What I love about our crowd-sourced sermons is that it doesn’t matter what I wanted to write about or say in relation to the text I presented, what interested you about this week’s question is now what I have to write about.
This situation actually sums up pretty well a certain tension in our High Holy Day liturgy; in our new machzor (our High Holy Day prayerbook) Mishkan HaNefesh; and in the process of repentance that we undertake during the Holy Days. Who, what, is primary? Is it the individual, me, writing this sermon with things I want to say, or is it the community, and the individual thoughts and experiences that can turn the discussion in ways an individual may not have intended?
Tonight I pray for the State of Israel. And I pray in dismay and worry, having heard the statement from the Prime Minister, broadcast around the world: We are willing to become smaller, so we don’t have to think bigger; we would rather cover the bud than take this chance to bloom.
Do you remember that scene in the movie Mary Poppins when Jane and Michael jump into Burt-the-chimney-sweep’s chalk paintings on the pavement and actually become part of the scene depicted?
I have had one experience in my life where I felt like I stepped into a story. I was in my junior year of college, which I spent studying at the University of Bristol in England. I met my father in Amsterdam for a weekend while he was there for business. As you may know or remember, my mother is Dutch and her entire family is from Amsterdam. When I took this trip, it was my first time in The Netherlands. I took a flight from London, arrived at the Schipol airport outside Amsterdam and boarded a train to the center of the city. I sat on the train…and was devastated to look at the faces around me. I recognized these strangers. They looked like my relatives, the ones I knew, and the ones I only knew through pictures. I felt I could be one of them. I was devastated to feel in that moment that I might be experiencing in some small measure how it looked, the scene, to be on a very different train in the 1940s as the Jews, some of my family members, were transported away from Amsterdam. At the same instant, I knew I could be looking at faces that were not Jewish, and I wondered how those faces would have looked upon that scene of the Jews being rounded up and forced to board that train.
Our discussion on the blog this week was inspired by the question, “What song or piece of music makes you think differently or think deeply?” Some individuals mentioned a particular song and some mentioned a particular text. All talked about how the music makes them think. Two ideas emerged over again.
A continuing theme running through the book of Exodus is the coming and going of both Moses and God. After the lengthy drama of the Exodus, Moses disappears up the mountain and reappears to see the chaos of the episode of The Golden Calf. He is God’s corporeal messenger to Pharoah but absent from the discussion in Parashat T’tzaveh of the priestly responsibilities. God, too, is near when displaying signs and wonders in Egypt and splitting the sea, enabling the Israelites to pass to freedom, and also remote to the Israelites while Moses is up on the mountain receiving the law. Indeed, the whole discussion of the building of the Mishkan (tabernacle) through a great proportion of the book of Exodus revolves around the central question of how God will dwell among the people, so the Israelites understand that something that cannot be seen or touched can feel close.
What does it mean to be present? What does it mean to have presence? Perhaps we best consider our most abstract questions through the abstraction of art.Continue reading
Count the omer and explore the attribute of tiferet, beauty, by witnessing the power of live theater at our production of The Fiery Furnace, Sunday May 4 at 4 pm at RS.
We are staging an original musical right here in this sanctuary on Sunday, May 4. The Fiery Furnace: A New Rock Musical was written for us and directed by John Rea, the director of MacGuffin Theater and Film Company here in Center City, and it features 30 of our Mercaz Limud students ages 5-15.
The story is based on an episode from the book of Daniel. It features big characters, heroic and brave acts, passionate proclamations of faith, and, best of all, dreams and visions. It lends itself so easily to a larger than life musical in the tradition of Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (and wait until you see some of the costumes).
Let me tell you about this piano. It belonged to my grandmother, and for the last 11 years it has belonged to me. My grandmother, Philly Krieks, was Dutch, born and raised in Amsterdam. She and one of her two sisters studied music and sang in the Concertgebouw Orchestra Chorus, the volunteer chorus for Amsterdam’s orchestra. My grandmother survived the Holocaust living in Amsterdam with fake identification papers. Her other sister worked for the Dutch underground and one night, while my grandmother waited and worried at the window as she did every night, she did not come home. She died in one of the camps.
My grandparents bought this piano in the early 1980s when they lived in a high rise in Ft. Lee, New Jersey, on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, with a view of the entire Manhattan skyline. I credit the seeds of my childhood love affair with New York City and my choice to attend college there to the evenings I spent as a young child, face pressed against the sliding door on the balcony, watching the lights of that skyline. Only a few years after purchasing the piano, my grandfather passed away at a young age. Most of my memories of my grandmother are of her alone.
