#OccupyHeaven: A Poem for Ne'ilah 5777

United not by common language or experience

but by action, by clapping, using our hands

to give voice to our rising power

transcendent heartbeat of our collective will, we say

petaj lanu sha’ar b’et ne’ilat sha’ar ki fanah yom

hayom yifneh hashemesh yavo veyifneh navoah sh’arekha

Keep the gate open for us when the day turns to night!

As surely as the closing bell sounds, we will rush the gates!

The word ne’ilah means closing time, buildings locked, gates bolted, alarms set

so no intruders can infringe on God’s spare time He spends like spare change

Ne’ilah means our time is up, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here

If God didn’t get to you today, you should have showed up earlier

Forced to participate in this frustrating process of penitence

God’s yearly performance review of humankind

all denied food and water for the last twenty-four hours

some denied food and water each and every twenty-four hours

we convene today for protest’s sake

as the sun sets on this Day of Atonement

The Day of Judgment

when even the Hosts of Heaven are judged

God thinks if management has to do this too that we won’t notice

the glorified injustice of the pinnacle of our calendar year

So we’re here ready to make some noise - our voices will be heard

We will make God listen; that’s what we’re here to do, to insist on

to insist on not being ignored, to insist on disrupting God’s dinner party

"No humans allowed" except the help; be sure to use the service entrance

If you are a veteran of actions like these, great.  If this is your first, even better.

Let’s start with refreshing our memory at why we’re here

God says He seeks our repentance, not perfection

God says this is all He desires, as soon was we repent, He will forgive

Adonai adonai el rajum vejanun

erech apayim verav jesed ve-emet

notzer jesed la-alafim

nose avon vafesha  vejata-a venakeh

My Lord, My Lord, God is merciful and gracious

endlessly patient overflowing with kindness and truth
bestowing kindness to the thousandth generation,

forgiving wrongdoing, sins of commission and omission and granting pardon

What a load of -

oh right, no cursing - there are children present - yeah, right

You may not know yet but we have the full text of that quote about God’s kindness

it’s taken out of context and when you play the tape all the way to the end

He’s actually talking about how He won’t forgive

and instead He’ll punish people to the third and fourth generation - at least

God and His cronies don’t want us to know He seeks revenge and calls it justice

God and His cronies don’t want us to know the Messiah is ready to come tomorrow

if police lay down their weapons and superintendents reopen closed schools

if we tear down separation walls and throw welcome home parties for refugees

as they come back to the properties whose deeds they have safeguarded for generations

if we abolish prisons and establish a justice system that respects even the cockroach

and one that never treats humans like roaches - but that would destroy God’s master plan

Hypocrite on High - we see through Your empty rhetoric

this was the year that God increased, not decreased, extrajudicial execution of Black boys

this was the year that dancing in your queer Brown body became punishable by death on Shavuot

that going to mosque in Queens became a capital crime for Imam Alauddin Akonjee

On Tisha B’av.  This was the year God further punished poverty

and humiliated and killed transgender women of Color

this was the year God sanctioned the scapegoating of Muslims for violence

even though God gave us violence millenia before the life of the Prophet

that’s why we’re here to #occupyHeaven, here for the immigrant, for the beggar, for the refugee

for the orphan and the child soldier, for the domestic workers, the sex workers, and ourselves

here to negotiate a new covenant, here to strike if needed

God and His cronies don’t want us to know we can throw off their yoke

But now is the time

we #occupyHeaven

Now is the time

we deem God an unsuitable negotiation partner

Now is the time

we hold out for a better offer
Now is the time!

Now is the time

               we say no más to deportation

Now is the time

we make the sun stand still over Jericho and Silwan and Susiya

declaring #existenceisresistance against God’s weaponized bulldozers

until Jacob and Esau once again embrace

This is the year, the poet says, this is the year the squatters evict landlords

the year we refuse to go home until everyone has housing

the year we refuse to be satisfied with forgiveness until all are forgiven

the year we tell God not to make foolish promises, the year we abolish not only prisons but sin

The sun hasn’t set yet, the gates are still open.  So here’s what we’ll do

even the worst sinners and those whose guilt weighs heavily though they are blameless

we’re going to join hands and enter the open gates. Our chant starts simply:

Hear our voices!  Hear our voices!  Hear our voices! Hear our voices!

Reflections of a Student Rabbi Against the Occupation of Palestine for Shabbat Shuvah

These holidays have been particularly hard. The difficulty comes not only from the added, expected stress of increased responsibilities in the planning department.  As someone preparing to enter the rabbinate, I have many friends who are rabbis or cantors or Jewish educators or who are, like me, currently in school to become Jewish professionals.

