Clothing Inside and Out: Tetzaveh 5784

Clothing Inside and Out: Tetzaveh 5784

I was boarding an airplane recently when the man in front of me, who looked to be about 20 years my senior, turned and asked, “How long have you worn a kippah?” He was not wearing a kippah, so I was a little startled by this very direct question. But my mind picked up on other cues and quickly filled in a story that he was Jewish and was asking this question out of a sense of solidarity.

 
“Since I was 19,” I told him.
 

“I’ve been thinking about wearing a kippah in public recently because…” he trailed off. “Well, you know why.”

 
The line moved and we were on the plane, and that was the end of the conversation. But his last words lingered with me. I didn’t know exactly why, of course. My surmise is that he meant he wanted to show Jewish pride at a time when acts of hatred towards Jews have increased dramatically, when many Jews experience greater fear and trepidation about displaying their Jewishness in public. I think–again, my mind is filling in a story based on two lines of conversation here–he meant that he wanted to show it to the world, to be loudly and proudly Jewish, and that wearing a kippah was a way to do that. He hadn’t done it yet, but seeing me wearing a kippah in the boarding line gave him a little nudge.
 
 
Parashat Tetzaveh provides readers of the Torah our annual seminar in clothing, as it describes in detail the garments of the Kohen Gadol (high priest). “Make sacral vestments for your brother Aaron, for dignity and adornment,” the Holy One tells Moses. “And you shall instruct all who are skillful, whom I have endowed with the gift of skill, to make Aaron’s vestments, for consecrating him to serve Me as priest” (Ex. 28:2-3). Rashi notes here that the Torah is saying that it is through putting on these garments that Aaron becomes installed as Kohen Gadol–that the clothes literally make the man. Before he puts them on, he’s Aaron, Moses’s brother; once he puts them on, he becomes identified–to others, to the Divine, and to himself–as something else.
 
 
I don’t think of myself as someone who thinks a lot about clothes. My middle son pays a lot of attention to sneakers; I don’t get it (in the same way that he doesn’t get how I spend time comparing the recordings of the same Beethoven symphony by different orchestras–we all have our mishigas). But I’m a human being who lives in various communities, so of course I do think about clothes a great deal, even if I don’t do so consciously. I think about how I’m going to show up, what my clothing will communicate to others about me, how it will contribute to setting a tone, how it will or won’t display kavod, honor, to the others in the room, real or virtual.
 
You may or may not be a clothing person, but chances are you too, at least subconsciously, think about these questions too. When we scratch their surface, I think we find these questions can quickly become rather intense, as they are bound up with our sense of self, our social location, our relative sense of power and security–or lack thereof–in the world. I think that’s what underlay that short conversation with the man in the airplane line, and why, weeks later, it still echoes for me.
 
 
How might our Jewish mindfulness practices help us navigate these questions with greater ease and wisdom? In many ways: By helping us slow down and make our clothing choices with more awareness; by assisting us in cultivating the courage to dress in ways that we might be intimidated from doing; by nurturing the internal space for us to remember that, no matter how we dress, the Divine spirit resides within us and all beings. Just as it was for Aaron and his children, our clothing both informs and expresses who sense ourselves to be and how others understand us; it becomes a liminal space in which our sense of inner and outer takes shape. Such spaces are precisely where our practices can help us most.
Habits of the Heart: Terumah 5784

Habits of the Heart: Terumah 5784

The other night I pulled off our bookshelf a thick volume from my childhood, “The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents.” I was into politics and government as a kid, and at some point (before the presidency of Bill Clinton, to judge by the men profiled in the book) I had acquired this one. I’m still something of a government nerd–my kids sometimes get out the almanac on Shabbat afternoons and quiz me–though as I’ve aged into the life stage in which I can recognize and relate to U.S. presidents as my own contemporaries, I see them with less mystique and, perhaps, more sobriety.
 
