A Prayer While Sheltering in Place for COVID-19

The bright pink and white azaleas are stunning right now. 

Oh, Lord, I see Your glory all around me.

And yet I feel unease, 

Deep, relentless unease,

A sense of impending doom and

Uncertainty

certain only that the future will not be like the past.

Worries, fears, panic even, take me over, 

Especially at night when rest should come.

Oh, Lord, in You there is calm

And strength and resilience

And peace

And a sense of security, 

Though maybe not exactly the kind I thought i wanted

But some form of security and ground

That is eternal, so much bigger than this.

You are the Place that Peace always lives

No matter what happens here on earth

Help me find this Place inside me.

I try to manage things

To make them right

But it often comes from panic

And is not wise

Teach me to relax into Your embrace

To know that though all may not be well

All will be as it is meant to be

In Your infinitely Good universe

And that we are still loved at all moments

Teach me to know the peace of surrender

To allow things to unfold

Without panic

Only playing my part in wisdom and calm

And clarity

And great great love for myself 

And my fellow human beings 

For Pesach: Unclenching Our Fists

How much do we control our own destiny? Particularly at times of uncertainty and anxiety, we hold on very tight. We try so hard to make things just right so that all will be well for ourselves, our families, our community and the world.

Purim celebrates these efforts. On Purim we say what Mordecai said to Esther-- “who knows if it was for this precise moment that you got to be the queen?” You have some role to play in the unfolding of history, some designated role that you were born to play. The pressure is on to know what it is and to accomplish it. You need to make an effort, to fast and organize and approach the king and fight for your own survival.

That is Purim. But Pesach feels like it takes the very opposite approach. God alone saved us, says the Haggadah -- Ani, velo Shaliah --I, God says, I alone redeemed you, and no messenger. While on Purim, it is God’s name that is absent from the story, on Pesach, it is Moshe’s name that is absent from the Haggadah.

Indeed, all the descriptions of transformation in the Haggadah have God as the exclusive agent. Avadim Hayinu, we say. “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and God brought us out. “ Not Moshe. Not our own organizing or protesting. God alone. And our spiritual transformation, too, happened exclusively through God; we say -- “our ancestors were idol worshippers but now God has brought us close.” God?! Isn’t it that we have been seeking Him, working on getting close? But no -- the Haggadah views even our religious attachments as a pure act of grace, a gift from above. It is not our own striving that brings us freedom or that brings us spiritual enlightenment. We are in the care of God.

Pesach night is a leyl shimurim, a night of divine protection. On this night the lesson is not about human effort, but about trust and surrender, learning to actually feel the care that comes to us at all moments from above. To stop all of our human efforting and feel it, feel the embrace, trust in it and relax into it.

This posture of trust and surrender is not a natural one for most of us, and ironically, is the thing that requires the most effort of all. So it is not really that the night of Pesach involves no effort. The Haggadah makes it clear what our role is -- sippur yetziat mitzrayim, telling the story of leaving Egypt. The Sefat Emet reads the word sippur as meaning not telling, but “clarifying,”. What we do on Pesach night is to clarify for ourselves -- through this particular telling -- that God is in control. We learn to let go, to know that we are not in charge, to go with the divine flow rather than resisting it. Indeed, the one person who is thrown out of our Seder is the rasha, who is unable to do this; he is unable to make himself a part of the flow. He resists and stands apart, excludes himself from the whole. The goal here is not resistance but surrender to the whole, to the flow, to the knowledge of divine control of the universe.

Learning to let go of control in this way, to acknowledge and trust the divine flow, to make ourselves a part of it, is in large measure the work of meditation. Rupert Spira, a meditation teacher, likens the situation to a person who has had her hands clenched her entire life (most of us). Although the clenching itself takes a lot of continuous effort, we are unaware of this effort since we have been doing it for so long. Theoretically, the natural effortless way should be for us to have our hands relaxed in an open position, but because we have spent our whole lives with our fists clenched, it is the clenching that feels natural and effortless, while learning to unclench feels difficult.

Pesach night is a night to learn to unclench our fists, to relax and open and trust in the divine flow. This won’t necessarily translate into passivity in our actions in the real world. On the contrary, relaxing in this way is deeply clarifying, as the Sefat Emet intuited; it clarifies when to act and how. It helps us with the Purim task of recognizing the exact moment we are meant to act, rather than being continually clenched in an effort to resist and control the universe. Learning to relax into God’s embrace, to trust in it, also gives us the confidence and courage to act when we need to, and to act, not on our own plan, but as part of the natural flowering and unfolding of God’s plan.

For Pesach: A New Read of Dayenu

Dayenu. It would have been enough for us. It would have been enough for us if You had only taken us out of Egypt but not also punished the Egyptians. It would have been enough for us if You had taken us out, but not also split the Sea for us. Dayenu. It would have been enough.

Dayenu. The word comes from dahy, meaning “enough” and anu or lanu, meaning “us” or “for us.”

What if we translate it differently this year? What if, instead of reading it as “It would have been enough for us,” we read it as -- “we are enough”?

We are enough. Dayenu.

We sit here looking at all the amazing things that God has done for us and what we conclude from all this love and attention, from all the gifts bestowed upon us for no apparent reason, is this simple idea -- that we are enough for God just as we are. We are enough. Yes, of course, we should improve and do better, and we will strive to.

But at the very basic level, the story of leaving Egypt is not about our deserving it. We most certainly did not deserve it. Tradition has it that we were on the very lowest of spiritual rungs at the time, the 49th step of impurity. We had sunk low, hit bottom, as it were, and the only way out was divine grace and compassion.

