beans, preserves
but one swipe of paper towel across this hidden surface and
I flinch at the grime I never noticed before.
This is teshuvah: opening every closed-up space. I’m a
window smeared with dust, a cabinet in need of scouring.
It’s simple work, but part of me resists, preferring
distraction to clarity. When I make the leap
I suddenly can’t believe I ever ignored the dirt. Hot water
blesses my hands into action. God, help me
put my house in order, begin the year in readiness for the
wonders I know are coming, are always here.
Rachel Barenblatt, “New year’s poem”
Aug. 30, 2021
ANOTHER LAST CHANCE
If the beginning of the year brings a flood of resolutions to change, it is because we are faced with an existence that is invaded by the routine, by the rush of demands. We can’t bear it. We know that another life exists, more beautiful, more passionate, one that laziness and apathy keeps us from attaining.
I have to break with time to overcome my obstacles, to rediscover myself, to be myself in all innocence. I can change my life, at least in some small way. Making resolutions demonstrates optimism, the desire to make oneself better, a faith, naïve and beautiful at once, that declarations can spontaneously become actions, that saying means doing.
Oh, the glorious day of making a resolution, the belief that starting tomorrow I will be the pilot of my existence, that I will stop being the plaything of external circumstances, that I will govern myself. I’m better than I seem to be – a person obsessed by little irritants, addicted to talking nonsense – and I’m going to prove it to the world. The certainty that soon, thanks to my willpower, I will no longer be someone who is habitually late, a slave to my cellphone, a glutton, a distracted driver . . . that can galvanize me, prompt me to change, tear away my imperfect personality. Real life starts now; I can immediately correct myself. I can rid myself of the fear of failure and of the specter of the failures of the past.
Knowing that you can change your behavior, even by an iota, is essential for holding yourself in esteem. We’re often cynical about how resolutions are never kept, but we shouldn’t be. Resolutions are perhaps lies, but they’re lies of good faith, necessary illusions. As long as we can make them, we are saved, we can control the chaos of destiny; it doesn’t matter that we break them. Every resolution is good simply because it is declared. It is a comedy, perhaps, but it keeps us sane.
Pascal Bruckner, “Another Last Chance to Change Your Life,”
Aug. 23, 2021
THE PANDEMIC IS A PORTAL
What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Arundhati, Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” published in The Financial Times, (3 April 2020)
Aug.16, 2021
The cosmos is filled with precious gems.
I want to offer a handful of them to you this morning.
Each moment you are alive is a gem,
shining through and containing earth and sky,
water and clouds.
It needs you to breathe gently
for the miracles to be displayed.
Suddenly you hear the birds singing,
the pines chanting,
see the flowers blooming,
the blue sky,
the white clouds,
the smile and marvelous look
of your beloved.
You, the richest person on Earth,
who have been going around begging for a living,
stop being the destitute child.
Come back and claim your heritage.
We should enjoy our happiness
and offer it to everyone.
Cherish this very moment.
Let go of the stream of distress
and embrace life fully in your arms.
Thich Nhat Hanh, “Our True Heritage,” published in Call Me by My True Names: The Collected Poems, (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1999).
June 28, 2021
“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”
― Joseph Campbell
“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
― Salman Rushdie
“As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.”
― Amos Oz,
“What does it matter to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.”
― Anatole France
June 21, 2021
Seeing clearly:
Step out of the Protected Room
Until we turn and face what we've spent our whole lives avoiding, what are we really doing with our lives? Practice is not some pretty thing we do just on a meditation cushion. Until we learn to observe ourselves objectively, we will remain looking with increasing honest at all the ways that we've held ourselves back in fear, we can also begin to experience the freedom of stepping outside our protected room and into the genuine life that awaits us.
–Ezra Bayda, from Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (Shambhala Publications)
Bow to Yourself
We may be adept at bowing to others, yet find it impossible to bow to ourselves, to acknowledge the wholesomeness and sincerity that keep us persevering on this path. Learning to make that first bow to ourselves is perhaps a step to realizing that a bow is just a bow, a simple gesture where all ideas of “self” and “other,” “worthy” and “unworthy,” fall away.
-Christina Feldman, “Long Journey to a Bow”
http://www.tricycle.com/dharma-talk/long-journey-bow
Not Knowing
Zen Master Jizo said that “not knowing is the most intimate thing.” Not knowing means to be open to all eventualities, to not prejudge a person or situation. If your mind is full of preconceived notions, there is no room for an unbiased view. It is like when your hands are full of objects—you cannot pick up anything new. A closed mind causes separation and suspicion. Like an umbrella, a mind is only useful when it is open.
From "Zen in the Workplace: Approaches to Mindful Management," Tricycle, Summer 1996
June 14, 2021
After a long illness, I was permitted for the first time to step out of doors and as I crossed the threshold sunlight greeted me. That is my experience—all there is to it. And yet, so long as I live, I shall never forget that moment. In that instant I looked about me to see whether anyone else showed on their face the joy I felt. But no, there they walked—men and women and children, in the glory of a golden flood and so far as I could detect there was none to give it heed. And then I remembered how often I too been indifferent to sunlight, how often, I had disregarded it. And I said to myself—how precious is the sunlight, but alas how careless of it are we. How precious, how careless. This has been a refrain sounding in me ever since.
Rabbi Milton Steinberg
June 7, 2021
Humility, deep holes and Korah:
Fault-finding comes from Fear
Whenever we find fault with others, whether through anger, contemptuous certainty, self-righteousness, or gossip, it is often based in fear. We may not be aware of our fears, but when we look deeply, we may discover the fear of rejection, loss of control, of unworthiness, or the fear of disconnection. But refraining alone is not enough—by itself it is just behavior modification—and it is neither healing nor transformative. Only through uncovering and consciously entering into the deep hole inside, welcoming the fear with curiosity and compassion, can we ultimately reconnect with the basic wholeness of our true nature.
- Ezra Bayda, "Quotable: On Right Speech"
Bow to Yourself
We may be adept at bowing to others, yet find it impossible to bow to ourselves, to acknowledge the wholesomeness and sincerity that keep us persevering on this path. Learning to make that first bow to ourselves is perhaps a step to realizing that a bow is just a bow, a simple gesture where all ideas of “self” and “other,” “worthy” and “unworthy,” fall away.
