Selah

The verses of Numbers 5:11-31 are by far the most disturbing of Parsha Naso. They contain descriptions of a ritual which humiliates women and highlights their relative lack of agency in the ancient world. Nonetheless, I believe that it is our duty as Jews to wrestle with all that we have inherited and not pretend away the complexities in our sacred texts. Perhaps we can learn something from its shortcomings. You can read them here , if you like, but my d'var Torah, below, probably makes enough sense even if you can't. ----- During the Israelites’ last few months in Egypt, they knew something had to change.  They feared for their wellbeing, for their lives, for their children, and they called out to God to save them. Then they brought chaos into the streets. They destroyed the businesses and looted the homes of their oppressors before fleeing with Moses, out of bondage and subjugation, into an unknown wilderness.  Much of what we read in Torah post-exodus is the...

Every time I experience a major shift in my life, I see my entire history with new eyes. I understand the events of my past as precursors to this moment, in ways I couldn’t have done before this moment, and so I tweak the story of my life, just a little. Over the course of the past few years, the story of my life as a seminary student went like this: I’m here to get credentialed as a religious professional. I’m here to unlearn the damaging theologies of my childhood. I’m here to learn how to be a scholar. Erm, I actually have no idea what I’m doing here. It’s only now that I’ve graduated that I can look back on the entire arc of my experience and tell you a new story I didn’t know before: I went to a Christian seminary in order to discover and ultimately convert to Judaism. This new story doesn’t overwrite the others—I’m still going to do some kind of religious or scholarly work, probably—but it gives the old stories new flavor and more nuance. The book of Deuteronomy is a sim...

...Now you must void yourself of injuries, insults, incursions. Go with empty hands to those you have hurt and make amends. It is not too late. It is early and about to grow. Now is the time to do what you know you must and have feared to begin. Your face is dark too as you turn inward to face yourself, the hidden twin of all you must grow to be. Forgive the dead year. Forgive yourself. What will be wants to push through your fingers... --Marge Piercy, from "The Head of the Year" On September 19, 2018, I woke up thirsty. Even though I hadn’t had anything to drink since right before sunset, I only sipped enough water that morning to swallow some Excedrin. I knew that without my morning coffee, I would quickly develop a headache if I didn’t proactively take some medicine, and this was not considered breaking the fast. It was the morning of Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement. The idea of earning Divine forgiveness for my sins through self-punis...

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” ...Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.  ~Matthew 3:1-2,4 On this Ash Wednesday, we hear John the Baptist, the straight-talking Chariot, reminding us: From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return. Like the swords perched above the lamb on the Four of Swords, those words may seem menacing. But you can channel that lamb's inner peace... Remember where you came from. Like the tree on the Six of Cups, your ashy roots are also contain the rainbow of Divine Love. Live inside that love now as you (repent of your inaction) turn your face toward justice, (believe in the good news) envision a better world, and act with kindness to manifest it. This  life is a fleeting, magical, liminal space between two eternal ashy existences. In it, you’re alive like Tempe...

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” —Patrick Rothfuss,  The Name of the Wind I have lots of stories in my head, about who I am, what I’ve done, what my life and its constituent pieces mean. Every one of my three (so far) tattoos has a story attached, but the one I will not always tell when strangers ask “what the tattoo means” is the story of my first tattoo.  It’s a story that started out with one (complex) meaning, andnhas taken on new shades as I’ve grown. My stories define me, I define them, and the dialectic circle goes ‘round. That’s actually a really core piece of my theology—we have to keep telling our stories, but can’t ever let them get stuck. When we do that, we’re lost. It’s part of why the liturgical year means so much to me, and why I keep returning to the Bible again and again, even though I no longer believe about it wh...

I feel, so often, that my self is kind of a strange dichotomy. I am in seminary, currently on a path toward Christian ordination. The rhythms of the liturgical year are etched deeply in my soul, and right now it's Advent, the Christian pre-Christmas season of darkness, preparation and waiting. Yet the rhythms of the earth & sky are embedded in me just as deeply, and the Winter Solstice means even more to me spiritually than Christmas does. I'm pretty sure both of these attachments and longings point toward a mystical core deep inside of me that's been papered over and stepped on and plastered and bricked up by the rationalistic-logical world of patriarchy. But layer by layer, I'm unearthing her. Through connections I've made in seminary and outside of it, in spiritually-oriented women's circles, I've begun to embrace a femme epistemology. Femme is a kind of queer femininity, and epistemology means a way of knowing and learning. It means I am turning to...

Everything is about to change. And it already has. It will be. It was. It is. The dawn you eagerly await to end the long, cold darkness is already full sun far off in the east. Yet even after light’s return spring is months away. The promised land waits so far from the sea of liberation— and Thirty long years pass after His birth before their Messiah will come. Stones of justice have been tossed in the lake but their ripples have not yet arrived, have not resolved into the kin-dom already present among us. While we wait, let us seek —in the darkness of the Now and Not Yet— for the treasures God has hidden there, the riches of the secret places only found by night. This is what is promised us: the wheel of life turns ever on and darkness is a path to joy. (Originally published as “Secret Places” in the UUCF Good News Journal, Winter ‘17)