Author Archives: Rabbi Brant Rosen

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About Rabbi Brant Rosen

I'm a rabbi, blogger, and activist with a special interest in Israel/Palestine justice work.

On Choosing Films of Faith

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Can’t wait to see Terence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (above) which looks pretty awesome and is being hailed by many as a film with powerfully existential/spiritual themes.

In anticipation of “Tree’s” release, I recently surfed over to Arts & Faith’s “Top 100 Films.” Though I consider myself something of a film nerd, I was pretty humbled to discover I haven’t seen the majority of films on the list (and haven’t even heard of a fair amount of them either.)

Check it out yourself and see if you agree with the rankings. As for me, I have no argument with “The Passion of Joan of Arc” as #1, but what on earth is “Make Way for Tomorrow“- a minor 1937 comedy directed by Leo McCarey, of “Duck Soup” fame – doing at #6? And I’m sorry, as much as I love Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil,” I’m not sure I’d call it a spiritually themed movie.

And as for Jewish films, was “Fiddler on the Roof“ really the best they could do?  Granted there aren’t that many “Jewish films of faith” to choose from, but off the top of my head, I’d nominate “The Quarrel,” “Enemies: A Love Story,” or the Coen Bros’ “A Serious Man“ for starters…

Voices in the Wilderness

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As we begin Parashat Bamidbar – the first portion in the book of Numbers – we read:

God spoke (vaydaber) to Moses in the wilderness (bamidbar).

I’ve often been interested in the fact that the Hebrew verb “to speak” and the word for “wilderness” share a common root: d-b-r.  It suggests an important connection between wilderness and speech – more specifically divine speech.

There are, in fact, numerous Biblical descriptions of Godly encounter that take place in a deep wilderness setting. Before Moses discovers the burning bush, for instance, he drives his flock “achar hamidbar” – “beyond the wilderness.” Not long after the Exodus, the Israelites experience a communal revelation at Sinai after they had “encamped in the wilderness” (Exodus 19:2)  And in 1 Kings 19, the prophet Elijah encounters the still, small voice of God after traveling “bamidbar derech yom” – “a day’s journey into the wilderness.”

It isn’t difficult to understand why the desert habitat is considered sacred by so many Western, Eastern and indigenous spiritual traditions. At first glance, the wilderness might seem to be a wasteland – a “God-forsaken” environment unable to support life. But desert biomes are actually vital, and dynamic ecosystems teeming with a wide array of geological variety as well as significant plant and animal biodiversity. In other words, the desert invites us to look beyond its seemingly barren surface to discover the life that dwells deep within.

We also might regard the wilderness as more symbolic terrain – an existential place far from the “noise” of culture, artifice and ego. Indeed, this form of spiritual experience is available even to non-desert dwellers: a mindfulness or way of life that seeks to strip away the outer layers of self so we may discover, like the ancient Israelites, the divine word that dwells at the elemental core.

In the end, the journey into the wilderness is one that leads both inward and outward: to the outermost reaches of experience and the innermost reaches of the human soul. These are the places where the voice of God may truly be heard.

Counting the Omer in Funkytown

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Today is the thirty-seventh day of the Omer, which according to Jewish mystical symbolism corresponds to the Divine attribute of Gevurah (“Strength”) within Yesod (“Foundation.”)

Looking for spiritually alternative ways to count the Omer? Click above to watch/listen to the great John Zorn Ensemble perform “Gevruah,” then below for Zorn’s “Yesod,” as performed by the Crakow Klezmer Band.

As you listen, read this rendering of Psalm 24 by Stephen Mitchell:

The earth belongs to the Lord
     and everything on it is his.
For he founded it in empty space
     and breathed his own life-breath into it,
filling it with manifold creatures,
     each one precious in his sight.

Who is fit to hold power
     and worthy to act in God’s place?
Those with a passion for the truth,
     who are horrified by injustice,
who act with mercy to the poor
     and take up the cause of the helpless,
who have let go of selfish concerns
    and see whole earth as sacred,
refusing to exploit her creatures
     or to foul her waters and her lands.
Their strength is in their compassion;
     God’s light shines through their hearts.
Their children’s children will bless them,
    and the work of their hands will endure.

