Itzik's Well Podcast - Irwin Keller: Recent Episodes
Irwin Keller
A podcast about Judaism, life, loss, queerness, family, hope, wonder, change, Torah, gender, sexuality and the usefulness of an outsider's perspective.
In Isaiah 49, God says, "I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands." Our palms are less doers than holders. They hold, caress, bless, soothe. What does it mean to be etched on the palms of the Divine? How does it feel?
On the Palms of Your Hands (Audio) Or Read it in Print
There is something underneath the mythological words of Isaiah – and that is hope. That even after tragedy, after life-changing tragedy, there is still a possibility of joy and blessing ahead. That even conquerors and despots will fall, and something of value will outlive them.
Nachamu x2 (Audio) Or Read it in Print
I’d like to suggest that there is room for so much more than what the American ethos has shrunk to. There is room for reckoning. Reconciliation. Reparation. There is room for education. Critical thinking. Art. Poetry. There is still room for greatness.
America, in the Narrows (Audio) Rabbi Irwin Keller Or Read it in Print
Some sages say angels’ names are not fixed. That an angel’s mission *is* its name. And thus its name is always changing, depending on its task. And so, angels, now I ask you. What is your task right now? What is your name?
Hey Angel (Audio) Or Read it in Print
On Shabbat HaGadol we read a line from Malachi in which we envision the heart of parents turning to the children, and the hearts of children to their parents. How do we create meaningful inter-generationality in our own communities and lives? How do continuity and change dance together?
Listen Now and a new song to go with this text . . .
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I had not been excited about going to the Reconstructionist convention. In this divisive climate I have felt rather isolated among rabbis, I didn’t know what it would be like to be in a rabbinical scene. Spoiler: it was good.
This audio includes a performance of Ashirah Ladonai by Irwin Keller, featuring Suzanne Shanbaum on guitar, Sheridan Gold and Rhonda Findling on drums, and Congregation Ner Shalom on vocals.
The Philadelphia Story (Click to Listen) Or Click to Read it in Print
All these feelings – the fears, the desire for things to be quiet, for Jews to be quiet, this whole tangle of ancestral anxiety inside of me – it all comes into view at Purim time when we read the Book of Esther. This ancient book of ours is a symphony of anxiety.
The Anxiety of Purim (Audio) Or Read it in Print
The Unfolding Now (Audio Podcast) This is what I want for all of us — Jews and everyone else living in this time — to survive the terrible and to keep flourishing through it. . .
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So much is demanded of us now but I, for one, have been feeling inert, immobile. Tu Bishvat reminds us to have patience – the sap will again rise.
Being a Tree (Audio) Or read it in Print
In this week's Torah, Joseph is thrown into a pit, bullied by a gang of brothers, because of his difference. And also this week Sutter Health has similarly tossed to their fate our transgender children, doing the bully's work even before the bully asked them to do it. How will we respond?
Doing the Bully's Work (Audio) Or Read it in Print
I had cause to do a deep dive into Ma’oz Tzur – our old Chanukah song, sung in English as “Rock of Ages.” So much more to it than I’d ever thought. I went from indifference to love. Come geek out with me.
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Gone a dozen years now, the flavor of my grief has changed, and memory is sweet.
Click here to listen. Or read it in print
In Elul, they say the King is in the Field. Kind of like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.
Audrey Hepburn is in the Field (Audio) Or Read it in Print
We offer our *teshuvah* not out of obligation but because we love. It is because I love you that I want to be clean with you. It is because I love this world and the people in it that I want to make good on all the ways I have failed it and them.
Accountable to Love (Audio) Or Read it in Print
It seems I had to come to Ireland to be reintroduced to the prophet Elijah. For more than a week this summer, I have been on retreat at a Catholic hermitage in County Sligo run by a tiny community of Carmelite sisters and brothers. The Carmelites see the prophet Elijah as their spiritual inspiration and as the founder of their order. They call him Saint Elijah, and I happened to be there on Saint Elijah’s day.
What is the kind of prophet we need now? Can we find that prophet? Can we be that prophet?
An essay for My Jewish Learning’s Recharge Blog.
The Elijah I Want – Audio Or Read it in Print
Perhaps in 2025, in this tug-of-war between loyalty and morality, resistance is the true shape of patriotism. Reflections on the 4th of July. Reflections on Fourth of July themes.
