About This Blog (aka Relaunching My Blog)

Okay, so even though almost everything posted here is backdated to the date when I actually wrote it, in actual fact I put together this blog just now -- over the course of April 2017 -- from a myriad of sources (other abortive blogs I started over the years, electronic files that I'd saved, in some cases social media where I posted some of this stuff the first time around).

You'll find multiple categories of stuff here:

1.  A lot of poetry (which for the most part I have no idea where else to publish, since I know there are literary journals in the world but as far as I can tell no one reads them -- and I'm not sure I'd characterize my poetry as a "literary" pursuit in any case).

2.  A few academic / academic-style essays which aren't polished or original enough to publish in an academic setting but which I still think may carry some interest / point towards useful sources for folks who are interested in the topics I wrote about.

3. Short sermons, about Jewish liturgy, other Jewish texts, the Jewish year cycle, etc.

4. Some reflections on my own spiritual and mental-health journey, as well as lessons learned which I think might help others who wrestle with related challenges.

5. My reflections on life as a reader (and writer) -- reactions to specific works of literature and musings about bookworm-hood in general.

6. Interesting odds and ends that I encounter in my work as a graduate student in the field of Yiddish literature and culture, and in my study of Hebrew and other languages as well.

7. Tips and tricks for research, and (feminist) reflections on life in academia.

8. Here and there, thoughts about contemporary politics.

9. Last but not least, a bunch of music that I've written over the years.  I write quite a lot of music, but I'm not the greatest singer (or recorder!), so it's been a bit of a challenge to figure out how to get my music out into the world.  For now, I've decided that something is better than nothing, and putting it out there will allow "real musicians" to take what I've written and make it into something better than the forlorn recordings I'm posting here.

Happy reading!  Comments and emails are welcome.

Two more oldies but goodies (?)

Once upon a time I knew enough Latin to write Latin poetry... maybe.  You be the judge 😛

Interclusa

Numquam futuro lacrima-
tur sanguinem corpus meum.
Cum candet luna alvus mea
videtur esse ingens pirum.
Nitor genibus in nive ululo-
que frigido exanimique. Dum
capra parit infecunda sum.

Aestas

In herbis altis aridis
clandestinis duae fidis
confirmant amicitiam.
Ocellis pullioribus
et quasi aquam manibus
complexis spargunt gratiam.

My first ever poem

I've been going through a bunch of my old writing in order to put this blog together, and I found this poem which I apparently wrote at the tender age of 6 😉

FISH DOG CAT

A dog and a cat, especially a fish
Asleep by the fire
Awakened by a sound outside.
Ready for my meal!
That's what the dog says
Ready for some fish!
That's what the cat says
Don't eat me!
That's what the fish says
Neither the dog nor the cat had noticed the fish.
The fish! The fish!
That's what the cat says
I can chase the fish!
So the cat and the dog tried to chase the fish in its big glass case.

שתהיי לי הסכין

Today I finished listening to the audiobook of שתהיי לי הסכין (Be My Knife) by David Grossman. I do not know what to sayyyyy.

It is an extremely unique book, definitely worth reading, and I really really loved most of it; as always with his books I'm not sure about the ending (although I actually think it works better than the endings of some of his other novels).

For most of the book I strongly identified with Yair (unfortunately for me 😛); on the other hand, there are some things about him that are really non-OK, and it bothers me that the book is like one ginormous "woman performs emotional labor for man"-fest. I know it's a little more complicated than that but I think that's in there too, and I'm not sure whether the book itself is critical of that or not (although I guess it basically is). I mean I guess also, relationships are complicated and problematic and people can get a lot out of them and be strongly sucked into them even when the participants are seriously flawed -- and also, it's OK and important for stories to also show the ugly parts of being human. But in some sense, I feel like this is one of the least optimistic of his books that I've read (and the gender aspect is probably the most disturbing aspect).

I guess to some extent I'm also trying to think about what I personally can or want to learn from the book, considering how strongly I identified with one of the main characters... I guess I'm just hoping that I am on the way to becoming not-Yair (or, maybe, grownup-and-new-and-improved-Yair at least).

