At the Thanksgivukkah Table: Stories, Rituals and Conversations

Following the ideas in my Thanksgivukkah Manifesto, here are some suggestions for conversations, rituals and activities for Thanksgivukkah night. I’d love to hear your suggestions and ideas – you can reach me at mishzion @ gmail com, or just leave a comment on this post.

Spark Conversations:

It isn't Passover, I have few illusions of getting into anything to elaborate. But a few pointed questions can get a good conversation going, even with the football in the background…

• The juxtaposition of Christmas and Hanukkah is so strong in our minds and has served as a crucial part of American Jewish identity building. What “happens” when Hanukkah is juxtaposed with Thanksgiving? What similarities and tensions does this raise? What does it mean for Judaism in America?
• Thanksgiving is an opportunity to take stock of the “American Project”. How are we doing? Where does your own story fit into this idea? What are the ways we dedicate energy and resources to bettering this country and furthering this project? And what is the role of criticism and counterculture in this project?
•           The fantastic folks at Ask Big Questions put together a conversation guide for asking "What are you Thankful for".  Use it with your family at Thanksgiving. Get a group of friends together around the fireplace during the long weekend. Or invite your neighbors from down the hall or around the block for a living room conversation.
• If Thanksgiving was a Jewish holiday, how would it look different? What laws, rituals or prayers would it have?
• Many of us struggle with Thanksgiving’s founding myths – the relationship to the Indians, the unclear religious roots. The same if often true of Jewish founding myths. What lessons can we learn from these various struggles?

Tell Stories:

Families tell stories in many ways, not just the overt “once upon a time”. Thankgivukkah is a powerful opportunity to unearth some of those family stories. Some stories to look out for:

•           Have someone share a story of a first Thanksgiving in America – from an immigrant or an older participant; or try and research your family’s earliest Thanksgivings…
•           Of the various ethnicities or families around the table, what has been the path to Americanness of each family, and what “additional” identities continue to play out in America?
•           Participate in StoryCorps’ National Day of Listening (http://nationaldayoflistening.org/) 
•           Hanukkah is the holiday of Jewish heroes – from the Maccabees to Bella Abzug, a great Jewish American heroine. What “heroes” do you recall on Thanksgivukkah?

Invent Rituals:

•           Sharing a moment of rooted gratitude, with three lenses: Something one is grateful for in the present, in relation to the past, and with a hope to the future.
•           Much has been made of various Thanksgivukkah recipes. As you eat them, have someone “say something” about the stories or values hidden within this food.
•           Some families celebrate Thanksgiving with ritual readings – like Winthrop’s City on a Hill, Emma Lazarus’ New Collosus, and some have even formed a Thanksgiving Haggadah. What would you read on Thanksgivukkah?
•           Put the giving back in Thanksgiving. Stefanie Zelkind offers Eight Giving Rituals for Your Family: Making the Most of Thanksgivukkah
•        JewishBoston has a wonderful pintrest style Thanksgivukkah site with a whole lot of resources and ideas.

What else? Let us know and we'll feature it here!

“Giving up the Art of Laughter?”: Isaac, After the Akeidah

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Bronfman Fellowships | Text and the City | Hayey Sarah 2013

George Segal, Avraham offering his son Isaac, 1973

After the Akeidah. Is there such a thing? “No poetry after Auschwitz,” said Adorno - would Isaac agree?

This week’s Torah portion focuses on the finding of a wife for Isaac, but he is barely mentioned in the process, inviting us to consider Isaac’s life after the Akeidah.

The truth is that Isaac is the blandest of the Patriarchs. The Biblical spotlight barely focuses on him. He seems to always play the supporting cast to his father/wife/neighbors/twin sons. Someone else is sent to find him a wife, he spends his life digging his father’s wells only to have them blocked or stolen by others, and finally gets tricked by his son in his old age.  Perhaps Adorno is right, and Issac’s life is to be understood as the poetry-less life of a survivor of patricide (interestingly, his son Jacob describes God as “the God of Avraham and the Fear of Isaac” Gen 31:42).

Elie Wiesel however presents a different take, focusing on the things which we might take for granted about Isaac:

 Isaac survived. He had no choice. He had to make something of his memories, his experience, in order to force us to hope. Isaac represents defiance. He defied death. Logically, he should have pursued oblivion. Instead he settled on his land, married, had children, refusing to let fate turn him into a bitter man.