Tug-of-War (Audio) Or Read it in Print
What if Torah tells it wrong? What if wandering in the desert was not a punishment but a chosen path for a people who did not want to become Pharaoh? An alternative take on Shlach Lekha.
In the Peacemaker's Tent (Audio) Or Read it in Print
It feels like there is so much being lost right now. But we still carry those things *in* us. Like Levites carrying crates of holy regalia. A consideration of *Parashat Bamidbar.*
Portable (Audio) Or Read it in Print
The house is a kind of living being – our individual houses and the one we all share. How do we help it release its past and present suffering?
This Old House – Audio Or Read it in Print
How do you tell the story of Purim in a time when we are already activated, when we are beginning to feel the breath of danger on the backs of our necks?
Audio: Telling Purim Or Read it in Print
I wake up every day in fear. But I am not in any personal, imminent danger. This is the conditioning of my past and the dread of the future. But I am not the captive of my conditioning, and dread is not destiny. In this moment I am strong. In this moment I am needed. May I be of use.
Strong and Needed (Audio) Or Read it in Print
Coming back from rabbi jamboree in Colorado, I realize that even in what seems like the loneliest places, we are not alone. (Apologies for mechanical noise on the recording. Oy, what did I do wrong?)
Loneliest Road (Audio Podcast) Or Read it in Print
Stairway to Paradise – Audio Or Read it in Print Even if we believe that the Divine is all around us and in us, it's hard to shake loose the metaphor of verticality. What do you do to ascend to celestial heights? And how do you pour that back into the everyday?
The time that we are in is much bigger than the election. Our role is bigger than getting particular individuals into office. There is a field – I don’t know what to call it – a spiritual field, a cultural field, a metaphysical field that needs to be restored and protected.
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We are at a crossroads: one path moving forward and one circling back. Thankfully, we are very good at circles. Some thoughts coming out of Sukkot, Hoshanah Rabbah, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah.
Fork in the Road (Audio) Or read it in Print
Spending a month alone in Worms was an unresearched, romantic idea. It wasn't what I was looking for. But maybe it was what I needed.
Audio – Holy Sand Or Read it in Print
In this moment of crisis, we need to let things arise and evaporate, leaving us unburdened enough to do the work of peace. Dew Season can suggest how.
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On a trek to 15,000 feet, my greatest companion was Psalm 121. (The other companions were pretty amazing too.) A report-back on a struggle, a summit, and a psalm.
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There is a dark side to Purim – Jewish self-defense gone out of control. How do we keep from becoming Amalek in responding to those we've labeled Amalek? What if Amalek is not outside us but in us? What do we need to do to begin to wipe it out beyond memory? Press play below for audio (and sorry about the loud rain on the roof).
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A vision isn't moot just because there isn't currently the will and skill to carry it off. There will be. A drash on Parashat Pekudei, plus a musical setting of Vihi Noam. (And an extra opening story in this audio version.)
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How is it that we can listen to a voice in our ear, directing us on paths that we know will lead to disaster, and still not question? Two weeks in Israel: war, rain, sorrow, and a GPS disaster.
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The war in Israel and Gaza has, I notice, offered to Supporters of Israel and Supporters of Palestine proof of what they already believed. And our city councils have become the proxy battleground. Righteousness is easy. Blame is easy. But empathy is hard and will break us open. If we can't manage some empathy here, what hope is there for reconciliation in the land we all love? This is a Come-to-Pharaoh Moment.
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Nations have a life of their own, behaving in ways few individuals would. Maybe remembering the angel of the collective can bring out our best.
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Today is ten years since my mother’s death, and the haunting is sweet. She is gathered into me like Jacob was gathered into his people. The ancestors are in us. We are ancestors too. What traits and traumas, what hope or despair, openness of heart or resilience of spirit, will be gathered from us into those who come after?
Audio below.
Or Read it at "My Jewish Learning”
The truth is I no longer even know what I’m crying about. At this point, I seem just to be yielding to the big blur of suffering.
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I am walking around afraid. Not always afraid of something specific. My body is fueled by adrenaline and programmed by the epigenetics of generations of ancestors whose fear responses enabled their survival and mine. My soul has fluttered right out of my body. Is there any solid place where it can land?
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The audio opens with the chant “My Protection” by Rabbi Shefa Gold, sung here by Ner Shalom Chantleader Atzilah Solot.