-Christina Feldman, “Long Journey to a Bow”
A medical colleague describing his own experience of staying true to himself told me that he thinks of his life as an orchestra. Reclaiming his integrity reminds him of that moment before the concert when the concertmaster asks the oboist to sound an A. “At first there is chaos and noise, as all the parts of the orchestra try to align themselves with that note. But as each instrument moves closer and closer to it, the noise diminishes and when they all finally sound it together, there is a moment of rest, of homecoming.”
“That is how it feels to me,” he told me. “I am always tuning my orchestra. Somewhere deep inside there is a sound that is mine alone, and I struggle daily to hear it and tune my life to it. Sometimes there are people and situations that help me to hear my note more clearly; other times, people and situations make it harder for me to hear. A lot depends on my commitment to listening and my intention to stay coherent with this note. It is only when my life is tuned to my note that I can play life’s mysterious and holy music without tainting it with my own discordance, my own bitterness, resentment, agendas, and fears.”
Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not. It is a note that only we can hear. Eventually, when life makes us ready to listen, it will help us to find our way home.
Rachel Naomi Remen, “My Grandfather’s Blessings”
May 31, 2021
To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.
- Rowan D. Williams
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
- Ramsey Clark
Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots. If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response—anger—then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance.
-Andrew Olendzki
None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
- Edward R. Murrow
May 24, 2021
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
May 16, 2021
The purpose of all the commandments, both positive and negative, that were given to Israel, is so that every person in Israel shall be free. That is why the liberation from Egypt comes first [before the giving of the Torah]. Torah then teaches the soul how to maintain its freedom, by not becoming attached to material things. These are its 613 counsels. Every mitzvah/commandment in which the liberation from Egypt is mentioned tells us yet again that by the means of this mitzvah one may cling to freedom. In the commandment regarding the [gifts to the poor of] leftover gleanings, the corners of the field, and forgotten sheaves, Torah says: ‘Remember you were a slave’ (Deut. 24:22). In this way your food will have no waste, and you will not become overly attached to wealth…A Jew has to be free in soul, in body, and in all he or she has…This is the purpose of the entire Torah. That is why they (the rabbis) read ‘engraved (harut) on the tablets’ [Ex. 32:16], as though it said ‘freedom (herut) on the tablets.’ ‘The only free person,’ they added, ‘is the one who is engaged in Torah,’ for Torah teaches a person the way of freedom.” (Sefat Emet comment on the Torah portion Ki Tetze)
Adapted and excerpted from The Language of Truth by Arthur Green, JPS 1998
May 10, 2021
Every Day a Potential Eternity
Imagine that you spent your whole life at a single house. Each day at the same hour you entered an artificially-lit room and took up the same position in front of a motion picture camera. It photographed one frame of you per day, every day of your life. On your seventy-second birthday, the reel of film was shown. You saw yourself growing and aging over seventy-two years in less than half an hour. Images of this sort, though terrifying, are helpful in suggesting unfamiliar but useful perspectives of time. They may, for example, symbolize the telescoped, almost momentary character of the past as seen through the eyes of an anxious or disaffected individual. Or they may suggest the remarkable brevity of our lives in the cosmic scale of time. If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds.
But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86.000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby’s conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.
Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living
May 3, 2021
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot always tell by looking at what is happening
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden
Gnaw in the dark, and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make life that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble
wilderness to the outside but to us it is interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always.
For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
Marge Piercy
April 26, 2021
Continue
By Maya Angelou
Into a world which needed you
My wish for you
Is that you continue
Continue
To be who and how you are
To astonish a mean world
With your acts of kindness
Continue
To allow humor to lighten the burden
of your tender heart
Continue
In a society dark with cruelty
To let the people hear the grandeur
Of God in the peals of your laughter
Continue
To let your eloquence
Elevate the people to heights
They had only imagined
Continue
To remind the people that
Each is as good as the other
And that no one is beneath
Nor above you
Continue
To remember your own young years
And look with favor upon the lost
And the least and the lonely
Continue
To put the mantel of your protection
Around the bodies of
The young and defenseless
Continue
To take the hand of the despised
And diseased and walk proudly with them
In the high street
Some might see you and
Be encouraged to do likewise
Continue
To plant a public kiss of concern
On the cheek of the sick
And the aged and infirm
And count that as a
Natural action to be expected
Continue
To let gratitude be the pillow
Upon which you kneel to
Say your nightly prayer
And let faith be the bridge
You build to overcome evil
And welcome good
Continue
To ignore no vision
Which comes to enlarge your range
And increase your spirit
Continue
To dare to love deeply
And risk everything
For the good thing
Continue
To float
Happily in the sea of infinite substance
Which set aside riches for you
Before you had a name
Continue
And by doing so
You and your work
Will be able to continue
Eternally
April 19, 2021
“This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.”
―Theodore Roosevelt
“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
―Mohammed Ali
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
―Winston Churchill
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
―Rabindranath Tagore
“To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.”
―Horace Mann
April 12, 2021
Beauty and Compassion quotes:
Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them---David Hume
Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful---Thich Nhat Hanh
There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness---Shannon L. Alder
The practice of compassion means letting experience in. A Japanese poet, a woman named Izumi who lived in the tenth century, wrote: “Watching the moon at dawn, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely. No part left out.” When we can open to all parts of ourselves and to others in the world, something quite extraordinary happens. We begin to connect with one another.
Joseph Goldstein, from “Heart Touching Heart,” Tricycle, Winter 2007
When you don't punish or condemn yourself, when you relax more and appreciate your body and mind, you begin to contact the fundamental notion of basic goodness in yourself. So it is extremely important to be willing to open yourself to yourself. Developing tenderness toward yourself allows you to see both your problems and your potential accurately. You don't feel that you have to ignore your problems or exaggerate your potential. That kind of gentleness toward yourself and appreciation of yourself is very necessary. It provides the ground for helping yourself and others.
Chögyam Trungpa, The Sanity We Are Born With (Shambhala Publications)
April 5, 2021
Satisfaction readings:
“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
― Seneca
“Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be. But for now, we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages
“If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.”
