MetaDevotion

We know from leaves
that winter is, at bottom,
separation from lines –
of sap and fire, juice and blight,
the wrath of G-d, flowers.

We know from words
that winter is, at bottom,
a glottal stop, the connection
broken when there is no sound
to land on.

We know from the sun
that January begins things,
presides over the heat,
the juice, the blood.

And there is still
no sound this month
beyond the choke of the throat
as it tries to open onto song.
But I’ll tell you, love

we know from G-d
that winter is the space between
love and demons,
spring and blight,
horror, gratitude,
a despicable longing –
for trees and sap and the wrath of G-d

and the leaves are falling
and the leaves are falling
and silence is a lot less golden
than you in winter conversation.

We know from knowing
that you are the sky
of my story
and I am lighthouses in the sea
so you’re never too far out
for me. But I am cold here,
on the edge. And January
pulls the sun around too slow.
Though I know from leaves
where to go. Where to wait
for G-d and spring.

---

Kyla wrote that, because she is the best!

That's all...

Porch, Cafe, Yeshiva

B"H

Arwen has gone philosophical on us. I empathize with her blues, down to the details, but I have my own today. The early spring restlessness has set in. As I observed to Aviel, I've always been restless -- since before I was born -- but I don't mind spending a lot of my life sitting (which I do, of necessity). It all depends on the quality of the sitting. There is dynamic sitting and dull sitting. In the dark maw of Winter, dull sitting has some kind of comfort. It's a kind of hibernation, I think. But when the sun comes back, it brings too much energy to bear comfortably in dull sitting, so I need a shift to something more interactive.

If my sitting doesn't shift with the season, I'm afraid I'm going to become very restless and cranky. (It's sure happened before.) Here's the catch: I need a good place to sit. You can't do dynamic sitting just anywhere.

Every healthy creative society has been built on a good place sit -- the front porch, the cafe, the coffeeshop, the yeshiva (literally the "sitting"). One of my most encouraging discoveries at Point Roberts has been the abundance of large front porches, especially in the older eastern blocks (see for yourself), indicating that this may be a good place to sit.

One of the weaknesses of our shul is that it does not provide any very good places to sit; consequently, people are generally not inclined to stick around with each other there, and the community gels less than it would. I have designed a way to rearrange the furniture already available to create a small beyt midrash/lounge alcove facing a large window onto the street. B'ezrat haShem (and certain other powers that be), I may put that plan into motion this week, and then we can see what kind of a difference it makes.

This is a start, but, as it is, I don't think the shul regulars represent the social critical mass that it will take to feed this beast. In general, Mishkaneering requires a kind of maximazation of the dynamic potential of our sitting. So we need to figure out what really makes a great place to sit.

To begin with, examples -- some of my most joyful times spent sitting were in: music rehearsal, audience to artistic performance, a good coffeeshop, the sidewalk in front of a good coffeeshop on an interesting street, a Shabbos table with two to four other people, learning in chavruta or a small group, my home or someone else's if I'm having a really great conversation there. Now, situations like this can be found readily, why not just go to them more? Well, that is the ideal situation; but the choice of a place to sit is one that defines one's chevre. In the process, as we are, of trying to build one, the investment of our sitting energies (as with other energies) is needed in the emergent community's domain, not that of some other collective, as much as possible. The trick is, dependence on the domain of a community-in-building to provide the setting for your life ends up sapping a lot of energy. Even just organizing dinner parties and melava malkas and other events, in order to create that space for good sitting, grows tiring after a while.

A great sitting place, ultimately, must sustain its own location. You can depend on it being there, without need for reinvention or reinvocation, every time you need it.

What else characterizes such a place? Here are some rules I can think of:

• It is physically comfortable
• It is in some way intimate and safe.
• Life can be heard in the background
• The life that can be heard in the background isn't so loud that it overpowers my attention to what I am doing.
• I can alternate between doing something by myself and doing something interactive with another person.
• I can expect a random, serendipitous encounter with someone of importance to me.
• I can get lost in conversation, for hours if need be.

What else?

Jewish Culture War?

B"H

While learning with R' Schachar a few months back (historical overview of the Slonim dynasty, I think), he encouraged me to write down something that I said, and today I am going to do it. The discussion was of how teacher-student and rebbe-chasid relationships are constructed in religious life as strict devotional partnerships. The question was, isn't it an enormous liability that the absolute faith required of the student/chasid creates readily abusable power? What if a teacher/rebbe sends his charge down an untenable path -- not one that the student/chasid merely lacks understanding of, but, rather, one that he knows to be wrong? I answered: by definition, one who sends him down an untenable path is, as of that moment, not his teacher/rebbe.

This is not a case for anarchy. (Only those fixated with power would believe so.) It is a case for the immanence of Truth. One of the greatest privilege-responsibilities we all bear in this life is to know who our teachers are. It is a matter of knowing the definition of the word and engaging it, which is a holy act of deep faith.

One paragraph on words and faith: In Torah, G-d speaks for Creative purposes only. Words are the tools of Creation, and nothing else. (Fundamentally, this is why lashon hara is bad: it is the perversion of speech from its Creative purpose.) Adam's likeness to G-d consists in our capacity to speak words, to engage their meanings, which manifests Truth and figures the Divine movement from tohu v'vohu to Creation itself. This function is Adam's identity, and our impulse to divest of its terrible blessing is the precise heart of idolatry. (See R' Kook on "original sin.") On the other hand, the impulse to own this Creative agency of language, to realize Adam's Divine likeness -- to give something a name -- is the original act of faith. In giving a name ("you are my teacher"), I expresses my vision, hope, idealism, and conviction in the immanent Truth. There is a strong tendency to confuse faith with the denial of one's own sense; hence blind-faith, which isn't faith at all. This is a (dumb) reaction to the equally strong tendency to confuse immanent Truth with ego. But correcting that confusion is what halakhah is for.

