This past Tuesday morning at Moreshet Yisrael Nancy gave a dvar torah about v’ahavta, the first paragraph of the shema, and about loving God. I was suddenly reminded of the last time I had heard Parshat V’etchanan in which v’ahavta appears. On Shabbat Nachamu last year I took weekend trip to Tzfat with some friends from the Yeshiva. We ate, slept and davened at Ascent, a Chabad hostel. After I outed myself to one of the staff as a Conservative Yeshiva student and hopeful future rabbinical student, he asked if I would give a d’var torah during lunch. I’d not given a d’var torah since my bat mitzvah. I didn’t have any of my books or the internet, I didn’t even have a chumash with me. I was scared – no, I was terrified. But I saw that I was being challenged as a Conservative Jew by a Chabad rabbi, and I couldn’t back down from that.

Lying in bed that night at 2 am, I tried to think… parsha parsha parsha… what can I say about the parsha? Shabbat Nachamu, ok… 10 commandments, always nice… Shema… Ah! Yes, I thought! Shema! I know the Shema! Well, yes, I mean one should hope, right? I mean I say it at least twice a day. Last summer we studied Shema pretty closely in a few of our classes. I remembered feeling troubled in Rabbi Goldfarb’s tefillah class, when I was studying in chevruta, about the talk of love in the shema. Take the Shema completely out of context. Forget the brachot before and after, forget everything else you know about Judaism. The love described in v’ahavtah, the first paragraph of the Shema, seems very one-sided. You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. Why? Because the second paragraph says that if you don’t… you get “schmeised,” as Reb Mordechai likes to say. Love God, obey the commandments, otherwise, no rain, grain wine or oil, and you disappear. The brachot before and after talk extensively about God’s love for us, but if anything it seemed to me at the time that this was an attempt to compensate for the lack of reciprocal love in the Shema proper, our paradigmatic statement of faith. How can we love God if we can’t see God’s love for us? How can you even conceive of calling such a thing love?

What else happens in the Shema, I asked myself. Mention of Yitziyat Mitzraim, and Tzitzits. There are many different ways to tie tzitzits, but the way my father’s family does it, the way I learned at Camp Ramah, is to tie them in 4 segments with 7 loops in the first segment, 8 in the second, 11 in the third and 13 in the fourth. I started thinking about numbers, playing a gematrya game in my mind. What is God? Well, God is One. The Shema tells us this. But God is also 26, 10 for yod, 5 for hey, 6 for vav and 5 for hey, adds up to 26. So do 7, 8, and 11, the numbers of the loops in the first three segments of the tzitzits. Love, Ahava, it just so happens is 13. 1 for aleph, 5 for hey, 2 for bet and 5 for hey add up to 13, the number of loops on the last segment of the tzitzit. Why do we wear Tzitzits? The shema says to look upon them and to be reminded of all of the commandments. So if God, 26, plus love, 13, makes up the tzitzits, which we can understand to be a representation of the commandments, since we look at them to be reminded of the mitzvot, what can I take from this? God, plus love, equals Commandments. The mitzvot are the expression of God’s love for us.

Ok, a numbers game. That’s very nice and very cute. But does it mean anything to say that God shows God’s love for us by giving us commandments? This summer when I went back home to New York for a couple of weeks, I was bombarded with questions from my friends and family and shul community about what I’ve learned during my year in Israel and how my observance and my outlook on Judaism have changed. I found that these conversations tended to break down when they came to the concept of commandedness, specifically the idea of Jews being bound, obligated, by the commandments. “Ah, see, there’s the problem,” one friend told me as she tried to wrap her head around my newfound religious fanaticism. “I hear obligation and I immediately think ‘that’s a bad thing!’” Another friend agreed, insisting that obligation by definition carries negative connotations. According to these views, the notion that God shows love for us by giving us commandments seems, if not preposterous, at least childish. When we think of commandment, of laws, many of us think of restriction, of narrowing. Many modern enlightened adults view this kind of restriction as infantalizing… as a vision of a sort of cosmic mommy and daddy who restrict our behavior because they know better than we do. Do we really need this? After all, we thank God every day for granting us intelligence, for making us free… how then can we see being bound to a restrictive prescriptive system by which to live, even to think, as a good thing, as a manifestation of God’s love? Aren’t we supposed to be able to think for ourselves?

Ok, so we’ve covered tzitzits. Yitziyat Mitzrayim is the other main element of the Shema. God gave us commandments, the Torah, after taking us out of Egypt. When we think of commandment as restriction, narrowness, are we to learn from this that God brought us out of the narrowness of bondage in Mitzrayim, to bring us into another narrowness called mitzvot? Psalm 118 says that Min Hametzar Karati Ya, from my troubles, literally from the narrowness, I called to God, Anani Vamerchav Ya, God answered me by setting me free, literally by widening the way. Perhaps God does not take us from narrows to narrows but rather from narrows to widening. It is true that living a halachically bound life is, on the surface of it, restrictive. There is no way of getting around that. But perhaps what we can learn from the psalm is that there is a way to look deeper at the commandments. I tend to believe that each mitzvah, if you look at it closely enough, points to something else, some principle, something for us to be aware of. There is a lot of marking, distinguishing, sanctifying, categorizing in Jewish practice. If we can accept as a basic premise that God’s commandments, our law, is meant to teach us how to live with maximum awareness, to maximize our potential as human beings, then each mitzvah has the potential to widen our perspective and broaden our understanding of the world in which we live. The world may be a very narrow bridge, but God gives us a derech, a path, a way to live which can expand our consciousness if we let it. This is how I can believe that God loves us by commanding us. Viewed in this way, the mitzvot are a gift, an addition to the gift of our lives to allow us to get the best that we can out of that life, if we are open to receiving it.

