We are taught that when God created the world, it was by saying, “Let there be light!” And there was light.
Anyone who has ever been involved in a remodel knows that this isn’t how it happened.
First, God said, “Let there be light!”
Then the contractor responded, What kind of a light would you like?”
“You know, one that will be different from the dark.”
“Oh, there’s darkness, too? Then you need to have a light that will complement the darkness. What color is your darkness?”
“Darkness has color? Really? It just kind of looks dark to me.”
“Oh, yeah. You’d think all darkness was just the same. But really it’s not. And if you get the wrong color light to go with your darkness, it will look all wrong, and bother you whenever you look at this universe.”
“Okay, if you say so. Are there swatches or something I can compare my darkness to?”
The contractor pulls out a big book of swatches, thousands of swatches of darkness and hands them to God. “Here you go, come back when you know which one best matches your darkness.”
Some two and half weeks later, following many conversations with the heavenly hosts, many repetitions of the “there are different kinds of darkness?” conversation with each seraph, God got back to the contractor.
“I think we’ve selected “tenebrosity” as the shade of darkness that best matches what we thought.”
“Great,” the contractor responded. “Now, which kind of light would you like?”
“Oh, you know, a good basic light that goes well with tenebrosity,” said God, feeling sophisticated.
“Well, that’s good. That narrows down our choices. In fact it eliminates several infinite sets of light, leaving us with only this infinite set.” The contractor thumped another sample book down in front of God.
“I’ll get back to y0u,” God sighed.
And so God sorted the lights, dividing the neons from the incandescents, the full-spectrum from the infra-red. And God said, “let there be ‘resplendent’ light.” And the contractor placed the order, and some month later, the after the order arrived, and contractor’s workers were done with a couple of other projects they had been working on, there was light.
And God called the light “day”, and the darkness God called “night”. At which point God noticed that while there was light, there didn’t seem to be any particular sources for the light. So God called the contractor.
“Umm. The light seems to be sort of abstract, not actually coming from any particular point. It just sort of drifts around, getting mixed up with the darkness.”
“Of course it does. You didn’t order any light fixtures.”
“Light fixtures?”
“You know, lamps, or chandeliers, or fixtures set into the ceiling or something.”
“I kind of just assumed that when we ordered light, it would come with those.”
“Oh, no. That would never work. People get very picky about their light fixtures, so they need to be able to choose their fixtures separately.”
“Okay,” sighed God, “is there another catalog to look at?”
“Here you go.”
And God took the catalog, and he saw the catalog, and God saw that the catalog was big. And eventually God chose a sun, a moon, a strobing pulsar and stars of light for fixtures. And the contractor saw the selections, and said they were good.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament, a great light and a lessor light–”
“Just a second,” interrupted the contractor. “What firmament? And besides, you just ordered these lights. It’s going to take a while for them to get here. Which is just as well, really, cause if you want them put into a firmament, we’re going to need to build the firmament first. Oh, and by the way, they’ve discontinued strobing pulsars. Do you have a second choice?”
And God sighed, vowing never to create a universe again.
Teaching mysticism is difficult. Mysticism deals with direct experiential knowledge of God, while affirming that the nature of that God is beyond human expression (and perhaps even understanding). Mystics then attempt to use human expressions to describe this experience and the understandings they have gained, using metaphor and analogy. To make it all the more complex, the mystic (at least in Judaism), sees the lines between metaphor and reality as blurry, and perhaps even non-existent. Other than that, it’s an easy task.
Traditionally, Jewish mysticism (of which I consider Kabbalah to be one type, while others consider the entire history of Jewish mysticism to be included within the bounds of Kabbalah) was taught one on one, over the course of years. The students who studied mysticism were already learned in Torah and Talmud, and knew all biblical text intimately. In my case, I have two hour-and-a-half sessions in an undergraduate classroom with students who will be three-fourths of the way through a semester long course on an introduction to Judaism. Somehow, I find this daunting.
I have spent years studying Jewish mysticism, and at times even consider myself a mystic, in the tradition of Art Green (while hurrying to add that I am neither nearly as learned as he, nor do I have the depth of his understanding of reality). Most days, I still struggle to understand Jewish mysticism. Most days, I am completely confused as to what the authors of a text I am reading are trying to say. Sometimes, I get it. Now, I am to teach it.
Many teachers of Jewish mysticism distinguish between teaching about mysticism and teaching mysticism. Teaching about mysticism is to teach the terminology and the beliefs held by their practitioners as an outsider, an anthropologist looking in. But for the mystic, whose understanding of the world is that we are all part of the Oneness which is Divinity, to teach from the outside view seems to ensure a lack of understanding of the subject. How can one understand something from the outside, when there is no “outside”?
And so, as I prepare a pair of class sessions, going through possible readings, debating the merits of Gershon Sholem’s German-style modernist scholarship about mysticism as opposed to Larry Kushner’s or Art Green’s experiential accounts of Jewish mysticism. And I am confronted with a basic paradox (upon which paradoxes, after all, mysticism is built): how does one teach about something experiential in a non-experiential way?