He felt neither hatred nor anger toward his contemporaries who did not share his experience. On the contrary, he liked them and showed concern for their well-being. After Moriah, he devoted his life and his right to immortality to the defense of his people. He will be entitled to say anything he likes to God, ask anything of Him.

Because he suffered? No. Suffering confers no privileges. Rather Isaac knew how to transform his suffering into prayer and love rather than into rancor and malediction. This is what gives him rights and powers no other man possesses.

And as the first survivor, he had to teach us, the future survivors of Jewish history, that it is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.  (Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God.  pg 92)

Isaac’s calling, according to Wiesel’s auto-biographical projection, is in transforming the most traumatic moment in his life into a resource for his community. He is to become an advocate on behalf of those who suffer in silence. Wiesel’s point highlights one of the rare moments in which Isaac takes agency. When Rebecca is barren, he prays on her behalf, turning “his suffering into prayer and love rather than into rancor and malediction”:

And Isaac entreated God in presence of his wife, because she was barren; and God let Himself be entreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived. (Gen 25:21)

וַיֶּעְתַּר יִצְחָק לַיי לְנֹכַח אִשְׁתּוֹ, כִּי עֲקָרָה הִוא; וַיֵּעָתֶר לוֹ יי, וַתַּהַר רִבְקָה אִשְׁתּוֹ. (בראשית כה:כא)

Isaac’s behavior puts his heroic father to shame. How come Avraham, in all those years of Sarah’s barrenness, never “entreated God in presence of his wife”? Returning to Wiesel’s words above, I wonder if this is in some way connected to the “Art of Laughter”, and the connection between knowing how to pray and knowing how to laugh. Prayer is indeed laughable, in the deepest sense. Both come across as the most primal of human responses, irrational and yet totally real. They are both actions that embody full presence-in-the-moment, seemingly not representing action, but actually offering a third way. Laughter and Prayer break the evolutionary psychologist’s dichotomy of “Fight or Flight”. Avraham knew how to fight, and he know how to run. But, perhaps, he didn’t know how to laugh.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mishael

P.S. Yehuda Amichai completely disagrees with Elie Wiesel in this poem:

Avraham had three sons, not just two

Avraham had three sons: Yishmael Yitzchak and Yivkeh.

No one has ever heard of Yivkeh, for he was the youngest

And the most beloved, who was sacrificed on Har Hamoriah.

Yishmael was saved by his mother, Hagar; Yitzchak saved by the angel.

But Yivkeh was not saved by anyone. When he was young,

His father would call him, in love, Yivkeh, Yivk, little Yevk

My sweetie. But he sacrificed him in the Akedah.

And in the Torah it says a ram, but it was Yivkeh.

Yishmael never again heard about God, the rest of his life.

Yitzchak never again laughed, the rest of his life.

And Sarah only laughed once, and never again.

Avraham had three sons,

Yishma, Yitzchak, Yivkeh

Yishmael, Yitzchakel, Yivke-el.

Yehuda Amichai 

The Akeidah in Context: After What Events?

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Bronfman Fellowships | Text and the City | VaYera 2013

“Now after these events it was that God tested Avraham” (Genesis 21:1)

What events? What events could possibly serve as a pretext for sending a father to slaugh

ter his son? We usually dismiss the opening of the most intense story in the Torah as the Biblical version of “Once upon a time”. But re-reading the opening verses of the Akeidah one is struck by the exactness of the Biblical prose, more a poetry to be read slowly, with long pauses between the lines for maximum effect:

Now after these events it was that God tested Avraham And said to him: Avraham! He said: Hineni [Here I am]. He said: Pray take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Yitzhak, and go-you-forth to the land of Moriah/Seeing, and offer him up there as an offering-up Upon one of the mountains that I shall tell you.’   (Genesis 20:1-3)

(א) וַיְהִי אַחַר הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה וְהָאֱלֹהִים נִסָּה אֶת אַבְרָהָם וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו אַבְרָהָם וַיֹּאמֶר הִנֵּנִי: (ב) וַיֹּאמֶר קַח נָא אֶת בִּנְךָ אֶת יְחִידְךָ אֲשֶׁר אָהַבְתָּ אֶת יִצְחָק וְלֶךְ לְךָ אֶל אֶרֶץ הַמֹּרִיָּה וְהַעֲלֵהוּ שָׁם לְעֹלָה עַל אַחַד הֶהָרִים אֲשֶׁר אֹמַר אֵלֶיךָ:

The Torah does not mince words, and while many readers of the Akeidah stress the irrationality of God’s commandment, emphasizing the lack of pretext for God’s call to offer-up Isaac as the real meaning of the “Knight of Faith” moment, some commentators have pointed at a specific act of Isaac’s parents as the impetus for the Akeidah, a mistake or sin which brought God to seek to “test” Avraham (or Sarah). In this reading, the terrible ordeal is not an act of religious courage, but rather the psychological penance of the sinner.