If God loves us by giving us mitzvot, then the shema is not devoid of God’s love, it is filled with it. And it seems to me that the best way of loving God back is to use this gift of God’s love to its fullest, to use each mitzvah to its full potential. To do the mitzvot is only the first step. To really fulfill the Mitzvah to love your God is to do more than that. It is said that the Torah has 70 faces, that everything is in it. To take each mitzvah and to turn it over and over and to learn all you can from it is, in my opinion, the way the way to love God back.

Sometime before I came to Israel, I took on the custom of covering my head at, pretty much, all times. Sometimes I wear a kippah, sometimes a scarf wrapped in such a way that I hope it is obvious that what I am covering is the top of my head and not my hair. I have been doing this for about two years now.

The wearing of a kippah is a custom, not a law. It has been elevated in Orthodox communities to the status of law, but this is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the Talmud it says that Rabbi Huna, son of Rabbi Yehoshua, never walked more than 4 cubits without covering his head. There is also a story of Rav Nachman Bar Isaac whose mother was told by a stargazer that he was destined to become a thief, so she instructed him to always cover his head so that the fear of heaven should be instilled in him… and indeed one time the scarf that covered his head fell off, and he was seized by the urge to steal, and stole some dates from the tree under which he was sitting.

The custom of piety took on the status of law for some simply because it became ubiquitous among Jews at certain times, and ubiquitous customs in Judaism have this tendency to become laws. But there is nothing in the Torah or in the Talmud which suggests that everyone, all men, or even really anyone is legally bound by this custom.

So why do I do it?

There are a few reasons. Just as custom has a habit of becoming law in Judaism, there is a strong injunction in Jewish custom that one is to follow the custom of one’s father. In my father’s family, the custom is that one will cover his or her head when he or she is in a religious institution, saying or responding to a bracha, or studying classical Jewish texts. So I began covering my head at all times so that when I engaged in any of these activities, which were becoming much more frequent, I would be ready and not have to go fishing for a head covering. Also, putting on a headcovering when you begin to study and taking it off again when you finish, I feel, is more conspicuous than simply having the covering on by default, and not wishing to draw more attention to myself than is necessary is one motivation. That was my rationale.

Here’s a story.

One day I was on the subway on the way to work. This was a few years ago when I was still working in retail. I had a hat that I had bought at The Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. It was a green brimless cloth hat, one might call it a skullcap or a beanie. I used it at times as a kippah, when I was in shul or when I was studying, and when I bought it I thought “this would make a good kippah.” But when I wore it, I didn’t always think of it as a kippah. It was a hat. There was nothing particularly Jewish about it, it was sold to me by a non-Jew who almost certainly didn’t think of it as a kippah, and a lot of people who were at the festival that year bought similar hats and wore them without making any sort of religious statement. That day, I was wearing this hat because it was cool out. I was going to take it off when I got to work.

So there I am on the subway minding my own business, not really looking at anything or anyone in particular. Suddenly I hear a loud, not so friendly voice:

“Look! A woman rabbi!”

I look up and there is an Orthodox man with a black hat staring down at me. I regard him in bewilderment, saying nothing. He turns to the man next to him, also a black-hat Orthodox man and begins speaking, to him, but clearly for my benefit, about how ridiculous these Reform Jews are who think that women can be rabbis. “There’s no such thing as a woman rabbi!” He declares loudly as though his companion needed convincing. He continues on about Reform Jews pervert Judaism, serve lobster at bar mitzvahs, don’t know anything about anything, “and look… they think that women can be rabbis!” He continues this tirade for the entire 40 minute train ride, and I say nothing until he disappears the stop before mine.

At this point I take a deep breath and let it out.

I get off at the next stop, Union Square, and exit the train station. As I emerge from the stairwell to the street, I see the man. I had thought he’d gotten off the train at the previous stop and I have no idea how he is there. He spots me and points directly at me. “YOU!” He yells at me, “you’re a woman rabbi!” It sounds so much like a declaration, a proclamation. I’m not entirely certain what his purpose is… is he asking? Is he asserting?

Regardless, he needs to be set straight. I walk calmly up to him.

“I’m not a rabbi,” I say to him softly. “But I will be. Because of people like you.” And I walk off toward my store.

Were I put in the same situation again now, I don’t know that I would have given the same answer. Because the truth is I am not doing this for him or for people like him. I’m not doing this to rebel, to be anti-anything, to make a statement.

On the other hand, wearing a kippah is a statement, regardless of my intention. It is a statement because it is out of the ordinary for a woman to do so. For me to wear a kippah is to go against the grain which necessarily calls attention to me and necessarily makes a statement to those who take notice. The same is true for wearing tzitzit. And this is at least part of why when I am not in the Yeshiva, I tuck my tzitzit in and I wear something on my head which is not immediately recognizable as a kippah.

This is a constant struggle for me. Part of me dislikes the idea of making a statement at all. It feels as though my practice loses something the minute it becomes about making a statement. Like with hagbah… the second it stops being about the congregation and becomes about me, it becomes meaningless. At the same time, since I have no control over how people read the symbol, the only way that I can prevent it from being read as a statement is to be in hiding about it, which is problematic for a number of reasons. It is beneficial for me and for women like me for such symbols being visible on women to become more mainstream, and hiding the symbols prevents that from happening. It also does little to encourage other women to explore ideological full egalitarianism, and perpetuates the status quo sense of isolation and loneliness.

My general rule is that I wear the “potentially gender problematic” symbols visibly in contexts where there is hope of the people who see them receiving the potential challenge to their world view in a productive and useful way. That means that I will wear tzitzit out and sometimes a kippah-style kippah at The Yeshiva, at Masorti/Conservative and progressive congregations, in the English tutoring program I do with 4th 5th and 6th graders at the Reform shul, and at my choir. On the street or in an Orthodox congregation, I keep myself closeted until I have reason to out myself.