And/or this excerpt from James Dickey’s poem, “The Strength of the Fields:”

Dear Lord of all the fields
                                             what am I going to do?
                                      Street-lights, blue-force and frail
As the homes of men, tell me how to do it
    To withdraw    how to penetrate and find the source
      Of the power you always had
                                            light as a moth, and rising
       With the level and moonlit expansion
    Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.
       You?    I?    What difference is there?    We can all be saved
       By a secret blooming. Now as I walk
The night    and you walk with me    we know simplicity
  Is close to the source that sleeping men
       Search for in their home-deep beds.
      We know that the sun is away    we know that the sun can be conquered
   By moths, in blue home-town air.
          The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under
The pastures.    They look on and help.    Tell me, freight-train,
                            When there is no one else
   To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea
         Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,
          Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar
               Like the profound, unstoppable craving
            Of nations for their wish.
                                                      Hunger, time and the moon:
         The moon lying on the brain
                                                    as on the excited sea    as on
          The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake
         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring
         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.
            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord
Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:
         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
             Than save every sleeping one
             And night-walking one
         Of us.
                  My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

On the Curse of a Windblown Leaf

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As for those of you who survive, I will cast a faintness in their hearts in the land of their enemies. The sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. Fleeing as though from the sword, they shall fall though none pursues (Leviticus 26:36).

This verse, which comes from this week’s Torah portion, Bechukotai, is one of the many vivid curses threatened by God if the Israelites should disobey the commandments (a litany that is lovingly referred to by Biblical scholars as “The Execration.”)

I’m particularly struck that among all of the worst execrable curses God can name, comes this psychologically resonant image of a people whose anxiety is so intense that they will flee at the very slightest of triggers. Based on the description of such “symptoms,” we might well call this verse a Biblically ordained “panic attack.”

For comparison purposes, check out this excerpt from the web article, “How to Identify Signs of a Panic Disorder.” (Just go with me for a second here):

Pay attention to your emotions and feelings at any time of stress or worry. Are you ready to run at the slightest sound? Do you sense fear or impending doom or an overwhelming sense of dread? Such fears only provoke more fears and often lead individuals to feel like they’re going crazy. If you have such symptoms, schedule a visit with your physician to discuss possible causes and potential treatments.

See what I mean?

Of course even if we do accept the parallels, many of us would find a theology that views psychological disorders as divine punishment to be utterly unacceptable (or at least not particularly comforting.) I prefer to think that the exact opposite is true: God is not the “cause”, but the “solution.” God does not punish us with the pain of stress and anxiety; God is the source of healing to which we turn.

In a recent article for the LA Times, writer Margaret Finnegan described the severe panic attacks she experienced when her five year old daughter was first diagnosed with epilepsy. After a several attempts to alleviate her panic through therapy, exercise and medication, she explained,

…I needed to change. I couldn’t be a constant yo-yo mirroring everyone else’s health. I needed to be strong in myself.

So I did the smartest thing I ever did: I started meditating. I’ve been doing Vipassana meditation for about three years now.

In Vipassana, we focus on the breath. When we realize our minds have wandered, we go back to the breath. In that moment, we “wake up.” We practice mindfulness. And, funny enough, after a while, you start “waking up” in daily life too.

Now, when my mind starts to spin out tragedies or dwell on past dramas, I’m less likely to get stuck in them. I wake up. When the stress of parenting a chronically ill child ratchets up, I take solace in the fact that my hardships are like each breath: They evolve. They pass. Nothing lasts forever.

As I read her words about the healing power of breathing mediation, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a well-known theological image from the Torah, namely:

(YHVH) blew into his nostrils the breath of life (“nishmat chayyim“) and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)

Now here is a powerful antidote to the image of a God that sends down panic attacks as punishment for our disloyalty: the God to whom we turn in our darkest, most panicked moments: the divine power embodied by nishmat chayyim: the healing breath of life itself.

Downward Facing Jews

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Talk about harmonic convergence! On my way to work yesterday I was listening to Johnny Cash singing “The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea” (one of my very favorite song titles, btw). Just a little bit later that day I was asked why there is no kneeling/prostration in Jewish tradition. (Coincidence? I think not…)

I explained that Jews traditionally prostrate themselves only once a year on the High Holidays. But it’s interesting question that I’ve never really stopped to ponder: why is prostration is so relatively rare in Judaism as opposed to Islamic or Christian tradition?

