In the case of some terms, people might have doubts as to whether they’re names or descriptions; like “God”—does it describe God as the unique divine being or is it a name of God? (Saul A Kripke, Naming and Necessity, p. 27)

Our text seems to be preoccupied with names. Moshe (Moses) went to Pharoah as instructed, and instead of freeing the slave people, Pharoah makes their life even more miserable. Moshe complains to God about the suffering of the people and the failure of his mission, but God wants to talk about names. The text relates (Shemot 2:6):

And God spoke to Moshe, saying: I am ADNY. I have revealed myself to Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov as El Shaddai, but with the name ADNY I had not revealed myself to them.

Moshe wants to know how the people will be freed, and God answers with a seemingly irrelevant discourse on names. Why does it matter with which name revelation was conducted in the past? In attempting to find meaning in this emphasis upon ancient names, we will find ourselves confronting very contemporary issues regarding faith and science.

Even as we focus upon the centrality of names in the current verse, we can’t help noticing the preoccupation with names in the early part of the book of Shemot (Exodus). This book begins with an enumeration of the names of the tribes, then Moshe names his children, then Moshe is concerned in his first dialogue with God that the Israelites will ask of him what God’s name is, and here again, in this speech announcing the deliverance from Egypt, God begins by announcing a new previously undisclosed name. It is fitting, I suppose, that this book, called Exodus in Greek, is traditionally known as Sefer Shemot, the Book of Names, in Hebrew. What’s all this business about names?

by Sarah Stafford

Artist Yoram Raanan seeks to revive life and purpose. His characteristic style drips with vibrant colors and processions of people that practically melt into each other and their surroundings. While his work is inspired by the “Jewish people who are happy in being a part of this sort of resurrection,” he attracts a wide-ranging audience – from Toronto to London to Israel, where he lives.

Blessing of the Sun

To see more of Yoram’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Rev. Sarah S. Ray:

The Divine Glance

Rumi wrote of it. Christ Yahshua (Jesus) certainly experienced and shared it, when he spoke of “letting your eye be single,” and “full of light.” The Hindus and Sikhs call it Darshan.

And yet, with millions of Christians in this country, it seems virtually unheard of. Even feared.

I experienced it for the first time at the Healing Center in Columbia, SC, sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, if I recall. It was a group that focused on “A Course in Miracles” and they had a leader from “The Academy” as it was referred to.

I came in a little late and the group had already started. The leader, Peter, was standing with his arms up in the middle of the room. I think someone told me later that what he was doing was called, “creating the space,” but I can’t be sure. Peter was a tall, thin man with a fascinating accent (Australian, maybe?) and medium brown close-cropped hair. He looked at me with this loving smile of joy on his face as I came into the room. I felt instantly connected to him even though I had never met him before and then I felt a force come from him that touched me all around my head and shoulders.

I didn’t recognize what it was at the time and Peter himself did not seem to know what he had done. When I told him after the meeting what had happened, he said, “That wasn’t me, that was you!” Actually, I think it was both of us. I was ready to receive it and he was ready to give it.

by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens

It was in San Rafael, in a tiny subterranean artist studio with walls of thickly plastered brick that I made my acquaintance with New Zealand’s huia bird, meeting it in my friend Lorna’s intricate twig sculptures and an altered artist’s book whose pages had been painstakingly excised, erased, and inked with images of haunting delicacy. I learned how the bills of males and females (his squat cudgel for shredding bark, her curved needle for finding insects) had evolved so as to make them mutually dependent mates-for-life. I also learned that the huia had recently become utterly, unalterably extinct, so that not only would I never see it with my own eyes, but neither would my children, nor my children’s children, nor their children and so on and on down the long, bitter corridors of never.

Three poems by Elizabeth Cunningham.

IT’S NOT ALL PRETTY

It’s not all pretty.
The earth knows terrible things.
She receives all deaths,
gentle and brutal.

She bears the pain of every birth.
She turns all things back into herself;
she worries the bones to dust.

She is changing, always changing.
Layers shift.
Her own bones crash and break.

