Parshat Pinchas - How Much Strawberry Shortcake Should I Eat?

by 

Rabbi Katy Z. Allen

This week's Torah portion, Pinchas, contains instructions about how the Israelites are to divide up of the land once they arrive: "The Lord spoke to Moses, saying,  'Divide the land among the tribes, as an inheritance according to the number of the names: with larger groups increase the share, with smaller groups decrease the share. Each is to receive its share according to its enrollment.'" (Num. 26:52-54). The land is to be divided up among the tribes, and it must be done fairly. It matters not only what is done, but how it is done.

The Chasidic Rabbi Zadok HaKohen Rabinowitz, known as Pri Tzadik, commented on a passage from the Talmud that was discussing that Jacob remained alone by the river without his family to remain with certain possessions, and he says, "That which is not created for this specific person is like stolen property when they are in possession of it, and thus [the righteous are careful] not to take possession of it." When we take that which is not due to us, we are stealing! But, that which is ours, which comes to us from G!d, the Pri Tzadik (quoting earlier rebbes), says that we have an obligation to appreciate it: "a righteous person is obligated to enjoy an object which is fitting for them even if it means risking their life."*

This passage makes me think about eating (though I could also think about how much gas or electricity I use or how many clothes I own, or...). Jewish tradition teaches us to recite a blessing before we eat and again after we eat, acknowledging the holiness of the food, acknowledging G!d's role in putting food onto our plates. We acknowledge that G!d brings forth bread from the Earth, that G!d is the creator of the fruit of the earth and of the tree and of all kinds of sustenance, or that all is according to G!d's word. But what if we eat too much, not just satisfying our appetite, but continuing to eat, filling our bellies to overflowing? What if we eat too fast and gobble it down, rather than savoring it and appreciating each bite? What if we enjoy our food so much that we eat more than our share?

First, we haven't divided - not the land, but the fruit of the land, fairly, larger groups having a larger share and smaller groups a smaller share. Instead, as a small group of the wealthiest on the planet, we have taken a large share. And, according to Pri Tzadik, we are stealing! I can think of many times when I have gotten up from a meal at a restaurant or a dinner of something I really like (strawberry shortcake with fresh strawberries and whipped cream being the most recent example) and have said to myself, I ate too much. I have eaten more than my share, and so, following the Pri Tzadit, I have stolen. I have stolen by taxing the Earth too much, using resources of water and soil and fossil fuels that were not my allotted portion. I have stolen by not properly appreciating the portion that is due to me, instead feeling that it is too little and that G!d should give me more. I have stolen by not leaving some of that food in the store or at the farm stand for someone else to have.

Culturally, we have a tendency to always have more food at a simcha (joyous event) than we need, perhaps carried over from a time when eating was one of the few enjoyments open to us. But Margaret Atwood, in her poem, "The Moment," reminds us that, as the Psalmist says, "The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." (Ps. 24:1) "The moment when, after many years / of hard work and a long voyage / you stand in the centre of your room, / house, half-acre, square mile, island, country / knowing at last how you got there / and say, I own this, // is the same moment when the trees unloose / their soft arms from around you, / the birds take back their language, / the cliffs fissure and collapse, / the air moves back from you like a wave / and you can't breathe. / No, they whisper. You own nothing. / You were a visitor, time after time / climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. / We never belonged to you. / You never found us. / It was always the other way round."

When I eat too much, I am in essence saying, "I own this," about something I do not really need. I am taking more than my share. I am stealing.