― Noel Langley, The Wizard of Oz
“Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
March 29/30, 2021
The plague of darkness:
Now a plague of darkness has fallen, as it is written: “People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was.”(Exodus 10:23)
Darkness is the penultimate plague, coming right before the death of the first born. Is darkness really worse than the plagues that preceded it, like killing all the animals and destroying all the crops? Yes, because this plague doesn’t mean that there was a blackout. The plague was that people didn’t see each other. By the time of the ninth plague people stopped helping their less fortunate neighbors and didn’t join together to mitigate the situation. The plague of darkness was every person for themselves. It was the end of any sense of society.
This is the plague of darkness that has been increasingly spreading across America. There are the people who count and the many who don’t. There is the 1% who get the breaks, the shrinking middle class that get a few breaks and the ones at the bottom who get broken.
Much has been said about the increasing gap between the rich and everybody else. But the coronavirus makes clear what is at stake is not just privilege but life and death.
The plague of darkness is the ninth plague because it is the last warning to a society that has become hardhearted and doesn’t see its fellow citizens. It comes right before the final plague—the death of the first born, a plague that struck down “every first born from the first born of Pharaoh who sits on the throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones.” (Exodus 11:5)
Ultimately, what the Coronavirus has reminded us is that we are all connected. What happens on the other side of the world affects us here. What happens to those who have been ground down by the millstones of prejudice and inequality makes all of us vulnerable even the first born of Pharaoh.
“People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was.” The question is who will stand up in this darkness and bring light to people wherever they dwell so we can all rise together.
Michael Strassfeld
March 22, 2021
The voices echoed all through the long night, until Elijah, the eternal student of humanity, entered and said, “Dawn is finally breaking, a new day is at hand, at last God’s unity is complete. Therefore, we should say the Shema.
Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said, “Behold, I am nearly seventy years old, and I never understood why it was a mitzvah to remember the Exodus at night. After all, the verse says, “In order that you remember the day of your going out of Egypt all the days of your life (Dt.16:3).
Then Ben Zoma explained it to me:
“The days of your life refers to the good times in the daylight—for then it is easy to remember. But when we sit in the darkness of fear so heavy that none can move, when we lose our first born, or when we know of others under the chain of oppression, how then can we talk of freedom? Because the verse reads ‘all the days of your life,’ thereby teaching that both in darkness and in light, we remember Egypt. We remember slavery and freedom for the two are always mixed together”
The sages added: “The ‘days of your life’ means in this world, but ‘all the days of your life’ means to help bring about the messianic days.” To remember is not enough; rather, we should work to help bring about a time when we are all free.
Michael Strassfeld (based on a Haggadah text)
March 15, 2021
Awakening
in a moment of peace
I give thanks
to the source of all peace
as I set forth
into the day
the birds sing
with new voices
and I listen
with new ears
and give thanks
nearby
the flower called Angel’s trumpet
blows
in the breeze
and I give thanks
my feet touch the grass
still wet with dew
and I give thanks
both to my mother earth
for sustaining my steps
and to the seas
cycling once again
to bring forth new life
the dewdrops
become jeweled
with the morning’s sun-fire
and I give thanks
you can see forever
when the vision is clear
in this moment
each moment
I give thanks
Harriet Kofalk
March 8, 2021
Sabbaths
Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we're asleep.
When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.
-Wendell Berry
March 1, 2021
“The idea of the Bible as a divine guidebook, a map for getting through the terra incognita of life, is our golden calf. It's a substitute for the wilderness wandering that the life of faith necessarily entails.”
― Timothy Beal
“The essence of idolatry is enjoying the gifts but not honoring the Giver.”
― Warren W. Wiersbe
“Anxiety is treated by a search for certainty. And certainty – wherever we think we've found it – will lead to dogma. And wherever we have dogma, in time, it leads to rigidity. And that rigidity ultimately leads to idolatry.”
― James Hollis
“Images of the Holy easily become holy images -- sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? ― C.S. Lewis
Feb. 22, 2021
Now is the time to free the heart,
Let all intentions and worries stop,
Free the joy inside the self,
Awaken to the wonder of your life.
Open your eyes and see the friends
Whose hearts recognize your face as kin,
Those whose kindness watchful and near,
Encourages you to live everything here.
See the gifts the years have given,
Things your effort could never earn,
The health to enjoy who you want to be
And the mind to mirror mystery.
-John O’Donohue
Feb. 15, 2021
Almighty God, you bring morning light
Into the place of darkest night.
All creation delights in dawn’s brilliance
And exults in the rediscovery of life.
All nature becomes a holy sanctuary, resounding
With the joyous hymns and exultant hallelujahs
It offers up to you, awesome Creator of Worlds.
In the depths, rivers burble their song to you.
From the mountains, mists rise toward you
Like incense from colossal altars.
And so I – but one small being in this vast universe –
Fold my hands in gratitude to you…
Fanny Neuda
Feb. 8, 2021
Hasidism taught that the word mitzvah—commandment is related to the Aramaic word tzavta which means connection. The mitzvot for Hasidism were not some list to check off, rather they were opportunities for connection. I want to suggest them as connection to other people, connection to our vision of life, connection to this planet, connection to the unity underlying the universe and finally connection to ourselves. It is a way of being in the world by paying attention to the blessings and challenges that each of us face on our journey.
Hasidism’s notion of the holiness of the everyday meant that every moment had that potential for connection. They spoke about feeling connected in the workplace. This did not just mean that you should not cheat your customers. Of course not. It meant that every interaction had the potential to be holy or at least helpful.
from Judaism Disrupted by Michael Strassfeld, forthcoming
Feb. 1, 2021
God and Israel
You were God
And we were Israel.
God alone
And a lonely people
Long ago.
You loved us a great love
And You taught us
How to respond to You.
Through mitzvot,
Recollections,
Celebrations,
Torah
They are the light of our eyes,
The uniqueness of our being.
In the joy of them
You have drawn us close to You.
In the truth of them
We have discovered You, the only One.
We are together still.
You respond to every people in Your chosen way.
With Your love
You have chosen to respond to us.
With our love,
We offer You praise.
Siddur Sha'ar Zahav
Jan. 25, 2021
Creation Revisited
If God had stopped work after the fifth day
With Eden full of vegetables and fruits,
If oak and lilac held exclusive sway
Over a kingdom made of stems and roots,
If landscape were the genius of creation
And neither man nor serpent played a role
And God must look to wind for lamentation
And not to picture postcards of the soul,
Would he have rested on his bank of cloud
With nothing in the universe to lose,
Or would he hunger for a human crowd?