In her exceptional 2004 book, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown vs. Board of Education, Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen offers a reflection on the model that–we hope, at any rate–presidents of the United States hold out to the rest of us, particularly as it relates to one of the most basic elements of living in a democracy, namely the need to talk to strangers. I quote the full passage here, because I have long loved and taught it and I think it deserves to be read and studied in its entirety:
 
‘Don’t talk to strangers!’ That is a lesson for four-year-olds. Eyes that drop to the ground when they bump up against a stranger’s gaze belong to those still in their political minority. If the experience of the most powerful citizen in the United States is any guide, talking to strangers is empowering; the president is among the few citizens for whom the polity holds no intimidating strangers. Presidents greet everyone and look all citizens in the eye. This is not merely because they are always campaigning, but because they have achieved the fullest possible political maturity. Their ease with strangers expresses a sense of freedom and empowerment. At one end of the spectrum of styles of democratic citizenship cowers the four-year-old in insecure isolation; at the other, stands the president, strong and self-confident. The more fearful we citizens are of speaking to strangers, the more we are docile children and not prospective presidents; the greater the distance between the president and us, the more we are subjects, not citizens. Talking to strangers is a way of claiming one’s political majority and, with it, a presidential ease and sense of freedom.
 
Allen is, I believe, pointing us toward what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about two centuries ago, namely the habits of the heart that are foundational to sustaining a diverse democracy. How we encounter strangers in our neighborhoods and our communities–whether we approach them with an open-hearted faith or a closed-hearted fear–is one of the constitutive elements of the character of our larger polities. As Judge Learned Hand said in an Independence Day speech in 1944, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.” The condition of our hearts and the condition of our democracy are, in a profound way, intertwined.
 
The heart plays a foundational role in the construction of the Mishkan, the portable dwelling place for the Divine: “Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved” (Exodus 25:2). The Mishkan was required to be constructed of voluntary donations, not taxes or seized property. Everything within it–all its curtains and rods, the ark and the menorah and the altar, all the clothing of the priests–all of it had to be imbued with an opening of the heart, an opening which was then reciprocated by the Divine: “They shall make me a dwelling place, that I may dwell among them.” As Rabbi Meir Leibush Wisser (Malbim, 1809-1879) puts it: “A holy sanctuary like this exists in the heart of every person, and it is possible to create it in every time and era.” When we open our hearts, we create a space for the Divine to dwell within us.
 
It’s Presidents Day weekend in the United States, and I don’t need to remind you that it’s a presidential election year. As we move further into this season, the pressures to harden and close our hearts will no doubt increase. So I find myself thinking about the ways in which our spiritual practices can not only help us cope through the inevitable travails of a year like this, but can help us even see in them opportunity–to open our hearts, to have the courage to talk and listen to strangers, to discover anew where and how the Divine might reside within us and the world.
A Conversation with Rabbi Toba Spitzer

A Conversation with Rabbi Toba Spitzer

We are grateful to  Rabbi Toba Spitzer for speaking with IJS President & CEO, Rabbi Josh Feigelson! Please enjoy the conversation recording below.

Rabbi Toba Spitzer has served Congregation Dorshei Tzedek since she was ordained in 1997 at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC). Rabbi Spitzer is a popular teacher of courses on Judaism and economic justice, Reconstructionist Judaism, new approaches to thinking about God, and the practice of integrating Jewish spiritual and ethical teachings into daily life.

Factory Reset: Mishpatim 5784

Factory Reset: Mishpatim 5784

As I’m regularly privileged to do, I spent part of this first week of February with 50 rabbis and cantors, some of the 530 alumni of our IJS clergy cohort programs, during our annual Hevraya retreat in Simi Valley, California. First and foremost: We were all okay with the weather. Thankfully, the American Jewish University’s Brandeis-Bardin Campus, where we have long held this retreat, is at a high enough elevation to avoid major flooding. While there were some travel delays, everyone arrived safely. And given all that these spiritual leaders have been holding for themselves and their communities in recent months, it didn’t take long for the weather to become an afterthought.

During this retreat, I found myself reflecting on a talk I listened to recently by one of my favorite teachers, Gil Fronsdal, about the meaning of “retreat.” Gil suggested that the word is a bit of a misnomer, because the label “retreat” suggests that the experience is a pulling back from what’s normal: Our normal world is full of hustle and bustle, but on retreat we do something different, live at a slower rhythm, engage more deeply with ourselves and the world. And while that’s true, Gil suggested that a better label might be “return”–because the truth is that our actual normal is that slower, deeper reality. It’s the fast-paced, surface-level life before and after the “retreat” that we should see as the unusual setting. When we go on retreat, we’re really returning to our truest nature.

