Parashat Naso

            Shabbat Shalom! You may not be surprised to hear that I am often asked why I wear a kippah. People of many backgrounds seem to find this confusing, particularly because I am a woman. And those who know me better like to tease me for the number of kippot I own and how I match them to my outfits. I feel connected to my head coverings and enjoy trying to make them fashionable for myself because it brings God into my mundane every day things like getting dressed. It’s not just an afterthought or something I do because I feel commanded to or expected to, it’s something I think about in the morning before setting out on my day. I also don’t wear one 100% of the time, and that is also a part of my considerations as I prepare for my day. What is on my schedule or to do list today? Are they things I want to physically feel God’s presence above me for? If so, are they in spaces I will feel comfortable wearing a kippah or do I want to opt for a less obvious head covering like a hat or bandana?

            All this to say that sometimes it is possible and even important to bring God into some decisions that may seem outside the realm of the holy and sacred. This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Naso, for example, spends considerable time discussing hair. The Torah tells us that it is possible for people to take stringent vows to commit themselves more deeply to God, but that they do not do this indefinitely. Nazirite vows are to be for a finite period, and this can be a predetermined time, or it can be cut off if a Nazirite accidently comes upon something that defiles his vows. During the time of his purity and commitment to HaShem, Nazirites are not to drink wine or cut their hair, as well abstain from feasts and fast more often than the proscribed fasts. The rabbis disagree about the righteousness of these decisions, which I think is preemptively why they are limited in time to begin with.

            As I was reading through the parasha this week, Numbers 6:9 caught my eye: “If a person dies suddenly near him, defiling his consecrated hair, he shall shave his head on the day he becomes clean; he shall shave it on the seventh day.” It reminded me of the last time I went to the mikveh, in 2015. You may or may not know about me that I have donated my hair several times to non-profits that make and distribute free wigs for cancer and alopecia patients. I like to time these dramatic 10-or-more-inch haircuts to coincide with transitions in my life (following high school and college graduation and getting married, etc.). I had planned to wait until 2016 and cut my hair around the time of my ordination. But the 2014-2015 school year had been a bit tougher than the previous three, and my hair was already more than long enough, and I decided I was ready for a change. Feeling inspired by an amazing course on “Architecture of Ritual” I took that year, I schedule a mikveh date and planned a meaningful, personal ritual with the help of a mikveh guide from ImmerseNYC, an organization that helps provide less traditional but no less meaningful mikveh rituals for people of all genders. The morning of my mikveh date, I cut off about a foot of hair. I didn’t quite shave my head, but it was pretty short. Then I went directly from the hair salon in Brooklyn to the West Side Mikveh in upper Manhattan (the mikveh that allows ImmerseNYC to use its facilities) and felt the purifying living waters of the mikveh run through my freshly shorn hair and over my newly bared neck. I still had the braid in my purse to mail to wigmakers.

I hadn’t been around any death within that previous seven days, but I felt I needed a cleansing and a haircut similar to that which is described in this parasha. In the time of the Torah, mikvot hadn’t quite been established yet – they’re still wandering in the desert; it’s hard to guarantee a pool of fresh water will be available any time someone needs a cleansing. But they did have a process of anointing the person with oil to signify their cleansing after the appropriate time of separation that established the person’s purification. The Torah doesn’t specify if this cleansing was done before or after the haircut on the seventh day of the Nazirite’s purification, but based on my experience I would hope after. I felt so free to be purified by the waters of the mikveh without being weighed down by long and heavy wet hair.

