Stop Struggling, Start Receiving

"I cast aside the need to conquer the mountain. I rest,
and the gifts of the mountain are presented to me."

- Lady of Lhasa Descends, from the Wild Kuan Yin Oracle
by Alana Fairchild and Wang Yiguang.

"Help me to set realistic expectations for myself by
taking the time to honor and enjoy the process."

- Budding Trees Moon, from the Spirit of the Wheel Meditation Deck
by Linda Ewashina and Jody Bergsma.

They Say He Erased Her Memory

Hecht Museum, Israel

King Josiah, the Deuteronomists, and the Prophets saved our people and our goddess.
 
Thanks in part to them, Asherah was not forgotten. She appears in the Bible, the Zohar and other Kabbalistic texts, not to mention the prayer book. She is a weeping mother of Israel, the Sabbath bride, Torah personified, Mother Zion, “His Shekhina,” and a number of other feminine figures in Jewish tradition. As Shekhinah, she went into exile with us and remained with us. The feminine divine survived in our memories, as did our Land.

In exile, our texts helped us remember our connection to the Land.

In the Land there were bamot, high places where we had worshipped our god. At those high places, we had also erected asherot, pillars symbolizing our goddess, "His Asherah."

Opposition to the worship of Asherah grew, particularly in the monarchy. We were supposed to have no king but god, but eventually a monarchy arose and it needed to centralize power and worship. (Read Judges 19 to learn one story that the monarchy created to justify its existence.) It may have been the monarchy’s scribes who wove various traditions into single text, the first four books of Torah, but it was most certainly King Josiah’s scribes who wrote the fifth book, Deuteronomy, as part of his program of religious and political reforms.

These reforms included banning the high places to centralize worship at the Jerusalem Temple. (The northern kingdom with its temples in Beth El and Dan had been destroyed by Josiah’s time.) Nonetheless there were other Jewish temples, and the bamot with their asherot remained places of worship. The prophet Jeremiah reported that men and children continued to gather wood for fire rituals and women continued to “bake cakes for the Queen of Heaven.”

Although King Josiah had the pillar of Asherah removed from the Jerusalem Temple during his reign, an asherah was repeatedly re-installed in and removed from the First Temple during the reigns of different kings. (The seven-branched lamps in both Temples may have been remnants of her worship.)

After the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple, Jews in the Land (renamed “Palestina” by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba Revolt) began putting to paper the oral traditions that interpreted Torah. The study of Torah and the expansion of the no-longer-only-oral tradition preserved us during 2,000 years of the galut (exile). If our religion had remained tied solely to the Land, we could not have survived for so long as a people.

King Josiah, I believe, can take some credit for our survival. And because his reforms focused on eliminating goddess worship among our people, he (inadvertently) preserved her name and even some of her rituals.

Raphael Patai, William Dever, and other scholars have written about the Hebrew Goddess. Rabbi and Priestess Jill Hammer excavates our texts to learn more about our goddess and our resurect our priestess traditions. But in some cases, we don’t have to dig deeply at all. A song, composed in the Land in the 16th century, contains many images of the Hebrew goddess: she is the Sabbath Bride, the city of Jerusalem, the people of Israel, Mother Zion, god’s spouse, and Queen. Each time I hear a congregation sing L’cha Dodi on Friday night, I see her entering the synagogue, clothed in light.

Many faces of the divine feminine are found in our tradition because she accompanied us in our exile, but Asherah herself remained in the Land, among the bamot. Josiah and the Deuteronomists gave us monotheism and a textual tradition that helped us survive exile. But we’re home now and I long to meet Asherah in her Land.

Sacred Land

In reading fiction and non-fiction, I've felt there were commonalities between the histories and peoples of ancient Israel and Judah and the Navajo people. If Tony Hillerman's mystery novels can be relied on, some Navajo create sacred bundles containing stones, soil, and plants collected on pilgrimage to the four mountains that define the boundaries of their ancestral lands.

from israellycool.com

What would my sacred bundle contain? What are the major geographical features of Israel? (I'm revealing gross ignorance here.) The Negev, a huge desert in the south. The Mediterranean coast with cliffs and sandy beaches. Farmlands near the coast and in the Jordan Valley. The Dead Sea. The hills of the Galil and the Kinneret. The Golan Heights. Mount Carmel. The Mount of Olives. Mount Hermon.