The rabbi in me was immediately drawn to this notion of return as teshuva. Every year during Elul and Tishrei, we make a special effort to return, as it were, to our factory settings: to reconnect with what we know to be our deeper nature, the go back to the intentions we know we really have. Throughout that intense period of teshuva, it can feel like we’re on a kind of retreat, and at the end of it we’re remade and reborn.

Yet we don’t have to wait for Tishrei, as evidenced by the retreat/return we held for those spiritual leaders this week. For so many of them, this time has become a sacred period of reconnection, renewal, and rebirth. It’s truly one of my greatest honors and joys that these holy souls trust us to create and hold the container for them to do that returning.

At morning services on Tuesday, Rabbi Hannah Dresner, one of our wonderful alumni, shared a beautiful teaching about Parashat Mishpatim from the Hasidic master Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger’s Sefat Emet (Terumah, 1895). At the end of the Torah portion, Moses ascends into the mountain, where he will stay for 40 days and 40 nights while he receives the Torah. The Sefat Emet picks up on the number of 40 days, which in the mind of the Talmudic sages is the same amount of time it takes after conception for a fetus to be formed in the womb. Putting the two ideas together, he teaches that during his sojourn on the mountain (which was enveloped in cloud, suggesting to the midrashic imagination a womb-like experience), Moses “received an entirely new form”–that is, he was literally transformed, renewed, reborn. And further, through the study of Torah, all of us have a share in Moses’s experience–we can experience our own renewal and transformation too.

I wonder if we might understand this transformation and renewal as of a piece with the return we experience on retreat or during the fall holidays. I wonder if we might think of it as available to us not only through those intensive experiences but even on a weekly basis (Shabbat) and a daily or even moment to moment basis through our mindful return to our intention. As we say in our liturgy, the Divine “renews creation each day.” Likewise, we can, through our practices, experience that renewal, that return to our factory settings, in every time and place.

Homeward Bound: Yitro 5784

Homeward Bound: Yitro 5784

In some of my recent morning meditation sits, I’ve noticed a feeling of sadness and grief arising. Yes, of course, there’s plenty of cause for sadness and grief in the world and amongst the Jewish people. But this grieving was coming up from a different place. It’s some anticipatory grieving around a subtle but significant shift in the life stage my wife and I are going through as our middle child prepares to graduate high school and leave home.

In one of those mysterious poetic rhymes in which life can sometimes speak, my children–21, 18, and 11–have almost precisely the same spread in age as my brothers and I (I’m the youngest). And I’m finding echoes of the feelings of loss that I experienced when my two older brothers had flown the coop and it was down to just my parents and me at home. But this time, I’m approaching that point as one of the parents, aware of all the memories of these now-grown children in this house we’ve lived in for the majority of their lives. While I am happy that both my older boys are making their way in the world–and that we can still look forward to the company of our wonderful little one for a few more years–I get why there’s some grief making its presence felt. The shape of home is shifting, and that’s hard.

Home, its shape-shifting, and even the undertow of the powerful emotions surrounding it, is a theme in Parashat Yitro–though I think we sometimes have to look for it a little. But when we do, it’s right there beneath the surface. Look right at the beginning: “So Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, took Zipporah, Moses’ wife, after she had been sent home, and her two sons—of whom one was named Gershom, that is to say, ‘I have been a stranger in a foreign land’; and the other was named Eliezer, meaning, ‘The God of my father was my help, delivering me from the sword of Pharaoh.’ Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, brought Moses’ sons and wife to him in the wilderness, where he was encamped at the mountain of God.” (Ex. 18:3-5) Rashi, quoting the midrash, paints a scene wherein Aaron, when he first greets Moses on his way back to Egypt from the burning bush, asks him, rhetorically, “We’re already grieving so many people in Egypt; why add to the number?” So Moses sends his wife and children away–a moment, one imagines, of painful family separation, of grieving and loss, of shifting the dimensions and feelings of home.

Home is also present in the Ten Commandments: the mitzvot of honoring parents (#5), honoring marriage (#7), focusing our attention on what is present in our homes and not coveting that which is over the fence (#10)–and the ways we can imagine or have experienced the transgression of those commandments–all of these tap into the strong emotional currents surrounding the nature and shape of home.