Kneeling and prostration is actually quite common in the Torah (where it is not at all uncommon for major characters tend to “fall on their faces” before God) but it was never universally embraced as a regular practice by rabbinical authorities. With the notable exception of Maimonides, most medieval Jewish authorities discouraged regular kneeling/prostration during the Middle Ages – most likely in order to differentiate Judaism from Christianity and Islam. While bowing from the knees is common in Ashkenazic Jewish tradition (i.e. in the daily Amidah or Aleinu prayers) kneeling or full prostration occurs only during Rosh Hanshanah Musaf and Yom Kippur Avodah services – and then only among more observant Jews.

With the current growth of Jewish yoga, it’s somewhat inevitable that we’re now witnessing prostration being reconsidered in new ways. (Just a cursory web search, for instance, reveals the work of Daniel Gigi, who seems to have developed an extensive synthesis of yoga and Jewish mysticism, including a technique he calls the “13 Point Prostration.”)  I still remember well that two years ago, during JRC’s observance of the once-in-twenty-eight-years celebration of Birkat Hachamah, we held a wonderful service that combined sunrise meditations, yoga sun salutations and traditional Jewish prayers.

Our cantor and I perform the High Holiday service prostrations ourselves (but for obvious reasons we never really know how many congregants follow our example). For myself, I find something enormously powerful about the physicality of bowing down to the floor. It is truly the most universally humbling of gestures – a simple yet profound way to emptying one’s ego and acknowledge the presence in the universe of a power greater than oneself.

We Are All Strangers Here

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“But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with me.” (Leviticus 25:23)

In this verse, which comes from this week’s Torah portion Behar, God makes it clear to the Israelites that the land they are about to enter is not to be sold in the conventional manner. God is the ultimate “owner” of the land – thus the Israelites are cautioned they cannot treat it as private property. The Israelite residents are akin to resident aliens who are entrusted with the use of the land; however, since land was going to be “bought” and “sold,” this verse prohibits any purchase or sale to the exclusion of a claim of ownership

The land in Mine and you are but resident aliens…  The land, this earth, the very ground upon which we make our homes, does not ultimately belong to us. We are but strangers upon it – or at best we’re merely “leasing” it temporarily from God.  In just about every respect, this is truly a radical teaching. Indeed, if we broaden our understanding of this commandment beyond the milieu of Ancient Israel, it certainly carries a myriad of powerful economic, political and environmental implications.

It also has profound spiritual significance as well. In the words of Madeleine L’Engle:

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.

The Anti-Psalms of Alicia Ostriker

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I’ve been reading a lot of poet/scholar Alicia Ostriker’s stuff lately – and find myself especially drawn to her creative observations on the Bible. (Highly recommended, her book “For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book.”)

Check out her take on the Psalms:

The Psalms are glorious. No, the Psalms are terrible. No, the Psalms are both glorious and terrible, both attractive and repulsive to me emotionally and theologically. I read as a poet and a woman, a literary critic and a left-wing Jew who happens to be obsessed with the Bible. And when I read these poems, I experience a split-screen effect: wildly contradictory responses.

As Catullus says: I love and hate. And it is excruciating.

The Psalms are overwhelmingly beautiful as poems. They represent the human spirit, my own spirit, in its intimate yearning for a connection with the divine Being who is the source of all being, the energy that creates and sustains the universe. Unlike the portions of the Bible that lay down rules and regulations (I skip these), and unlike the narratives that tell compelling tales of patriarchs and matriarchs, judges, warriors and kings, but don’t tell how they feel, what they think, what it all means to them–the Psalms are love poems to God. Since the course of true love never does run smooth, the Psalms are poems of emotional turbulence.

Wrestling with the what she calls “the need of God, the violence of god,” Ostriker herself has written what she calls “anti-Psalms” – consciously addressing a “God who deals cruelly with us and demands our praise.”