At the end of Torah, Moshe dies, after much struggle and resistance. Torah seems to take a breath, a long exhale, as we roll back the scroll to the beginning. And so in our lives as well, the exhale after the long-anticipated death of anyone we love. The gasp, the exhale.
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For Yom Kippur, I explore what it is in our American Jewish soul – the longing, the fear, and the insecurity – that keeps us silent when Israel (and Palestine) are under discussion. Now is the time to find our voice.
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The Lurianic story says that Creation came about through a shattering of light-filled vessels. The primordial light is embedded in all of us. And our bodies and our separateness are all a kind of mask over an ancient, light-filled Oneness. How can we use that mystical insight?
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Moshe is denied entry to the Promised Land. But he is invited to climb the mountain and look to the horizon and see what no one else can.
We are in the narrows now. Is that such a bad thing?
A drash reconsidering the Beyn Hametzarim – the three narrow weeks leading to Tisha B'Av.
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Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Day – celebrates the reunification of the City. But it feels anything but unified. It can only be honored as a vision, but a vision in need of revision.
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The month ahead – the month of Nisan, which begins Wednesday night – is not only the first month of the Hebrew calendar, it also contains all the subsequent months within it as if *in utero*. It is the Shekhinah, the Divine Mother, birthing time. What do we want to birth in this next year?
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Money is power. And the more money you have, the greater your power to do good and the greater your power to do evil. In the Purim story, the Queen Esther story, Haman uses arguments about Jewish disloyalty to convince the king to order the destruction of the Jews. But to clinch the deal, he offers to fund the operation himself. He offers 10,000 talents of silver for the king’s treasury if the king will issue the edict. Haman doesn’t just dream up the destruction of the Jews, Haman buys the destruction of the Jews. How are we ever to prevail against well-funded hate?
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Just as the memory of earthquakes is wired into our bodies, so the memory of earthquakes is wired into our mythologies. Our ancestors understood earthquakes to be the very Earth trembling in God’s presence, as we ourselves certainly would. God is the physics of the earthquake and more than the physics. God is also in our pained experience of the catastrophe.
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We name this not only Shabbat Shirah but Refugee Shabbat, to help us renew our compassion and empathy for the refugees who are right now lodging in tent cities and crossing great waters and wandering from place to place in search of home. We were refugees too. They are our story rewritten in the present tense.
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What if at some point the Egyptians had refused to go along with it anymore? What if they had declared a general strike? If they had gathered at the palace in protest? If they had decreed a day of fasting and crying out to their gods or to ours? Would it have made a difference to Pharaoh? Even if it didn’t, mightn’t it have made a difference to us? Introducing Interfaith Public Fast of Sonoma County.
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For me, looking back over this year, what stands out most is how many individual stories in our community reached their conclusions. Looking at them, suddenly, everything shifts. A story of individual trauma and triumph gives way to a larger story of life pouring through the details of circumstance. Every act, every turn of the story, is imbued with a greater knowingness. Seeds have borne fruit. Life has had its way.
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There is an invitation for collective teshuvah in front of us at this moment of history, being proffered by too many modern-day prophets to count, and by too many to ignore, taking the form of the movement for reparations. This critical piece of teshuvah is an invitation for the collective to develop its moral conscience, to look at how old harms continue to live with us until they are addressed, to notice how we are implicated even in histories we didn’t actively participate in.
Rosh Hashanah reminds us to think beyond the human scale of our lives, and get on Cosmic terms. Is our Judaism big enough to go galactic? And what does a Cosmic consciousness require of us in the here and now?
Parashat Eikev offers another Jewish entry point to a consideration of reparations. “Beware,” Moshe says, “lest you come to think that your good fortune is of your own doing.”
Shabbat Chazon 5782Where evening becomes day, light alternates with leaf, and experience becomes story.
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Featuring Min Hametzar – Psalm 118:5; Setting: Rabbi Shefa Gold.
Prophecy is not dead. But it does require the right conditions to emerge. What are the insights waiting to come from or through us? How can we make it easier to hear them?
Tisha B’Av, coming up in a few weeks, might be a cautionary tale. This is what destruction looks like. This is what it looks like when there’s nothing left to be done. But the 17th of Tammuz is a blueprint for possibility. “Do something now,” it seems to tell us. Fast. Plead. It’s not too late. It’s not over yet. A drash for 17 Tammuz.
