Printing Posts for Pesach

 Here are two google docs for ease of printing this year's Pesach posts:

1. The full 5 posts 

2. Highlights of the posts (1, 3 and 4)

Chag Sameach!

( For Pesach) Lehem Oni: Where the Poor Parts of You Lead

What if it is the “poorest” parts of ourselves that are the doorway to redemption?

On Pesach we eat only lehem oni, the bread of poverty and affliction.   On Pesach, we hold up this flat meager bread and say  -- this is it.  This is the portal.    

We normally honor only our “good” or rich side, the parts of us that seem acceptable in the eyes of the world.  We only show  -- and indeed, often only know -- our external identity, the poise, the confidence, the competence, the hats we wear.  Sometimes we imagine that increasing this side of us is where redemption lies; if only we could be more put together and productive and perfect -- then everything would go well; then we and the world would be moving in the right direction.

But on Pesach we say -- no.  The road to redemption is actually through lehem oni, through the places inside us that are not rich, but poor, not fully risen and perfect by external standards, but deemed imperfect and unacceptable, the parts that cause us shame and suffering and pain, the parts we hide under layers of puff that we present to the world.   On Pesach, we strip off the layers and we lift up the matzah and declare -- the road to redemption is through our vulnerability, not the covering we use to hide it.

Have you ever sat for a long time with emotional pain, or with some part of you that you dislike or consider shameful -- really stayed with it, from a place of presence, without judgment, with only curiosity and openness and a sense of honoring?   I am a client in a form of therapy called IFS, and this is part of the work -- to go deep into the parts you consider poorest and most painful, to go deep into your lehem oni with respect and care.  It is difficult to describe what happens when you open to pain in this way.  It is as if the part of you you thought was a bottomless aching empty hole -- that you’ve been trying to fix or avoid your whole life -- turns into a tunnel that leads to an endless ocean of love and compassion, that leads to God, that leads, essentially, to redemption.  All that time we spent trying to cover up the hole was only a way of distancing ourselves from finding the passageway.  

So on Pesach, we do not turn away from the oni, the poverty and the suffering, but towards it; we say -- this, this bread, this core human vulnerability -- this is what we value; redemption happens here; we mark it with a star.  

The words from Hallel express a similar idea --  min hametzar karati Yah, anani bamerhav Yah --   From the narrow straits I called out to God; God answered me with expansive divine spaciousness.    The first word, min, can be understood as “from” or “out of,” or even “through” -- it is precisely through the narrow straits of pain -- through entering them, by calling out to God from that place -- that they turn into tunnels, still narrow, but leading somewhere sacred, leading to the wide expansive spaciousness of the divine Presence.   From the narrowness, out of the narrowness, through the narrowness, through the pain, we come to experience the space; we come to know the love; we come to feel the possibility of healing and redemption.  We are born afresh, through the narrow birth canal, into a wide universe of divine holding.  

Kulanu, Kulanu: All of Us (A Pesach Poem)

Act 1:

Ate down our chametz well

One challah roll left in our freezer

Saving it for hamotzi 

Shabbos Erev Pesach

Need two more

Been worrying for days

What to do

Can’t buy a whole package

And have them leftover.

Act 2:

Spicy Peach store

Taped up for Pesach

Can’t find the spices

Find instead my friend Wendy

Who is standing by the spices

I came for Paprika

Buy Cinnamon, too.

Act 3:

Next day a text

From my neighbor friend Debra

Can’t find KLP Cinnamon

She says

Do you happen to have

Why, yes, a large jar

I’m happy to share. 

I’ll put some in a baggie

Wait, do you happen to have

A challah roll or two

In your freezer for me

Two rolls with your name

Are on their way over.

Act 4:

This makes me so happy

I say

She replies, and I quote

We’re in this together.

Let the people emerge from slavery as one!

Amen!

(For Pesach) A Yachatz Poem

We break the matzah in half, hetzi,

Before we endeavor to tell the tale

Because our hearts need to be broken 

open, pierced (as if by an arrow, a hetz)

Just a crack, enough for the winedrops 

of redemption to drip their slow

Fast way in and remake us

Whole.

It hurts -- this breaking

And our growing knowing 

Of the broken.  

We are opening to oni, to only

To lack and black and a flat lifeless snack

Whose lines remind us of the whip on the back

We are opening to endless generations

Of running and hiding even while thriving

Bekhol dor vador

More and more 

pain until it’s ma-roar

Bitterness that seeps into our core

Until  -- 

Never again, please no more.

But then we begin to open the door

Not just to the needy 

but also to Elijah

Not just to oni 

but also to Dayenu,

Not just to lack and never, 

but also to ever

Enoughness.