It's obvious, even to me, that I lack basic familiarity with the Land. I'll start my studies with Wikipedia.

A pilgrimage through the Land of Israel would include sacred sites mentioned in Tanakh, places where the matriarchs and patriarchs camped and were buried, towns and cities of ancient Israel and Judah, places of worship in Beth El, Shilo, and Jerusalem. (It's time to re-read Tanakh with an eye to place.)

Where were the high places? How many bamot were in the Land? 

Here's a map showing the territories of each of the twelve tribes, including those outside the Land, on the east bank of the Jordan River.

I'm eager to learn more.

Ah... I should have followed my gut and left the Yeshivah of Rotting Pomegranates to explore Israel, meet more of its people, and master its language. But this will be better, because now I know why it's so important to know the Land that I belong to.

Good News

At the risk of jinxing myself, I will say that I am healthy again. I made a nice Shabbos dinner for myself last night and finally went to Saturday morning Torah Study at the big, Reform shul today.

After Torah study, I asked a woman who's obviously an inveterate student if she would study Leviticus with me. Yes! We exchanged numbers. We'll start Tuesday the 26th and maybe I'll join her for a Biblical Hebrew class this Wednesday night, even though they started ten weeks ago and even though I'll have to go out after dark.

A chevruta! I've been looking for someone to study Leviticus with me forever and I finally found someone! 

It was a wonderful/horrible morning.

So nice to be at a Reform Torah study. Sure there are fewer comments citing specifically Jewish knowledge, but there is a love of Torah and a respect for other human beings that is uniquely Reform. In a Reform setting, the exploration of text is also an exploration of life and values.

Near the end of class, I had a flashback. For the first time, I recognized it for what it was. Instead of the shame of the experience and the shame of having a mind that would return to it, I could hold the memory and look at it-- and, knowing it was only CPTSD, set it to one side (where it kept poking at me like my cat does when she wants a snack at 3 in the morning).

After Torah study and talking with Kilian (while pushing away the flashback), I found comfort in basar v'chalav and a potent beer at Tucson Tamale. And I realized why I'm having some trouble starting to keep kosher again; traif is my defense mechanism against pain.

When I got home, I dragged Nutmeg's new piece of cat furniture outside so we could both bask in the sun. She prefers my lap.

So sweet!

Love Your Life

(Images from The Gaian Tarot)

The Trees Teach Us Their Torah

Tekufat Tevet, the winter solstice, occurred so recently, but already there are hints of the renewal of springtime. As we observe new growth in nature, we recognize new growth within ourselves. The Torah's teachings are everywhere, all around us and in our own hearts.

The two quotes below, and the commentary that follows them, are from Jill Hammer’s The Jewish Book of Days:

It was the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, that Moses addressed the Israelites in accordance with the instruction that the Eternal had given him for them. – Deuteronomy 1:3

The new moon of Shevat is the new year of the trees: these are the words of Beit Shammai. Beit Hillil says: the fifteenth of Shevat. – Babylonian Talmud, Rosh HaShanah 2a

On this day, in the final year of wandering in the wilderness, Moses began to teach the people a new book of the Torah: Devarim, or Deuteronomy. This is also the day, according to Shammai, that trees become a year older: it is the new year of the trees. Although, according to the majority opinion, Jews will not celebrate the trees' new year until the 15th of the month, the new moon of Shevat represent the first moment when we might consider the trees to be renewed after the winter.

Like the budding trees, Deuteronomy is a new flowering of the divine will. On the 1st of Shevat, as the people prepare to enter the land without him, Moses offers them the best of his wisdom to sustain them. So too the branches that have survived the winter sustain this new life, and the tree waits to burst into new buds. Indeed, in Israel and similar climates, trees may already be budding at this time.