Not too long ago I accompanied my friend Rachel, an Israeli woman from my choir, to a shabbaton called “Shabbat Shetach,” a Jews in the Woods sort of event, though decidedly less crunchy, and consisting almost entirely of nominally Orthodox young Jews. After some internal debate, I made a decision to cover my head with a kippah rather than with a scarf, and to wear my tzitzit out. This was supposed to be a friendly environment where people get to know each other and bonds form between people. If I was going to be myself anywhere, it was here. My garb elicited many questions, about myself, about Conservative Judaism, about my Yeshiva… all productive, all constructive. The determining factor is how likely it is in any given context that I will be dismissed out of hand versus how likely it is that someone will come to me, genuinely curious, ask me “why,” and then care enough to hear the answer.

Every Thursday during the school year, Reb Shmuel our Rosh Yeshiva has a sicha. Sicha means conversation. He starts with some thoughts of his own on some point of relevance to religious life… truthfulness, faith, tefilah, humor, study, it can be anything really. He shares with is his thoughts, looks at his watch, and says “your turn.” And we have a conversation.

This past Thursday was the last day of Yeshiva for the year. Reb Shmuel in his sicha talked about the sichot we have had over the course of the past year. Usually I remember what Reb Shmuel says in his sichot. Reb Shmuel is a very smart and a very wise man. This sicha I actually don’t remember very much of. What I remember is the reactions to it, some of which I found disappointing. Someone asked if Reb Shmuel had a vision for a structured way of implementing the values he attempts to communicate in his sichot into the Yeshiva throughout the year. I found this disappointing because the sorts of values that he talks about in his sichot are largely personal values that one must implement personally, not through a program prescribed by an institution. I felt that this person, along with others who expressed similar sentiments about the lack of structured implementation, missed the entire point of the sichot over the course of the year, and probably largely missed the point of Yeshiva as well.

Someone else asked “Where is God in all of this?”

Reb Shmuel said a bit about how he doesn’t like so much to talk about God in God terms because it often feels as though when people start to talk about God, they are talking about something that doesn’t mean anything, using a language that doesn’t mean anything. He said that nevertheless, bli neder, he would try to come up with a sicha about God perhaps for the coming year, since people seemed to want to talk about it.

I raised my hand.

Reb Shmuel talks about God all the time. All of his sichot are about God. See, I take his sichot very seriously. I listen and I try to assimilate and incorporate the things that he talks about into my daily life, and into my outlook. Some of his sichot are very concrete, very tachlis, like this is how you daven properly, this is how you build a kosher sukkah, this is how you hold a lulav. Some of them are more conceptual, more abstract, like about the nature of truth and truthfulness, or faith and faithfulness. They are all about how we live our lives, and they are all about God.

I remember a few months ago I was having a conversation with someone here at the Yeshiva. It was a conversation about personal conduct, about doing right by other people. And God came up in the conversation. We talked about God, matter of factly, comfortably, unselfconsciously. And I remember, after the fact, realizing that that was the first time I had ever been able to talk about God in that way… to talk about God without making disclaimers, without defining terms, without specifying what kind of God we are talking about here… God was just there in the conversation, perfectly at home.

Another time, I was having a conversation with another Yeshiva friend, one of those deep intense conversations that I tend to have with people, and he asked me the question “Do you ever just… talk to God?” The question seemed a little odd to me, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. I thought about it and gave him an answer about the times in my prayers when I explicitly include personal thoughts, supplication, etc. like tachanun and the end of the Amidah, but it didn’t seem like the right answer. I remember thinking about it the next day and trying to write about it… and I realized why the question had seemed so odd… it was because I don’t need to think in terms of “talking to God.” I have come to a point in my life where God is a constant presence.

In Shaiya’s medieval philosophy class we talked a little bit the other day about first order and second order theologies. Basically, second-order theology involves the questions of what we mean when we talk about God, what kind of God we do or don’t, can or cannot believe in, what it does and doesn’t mean to worship, etc. Academic discourse about God belongs in this category. First order theology is the realm of faith, worship and practice. My whole life, since the age of 7 or so, has been about second-order theology. This is where The Conservative Movement especially puts a great deal of emphasis. This year, as I mentioned way back last July, I made a decision to take a step back from second-order analysis of my Judaism and my theology and just work on practice. Now theology and philosophy and halachic theory have all slowly been reasserting themselves into my consciousness over the course of the year, and that is fine. But what I’ve been amazed to discover is that through the living of this life, thorough choosing to open myself to what text and practice has to teach me, I have, somewhere along the way, developed a first-order theology. God is in my life now in a way that I would not have thought possible for an overly-analytical type like myself. God is there when I wake up and thank God for returning my soul to me after sleep. God is there when I pray three times a day. God is there when I study. God is there as I work hard to live according to the standards of ethical personal conduct that our tradition mandates. God is there when, in my imperfection, I do things wrong and seek the rachamim that enables me to pick myself up and try again, to always strive to do better next time. And God is in the community that we create here with communal prayer and study, sharing shabbatot and holidays. God is there in the family that we become.

These are the things that Reb Shmuel’s sichot are about. How we live and think and practice Jewishly. And these are the things that bring God into our lives.

After the sicha ended, after I had expressed these thoughts, Reb Shmuel called me over and told me that he has never felt so appreciated in all of his life. And it made us both smile.

A couple of years ago I made a decision to work on watching my tongue. I decided to take on lashon hara as my project for the year and I became very aware of what I said and I also became very aware of what others said and what conversations I did and did not participate in. Over the course of that year or so I felt like I did a pretty darn good job. Not good enough, because of course it is never “good enough” (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing) but I felt like I made a lot of personal progress.

This year I feel that I have not done so well.