To the possibility that the pain --

Like maror in a Hillel sandwich

Like matzah in a Hallel sandwich--

To the possibility -- 

Nay, to the knowledge, now clear as fiery hail --

that the pain is always held

In the embrace of an outstretched arm

Whose capacities don’t stop at ten

Fingers on the hands

But keep multiplying, powerful

And loving with no end. 

Maybe we break open the heart 

To take our part in this embrace

To make our heart a part of this embrace

To have two halves that can have

And hold the old wounds 

And become whole through the holding,

And come to know All through the holding.

What Has Changed: A Mah Nishtanah Pesach Poem (With help from Ps 114 from Hallel)

We are all sometimes in Mitzrayim

Tense, constricted, stuck, distressed.

Holding on tight to make things right

Rushing ourselves out into the night

With bread we feel is not done quite right.  

But now we have arrived at redemption

In the blink of an eye --  Keheref ayin

There is nothing to do but  lean in 

Breathe, 

recline, 

relax, 

mesubin

Dip your soul 

Twice into oceans of plenty

Let others do the pouring.

Let God do the protecting.

Let Elijah stand guard.

Your only job is to dip and sip

And pour out your free forming song

Like wine.  

Move now like the sheep, like the rams

Of the mountains -- shake it out

Leap and dance, 

skip and tremble and bound - 

Until your cords become unbound

With awe and joy

At the clarity of seeing 

What the Red Sea saw:

We are safe, we are cared for

We are not in charge

There is hope, there is meaning

There is freedom

There is love

We can rest.

And in our rest, a shift will unfold

Without our firm hold.

Mah Nishtanah

What has been changed on this night?

Not just the vegetables and the bread

But our sight, 

our sense that things are already all right.

From Rock to Water (A Pesach Poem)

ההפכי הצור אגם מים

O, You who turn rock into water (Ps 114:8)

What we want is flow

To feel we can gli -i - i - de

Like an eagle, wings out

Flapping, then relaxing

Into the soaring wind,

Like a raft floating downriver,

Or a drop of water falling over the edge

Of a waterfall -- 

Just like that, no anticipation, no worries, 

No resistance -- 

Falling, then joining 

our droplet cousins down below

For an impromptu jamboree.

Instead we lift our leaden feet

Our backs laden with bricks millenia old

And try to make things just right 

With our schedules and dead lines 

And workouts and work force --  

We force the work to happen --

Moving a rock from here to there

The wind isn’t blowing it anywhere.

Nor do rocks ever integrate.

Their cousins can’t hear them

And aren’t very near them

They party alone

If at all.

So You who turn rock into water --

Come now and enter our hearts 

They are stone, make them flesh  

(as Ezekiel suggests)

Help us dissolve our separateness.  

To soften and thaw the ice of fear

Rejoin the river current, right now, here.  

This is hard for us --

The first act of flow 

Is to let go 

of trying as hard as rock 

to make it so.

The dissolving begins with surrender of self

I am nothing

No matter

No self no ego no boundaries

No effort

Only the effort of no effort

Relaxing into the ground

Melting into a puddle

Like butter in the sun

(Or Olaf in the summer)

Dissolving, Dissolving

Diss

olv

In

g

Seeping into the earth

And finally belonging

To You who turn rock into a pool of water

And flint into a fountain

That is ever flowing.  

A Poem for Parashat Vayakhel-Pekudei: Kiyor Mirrors

Some introductory notes as background for this poem:

*The kiyor, the washbasin in the courtyard of the Tabernacle used for purifying before service, was made of mirrors contributed by the women of that generation.  According to the midrash, these women had used the mirrors to beautify themselves and entice their tired husbands to be intimate with them during the Egyptian enslavement.   Moshe was initially wary of such a contribution, according to the midrash, but was told in no uncertain terms by God that these gifts were the most valuable of all.  

*The word mar’ot, mirrors, is from the root ra’ah, to see.  The first use of this root in the Torah is in creation, when God looks at the or, “light,” that He has just created and sees that it is good.  Vayar Elokim et ha’aor ki tov.  “God saw that the light was good”  (Genesis 1:3).

Kiyor Mirrors:

Narcissus died of self love 

Upon seeing his reflection in the waters.

The evil queen from Snow White said: 

Mirror, Mirror on the wall

Who is the fairest of them all

Not the most generous sentiment.  

So Moshe was right to be a bit wary

And, upon seeing what the women brought -- 

Thought -- no, not in our sanctuary!

But God thought differently.   

Mirrors can work two ways, you see.

There is cold beauty -- which 

disconnects.

It comes from insecurity 

And leads right back to it.

Am I not better than the rest?  

My looks make you feel low -- confess!

We tend to cover over all mirrors

In our fear of this frigid beauty.

We say -- don’t look at yourself!

Don’t think, reflect, don’t self-engross

In fact, don’t even shine

Lest your shine block out the shine

Of some other poor soul

Who needs it more.