As in any community of shared purpose and interest, we exchange thoughts and writings.  Among those writings are the High Holy Day Israel sermons I have dreaded since adolescence, when my curiosity about where the trees we raised money to plant in Israel uncovered the horrifying truth.  We were taught to think about the Jewish National Fund (JNF) both as an environmental organization and part of the Zionist effort to make the desert bloom, which, in and of themselves, are two oppositional ideas.  Because we were taught that the JNF was beautifying our homeland, to discover that the real purpose, now extremely well-documented, of this beautification, much like beautification projects in our major cities, is the continued displacement and erasure of its prior residents.  The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by the JNF, the Israeli government, and other Zionist organizations, is a Jewish communal wrongdoing I could not unsee - that I would not unsee.  So to see my colleagues and friends embody and enshrine the concept of "progressive except Palestine" 

I am deeply bothered by the content of these sermons.  They often conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, or, worse, redefine anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism, thus ignoring the very real ways anti-Semitism persists as a system of oppression independent of Israel's existence and independent of her actions.  They fear-monger about open discussion of Palestine on college campuses, urging congregants to empathize with Zionist students over and against Palestinian students and those in solidarity with them, including a growing number of Jewish students against the Occupation.  They tell, essentially, conversion stories of Zionism.  These stories explain the exceptional spiritual experiences of spending time as a Jew in Israel.  Even as liberal, marginalized Jews in the Jewish state, they were able to appreciate the modern-day miracle of having a Jewish state in a historical Jewish homeland.  In none of these stories do the authors stop to consider Palestinian experience.  A few share stories of spending time with Palestinians in the West Bank, stories of Palestinians being peaceful, stories of Palestinians graciously allowed by the Israeli government to inhabit their own land, stories of Palestinians providing hospitality, of baklava, kanafeh, and Turkish coffee, stories which strip Palestinians of power and agency and leave them backdrops for an empathetic Jew.  They share the trauma of the Holocaust to justify the existence of the state of Israel.  Again and again, Western Jewish experience is privileged over indigenous Palestinian experience.

Fewer of these sermons focus on the demographic threat and the urgency of a two-state solution the way such sermons did before the incursion in Gaza in 2014, now a yearly summer ritual of the IDF.  Fewer focus on oppressions within Green Line borders like sexism, racism, and xenophobia.  None focus on the problem of Occupation.  Instead, in a globalized world, they focus exclusively on Zionist Jewish concerns.  Some on the need to oppose Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.  Some on the need to oppose #BlackLivesMatter.  Some on pinkwashing.  But don't say they're Islamophobic because they think Arab Muslims throwing rocks are more inclined to violence than white Jewish soldiers with M-16s.  Don't say they're racist because they're willing to throw away half a century of solidarity over the exclusive right to use the word genocide.  And they certainly aren't using LGBT people as pawns to deflect from other human rights abuses.  See, they're liberal Jews which means they treat everyone equally and God is on their side.

Worse than the content of their sermons is the framing.  There's the coded language of "starting a difficult conversation about Israel."  I wonder if they learned that phrase in school, or from AIPAC or J Street.  It's doublespeak for silencing dissent.  There's the Israel-has-problems-but-so-do-we, a kind of deflection which is often used by domestic abusers to distract from their own wrongs.  And there's the gross manipulation of the recent lost of Shimon Peres, z"l.  Ignoring the complexity of a peacemaking leader who participated in the Nakba, ignoring the failures of the Oslo Accords and the decades since then, ignoring that Peres' understanding of the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict (that is, land in historic Palestine being controlled by Palestinians), has never truly been implemented, and ignoring that the lack of implementation of that solution is Israel's fault, my colleagues are using congregants' grief over Peres' death as a political tool of redoubling support for Israel.  That most of these sermons were for Rosh Hashanah rather than Yom Kippur strikes me as telling on an ethical level.  How can one truly repent while transgressing?

I have become increasingly skeptical about the utility of so-called dialogue about Israel in American Jewish communities.  The privilege and oppression dynamic that exists between Jews and Palestinians means at best we are like a bunch of suburban white folk discussing the impact of racism in American cities.  Plus, the people leading these so-called open dialogues are often the authors of the sermons people like me walk out of.  In the year ahead, I think we should move more toward a model of uplifting Palestinian voices, of hearing from those targeted by the Occupation.  Of reminding ourselves over and over that Jewish opinion and reaction is not the point.