Which would a wise and just creator choose:
The green hosannas of a budding leaf
Or the strict contract between love and grief?
Linda Pasdan
Jan. 18, 2021
We learn to look at our fellows as aliens, men and women with whom we share a city, but not a community; men and women bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among human beings and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land.
Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a solution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers and sisters, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as we do, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation” delivered at the University of Cape Town, South Africa (June 6, 1966)
Jan. 11, 2021
The Place Where We Are Right
by Yehuda Amichai
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
Yehuda Amichai
Jan. 4, 2021
One day you finally know
what you have to do, and begin,
though the voices around you
keep shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
begins to tremble
and you feel the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cries.
But you don’t stop.
You know what you have to do,
though the wind pries
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations -
though their melancholy
is terrible.
It is already late
late enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you leave their voices behind,
the stars begin to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there is a new voice,
which you slowly
recognize as your own,
that keeps you company
as you stride deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you can do,
determined to save
the only life you can save -
Yours.
Mary Oliver. “The Journey” in Dreamwork
Dec, 14, 2020
Don’t forget the miracle of morning, says God,
how the blacks and greys of night
fade to technicolor,
how I drench my mountains
in gold, pink, purple and orange,
splashing green onto the long grasses
and sponge painting each tree trunk.
Don’t forget the miracle of morning, says God.
It is I who persuaded the night stars
to lend their sparkle to the water’s surface by day.
Don’t forget the miracle of morning, says God.
While humans lumber and slumber,
my manifold creatures flutter, leap, perch and crouch to meet the dawn.
They are my most faithful witnesses to the daily renewal of creation.
Don’t forget the miracle of morning, says God,
the temporary triumph of light over darkness.
How the sun’s fingers peel away the night
and the travails of the evening are laid bare.
When dreams are shaken loose from their husks
and sent back to the inner world.
When the shadows retreat
and give way to new old wonders.
Remember the miracle of the morning. By Joanna S. Dulkin
Dec. 7, 2020
PSALM FIFTY-NINE
Rosh Chodesh Kislev
by Debbie Perlman
Slowly, You ease the chill upon us,
Sending midday sun to warm us;
Through the shattered glass of yesterday’s pain,
You move us ahead into winter’s dark.
Balance the dark with Your light, O Eternal;
Balance the cold with the warmth of Your care.
You train us to look at both sides;
You give us a month of duality to contemplate:
Two wives, twin sons, a man with two names, A nation not knowing its own identity.
Balance our questions with Your clues, O Eternal;
Balance our fears with Your comforting hand.
And in the grip of Kislev’’s deepest cold,
Light so brief we could swallow it in one gulp,
Balance the darkness with shining eyes,
Smoothed windows cleared
To broadcast the growing light,
Pinpoints of Your living flame,
Answers to our winter yearning.
Nov. 30, 2020
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
Mary Oliver
Nov. 23, 2020
ONE HUNDRED FORTY
Thanksgiving Day
How easy to praise You, Beloved One,
For abundance, for cups brim filled;
How can we not delight in Your majesty,
Your endless blessings to us.
How simple our thanks, Beloved One,
For laden tables, for gathered families,
Shoulders touching in the intimacy of the meal
You have spread before us.
Teach us to thank and bless Your name,
When cups are empty and thirst is great;
Put our hands together to replenish,
Finding blessing in tiny sips.
Beloved One, to thank and bless You,
We find hope in uncertainty
And triumph in shaky steps.
We recreate abundance for Your sake.
Debbie Perlman, Flames to Heaven: New Psalms for Healing & Praise
Nov. 16, 2020
Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer
We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done—the unpacking, the mail
and papers . . . the grass needed mowing. . . .
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.
And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.
Jane Kenyon, “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer”
published in Collected Poems
Nov. 9, 2020
Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Nov. 2, 2020
For Citizenship
In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home.
John O' Donohue
Oct. 26, 2020
Quotes on journeying:
Not all those who wander are lost. - J.R.R. Tolkien
Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.
Robert Neelly Bellah
A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
Laozi (Lao Tzu)
You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river.
Steven Foster
Oct. 19, 2020
Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
And the dreams that you dream of once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow blue birds fly
And the dreams that you dream of, dreams really do come true
Someday I'll wish upon a star, wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where trouble melts like lemon drops
High above the chimney tops is where you'll find me
Somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly
And the dreams that you dare to, oh why, oh why can't I?
Someday I'll wish upon a star, wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where trouble melts like lemon drops
High above the chimney tops is where you'll find me
Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
And the dreams that you dare to, oh why, oh why can't I?
Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg
Oct. 12, 2020
We reach for You, our God
from our quiet places.
May we stand still, for a brief moment,
and listen to the rain —
Stand still, for a brief moment,
and watch the play of sunlight and shadow on the leaves.
For a brief moment — listen to the world.
Let us stop the wheels of every day to be aware of Shabbat.
Find the stillness of the sanctuary which the soul cherished.
Renew the Covenant of an ancient people.
We need a quiet space to test the balance of our days.
The weight of our own deeds
against the heaviness of the world’s demands.
The balance is precarious — steady us with faith.
Quiet places and stillness —
where we will hear our own best impulses speak.
Quiet places and stillness —
from which we will reach out to each other.
We will find strength in silence
and with this strength
we will turn again to Your service.
from the prayerbook Mishkan T’filah
Oct. 5, 2020
FRIEND, WHEN YOU SPEAK
Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don’t know
what to say. I listen in such a way so as not to add to your confusion. I make
some reply at every opportunity so as not to compound your loneliness. Thus
the conversation continues under an umbrella of optimism. If you suggest a
feeling, I affirm it. If you provoke, I accept the challenge. The surface is thick,
but it has its flaws, and hopefully we will trip on one of them. Now, we can
order a meat sandwich for the protein, or we can take our places in the
Sanhedrin and determine what it is to be done with those great cubes of
diamond that our teacher Moses shouldered down the mountain. You want
to place them in such a way that the sun by day, and the moon and stars by
night, will shine through them. I suggest another perspective which would
include the light of the celestial bodies within the supernal radiance of the
cubes. We lean toward each other over the table. The dust mingles with the
mist, our nostrils widen. We are definitely interested; now we can get down
to a Jew’s business.