Just stay inside and hide instead.

Then we can all be equal 

And dull together.

God sighs at this great loss:

A mirror can bring forth not ice, but nice beauty

A beauty that warms up the room,

And in its confidence can 

Spark

The glorious shine of one and other.

Reflecting, refracting, like a prism, 

Many colors, now more, not less.

The Israelite women stood at their mirrors

Preening

And flashed their husbands a quick reflected glimpse.

Their words much like the evil queen’s --

“I am more beautiful than you,” 

But chirped in a flirty, teasing tone --

Inviting rejoinder and rejoining.

See -- my beauty -- I am proud

I let it shine.

Where is yours, don’t be so down

Come with me on this journey of self- 

And other- love.  

You can be as exquisite as I

(Well, almost anyhow)

What makes the difference?

In one a mirror is a closed door

In the other an invitation to explore

We are attracted to confidence

And there is a reason:

It is divine.

It is the knowledge that we are divine.

Upon entering to serve the Lord

The need is not to shut off the light of self

But on the contrary, to celebrate it,

To look into the reflective water 

Held inside a multi-mirrored kiyor

And see what God, who was the first to see,

Saw -- et ha’or ki tov   

Kiyor ki tov

To see the light that is good 

To see the good light that is 

Us

Parashat Ki Tisa: True Refuge for our Vulnerable Heart

(A) Mishkan (Exodus 25-31:11 - Terumah and Tetzaveh)

(B) Shabbat (31:12-17 - Ki Tisa)

(C) Golden Calf (31:18-34:35 - Ki Tisa)

(B) Shabbat (35:1-3 -- beginning of Vayakhel)

(A) Mishkan (35:4-40:38 -- Vayakhel and Pekudei)

The final section of the book of Shmot -- comprising five parshiyyot all together-- deals primarily with the construction of the Mishkan (Tabernacle).  Through its ordering of this section, the Torah creates a textual architecture that parallels the physical architecture of the Tabernacle.   The literary structure built here is a chiasm, a rhetorical device with the structure A-B-C-B-A as seen in the diagram above.   The C here, the middle, is the sin of the Golden Calf. On either side of that incident stand first, short reminders to observe Shabbat, and then, on the next outer layer, much lengthier (two full parshiyyot each) descriptions of the construction of the Mishkan.  

What is the purpose of this literary structure?  

The Golden Calf Story as the Heart

(Purpose #1) A chiasm tends to highlight or point to the element in the middle, asking the reader to move from the outside to the inside, to focus on the heart of the matter.  In the Tabernacle, the innermost space was the Holy of Holies, where the Ark holding the tablets resided, and where God Himself communicated from the top of the Ark.  

In the chiasm of our parshiyyot, the innermost point -- the Holy of Holies, as it were -- turns out to be the story of the Golden Calf.  

Why?  What is it about this story that makes it the heart, the Holy of Holies?  After all, this is a tale of idolatry!  

The Heart is the Intimacy Achieved Through Forgiveness

One way of thinking about it is to understand the aftermath of the sin.  We all know that when we reconcile with our partners after a fight, our relationship becomes that much stronger; there is a new level of intimacy achieved through the ordeal of disharmony and then repair.    The same is true here in the relationship between God and Israel.  Probably the peak moment of intimacy anywhere in the Torah happens in the aftermath of this sin, as God reveals Himself in a new way, passing over Moshe and showing Moshe who He, God, really is -- His thirteen attributes of compassion and love.   Here, in this moment, we have indeed entered the Holy of Holies -- a place where we meet God in an intense and intimate way.  

This moment of intense connection to God, we should note, is only achieved through the process of sin and then forgiveness.   It turns out that the heart of the matter -- connecting to God -- will often necessarily involve human imperfection and wrongdoing.  Indeed, the Tabernacle itself is built partly for this purpose, as a place the people can go to be absolved of their sins and reconnect to divine presence.  The Torah’s literary structuring of the Golden Calf sin in the middle of the Mishkan parshiyyot expresses this idea structurally, that the purpose -- the core -- of the Mishkan is to connect to God despite or even by means of human sin and repair. 

The Heart is the Vulnerability Behind Sin

I want to take it one step further.  It isn’t just that through the process of sin and forgiveness the people come closer to God and that such closeness is the heart of the Mishkan.    It is actually the sin itself -- or more precisely, the vulnerable human heart behind the sin -- that is the centerpiece here, that is the place where God ultimately resides, the core of the Mishkan inside us.  Our vulnerability is our Holy of Holies.