The broader context of "discussion of Israel" in American Jewish life has made me even more grateful to be a part of Tzedek Chicago.  The Pro-Israel hegemony in American Judaism and the way that hegemony is increasingly detracting from our ability to be engaged progressively in other realms (#BlackLivesMatter being the most notable case) are our most pressing collective wrongs.  I am blessed to be part of a community that sees that.  I look forward to another year of working for justice together.

As fellow Tzedek member Adam Gottlieb said in his interpretive Haftarah for Rosh Hashanah,

This is the year the whole system is indicted!

Adam, from your lips to God's ears.

New Beginnings

I have wanted for some time to begin a new blogging project.  I have for some time maintained blogs at different places essentially for the purpose of writing therapy, for working out my thoughts as I develop them.   However, I have not yet undertaken a blogging project meant primarily to post more well-formed ideas.  That is, not until now.  So what better way to begin than starting at the beginning of the New Year.  I am proud that my first post contains my Rosh Hashanah remarks.  I hope it will be the first of many well-formed reflections in this tiny corner of the internet.

The Emperor’s New Liturgy: Remarks on Malkhuyot delivered at Tzedek Chicago - Rosh Hashanah 5777

The Emperor’s New Liturgy

In 1837, Hans Christian Andersen published “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.[1]  The fairy tale describes a vain emperor and the con-artists who convinced him to let them make an extraordinary garment.  Its fabric had the power to be seen only by those who deserved their jobs; to anyone else, it would be invisible.  After commissioning the garment, the emperor sent advisers to check on its progress, and they returned and gave good reports.  When the con-artists presented the “garment” to the emperor, not wanting to out himself as unfit for his post, he praised the garment. At the parade showing his new outfit, all his subjects cheered his magnificent new clothes.  Then, a young child shouted, “he’s not wearing any clothes!”  As everyone realized the emperor was naked, he kept the parade going with more gusto than before.

As modern pursuers of justice, this story expresses our critique of monarchy, imperialism, and selfish leadership.  Monarchy is antithetical to our value of equity.[2]  Leaders with or seeking absolute power do whatever they must to maintain that power, and the naked truth of their corruption becomes obvious to us all, with or without a child to vocalize it.  We know too well the costs of the destruction of modern-day despots and dictators.  We know electing a leader doesn’t resolve the problem of abuses of power.  Investing a leader as ultimate authority is morally repugnant.

To make matters worse, our High Holy Day liturgy refers to God-as-monarch.  Confronted with malkhuyot, Divine sovereignty, a central theme of the Days of Awe, we wish we weren’t. Hamelekh Hakadosh - the Holy King - and its paternalistic version - Avinu Malkeinu - Our Father Our King - block our process of teshuvah.[3]  We don’t believe in a Book of Life or Book of Death.  Whether or not we believe in God, we’re sure She’s not poring over ledgers of our deeds to see if we’re good enough to live another year.  We come for the music and company and ignore the prayers.  

Still more of us stay away.  This - our imperialist liturgy - keeps us away from the synagogue.  In “A High Holiday Manifesto for Millennials”, Rabbi David Wolpe writes “the High Holiday theme of being judged is alienating.”[4]  Rabbi Wolpe wrongly asserts that young Jews do not wish to be evaluated. People my age do not fear being judged; our misdeeds are recorded and accessible with a simple internet search.  We are judged constantly by people everywhere, and the process has made us more cognizant of our responsibility to a globalized world.  This experience isn’t unique to my generation; Baby Boomers are the fastest growing demographic on social media.[5]  Being critiqued isn’t alienating; being arbitrarily judged by a supposedly Benevolent Dictator in the Sky who determines our fates is abhorrent.

If the only goal of the High Holy Days is to become better people, the staying-home solution to the malkhuyot problem is adequate. This undercuts Rabbi Wolpe’s argument that young Jews should come to services, as every suggestion he makes can be done having dinner with friends. We don’t need Judaism or synagogue or a bunch of words we don’t believe to help us grow or feel more connected.  And yet, we’re here.  Tzedek is not a default; we chose to be here today.  Today, we need to add our legacy of imperialist liturgy to our litany of transgressions.  Today, we need a better solution to the malkhuyot problem than dismissing our discomfort at the words on the page.

Actively persecuted by the Roman Empire,[6] the early rabbis responsible for our liturgy developed an idea of God in opposition to empire.[7]  God was independent of any state power.  Yet, especially in High Holy Day liturgy, our rabbis used the language of empire to refer to the Divine.  At first glance, the tactic seems a simple enough critique of human rule.  In a hierarchical system, God is the One True Monarch and all human rulers are merely posers.  The Diva of Divas, Her whims are honored rather than those of obviously unjust human rulers.  Under closer examination, the picture of God these radical rabbis painted is not like any human ruler.  Avinu Malkeinu cares deeply for His subjects.  God ‘al kise ram venisa (on a high and exalted throne) balances compassion and justice. She keeps good people alive and kills the bad ones.