Tides heave.
Rock erupts into fire.
It’s not all pretty.

Beauty never is.

Many years ago, when I was struggling to understand the smoke-and-mirrors world of corporate journalism, a Washington, D.C., veteran passed on to me a bit of wisdom:

When I was a reporter, an old PR pro once told me something. He said ‘You come to the press conferences and you listen, and the first mistake you make is that you think we’re lying. You discover we’re not lying. Then you make a greater mistake. You think we’re telling the truth.’ (1)

In Part I of examining the Catholic Crisis, I tried to point out the problem with this greater mistake. We examined the falsity within the partial truths of the meta-stories in pop culture, these simplistic, black-and-white constructs that make the world safe and understandable. We picked apart the assumptions blended with facts in one of last week’s news story that made it seem the Vatican thinks the ordaining of women is as bad as priests who sexually abuse children.

Now, we turn to a more difficult side of the partial truth: the way in which it is true. The truth within the partial truth poses a challenge to human understanding, because it is so difficult to face that our mind wants nothing more than to jump to quick and easy explanations, to construct meta-stories of some kind. But if we do this, we avoid the paradox that can, with struggle, force us to mature.

Crossposted from Common Sense Religion

God does not answer prayer.

There, I’ve said it. I know for some my assertion is scandalous, while for others it is mere common sense. But before you summon the inquisitor to prepare the rack or brand me a heretic or rush to my defense, hear me out.

I used to believe that God answered prayer. Being raised a Christian I was taught that I had an invisible, magical and wish-granting friend named Jesus who cared about all of my problems, however big or small. All I had to do was pray in his name. And if I didn’t get what I asked for there was a good chance it was because I wasn’t praying hard enough. This idea was so central to the Christian faith I was taught that never was I allowed to question the presupposition that God played favorites via a divine competition for “his” attention.

It took many years before I began wondering about the implications of God intervening in the world to answer prayer. I must admit, however, that in my youth I never had made an earnest effort to understand the logic behind prayer. Like many Christians I had a superficial understanding of my religion. I never read the Bible or studied the history of my tradition. And in high school I was too busy skipping Sunday school and getting high behind the Church to care about theology. One of the few times I did attend I remember listening to former WWF wrestler Jake the Snake Roberts with boa constrictor in hand give his testimony about how Jesus saved him. With an old spandex clad wrestler as a primary source of my understanding about the Christian faith I definitely had some learning to do.

This week I’d like to share some of my own thoughts on God, emotion, and patriarchal thought with you all:

The richness of human emotions, the wealth of nuance and excitement that can be generated by human neediness, the depth of love that can be generated by human relationships — these magnificent aspects of reality are likely to be aspects of God as well. Why should God be any less wonderful than human beings? If one rejects the notions of perfection that come from Hellenistic and patriarchal thought, then one could easily see that attributing emotions, personality, feeling, and caring to the spiritual Being that permeates all of reality is not a put-down or a belittling, but a celebration in God of what we can and ought to honor in human beings. And if we recognize that a caring being is also a being that hurts, yearns and desires, then there is no reason to think we are belittling God when we see that S/He (as the unity of all being) is a yearning, desiring and sometimes hurting totality. It is only if we accept the male-dominated vision that perfection is that which has no needs or lacks and that God must be perfect in this sense that the Jewish conception of God becomes a scandal. But if we think of God in more feminine terms, we may allow ourselves to imagine that all of being is permeated by yearning, desire, caring, sensitivity, love and vulnerability – and that that is not a deficiency but an amazingly beautiful aspect of the Unity of all Being.

This translation of and reflection on Psalm 30 was a part of an assignment for a Psalms class we are taking in rabbinical school this semester with Dr. Nehemia Pollan. It has been amazing to learn about the Psalms as the music and poetry of the Bible. Through this translation assignment we were able to find the depth and myriad meanings in each word and to familiarize ourselves with the vastly different and extremely moving translations that have been published, including Robert Alter’s The Book of Psalms and Norman Fischer’s Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms. There is a new book of Psalms translations written by a woman in our community, Pamela Greenberg, The Complete Psalms which I am excited to check out!

