Cross Country #39  Promise Kippas (Barry: Say it out loud you'll get it.)

Barry: Or a tale in which Mark studies Noah, Barry is flooded with insights, and Goldie has butterflies in her stomach.

Goldie: Where can you awaken at 7 a.m. to the sound of six to eight hundred people chanting the Shema outside your bedroom window? And go to sleep to the sound of frenetic drumming at times alternating with passionate Chassidic song? Where does every other person ask: Are you the Barry and Goldie who have been sending out the spiritual travelogue on the internet?

Barry: Very affirming feeling having a total stranger light up in recognition when he meets us... ...a virtual family has evolved from these postings.

Goldie: We have arrived at the ALEPH Kallah, a festival of Jewish spirituality being held at the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, Oregon. In high school we learned the term "oxymoron" and were then assigned to create a list of ten examples. My list started with "Jewish Spirituality", "woman rabbi" and I think, "tasty tofu".....proves my family's motto: "Almost all things change." Seekers and innovators of Jewish spirituality have arrived here, mostly from North America....a few from other continents, too. Rabbi Jack Gabriel quips to us during orientation in a huge tent that this is a week of Jewish "re-shtetlment."

Barry: I'm not sure whether to feel energized or exhausted. Returning from a two-week cruise with strangers, we are now flooded by hundreds of people we know well and many more who know us. I had heard that the Kallah is intense. Nothing could have prepared me for this experience - being excited but sleep deprived, and not wanting to miss anything.
    The very first evening I was drawn into an optional connecting time workshop on mid life transition. We pair off and harass each other by persistently asking: "What do you want?" then immediately after the reply asking again: "Well, what do you want?" On and on we go till we are forced to dig deeply into ourselves.
    Perfect. This was the question haunting me all the way across the USA.
   
    Then follows a typical day:
    The morning starts off at 7 a.m. with six separate services being held on the lawn outside our bedroom. I am already awake, the sound of singing drifts in through the bedroom window. Outside one group will be holding a traditional service, another a creative service. A small group are standing on their heads and presumably meditating. Others do yoga combined with prayer. The sounds of singing and chanting and drumming and praying bombard us from all directions.
    Breakfast, then a three hour workshop which for me is one on creating ritual objects. I was drawn to this because I didn't want to do anything too intense. Ha!
    The first day we were asked to draw a star of David representing what Judaism means to us. A 10 year old explained hers. It was an elaborate design which included a cross ( her father is Jewish), her brother (who is very religious) a smiley face symbolizing Jewish joy and a sad face symbolizing Jewish tragedy. In the presence of her mother she expresses a desire to have more Jewish involvement in her life.
    What I discovered about myself is that even though my self image of not being a good painter is probably correct, I do have a sense of esthetics and design. It's the first time I've been in a craft class since primary school. I'm not working, not generating an income, I'm stringing beads with teenagers! Next door the choir is chanting haunting melodies. I love it and I'm excited at the thought of continuing to study crafts in New York. During the week several of the participants have come up to thank me for being here, they point out that I am the only man in the class. I was surprised - I hadn't noticed.
    My afternoon class is with Ann Brenner on "Care of the Care Giver." We discuss mourning and since it is the week of Tisha B'Av - the fast day commemorating the destruction of the temples build by Kings David and then Solomon, we talk about mourning the loss of these Temples. I feel an urge to say that if there is one thing I have learned this journey, it is that nothing is permanent. Mountains, seas, lakes, glaciers - all come and go. Even the planet, sun and universe. So why should the Temple last forever?
    Someone responds that this should not stop us mourning our losses. Another person who is a priest (married to a Jewess) remarks that we should not discount the spirituality of beautiful buildings and religious objects, and not forget to remain grounded and physically in contact with these.
    So this leads me to wonder if the answer for me is to love and respect art, beauty and architecture, mourn losing them when the time comes, and move on. We are selling our gorgeous house - in some ways my temple - and that is the nature of temples and houses and everything else.
    Later Goldie explains that Tisha B'Av is about mourning our exiles; from Jerusalem, from self, from safe and supportive co-existence with other nations, from relationship with God. It is a time of considering all the consequences of being driven out of our homes, families torn apart, remembering many of the tragedies of the Jewish people. (Goldie: the end of Bar Kochba revolt, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Polish and Russian pogroms, etc., many horrible moments within these were timed to this date, the 9th. Of Av)
    So in a sense this is an ongoing low grade mourning, not the type you do once then get over your loss. Intrinsic to Judaism will always be an element of mourning. Around us people have blue and red threads in their prayer shawl fringes, I imagine one could have a black thread running through as well.
    We step out from the evening service and Goldie does a free translation of Lamentations to a small group of us. She creates an image of the tragedy strikingly like that of Kosovo with our people streaming out of the city while aggressors mock us and God does not respond with help. Now I not only understand the tragedy, I begin to feel it. Then I rejoin the service in the tent, in semi darkness, link arms with the others and chant, allowing the feelings to take root.