And so, I think of words I wrote at another time when eating too much was on my mind, and I try to remember as I eat that both how I eat and how much I eat are acts with the potential for greediness and distance from G!d, or for holiness and connection to the Divine:

יהי רצון ה' אלהינו, מלך העולם, שעם כל נגיסה מהאוכל שלפנינו נחשוב עליך ועל כל ברייותיך שאין להם די לאכול. תעזרנו בבקשה לאכול רק מה שאנחנו צריכים כדי להיות שבעים ולא יותר, לאכול לאט ולא למהר, ולהרגיש אותך בתוכנו ומסביבנו בכל עת ובכל שעה. ברוך אתה ה', מקור הכל

May it be your will Adonai our G!d, Sovereign of the Universe, that with every bite of the food before us we think of you and of all of your creatures that do not have enough to eat. Help us, please, to eat only what we need in order to be satisfied and not more, to eat slowly and not quickly, and to feel you within us and around us at every season and at every moment. Blessed are you Adonai, the Source of all.

Amen.

*This material is posted as part of Jewcology’s “Year of Jewish Learning on the Environment,” in partnership with Canfei Nesharim.  Learn more at http://www.jewcology.com/content/view/Year-of-Jewish-Learning-on-the-Environment. 

To the Stars and Back - Our Quest for Connection / Part 7 of 7

If I am to authentically hang on to my pluralism, if I want to be true to my belief that we should each be allowed our beliefs, I must allow you to believe what you want, even if you want me to believe something else. I must remember that it is what we do with our beliefs that makes a difference in the world. In some important way, it doesn’t really matter what we believe, whether in G!d or in stardust, or in fairies. We all come from the same place, we all came into being on this planet. We have the same carbon and hydrogen atoms in each of us as in the stars and the crust of the Earth. We all are born and we all die. What does matter is what we do and what we say. Our words and our actions have impact. And there will be points on which we will never agree, for if you kill me, it is because it is OK with you, but if I kill you, it surely will only be OK with me.

And so, let us look to the Big Picture and to the details. Let us see the world through an ecological lens – the lens of relationships among organisms and their environment.[1] Let us figure out how to be Zusya, how to be ourselves. Let us ask ourselves: Who am I? What are my gifts? What is unique about me? What is universal? What is my relationship to my environment? How am I separate? How am I connected?

When I look up at the stars, I know that I am small. I know that the same stars shine above the heads of 7 million other people. I know that the Universe goes on and on and on for such a great time and distance that it feels infinite even if it is not. I know that we were both born. I know that we both will die. I know that you and I are more similar than we are different. I know that I want to choose, each and every day, to hold love in my heart and not hate. I know that the world is good.

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[1] Lappe, p. 15.

To the Stars and Back - Our Quest for Connection / Part 6 of 7

Another aspect of our connectedness is that we share with each other our need for each other. We can try to live “off the grid,” but it is not really in our genes to do so. Like those ants, we are social creatures. To live totally independently of all other human beings is not how we are programmed, and it takes a yeomen effort to make it happen. Just going to live in the woods isn’t truly getting away from others, not if we take even the smallest item with us or at any point in our seclusion need something we cannot find in the woods around us, for surely someone else helped to make the item. And if we make an item ourselves, did we learn to do so totally by ourselves, or are we bringing learning with us, learning that came from another member of our species?

Parker Palmer speaks of the need “to hold solitude and community together as true paradox…Solitude … means never living apart from one’s self. It is not about the absence of other people—it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others. Community … means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people—it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.”[1] Going out into the woods to live alone may be about deep listening, but it may also be about the solitude that is about the absence of people. It is a way to try to create stringent boundaries between ourselves and all other people. To set ourselves apart.

We all have and we all need boundaries. Our skin is our first boundary. Andrea Jones, in her essay about skin, begins with disconnection: “skin is the membrane that distinguishes self from world. Inside its margins: you. Beyond its flexy surface: everything else.” But, she ends with connection: “Skin differentiates but does not isolate…[it] does not hold the universe at bay. Instead it marks the seam that joins your existence to everything else.”[2] Or, in the words of Francis Moore Lappe, “Separateness is…the illusion…Mutually created and every changing – that is the reality.”[3] The reality of solitude that is connection to ourselves and community that is the awareness of connection to others – these are the details and the Big Picture, or perhaps the Big Picture and the details, or, most likely, both.