After my most recent donation, I got a letter back from the organization that they now have enough hair to make wigs to meet their projected needs for the next ten years and do not need anymore hair for a while. I heard from other friends who have also donated their hair that many of these types of organizations have said the same thing. So now for the first time in nearly 20 years I don’t really know what I want to do with my hair. My previous process felt holy – the big chop was always so freeing and helped me through transition periods of life, but mostly I did it for the mitzvah of helping children coping with serious illnesses that also cause them baldness. As I think through more ways to continue to mark endings and beginnings for myself, to show my honor for the Divine through mundane acts, and to bring holiness for myself into my daily life, I encourage you to do the same if you don’t already think about these things. How can you include Judaism in your regular decision making as you get dressed, decide on what to eat for dinner, how you wear your hair, how you move from one stage of life to another? Jewish tradition has many guidelines to help you, but there is so much room to go beyond halakha, and especially as Reform Jews it is up to each of us to find the rituals that make our lives most meaningful and lead us more toward a life path directed always toward tikkun olam. May you find your little rituals that bring you sanctity and peace, and guide you toward acts of tzedakah. And since this parasha also contains the priestly benediction: May HaShem bless you and keep you, may HaShem shine on you and be gracious to you, may HaShem lift Their face toward you, and give you peace.

Parashat Bechukotai

Shabbat Shalom! Tonight we count Day 42 of the Omer, which has the mystical meaning of Malchut of Yesod, majesty in foundations. In this realm, we experience revelation as a part of our spiritual foundation and seek stability or comfort in the presence of Shekhina.

Shavuot is fast approaching, during which time we will celebrate the revelation on Mount Sinai, the receiving of the Ten Commandments, and the Earth-shaking potentiality of God's power.

In this week's Torah portion, Parashat Bechukotai, we hear about statutes and laws. The word chok (“statute” or “decree”), which gives the Parshah of Bechukotai its name, literally means “engraved.”

Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi said, "The Torah comes in two forms: written and engraved. On the last day of his life, Moses inscribed the Torah on parchment scrolls. But this written Torah was preceded by an engraved Torah: the divine law was first given to us encapsulated in the Ten Commandments, which were etched by the hand of G‑d in two tablets of stone. When something is written, the substance of the letters that express it—the ink—remains a separate entity from the substance upon which they have been set—the parchment. On the other hand, letters engraved in stone are forged in it: the words are stone and the stone is words. By the same token, there is an aspect of Torah that is “inked” on our soul: we understand it, our emotions are roused by it; it becomes our “lifestyle” or even our “personality”; but it remains something additional to ourselves. But there is a dimension of Torah that is chok, engraved in our being. There is a dimension of Torah which expresses a bond with G‑d that is of the very essence of the Jewish soul."

As we count down our last week of the Omer and prepare to celebrate the festival of our theophany, I encourage you all to start thinking about which pieces of Torah are inked onto your being and which are engraved. When have you experienced joy of learning Torah or known the right thing to do by Jewish values, and when have you experienced true revelation, Divine inspiration, or out of body awareness of Truth? How do you carry these moments through your life and how will you teach of them to those who after? May you find joy in your revelations, majesty in your foundations, and peace in your souls. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

Parashat Acharei Mot and Yom HaShoa

Omer Day 14: Unlock Your Heart

By Alden Solovy

This is part prayer, part insight, part inspiration. It’s about the yearning for a certain kind of nobility that comes from allowing G-d’s gifts to enter our hearts, the kind of nobility that requires self-confidence, self-care, and self-discipline. I use this prayer for the 14th night of the counting of the Omer, Nobility in Discipline (Malkhut Sheb’Gevurah).

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Unlock Your Heart

Come,

Unlock your heart,

Open the gates

So your soul may enter.

Splendor.

  Radiance.

    Awe.

Let the spark of holiness

And the gift of humanity

Meet in the core of your being.

Wisdom.

  Glory.

    Truth.

Let the echo of the ages

And the yearning for tomorrow

Sing a duet of eternity.

Mystery.

  Majesty.

    Wonder.

Then, dear sisters and brothers,

Your hands will become a fountain of blessings,

And your eyes will become wells of love.

Your words will resonate with Torah,

And your deeds will glorify G-d’s Holy Name.