Uncovering their words shows us again how the Akedah is used as the threshing floor of ideas, ideologies and moral conflicts. Tell me how you understand the Akedah and I will tell you what your most basic beliefs are.

The Punishment #1: Pre-mature Peace

Rashbam, Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, grandson of Rashi, is well known as the champion of “pshat”, the simple/literal reading of the Biblical text. This is how he unpacks our opening verse:

“Now after these events” – every place where it says “after these events” – it is to make a connection to the previous passage…. Here too it refers to “after the events” in which Avraham cut a covenant with Avimelech, the local Philistine king, binding himself, his children and grandchildren. And for that God became incensed with him, for the land of the Philistines was given to Avraham – [and not to Avimelech]. Therefore God tested Avraham, taunting and tormenting him… saying: “You have become haughty in the son that I gave you, seeking to create a covenant between your sons and Avimelech’s sons – now go and raise him as an offering up and see what good your covenant with Avimelech has caused…”

ויהי אחר הדברים האלה - כל מקום שנאמר אחר הדברים האלה מחובר אל הפרשה שלמעלה... אף כאן אחר הדברים שכרת אברהם ברית לאבימלך לו ולנינו ולנכדו של אברהם ונתן לו שבע כבשות הצאן וחרה אפו של הקב"ה על זאת שהרי ארץ פלשתים ניתן לאברהם... לכן והאלהים נסה את אברהם. קנתרו וצערו  ... כלומר נתגאיתה בבן שנתתי לך לכרות ברית ביניכם ובין בניהם. ועתה לך והעלהו לעולה וראה מה הועילה כריתות ברית שלך

It is unclear from Rashbam’s interpretation what incensed God more – Avraham compromising over the promised land, a pragmatic move of the new father seeking to protect his son from war; or the cutting of a covenant with anyone other than God. In His anger, he punishes Avraham, “tormenting and taunting him” – with the test of the Akeidah. Rashbam doesn’t balk at Divine anger and torment - the religious meaning of the Akeidah for Rashbam is not to sacrifice one’s child - God never intended that as a holy act, rather the redirecting of Avraham from a covenant with Avimelech back to the covenant with God.

Alongside the ocntemporary political reading inherent here, I hear another point: Rashbam is highlighting the fact that Avraham lost his way, settled for less and compromised. He lacked the courage to “have it all” – a struggle many young parents face. While Rashbam’s God seems quite ruthless, it does provide a most powerful context for this test: Avraham, now a parent, is torn between his calling as parent, pragmatic leader and visionary careerist.

The Punishment #2 :The Ostentatious Bar Mitzva

Who do we celebrate with? Who do we invite into our circles of gratitude? For the Zohar, the edict of the Akeidah was given as a response to this question, decided in the heavens as Avraham and Sarah were celebrating Yitzhak down below. Focusing on a different “event” which preceded the Akeidah, the celebration of Yitzhak’s coming of age, the Zohar tells the following story:

That pernicious prosecutor [Satan?] was standing at the doorway. As soon as Sarah said “God has made a mockery of me” – the prosecutor immediately rose up before God and said: Master of the World, you have called him “Avraham who loves me”, yet Avraham made a meal and did not offer anything up to you, nor to those more unfortunate then he [מסכנים]…” Immediately God said: Who in the world is like Avraham? God did not move from there until he overturned all that joy, and commanded to offer up Yitzhak as a sacrifice, and for Sarah to die in sorrow over her son. And all this sorrow was caused because they did not offer anything to those less fortunate than they. (Zohar I:11a)

וההוא מקטרגא על פתחא, אמרה שרה צחוק עשה לי אלהי"ם, מיד סליק ההוא מקטרגא קמי קב"ה ואמר ליה, רבון עלמא את אמרת אברהם אוהבי, הא אברהם עבד סעודתא ולא יהיב לך מידי, ולאו למסכני, ולא קריב קדמך אפילו יונה חד, ותו אמרת שרה דחייכת בה, אמר ליה קב"ה, מאן בעלמא כאברהם, ולא זז מתמן עד דבלבל כל ההיא חדוה, ופקיד קב"ה למקרב ליצחק קרבנא, ואתגזר על שרה דתמות על צערא דברה, כל ההוא צערא גרים דלא יהיב מידי למסכנא. (זהר ח"א יא.)