In the same way that our skin both separates us and connects us, religion is also a paradox of connection and disconnection. It helps us to connect to those who share a similar spiritual pathway, but it can disconnect us from those who are different – to the point that we may wage war on each other. So, too, our language, our culture, our foods, and our neighborhoods, both connect us and disconnect us. But one of the amazing gifts of being human is that we can learn new languages, we can open our minds to differences in cultures, we can try new foods, and we can travel out of our neighborhoods. So, too, can we reach across the boundaries of faith. Some of the most powerful moments of prayer I have experienced have been with people of different faith traditions, at the moments when together in letting go, we have touched a deep common well of strength and courage and connection.

Places such as religious institutions, have skin, too, usually known as walls. I went to a pluralistic rabbinical and cantorial seminary. At the Academy for Jewish Religion, we share our common connection to Judaism, but we practice our religion in many ways, and as we study together and struggle to find ways to gather in prayer that will meet all of our needs, we name and acknowledge that fact. And yet, when we leave this learning environment and go out to serve in the world, there are limits to the ways in which we can be pluralistic. In our synagogues and other institutions, we build a community, we make decisions, for we can’t do everything, and our decisions determine who we are. Our communities have boundaries that define who and what they are and how they do things. They have a skin that distinguishes them from the rest of the world. The question becomes, does an institution or a community use its skin to isolate itself, or to join itself to all that is around it?

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[1] Palmer, Parker, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, 2009, Wiley and Sons, p. 55.

[2] Jones, Andrea, “Identity’s Edge,” Orion Magazine, January-February, 2007.

[3] Lappe, Francis Moore, EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want, Nation Books, 2011, p. 16.

To the Stars and Back - Our Quest for Connection / Part 5 of 7

For each one of us, our vision or Big Picture is personal and unique, based on our individual life circumstances and our sense of who we are as a human being. And yet, for all of us, our universal realities intersect. We are all human beings, and like other organisms, we need food, water, air, and a place to lay our bodies down to sleep – even if that place is the street. A baby who is not sufficiently held and cared for – even if it has enough food and water – may fail to develop and gain weight due to a syndrome known as “failure to thrive.” Unlike most other creatures, in order to thrive, we human beings need some sense of love, hope, meaning, and trust. How these terms translate into a metalanguage that can be understood by all humans, I do not know. And just because we need love, hope, meaning, and trust, does not mean that we get them, just as we all do not get a livable home and enough to eat. But we are not ants and we are not maple trees and we are not fungi. We are human beings, with minds and with emotions, and our needs include those not easily translatable from language to language. And yet, like the ants and the maple trees and the fungi, we all share the Earth on which we live. Even as we fly off into space, we cannot get away from our connection to the planet upon which we evolved. It is home. It is our home. It is home for all of us, all 7 billion of us.

An important aspect of scientific research is the need to be objective. I have a friend who is studying science in a way that acknowledges the limits of our ability to do so. We can try to be objective. We can try really hard, and with some things, such as our concrete measurements, we can succeed. But we are governed not only by “seeing is believing,” but also by “believing is seeing.” Behind every measurement lie our beliefs. Behind every measurement is the decision of which measurement to take, and that decision – like all of our other decisions – is a very personal one, impacted by our own personal story of who we are and how we have gotten to this point in life. It is impacted by our family and our community, by our culture, our religion or lack there of, our race, our genes, our birthplace – physical, economic, and social. And, I would posit, our decisions are impacted by our ability or lack of ability to trust the unknown/Unknown and the unknowable/Unknowable.

Life events change us, and can change how we see the world. Trauma – a radical change in our immediate world – tends to change us. We want to keep ourselves safe. Sometimes we do it through anger, sometimes through escape into tightly knit communities, sometimes by embracing peace and serenity. We make choices. We make decisions. We make decisions about what to believe and what to do. And then, our decisions have impact.

