Kislev Dreaming

This Saturday – 122/26 – and next – 12/03 – I’ll be presenting on the month of Kislev and its connections to sleep health! I’ve been a registered sleep tech for over 16 years and now I’m in rabbinical school, so this seems a perfect combination of my knowledge bases.

Come and hear – there’s more to the month of Kislev than just Hannukah! We’ll take our cue from the Sefer Yetzirah’s list of associations aligned with each month, talk through some texts, and understand the vibe of Kislev. While nothing is required to participate beyond your Self, some thematic items might add to the experience; listed below are some of those themes and examples.

Join tomorrow evening – 11/26 @ 6 pm Pacific time
Or next Saturday – 12/03 @ 6 pm
Contact me at eishzarah @ gmail . com for event links

The compassionate suffering of a changing g-d

 

In B’reshit Rabbah there is a midrash that the angels did not want g-d to make humans:

Rabbi Simon said: When the Holy One, blessed be [They], came to create people, the ministering angels were divided into camps and factions. Some said, “Let g-d create humans;” others said, “Let g-d not create humans.” This corresponds to the verse: “Kindness and truth met; justice and peace came together” (Tehillim 85:11): Kindness said: “Let g-d create humans, for they will perform acts of kindness.” Truth said, “Let g-d not create humans, for they will be full of deceit.” Justice said, “Let g-d create humans, for they will perform righteousness;” peace said, “Let g-d not create them, for they will be full of divisiveness….”

And while the angels are arguing about the pros and cons of this decision, arguing our future out of existence, g-d just slips out back and makes people in all our complex beauty. Sometimes we do the same, creating our new selfs even as we logically argue against change or, unawares, focus on other life issues. We are often  both g-d and angels, even as we are still the creative result between.

Even in the traditional Jewish story of the beginning, there are aspects of the power and pain located in separation and creation.  On the second day g-d separates the waters, parting them into the waters above and the waters below. This second day is also the only day never labelled as “good.”  But on the third day; when g-d makes something of the separation, when g-d turns the waters into sky and sea  and creates land, when something comes from the pain; then that day is doubly blessed. 

G-d in these stories seems far more compassionate than the angels, far more willing to give humanity a chance to exist, despite knowing we will screw up and hurt each other. Sometimes I envision a g-d who is more compassionate simply because Ey knew the suffering of separation, because They felt Their Selfs pull away during the tzimtzum, felt the  withdrawal from that previous completeness, while the angels in their unchanging perfection can never know that pain.

Did it hurt g-d to create that space? Was it painful to limit Themself, to see the disconnected emptiness that used to be Them? Or did that space create joy? Was there happiness in knowing what that change would lead to? Is this what makes a compassionate g-d? The ability to know that all too human intertwining sense of loss and possibility, grief and hope?

A Brevity of Angels

There is a tradition the ophanim, the encircled eye-bejeweled angels, are the planets on a universe level. When I learned this the wheels within wheels suddenly made historical sense. We know the sun is at the center of the universe and Earth moves about it. But an Earth centered universe had humans who kept noticing planets would backtrack in the sky, they would retrograde.

This is the astrological retrograde often complained about and mocked. In the sky the planets sweep, making circles within their circles. And the ancients noticed.

I myself see an ophanim as a totality of a life, at least on this lowest level. The cycles of behavior and patterns, the eyes you thought were others looking but were always you, the wheels within wheels spinning within. But that’s a different story.

Out in Front of G-d

I’ve been trying to put feelings together on Noach for some time, but the threads keep getting more woven and it’s harder to simply write something short from the tapestry.

The fact that he is righteous in a generation of violence.
That he never questions g-d, never says a single word until he curses his own son.
That he creates a previously unknown sacrifice that burns up the (kosher) animals he had kept alive with such effort for over a year in a tomblike floating box.

Noach is like the one who does not know even how to ask. And he never grows from that state. He saw a world of violence and hurt; he saw a g-d who used violence against violence. The lessons he learns from those interactions?

To kill and burn what he spent a year keeping alive. To plant vineyards so he can forget the bodies of his neighbors floating by, the neighbors who stoppered the water with their own babies. To silently acquiesce to worldwide murder.

The sacrifice he offers is the first “pleasing aroma” of the Torah, but when you break the words down that “pleasing” has more to do with calming, with soothing. It comes from the same root as Noach’s name – to rest and settle, to quiet. Noach’s sacrifice is to sooth his own self, to quiet the part of himself that believes in a punishing g-d.

To offer death after so much death seems nonsensical. And yet the world shows us this pattern over and over again. People who are hurt and do not grapple with their pain frequently inflict harm back onto others through that lens. Even Avraham nearly falls into the pit : death as a sacrifice to the shadow of his childhood trauma.

How do we break away from this pattern – offering death for death, trauma for trauma? We become like Avraham. El Shaddai called and said not “walk with me” but “walk before me.” We must learn to not let the g-d of the world, the darkened mirror of our current reality, stop our imagining. We must walk before that g-d image, we must get ahead of it, we must walk “l’panai” facing g-d. Only in this way can we envision and embody a growing g-d, greater than the limits of our possibility.