Plus a new niggun, “Niggun in the Breach” performed by the Ner Shalom Good Shabbos Band – Suzanne Shanbaum, Sheridan Gold, and Irwin Keller.
story from the Book of Judges about an angel prophesying the miraculous birth of a child, and the unnamed woman who was to be Samson's mother. (AUDIO)
If there is some balance between human and nature, and between human and Divine, that’s represented in the Book of Leviticus, then these terrible consequences are not a doling out of punishment, but the natural outcome of letting the delicate balance fail. We understand this now, in a new way, in this time we live in where every year we wonder if the sky will be like iron and the earth like copper.
It is the moon, not the sun, that governs our dreams. And we needed to dream a different life, to dream a renewed self, before we could even think of putting on our sandals, packing our matzah, and taking our first step toward freedom. So now is the time we are commanded to follow the unfolding of the moons.
Every call happens in a circumstance, and every circumstance has, if we listen for it, a call. We have spent two years refining our ability to live in our conditions while responding to the Divine call arising from them. Let us not stop being prophets just because we are getting some of the goodies back. Let us not sweep the pain we feel or the revelations we’ve received under the rug of normalcy.
We are in a time of general emergency, it seems to me. A time in which we need our hands to be especially skillful. We need our hands to be busy in the work of peacemaking, tending, healing. May it be said that in our time, the hands of peacemakers were blessed. A drash for Parashat Pekudei, plus a new song – Vihi Noam.
It is important to resist any schmaltzy Fiddler-style nostalgia for Jewish life as it was once lived in the Ukraine. But it is also right to notice how that land is imprinted on us, and how we are imprinted on it. There are not many places you can go in the world that doesn’t have some Jewish imprint. In Ukraine it is profound.
The priest’s regalia as described in this week’s portion, is not just fancy clothes; it is protection magic. Designed to deflect, to protect, to allow the priestly service to continue despite the magnitude of what the priest processes.
So I ask you: what is your protection magic?
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I sat in the resonating chamber of the Great Synagogue, just as I had stood at the Temple of Poseidon, and wondered about this human impulse to build a house for the gods. Why? We could go outside and worship on a mountain, or before an altar of ocean, or in the Italian countryside among colonnades of umbrella pines. But no, instead we build structures of great weight, at great expense, even though their bulging doric columns are designed to call to mind the trees just outside the door.
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Joseph is not asking for the transport of their physical bones. Joseph is asking the Children of Israel – asking us – to raise up, to honor, to carry forward with us, their complex and multiple qualities. Their fullness. Their selves. And that is what we are about to do. Even if it has taken 4000 years and 7000 miles to make good on Joseph’s request.
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Once upon a time we were animals alongside the other animals – before we evolved the self-awareness that cut us off from the others, that got us caught in our heads, in our bodies, in our civilizations; that got us kicked out of Eden. Now we only have a dim memory of what it is like to be the animals that we are. And so we seek out, through our imaginations and our liturgy and our magic, the connection with the animal world that even the ridiculous amount of DNA we share with other creatures can no longer provide.
Sondheim's sense of “in it but not of it” is not just a gay vantagepoint in 20th Century art, but a Jewish vantagepoint also. American Ashkenazi Jews of the mid-20th Century, the children or grandchildren of immigrants, were also involved in a struggle to assimilate into a culture that wasn’t theirs. And they often had a dramatic influence on that culture, creating much of what we imagine as American! But still, maybe because of that authorship, having a burdensome awareness of the artificiality of American culture. The arbitrariness of naturalness. So we see in his writing that deep Jewish longing to let go and belong, even while questioning the authenticity of the thing we want to belong to.
The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse comes during the week of Vayishlach, and the painful Torah story of Dinah. What do these stories have to tell us about how our society looks at male violence? And how might we still see, hear, and heal Dinah?
A prophetic dream helps Jacob recognize the Divine that is immanent in space. What do we need to do to have a zap of realization? It's easy when we're in stunning nature. Harder at the hospital.
In Chayei Sarah we see Isaac and Ishmael shoulder to shoulder burying their father. How is it possible to resist the expectation to be enemies and let go of the past's hold on us?
Maybe Hagar conjured the angel in a vision because in her suffering her thoughts were stuck in her head, and her fear caught tight in her gut, and she needed to be drawn out of herself; she needed to be witnessed from the outside, to witness herself from the outside, in order to make sense of her next steps. And she did.