I have noticed this year an unwillingness on my part to say anything about L”H when I hear it, or even to refuse to take part. This is a big problem. It is a problem for me personally and it is a problem in the Jewish world. This is not one of those areas in which one can say “oh that’s just not so-an-so’s strong point.” Shmirat HaLashon is essential in Jewish life and especially essential for our professional body. I’m sincerely disturbed by the lack of care i have observed given to this area.

So I’m laying out a proposal. I am making a deal with myself. I want to be a rabbi. Not so that I can have the job-title “Rabbi” but because I want to achieve a certain level of mastery in Jewish learning so that I may contribute to the Jewish world and the Jewish people by helping others to live fulfilling Jewish lives, have their lives enriched by Jewish learning, and so that I may live properly as a Jew myself. Becoming a rabbi entails more than just learning though. You can get a master’s or a doctorate just learning. Being a rabbi is being a master in our tradition which is not just a learning tradition but a legal and ethical tradition as well. Study is in our tradition is optimistically considered more highly than performing mitzvot for the simple reason that study leads to mitzvot. If you study with no intention of putting into practice what you learn, then you have merited something certainly… and you might gain a title out of it… but how can it be anything but empty until you implement it in your own life?

I’m making Shmirat HaLashon my project again. And not just for a year, but for good. I was reading lessons from the Chafetz Chaim that year, and I think I might do so again… but what I might want to do, rather than reading summaries written up in English flooding my inbox, I might make it a project to read the original. Maybe set a weekly goal. I will make it my business to watch what I listen to, what conversations I participate in, and to try to steer conversations away from lashon hara when I see it rearing its ugly head. I have already incorporated a reminder into my daily tefillah. Now I am making it public.

We’ll see how this goes. Wish me strength and success.

So I’ve been here at The Yeshiva for about a year. I’m going home for a couple of weeks in June and I’m starting to really worry about what it will be like in the “outside world.”

Here’s the thing about the Yeshiva/Outside world dynamic: a couple of weeks ago, there was a young woman who came to check out the Yeshiva because she was thinking of studying here in the summer. She ended up studying with me in the 2nd level talmud class. As we went through a sugya about certain mitzvot potentially superseding Shabbat, and I tried to explain what was going on, she kept asking me what the relevance was. Why do we care what Rabbi Eliezer thought about shaking a lulav on shabbat, especially since that’s not what we do anyway? And why would he think that you could when everyone else thought otherwise? And why do we care? How can this matter if it’s not about saving someone’s life or about the community or the sorts of things that are, you know, really important? Why would something as trivial as shaking a lulav supersede Shabbat? And what’s so important about Shabbat anyway??

These are the sorts of questions I can hear people asking all the time in the “outside world.” And they are reasonable questions. Why does any of this matter to people who live in a real world with a surrounding culture that tells them what is important and where those things don’t, on the surface, seem to bear any similarity to the sorts of things we get so embroiled in at Yeshiva? And what troubled me was that I didn’t know how to answer those questions. I knew, deeply, structurally, why these things were important… at least why I thought they were important. But I didn’t know how to communicate any of it because it is built on the entirety of my learning, on the way that the structure, the deep structure of the tradition and the text are put together, how things fit, how reasons and symbols grow out of each other and build our practice. It is built on my understanding of what I have just begun to have a bit of understanding of after a year of intense study. How can you communicate that to a person impatient for answers, for meaning, for relevance?? It’s perfectly relevant for my life, but only because I found reason to tie my life to this tradition and to the study of it, and in order to do that I made a conscious decision to try my best to release as many of my preconceptions about what is “important” or “relevant” as I could before trying to learn, because I knew that if I held to them I would blind myself to what the Yeshiva could give me. I’m just not sure how to translate that. I’m not sure how to communicate to someone why they shouldn’t marry a non-Jew. I don’t know how to communicate to someone why they should come to shul or keep kosher. I don’t know how to communicate to someone that they shouldn’t drive or go shopping on shabbat. If I can’t learn how to communicate such things, then I’m going to have some significant difficulties in a relatively short while.

I talked to Reb Shmuel about this and he told me he thought was the way to address my concern about losing my sense of how to communicate what I’ve gained in Yeshiva to the Jewish “outside world” was not, chas v’shalom, to withdraw from Yeshiva but davka to go even deeper and learn more, and God willing that will give me more security in my learning and more of a sense of how to transmit, how to share my learning. I hope so. So like Shimon Bar Yochai (lehavdil) I go back into the cave for another 12 months.

Hevel wasn’t really there.

Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did, what was was as it had to be. Agency was mine, I bear the punishment and the mark of it, and God is the True Judge.

But in the beginning was a word. And another. And another. And thus was the world created– with stories. And we, whose lives were the first lives and whose births were the first births, our lives were made of the stuff of stories. I was born to be Man.
Hevel was born to die.

I would sometimes prod him to see if he would dissolve into vapor at my touch. You have to understand, it wouldn’t have seemed so odd. In those times, things were as they were and we, the first three, were discovering a newly created world. We were each so different from each other, would it be so odd to have a man who was flesh and a man who was not? Well he was solid enough– solid enough to bleed, solid enough to kill– but though, as it turned out, he could be killed, he did not truly live. Hevel was not Named. Hevel did not speak. I was given to Mother Chava to be Man after Father Adam. Hevel was addded. Added to be My Brother.

To see what I would do.

My suspicions about my brother came to a head when we brought the offerings before The Lord. It was given to me to till the soil, to toil for our bread. This was the charge of The Lord to Father Adam and passed to me. How then could I not offer before The Lord that which is our sustenance? How would I not offer the choicest of what we were given by The Lord to feed and maintain us? Hevel was the keeper of a flock, something he silently took upon himself without our knowing why. As we learned, from the flock we could take wool for clothes and milk for cheese, but we knew nothing of flesh. How then would I have thought to bring flesh as an offering? For that matter, how would he?