In Avraham’s haste to leave the company of the unlucky and sterile as he joined the ranks of the successful and fertile, the great host relinquished his commitment to those less lucky then him – and with God. Perhaps, suggests the Zohar, forgetting God and forgetting the needy are the same thing. Only be returning to the prospect of losing everything can Avraham be brought back to being the person who loves God, and doesn’t turn a blind eye to those less fortunate than he.

The Punishment #3: Sarah and Hagar

Modern-day readers have suggested a third sin which the Akeidah might be a punishment for: the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael. Prof. Uriel Simon shows the many parallels between the two narratives: an edict banishing a son, preparations early in the morning, divine intervention saving the child from the father’s death-sentence, etc. Comparing Genesis 20 and 21 is an eye opening experience in Biblical literary parallels – perhaps it is after “Those events” that the Akeidah was decided upon? Avraham, claims Prof. Simon, must be taken through the same experience he inflicted on his “unchosen” child as a punishment for his behavior. If the above Rashbam can be read as a call to only focus on God/Jews, ignoring the other inhabitants of the land, Prof. Simon points us in the opposite direction.

In a similar vein, Rabbi Lynn Gottleib, in her poem “Achti” (sister in Arabic), turns our attention to the unsung victim of the Akeidah, Sarah, suggesting she is just as much the perpetrator of it. In Gottleib’s reading the Akedah serves as a punishment or re-education for Sarah, who taken through the process of losing her own son, realizes the pain and suffering she inflicted on her employee-turned-rival Hagar:

Only at the end

When I witnessed my young son screaming under his father's knife

Only then

Did I realize our common suffering.

Forgive me, Achti

For the sin of neglect

For the sin of abuse

For the sin of arrogance

Forgive me, Achti,

For the sin of not knowing your name.

Shutdown, Slimdown, Babylon: The Dangers of One Language

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Bronfman Fellowships | Text and the City | Noach 2013

“Now all the land was of one language and one set-of-words.” (Gen 11:1)

וַיְהִי כָל-הָאָרֶץ שָׂפָה אֶחָת וּדְבָרִים אֲחָדִים

Rarely do current events illuminate a Biblical text as poignantly as the poker game currently unfolding in  our

Fox News coverage

nation’s capital does. The story of the Tower of Babel, which we reread in this week’s Torah portion, is receiving a contemporary reinterpretation on the National Mall. Yet in this post-modern theatrical revival, there are not one, but two towers. On either side of Washington, two severe ideological-political towers have risen, and each side has locked itself in, speaking to itself in “one language and one set-of-words”. Each side has its own blogs, newspapers, TV channels, court jesters, and of course its own “set-of-words” to describe the unfolding reality (the “Tea Party Shutdown” vs. the “Slimdown”). Hearing each side tell the story, one can barely correlate it to the tale being told in the other language.

Granted, some might feel that only one side is stuck in an insular Tower of Babel. But what the current shutdown illuminates so powerfully in our Biblical text is that “the sin” at Babel was not the content of their actions or the values they held. It wasn’t that the people at Babel were idolaters, or rebelling against God, as many commentators hold. Rather, the problem was in their unity and uniformity. Rabbi Naphtali Zvi Berlin, the Netziv, in his commentary on the Torah “HaAmek Davar”, makes this point:

“Now all the land was of one language and one set-of-words” – God did not rise against them because of the content of their beliefs, but because they had only one set-of-words – regardless of their content. For their “set-of-words” became an obstacle to them, as they decided to terminate anyone who did not think like them. (Netziv, Ha’amek Davar Genesis 11:1)

'ויהי כל הארץ שפה אחת ודברים אחדים' – לא משום הדברים התעורר הקב"ה, כי אם בשביל שהיו אחדים, יהיו מה שיהיו... היו 'דברים אחדים' שביניהם לרועץ, שהחליטו להרוג את מי שלא יחשוב כדעתם.

Unity and agreement – desirable in their own right - became insular. Their air-tight logic turned into a suffocating collectivity. Within the confines of their own language, the people of Babel could no longer understand any alternative but their own. So taken by their “one set of words”, they could no longer tolerate anything foreign to it.

Much has been made recently of that fact that America has become a place where people of similar opinions

live, work, worship, study, marry and even shop in separate “lands”, receiving their news from “information siloes” in which they hear only what they already think to be true. Have we become a series of Babels ourselves? When is the moment when shared language becomes insularity, when solidarity becomes impermeability, when talking to those who share our values becomes solipsism?