Leonard Cohen
Sept. 29, 2020
The sycamore gathers does not add up to it.
out of the sky, white There is a bird who nests in it
in the glance that looks up to it in the summer and seems to sing of it—
through the black crisscross the quick lights among its leaves
of the window. But it is not a glance —better than he can.
that it offers itself to. It is not by his imagining
It is no lightning stroke its whiteness comes.
caught in the eye. It stays, The world is greater than our words.
and old holding in place. To speak of it the mind must bend.
And its white is not so pure
as a glance would have it,
but emerges partially,
the tree’s renewal of itself,
among the mottled browns
and olives of the old bark.
Its dazzling comes into the sun
a little at a time
as though a god in it
is slowly revealing himself.
How often the man of the window
has studied its motley trunk,
the out-starting of its branches,
its smooth crotches,
its revelations of whiteness,
hoping to see beyond his glances,
the distorting geometry
of preconception and habit,
to know it beyond words.
All he has learned of it
Wendell Berry, “Window Poems” published The Selected Poems of
Wendell Berry
Sept. 21, 2020
WE ALL NEED MENDING
My grandmother was an excellent seamstress who made most of her own clothes. Widowed at forty-three and forced to count every penny, she sewed her three daughters’ clothes and some of their children’s as well.
I can knit but I cannot sew new creations from tissue paper patterns. Whenever I try, I tear the paper. It clearly requires more patience, more math, more exactitude than I am willing or capable of giving.
Recently, though, I have come to relish the moments when I sit down and, somewhat clumsily, repair a torn shirt, hem a skirt, patch a pair of jeans. I believe in mending. The solace and comfort I feel when I pick up my needle and thread clearly exceeds the mere rescue of a piece of clothing. It is a time to stop, a time to quit running around; it is a chance to sew actual rips together. I can’t stop the war in Afghanistan, I can’t reverse global warming, I can’t solve the problems of my community or the world, but I can mend things at hand. I can darn a pair of socks.
Accomplishing small tasks, in this case saving something that might otherwise have been thrown away, is satisfying and, perhaps, even inspiring.
Mending something is different from fixing it. Fixing it suggests that evidence of the problem will disappear. I see mending as a preservation of history and a proclamation of hope. When we mend broken relationships we realize that we’re better together than apart, and perhaps even stronger for the rip and the repair.
Mending doesn’t say, “This never happened.” It says, instead, “Something or someone was surely broken here, but it can be brought to new life.” So too my old pajamas, the fence around the garden, the friendship torn by misunderstanding, a country being ripped apart by economic and social inequity, and a global divide of enormous proportions – they all need mending.
I’m starting with the pajamas.
Susan Cooke Kittredge, “We All Need Mending,” published in This I Believe II, Jay Allison and Dan Gediman, eds., (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2008), [edited and adapted].
Sept. 14, 2020
I am not Jewish,
as far as I know,
(although a woman once
stopped me and told me
I certainly was,
right around the eyes)
yet sometimes
I wish it were so –
a mighty people dragging
sand-sacks across the desert
of dreams. Finding fluffs of
manna everywhere like
popcorn on movie night.
Flocks of quail dripping
from the skies like feathered rain.
And in September, I feel
the yearning even more.
Who else paints the new year in shades
of aching, a shimmer of tension between
gold and red? Who remembers
to forgive, forgives to forget,
and forgets to remember?
Who seals summer with a waxing moon,
impressed into an open envelope of hope?
The Jews. The juicy Jews.
Thousands of years of waiting.
Hundreds of years of wandering.
Decades and days of wondering.
This will be my new year, too –
groping for the manna, chasing great
herds of tufted quail, and
forgiving to forget amid the waning leaves.
Gina Marie Mammano, “My Poem for Rosh Hashanna,” published in Poetica Magazine: Contemporary Jewish Writing, (Fall, 2016).
Sept. 7, 2020
Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now,” how can I comfort and care for myself in this moment? Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect? You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are. Perhaps most importantly, having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness. Things will not always go the way you want them to. You will encounter frustrations, losses will occur, you will make mistakes, bump up against your limitations, fall short of your ideals. This is the human condition, a reality shared by all of us. The more you open your heart to this reality instead of constantly fighting against it, the more you will be able to feel compassion for yourself and all your fellow humans in the experience of life.
Kristin Neff
Aug. 31, 2020
A midrash teaches that during the Days of Awe, God is poised between the throne of judgment and the throne of mercy; in the end, God rejects the throne of judgment and, through the strength of our prayers, ascends the throne of mercy (Leviticus Rabbah 29.3-4). Seeking to emulate God’s qualities, we aspire to the same: to reach for our higher, more compassionate selves, to ascend to mercy. But sometimes we lose sight of the crucial distinction between the desire to be compassionate (as God is compassionate) and the desire to be perfect (as God is perfect). Thinking of ourselves as “little lower than the angels” can blind us to that distinction; and so we forget that God does not require us to be perfect. Indeed, we forget that it is the very imperfection of our striving and the sincerity of our attempt that move God from one throne to the other.
Not perfect, but fully human: this is what God asks of us. And, in response, this may be the best we can do: forgive ourselves for our yearnings and failings, for being human and not God; and accept the imperfections, satisfactions, and challenges of being a person. Only having made that choice can we walk unburdened and openhearted into the new year.
~Rabbi Ellen Lewis
Apr. 24, 2020
The first thing people do when restoring old chairs is strip — strip right down to the bare wood. They do this to see what the original might have looked like and to determine if the thing is worth doing over. They strip away all the years of grime, the garish coats of paint piled one on top of the other. They get rid of all the junk that’s been tacked on through the years and try to find the solid, simple thing that’s underneath.
I’m like an old chair needing that stripping process. Every now and then I have to take a really hard look at the illusions I’ve built up in myself and see what I’ve gotten myself into. Illusions? Yes, illusions; the excess baggage I carry around, the unnecessary; all that keeps me living off center too long. Stripping myself of all this is an intentional letting go of these illusions. It is a spiritual act of personal forgiveness. God lets us let go.
It’s hard work to let God forgive me. I have to discover the original under all these coats I’ve added, strip away all the cynicism and anger I’ve built up, get rid of the junk I’ve taken on, defy my disappointments, and find what is real again.