After two weeks of teaching at Willamette University, I’m ready to declare teaching fun. I’m sure I won’t always feel as positive about it as I do right now, but I just finished going over my students first set of ”response papers,” an every-other-week writing assignment in which I ask them to react to the readings, the lectures, or their own reactions to the course. Designed to be more blog-post than academic assignment (my instruction was that it should take 10 – 20 minutes), the responses have been as diverse as my students, which is exactly what I was hoping for.
It’s my first chance to see what students are connecting to in the course, or being challenged by in it. One reason I love teaching is that I love forcing people to think beyond preconceptions, to explore ideas at a deeper level, and many of these students are doing exactly that. Whether reflecting on how what they are learning affects their own faith (non-Jewish), or thinking about the contrast between studying history and studying the mytho-historic account of a culture (in this case Judaism), to reflecting on teaching style, or a very detailed reaction to a specific page in the reading, it’s all been great.
I’m having so much fun with these response papers, I’d love to make them weekly (relax, students, I’m not going to do it). Even though I suspect it takes me as long to write notes on these as it took many of the students to write them in the first place, the thoughtfulness shown in the writing, and the connections made between material we’re covering and the rest of the world makes it a fabulous exercise. Judaism teaches that we learn as much from our students as we do from our teachers. I’m honored to be learning from my students.
Tomorrow, I embark on a new adventure. I will be teaching a college course on Judaism at Willamette University.
Now, I’ve taught about Judaism in a variety of settings for years. I’ve taught pre-schoolers. I’ve taught kids in elementary school. I’ve taught middle-schoolers (the pre-schoolers were way easier). I’ve taught high-school students. I’ve taught adults. I’ve even taught classes at retirement homes. But, until now, never have I taught at a college.
The good news is that I have a fair amount of experience as both an undergraduate and a graduate student. The even better news is that, in some ways, this will be the educational setting that is the best match for my style, which is challenging people to think about ideas, and to question easy answers.
So I’ve selected textbooks, put together a syllabus and begun to outline lectures and class sessions. I’ve been to the university HR office, and been officially hired as a part-time Visiting Assistant Professor. I know where my classroom is, and have enjoyed fabulous support from the departmental secretary. Admittedly, I’m still somewhat confounded by the internal websites for the university, but that might be because I don’t have everything setup right yet.
And tomorrow, I drive down to Salem, and I enter a new classroom, with a new group of students, and together, we’ll learn something about Judaism.
I’m working on my Yom Kippur sermons. Or rather, I’m trying to work on my Yom Kippur sermons. But they’re refusing to be worked upon.
They are steadfastly refusing to write themselves. Which frankly, just seems churlish of them.
To make matters worse, they won’t even tell me what they’re about. Is one of them about the Isaiah quote, “Is this the fast I desire?” Good sermon topic, and not one I’ve written previously, but I keep hearing that line in my head as spoken by a John Wayne impersonator, which I’m pretty sure is my brain adapting some stand-up comics bit about John Wayne playing Hamlet, and saying, “Is this a dagger I see before me?” None of which is helping me out at all, because I’m pretty clear that John Wayne and Isaiah have radically different voices.
I could talk about God. I like talking about God. Of course, I started off doing that for Rosh Hashanah, and wound up writing a different sermon entirely, because the God sermon was way too dry.
Prayer is a good subject. But, the problem with talking about prayer in a sermon is that the sermon comes a the end of the service–after the prayers have all been said. Which means it often feels like I’m explaining how to do what we just did. Feels a bit backwards.
The flip side of this is that some of my best sermons have been completely off the cuff. The flip-flip side, is that some of my worst sermons have been completely off the cuff. When I go in trusting that I’ll have something coherent and meaningful to say, 80% of the time, I do. It may not be quite as polished as I’d like, but it tends to be pretty good. About 10% of the time, I have something meaningful to say, but it doesn’t come out coherently, and meanders a little. It’s the last 10% of the time that I try to avoid: I start to speak and realize the sermon isn’t going where I wanted it to, and start rewriting an extemporaneous sermon in my head while I’m speaking. Those sermons tend not to work out so well.
So I’ll push through, and try to a least get some drafts out that I can react to: ideas that I can either develop or reject. And sometimes, in the process of putting down an idea, a sermon pops out, pretty much finished.
Over the course of this year, I looked for rabbinic work, with no success (no one can remember quite so dead a rabbinic job market as this year). That being said, I hit the summer, and decided it was time to make something happen, and founded a congregation here in Southeast Portland. And while that’s dominated my thinking for the last few months, it wasn’t really what the year was about.
The spring was entirely about death. Over spring and early summer, three people in my life died. I spent all Spring in Boston with my grandfather, accompanying him on his final journey. I wrote about that here and here. In the midst of which my friend Paul Bingman died.
When thinking about this year, that’s what really stands out for me: the spring.
Yet there were other parts of the year as well: I started out the secular year by heading to Spokane to speak at a Unitarian Universalist Church, and meet up with a college classmate I hadn’t seen since college. During June, just after my grandfather’s death, I returned to Portland in time for the college’s Centennial Reunion, with a chance to get to see lots of faces I hadn’t seen since, and meet people’s children and spouses (those few who didn’t marry other classmates). It was a chance to look back over the longer-term, and see who we are now, and how that related to who we were then, in the first blush of adulthood.