And yet, thus he did. My offering lay before the Lord, and there was an uneasy silence. And I watched as he silently took a lamb of the flock. I watched as he took his knife in hand. I watched as he did the unthinkable.

The blood flowed forth from the neck of the animal, life drained such as I’d never seen, poured out at the base of the altar. The body, the lamb that was no longer a lamb, he offered by fire. This he did without a word, without a moment of hesitation, as though he had recieved instruction. As he did this inconceivable thing, I gazed at him, first in confusion, then in horror.

But when the smoke began to rise, and when the flesh began to sizzle, and the fat began to melt, that was when I understood. The aroma of roasting meat filled my nostrils as I looked at my grain offering, and knew suddenly that it was lacking. What I had to offer from my own, from myself, from who I was, from my experience, could not live up to what Hevel seemed to just know, seemed to have embedded in his very being directly from God. A perfect knowledge, a perfect understanding. My understanding was imperfect. My sacrifice was imperfect.

I was imperfect.

It wasn’t reasonable. It didn’t make sense. Who was he? What was he? He was silent. Insubstantial. He had no desire, no will, no purpose, no identity. He had no anger and no joy. No longing and no satisfaction. He was inert. He was futility, vanity embodied.

He was perfect.

God spoke to me then, as I sat hunched by the altars of our offerings, Hevel walking silently back toward his flock. The weight of my confusion was nearly too heavy to bear. What could this mean, to be so flawed and to be taunted by this vision of perfection? What did it mean to have my sacrifice rebuffed by God who had given no instruction, and yet have him, my brother, somehow just know?

“Will It Not Be That If You Do Well…”

Do well? What is it to “do well?” What can that even mean? How could it be that I should do well in the eyes of my God when my brother is His vision of perfection?

“Sin Crouches At The Opening, Its Desire Shall Be For You, And You Shall Rule Over It.”

And thus my fate. God is telling me my future. Like Father to Mother, I will be tied for all time to sin… it will be my bride. Because I am in an impossible situation.

This is a set-up.

I stood and began to walk toward the flock. I had to try to understand. And Hevel… Hevel knew. He had to. He knew about the flock, about the lamb, he knew about the blood, the flesh, about fire and flesh, the smoke, the pleasing odor– he knew what it meant to Do Well. It was all he ever did.

And thus I took Hevel into my field. I would talk to him, I thought. Ask him, beg him, plead with him to tell me how to do right in the eyes of God. This angel of a brother of mine, who knew the heart of The Lord, who knew the secrets of the smoke of the altar– he would give me those secrets. And maybe, maybe then, we could live together in perfect praise of the Lord, both of us doing Well in his eyes, with no sin to tempt and taunt, and no need to master it.

But it was not meant to be. And now I think that it never was. Because God is telling this story with my life, creating His Just-So world. Only God’s world is not “just so.” It can’t be. And like Mother and Father before me, I will take the fall so that God can have his complicated and conflicted world, full of turmoil and desire and anger, full of sorrow and pain, full of love and joy and comfort, full of sin, and of mercy, and redemption.

Hevel’s silence was maddening. I spoke to him softly, timidly at first. I spoke to him as a friend, a fellow man, relating from shared experience, new people in a new world. He was silent. I spoke to him then as a brother, with love, the love of a brother born of the same womb by the same seed, the love that I longed to feel from him. He was silent. I spoke then with anger, my voice strengthening, my face reddening, with jealousy as I felt he jealously guarded the secret to being God’s favorite. He was silent. My voice faltered and I spoke with baffelment, almost with awe. Who are you? I asked flatly. What are you? He was silent.

Finally, despair. I didn’t have a brother. I saw this Hevel for what it really was. Inert. Stagnant. Dead. This was the antithesis of everything that would drive God’s creation. If Hevel was Man, then man was dead at birth.

Hardly knowing what I did, I picked up a rock that seemed to appear from nowhere at my feet. It fit my hand as though made for this purpose. I raised it high as Hevel, this brother-thing given me to see what I would do, gazed blankly, serenely into my eyes, not a word, not a flinch, not a move. “Lord,” I whispered, “forgive me for doing your will.” And I brought my hand down.

The blood flowed more freely than I imagined it would, pouring out among the stalks, soaking into the soil, feeding the produce of the land given me to till. God’s perfect creature, this thing that had never lived, lay dead before me, life drained as I’d seen only once before.

As I sank to my knees before the body, the brother that was no longer a brother, I heard the whisper of God, a voice of sorrow, of pity, mocking me: “Where Is Your Brother Hevel?”

Where is he? Where was he ever? I wasn’t given a brother, and yet I was. This lifeless shell before me, how different was it really from when it was animated? He never spoke. He never felt. He never loved. He never loved me.

Was it given to me to guard this creature that belonged to no one but God? You, God, know much better than I where your puppet my brother is. For my part, I know not.

Even as I spoke the words, as they left my mouth, I knew what they meant. I was speaking the future of my offspring, of humanity. My question would ring throughout the ages. I, through my words, through my actions, was creating the story, creating humanity, creating the world. Yet, not me. In those early days, our lives were the stuff of stories. We were not people, we were the words, the hands of God.

And so I need you to understand. I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did, what was was as it had to be. Agency was mine, I bear the punishment and the mark of it, and God is the True Judge.

But in the beginning, the words were people, and the people words. And thus was the world created– with our lives and our actions. I was not destroyed for my crime, but protected, guarded, ensured that my seed would be sown, that my crime would live in the heart of every man, that the world would move, driven by the engine of my imperfection, so that man might strive. Driven by my anger, my sorrow, my pain, so that there may be in this world love, joy, comfort.

And thus was the world created in mercy.

And thus was born Redemption.

So, raise your pinky if you know what hagbah is.