Donna Schaper
Aug.17, 2020
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Aug. 10, 2020
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1985)
Aug. 3, 2020
When I Am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
Mary Oliver
June 29, 2020
“Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
― Bryan Stevenson (social justice activist) from Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
June 22, 2020
What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope?—
You yourself must change it.—
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?—
You yourself must change it.—
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?
Adrienne Rich
June 15, 2020
It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try –
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
- to live in harmony
with the “voice of Being,” as I
understand it within myself
- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
not the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.
Whether all is really lost
Or not depends entirely on
Whether or not I am lost.
--Vaclav Havel
June 8, 2020
This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let’s not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.
The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends'
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.
But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.
Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.
Marge Piercy, excerpt from The Art of Blessing the Day
May 25, 2020
Inexhaustible
Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible
wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men,
as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every
language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does
not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains
pure, inexhaustible and complete. In three thousand years it
has not aged a day. It is a book that cannot die. Oblivion
shuns its pages. Its power is not subsiding. In fact, it is still
at the very beginning of its career, the full meaning of its
content having hardly touched the threshold of our minds;
like an ocean at the bottom of which countless pearls lie,
waiting to be discovered, its spirit is still to be unfolded.
Though its words seem plain and its idiom translucent,
unnoticed meanings, undreamed-of intimations break forth
constantly. More than two thousand years of reading and
research have not succeeded in exploring its full meaning.
Today it is as if it had never been touched, never been seen,
as if we had not even begun to read it.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
May 18, 2020
The initial mystery that attends any journey is: how did the
traveller reach his starting point in the first place? How did I reach
the window, the walls, the fireplace, the room itself; how do I
happen to be beneath this ceiling and above this floor? Oh, that is
a matter for conjecture, for argument pro and con, for research,
supposition, dialectic! I can hardly remember how. Unlike Living-
stone, on the verge of darkest Africa, I have no maps to hand, no
globe of the terrestrial or the celestial spheres, no chart of moun-
tains, lakes, no sextant, no artificial horizon. If ever I possessed a
compass, it has long since disappeared. There must be, however,
some reasonable explanation for my presence here. Some step
started me toward this point, as opposed to all other points on the
habitable globe. I must consider; I must discover it.
Ruth Limmer, Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan
May 11, 2020
Theology of the Common Deed
"The gods attend to great matters; they neglect small ones," Cicero maintains. According to Aristotle, the gods are not concerned at all with the dispensation of good and bad fortune or external things. To the Hebrew prophet, however, not subject is as worthy of consideration as the plight of man. Indeed, God Himself is described as reflecting over the plight of man rather than as contemplating eternal ideas. His mind is preoccupied with man, with the concrete actualities of history rather than with the timeless issues of thought. In the prophet's message, nothing that has bearing upon good and evil is small or trite in the eyes of God.
The teaching of Judaism is the theology of the common deed. The Bible insists that God is concerned with everydayness, with the trivialities of life. The great challenge does not lie in organizing solemn demonstrations, but in how we manage the commonplace. The prophet's field of concern is not the mysteries of heaven, the glories of eternity, but the blights of society, the affairs of the market place. He addresses himself to those who trample upon the needy, who increase the price of grain, use dishonest scales, and sell the refuse of corn (Amos 8:4–6). The predominant feature of the biblical pattern of life is unassuming, unheroic, inconspicuous piety, the sanctification of trifles, attentiveness to details.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
May 4, 2020
Sayings about holiness:
Holiness doesn't mean doing extraordinary things, but doing ordinary things with love and faith.
Pope Francis
In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.
Robert Ingersoll
Holiness is doing God’s will with a smile.
Mother Teresa
There is no shortcut to holiness; it must be the business of our whole lives.
William Wilberforce
Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Holiness is not something we are called upon to do in order that we may become something; it is something we are to do because of what we already are.
Martyn
April 27, 2020
All living are one and holy, let us remember
as we eat, as we work, as we walk and drive.
All living are one and holy, we must make ourselves worthy.
We must act out of justice and mercy and healing
as the sun rises and the sun sets,
as the moon rises and the stars wheel above us,
we must repair goodness.
We must praise the power of the one that joins us.
Whether we plunge in or thrust ourselves far out
finally we reach the face of glory too bright
for our eyes and yet we burn and we too give light.
We will try to be holy,
We will try to repair the world given us to hand on.
Precious is this treasure of words and knowledge and deeds
that moves inside us.
Holy is the hand that works for peace and for justice,
holy is the mouth that speaks for goodness,
holy is the foot that walks toward mercy.
Let us lift each other on our shoulders and carry each other along.
Let holiness move in us.
Let us pay attention to its small voice.
Let us see the light in others and honor that light.
Remember the dead who paid our way here dearly, dearly
and remember the unborn for whom we build our houses.
Praise the light that shines before us, through us, after us.
Amen.
Marge Piercy
April, 20, 2020
No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
William Osler
Human fallibility being what it is, victory and truth do not always go together. Therefore, if you have to always win, you can't always be true.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
Thomas Mann
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Galileo Galilei
April 13, 2020
I Shall Sing to the Lord a New Song
I, Miriam, stand at the sea and turn
to face the desert stretching endless and still.
My eyes are dazzled
The sky brilliant blue
Sunburnt sands unyielding white.
My hands turn to dove wings.
My arms
reach
for the sky
and I want to sing
the song rising inside me.
My mouth open
I stop.
Where are the words?
Where the melody?
In a moment of panic
My eyes go blind.
Can I take a step
Without knowing a
Destination?
Will I falter
Will I fall
Will the ground sink away from under me?
The song still unformed— How can I sing?
To take the first step—
To sing a new song—
Is to close one’s eyes
and dive
into unknown waters,
For a moment knowing nothing risking all— But then to discover
The waters are friendly
The ground is firm.
And the song—
the song rises again.
Out of my mouth
come words lifting the wind. And I hear
for the first
the song
that has been in my heart silent
unknown
even to me.
Ruth H. Sohn
April 6, 2020
Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots. If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response—anger—then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance.
-Andrew Olendzki
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
- Edward R. Murrow
Everything can be taken from a man but ... the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
- Victor Frankl
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.