It was a year I spent quality time in the garden.
It was a year our car got totalled.
It was a year. And perhaps I was less productive than I would have liked, but I think it was a year of growth for me. A year of figuring out some pieces. And I’m looking forward to the coming year, and to seeing what it brings.
In the Jewish tradition we are taught to face the High Holidays, the Yamim Nora’im, with fear and trembling as we evaluate our actions and failings. Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah is a time of spiritual preparation for the High Holidays.
For rabbis, Elul is also a time of preparation, both spiritual and logistical. It is our busy season, during which we are preparing what expected to be our four (or five) best sermons of the year, at least five distinct services, not to mention the logistics associated with that (facility setup, making sure the various committees are ready to do their thing, etc.).
For me, this year, I’m also organizing a new congregation, which means figuring out things like opening up a bank account, initial meetings with potential members, finding insurance, creating marketing materials, borrowing machzors, and desperately wondering what else I’ve forgotten. All in all, it’s a somewhat daunting prospect.
Which brings me back to fear and trembling. This year, I’m awfully close to outright panic.
Today has been a day of great significance in my life. Two things happened, each of which may be seen as a turning point in the story of my life.
Today, in forming Mikdasheinu, I filled all of the obligatory roles for the Board. This doesn’t mean I can’t add more board-members, merely that I now have enough to move forward. It means Mikdasheinu is actually going to happen.
Secondly, today I bought my first pair of reading glasses. I don’t need them all the time; only when the print is small, my eyes are tired or it’s dark. And they’re not particularly strong. But the fact is, when I’m wearing contacts, I need reading glasses for some close up work.
I’m a rabbi. As such, I deal with death frequently. I officiate at maybe five funerals a year. I spend a lot of time at graveyards (compared to your average American). Death is something I think about and talk about professionally. But I don’t have to deal with it in my own life very often.
Until now. Somehow, over the past three months or so, I’ve found myself dealing the loss of a number of people in my life. My friend Paul died in April, while I was in Boston spending time with my grandfather who was in hospice. My grandfather died at the end of May. And my college classmate Elinor passed away last night, following a lengthy battle with cancer. All in all, that’s a lot of death (putting aside the three funerals I’ve already done this year).
It makes me reflective. I find myself thinking about how long I’ll live. Certainly no one knows when they’ll die (unless, like Elinor, they are able to plan the moment), but somehow I always think about my own death as somewhere in the nebulous–but distant–future. After all, people my age don’t die of natural causes. . .
Except that as I get older, and age into my forties, more and more of my contemporaries do die of natural causes. Part of that is just the nature of statistics. The longer you live, the greater the chance of dying of natural causes. And as I get older, the people I bury get closer and closer to my own age. Usually that doesn’t strike close to home. This spring, however, it’s beginning to feel personal.
Elinor, Paul and my grandfather represent exactly three generations. My grandfather died at age 91. Paul in his early 60s. Elinor in her early 40s. Death is an equal opportunity employer.
All of which has me feeling just a touch reflective, a touch melancholy. Buy while I am yet above the ground, I will celebrate the day. I will lift a glass of wine to the memories of loved ones who have passed, and savor the flavor of life.
There’s something special about the first cup of coffee in the morning. Both symbol of the start of a new day, and the fuel to make it happen. The first sips are bracing: both hot and somewhat bitter (I drink it with milk, no sugar). It’s the taste of incipient productivity.
The drinking of coffee falls somewhere between an act of self-medication and religious/magical ritual. We (and by “we”, I mean “I”) count on the caffeine to infuse our system, and add the motivation we need to do the things which need to be done. Yet the power lies not just in the caffeine, but in the very act of drinking. In the Jewish mystical tradition, there is a tradition of reciting a meditation before performing a mitzvah: “Here I am, prepared and ready to accept upon myself this mitzvah in order to bring about the unification of the Divine.” Drinking coffee is a similar act, saying, “here I am, prepared and ready to accept upon myself this day, to make of it something productive.” When I drink coffee, I am acknowledging that the day has begun, and that I am trying to make something of this day.
Yet at other times a cup of coffee connotes a very different sentiment. Drinking a bottomless cup of coffee over weekend brunch with friends bespeaks relaxation and a willingness to spend time carelessly together, not counting the moments, but allowing time to flow by at its constant, relaxed, pace. Most different is the cup of coffee drunk after dinner, which I covet as a child might a lollipop, and resist because I know it will cost me sleep: a forbidden fruit which somehow the elder generation drinks with impunity.
Yet for me, it always comes back to that first cup of coffee in the morning: steam rising from the cup as I begin the day, like the smoke of a burnt offering in the ancient Temple rising to heaven each morning without fail. Drinking it slowly, knowing that I can’t be expected to be productive until I’ve finished the cup. Savoring the taste, the smell, and waiting for the caffeine to kick in, and truly wake me up.