How does the relationship between sin and vulnerability work?  Consider the nature of this sin of idolatry.  What leads the people to create a concrete idol to worship?  They are waiting for Moshe to return and he does not return in the expected timeframe.  They think -- maybe he is not coming back.  Maybe he is dead.  Maybe he got run over by a truck.  (Have you never been in that situation, awaiting a loved one who is delayed, and imagining the worst?)  They feel alone and abandoned, scared, maybe even terrified about their uncertain future.  What they say is: This man Moshe who saved us, “we don’t know what happened to him”  -- we don’t know.  Uncertainty.  We hate that feeling.  It makes us anxious, so anxious that we forget any faithfulness and steadfastness to the things we hold dear.   We just want some way to feel better right away, some fix for the anxiety of not knowing.  And so we build idols.  We declare -- this is our god.  This is the answer.  We need to know and so we create an immediate answer.

And maybe that sense of abandonment wasn’t just a matter of uncertainty; maybe it was a real wound, a place of vulnerability.  The children of Israel are like children at this stage of their relationship to God.  Moshe is their conduit and he has been gone for forty whole days.  That is a long time for a child, especially after the trauma of Egypt.  We can imagine the sense of abandonment here, the feeling of a child, brought to a new country far from home and from anything familiar, and then suddenly left to fend for herself.   Help!  The ground has been taken out from under us.  We are alone and helpless, dropping through the net of security, free falling with no one to catch us.  

It is in this Tender Human Heart that God Resides

All of these feelings make up the precious tender human heart of vulnerability; it is precisely in these places that God resides, that we are truly open-hearted enough to receive such presence; it is precisely through these portals that we know we cannot do it alone, and it is in that knowledge of our impossibly needy hearts that we turn to and find God; It is here that we make room for and build a Mishkan.   It is this heart that is the heart -- the Holy of Holies -- of the Mishkan.  No wonder the Golden Calf incident, which points to all of this vulnerability, no wonder it stands at the center of the text.  

The problem is that here, in our vulnerable needy heart, it is often easier to build an idol than to build a Mishkan.  It is easier to close off the insecurity and fear and hurt, to shut those all down, banish them with an idol that offers temporary refuge -- this is our god; no worries; get busy; distract; be productive; build something; watch something; post something; check your phone; then for a moment at least you won’t feel the gnawing fear, the restlessness, the sense of incompleteness and inadequacy.  

The Sanctuary (ies) as the True Refuge for our Vulnerability

(Purpose #2) And so the second purpose of the Torah’s use of a chiasm here -- in addition to pointing to the Golden Calf incident as the centerpiece -- the second purpose is related to the importance not of the inner layer (C), but of the outer layers (A and B); the second purpose is to portray the sanctuary -- both of space and of time (shabbat) -- as the answer, the ultimate refuge for this tender human heart of ours.  

In their position surrounding the Golden Calf, the Mishkan and Shabbat both stand guard around this heart, offering a place of refuge, and yes, sanctuary.   Our physical hearts are surrounded by lungs for protection, and the midrash notes that in the physical Mishkan, the wings of the cherubs atop the Ark offer protection for the Ark as heart.   Similarly, the Mishkan and Shabbat are the protectors -- double doors for extra security -- for our vulnerability.  

These two protectors point to the one true refuge in this world.  While idolatry in all its ancient and modern forms is a false refuge -- a place where we seek temporary refuge but which we know will ultimately not help us -- there is only one true refuge -- God -- only one true refuge where we can rest our weary human selves without risk of losing or enslaving ourselves. 

The Mishkan and Shabbat are two aspects of this divine refuge, two ways of accessing this sanctuary of the heart, one a sanctuary of space and the other a sanctuary of time.   In both, the central idea is that the human being is creating a place -- either by setting aside a physical space or a specified time -- for God to come dwell on earth, opening up to make room for God.  In our anxious moments, we may feel like we need all the space and all the time in the world and have none to spare, but when we are able to make room for God, something counterintuitive happens -- we open up space for God only to find that God is the space -- the makom -- that we dwell in, that God is the home for this heart of ours, the sanctuary, the only container that can truly hold all of our hurts and needs.   When we make room, it turns out this is our home; we are coming home to God, and our hearts can finally rest in that peace, the peace of Shabbat, the peace of a God whose name is Shalom.   

Shuvi Nafshi lemenuchaychi -- Return, my soul, to your resting place. (Ps 116:7).

Our worries, our uncertainty, our insecurity, our feelings of aloneness and abandonment, all of that is real -- and also precious.  It is the stuff inside that is looking for God, looking for a home, a refuge, a place to be held.   We can construct idols or we can construct a Mishkan, a Shabbat, a true home inside us.  In depicting the Mishkan and Shabbat as surrounding the Golden Calf, the Torah shows us structurally that these divine sanctuaries are the company we should keep -- the malakhei hasheret, the accompanying angels -- for this vulnerable heart.   Our needy hearts need divine accompaniment; no other refuge will do.