To the Stars and Back - Our Quest for Connection / Part 4 of 7

Related to whether or not to engage with others and with the world is the matter of how we engage. Part of a Talmudic sequence of stories related to seeking forgiveness offers some options. “When a certain person injured Rabbi Zera, [Rabbi Zera] would repeatedly pass before him and invite himself into his presence, so that the injurer would come and appease him.” Moshe Halbertal identifies Rabbi Zera’s graceful entrance into the presence of one who had injured him as an action worthy of emulation that created the conditions in which it was possible for the injurer to approach him and ask for forgiveness in a way in which no one was humiliated.[1]

In the story that follows, Rav, on the day before Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement, at the eleventh hour for seeking forgiveness, goes to see a butcher who had slighted him. Rav’s colleague expresses concern that Rav is going to kill the butcher, and, in fact, the butcher rejects Rav’s presence, a supernatural event occurs, and the butcher dies. Halbertal points out that Rav’s strident intrusion when the clock is ticking for forgiveness is an act of aggression, influenced more, perhaps, by Rav’s need to be forgiven, than the butcher’s need to forgive. Rav got stuck in the details and forgot to see the Big Picture. He chose to engage, but with anger and aggression rather than humility and grace.

Let us ask ourselves, “Do I approach others with humility and love or do I approach with hurt, aggression, and anger?” The answer, as these stories show, makes all the difference in the world. Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, teaches that, “While it is true that anger brings extra energy…[w]e cannot be sure whether its result will be positive or negative. This is because anger eclipses the best part of our brain: its rationality. So the energy of anger is almost always unreliable. It can cause an immense amount of destructive, unfortunate behavior.”[2] Gyatso posits that anger and hatred are always harmful, they are our real enemies, and we should find ways to cherish and develop passion and love. Holding a vision or a sense of our place in a bigger picture can help us to open our hearts and minds and souls, to be less afraid and less angry, and to feel more love and compassion. As we go through our days, it can be helpful to know how to hold our hand at arm’s length before us and, as we gaze at our hand, be able to shift our focus from the hand to the room beyond and back again, and to know when the focus is best on the hand, and when it is best on the view beyond to the Big Picture.

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[1] “At the Threshold of Forgiveness: A Study of Law and Narrative in the Talmud,” by Moshe Halbertal, Jewish Review of Books, No. 7, Fall 2011.

[2] “Compassion and the Individual,” by His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, http://www.dalailama.com/messages/compassion.

To the Stars and Back - Our Quest for Connection / Part 3 of 7

Time walking the journey of life makes clear that managing in the world asks us to stand in the “breach,” in the tension, in the paradox between our individuality and our universality. And yet, the breach, the tension, and the paradox also ask us to stand between our own needs and the needs of those around us; between our finite physical selves and our minds and our spirits that reach beyond what we can actually do in the time and space we occupy; between our dreams, our hopes, our visions, and the reality of the details of daily living and of the physical path we walk.

Once we begin searching for both our inner unique self and our universal self, the questions become more practical. What helps us in this process? What hinders us?

Perhaps you have experienced a deep need to be heard, or a time when you could not learn from others but needed the space and the silence to hear your own inner voice. Deep listening, to ourselves, to our ancestors, to the texts we hold sacred, to the Earth and the stars, to G!d – deep listening can connect us to our inner truth. Judaism teaches most fundamentally Sh’ma – hear – something we can only do if we listen. Pauline Oliveros, in words of hope for the third millennium of the common era, writes, “I pray for deep listening in the new century – listening alone – listening together – listening to others—listening to oneself – listening to the earth – listening to the universe…helping to create an atmosphere of opening for all to be heard, with the understanding that listening is healing. Deep listening in all its variations is infinite. Deep listening is love.”[1]

Deep listening can lead us to broader understandings and visions. Standing in the breach can become more manageable when we find and maintain a vision, see some kind of Big Picture before us, and find ways to remain connected to that vision or that Picture. The development of such a vision generally evolves over time as our life changes. Although it generally doesn’t pop up fully fledged overnight, it may start like a thunderbolt, making us acutely aware of its birth. Or, it may very slowly emerge, almost without our awareness, and we may find it difficult to pinpoint the birth moment.