- Peyton Conway March
March 23, 2020
Liberation is costly. Even after the Lord had delivered the Israelites from Egypt, they had to travel through the desert. They had to bear the responsibities and difficulties of freedom…Liberation is costly. It needs unity. We must hold hands and refuse to be divided. We must be ready. Some of us will not see the day of our liberation physically. But those people will have contributed to the struggle. Let us be united, let us be filled with hope. Let us be those who respect one another.
Desmond Tutu
March 9, 2020
Idolatry
“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott
“Technology presents us with a unique spiritual challenge. Because it is meant to serve us in fulfilling our created purpose, because it makes our lives easier, longer, and more comfortable, we are prone to assign to it something of a godlike status. We easily rely on technology to give our lives meaning, and we trust technology to provide an ultimate answer to the frustration of life in a fallen world. Because of this, technology is uniquely susceptible to becoming an idol, raising itself to the place of God in our lives.”
― Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion
March 2, 2020
Joy
The Renaissance conception of laughter can be roughly
described as follows: Laughter has a deep philosophical
meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth
concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and
man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the
world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly
than when seen from the serious standpoint. Therefore,
laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing
universal problems, as seriousness. Certain essential aspects
of the universe are accessible only to laughter.
Mikhael Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World, p. 66
Feb. 24, 2020
Building a sanctuary in time:
Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of the year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is …the Day of Atonement.
The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day in which we are called upon to share what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.
The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, of joy and reticence. In its atmosphere, a discipline is a reminder of adjacency to eternity. Indeed, the splendor of the day is expressed in terms of abstentions, just as the mystery of God is more adequately conveyed in the categories of negative theology which claims that we can never say what God is, we can only say what God is not. We often feel how poor the edifice would be were it built exclusively of our rituals and deeds, which are so awkward and often so obtrusive. How else can we express glory in the presence of eternity, if not by the silence of abstaining from noisy acts? These restrictions utter songs to those who know how to stay at a palace with a queen.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath
Feb. 17, 2020
A NEW LEARNING
A new “learning” is about to be born — rather, it has been born. It is a learning in reverse order. A learning that no longer starts from the Torah and leads into life, but the other way round: from life, from a world that knows nothing of the Law, or pretends to know nothing, back to the Torah. That is the sign of the time.
It is the sign of the time because it is the mark of the people of the time. There is no one today who is not alienated, or who does not contain within himself or herself some small fraction of alienation. All of us to whom Judaism, to whom being a Jew, has again become the pivot of our lives — and I know that in saying this here I am not speaking for myself alone — we all know that in being Jews we must not give up anything, not renounce anything, but lead everything back to Judaism. From the periphery back to the center; from the outside in.
This is a new sort of learning. A learning for which — in these days — those are the most apt who bring with them the maximum of what is alien....They will succeed, not in the capacity of specialists, but only as Jews who are also alienated, as those who are groping their way home.
It is not a matter of pointing out relations between what is Jewish and what is non-Jewish. There has been enough of that. It is not a matter of apologetics, but rather of finding the way back into the heart of our life. And of being confident that this heart is a Jewish heart. For we are Jews.
Franz Rosenzweig (adapted)
Feb. 10, 2020
Torah
We must read the Jewish Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before us ready-made, at school and after in the light of “religious” and “scientific” certainties; ...We must face the book with a new attitude as something new. We must yield to it, withhold nothing of our being, and let whatever will occur between ourselves and it. We do not know which of its sayings and images will overwhelm us and mold us, from where the spirit will ferment and enter into us, to incorporate itself anew in our body. But we hold ourselves open. We do not believe anything a priori; we do not disbelieve anything a priori. We read aloud the words written in the book in front of us; we hear the word we utter and it reaches us. Nothing is prejudged. The current of time flows on, and the contemporary character of a person becomes itself a receiving vessel.
“The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible” from Martin Buber, Israel and the World, Olga Marx, trans. (New York: Schocken, 1963)
Feb. 3, 2020
Tu Bishvat-the New Year for the Trees
Tu Bishvat
Tu Bishvat is a minor holiday known as the New Year for the trees. The 16th century mystics of Safed created a seder loosely modeled on the Passover seder. Its central ritual focuses on eating different kinds of fruits.
A contemporary kavanah/intention focuses on the environment. The first fruits eaten have outer shells like an orange, followed by fruit with pits and then fruits that are completely edible. The fourth step is completely spiritual--no fruit is eaten.
Starting with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, humans were no longer in harmony with nature. “By toil shall you eat of it all the days, thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you” (Gen. 3:17-18). There is separation between humans and nature represented by fruit/nature covered by a shell. Then humans come to understand that we need to be stewards of the earth, not just using it for our needs. This is represented by fruit accessible from the outside, but still without complete harmony, represented by the pit. Then we come to see all creatures and nature as having a purpose beyond our pleasure, represented by a completely edible fruit. Finally, deep ecology teaches that we are all part of the universe in an intricate weave of existence. Unity and harmony are our vision.
The same progression can be seen in relationships. When we first meet someone, our shield is often up. As we get to know someone, we are willing to be vulnerable, while still protecting our innermost selves. When we come to trust a friend or a lover, we become completely open. Finally, in our deepest relationships, there are moments when we become intimately one.
Reading for Tu Bishvat 1:
We give away our thanks to the earth, which gives us our home.
We give away our thanks to the river and lakes and oceans, which give away their water.
We give away our thanks to the trees, which give away fruit and nuts.
We give away our thanks to the wind, which brings rain to water the plants.
We give away our thanks to the sun, which gives away warmth and light.
All beings on earth – the trees, the animals, the wind and the rivers – give away to one another –
so all is in balance.
We give away our promise to begin to learn how to stay in balance – with all the earth.
Dolores LaChapelle
Reading for Tu Bishvat 2:
"May all I say and all I think
be in harmony with thee,
God within me, God beyond me,
maker of the trees.
In me be the windswept truth of shorepine,
fragrance of balsam and spruce,
the grace of hemlock.
In me the truth of douglas fir, straight, tall,
strong-trunked land hero of fireproof bark.
Sheltering tree of life, cedar's truth be mine,
cypress truth, juniper aroma, strength of yew.
May all I say and all I think
be in harmony with thee,
God within me, God beyond me,
maker of the trees.
In me be the truth of streamlover willow
soil-giving alder
hazel of sweet nuts, wisdom-branching oak.