For the rest of you:

Hagbah is when, after reading the Torah, the open scroll is lifted and turned so that the congregation can see the writing in the scroll.

This is hagbah.

When I was a kid, my dad would comment on the hagbah. He would say what the magbiah did right or wrong, what a good hagbah is supposed to look like, how many columns of text it is proper to show, etc. My father put into my mind that there was such a thing as a good hagbah, a well-done hagbah. He taught me to appreciate a good hagbah.

There’s a fellow here this year, a wonderful person named Alex who has become a very good friend of mine… he does a positively beautiful hagbah. He has impeccable form, graceful, unwavering, the words that come to mind when I see Alex do hagbah are “good lines!” Everyone sees it, even people who don’t know so much about what is a really well and properly done hagbah can appreciate that Alex’s hagbah is just beautiful.

Hagbah is traditionally a male honor. Well, traditionally all Torah-related honors are male honors. Hagbah remains overwhelmingly in the male sphere even in egalitarian communities.

Why? Because a Torah scroll is heavy.

On Rosh Hashannah of this year, I did hagbah for the first time.

It was something I’d long wanted to do but had no confidence that I could. I mean, I don’t think I’d ever seen a woman do it, generally I’d only seen strong men doing it, and heard many untried men express apprehension at the prospect of lifting that heavy book from far below its center of gravity, spread out with the threat of a 40-day fast hanging over the heads of the congregation should he falter.

Oh yeah… if you drop a Torah, everyone who witnesses the drop has to fast for 40 days. There are ways to be lenient about it, but it’s still a damn scary thought for the one doing the lifting.

But anyway, at the service that a group of us from the Yeshiva were leading at a chiloni (secular) Brazilian kibbutz, Reb Hillel beckoned that I should come forward for hagbah. Startled, I hesitated. He reassured me that I could do it, and briefly instructed me in the proper technique. I grasped the handles. I took a deep breath, bent my knees, and stood up.

Since then I do hagbah not infrequently at the Yeshiva. I am the only woman who does so. Alex does it more often than anyone. In egalitarian circles generally by default hagbah goes to a man and galilah (the rolling, tying and dressing of the scroll after hagbah) goes to a woman. I am one of the gabbaim at the Yeshiva, so I would like to be able to reverse that model when I can but it isn’t easy. I managed to convince one of the cantorial students (a class of 6 women this year) that she could do it, and I gave galilah to Alex. I like to give galilah to Alex when someone uncertain or doing it for the first time has hagbah, so that he’s on-hand for support in various ways. It felt so good to see Annelise lift that Torah.

It took some doing to convince them (and it is difficult to do so gracefully since honors like aliyot, hagbah and galilah are not something you ask for but which are given by the gabbai or rabbi [when the rabbi is also the gabbai]) but I recently became a regular magbihah at the synagogue next door where I daven when Yeshiva is not in session. The first time I did hagbah there was the first time many of those folks had ever seen a woman do the lift. Yesterday, we read from two scrolls. I had the first hagbah and Alex had the second. After services Alex and I hugged (as we always do when parting company) and one of the congregants asked, laughing, if there was a post-hagbah hug tradition.

My friend Nadav, an older (older = early 50s) Sabra (Sabra = native Israeli) who was so very pleased the first time he saw me do hagbah, pulled me aside and told me that I’d made him very happy. Why? Because I did the lift so gracefully, with no shaking or shuddering or wavering or dramatics, so smoothly and gracefully… and that I’d done it with the second heaviest Torah scroll in the shul… and with most of the wight on the left side, no less!

The heaviest was the one that Alex lifted.

It’s hard to describe what its like to do hagbah as a woman, or to see a woman doing hagbah. The word that comes immediately to mind is “empowering” but I tend to dislike those sorts of cliche feminist words. Cliches in general are bad. Feminism is good, but it’s important to keep perspective here. I’m not sure that Jewish practice should be used as a tool for empowerment in that way, especially personal empowerment. It’s not supposed to be about you but about the community. I guess that is really the point… getting up there and hearing murmurs of astonishment that *gasp* a woman is lifting the Torah(!) is not about people being impressed with me. If it were then I would have no interest in getting Annelise or any other woman to take hagbah… rather it is about broadening the community’s perspective, challenging assumptions which, in the egalitarian model anyway, need to be challenged. For those of us who feel themselves obligated in time-bound mitzvot and participate fully in public Jewish life, no area of that system of practice should be assumed by default to be out of bounds. Women can be physically strong too. And hagbah really has more to do with physics than with strength. Women can be rabbis, sure. That one seems so obvious to so many people. Women can and (in some circumstances, some women) should put on tefillin. That one seems so much less obvious to folks. That women can/should do hagbah… well, that’s just right out for so many people, when there is no reason that it should be.

This is the thing about feminism in Judaism altogether, really. I’ve heard far too many people shy away from or react negatively to being called feminists, especially in connection with Judaism, because their perception of feminism is of overlying “female empowerment” on our tradition… images of angry women putting on tefillin in front of old men and saying “whatcha gonna do about it?” come to mind. To my mind that’s not Judaism done right, and furthermore that’s not feminism done right. The kavanah (intention) cannot be about my empowerment. If empowerment comes about from the experience then bully for me, but once it becomes about me rather than being about the the connection of the kahal (congregation) to the Torah, then egalitarianism and feminism lose their meaning and their relevance.

My friend Jessica suggested a nice little drash on “v’zot haTorah” when a woman is doing hagbah… she remarked on the gendered form “zot,” meaning “this” in the feminine. I was confused. Zot is referring to the Torah which is feminine, I told her. No, no, I understand that, she said, but so is the woman doing hagbah. She is also zot. The whole scenario is zot. Zot haTorah. This too is Torah. For the egalitarian community, it is the very fact that this *is* something that we do and that we believe is permissible, women participating… it is Torah. Just like the rest of it. Pshita. Simple. And yet… so significant. The most powerful feminist statement to me is being able to not think twice about these things.