So, you are my teacher. You are not my teacher. If we don't say it, we don't know it, and if we don't know it, we aren't learning.

I asked my wife, "Is R' Mordechai really my rebbe?"

She said, "No, not really; if he told you to [jump off a cliff], you wouldn't do it."

"But I know he wouldn't tell me to do that, unless he and I both knew that [jumping off a cliff] is what I truly need to do." If that sounds solipsistic, read it again, more closely.

In Truth, R' Mordechai is my rebbe -- not because I am slavishly, self-denyingly devoted to his guidance, but because I don't need to be self-denying in order to remain devoted to his guidance. This is True and therefore he and I declare Truth by continually training our relationship upon it. R' Mordechai is my rebbe, not because I loyally affirm everything he does or says (I don't), nor because his guidance is conveniently unchallenging (it isn't), but simply because he and I together engage the definition of a rebbe-chasid relationship. Not davka. In faith.

Barukh haShem!

Now, why am I writing this today? It is in reflection upon the recent blasts of antiestablishment angst in the religious Jewish blogosphere (not to mention my own local community), which, as I read in the otherwise generally encouraging discussion below this piece on Cross-Currents, is tied to an experience of "culture war" within contemporary Judaism. In my view, war is only ever declared after we have been sold a bill of goods, so I have a strong reflex to reign in these horses of the apocalypse for a moment to consider our reality.

Our reality, currently, is that religious Judaism is living in a deeply adolescent stage of development. It is in a fever to dissociate from its squishy youth, to differentiate from its hosts and family, and to assert its pure, righteous vision. There are many significant corrolaries to the fact of this adolescence, but foremost is that religious Judaism is alive at all. Alive and in development. So this is good, and it will be for good, B"H. Meanwhile, there are other corrolaries, such as that our facility with Torah, whether the discourse be halakhic, maggidic, or qabbalistic, is generally clumsy and superficial, however much it may show personality or promise. Also, we are damn awkward at relationshipping, on all levels -- which brings us back to the teacher/rebbe and student/chasid.

The only way to make a great teacher is to be a great student. Without such relationships, there are no great teachers. The religious community, in a distinctly adolescent kind of urgent existential torpor, has been spending a lot of time out behind the cafeteria, experimenting with modernism in various forms. Anyone familiar with the analogy will know what this means: we are just putting off of the eventual plunge into the actual messy work of relationship-building. Until then, we will continue to fart around with modern brand economics, mass media, quasi-academia, and romantic nationalism -- and we will not produce great students and teachers.

I repeat: this generation is in no position to produce authentic gedolim, no more than an aspiring teenage writer is positioned to enlarge the canon of great books before she lives a few more years. Our gedolim are simulacra, not the beloved of generations to come, but temporary crushes, the top exponents of savvy in harnessing youthful, volatile passions for the consolidation of their popularity. This is to their discredit no more than it is to ours. And it is no shanda; it's just a stage of development (one with distinct virtues in addition to its limitations). Any of us who is ready to cut the pageantry and move on can go ahead and find a good teacher, find a good chevra, and start building our future.

The antidote to Jewish adolescence has a simple recipe: patience, and ahavat Yisraeyl. Brew it strong. When I am overcome by ennui over some shining example or another of the sorry state of Judaism, I try to remind myself, "The sky is not falling. The sky is not falling." This is especially vital in our time, because patience is so alien to our habits. No matter what political position they represent, it seems everyone in this so-called culture war is running scared that what they most value in Judaism is imminently endagered. If you think about it, this takes some hubris. Judaism is about the most resilient thing out there, and its robust survival beyond this generation is certain. So relax! Moshiach will come when I open my heart, not when I open someone else's spleen.

Kyla recently asked me (out of anthropological curiosity, she said), what my personal interest is in seeing more Jews, and more Jewish points of view, in the Halakhah Club. This came up when I was musing over why urban Conservative rabbis (not to mention modern-orthodox rabbis, who have obvious, if dumb, political reasons) don't promote the use of public transit, or establishment of a proprietary "Shabbos bus" service, as a halakhically-preferable alternative for their congregants who drive to synagogue on Shabbat and Yom Tovim. I am shomer Shabbat, I walk to shul, and I don't as a rule lose sleep over the aveyrot of other Jews (I have my own garden to tend), so what difference does it make to me whether someone else drives to shul or scrupulously takes a bus (w/o money, inside an eyruv, etc., etc.)? The answer is that halakahah is an oral language, which is animated only by those who engage it in their lives, and the difference between some Jew driving to synagogue out of convenience, and the same Jew taking the bus for the sake of mitzvah, is the difference between that Jew being engaged with halakhic culture or not.

Now that religious orthodoxy is fully modernized, in the sense that it is consumed as a brand-name lifestyle, effective leadership has come to mean effective mass marketing. Stability, which was always orthodoxy's ace-in-the-hole, now requires the mass consolidation of halakhic production and distribution in order to preserve a unified brand loyalty. The upshot is that halakhah becomes less transparent and more narrow. (Hey, that's industry.) This is, in my opinion, a sure cul-de-sac for oral Torah, and the only alternative way is to bring more different individuals into the life of the language, and to keep them engaged there. That patience and ahavat Yisraeyl are crucial to this end should be self-evident.