Witness from Charlottesville

I spent this past Shabbat in Charlottesville with a small group of rabbis as part of a delegation from T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.  The rabbis and other spiritual leaders who went to Charlottesville fulfilled many roles, some on the front lines of the protests, some as witnesses, and some as protectors and nurturers.  There is much for us to learn from being present.

I felt called to play a support role.  One aspect was to be present with the local Jewish community,  The synagogue is very close to the park where much of the action was happening, and we could see small groups of neo-nazis walking by after our morning service on Saturday.  After services, congregants arranged for the Torahs, the precious holy scrolls upon which the five books of Moses are handwritten in Hebrew,  to be stored safely outside the synagogue before locking up the building.  A member of the congregation said, “a building can be rebuilt.  The Torahs are irreplaceable."  Among the treasured Torahs put away for safekeeping was one rescued during the Holocaust.

After services, my local host and I were attempting to walk over to a café where many of the visiting clergy were gathered; however, the timing was such that we could not cross the street and rather witnessed a parade of various groups of white supremacists, primarily younger men, marching down the street after their rally had been declared unlawful.  I saw medics leading journalists who had been pepper-sprayed to the medic tent at the church that had been set up as a safe space.  I saw groups of counter-protestors marching down the perpendicular street to face the white supremacists, and I even saw an older white woman in a tie-dyed shirt with the word "love" printed on it, standing right in the middle of the street they were marching through.  I left the area when mace was set off in the midst of the protesters, I’m not sure by whom.     

We then went to the safe church, where those who had come in the name of justice, kindness, and love could rest and get care as needed.  Over the course of the afternoon, there were times when the church went on lock-down because there was concern about violence in the immediate area.  There were also times when the clergy was asked to come outside and hold the space, for fear of who might be coming up the street.  

We have a tradition to chant a passage from the prophets each week at synagogue (the haftarah).  This past week's haftarah includes the following verse (Isaiah 50:11): “All of you who light fires and provide yourselves with flaming torches, go, walk in the light of your fires and of the torches you have set ablaze. This is what you shall receive from My hand: you will lie down in torment.”   The prayer that flowed through me sitting in synagogue in the center of Charlottesville on Shabbat morning is that the flames of hate burning in these young men take the natural course of a fire, which is to burn themselves out.  Fires can cause damage while they are burning, and our work is twofold: to protect those vulnerable to flames and to not further feed the flames.  

How we do this work of facing the flames of hate is worthy of much discussion within and between our communities at this critical time in our world’s history.  We must resist the forces that work to separate us.  We must limit our consumption of news that is designed to get us worked up without giving us direction, and rather find channels to become knowledgeable and engaged as we work to protect our country.  A good place to start are two books that were written since Trump came into the presidency: On Tyranny by Tim Snyder and No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein.

My role in Charlottesville was to be a witness, a nurturer, and a keeper of the spiritual center.  I pray for each of us to find our voice and our special role in these times of transformation.  

I shared these words at a candlelight vigil in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia Sunday night.  We ended with a chant from Psalm 23, shavti b’veit adonai, which literally means, “May I dwell in the house of God.”  I understand this to mean, “may I know the deep abiding truth of our interconnectedness.”  The chant is composed by my teacher, Rabbi Shefa Gold, and includes the English interpretation,  “I place myself in your care.”  To hear the chant, go to Shefa’s website: Trusting: Shavti b’veit Adonai.  

Annie McCormick of ABC news in Philadelphia created a wonderful story about the vigils last night:

Breathing Through: A Meditation for Opening our Hearts to Suffering

I have been fasting today for the 17th of Tammuz, the day when Jerusalem's walls were breached during the 2nd Temple period.  Fasting has helped me become more aware.  When I picked up my smartphone to read an essay about the violent crackdown on non-violent protests in Hamburg at the G20, I decided to read with the intention of getting out of my head and and allowing myself to feel the pain and the outrage.   Reading in this way helped me to stay present and kept me from swirling into despair.  What this meant in my parenting role is that my son experienced his Mom in that moment as sad rather than as disconnected and fearful.  For this I am deeply grateful.  

As parents, so much of what we teach our children is on a subtle, energetic level, and cultivating energy of connection and courage is one of the most important, yet mostly unacknowledged, ways we can nurture our children.  How do we cultivate nourishing energy when there is so much disturbing news, both on a local and global level, that it feels like we could drown in our sorrow and burn with our rage?

Here's a powerful practice from Joanna Macy, one of the great teachers of our times, for learning to open our hearts to the pain of the world as we connect into the living, breathing web of life.   I am including a link both to Joanna's guiding the meditation on video and also to her written text. 

Joanna Macy Breathing Through Video

I shared this practice today at our weekly Tuesday morning meditation group at Germantown Jewish Centre.  Those in Philadelphia are welcome to join us from 9:00-9:40AM each Tuesday in the library for meditation. 

Honoring our Grief for our World: The Three Weeks

July 10 marks the beginning of the three week mourning period leading up to Tisha B'Av.  The Three Weeks, or bein hametzarim (in the narrow places) is a tender time for getting in touch with our feelings around anticipating the destruction of the Temple.   

The ancient rabbis understood the importance of honoring our pain for the world. In our contemporary culture, it is often difficult to slow down and experience our pain, even as we witness so much brokenness all around us.  Yet it is the process of honoring our pain which opens us to clarity, compassion, and courage.  