Why do it this way? Why didn’t God redeem us when we were worthy? Why didn’t He wait for us to earn it?

Why? So that we can sit at our seders right now and know that dayenu -- we are enough as we are. We don’t have to deserve redemption or God’s love or care. We can look at how He took us out of Egypt and also punished the Egyptians, and also their gods, and also split the sea and also gave us the gift of Shabbat -- we can look at all of that and we can know that we are still worthy of that, just as we are, sitting here right now in all our imperfections and wishing we were otherwise, we are enough just like this to deserve all those gifts. We can know that now because we can look back and see that back then they were enough, too, enough even at their lowest point. God looked at them, His precious people, and even in their dirtiest moment, in all the muck of Egypt, even then, He loved them and wanted them and took care of them.

We are enough. What does it feel like to say that to yourself? I am enough just as I am, right here, right now, in God’s eyes. Even now, however I am, midstream, midwork on myself, I am already enough to be redeemed. I do not have to wait.

This is an essential part of the process of the night. If we expect to have some kind of transformation in the course of one night, we cannot expect it to happen through our own efforts, or through some real work and change that we can make happen inside us. The only way it can happen is if we are already enough, just as we are, right now, to be redeemed, to be loved, to be set free. There is no journey to make other than a simple switch in our minds from unworthy to worthy, from needing work to enough, enough right now to be free and loved and redeemed by God. Dayenu. We are enough.

Some Pesach Thoughts -- via Video!

I created these videos on Pesach for my high school class, but I thought a wider audience might enjoy them.  Each one below has one main idea.  They are of varying length.  Note that the last 5 are all extremely short (1-2 mins). 

1. On Different Types of Slavery (In the gemara and haggadah) (7 minutes)

2. How and Why Hallel is Different at the Seder (5 mins)

3. From Shame to Praise (Take 2) (1-2 minutes):

4. Matzah (based on the Sefat Emet) (1-2 minutes):

5. Maror (based on the Sefat Emet) (1-2 minutes):

6. Afikomen (based on the Sefat Emet) (1-2 minutes):

7. Who Knows One?  (Based on the Sefat Emet) (1-2 minutes):

Parashat Zachor: On Doubt

This week I had the experience of doubt. I had to make a big decision, and I kept coming to a certain conclusion and then doubting it and questioning it, giving me a sinking, uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. But wait, the doubt kept saying. What if you are making a terrible mistake? Maybe the other way is better? I noticed how corrosive the doubt was. When I was under its attack, I was restless and distracted, unable to focus or be present to what was going on around me, unable to engage in the precious moments of right now with full heart and passion, trapped in a wearying, immobilizing loop in my brain.

This Shabbat before Purim we remember Amalek, the eternal enemy of God and the Jewish people. It is often noted that the gematria, the Hebrew numerical value, of the name Amalek, is the same as the gematria of the word safek, doubt. Amalek stands for doubt, the gnawing unsureness that robs us of the ability to act with strength and whole-heartedness.

The Torah says that Amalek attacked us while we were weak and exhausted, in a period of transition out of slavery, on the beginning of a path, baderekh. That is how doubt operates. It comes at us when we are in some transition, not yet secure and confident of our path. The people of Israel finally screwed up the courage and faith to make a change and leave Egypt, a very difficult thing to do, but they took the leap of faith, and then, just as they are beginning to walk on their toddler legs of faith, boom, Amalek attacks; they are hit with doubt. Yes, God saved us from Egypt and we should follow Him, but what is happening now with this other nation attacking us? Maybe He has abandoned us? Maybe that Egypt thing was just an accident? Just at the beginning of any path, when we are still not sure of ourselves, that is when doubt strikes.

And when it strikes, it has a cooling off power. The rabbis read the Torah’s term for Amalek’s approach, asher korkha baderekh, literally, “who happened upon you on the way” as related to the word kor, cold. What Amalek did was throw cold water on the people’s enthusiasm for this God project. Whatever fervor and trust they had built for this path was dampened; they became that much less clear and whole-hearted. We can feel how that happens to us. We have some grand beautiful scheme, some pie in the sky belief, and then someone comes along, or our own doubt comes along, and begins to poke holes in it, to doubt, to question, to be skeptical. Afterwards, even if we continue on that path, we are cooled down; we are missing the spark and the excitement. That is what doubt does.

The Purim story, too, includes the theme of doubt. In a pivotal scene of the Megillah in chapter four, Mordecai sends Esther a message that she should approach the king to advocate for her people. What is her reaction? DOUBT. She doesn’t disagree with him. She is just worried, doubting whether she can be successful in the venture given the normal workings of the kingship. Mordecai replies with sureness that can only come from total faith. He has no doubts. He knows that God will make certain things happen. It is just a question of through whom. And so, in the face of this sureness, this confidence, this faith, Esther agrees to approach the king. But she asks for one other thing -- that all the people fast with her for three days; if she is going to do this despite her doubt, she needs support; she needs to feel the strength of the community’s faith and resolve.

The people’s battle with Amalek and our own struggles with doubt, are never easy. When the people are first attacked by Amalek, they actually begin to lose. Doubt is strong. It wends its way into our hearts and weakens us. What finally turns the battle around are Mohe’s upraised hands, a symbol of faith in the heavens above, of a power beyond the realistic doubts of this world.

This Shabbat, when we remember Amalek, we can also acknowledge our own struggles with doubt, and, like Esther and Moshe, gird ourselves with faith and trust to continue on the path ahead of us.