Here is one example (I just love what she does here):

I am not lyric any more
I will not play the harp
for your pleasure

I will not make a joyful
noise to you, neither
will I lament

for I know you drink
lamentation, too,
like wine

so I dully repeat
you hurt me
I hate you

I pull my eyes away from the hills
I will not kill for you
I will never love you again

unless you ask me

If you are digging this kind of thing as much as I do, read Ostriker’s essay “Psalm and Anti-Psalm: A Personal View” and this conversation on the Psalms between Ostriker and Christian poet Peter O’Leary.

The Torah of Steve Earle

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The release of a new Steve Earle CD is always a pretty big deal for me – and I’m really loving his latest, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.”

Amidst great tunes about the BP oil spill, NOLA after Katrina, and the hubris of Empire is a song Earle wrote for Joan Baez some years back called “God is God.” Give a listen: it’s about as humble and lovely a spiritual statement as you’ll ever hear sung by a radical leftist country singer:

I believe in prophecy
Some folks see things not everybody can see
And once in a while they pass the secret along to you and me
And I believe in miracles
Something sacred burning in every bush and tree.
We can all learn to sing the songs the angels sing
Yeah I believe in God and God ain’t me

I’ve traveled around the world,
Stood on mighty mountains and gazed across the wilderness
Never seen a line in the sand or a diamond in the dust
And as our fate unfurls
Every day that passes I’m sure about a little bit less.
Even my money keeps telling me it’s God I need to trust
And I believe in God but God ain’t us

God of my little understanding. Don’t care what name I call
Whether or not I believe doesn’t matter at all
I receive the blessings
And every day on Earth’s another chance to get it right
Let this little light of mine shine and rage against the night
Just another lesson
Maybe someone’s watching and wondering what I got
Maybe this is why I’m here on Earth and maybe not
But I believe in God and God is God

Finding God in the Broken Places

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YHVH spoke further to Moses: Speak to Aaron and say: No man of your offspring throughout the ages who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the food of his God. No one at all who has a defect shall be qualified: no man who is blind, or lame, or has a limb too short or too long; no man who has a broken leg or a broken arm; or who is a hunchback, or a dwarf… (Leviticus 22:17-20)

I know. I know. After reading these verses (from this week’s portion, Emor) it’s difficult to know where to even start.

Of course we could follow the lead of most commentators and interpret these verses allegorically. Since the priesthood and the sacrificial system are long dead, these commandments are meant to be taken symbolically: i.e., to find God we must offer up our highest selves, we must give with a whole and “unblemished” heart, etc…

As for me, while this approach may work for some passages in Leviticus, in this particular case it feels forced  – and frankly just plain wrong. On balance, I believe the imperative to see God’s image in all people simply trumps a Torah passage that prescribes the physical “appropriateness” of the ancient Israelite priesthood.

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat put it perfectly in her commentary on this passage:

I think of the generations who have read and cherished this text, and I imagine how many of them were halt or lame, how many had spines twisted or lungs sickly, and I wonder what reading this passage meant for them, how it damaged their sense of who they might be. I remember the cruelty of eleven-year-old girls, confronted with a classmate who had a foreshortened limb, and how their barbs sting even now, so many years after their insults were lofted in the chalky classroom air.

No, there are some things in Torah that simply cannot be allegorized – and indeed this is one such case. If the Jewish people does consider itself a “kingdom of priests,” then it is beyond shameful to suggest that anyone with a disability might be considered unworthy of divine favor. In a contemporary world that values the ethic of inclusivity, I believe it’s exceedingly problematic to even try to rationalize passages like these.

Besides, if pure physical perfection were truly the benchmark, none of us would be considered worthy. Forgive me, but I can’t help but think of the classic Jewish joke:

Mrs. Goldberg went to the butcher at least once a week to buy a chicken. And every week she would pick it up, pinch it, fondle it, smack it, then put her nose in it to smell it. When she was through, she would ask the butcher “Is this chicken fresh?” Each time the butcher would assure Mrs. Goldberg that it was.

One week she came in and again went through her ritual: pinching, fondling, smacking, smelling, then asking “Butcher, is this chicken fresh?”

Finally, the butcher replied: “Lady, could you pass that test?

No, at the end of the day, to be human means to be “broken” to a very real extent. One way or another, the truth of our imperfection is part of our very humanity.

