My pre-Pesach cultural/theological preparation this week includes watching The Last Temptation of Christ. I haven’t seen it in about 10-12 years, though it was actually pretty important for me in college. That’s a whole other story.
My goodness, what an exquisite film.
For the last year and a half or so, I’ve been meeting some friends once a month for Kiddush Levanah, the sanctification of the new moon. It’s great fun–we meet late Shabbat afternoon not long after the month has begun, do a little learning, and once it’s properly truly night out, we go out into my friend’s amazing garden and do the Kiddush Levanah liturgy under the big white sliver in the sky. (Another friend from this group has actually been writing his own KL liturgy, so we’ve started experimenting with that as well.)
Anyway, this last Shabbat, we had rather an interesting conversation about geulah (redemption) and the Pesach seder. As B. pointed out, the notion of redemption as an interior process evolved in the Hasidic world at a time when Jews had no real chance of being redeemed politically. The way to be able to stand the pain of exile and sometimes rather unfortunate circumstances vis a vis their Gentile rulers was to go inward, to take control of the redemption within since there, anyway, some change could be effected. Hence, the Exodus from Egypt became the individual’s exodus from his or her own, personal “narrow place” (as tzar, the word for narrow can be found in the Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim.)
B. posed, I think rightly, the question: “What about now?” What is geulah for us now, in a time and place where Jews do have control over the land of Israel, where Jews have more autonomy in America than they have in most other times and places accross history. Is it perhaps time for us to begin thinking again about what communal redemption might mean?
The implications for this line of thought can be fairly complex when parsed through the lens of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Certainly, one of the ways that we’ll know we’re redeemed is when everyone, on all sides, is safe and able to work, play, study and thrive. But how to get there? How can the Haggadah be a guide for that process? How do we understand God’s role in the Pesach’s story as a guide for this? As we got heavy into this conversation, through Liberation theology to its problems and back again, and it became clear that there are no easy, or obvious answers. Our attempts to sort through all of this began to get so tricky that someone wryly suggested that this sure makes the internal-liberation model look appealing, doesn’t it?
The internal liberation model is certainly appealing. And important, in the sense that we all have to do that work, over and over. But the work does not stop there. We are not just discrete individuals–we’re part of something much bigger. And, sometimes, more challenging. I don’t know what the answers are today, what redemption in the larger sense, in the communal sense, through the lens of this holiday and this seder, means in light of our present-day circumstances. But I do know that one of the difficult passages that we must cross over the course of the next week and a half is, in fact, this–crossing from being concerned about only our small, isolated selves into the sticky, challenging and necessary land of community, of peoplehood, of citizenship in the whole big world. It’s a lot harder over there, but it is that way that redemption lies.
I think I’m done with the rough draft. More or less. I need to add two more paragraphs to the epilogue, but I’m fried like a fried thing and it’s not happening today.
This afternoon is all about errands out in the three dimensions.
Hot dang, I’m dangerously close to sewing up the first draft.
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77,140 / 80,000
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That inching past 96% you see there is the result of my having worked Chapter Nine into the ground until it whimpered for mercy (or until I did; still not sure which.) There’s just the messy detail of an Afterword and, perhaps, a few hundred words of Prologue if I can make this idea I just had work. Not much to go, I’m hoping to sew it up by Pesach.
I’ve begun getting edits back from my editor at Beacon, and so never fear–I’ll still have what to do in April and May. So far they sometimes leave me with relatively little to do, sometimes ask me to reconfigure or beef up this section or that. They haven’t been nearly as gruesome as I had feared, which is nice, I think. It’ll be interesting to get in and give everything a serious, hard second look. But not yet! Not this week! No, no, not at all.
Soferet Jen Taylor Friedman has started a tefillin gemach for women, based in NYC. She explains,
A gemach is a charity which lends things to people in need. Sometimes it’s basic stuff like plates, sometimes it’s wedding dresses, sometimes it’s furniture, and sometimes it’s tefillin. Men who can’t afford tefillin can borrow some from a tefillin gemach for as long as they need them. But women can’t, because gemachen don’t exist in the liberal Jewish movements (so far as I know) and the liberal movements are the only places where they’re interested in women laying tefillin. Bit of a bind, as it were. So I’m working on doing something about it. Slowly, as yet, but working on it. And lovely people who donate tefillin completely out of the blue are a vital component.
Go here to contact Jen if you have tefillin (or money to buy tefillin) to donate to the cause.
Award-winning playwright, performer and author S. Bear Bergman has got a new and extremely worthwhile project going on. Bear writes,
Last month, someone told me I was her hero. I had gone to her small college and performed, and afterwards her classmates had begun to speak positively about queer and trans folks. For the first time, she felt she could come out - and did.Organizations and institutions that are queer- and trans-inclusive have the resources to invite me to participate in their conversations. The places where the administration is intolerant, where the culture is conservative, or where our issues are not given priority end up starving for it.
I am dedicated to meeting that need. I am committed to taking education, awareness, openness, and the great joy of my outlaw tribe wherever anyone will have me. I go where I’m asked, whenever I’m able, and perform or teach or lecture for free. I love it.
Here’s the problem - I can’t always go. Even when I can work for free, I can’t travel for free (and I can rarely afford to pay for it myself). So sometimes I have to say no, and I really don’t want to.
Here’s the solution - be a hero with me. If you can spare just $5 per month, over the course of a year you can help me work with hundreds of students. None of us has very much money, I know, but if you can afford $5 every month you can make a huge difference. You can make it possible for at least a dozen organizations or institutions every year to have programming they really need.
This money will only ever be used for expenses, and I am always accountable to the Fund For Women Artists as it gets used, but more than that I promise - I will make it count.
In other words, Bear will go perform for free at places where it seems like there’s a need, but needs help getting funded for transportation to said locations. Go here to learn more.
I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.
–Mohandas Gandhi
(This is one of the last notes left behind by Gandhi, in 1948.)
Yesterday was mostly about errands. I took a sweater into the dry cleaner–the guys I wave hi to every time I pass by, which is often–and, for not the first time, the owner wrote down my first name on a piece of paper, pinned it to the article of clothing, and told me to pick it up Thursday. No last name, no phone number, no receipt. Why would I need one? I know where the dry cleaner is, after all, and of course I’d want my sweater back.
Then, I hauled something like 12 books up to the used bookstore. The woman at the store told me that she wasn’t allowed to price and sell the books, but there was no reason for me to continue to schlep them–she’d just make a pile and put my name and number on it, and the owner would call me after he’d had a look at them.
Now, I’m trying to imagine this happening in the US. Maybe in the small towns, where everyone really does know one another. But the big cities? Just leave your merchandise, and of course we’ll pay you and give you a fair price for it? I’m having trouble with this picture.
But of course I left the books, and of course the owner called me last night, and of course he’s leaving a note in his ledger books so that anytime I come by, I’ll be able to collect my money. It’s like stepping back in time, in a very nice way.
Then I went to the copy shop and it was annoying and headachey, and I was reminded that, when it’s not a small town, Israel is a customer service-free zone. So it evens out. But still. I love those little moments when I get them.
Over the last few days, a tremendous number of people have gotten to this blog by googling, “How to protect yourself from demons.”
I’d like to guess that since we’re in Nisan now and that chunk of Talmud I quoted on the topic a couple of years back is, in fact, from tractate Pesachim and derives from a conversation about the four cups of wine at the seder.
But somehow I suspect that might not be the reason. I don’t know what it’s about, really.