Here is my translation for Psalm 30, which is part of the daily liturgy of traditional Jewish prayer.

Last Saturday, my son Benjamin became a Bar Mitzvah. His Torah portion is Yitro. I would like to share his D’Var Torah which was packed with insight about participatory government as well as the taking and giving of good advice.

My parsha is Yitro. It comes right after B’shallach, in which the Israelits left Egypt by the Reed (Red) Sea. In a nutshell, during Yitro, Moses’ Father-in-Law says, “Oy! What the heck are ya doin’?” and tells Moses to correct himself by appointing judges. “Sheesh. Dumb kids!” After that, God apparently thought that Moses should beef up, because God sent Moses up and down Mt. Sinai three times. Finally, God gives Moses and the Israelites the Ten Commandments.

Most normal people with this parsha would choose to talk about the Ten Commandments; but then again, my family is far from normal (although apparently we rank only 5th most eccentric by Ellen’s standard [Ellen is his Hebrew tutor]). I chose to focus on the creation of the judicial system and God’s apparent need to repeat Himself.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement on the nature of God, which was broadcast to America from London in October 1931:

Newspaper Vendor

My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.’” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.’” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction. These days we’re at less than 5%!?! But the miracle is that some of Wisconsin’s business leaders are lining up behind the governor, including executives of Johnson Controls, an auto parts and building products manufacturer. All of this combined with the EPA’s stricter standards for smog-causing pollution made me ebullient.

I’ve been really angry at the Obama administration lately, so it was nice to agree with them for the first time in what seems like months. The last straw for me was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, coming right on the heels of his announcement about expanding the war in Afghanistan. Until then had I tried to see his incrementalism as “realism.” But Rabbi Michael Lerner‘s editorial in the latest Tikkun, “Afghanistan: Obama Capitulates to the War Makers,” says it all. I agree with Rabbi Lerner that Obama’s announcement represented “a decisive endorsement of the strategy of domination.” And then Obama’s Nobel Prize speech tried to justify his decision by saying that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes, that “Evil does exist in the world.” When Obama used that final phrase, I stopped listening to him. Christopher Hedges‘ article in the same Tikkun, “Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand,” describes the shift in my opinion at that point: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another.” I stopped believing in Brand Obama.

It’s hard to be optimistic given the world situation these days. But I believe that the three stories that filled me with hope today are related in a way that may not be immediately apparent. Without more spiritual exploration, people in this country will have trouble opening their minds to the changes in store for us. And those changes are going to be very fast, whether for the better or for the worse. As I said in a post several months ago,

In the Talmud in the tractate Brachot (Blessings), the rabbis raise the question of what is meant by the mishnaic statement “ha oseh tefilato keva, ain tefilato tachanunim – the one who makes his prayer fixed, his prayer is not one of supplication.”

One explanation given is that our prayer lacks supplication when it is not done “eem dimdumei chama – with the reddening of the sun.” While on a peshat level the rabbis may be referring to the need for one to be earnest in his or her prayer in order for it to be supplicatory, I think there may be another level to their words.

Hi all! I wanted to share with you a recent piece I wrote for the Theology of Prayer class I am currently taking with Rabbi Art Green. This piece is another segment in the exploration of traditional Jewish prayer and embodiment.

For those who are unfamiliar with the framework and language of traditional Jewish prayer, the “Amidah,” which I am writing about in this piece, is known as “the standing prayer,” “the silent prayer,” or sometimes even just “the prayer.” It is the central point of the traditional service, the crescendo in a long flow of liturgy. Traditional Jews recite the Amidah three times a day. In rabbinic literature there is a set posture for the Amidah: standing, and an established choreography that one follows throughout the 19 blessings that make up this prayer.

* * *

As we approach the Amidah during this morning’s tefillah I want to offer one way of expanding our connection to this foundational prayer of our davening. Not only does this prayer give us an opportunity to approach the Divine through the framework of tradition, history, and community, but it also allows us to come into deeper relationship with our own physical form as a means of accessing Gd.