While our bodies are something like 75,000 cubic centimeters of saltwater, our minds, our spirits, are Oceans. It is comforting to be contained in these familiar bodies. But there is something in us that wants to be vast. This is, I think, why we live here, why we go to the Ocean when our spirits are low, why we dream of being on or in the Ocean. We want to recapture the sense of endlessness that our souls once knew.
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In 2016, on the eve of the World Series, during the holiday of Sukkot, amid a nasty and unsettling presidential election, I found myself watching baseball like I hadn’t since childhood. The Cubs, after a 108-year drought, won the World Series title that year. This year, as I begin to ease into SF Giants fandom (gimme a break; I’ve only been in the Bay Area for 32 years), and as we head toward post-season, I think back on the lessons I learned from loving the Cubs, leaving the Cubs, and returning to the Cubs. I decided to repost this essay, written on the eve of the 2016 World Series.
You will not, in death, get the apology that you have been waiting for in life. So why carry it to your grave? Why not imitate the grave now and release the debt? What would it feel like to let go of the apology you think you are owed? What a relief that might be not for them, but for you.
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On the morning of Day Two, you realize there is no shower coming, and there is no mirror to reflect how well you’ve tamed the wild of your face. There is no internet to amuse you, and no savior to bring the important item you forgot. This is when you begin to surrender. Letting your existence, along with your appearance, go fallow.
This is when I begin to feel the sorrow that comes from living in human civilization, in constant battle with nature, even though I’ve mostly, politely, outsourced that battle to food manufacturers and petroleum companies. I begin to see – and grieve – the outrageous complexity of my life; the expense and fossil fuels and other people’s labor required for me to live the way I do.
Psalm 27, the gorgeous, heart-filled, and raw piece of holy poetry that accompanies the month of Elul, challenges us to ask what our lives would be like if we couldn't see the good, the magic, the Divine, in the world around us. What if I couldn't? It's hard to say...
A Yiddish women's blessing for the month of Elul teaches us that three anagrams forming the word Elul offer us a roadmap for transforming dread to love to action and fulfillment.
Maybe our journeys of hardship and danger are not tests of endurance or tests of faith. If they are tests of anything, maybe they are tests of love.
Ultimately, an ethical will is for us, not for our children or grandchildren. Because we can’t really control what people in the post-us future will do. We can’t force those who follow us into a mold of our devising. The future belongs to them, not to us, and it is a mistake to cling too tightly.
Since we began sheltering in place, we have, by my count, spent 69 consecutive Shabbatot together, here in this dazzling Zoom Room. Sixty-nine opportunities to sit together and breathe. Six-nine opportunities to gently push back against the narrowness of the time. To feel expansive. Shabbat has been our technology for resilience. The light inside the tunnel.
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The flora and fauna at my house are very, very alive. There are many personalities crowding around our house, and under our house, and sometimes in our house. Each has its own Torah. Each has its unintended teaching for me.
B’rukhah haTikvah
Blessed be my hope, which continues to live. May it be not fantasy but demand. A demand upon heaven and a demand upon earth. May hope be rewarded, speedily, in our time. Rewarded with peace. Rewarded with breath. Rewarded with ordinary, unremarkable coexistence. Rewarded with yet more hope.
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Today is the 6th day of the 7 days of the 6th week of the 7 weeks of the Omer. And here we are in the 6th year of the 7-year shmitah cycle. What does it mean to be in the 6, anticipating the 7?
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Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai died and was buried on Mt. Meron, having instructed his disciples to visit his grave and celebrate his memory annually. Which is what was happening yesterday, because the number of his disciples has grown, no longer ten, but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and includes all of those people who were there, just as it includes us as well.
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Oh to be so impervious! To hold the weight of the hardship of the people and for it not to absorb through our skin and into our bones! But no, we are so porous. N’kavim n’kavim chalulim chalulim as we say in our morning prayers. We are porous and penetrable! We were made that way.
This seventh day of Pesach is an intersection of Shabbat time, Passover time, mythic story, Divine names, the coming of dew, and the poetry of our medieval ancestors. It brings to mind obstacles, liberation, and love. (Or just scroll down for the treats.)
On Shabbat HaGadol we read from the prophet Malachi, who envisions a time when the hearts of children turn toward parents and the hearts of parents toward children. How do we turn our hearts to all the ancestors and to the people who will follow us on this earth? What is the healing we need and the healing we can offer?