Either way, the early stages of our vision may be as fragile as a premature baby. Imagine the first time you performed a ritual, tried a new task, spoke a new language, or did anything else you’d never done before. Whether or not it felt awkward or powerful, it nevertheless was something new and different. Only many, many repetitions of that act will make it feel integrated and a part of whom you are. With time and our nurturing, our fragile sense of our Big Picture can grow stronger and more mature and one day it will stand securely on its own. If we hold on and don’t let go, if we trust that inner core, we will gradually shed our fear and our insecurity and grow stronger. So, too, it is with our most intimate connections to our hearts and our souls, and to the universe.

But life of course is much more than a vision. Alongside our sense of our wider goals and the direction in which we want our lives to be going stand the myriad details of life. We must get up, get dressed, have breakfast, wash up, and get to work or otherwise get on with the day. We must call the phone company. We must plan for our old age. We must change the diapers. We must pay our bills. We must wash the floor, the clothes, the dishes. We must feed the cat and take out the compost. We must call our cousin and care for our father. We must send a birthday greeting. We must deal with a bitter co-worker. We must confront the personal issues of our family members. We must….

Sometimes the details are joyous. Sometimes they are dispassionate. Sometimes they are excruciating. Sometimes they are heartwarming. Sometimes they are annoying. Sometimes they are peaceful. Sometimes we must engage with the details and sometimes we have a choice about how to respond – both physically and emotionally. Evaluating when the details are important and when to let them go because they are impeding our progress forward is an important and legitimate process. There are situations when we need to engage and make a difference in the world. But there are other situations that just don’t matter enough, even if at first they seem important: the misunderstanding with the transit employee, the driver who cut me off, the lack of a thank you from a friend or family member for a gift I sent. Does getting upset about these things help me move forward with my vision and engage with my Big Picture or does it just take up energy I could be using more constructively? When stated like this, away from the emotion of the moment, the latter seems the obvious answer. The critical piece is always in the moment. The bark of a tree may respond to the growth of its trunk by stretching or by cracking, and if it cracks, a diversity of patterns of fissures and ridges may emerge. We, too, develop varying patterns depending on how we respond in the moment. Finding ways to keep the balance between the details and the vision is a daily tightrope walk that can smooth the pathway of our journey through life and help to keep us calm and focused.

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[1] From Prayers for a Thousand Years: Blessings and Expressions of Hope for the New, Elizabeth Roberts, Elias Amidon, HarperCollins Books, 1999, p. 55.

To the Stars and Back - Our Quest for Connection / Part 2 of 7

Each of us searches for our identity amid a sea of human faces. Who are these people around us? How are we connected to them? How much do we overlap in our experiences of life? The questions are complex and the answers not obvious. In my work as a hospital chaplain, visiting patients no matter what their religious persuasion, their country of origin, their cultural background, or their diagnosis, I find both moments of profound connection and moments of total lack of connection. Sometimes the inability to connect feels related to a religious or cultural difference and sometimes it seems totally personal – someone may be so angry about their disease or their life that they cannot let anyone anywhere near them. And sometimes it is something within me.

In an attempt to quantify our connections, researchers have developed a set of “universal human emotions,” experiences they believe are common to human beings independent of race or culture or any other factor. Evidence from a variety of research suggests that emotions such as happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise are shared by all human beings, no matter what their culture. One of the ways this was tested, as reported in a recent edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was by having people of different cultures respond to the sounds of expression of emotion and react to them.[1]

Not everyone agrees with this list of universal human emotions, pointing out that both emotions and language are complex, and some question the list of English words. If I say I am sad, or if I cry, you may or may not understand what I mean, even if we speak the same language and have a similar cultural background. Even if we live in the same home! Add into the mix differences in languages and meaning and culture, and precise translation may be nearly impossible.

