For prospective member Shabbat, May 13, 2022
Again, welcome to all the newcomers and the not-so-newcomers; to the prospective members in the room – and there are so many of you – and to the veterans in the room who probably just spent dinner trying to convince you how wonderful it is at Ner Shalom.
We’ve put together an evening of beautiful music to lure you into our clutches. But the truth is that every week at Ner Shalom is a week of beautiful music. We somehow just evolved that way. We attract musicians and poets and have made our Shabbat ritual a place where we harvest our coollective creativity. Shabbat evening is different every week here, depending on what melodies are moving in us.
This is the point in the service where I typically offer a word or two or 1400. I might raise something going on in the world that is concerning or affecting us – wars, pandemic, politics – and reflect on how it’s landing in me, trying to make meaning, plot a course, maybe find hope.
Or I might say something about Jewish time, because I love Jewish time. We are always caught in its current, sweeping from one place to another. For instance these 49 days of the Omer that we are in now, connecting Passover and Shavuot. Each one offers us a different lens for looking inward. Shoshana Fershtman will lead us through some of that later tonight and she is a master at it.
Or on a night like this I might tell a little about the week’s Torah portion, the piece of the Hebrew Bible that pops up now in our annual worldwide cycle of Torah reading. I might share something in it that troubles me or some hidden piece that excites me.
I confess that I go a little light on Torah this time of year – I’m not sure the congregation has actually noticed – because we’re neck-deep in the book of Leviticus and not everyone has the same appetite for Leviticus. It’s almost all laws, and they’re almost all about animal sacrifices, and many of the ones that aren’t are ones that make us squirm anyway.
But I find Leviticus kind of wonderful even though I full-on hate many of its particulars. Why? What is wonderful in it? Well, it seems to me to be about the care and feeding of the spiritual ecosystem. It is based on a shared understanding that our acts affect the spiritual whole of the community, the spiritual field that we live in. If we cause ruptures to the spiritual field, it is our duty to take action to heal them. In our day and age, we understand the concept of injury to person and injury to property, and the consequences of those things. But we don’t have a shared idea about when the things we do, directly or indirectly, harm the whole and siphon off some of its integrity, some of its holiness. And I like to wonder about what it would be like to have a shared commitment to the health of the spirit of humanity and the life of the planet. What would it take to bring such a commitment about and what, in turn, would such a commitment bring about?
Leviticus also seems to be concerned with our individual psycho-spiritual states. It categorizes the state that each of us is in at any given moment as either tahor which, alas, gets translated as “pure;” or tamei, which, even bigger alas, gets translated as “impure.” That’s when most of us slam the book shut.
But Leviticus doesn’t obviously mean these words as judgments, but rather as observations. If you read through, you realize that we spend more time being tamei than being tahor. We become tamei by what we touch. By having an unhealed wound. By having a lizard fall in the hot tub while we’re in it. By being in the proximity of death. Or even by having had sex with our partner – something Torah commands us to do (in its own heteronormative way). So saying that someone is tamei cannot be a judgment, since none of these causes is blameworthy.
Instead I might translate tahor not as pure but as spiritually available. A clear channel. And there are some things you only want to do when you are in that state of spiritual openness and readiness. If you are a High Priest of old and it is your job to bring the prayers of the people to God, you want that clarity; you want the flow of prayer to move through you unobstructed. Maybe there are other moments in your life when you want to be in that state. When you’re welcoming Shabbat. When you’re meditating. When you are making a solemn vow.
And I would probably render the word tamei, historically translated as “impure” instead as something like “clouded” or even “in the mix.” “In the thick of it,.” This is the state in which we mostly live our lives. We offer prayer, we think elevated and spiritual thoughts, but we also plan dinner and drive through traffic and witness suffering and go out on dates and change our children’s diapers and tend our sick loved ones. So many of these things, in Leviticus, risk rendering you tamei. And then Leviticus instructs you to immerse in water and put on clean clothes and let the day pass and when evening comes you are once again tahor – a clear vessel, open and ready.
Even though this bit of Torah doesn’t have memorable characters or plot twists, no feuding brothers or parting waters, I find this bit of Torah useful. I like that Torah is aware that I move through states of physicality and spirituality and the movement between them, the transition, is sometimes difficult and sometimes jangly and always worth noticing and accommodating and honoring.
So that is the kind of thing I might talk about if I were talking about torah which of course I’m not.
Stephanie suggested to me that on a night like this I might talk a little about the importance of community, since here you are, on the brink, poised to become more deeply part of this community.
And I confess that I resisted a little when she suggested it. Because for me, talking about community, like talking about anything represented by a multi-syllabic Latinate word, feels like an abstraction. It feels like head-talk. Like I could expound for hours on the virtues of community and you’d never feel a bit of it.
But I do want to tell you, if you don’t already know, that this congregation just went through something; we came together in the last 6 weeks to care for and this week to bury Robert Allen, the husband of our beloved administrator Vicki Allen. And people in this room and in this zoom room rallied around Vicki and her daughter Rachel in every possible way.
There are details I could tell about people making food or sitting at the hospital and reading Robert poetry or checking in with each other and planning support and offering skills and offering resources.
And I was especially moved at seeing us showing up en masse at the Ner Shalom cemetery in Sebastopol on Monday. What it felt like to see that sea of familiar faces. The people who are there in our lives and insistent on being there in loss also. People cancelling their workdays to be there, to hold, to witness.
And also to stand together on this shtikl of earth that many of us are choosing to populate upon our deaths. As Ruth says to Naomi in her “where you go I will go” speech, “let not even death part me from you.” And so for many of us, for many of our beloveds in this group, not even death will part us. And decades from now you can come visit us on a sunny day in Sebastopol.
So that’s what I might say about community, if I were to say something about community, which I decided not to do.
In the end, all I can really say in this moment with any certainty is that it is again Shabbat. And we are here to welcome her with joy and with song and with smiles flashed across the room and across the screen. Shabbat is medicine for living in this world. Drink up.