Why don’t Jews count people? No sooner do we count ourselves than we notice our extreme vulnerability and ephemerality in this life and this world. And thus the inherent bravery implied in the phrase “stand up and be counted.”
Unlike some depictions, Esther had no need to swoon when she entered Achashverosh's throne room. After all, she was garbed in Shechinah.
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I explore this moment and its mysticism more deeply in an article in Evolve Magazine. Click here.
We are in a kind of oasis moment right now. A place of respite does not need to be the perfect place or the best place. It just needs to be enough. And the relief and rest we feel will be real.
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Tomorrow is the simcha of my smicha – my rabbinic ordination. It means so much to me after a wait of more than half a century. But history waits for no simcha, and we have to also look at this week’s insurrection in our capital.
Despite the “good riddance 2020” memes, I actually feel that the last year, with all its challenges and surprises, needs to be seen and considered. I think about our forefather Jacob, who this weekgives a farewell assessment of each of his twelve unruly sons. I know how much we want to say goodbye to these last twelve unruly months that brought us so much angst, but let’s take a look.
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Making friends with Jesus, figuring out a handle for Christ, and managing Jewish Christmas guilt.
One often-overlooked dimension of Joseph’s hiddenness has to do with his gender. Torah keeps pointing to something unusual about it. This includes references to his looks, his emotions, his social role, even his body.
I return from a 6-week leave of absence with questions , raised by an unfortunate meeting of home and car, about my own mind’s sudden leave of absence.
I am worried that our will to live is being depleted. Not that people are dying because they gave up. Although clearly the world has become less hospitable, and our assessment of what future we might look forward to has shifted. But I'm talking about something beyond that. There is something about the usual flow of life through us and through this Creation that feels to be at risk.
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And here we are, wondering how to be part of this transformation, how to tend and cultivate it; how to keep it from becoming something dreadful and instead inch it toward something beautiful. I somehow picture it like that befuddling Olympic sport, curling. We can't force this rebirthing world to move forward the way we want. But we can skate alongside with brooms, and create the subtle conditions for it to gently incline toward blessing.
Let us not mistake this world of politics and rancor as the only world in which we exist. This is a saturated, hydro-charged Cosmos.
And there it was. My unspoken conviction that all fruition must come before age 60, while I'm still young in my own estimation. That if I didn't achieve whatever on some timeline, then I'd failed, and I might as well give it up. I sat there and laughed at myself, willing to deny my future self all sorts of fulfillment and joy, just because I thought 60 was too old.
I have nothing to say about it. No way to beautify this extreme weather story. No silver lining to offer. Our species long ago stripped the planet of silver linings, using them as shiny decorations on the edifice of unsustainable living.
The journey that we are on itself is a Divine Name. Each stop on it is a letter. This journey through stations of sorrow and hope, outrage and love, grief and fear and fatigue and coziness too. Each stop, each encampment wants to be noticed and counted, lest in retrospect it become a blur.
Reflections on Parashat Mas'ei during COVID times.
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We are in many overlapping periods of time – the 22-day "narrow place" as well as the enduring shelter-in-place. Some thoughts on the flow of Jewish time, and on the musical traditions that we employ to accompany us on the journey.
God, you have made the human slightly less than angels. Which is, I'm sure, meant as a compliment. But just under the angels is a bummer of a spot to be in. Not high enough to really get the big picture we need and want. And not rooted in the earth enough to have the ways of knowing that other animals do, who do not have to try to figure out what is motivating them.
It's Pride Season. And even though this is a difficult time, we must become adept at holding successes at the same time that we hold struggle. And so a little piece of celebration called "Gifts of the Queers" – a chance to recognize the role that LGBTQI people have played in our culture, including our Jewish culture, that we don't so often identify and name. Audio here.
It is harder to leave the Wilderness than it looks. We are peeking across a border into a Paradise right now, where we could be bigger than we are now; our spirits enormous as giants. But it is easier to stay grasshoppers, shrunken, constricted, hard-shelled, afraid of being trampled.
Miriam was struck with the disease, but until Aharon witnessed it, until she was witnessed, it wasn't quite real. How powerful is the act of witnessing – the way it draws something into manifestation! Torah this week is saying: witness. Make it real. You can't work with it until you see it. Miriam didn't have a prayer of being healed until her unexpected – and blessedly temporary – whiteness was witnessed.
Our European ancestors tossed their tefillin overboard along with their languages, rituals and personal histories. They sacrificed their particularity so that we could be Americans. By which we now understand – so we could be White.