So yes. I am a woman. I hagbah. And you* can too.

*assuming a Jewish audience for this particular statement

I spoke to Reb Shmuel, our rosh yeshiva, about some of the thoughts I had yesterday, about being troubled that the attack at the Yeshiva didn’t hit me more immediately, that I was as blinded by our differences as I was and that my own mind was revealed to me as being as bad at this klal yisrael thing as those by whom I feel excluded.

Reb Shmuel told me a few things.

First of all, the people in this Yeshiva, specifically this institution, were Jew loving people. What he meant is that, while we as (small l) liberal or (big C) Conservative Jews feel and often are excluded by the Orthodox in various ways, while we feel that we are not included in their vision of Judaism and often we aren’t, these people specifically did include people like us in their vision of klal yisrael. These are not the people who I think of when I think of “The Orthodox who hate us” as I inevitably do.

Second… Reb shmuel studied in that Yeshiva, for two years, when he was a teenager. The same age as the boys who were killed.

He asked me if it had been just 8 random Israelis standing at a bus stop of various backgrounds and ethnicities, would I feel differently? I thought a minute and said I probably would… because I stand at Israeli bus stops. And if it were in America? I thought and said “It would depend on where.”

Thinking about it… I thought back to katrina and to the tsunami… the disasters of the past several years, the things that have upset people, the big events that people have cried over, that have deeply touched even the unaffected. I have hardly felt touched by any of these events. The last time I viscerally felt a disaster was September 11th 2001. And I remember feeling guilty that I felt it so strongly, having personally lost no one I knew. And I remember that my initial reaction was not even to the people, it was to the building… I couldn’t see the people until I could see the building. I had to visualize the building and then visualize the people in the building… and I felt it specifically when the first building fell. Because the people left in the second building saw the first building fall. And there was no way they didn’t know what was going to happen next.

The first problem is the number. After 3000 people dying in one day in my hometown, about two blocks from my high school, 8 feels like nothing.

That needs to change.

I keep reading biographies. I’m reading everything I can about these boys, finding them, feeling them, feeling who they were and how they were like me. One of them, it is reported, was seen alone in the beit midrash studying until 1 am Wednesday night. I can relate to that. He was buried with the Masechet he was studying when he was murdered, which was soaked in his blood. Masechet Nedarim. I haven’t studied it. I am studying masechet Shabbat.

One of the boys, Avraham David Moses, is the son of a friend of Rabbi Diamond, one of the directors of our program, and of Shaiya, one of my favorite teachers. Avraham David’s mother came to study for a year in Israel in the early ’90s and decided to stay. She studied at Pardes, where I have many friends. This morning Rabbi Diamond said to us, “Imagine your vision of a crazy right wing settler and everything that goes along with that in your mind. Avraham David’s mother and family are just about the exact opposite of that.”

We dedicated a special learning session this morning to the memory of the boys who were murdered. Rabbi Diamond taught us a psalm that had been said at Avraham David’s funeral.

One of my initial thoughts was that, like I’ve had wakeup calls to start thinking again about theology, about philosophy, about halachic theory, this is my wakeup call to start reading the news again… to integrate some of real life back into my consciousness. I’ve been in my study bubble long enough. I have to become an integrated person again. I’m not diving back into analysis at this point, I just need to know what’s going on.

But right now, this is not about that. This is not about politics or analysis or about religious fanaticism or extremism. This is about me and my relation to my fellow Jews, and to my fellow human beings. This right now is an exploration of my emotional reactions, to gauge where my humanity needs adjustment.

***
I just remembered I was wrong… the last time I felt viscerally connected was not September 11th, but the Lebanon war.

Thursday evening I got home at maybe a quarter to ten. I put my stuff down in my room and proceeded to fold my dry laundry and hang up my wet laundry. I talked to my flatmate for a bit. I came back to my room and saw that I had a text message on my phone. I checked it and saw that it was from Harris, my chevruta from last semester who is now working in the dairy on a kibbutz. The text of the message read “Are you ok?”

Harris doesn’t usually check up on me like that unless there’s a reason. So I called him. He told me that 8 Yeshiva students had been gunned down in their beit midrash in Jerusalem, and that they thought that there was a gunman still loose. Now Harris knew that the Yeshiva hit was Mercaz HaRav and not our Yeshiva, and he knew that it was in a different part of the city. But still he worried.

I don’t have internet or television at home. I didn’t hear more about what happened until the next morning at Minyan, not at the Yeshiva but at the Conservative shul next door. The morning’s darshanit (they have a rotation of congregants who give divrei Torah every morning) was visibly shaken by the events. After services and the Rosh Chodesh breakfast, I went down to our beit midrash to set up for Yachad Minyan with my friend Benjamin. He used the Yeshiva Computer to check his email while I cleared off the tables for dinner. He turns to me and says “You’re going to want to check your email… people will be worried. Also Rabbi Diamond wants us to confirm that we received and read the security updates email.” So I checked my email and indeed I had a few asking if I was dead.

Grandma Bev heard from someone in her community that there was a shooting at “The Yeshiva” in Jerusalem. Since this person is active in the movement she assumed at first that she had meant my Yeshiva.

The news says things like Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Jerusalem Yeshiva, things that make people back home think of me and where I am, where I am studying. When I first heard the news, I didn’t make the connection as quickly. I am accustomed to the idea of the Yeshiva where I am studying is not generally accepted as the same kind of Yeshiva as where eight were killed and forty wounded Thursday night. I would not be allowed to study there, I would not be considered a serious Torah student there, I would likely not even be considered a Jew there. The first thing I thought about the kids who were killed (and they were just kids) in relation to me was not how we are similar but how we are different.

Where did this poison come from?

