I’m no big deal writer or anything, but listening to Norman Fischer and Charles Bernstein at last night’s “Radical Poetics and Judaism” event talking about how Judaism informs (or doesn’t) writing, I began to consider where religion touches my work. Is my writing Jewish just because I am? What if I never write about Judaism ever, is it still Jewish then? What’s the difference between being an American writer of Jewish origin and a Jewish-American writer? Norman and Charles were fascinating to listen to, but part of me recalled this feeling of being post-everything — that is to say, I don’t really like the idea of boxes, and I’d prefer not to be in any of them, thank you very much. Even though I liked the talk a lot, I wondered if the very idea is outmoded. If young people are actually creating a post-everything world, how does the question, “what makes culture Jewish?” apply? And how would I answer that question, as a person who is immersed in one type of Jewish culture almost by mistake (I live in Washington Heights, in a “religious building”) and as a person who practices almost exclusively through visiting the Jewish Meditation Center.

Neither of my parents have been in a temple in at least a decade, yet both certainly identify as Jewish. My dad worships at Katz’s Deli and my mom tells me that she prays — that when things are hard for her, she thinks about god. My dad doesn’t believe in god, but he does love the Marx brothers and world war two movies. Obviously, they’re divorced. Both of them were incredulous when I told them about my building, my street, my neighborhood. I pointed out the Shul, the Yeshiva, the Jewish Community Center. I pointed out the Jewish ambulance and the mezuzah on every door. I reminded them how hard it is to park on Shabbat and that if my dad was going to help me put the bed together, I’d have to buy screws on Friday — the hardware store around the corner is Jewish. This is insularity, of a sort, and it’s a sort of insularity to which I belong by accident. Across the airshaft, in my mirror image apartment, Yeshiva University boys share a couple of rooms and I watch them daven, tefillen and all. I watch them and wonder about what it must feel like to live Judaism like that every day. Is it stifling, reading scripture on the subway instead of novels? Is it inspiring? Is it like walking around with a secret wrapped up in leather binding?

Every day I am reminded that my post world does not actually exist yet, that there are actually boxes all around me, and that I put other people into boxes the same way everyone else does. Which brings me back to the question of how a cultural heritage I never knew much about touches my work. Somebody, and I can’t remember who it was, said last night that we are most Jewish when we are not around other Jews (and then immediately countered his own thought with the question of whether the opposite were true — perhaps we are actually most Jewish when we are only around other Jews?) and this has certainly been true for me. In New York, it can feel like everyone is Jewish, like you are just a drop of secular typicality in the bucket. But when you live in rural Vermont, you’re probably pretty much alone. And at the times when I’ve lived in the middle of nowhere, being Jewish suddenly became a real part of my identity, so much at times that I became active in congregations, something I’d never done as a child or when I’ve lived in a city.

Being present to recognize where I fit, or don’t, is so much at the heart of this exercise that I am reminded of something else that was discussed last night — that the process is the point, and that moving through each idea, each question, leaves us with more thoughts, different ones, and different ways of looking at the same thing. I love this idea, that I have the option to think about something without having to answer to it. And I think that the JMC is asking its members to do this. To be willing to sit with the person next to you, talk about your ideas, and form new ones, and question what seems immutable, and then change the world together, by finding similarity where we have been told it does not exist.

As I have mentioned in some of the sits, I’ve always struggled with some of the traditional ways T’shuva and repentance were taught to me – the guilt-inducing, chest-beating, “I’ve-been-so-bad-but-next-year-I-will-be-better” variety. As a kid during the High Holidays, I was racked with guilt about how “bad” I was, and how badly I wanted to be better. Once I told my little sister that every time I was mean to her, she should say the words, “Rosh Hashana!” and I would stop.  A few weeks later, I yelled at her about something and she cried,  “Rosh Hashana! Rosh Hashana!” I repressed an enormous urge to punch her in the face. I stopped yelling at her, but my anger did not go away – it simmered right beneath the surface until the next time she, or someone else, crossed my path, when I would lash out again.