I’m fond of saying that I think spirituality is our capacity to feel truly at home in the universe. And in this sense, perhaps the most powerful teaching about home comes not in any of these moments that I’ve mentioned, but in the mitzvah of Shabbat: “For in six days YHVH made heaven and earth and sea—and all that is in them—and then rested on the seventh day; therefore YHVH blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.” Like the Creator, for six days we label and separate, calling things heaven or earth or sea, this name or that home, home or not-home. All that naming connotes both standing in relationship with and standing over and against the world–at home in the world, but also not fully at home in it at the same time. On Shabbat we rest from all that, from the constant work of naming and labeling and separating. We allow ourselves to feel deeply, truly at home–in the world, in our houses, in our relationships, in ourselves.

Yet Shabbat doesn’t only happen every seven days. Shabbat consciousness is actually available to us every seven hours, every seven minutes, every seven seconds. That, in many ways, is the whole point of Jewish spiritual practice. When we can cultivate it and allow it to take root and grow within us, we can respond to the shifting shapes and tones of home more wisely and graciously–because we can sense that, on the deepest levels, we’ve never really left home at all.

Aging Well (Beshallach 5784)

Aging Well (Beshallach 5784)

In a casual conversation the other day with my dear friend Marvin Israelow, our board chair at IJS and someone nearly 30 years my senior, I shared with him that one of the many blessings of my job is being in the presence of so many people who are “doing aging well.” He asked what I considered aging well. I considered his question and responded that I thought it included a few things: Getting clear on what’s really important to you, developing the ability to share that openly with loved ones, and living your life that way (and it doesn’t hurt if you’re blessed with the health and means to do so).

Marvin is an exemplar of this, as are many of the people who serve on our board and in our broader community. That’s not an accident, of course–one of our founders, Rabbi Rachel Cowan z”l co-wrote, with Dr. Linda Thal, the book Wise Aging, and for several years IJS even ran a program to train facilitators to lead groups working through the book together (and some of those groups continue to meet to this day). People at what developmental theorists call the generative stage of life more frequently tend to have the time, capacity, and interest to engage in mindfulness and spiritual practices. If you’ve ever been to our daily online meditation sit, you’ll see the proof.

One of the reasons I felt prompted to share my observation with Marvin is that my own life, like most other people’s, I expect, has been a mixed bag of examples of aging. My grandfather did aging really well–lots of hobbies and interests, travel, writing moving letters and reflections on Torah at our bnei mitzvah and weddings. My mother, his daughter, did too–singing in choirs, volunteering at the symphony, writing her own reflections, sharing directly her thoughts and feelings. My dad, however, didn’t do as well. I always felt he struggled to adjust to life after children, as we had been the center of his life for so many years. While he cared deeply about family, he often struggled to express it with ease.

That difficulty was manifest at the end of his life, as, despite my noodging for many years, my Dad didn’t get around to buying burial plots. I don’t fault him–that’s a hard thing to do, and I can totally understand how it happened. Yet it led to the scene in his final days–again, a scene which I expect many others have experienced–of me standing in the hallway outside his palliative care room on the phone with the synagogue about acquiring a spot in the cemetery.

When I shared this with Marvin, he told me that one of the great gifts his own mother had given him was, several years before her death, talking with him about her wishes for her funeral and ensuring that all the arrangements were in place. As part of her own aging well, Marvin’s mom wanted to make sure that, when the time came, her family would not be preoccupied with figuring all of these things out on the spot and could be more present with their loss and with each other. Pretty amazing.

Amidst all the hubbub of leaving Egypt, the Torah offers us the image of Moses running around looking for Joseph’s bones in order to fulfill the promise Joseph made the Israelites swear–that they would bury him in the land of Israel (Ex. 13:19). There are many beautiful midrashim on this moment, some of which draw a comparison between the box (aron) that carried Joseph and the box (aron kodesh) that carried the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Within that second aron were not only the intact tablets but the broken pieces of the first tablets that Moses smashed.

The Torah thus offers us a window into the deeply intergenerational nature of the Exodus: the commitments we make to one another that extend beyond our lifetimes; the wisdom of our ancestors we carry with us, metaphorically and, in this case, literally; the ways in which elders help to liberate their descendants and descendants help to liberate our ancestors. The Seder, of course, is a quintessentially intergenerational conversation.

But I think the larger point is that that conversation between generations is not only meant to happen once a year over the matzah, but in an ongoing process that happens in gestures large and small, day after day, moment after moment. Initiating those conversations, living with that quality of awareness and intention, is, at root, what I think it means to age well. May our practices help us do it.