Reviewer Peggy Rosenthal tells us how Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, in her book of poetry Saint Sinatra and Other Poems, plays with the complexity of language and its multiple layers of meaning, stating that “Language is as incarnational as Christ himself, the Word made flesh.” Through her poems about saints both officially canonized and of her own making, O’Donnell “is conceiving of a new sainthood in its core New Testament sense of a “holiness…that is available to anyone” – any one unique human. Rosenthal wonders, “is poetry of God or of the devil…or merely human.” O’Donnell, of course, does not give answers, but at the close of the last poem in the book, she makes explicit the poem’s vision of poetry as sacramental, and invites the reader:  “Here. Take. Eat.”[2]

Considering the possibility of language being incarnational adds another layer of complexity to our understanding of our universal connections. Yet our efforts to comprehend and articulate these connections continue in a variety of ways. One, spearheaded by Anna Wierzbicka of the Australian National University, has been through the development of a Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which attempts to identify basic concepts, such as good, bad, and want, that are found in all languages.[3] To get to what we truly share in common – the concepts of good and bad, for example, as opposed to what our cultures consider to be good or bad – we have to get to what is most fundamental about life. Only then can we have a chance of conceptualizing our universal humanness, beyond our 23 pairs of chromosomes and the presence of our specifically homo sapiens physical features.

Poetry may or may not be divine, the list of universal human emotions may or may not be accurate, and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage may or may not succeed, but all are powerful attempts to find our common connections within and between traditions. For some reason, we seem to keep trying. Our hearts keep pulling us toward articulations of the universality of being human. At the same time, on the flip side of the coin, again and again, our religious, cultural, and modern traditions and teachers, through stories and through teachings ask us to become ourselves. They lead us and prod us and encourage us to find and express the uniqueness of our own selves. Jewish tradition, in Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, teaches that, “One human was created alone … to declare the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, for people mint many coins with a single mold, and they are all similar to one another. But the Sovereign, the Sovereign of sovereigns, the Holy One blessed be He, stamped every human with the mold of the first human. And not one is similar to any other.” Judaism, of course, doesn’t have a monopoly on the paradox of our universality and our uniqueness. Each of us has 23 pairs of chromosomes, but a unique set of genes on those chromosomes makes us who we are. Each of us, through the vehicles of the language and culture we know and that are familiar to us, is asked to express our uniqueness in our shared role as human beings.

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[1] “Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations,” by Disa A. Sauter, Frank Eisner, Paul Ekman, and Sophie K. Scott, PNAS 2010 107 (6) 2408-2412.

[2] “Beatifications,” in America, October 17, 2011, pp 24-25.

[3] “Language and Metalanguage: Key Issues in Emotion Research,” by Anna Wierzbicka, Emotion Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan. 2009) 3–14.

To the Stars and Back - Our Quest for Connection

Part 1 of 7

Every evening before going to bed, I step outside and look up at the night sky. When I can see the stars, the sense of seeing into the distant distance and distant time invariably fills me with awe. Recently, with Reb Zusya, Plato, Buddha, and other ancient and modern sages on my mind, I’ve realized that when they stepped out into the nighttime air, they saw the same stars I am seeing today. Among these and many other teachers, I have found a common thread about our need to find ourselves.

In the world to come they will not ask me, 'Zusya, why were you not Moses?' They will ask me, 'Zusya, why were you not Zusya?’ Reb Zusya of Hanipoli

Doubt everything. Find your own light. Buddah

The true profession of man is to find his way to himself. Hermann Hesse

Know thyself. Plato

And you? When will you begin your long journey into yourself? Rumi

The stars we share and the unique light within our hearts – the two are universal; they are both opposite and interconnected, and therein lies the tension.