Shevat is a month of renewed growth and vigor, and this first day of Shevat begins that renewal. As Moses begins to teach new Torah, the trees teach us their Torah by shaking off their slumber and awakening to growth. Deuteronomy (20:19) teaches that "a person is like a tree of the field." This is the message of Shevat as well.

Being Jewish is Not a Competition

Being Jewish is not a competition, and yet so many Jews behave as if it is. In addition to our most prevalent attitudes about death, this competitiveness is the least appealing aspect of Judaism. In fact, it's ugly and vicious.

Once, at a seder, someone began sharing an insight about the giving of Torah. Someone else interrupted and dismissed him by proclaiming that Shavuot, not Pesach, is about the giving of Torah and so Pesach was not the time to discuss the giving of Torah. While the second person was right about the focus of the holidays, redemption and covenant go hand in hand. A potentially good teaching was silenced because of another man's angst and need to draw attention to himself and his supposedly greater knowledge.

Perhaps childish one-upmanship occurs in every religious group, but knowledge is highly valued among Jews, so trying to appear more knowledgeable is always a temptation. Part of our ability to survive among other nations has been our dedication to remaining "separate" and "distinct." So we focus on who is Jewish, who is more Jewish, who is most Jewish, and then naturally, on who we should exclude.

It results in unnecessary divisiveness. Take two different lessons of Chanukah:

• let's not dismiss the assimilated Jews, after all we couldn't have defeated the Greeks without them
• let's not glorify zealots, after all they became the immoral rulers whose thirst for power handed the Land over to Rome and ultimately caused our exile

For some, the first one seems so obvious that only a fool would need to say it. For others, the second would be deeply offensive. But neither is truly the lesson of Chanukah!

We belong to our people and our Land.

To many Orthodox Jews, it is axiomatic that only a person born to a Jewish mother is a Jew. But when you see an adult gleefully telling a young child that he's not Jewish, you have to wonder if that adult has a heart. What benefit does he (or the Jewish people) accrue for making that child cry? Are adults who do that trying to squash their own insecurity?

The angst about "who is a Jew" annuls people's good sense. I knew an observant Jew who worried that she might not be Jewish enough to find a husband because her father was an Orthodox convert—even though her mother had undeniably been a Jew and both parents had raised her as a Jew. Why such insecurity?

Last month, a stranger commented on a photo I posted to Facebook of my chanukiah. "Isn't that lit backwards?" I explained that it had been lit "forwards" and then turned in the window to observe the mitzvah of publicizing the miracle. Many other Jews would have gone on to abuse him for not knowing the laws of Chanukah. It was enough for me to indicate that I wasn't going to be demeaned by him—but why did I need to respond at all?

Because we are a people and each of us wants to belong to our people.

Sometimes it's an Orthodox Jew and sometimes it's a secular Jew, but eventually you'll hear someone go on a tirade about Reform Judaism being inauthentic. Even a man I considered a mensch, and who should have known better, once told me that it was hard to keep himself from giggling when he heard Reform prayers. Reform is a 700 year old tradition of European Jews trying to find a balance between being free citizens of the societies in which they live and retaining their ancestral traditions. Reform Judaism may, in the long course of Jewish history be as ephemeral as the Hellenistic Judaism practiced by Philo of Alexandria, but it is Jewish and its members are Jews.

Meanwhile, every group of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem believes it is better than all the others.

We are one people. The first time I stood in Ben Gurion, watching the line of "holders of Israeli" passports, my eyes teared up, seeing faces from every part of the world. Despite centuries of separation, we are, ideally, one people.

None of us can be a Jew alone. While each of us prefers our own small group of Jews, it took all of us to defeat the Greeks, all of us to create the modern state of Israel.

Today, I unintentionally triggered someone's Jewish insecurity. When he responded angrily, I was triggered, too, but avoided trying to one-up him with by pointing out that Jews did, in the past, convert people forcibly (see Idumeans and King Herod) because it was beside the point. His frustration was still so great that he posted, "You are obviously not a Jew."

I cried.

I am certain he knew that his statement would hurt me. And I am certain that it made him feel good about himself.

We are one people. And often, we are really nasty to each other.

Sir, may you have a year of blessings. You are my fellow Jew.