I don’t have a solution to the intellectual and cultural divides in Washington. I also happen to believe that one side here is deeply correct while the other has made a grave error of judgment, one side is stuck in a tower in my opinion, the other is perhaps inching towards it. But I believe one lesson worth learning this week is that we need constant safeguards from becoming siloed in the “land of one language and one set-of-words”, and we need to ensure that our opponents don’t silo themselves off either.

The Bible offers a very strange solution to the challenge of “one-speak”:

“Let us go down and there let us baffle their language,

So that no man will understand the language of his neighbor.”

So God scattered them from these over the face of all the earth,

And they had to stop building the city.

Therefore its name was called Babble.

It is the tale of the invention of foreign languages, the creation of bafflement. Learning to decipher a foreign language, exposing oneself to the incomprehensible, recognizing that one person’s Babble is someone else’s common sense, are crucial safeguards against the destructive insularity of Babel. I do not apologize for the fact that I understand myself and the world through the boundaries of my own language, but I know that there are others languages out there, and that makes a world of difference. If we’re ever going to build some towers together, we’re going to have to make room for a whole lot of affable bafflement, otherwise we’ll never get very far.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mishael

p.s. Inspired by the Tower of Babble, and in the spirit of the ridiculousness of some of our leaders, I have been playing  Bob Dylan’s 1961 rendition of a “foreign song I learned in Utah”.

Now all the land was of one language and one set-of-words. And it was when they migrated to the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said, each man to his neighbor: Come-now! Let us bake bricks and let us burn them well-burnt! So for them brick-stone was like building-stone, and raw-bitument was for them like red-mortar. And they said: “Come-now! Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, its top in the heavens, And let us make ourselves a name, Lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth!” But God came down to look over the city and the tower that the humans were building, and said: “Here, they are one people with one language for them all, and this is merely the first of their doings – Now there will be no barrier for them in all that they scheme to do! Come-now! Let us go down and there let us baffle their language, So that no man will understand the language of his neighbor.” So God scattered them from these over the face of all the earth, And they had to stop building the city. Therefore its name was called Bavel/Babble, For there God baffled the language of all the earth-folk, And from there, God scattered them over the face of the earth. (Genesis 11:1-9)

א וַיְהִי כָל-הָאָרֶץ, שָׂפָה אֶחָת, וּדְבָרִים, אֲחָדִים.  ב וַיְהִי, בְּנָסְעָם מִקֶּדֶם; וַיִּמְצְאוּ בִקְעָה בְּאֶרֶץ שִׁנְעָר, וַיֵּשְׁבוּ שָׁם.  ג וַיֹּאמְרוּ אִישׁ אֶל-רֵעֵהוּ, הָבָה נִלְבְּנָה לְבֵנִים, וְנִשְׂרְפָה, לִשְׂרֵפָה; וַתְּהִי לָהֶם הַלְּבֵנָה, לְאָבֶן, וְהַחֵמָר, הָיָה לָהֶם לַחֹמֶר.  ד וַיֹּאמְרוּ הָבָה נִבְנֶה-לָּנוּ עִיר, וּמִגְדָּל וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם, וְנַעֲשֶׂה-לָּנוּ, שֵׁם:  פֶּן-נָפוּץ, עַל-פְּנֵי כָל-הָאָרֶץ.  ה וַיֵּרֶד ה’, לִרְאֹת אֶת-הָעִיר וְאֶת-הַמִּגְדָּל, אֲשֶׁר בָּנוּ, בְּנֵי הָאָדָם.  ו וַיֹּאמֶר ה’, הֵן עַם אֶחָד וְשָׂפָה אַחַת לְכֻלָּם, וְזֶה, הַחִלָּם לַעֲשׂוֹת; וְעַתָּה לֹא-יִבָּצֵר מֵהֶם, כֹּל אֲשֶׁר יָזְמוּ לַעֲשׂוֹת.  ז הָבָה, נֵרְדָה, וְנָבְלָה שָׁם, שְׂפָתָם--אֲשֶׁר לֹא יִשְׁמְעוּ, אִישׁ שְׂפַת רֵעֵהוּ.  ח וַיָּפֶץ ה’ אֹתָם מִשָּׁם, עַל-פְּנֵי כָל-הָאָרֶץ; וַיַּחְדְּלוּ, לִבְנֹת הָעִיר.  ט עַל-כֵּן קָרָא שְׁמָהּ, בָּבֶל, כִּי-שָׁם בָּלַל ה’, שְׂפַת כָּל-הָאָרֶץ; וּמִשָּׁם הֱפִיצָם ה’, עַל-פְּנֵי כָּל-הָאָרֶץ. בראשית יא

