"You're asking me to knowingly face my death?" "Yes." In the Torah, Moses, standing on the precipice of fulfillment, begs God for more life. It isn't fair, and we readers know it. How can God not? For the Rabbis who process their raw emotions and lived experiences through the prism of Torah, it is even more pronounced. In their imaginations, Moses offers to become a rock in the Promised Land, just to be witness that his life has meaning, that his People made it, that there is a future he helped realize. And isn't this fair? Don't we deserve to see our children's children's children? We do. But we won't. Even a "good death" after a long fulfilling life, an experience tradition describes as "pulling a hair through milk," is never timed perfectly, when evaluated through human experience. We are mortal coils surrounding a divine core, intimations of eternity coursing through our hearts, death a truth we cannot help but fight. And, in fact, we are called to live each day as our last, because it could be. Each not-last day should be so full of life force, pervaded by repair and commitment. Every action should hold the urgency of mortality. Yes, I will die. I really don't want to. Especially not now, when life is so very precious. May we feel this way often, energized by our limited time enough so that we do not miss the glorious poetry of today. #StrangerThanFiction #BiggerOnTheInside
Nov 22, 2019
The latest entry in Bigger on the Inside: Dr. Who - "We all change"
“We all change. When you think about it, we’re all different, all through our lives. And that’s Ok, that’s good. You’ve got to keep moving. So long as you remember all the people you used to be.” How powerful it is to look back, to see who I once was, to appropriately grieve for the loss of that person. I was once the 3-year-old who bumped his shin on the trundle bed in my bedroom. I once took the training wheels off of my bicycle and didn't re-secure the back wheel. I remember well the 15-year-old who cried when my grandfather died. I was the young father who held my beautiful baby daughter in my hand. I have been so many selves, all of which still live in me. We each have former lives, an infinite number of previous incarnations, all real, and now only alive as memories. How close to the surface of our consciences these previous selves live can change as well, as triggers and reminders abound, sometimes too often. and, the more immediate my old self is, the more pervaded my eyes can become with reminiscence. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can threaten to crowd out wonder and the uniqueness of now. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, "we rarely discover, we remember before we think." So what are we to do if we are to be present in the present? We must cherish (or 'grok' a la Robert Heinlein and, more recently, Mayim Bialik) all our past selves, all we remember. We must hold it all with love, and then tenderly place our past in our pockets as we open our old/new eyes and learn to see again.
Nov 15, 2019
Which Fire Will It Be? – VaYeira
Which Fire Will It Be? – VaYeira
When we tell the story of the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, how do we tell it?
Do we dare question the God who commands the unthinkable? Do we allow the text which portrays God this way to push us completely away from faith, rejecting the troubling image? Do we hold Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only remaining son, his entire future, as admirable? Do we see and acknowledge Sarah’s absence from the narrative ? Do we discuss God never speaking to Abraham again after the Akeidah? Do we point to Isaac’s complicity in the story? (He is old enough to hold the wood for the sacrifice on his back, and so he is strong enough to resist, we suppose.)
So many questions. And it is so important to us, to our world, that we ask them.
Too often we fall into apologetics (“God was only testing“, “Abraham knew it was a test“, etc… ) but we lose the awfulness, the compelling tension, the struggle of the story when we do not confront the questions that demand these responses in the first place. Abraham is willing to question God’s justice during the Sodom and Gemorrah story, so why not here?! He is willing to risk God’s wrath for the more-distant other but not for his own son, his own soul? When we forget our own worth, what does advocacy for the other truly represent? This literal self-less-ness is a confused goodness at best. Halacha, Jewish tradition, teaches us that tzedakkah begins in the most immediate geographic and familial range and then emanates further. In contemporary terms: How can I help Syrians if my unattended home crumbles?
What is the story of the Akeidah? What positive direction might we gain from encountering it over and over?
There is an incredible soul-song, a meditation before prayer, found in the Book of Tremblers (Sefer Chareidim), that reads:
“In my heart I will build a dwelling-place to amplify the Glory of God/ And in that dwelling place I will make a place for the flowings of God’s Beauty./ And as the eternal light I will take for myself the fire of the Binding,/ And I will offer as the sacrifice my soul- my only soul.”
The words of this poem suggest that the fire from the Akeidah is the light of a spiritual life. And while we believe and teach that seeing beyond (“sacrificing”) the self is crucial to authentic spiritual journeying, this is not – must not be – the Eternal Light of a faithful path. A healthy Judaism, a healthy Jewish relationship with God, demands engagement, not surrender. We are God-Strugglers, the very meaning of the name Yisrael. We argue, contest, reach, and grow as strong partners with God.The Torah teaches of a God as a Learning Creator, One who regrets every failed generation of humankind (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Flood, the Tower of Babel), who mistakenly measured the success of Creation by the horrible demand of Abraham to give it all up. Who called Abraham to suspend his sense of what is right (for a second time, including sending Hagar and Ishma’el into the wilderness) out of obedience. This is a Cosmic Parent who sees the measure of success in the conformity of the child. This is a God who doesn’t know what will come next, who is emotionally engaged with – and therefore vulnerable to – the decisions and fate of humankind. This is a God who needs us.
This is the Torah’s view. What is ours? What fire belongs in our holiest of places, basking in the Eternal Light of the Jewish soul? Is it the fiery devotion of obedience when the command is wrong? Is it the sense that God’s command overrides human morality? Is that fire so manifest that I can absolutely know what God demands of me? In a careful read of the Torah’s text, can an image of a Vulnerable God invite us back into an honest, healing, relationship?
The fire of our souls, of authentic Jewish identity in living, growing relationships with our Divine Partner in Creation, demands that we acknowledge the wrongness in Abraham’s choice, in God’s command, in the Torah’s text. This story demands brave hurt and determined healing.
The Akeidah calls us to reaffirm and establish our faith in a just world, in our trust that God has learned the pain from this story and demands a healthy, maturing spirituality.
May that world come to be through our loving, passionate work in the wider world, and in our own, worthy selves.
Amen.
Nov 11, 2019
"Sunsetting" TheTisch
Shalom Everyone,
For the past 19 years (!!), I've been honored to share Torah and updates with "TheTisch," a YahooGroup. In the coming months, YahooGroups will begin gradually closing down most of its functionality, and so TheTisch will sunset along with the times.
Luckily, there are other ways for us to remain connected! On my website, menachemcreditor.net, you can find much of my material, including books, music, and videos. You can follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and much of the Torah originally shared through TheTisch has been incorporated into two of my books: What Does it Mean? (2013) and Intense Beginnings (2014), both available via Amazon. My most recent album, Olam Chesed (2015) is available on Amazon and iTunes.
And there's always the deepest joy of actually seeing each other! I love serving as Scholar in Residence around the country, and will be visiting the following communities in the coming months:
Friends, TheTisch began as a way of connecting the college students I led on Birthright Israel in Dedember, 1999, sharing a weekly thought with a beautiful group of souls. It's grown and grown, and I'm grateful to have been able to share a holy journey with you all. I'll continue distributing my writings through this email list until it no longer functions, but hope we'll find ways of remaining connected outside of its platform as well!
Kol Tuv - all my best!
Menachem
Nov 6, 2019
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