The same thing happens when I tell myself  I’m going to be “better” these days. It never hurts to set a Kavannah (intention) to try and change habit patterns- like when I tell myself to get serious about flossing or removing my make-up before going to sleep. But telling myself to be nicer to people, to forgive hurts, to open my heart or to be more compassionate – for me, it doesn’t work.

For me, it works better to bring the gentle light of awareness to WHY I am not nice to people, to WHY I can’t forgive someone, to WHY my heart feels closed. Usually, the reasons are shrouded in hurts and shame that are really old, or deeply repressed. When I honor those feelings – even feelings that have led to lots of suffering – they come loose and fall away on their own. In a class I once took with Rabbi David Ingber, he called this the “T’shuva of love.”

I know that everybody’s path to T’shuva is different, and different things work better or worse for different people. If you are like me, however, I want to offer you this:

Those ways you were “bad” this year – those things you are ashamed of -those things are little voices from within you crying out for your attention and healing. They are a huge gift – points on a map calling for you to sit with them, and hear what they have to say. I know I’m mixing mad metaphors here, but you get the idea. Our bodies are beautiful, miraculous machines that are continually trying to move us closer to healing and wholeness, even when we act unskillfully.

Finally, here is a poem that speaks to this point for me, although I have no idea what the poet, Norman Fischer, was thinking when he wrote it:

RESPONSIBILITY

Tonight it’s quiet or in the quiet
Or, at least, the quiet
Is all around us. What is it
I’m worried about when I
Worry about anything? What is it
I tangle up in, wanting to go home?
From down here I look up at myself
In the little bright square of window
Staring down at me in bemusement
Querying what’s it worth. But that’s
A question snaps shut on itself
Thoughts with teeth or claws
To scrape away to the very core. What
Cares contains its value, a half life,
Mixed, no doubt, yet fair.
It’s always fair or anyway
It’s always what’s there…
And it’s not our fault.

(c) Norman Fischer, from Slowly but Dearly , 2004.

I am looking forward to my visit next week at Isabella Freedman (IF) where I’ll be giving a course and practicing meditation and davenning with everyone. This was to have been Rabbi Lew’s course, but Lee Moore at IF asked me if I would fill in for him and of course I was happy to.

So I’ve been reading and thinking. Yehuda Amichai’s great last book “Open Closed Open.” And essays by Emmanuel Levinas. Both present what to me are deep and deeply true views of Judaism, yet both are – each in his own way – outside the pale of normative Jewish practice and thinking, Amichai as a basically secular Jewish poet, Levinas as a Western philosopher. (I suppose I am attracted to this odd phenomenon – of important views of Judaism that come both from within and without the tradition – because I am myself involved in this same process/paradox).

Amichai:

I want a god who is like a window I can open/ so I’ll see the sky even when I’m inside. / I want a god who is like a door that opens out, not in,/ but God is like a revolving door, which turns, turns on its hinges/ in and out, whirling and turning/ without a beginning, without an end.
(“God Changes, Prayers Are Here To Stay #2)

And Levinas:

Monotheism is not an arithmetics of the divine. It is the perhaps supernatural gift of seeing that one man (sic) is absolutely like another man (sic) beneath the variety of historical traditions kept alive in each case. It is a school of xenophilia and anti-racism.
(“Monotheism and Language in “Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism”)

I suppose our mission in Jewish meditation is to find our way to this revolving door God, this God of xenophilia, through our time on the meditation cushion; to feel rather than to believe or not believe God’s reality for a practical ethical inspired Jewish life that doesn’t exclude, but rather encourages and illuminates, normative Jewish practice and observance.

Psalm 150, from Zoketsu Norman Fischer’s Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms:

Praise to you in your holiness
Praise throughout your expansive realm
Praise for the power of your doing
For your abundance and everywhereness
All praise
Praise with the blowing of trumpets
Praise with the psaltery and harp
Praise with timbrel and dance
With stringed instrument and pipe
Praise with clear-sounding cymbals
And with crashing cymbals

Every breath is your praise