During a discussion in the Talmud, the rabbis ask what it is that establishes the number of brachot we have in the Amidah. To this question, three possible answers are given. The first two responses say that the number of benedictions reflects the number of times the Divine name is mentioned in David’s Psalm 29, or the number of mentions of Gd’s name in the Shema. Both of these answers use textual evidence as their basis. The third answer given seems in stark contrast to the first two. Rather than citing a biblical passage, Rav Tanchum says in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi that the number of blessings is related to the number of vertebrae in the human spine.

Through these answers, three paradigms are given for understanding prayer. From the first, we understand prayer as an ancestral paradigm, connected to our past and future. The second ties prayer to a revealed paradigm, linking it to Torah. From the third, prayer is seen as a personal paradigm, connected to our bodies.

For this week’s spiritual wisdom, I’d like to share with you a piece on Jewish mysticism that I wrote for the October 2009 issue of Radical Grace, a publication of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

JEWISH MYSTICISM

The Jewish Mystical tradition has as one of its central motifs the notion that God is in need of human beings, and that we are beings who need to be needed in the way that God needs us.

What God needs us for is both to be partner and proxy in healing the world.

To be God’s partner is an amazing task for humanity. The Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, describes God as the creator of the world in order to share His/Her love with another. It is this fundamental desire to be giving love and to be in love that is the central creative force of the universe, and the reason why it exists in the first place. And what kind of creature could love? Only one that participated with God in God’s essence as a free, self-determining, conscious, love-seeking and love-giving, generous and caring being. So when the angels came to complain to God, as was recorded in the Psalms, “What is Adam (human being) that Thou thinkest of him, the son of humanity that you recognize him?” they are told, according to a Midrash, that they, the angels, could not be God’s partner because they lack freedom, they are, by their very nature messengers of God who are fixed in their lives by the task that they have been given and have no capacity to be other than they are.

Whenever I am in a really good movement class, be it yoga or Nia or some other type of dance, I become grounded in my body and feel connected to The Force of the Universe in such a direct and visceral way. My movement then becomes a prayer practice – a process that wakes up every part of me, shakes off the dust, fills me with energy, and allows me to connect to something greater than myself. However, alive and energized from the movement, I often leave these experiences longing for a way to connect these moments of resonance to my Jewish prayer practice. I feel a profundity that I yearn to share in a community of shared language and experiences.

At the same time, as I sit and stand and bow, singing and chanting my way through traditional Jewish prayer, I often feel as though I am only engaging from my shoulders up. After exercising my brain at school all day, I arrive for prayer in the morning and sometimes have a hard time differentiating it from my classes. On the one hand, our liturgy is poetic, beautiful and moving, and the service is designed to bring us into deeper awareness and to enhance our capacity for gratitude. On the other hand, traditional Jewish prayer is so full of words that it can feel like an intellectual exercise rather than a method for connecting to the Divine.

Fortunately for me, there are students and teachers who resonate with this dissonance and who are interested in going deeper to see if we can begin to weave threads of connection between the two practices.

Last week in my homiletics class we were given an assignment to write a prayer that we can say to ourselves before giving a d’var Torah (sermon). I found this very useful in terms of thinking about what effect I would want my words to have. What would be the feeling in the room? What impact would I want to make? I can imagine it will be much easier now to write that 15 minute sermon that is due in a few weeks, having created this intention through prayer.

While it would be impossible to have a focused intention for all of our actions throughout the day, I am wondering how I can weave this sort of prayer creation into other aspects of my life. I am also thinking about the fixed prayer service that I pray almost every morning with my community at school (in more and less traditional ways). In what ways do my personal intentions/prayers interact with the liturgy? Is there a way to pray a set service in community, yet to have a personally meaningful experience that answers my seemingly-individual needs?