It was the email from one of the directors of our program, Rabbi Goldfarb, that started to bring it home.

These boys were learning Torah and celebrating Rosh Hodesh in the beit midrash, activity we know and appreciate.

I sit here in my own beit midrash, in my makom kavuah, my gemara still sitting on my shtender open to the sugya we were learning this morning. At Mercaz HaRav, they might not recognize me as one of them, they might not see the similarity between this Yeshiva and theirs. That doesn’t matter. Why is it that it takes so long for me to recognize them as like me, their Yeshiva as like ours? What is this wall that is between us?

The shooter was a resident of Jerusalem… an Israeli citizen. Someone from a neighborhood not far from where I live. I don’t know what to do with that.

I find myself noticing that my makom kavuah is next to the door of the beit midrash. I find myself looking to see who it is whenever I see movement outside. Mercaz HaRav was hit most likely because it is the flagship institution of the Religious Zionist movement and of the settlement movement. These factors don’t apply to my Yeshiva. There is not much reason why an institution like this one would be a target of Palestinian terrorism… honestly, around here we are more worried when we see Haredi types poking around. They have been known to try to steal (liberate, I guess) sifrei Torah from liberal Jewish institutions. My sense has always been that we here at The Conservative Yeshiva have more to fear from the right wing of our own people than from the sorts who perpetrated last week’s massacre.

Talking to my friend Alex over lunch yesterday, we were talking about egalitarianism and the movement. He told me that he cares a lot less about the Movement than I do, or our friend Adam does. Alex is going to be enrolled in JTS’s rabbinical school in the fall. He says that he hopes to be a Rabbi for all Jews, not just for Conservative Jews. I agreed that Klal Yisrael is more important to me than Conservative Judaism… but that since Conservative Judaism is the only place where I have a home, I am necessarily forced into a particularistic way of thinking about my Judaism.

But this is much deeper than that. Deeper and sicker.

There is a Ramah shabbaton happening this weekend in Jerusalem. The Ramah directors are all here, and they came to the Yeshiva the other day to talk to us. Rabbi Resnick was here… it was weird to see him again. It was 15 years ago that I was at Ramah Berkshires. He looks exactly the same as he did then… he doesn’t seem to have aged. I asked a question about how the educational program is set up, about the curricula etc. and was told about things that I have no recollection of from when I was there. So I asked if that was the way it had always been set up, since I didn’t remember it being like that. The fellow speaking asked when I’d been there and I said ‘93. He said “That’s way before my time.” I said “Rabbi Resnick was there…” he was sitting in the back. “‘93??” he said, “that was a looong time ago.”

There are a lot of people here who went to Ramah. One of my best friends, Alex, is a rosh eidah at Wisconsin. He started Ramah when he was 12 and never left. He talks all the time about Ramah and about how wonderful it is, how it cements a kid’s Jewish identity and reinforces what they get in day school, but in a fun social community context that teaches the kid to love Judaism and Jewish community.

I didn’t have that experience at camp. I hated Ramah. I didn’t get along with anyone there, I had no friends, everyone made fun of me. I had a counselor that I liked who got fired a couple of weeks into camp. No one was interested in the things that I was interested in, no one cared about learning. The boys were cruel. The girls were crueler. I didn’t learn to daven, I didn’t learn z’mirot, I didn’t learn to love Judaism or Jewish people. If anything the experience pushed me away from Jews, Judaism, Jewish community. I had no community in this place, the clear message I got was that I do not fit.

I have no desire to bash Ramah in general. I think it is a great concept, and that it works so well for so many of the people who go attests to its effectiveness… but it is strange to hear everyone talk about Ramah in such glowing terms when I had such an awful experience there. I mean, it was a really bad, even scarring experience. It was my transition year between elementary and junior high school, and it pretty much set the tone of my entire junior high school experience. People say how wonderful Ramah is for Jewish kids. I mention that I didn’t have a good experience and the response is, completely reasonably, “well, nothing works for everyone.” And it is absolutely true… but since I’m one of the ones for whom it didn’t work, because I know what that is like, what that experience is, of being lonely and homesick and isolated with no one seemingly willing to help, I have to think about that segment, that 1% or 2% or 5% or 7%, whatever it is, for whom Ramah is a horrible experience. I went into Ramah excited. All of my uncles and cousins had gone to Ramah and loved it. My sister went to Ramah and as far as I could tell she’d loved it. It was expected that we were all going to go to Ramah and that it would be a wonderful Judaism affirming socially fulfilling experience. I was looking forward to it… to being at camp, to sleeping in a cabin with other Jewish kids my age, to writing and receiving letters, complaining about the food, singing songs, hiking, learning to row and canoe, making bizarre crafts to bring home… everything that I’d learned that camp Ramah was about. I was prepared to have a wonderful time at camp. And I didn’t, despite my best efforts. And this experience contributed not insignificantly to a not insignificant amount of pain and isolation in my life.

So when people say about Ramah and the people for whom Ramah doesn’t work that “nothing works for eveyone,” I have to think precisely about those people who are so often dismissed as the insignificant minority that we can’t kill ourselves worrying about. That is me slipping through the cracks. That is me slipping away from shul and from USY and from Judaism. That is me getting lost. And I think that one of the biggest problems that people like me have to face is, davka, that there are not enough people in charge to think “that is me.” It’s always an experience of “that is an Other whom I do not understand or relate to” and so they have little or no incentive or inclination or ability to be there for that person, to help them though the experience, to figure out how to MAKE IT WORK for them.

So I think what this means is that I have to work at Ramah. If I can be that person to one camper, if I can be that “this is me” for one young Jewish kid lost in the crowd, then that will be a significant and worthwhile thing. For every kid that we don’t dismiss, that we can catch as they start to fall through a crack in the system, is as though we have saved Judaism in its entirety.