In me the joy of crabapple, greatmaple, vinemaple,
cleansing cascara and lovely dogwood.
And the gracious truth of the copper branched arbutus,
bright with colour and fragrance,
be with me on the Earth.
May all I say and all I think
be in harmony with thee,
God within me, God beyond me,
maker of the trees. - Chinook Psalter.
January 20, 2020
Freedom from Fear
Franklin Roosevelt spoke about the Four Freedoms in a speech in 1941. The four freedoms he outlined were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In 1943, Norman Rockwell, the noted American artist, created a painting illustrating each of the freedoms. Each was published in an issue of the Saturday Evening Post accompanied by an essay. This is an excerpt of the essay on Freedom from Fear by Stephen Vincent Benet.
Now, again in our time, we know Fear — armed Fear, droning through the sky. It’s a different sound from … the shot in the lonesome clearing, and yet it is much the same for all of us. It is quiet in the house tonight and the children are asleep. But innocence, good will, distance, peaceable intent, will not keep those children safe from the fear in the sky. No one man can keep his house safe in a shrunken world. No one man can make his own clearing and say “This is mine. Keep out.” And yet, if the world is to go on, if man is to survive and prosper, the house of man must be kept safe.
So, what do we mean by “freedom from fear”?
We do not mean freedom from responsibility — freedom from struggle and toil, from hardship and danger. We do not intend to breed a race wrapped in cotton wool, too delicate to stand rough weather. In any world of man that we can imagine, fear and the conquest of fear must play a part.
But we have the chance, if we have the brains and the courage, to destroy the worst fears that harry man today — the fear of starving to death, the fear of being a slave, the fear of being stamped into the dust because he is one kind of man and not another, the fear of unprovoked attack and ghastly death for himself and for his children...
It will not be easy to destroy those fears. No one man can do it alone. No one nation can do it alone. It must be all men.
It is not enough to say, “Here, in our country, we are strong. Let the rest of the world sink or swim. We can take care of ourselves.” That may have been true at one time, but it is no longer true. We are not an island in space, but a continent in the world. While the air is the air, a bomb can kill your children and mine. Fear and ignorance a thousand miles away may spread pestilence in our own town. A war between nations on the other side of the globe may endanger all we love and cherish.
War, famine, disease are no longer local problems or even national problems. They are problems that concern the whole world and every man. That is a hard lesson to learn, and yet, for our own survival, we must learn it.
A hundred and sixty-odd years ago, we, as a nation, asserted that all men were created equal, that all men were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those were large assertions, but we have tried to live up to them. We have not always succeeded; we have often failed. But our will and desire as a nation have been to live up to them.
Now, in concert with other free nations, we say that those children you see and other children like them all over the world shall grow to manhood and womanhood free from fear. We say that neither their minds nor their bodies shall be cramped or distorted or broken by tyranny and oppression. We say they shall have a chance, and an equal chance, to grow and develop and lead the lives they choose to lead... And we say that freedom for ourselves involves freedom for others — that it is a universal right, neither lightly given by providence nor to be maintained by words alone, but by acts and deeds and living.
We who are alive today did not make our free institutions. We got them from the men of the past, and we hold them in trust for the future. Should we put ease and selfishness above them, that trust will fail and we shall lose all, not a portion or a degree of liberty, but all that has been built for us and all that we hope to build. Real peace will not be won with one victory. It can be won only by long determination, firm resolve, and a wish to share and work with other men, no matter what their race or creed or condition. And yet, we do have the choice. We can have freedom from fear.
Here is a house, a woman, a man, their children. They are not free from life and the obligations of life. But they can be free from fear. All over the world, they can be free from fear. And we know they are not yet free.
January 20, 2020
Readings on Freedom
The freedom of this meal at which all are equally free is expressed in a number of rites, which “distinguish this night from all other nights.” … This particular freedom expresses itself in the fact that the youngest child is the one to speak, and that what the father says at the table is adapted to the child’s personality and degree of maturity. In contrast to all instruction which is necessarily autocratic and never on the basis of equality, the sign of true and free social intercourse is this, that the one who stands — relatively speaking — nearest the periphery of the circle give the cue for the level on which the conversation is to be conducted. For this conversation must include everyone. … The freedom of a society is always the freedom of everyone who belongs to it. — Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1939), German Jewish theologian and philosopher
There is no freedom like seeing myself as I am and not losing heart.
- Elizabeth J. Canham
The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Real Freedom
Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots. If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response—anger—then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance. It's not that anger is repressed; anger never arises in the first place.
-Andrew Olendzki, "Calm in the Face of Anger," from the Fall 2006 Tricycle
January 9, 2020
Each of us has a name
by Zelda translated from the Hebrew by Marcia Falk
Each of us has a name
given by God
and given by our parents
Each of us has a name
given by our stature and our smile
and given by what we wear
Each of us has a name
given by the mountains
and given by our walls
Each of us has a name
given by the stars
and given by our neighbors
Each of us has a name
given by our sins
and given by our longing
Each of us has a name
given by our enemies
and given by our love
Each of us has a name
given by our celebrations
and given by our work
Each of us has a name
given by the seasons
and given by our blindness
Each of us has a name
given by the sea
and given by
our death.
Additional reading for the Shabbat of Martin Luther King weekend
Discovery
No one ever told me the coming of the Messiah
could be an inward thing;
no one ever told me a change of heart
may be as quiet as new-fallen snow.
No one ever told me that redemption
was as simple as springtime and was as wonderful
as birds returning after a long winter,
rose-breasted grosbeaks singing in the swaying branches
of a newly budded tree.
No one ever told me that salvation
might be like a fresh spring wind
blowing away the dried withered leaves of another year,
carrying the scent of flowers, the promise of fruition.
What I found for myself I try to tell you:
redemption and salvation are very near,
and the taste of them is in the world
that God created and laid before us.
From Siddur Sha'ar Zahav
Additional song for MLK weekend (could be used for Torah recessional)
I'm on my way to the freedom land. (3 x)
I'm on my way
Oh yes!
I'm on my way.
I'm on my way and I won't turn back. (3 x).
I'm on my way
Oh yes!
I'm on my way.
I'll ask my brother/sister
come go with me. (3 x)
I'm on my way
oh yes!
I'm on my way.