She moved this piano with her when she relocated in the Boston area. She was a very present part of my life as I grew up, and I remember distinctly the phone call I had with her as a young adult when I knew that things had irrevocably changed. She didn’t know who I was on the phone and she tried to talk to me as if she knew our relationship, but it was clear to me that she did not. She retreated into Alzheimer’s and unfortunately spent her final years lost to the disease. When she moved into a facility that could care for her, the piano was left to me, her oldest grandchild, and the one who had chosen a musical career.
I see my grandmother in this week’s Torah portion. We read in Tazria of a series of ritual impurities: childbirth, leprosy, skin afflictions. These impurities are called in Hebrew tamei. When someone is found to be tamei, she or he is isolated from the rest of the community for a period of time until she or he is considered tahor, pure again. The concept of tamei, the act of drawing a distinction between what is pure and what is impure, is clearly an ancient approach to dealing with the anxiety of illness and death, the fear of these unknowable and uncontrollable experiences. When faced with something we don’t understand, we want to isolate it from everything we want to protect. The intention of this ancient practice was always to return the one who was tamei to the community, the isolation was not permanent, as long as the person became tahor. When I consider my grandmother’s story, I consider this Torah portion from the point of view of the isolated. She experienced the isolation of tamei in two striking ways: first living through the terror of World War II, and then experiencing the deterioration of her memory.
So many things in modern life too, not just in the ancient world, are unknowable, unfathomable, inexplicable. So many things can make us feel isolated and alone. The songwriter Patty Griffin captures this in her song, The Rowing Song. Griffin creates a melody that feels like sitting in a boat on the ocean, traveling. “Nobody knows,” she says “so many things, so out of range, sometimes so strange, sometimes so sweet, sometimes so lonely.” And while we may feel at those moments that we are the ones who are tamei, that we are, Griffin says “alone all of the way,” we are, she says “alone…and alive.” In the isolation, in feeling alone, we can find life, the feeling of knowing we are alive.
For the isolation, both in Tazria and in modern day life, does not stop the journey of life. “The further I go” Griffin’s song says, “more letters from home never arrive.” We might lose touch, we might have to wait to be reconnected with the community, but we should never doubt that we are still very much alive. Whether it is the horrors of history or the horrors of illness that isolate any of us, we can find life.
My grandmother had music, and I firmly believe that music kept her connected in her darkest moments of isolation to the sparks of life within her. Even as her disease progressed she would brighten when she heard a piano playing. Music was the touchstone that reminded her she was alive, a letter from home that every once in a while actually arrived. She is no longer traveling on a journey of life, but her piano is. And the sound of this piano is one of my touchstones, a letter from home that arrived to me. I hear the piano and I picture it sitting in my grandmother’s different apartments. We all have our touchstones, the things that remind us in our isolation that we’re alive. There is so much we don’t know, so much that scares us. Find the thing that awakens life within you.
For me too, like my grandmother, it is music.
Given her ambivalent feelings about religion after her experience in Europe in the 1940s, I’m not sure what she would think about her piano in this room. But she would love that it will be played regularly and enjoyed immensely, bringing music to all who enter this space. I’m glad to share this piano, this music, and tonight this song, The Rowing Song, with you.
Some might think I’ve been spending too much time in The Fiery Furnace. (That’s the title of the original musical we are producing this spring starring our very own cast of RS students, based on a story from the Book of Daniel.) But everywhere I look this week, I see fire.
In Parashat Tzav, only a couple of parshiot into the book of Leviticus, fire is mentioned a lot. The description of each of the sacrifices brought to the priest describes the fire’s role in the process. It’s the fire that creates the burnt offering, that burns the meal offering, that consumes entirely the sin offering. The parsha begins with a discussion of the how the priest should dress himself and how he should keep the altar, before the long discussion of the different offerings commences. Eish tamid tukad al hamizbeach, lo tichbeh. The fire shall be burning always upon the altar; it shall never go out. (Levit. 6:6)
Fire is dangerous. Fire is powerful. Fire is beautiful. But fire is literally not tangible. You know fire, you feel it, you see it, you perhaps understand it or can even explain it, but you cannot hold it. Fire exists to transform.
The moment I hear something familiar in a new way, I feel a charge that to me epitomizes what it means to be alive. The moment engages us in its call to consider.
I most recently experienced one of these moments listening to the radio in my car. I heard Bon Iver, a contemporary musical artist, sing his cover of the song I Can’t Make You Love Me, made famous originally by Bonnie Raitt. Within only a few seconds of listening everything in me rushed to attention, to appreciate the beauty of the music and to notice the moment when suddenly I’m making connections all over the place, when the many tracks of my life miraculously converge to travel the same path together for a while.
It is the week of resolutions. Are you off on the right foot? How did you strengthen yourself to approach your new beginnings with a full heart, with full intention, and the will to not look back?
I found inspiration for this new secular year in a different type of source this week. My daughter and I have been reading Anne of Green Gables together for months now and this week we finished the book. Continue reading