For now, here is the prayer I wrote. I am sure it will evolve as I continue to learn:

Creative Source of the Universe

May I begin from a place of quiet stillness
May I access my relationship to You, and from that place speak
May I be calm and centered, fully present in body, mind and spirit
May what I say be gentle and powerful, powerful and gentle
May my words resonate, heal, melt, expand, nurture, challenge, comfort, move
May they cause people’s hearts to beat faster, their eyes to tear, their spirits to soften, their minds to open
May I tune into the rhythm of life around and within me and be guided by the pulse
May I help create openings where the energy of life can freely flow
May I be in service to the highest good for all

As I told you a few weeks back, the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum empowers women in remarkable ways. During last night’s class I discovered that it sometimes empowers in different ways at the same time.

Our reading for the evening was a compelling story — the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham (Genesis 22). As told in the Bible, this tale contains no mention of Isaac’s mother Sarah. Instead YHVH tells Abraham to demonstrate his loyalty by making a ritual offering of his one-and-only child. So Abraham dutifully takes fire-making tools, a load of wood, a knife, and his son Isaac to a nearby mountaintop to be slain. Of course, at the last minute an angel stays Abraham’s hand and provides a ram instead. What our class focussed on was the conspicuous lack of information about Sarah in this story.

Sarah is not easily overlooked. More girls have been named for Sarah than for any other woman in the Bible. There are good reasons for this. Sarah was a Chaldean princess and, because royalty and ritual leadership were inextricably tied together in those days, a priestess as well. She’s the only woman whose age is given in the Bible. She was the matriarch of the Jewish people. And Abraham owed his flocks, herds, and status to her.

Before we started to create modern-day midrashim — reinterpreting and commenting on this Biblical tale — we looked at several theories that questioned how this story was told in the Bible. Dancer and liturgist Fanchon Shur deduces from her absence that Sarah was the “hand of God” that stopped the sacrifice. Carol Ochs in Behind the Sex of God concludes that

the sacrifice of Isaac marked the death of the matriarchal tradition personified by Sarah. The meaning of Abraham’s test becomes clear when viewed in the light of the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy. The first allegiance in matrirarchy is to one’s offspring…In patriarchy, the first obligation is to an abstract moral principle…obedience to God.

Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah, the eve of the Jewish New Year. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rabbi Lerner’s synagogue will spend the evening romping indoors and out, singing, dancing, doing inner spiritual work, and yearning toward political and social transformation. It’s not your typical Rosh Hashanah service.

Rabbi Lerner leads a service.

No matter what your faith, it’s worth visiting one of Beyt Tikkun’s High Holy Day services to experience one of these  emotional neo-Hasidic “Jewish Renewal” services. Inspired by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, the Jewish Renewal movement has inspired many initiatives and congregations, most of which can be located through the organization Aleph. Rabbi Lerner describes the renewal movement in his book Jewish Renewal as also breathing through the work of social justice organizations like Peace Now, gay and lesbian synagogues, and Jewish feminist collectives, as well as through activism that is happening within all the different movements (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, etc.) of Judaism.

The Rosh Hashanah services today, tomorrow, and Sunday, and the Yom Kippur ones on September 27 and September 28 are Rabbi Lerner’s principle annual opportunity to do traditional Jewish services infused with a radical transformative take on Judaism: the idea that the Torah issues a prophetic call to create caring societies rather than ones built around profit motives and competition for power. Those who take this call seriously, he argues, must work for drastic changes in foreign policy, the domestic economy, the corporate business world, education, the law, our religious organizations, and theology.

As we prepare for Rosh Hashana at the end of this week we enter into one of the most spiritually powerful periods in the Jewish calendar. Rosh Hashana marks the intensification of a period of introspection or teshuva begun at the start of the Hebrew month of Elul, just a few weeks ago. We move from Rosh Hashana, the Day of Judgment through a ten-day period where our teshuva process is revved to its highest point, reaching its apex on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The totality of these days are known as the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe.

Rosh Hashana is a time when we thoughtfully examine the ways in which we have succeeded or fallen short in our relationships with ourselves, others, and the Great Power of the Universe. It is a time of personal reflection on who we have been this past year and of spiritual recalibration to return us to our highest version of ourselves. As the blasts of the shofar echo in the walls of our prayer spaces and reverberate in our souls we are given a powerful call to discard that which is no longer serving us and renew our commitment to that which gives us life.