Even so, this realization need not be an occasion for internalized shame. To be sure, if we choose to embrace the whole of who we are, we might well find that this reality offers us the potential for inner growth and transformation.

And so: as an antidote to these verses in Leviticus, here is a sampling of spiritual teachings that invite us to face our imperfections and greet our essential brokenness as a spiritual opportunity:

– “God is close to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:18)

– “True sacrifice to God is a broken spirit” (Psalm 51:17)

– “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” (Reb Menachem Mendel of Kotzk)

– “A broken heart is an open heart” (Rumi)

– There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. (Leonard Cohen)

Osama bin Laden: Can There Be Closure?

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Among the slew of news articles about the reactions of survivors and families of victims of 9/11 to the killing of bin Laden I’ve noticed the ongoing theme of “closure.”  While some have indicated that this event had brought them some semblance of closure to their grief, I’ve found that most have responded in the manner of Dick McCloskey of South Bend Indiana, whose daughter Katie died in the World Trade Center:

Closure has become a trite word. There is no such thing in the loss of a loved one.

In fact, research is bearing out Mr. McCloskey’s conviction. Studies are increasingly demonstrating that the execution of a murderer rarely brings psychological or spiritual closure to loved ones of the victim. A recent study by the University of Kentucky, for instance, revealed that most victims’ families don’t find peace of mind during the death penalty process or even after an execution:

The study’s lead researcher…says a murderer’s execution is not a soothing salve for many surviving family members, as they still feel victimized, and cites a 2007 study that makes that point.

“Only 2.5 percent of co-victims actually reported that the death penalty brought them closure. And, that includes people that were advocates for the death penalty from the very beginning. At the conclusion, it turns out that almost no one experienced closure at the end of the death penalty process.”

Why? Michelle Goldberg, in a piece for Salon, suggests the answer is rooted in unrealistic societal expectations:

For victims’ families who oppose the death penalty, as well as for some who support it but derived little comfort from the execution of their loved ones’ killers, it’s a myth that the death penalty heals. They say the pop-psych media formula, that catharsis equals closure, has been mostly created by a society desperate to believe that even the worst wrongs can be righted.

Others point out that the desire for “closure” belies the reality that healing from grief is a never ending process:

My goal is to get all of the media to understand that ‘closure’ is a bad word, a word survivors don’t understand. ‘Transition’ is the word we use. That doesn’t mean everything is OK. Never will it be OK, and no execution, no jail sentence, nothing, will help in that process.”

On another level entirely, I was also struck by something else Dick McCloskey said in response to the killing of bin Laden:

This has nothing to do with justice. Justice belongs only to God, not to us.

Whether or not we share Mr. McCloskey’s theology, I think we all can relate to the notion that there are just some things in the world for which there can be no justice – at least on any level we might comprehend. Even for those who believe that bin Laden’s execution meted out some semblance of justice for 9/11 (I don’t, btw), where is the justice for the fact that Katie happened to be in the Trade Center just at that moment, when some of her co-workers might have survived for the most random of reasons?

In this regard, I’m reminded of something Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote in his classic “When Bad Things Happen to Good People:”

I  can more or less understand why a man’s mind might snap, so that he grabs a shotgun and runs out into the street, shooting at strangers. Perhaps he is an army veteran, haunted by memories of things he has seen and done in combat. Perhaps he has encountered more frustration and rejection than he can bear at home and at work…

To grab a gun and shoot at innocent people is irrational, unreasonable behavior, but I can understand it. What I cannot understand is why Mrs. Smith should be walking on that street at that moment, while Mrs. Brown chooses to step into a shop on a whim and saves her life. Whey should Mr. Jones happen to be crossing that street, presenting a perfect target to the mad marksman, while Mr. Green, who has never more than one cup of coffee for breakfast, chooses to linger over a second cup that morning and is still indoors when the shooting starts? The lives of dozens of people will be affected by such trivial, unplanned decisions. (pp.76-77)

Regardless of our theologies – or whether we even believe in God at all – I think we can all agree that there is no ultimate justice in the world. There are some things – too many things – in life for which we will never achieve full closure. The real question before us, it seems to me, is not how to find closure for these injustices, but how to heal from them.