Great, right?  Except the killing part.  And the fact that this is plainly not how the world works.  Ask any mother who has lost her child too young: who shall live and who shall die is not based on any system of justice.  Anyone involved in the justice system knows that compassion doesn’t oppose justice; it enhances it.  The rabbis’ idea of malkhuyot is so fanciful it is clearly fictitious.  Some might say that this shows lack of imagination on my part; human, I refuse to consider that for God all is possible, including just use of absolute power.  But our rabbis left clues in our liturgy that they did not believe God-as-absolute-authority was good.  Our Torah and Haftarah readings for Rosh Hashanah show God as demanding and callous, allowing Abraham to cast out one of his sons and demanding he prepare the other for slaughter, granting the prayer of a barren woman for a child only to require that child be separated from her.  And unetaneh tokef calls God’s judgment of who shall live and who shall die “roa’ hagezeirah” - the evil edict.[8]  Our rabbis peppered our experience of praying to Hamelekh Hakadosh with depictions of God’s malevolence as a ruler.

What was their aim with the fanciful and fictitious description of the Sovereign God?  They show us God-who-has-transgressed.  Our liturgy does not show us our inadequacy in the face of a Perfect Being.  Instead, it vividly describes some of the worst of God’s mistakes. We have not fulfilled our end of the covenantal relationship, nor has God fulfilled Hers.  Our liturgy includes God along with us as needing to make teshuvah during these ten days.  

At the end of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, the Emperor deliberately continues the parade naked. While we read this before as a sign of gross incompetence, there’s another way to look at it.  When the emperor’s humiliating mistake is revealed, he views that vulnerability as a positive.

This is the Sovereign God our rabbis imagined while writing our liturgy: vulnerable, flawed.  A King of Kings who, like any other king, messes up.  Out of good and bad intentions.   Often.  Catastrophically.  But who carries on dealing with the consequences of Her mistakes head on, publically, without shame.   We pray to God who joins us in the process of teshuvah, the Queen who needs our forgiveness as much as we need Hers.  The King whose capacity for missing the mark is the one on which ours is modeled.

Contrary to Rabbi Wolpe’s message in his excoriation of my generation, we don’t need to celebrate Rosh Hashanah to understand ourselves better or improve our connection to a Greater Power.  We don’t need to celebrate Rosh Hashanah because we’re afraid of God’s judgment.  We don’t need to come to synagogue to become better people.  We need to come to experience the wisdom of the radicals who designed our rituals.  We need to celebrate Rosh Hashanah to be reminded that we are partners in creation, made in God’s flawed image.  To assert that God’s best isn’t good enough yet.  Our best isn’t good enough yet.  Creation is still unfolding, and we have a critical role to play.  The question malkhuyot leaves us with is: will we continue the work with our nakedness exposed?

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[1] Hans Christian Andersen.  Fairy Tales Told for Children. First Collection. (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1838).

[2] A Judaism of Equity is one of Tzedek Chicago’s core values.  For more information, see http://tzedekchicago.org/core-values/ Last visited October 1, 2016.

[3] See a traditional Maḥzor for the liturgy to which I refer.  Translations are my own; any similarity to other translations is accidental.

[4] David Wolpe.  “A High Holiday Manifesto for Millenials; For estranged seekers, a leading rabbi suggest a roadmap.”  The Jewish Week, September 21, 2016.   http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national/high-holiday-manifesto-millennials

[5] The data which show this are numerous.  A report of one such study can be found at http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/planning-to-retire/2011/08/30/retirees-fastest-growing-users-of-social-networks, last accessed October 1, 2016.

[6] Flavius Josephus. The War of the Jews, or the History of the Destruction of Jerusalem.  75.

[7] Solomon Schechter,  Aspects of Rabbinic Theology: Major Concepts of the Talmud (New York: Schocken Books, 1961; originally published 1909).

[8] While the pseudipigraphical authorship of unetaneh tokef attributes the prayer to 11^th century sage Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, its presence in the earliest stratum of the Cairo Genizeh, indicates that it dates at the latest to the 8^th century, with some scholars placing it even earlier.  See, for example, Planer, John H., “The Provenance, Dating, Allusions, and Variants of U-n'taneh tokef and Its Relationship to Romanos's Kontakion”,  Journal of Synagogue Music, vol. 38 (Fall 2013).