Join me in embracing these three weeks as a time to honor our grief through creativity, in service of strengthening our capacity to love and care for our world and one another.  I invite you to join me in keeping a grief journal or exploring grief through another creative medium, such as poetry,  chant, collage, drawing, painting, or dance. Devote time, even if just a few minutes, each day to creatively explore the following questions: 

1. What news stories arouse my sadness and outrage?
2. What am I most fearful about?  When I let myself consider the worst case scenario, what arises?
3. What does the Temple represent for me at this time? What is at stake to be lost with the destruction of the Temple?  What values and institutions do I hold dear whose walls have been breached?
4. In reading the haftarah of admonition for the week (there are three haftarot of admonition, from Jeremiah and Isaiah, starting with this coming Shabbat), what phrases speak to me?  (These can serve as writing prompts or inspiration for creative expression)

Please share your reflections and creative offerings in the comments section, as we support one another in journeying through the Three Weeks. 

May we be blessed with the courage to honor our grief.

Malkah Binah

Pesach with Family: Advanced Spiritual Practice

min hametzar karati yah, anani bamerchav yah

From narrow places I call out to Yah who answers me with Divine spaciousness (Psalm 118:5)

My teacher, Rabbi Shefa Gold, refers to extended family visits as “advanced spiritual practice.”  Passover is coming this week, and many of us are blessed by this opportunity to practice our patience, our trust, and our connection to the infinite flow of Love.    This is truly a blessing-- to have family who will come visit or whom we will visit; yet, it sometimes does not feel like a blessing.  Anticipating family time can awaken old fears and constrictions and stuck places, can bring us back to the narrow places, the metzarim, that we’ve been hard at work leaving behind. 

The reality is that we cannot leave a narrow place behind.  We must move through it and transform it, and reconnection with family shines a light on where we need to work.  This is a gift. Rather than being fearful of feeling bad or regressing to childhood behaviors, let’s be thankful that the possibility for opening has arisen, for we must know where the narrow places are in order to be inspired to call out for Divine help, and it is through this process of reaching out that powerful openings happen and the narrow place becomes a wide expanse.  The constriction opens, more love flows, and we truly rejoice in being with family.  ken yehi ratzon. may it be so! 

Note: Shefa has a wonderful chant for min hametzar which can be heard here.

Seventy Years after Hiroshima

Seventy years ago today, on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the small city of Hiroshima in Japan.  The bomb killed over 100,000 people, and due to the long-term effects of radiation poisoning, ultimately, many more.  Seventy years ago today, the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb.  As Jews around the world debate the merits of the nuclear deal with Iran, we must pause today, in deep humility.  Our country, the United States, introduced nuclear weapons to the world.  Our country, the United States, is the only country (and please God, may it stay that way) to have used a nuclear weapon on a civilian population, not once, but twice. 

My personal identity is deeply connected to these first bombs.  Like Little Boy and Fat Man (the names of the bombs dropped on Japan), I was raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a small town high in the Rocky Mountains of Northern New Mexico with fresh air and blue, open skies.  My parents did not move to Los Alamos until 1969, and I was not born until 1972, yet the legacy (or shall I say, ghost?) of the first atomic bombs was a dark, yet mostly unspoken presence in my life.  Nuclear weapons were the town industry, and as such, denial about the horrors and ethical implications was part of the fabric of daily life.  My recollection is that sometime in the 1980’s or 90’s, the winning entry for an international peace garden was designed to be placed in the town of Los Alamos, and the Los Alamos County Council voted to not allow such a peace memorial to be placed in town.  I imagine that they did not want the town to become a pilgrimage site for mourners and activists.  Was it security considerations for the laboratory?  Or fear of the feelings and instability that would arise from facing the devastation that came from the “baby” of the town?

I was awarded the Oppenheimer Memorial Award when I graduated from Los Alamos High School 25 years ago.  This award, honoring the memory of the first director of the laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was given to a student showing great promise in math and science.  I went on to study chemistry and physics as an undergraduate at Harvard, yet my heart was not drawn to scientific discovery.  Rather, my heart was drawn to seek holiness, justice and spiritual community, to seek the truths that come from deep listening (I ended up becoming a rabbi). 

The early 90’s were a confusing time for me.  The Cold War was ending, which seemed to be a good thing, and yet many people I knew from Los Alamos were losing their jobs.  I had learned in Los Alamos that the lives of a million American soldiers were saved with the dropping of the bombs, yet in my History of Science course, I came to understand that this was likely not the complete story: the new field of social science was developing during World War II and reports had come back from social scientists studying Japan in 1945 that morale was very low. According to my professor, these reports were suppressed and not taken into account in the decision to drop the bombs.   I also learned in that course about the stripping of Oppenheimer’s security clearance during the McCarthy era, likely due to his lack of enthusiasm for the H-bomb project, a project which increased the destructive power of nuclear weapons.

From what I can understand of the nuclear deal with Iran, my intuition is to support the deal, which would allow desperately-needed funds to flow into Iran to enable greater economic prosperity.  I honor the fear that arises for Israel in contemplating a nuclear Iran, and I honor the uncertainty about what will unfold in the coming years.  It is also important to name that the United States has a large nuclear arsenal, and Israel also likely has a nuclear arsenal of its own. As we all know from our years as children on the playground, “We’ve got some and you can’t have any!”  is, by its very nature, an unstable situation.  I pray for sanity for humanity.  We all have big challenges ahead of us as the temperatures rise; may we learn as a world community to make choices towards our mutual preservation. In one of the central prayers of the Jewish morning service, we recite, “ahava raba ahavtanu”, “with a great love does the Holy One love us.”  May we each feel that love and learn to love open our hearts to one another.  That is the beginning of our hope.