After we emerge from our houses back into the sunlight; after we are all driving and working and buying – we will look around and we will be disappointed. Others will seem not to have shared our visions, or agreed to our mitzvot. Our Revelation will not have turned into Transformation. Yet. So let us make sure that one verse of our Torah is: "Disappointment is to be expected. Disappointment is not an obstacle but fuel for the journey.”
Maybe the most salient difference between a Wilderness and a Garden is the fact of being witnessed. And the speech waiting for us in the Wilderness? Maybe it’s not chatter and not the earth-shaking thrum of God at Sinai. But the loving voice of a gardener.
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It was easy and heroic to maintain this seclusion for a while, when it was new, when we were constantly problem-solving. When our confinement was itself movement into the unknown. But at this point, I have depleted my internal resources.
Can I let go of my need for every moment of this terrible time to be productive or meaningful or insight-giving? What will it be like to let this time be: let it be its frustrating, tedious, anxious and sad self, without the pressure of having to be the source of global transformation or personal enlightenment?
Where is God in all of this? The answer is, maybe, everywhere. And why isn’t God intervening? Of course God is intervening. In fact we are doing so every day.
There are pieces of this isolation I want to remember and bring with me when we are finally able to move freely about the cabin. But I also know that this isolation, no matter how pleasant parts of it may be, is something we will all need to reckon with over time. Because there is injury in going so long not touching and not being touched! Noticing and having to ignore the skin’s desire to feel skin, our bones’ desire to be pressed in an embrace.
The doe sauntered away, leaving me wondering how we got here. Our glorious, sorry species. How did we end up living this way? So far removed from the rest of Creation that is just outside our door? How did we end up seeing this Earth so imperfectly, as if through carnival glass?
Talmud says a dream uninterpreted is like a letter left unread. What does this if-only-it-were-a-dream time have to say to us?
Anxiety is of no use. It takes up space and disrupts work and relationships. But what if it’s squatting in your house, refusing to leave?
Torah tells us that we are meant to be a nation of priests. It is our calling and our destiny. And now the call is even broader. Because right now we are being called to be a Planet of Priests. Each of us tending the altar of our relationships with God and Earth and each other. Offering up our guilt over the profit-driven, Earth-consuming culture we have allowed to take root. And offering up like fragrant incense our gratitude for the simple and intimate gifts of connection and food and shelter.
In this moment of unfolding epidemic, I am called to honor the complexity of the Creation we live in. This Creation in which uncountable species compete for space and survival, including the tiniest ones, who can sometimes, without malice, take down the mightiest among us.
Lying on the floor of an airport, unable to move, one learns lessons about prayer, angelic protection, and being one with the Universe. Not always the lessons one would have wanted to learn.
When I'm done with some of the prayers for specifics, I try to broaden out and pray for love. Always love. That it should enfold this world. That there should be a field of love so thick, so viscous, that it slows bullets and catches falling people.
When I pray, at some point, it is no longer me lofting prayers into the world; it is the world drawing prayers out of me…
When Shabbat falls in the darkest part of the month, the Jewish world reads Torah's queerest story. What is the medicine?
Whether or not we agree with the laws in Leviticus, there is something important about Torah's understanding that the physical body produces spiritual states. Our bodies affect the spiritual fabric of the community. So how do we include our bodies in our spiritual lives? They deserve it.
And indeed as you stand in the Scola Tedesca and look up at the women's gallery, you see what looks like a theater loge. There are low upright pillars to about knee level, and then a gilded latticework screen up to perhaps the neck of a seated woman, and above that it is open. This gallery is not meant to hide the women, but to foster flirtation.
If Torah were a musical, what sort would it be? For Shabbat Shirah, a diversion into the Broadway version of Torah, for which the Parting of the Sea ends Act I.
We are now in the annual 4-week saga of Joseph, and I find myself eyeing him across the ages. I see him young, middle aged and, at long last, at the end of his life, settling in to be a grandmother, the matriarch of his line. (Audio version.)
We don't always say yes to what Shabbat offers. Maybe we say no more often than we say yes. But she never gets the hint. And she never gives up on us. She keeps showing up at the door in all her beauty, the Shechinah robed in time, with the fierceness of lions and the voice of songbirds. And so it is also after a week like this one. A horrible, unthinkable week, here she is again. Despite it all.