Goldie: The word from parshat Noah jumps out at me again: "Hamas"....all encompassing violence - devastation of everything, it appears in Lamentations in the emphatic infinitive absolute verb form, the action is attributed to God, to the Melech, ruling, Yud Hay Vav Hay God aspect. At the same time that the presence, interpersonal, caring, Shechinah aspect of God is walking out as a mourner with her people. The text has a Schindler's list type moment, where the plural verbs become feminine singular....one tragic young despoiled girl walks off the page as pure bitterness or it could be She is the Shechinah, mourning for her children.
    A spiritual question implicit in Tisha B'Av becomes how is the Shechinah in exile now, in our lives, communities, countries, actions? How do we recreate the intent of the entomology of the word Jerusalem - which could be seen as "y'ru/ eer"=city, "shalem"=complete, whole, fulfilled, at peace?
    My morning class is on dance midrash with master teacher Liz Lerman. In three weeks I'll be in the Ukraine working with Jewish women and the movement skills she has taught me will be powerful tools to help transcend the spiritual language barrier
    We are preparing to dance a section of Eichah, the Book of Lamentations, which is read on Tisha b'Av. Liz asks us to write out our worst nightmare, or invent a worst nightmare scenario. We then place these paragraphs on the floor around the room. We wander among them reading, and capturing key phrases which can be expressed in a movement.
    I see someone wrote about a car wreck, rolling over and over in the vehicle out of control, it reminds me of what happened to beloved former congregants of mine.....I begin to roll on the floor feeling terror. Another writes of being trapped in freezing cold on a camping trip, their words rack my body with shivers. Another writes of being a Jew asking everyone to help her in her village during the war and they act as though they can not see her....I wander the room begging the invisible villagers for help....the woman beside enacts a miscarriage caused by assault.
    We then take these movements - rolling out of control, shaking, begging and many more and share them in small groups and turn them into a choreography of terror, performing the sequence as a group. Then we receive our copy of Lamentations....a degree of understanding of the tragedy sets in, we become the mourners streaming out of Jerusalem, our daughters ravaged, our guts spilling out, our faith a torment......then we dance the movements to lines from the text.....I chant some of it in the haunting traditional melody. We become Tisha B'av.

Barry: Goldie did fine except for accidentally swallowing a moth a few minutes after starting the fast. By now it's 10.30 pm. We have reserved the video player. Our friend Michael Goldberger has brought a video for us from Germany. He is the rabbi of a 6000 member congregation in Dusseldorf. We had met him there in November when he was about to officiate at the dedication of the first new Torah specifically written for a community in postwar Germany, for his community. It is going to be a big event - dignitaries, media, the Chief Rabbi of Israel.
    The day of our arrival, a fax arrived from the chief rabbi of Israel backing out of his commitment to come for the ceremony. Apparently he opted for attending a holocaust memorial in nearby Berlin over celebrating the restoration of Judaism in Dusseldorf. His absence would be a painful loss for the community. We brain stormed with Michael and he realized the opportunity this represented for his community to celebrate their own resourcefulness and self empowerment, rather than a dependency on Israel for identity. This is the video of that ceremony.
    The cantor was from Basel and he sang with great power and skill. Instead of the Chief Rabbi, we saw the President of Germany, and the national TV in Germany that night played footage not of Holocaust memorials, but of people singing and dancing in the aisles of a synagogue holding the new Torah. By now there is a small group watching with us. We are all taken with the experience of watching a real live modern day drama of how a community can revive and renew itself, particularly since we are watching it on Tisha B'Av.

Goldie: The next day our process deepens. As the day lengthens the topic of comfort begins to emerge. Liz Lerman has a brilliant way of encouraging us to find redemption in our ability to support one another. During a gorgeous niggun played by Rabbi David Shneyer, she has all of us walk slowly out of the tent, bending over at random every few yards....feeling the weariness of the fast and lingering images of horror. Each of us who sees someone so bent over, reaches over and gently and lovingly helps them to resume their walk in a standing position. Powerful comforting is happening on a vast scale.
    As we gather over eight hundred strong in a circle, the mind boggles at the continuing existence of the Jewish people in the face of all those cycles of destruction. One gets it that we have a purpose important enough to be sustained against all odds within Creation. We are invited to wipe a tear from each other's cheeks, many experience a mounting energy of hope that we can get humanity to another level, and through us God will get there as well.

Barry:    Goldie thinks you, the reader, may find all this too intense. If so, you have the picture.

More on Kallah, the festival, in our next posting.       Return to Main Menu