In so many wisdom traditions, teachings about the need and importance of finding and following our own unique path in life are found. In religious terms, the Name we worship wants us to become ourselves. Outside the religious and spiritual world, in the self-help section of the real or virtual bookstore or library we can find myriad programs to help us become our best selves. Could it really be that no matter where we are coming from culturally, an inner drive is urging us to find out who we truly are? Could it be that we all feel the need to become and be ourselves? Could it be that this is our personal human mission in life?

Perhaps.

Self-discovery and self-actualization are not simple concepts. If they were, we wouldn’t need so many teachings! In my limited experience, it is a lifetime journey to discover who I am and to allow my unique gifts to shine forth in the universe. It is a journey along which I have had many and varied teachers. It is a journey with many bumps, ups and downs, wrong turns, and backtracking, but that moves me ever forward into new territory.

Day 49 of the Omer

On this last day of counting the Omer, this seventh day of the sixth week, which gives us seven full weeks, we consider Malchut in Malchut - Leadership in Leadership, the ultimate in leadership.


Tonight, or some clear night soon, I invite you to step outside, lie down on the ground on your back, and look up at the stars. When you do, you will see celestial bodies that have been where they are for billions of years. You will gaze at a night sky that people have been gazing at since the beginning of human kind. Perhaps you will see constellations. Perhaps you have learned names that we humans have given to these pictures made of stars. Perhaps you are familiar with the Big Dipper, or the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, or Pegasus, the Winged Horse. If you identify Ursa Major, the Great Bear, you are seeing a constellation thought to have been named 5,000 years ago. We are looking back into human history as well as the history of the Universe when we gaze at the night sky. Feel your smallness. Then feel your connection. Know that you are a part of something so much larger than yourself that its size is beyond our comprehension. Know that mystery remains in the Universe. And know that you are important. And when you have gazed long enough, I invite you to get up and go inside and begin a new beginning, be ready to receive the gifts that came from the mountaintop and from the sky, the gifts that remain in the trees and the rocks and the birds and the moon and the flowers and the water and the stars, after all these many, many millenia.



Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha'olam, asher kid-shanu b'mitzvotav, vitzivanu, al sefirat ha'omer.

Blessed are you Adonai our G!d, ruler of the universe, who sanctifies us with mitzvot and commands us regarding the counting of the Omer.

Today is forty-nine days, which is seven weeks of the Omer.




And so we reach the end of our counting together. I thank you for walking this journey with me. I couldn't have done it without you. May your Shabbat be restful, your Shavuot meaningful, you Memorial Day healing, and your long weekend joyous. May you find the strength and the peace and the insight you need. May you be blessed on your journey through life.


Todah rabbah - thank you,


Katy

Day 48 of the Omer

On this penultimate day of counting the Omer, we consider the attributes of Y'sod in Malchut, Bonding in Leadership.


When we look up at the sky on a clear night, we see a milky section of the expanse of stars, what we have dubbed the Milky Way, which we all know contains no milk and is not a candy bar! It is, rather, our view of the galaxy in which we live - a rotating group of gases and dust and hundreds of billions of stars bound together by the force of gravity. When we stand outside and look skyward, the Milky Way looks like it is far away, but actually we are about 2/3 of the way outward from the center of the galaxy. Amazing is our galaxy, and every other galaxy in the Universe. Amazing in its size, in its many, many member parts, in its diversity, in its contained energy, its age, its future, its past, its mystery.


To look at the families and communities of which we are a part, bound together by forces stronger even than gravity, to see them as we see the Milky Way, as if from the outside, can give us a glimpse of what is amazing about them, and such a glimpse can give us hope and strength and a sense of security and understanding and vision, and can help us move ever forward, with spirit, with joy, and with hope. 



Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha'olam, asher kid-shanu b'mitzvotav, vitzivanu, al sefirat ha'omer.

Blessed are you Adonai our G!d, ruler of the universe, who sanctifies us with mitzvot and commands us regarding the counting of the Omer.

Today is forty-eight days, which is six weeks and six days of the Omer.