Yom Kippur sermon 2018, about my visit to my great-great-grandfather’s grave in Baden-Württemberg, and what it taught me about teshuvah.
In fifteen minutes, or for some of us less, we left it all behind. For the sake of life, for the sake of survival, we left it all behind. Most of us, but not all of us, were able to go back to our smoke-steeped houses in a week or ten days. But on that first night it was the same for all of us: we didn't know if we would have a home to go home to. On that first night, we experienced letting go and leaving behind. With lech lecha in our ears, we grabbed those few things, threw them in the car, and hit the gas pedal into the Unknown.
I ran into the Shechinah in an art museum. It was the Art Institute of Chicago. Maybe not the way it is now, but the way it was when I was a kid. She was in one of the Impressionist rooms. In front of Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of la Grande Jatte. (Audio Podcast.)
Dreams brought me to Germany, and ultimately to a graveyard in Waibstadt, to meet the ancestors. My first reflection on the experience.
Ore Read it in Print
The flood was terrible. But what about the days, weeks, 350 years to follow? Noah's story doesn't just end with a rainbow. Every disaster requires recovery.
Or Read It In Print
Dedicated to Rita and Terry Rowan.
The angel's suggestion that behind transformation lies language – that should mean something to us. If we want to mend the field, we start with language; we start with our words. Our words conjure a world. And we want it to be a world that we want to live in.
How does our biblical Creation story set us up for binaries, oppositions, hierarchies? And how does it also call us to see the fullness of the Universe? And how does that affect who we are and how we get along? Rosh Hashanah Drash 5778 –– AUDIO VERSION.
It sounds nice to talk about hate this way; it's nice to convey your values in three words. But hate isn't a thing out there in the world that we can fight. When someone says, "Fight hate," I am really at a loss for what it is I am supposed to do, other than repost the meme.
I bit in, and everything in me suddenly said, "Why yes, Grandma Minnie." A few bites later, it was again just a delicious thing and now sentimental too. But for that first moment, I had the unmistakable sensation of my grandmother next to me, our hearts turned toward each other in a way that hasn't been possible for nearly half a century.
Now beware. There are risks associated with stirring the waters, as any activist knows. The thing is, when you stir the waters, the waters get stirred. There are ripples; and the consequences can be unpredictable. Other activists might be stirred up or stirring up in different ways, and the hulls of your ships might bang up against each other – the hulls of your friendships, your partnerships, colliding. This happens. And so it is important to remember that someone stirring the water differently is not necessarily your enemy. And that there is room on these waves for all of us to ride.
So how do you create monumental Iron Age architecture without axes, hammers or iron tools? Yes, it could just mean that the milling happened at the quarry, many miles away where the ringing and clanging would not bother anybody. But that's too easy an answer for us Jews. Instead, our midrash, our vast array of legend, goes wild here. How did whole stones come to be so regular and perfectly shaped if iron chisels were forbidden? How were they transported if iron crowbars couldn't pry them onto wagons? One midrash suggests that the stones, once uncovered in the quarry, perfectly shaped, would hoist themselves up in the air and levitate to Jerusalem.
We are living in dark times. At least that's what people keep saying. So how can we use our mythic imagination of darkness to guide us on the difficult road ahead? Torah and Midrash might have an idea worth considering.
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This story, this exodus story, is our master story for this moment. We know it well. We retell it every year. We have digested it along with so much parsley and saltwater. It is in our cells. We know it starts with enslavement. And we know it ends with freedom.
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Recorded at Congregation Ner Shalom, Cotati, CA. Re-Auguration Shabbat, January 20, 2017.
How anxiety can become fear if we don't do something better with it. A Jewish view. Oh, and a road trip.
I've tried to imagine what it will take to create something of beauty and sweetness in this country. I've tried to observe and absorb what people are saying. Where the attention is going. I've wondered what kind of work each of us now needs to take on to face the future. And it's hard to know exactly, because so many different things could happen, and the landscape changes a little every day...
All of our best features: qualities, talents, learnings, adorn the sukkot of our lives. They are beautiful. But even they, like the gourds and apples and palm fronds on a backyard sukkah, eventually compost.
Starting the new year with the first podcast of Itzik's Well. Rosh Hashanah drash, recorded at Congregation Ner Shalom, October 2, 2016. Just hit play to listen to it on your device. Or read the text version at http://www.irwinkeller.com/itzikswell/