Acharei Mot

This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Acharei Mot, which literally means, “After the deaths,” situating this narrative a few weeks back, immediately following Parashat Shemini. In Parashat Shemini, as we are reminded at the beginning of Parashat Acharei Mot, Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu “came close to G‑d and died (Lev 16:1).”  The Midrash Tanchuma responds to this line in Acharei Mot by quote Ecclesiastes, “Everything [happens] to everyone, the same lot [falls] to the righteous and to the wicked” (9:1).

            Of course, not everything really happens to everyone, but anyone is vulnerable to terrible tragedies, regardless of their innocence. It is unclear what Nadav and Avihu’s crimes really were, and it is something Jews having been struggling with for thousands of years. Why did God strike down these boys? We may ask ourselves similar questions to the struggles in our own lives or to the horrors of the world – poverty, starvation, climate change, bigotry, war, and genocide. The Torah describes the deaths of Nadav and Avihu as from the “fire of the Lord,” but God is fairly silent on the matter. It’s generally taken to mean that God very intentionally killed them. In today’s misfortunes, we may have a more sophisticated understanding of God and the world and know that God created ordered and a set of rules of nature, including humankind’s free will. Accordingly, we have natural disasters and famine and illness, and we have to contend with the evil of others, and there’s little God has to do with the every day goings-on of our lives. Perhaps the strange fire that Nadav and Avihu brought into the Mishkan in Parashat Shemini caused some kind of explosion and the fire that killed them was also in accordance with the laws of nature. Laws that God created, thus it is still “a fire from the Lord,” but God’s intention to kill them is removed from the narrative. If the righteous and the wicked alike are subject to heartbreak and pain, it is hard for me to believe that God has an active role in doling out such catastrophes.

            I recently reread Howard Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People in which he argues that we should reframe our cries of anguish in tough times from, “Why is God doing this to me?!” or “Why would God let this happen?!” to “How can God help me endure this?” He invokes German theologian Dorothee Soelle several times throughout the book, but it is in the final chapter that I found the most useful piece of advice or theology. Soelle introduces the concept of “the devil’s martyrs.” She swivels from the common honor bestowed upon those who die in the name of God, the righteous whose unfaltering faith inspires others even as those left behind mourn their loss, whom we normally call martyrs. She suggests on the flip side that if the death of a loved one, or the knowledge of a tragic mass death across the world, causes someone to lose faith in God or humanity, to lose hope and love in themselves, then their loss is martyrdom for the devil. Kushner says, “It is not the circumstances of their death that makes them witnesses for or against God. It is our reaction to their death” (p.151). Both Soelle and Kushner ask that we honor the dead by carrying on in life with love and forgiveness in our hearts. Even if we cannot forgive the source of our pain per se, we can forgive the world for containing evil, God for creating laws of nature that allow for sadness and pain, and ourselves for any survivor’s guilt we feel. We can share the love that we have been given by so many in our lives and we can pass that on to more people, building up a new world of love to combat hate and to comfort those with little else to comfort them.

            In Parashat Acharei Mot, after the time-setting reminder, the Torah gets right back into Sacrifice Mode and Aaron goes right back to living his life, serving God and the People of Israel, and performing the first of what becomes the ancient Yom Kippur ritual with the scapegoats. Nadav and Avihu died trying in their fervor to get close to God, and Aaron best honors their memories by helping the community get closer to God as well. This is how he ensures that they have been martyrs for God and not the devil, despite the reasons they may have died.

             This week, as we remember the millions who died in the Shoa and as we rest on our first Shabbat since the latest antisemitic terror attack in this country, even as we mourn and feel the fear and anger in the world, we also are resolute in our commitment to fight bigotry wherever we see it. We honor those who have died in genocide by fighting fresh genocides, like the current situation in Burma. We honor those killed by hate crimes by ensuring that all identity-based discriminatory violence is seen for what it is and given the proper justice. We honor all our ancestors and loved ones who have gone before us by loving and embracing this broken world, and vowing to work to fix it. May we do them proud, and may their memories forever be a blessing. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.