“When they said Repent, I Wonder what they Meant": An Alternative Playlist for Yom Kippur

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Bronfman Fellowships | Text and the City | Yom Kippur 2013

Originally posted on Tablet's "The Scroll"

One of Jewish music’s most venerable traditions is that of borrowing love songs from popular culture and re-positioning them in a religious context. Yisrael Najara took Turkish love songs from the alleys of Damascus and Gaza and set them to holy words. Yehuda haLevi borrowed the imagery of Saharan shepherds and used them to describe the longing of the forsaken Jewish people. It is told of Rabbi Ovadiya Yosef that he can only write his halakhic responsa if Umm Kulthum is playing in the background. All is fair when trying to open up the heart…

As Yom Kippur comes round the bend each year, I find myself searching for an alternative playlist of songs to supplement the traditional ones, hoping to crack open my cynical heart with a surprising connection or two. As a gift for the new year, here is my list this year. While a random selection at best, it seems each song includes its own answer to Leonard Cohen’s immutable question:

When they said: “Repent, Repent!” I Wonder What They Meant?

Pay Me or Go to Jail!

Bruce Springsteen | Pay Me My Money Down

“Repentance” is the Latin term often used for the Hebrew word “Teshuva”. They actually mean vastly different things. In the metaphor of repentance, atonement is achieved by paying back. Our sins are debts, accrued throughout year. As the New Year approaches, our debtor demands of us: “Pay me my money down!” On Yom Kippur – unable to repay all our bad deeds – we admit bankruptcy and request a bailout from the powers that be: another year of life.

I'll find my way back to you / If you'll be waiting

Tracy Chapman |The Promise

 “Teshuva” on the other hand, means returning. It has nothing to do with the financial – it is wholly spatial. Sin is distance – from truth, from God, from ourselves. The distance is understandable; a logical outcome of a year of journeys. What is required now is a return. Luckily the Jewish people have a promise: No matter where they leave to, God will be waiting for their return. Tracy Chapman promises the same, and her words could easily be a stand-in for a Later Prophet or a Medieval Spanish Jewish poet singing about God and the Jewish people, recalling that old love affair one more time…

If you go, who will embrace me like that?

Idan Raichel | Im Telech

Yom Kippur is the day of closeness, the day in which the High Priest enters the innermost sanctum, the most intimate place in the Temple. Yet the moments of intimacy also raise the anxiety – what happens if you leave? How will I handle being alone again? We recall what happened with the Temple in the end… The Israeli Idan Raichel memorialized this felling most poignantly in his Hebrew song, “Im Telech - If you go”:

If you go / who will hug me like that / who will me hear at the end of the day

who will comfort and soothe / only you know.

In our new “theological” context, one can wonder: who has a deeper anxiety about being left alone – man or God? Rationalists might not like that questions, but Kabbalists, Hasidim and Heschelians have been asking it for years…

My Entire Body: Take One

Ibn Ezra | Lecha Eli

A moment before Kol Nidrei, Sephardic Jews will recite an erotic poem of deep desire: “To You My God, is My Desire” by Avraham Ibn Ezra.:

To you my God is my desire / in you is my pleasure and my love
to you is my heart and my kidneys / to you is my spirit and my soul

One by one they will mention each of their limbs and organs, reiterating how much they all aspire, desire and long for God’s proximity.

At the same time, traditional Ashkenazi Jews will also be mumbling about their limbs and organs. But in the Ashkenazi version, called “Tefillah Zakah”, it is to decry how each limb has sinned this year, how each organ has betrayed the Lord. Of these two alternatives, despite my European roots, the Sephardic embrace of life and desire is the gate through which I hope to enter Yom Kippur this year.

My Entire Body: Take Two

Nina Simone | I’ve Got Life

Here is a third alternative, rebellious and heretical, but life affirming in a way that is reminiscent of the lust for life of the High Holiday poetry. In Nina Simone’s version of this “Hair” classic, there is a deep spirituality to the freedom of the body. Some might find that freedom in a release from religion. I find it by reclaiming the divine roots of life, seeking freedom from the way society and corporations try to define my body for me. Either way, the cry of life is the basic cry of Yom Kippur: “I’ve Got Life!”, “Seal us in the Book of Life!”

May we be sealed in the Book of Life,

Mishael