Trump is not Hitler

I was concerned about this before the election and my friend just pointed it out again too, and I still agree. Guys, Trump is not Hitler. ICE raids are not SS raids. I'm not saying this because I think the Holocaust was exceptional and has to be held up as the greatest genocide of all time, and I'm also not saying this because I don't think that what's happening now is bad (or because I'm not aware that part of what's happening now is a rise in anti-Semitism). I'm saying this because, until six months ago (apparently), there was a widespread awareness/principle that every social justice issue is different and analogies need to be used sparingly and with caution. Usually, the concern is about not appropriating other people's struggles, because bad things are already bad without being named as being "bad in the same way as some other bad thing." In this case, I think the issue is that white people need to be able to care about the fate of people of color without getting there via an analogy to a genocide directed against white people (people who in the American context can, in general, pass as / are considered to be white today). Trump is bad. ICE raids are bad. Can we just look at their inherent badness without trying to rev up our capacity for empathy by talking incessantly about the Holocaust?

Bonus:  A passage from דער בלוטיקער שפּאַס (by Sholem-Aleichem) in which he describes pre-revolutionary Russia's equivalent of an ICE raid (unfortunately I forgot to make a note of the page number):

On Knowledge, or the Lack Thereof, and Making History

Something I've been pondering: I switched from organizer-esque work to academia because I wanted to be sure (or at least a little more hopeful) that I know what the heck I'm talking about when I make claims about history. However, Trump is such a good reminder that history is all too often made by people who don't know anything about history. So, all you organizers out there, keep doing the right thing without worrying about if it's perfectly right, because there are plenty of people with plenty of power who are doing the very wrongest thing without caring at all about what rightness is.

Random thoughts based on writing and reading feelingsmail

1. Why in American culture are there two simultaneous yet opposite tropes:

On one hand, there's such a strong trope (at least for affluent white people) that relationships between parents and adult children are fraught and no one wants to go home for the holidays (e.g.). On the other hand, there's such a strong assumption that everyone's close to their family and gets homesick. These things are totally opposite but also both totally operating in pop culture and small talk all the time. What's up with that?

2. This whole thing about how women are supposed to be assertive and negotiate (and not engage in verbal hedges or upspeak), otherwise it's their fault that they don't advance (even if that's not always spelled out, that's the message).

But in a lot of contexts, both personal and professional, women are literally punished every single time they are assertive or negotiate or don't soften comments that could be perceived as confrontational. And then they also don't advance. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Could we find a way to talk about assertiveness and negotiation for women, while also being real about the consequences for doing that in the vast majority of cases? We shouldn't be talking in a way that saddles individual women with the burden of "unilaterally fixing a broken culture by acting as if people should treat them with respect," when doing so often results in the opposite, in terms of the consequences in individual women's lives. I understand that long experience sometimes makes women feel like they can't be assertive when actually they can, and it's important to learn how to notice and take those opportunities, and that does help to create an overall shift in the culture, but in all cases, this should be on the basis of calculated risk-taking with eyes wide open about potential backlash, and I don't usually see that acknowledged when people write or talk about this.

3. A dear trilingual message about love sent to me piece by piece by three dear hearts:

האהבה היא רגש טוב ומעצים ומגוון מאוד בהופעותיו ובצורותיו. היא יכולה גם להשתלט ולכבוש ולכאוב ולגרום להרס. לא תמיד אפשר לנווט אותה או לרסן אותה או להבין אותה או לגדול אתה. אהבה טובה באמת היא כזאת שגם המימוש שלה הוא טוב, כזאת שהיא הדדית ומתפתחת מתוך התרומה ההדדית לקשר שנבנה מציפיות משותפות. אני בטוחה שבסוף תעשי גם מה שצריך -- וואָס ס'איז באַשערט, איז באַווערט. Вы должны попробовать и быть терпеливой. И ждать своей любви! Всему своё время – так говорят!

Yom Kippur and Teshuvah

I was inspired by this post on Ritual Well. It’s not a new thought or a new practice for me – especially for the past two years, Yom Kippur has served as a day for me to take stock of the status of my eating disorder and set an intention to continue to recover, starting by feeding myself well on the day itself. Very thankfully, this year I can say for the first time that I’m well enough that recovering further is no longer at the very top of my teshuvah list, and I’m more in “maintenance” mode. I’m still not ready to try fasting again yet (and I actually chose to spend the day alone today partly so that I wouldn’t have to interact with people who were fasting or talk about my choices), but it was pretty amazing to be like, “I know how to feed myself. Look at me feeding myself. I can just take care of this (and enjoy it) and then go on about my business and do other things today as well.” In particular, feeling like I could spend many hours in a row writing in my journal without being distracted by my body being sad about not having the food it needs, and even without being disturbed too much by chronic pain issues that have been making it difficult for me to write by hand for several years, is HUGE progress for me and I feel so grateful. (I’m also grateful to have been able to implement the decision to spend the day alone! I’ve been realizing that I’ve been doing a lot of “saying yes when I want to say no” about social interaction, especially with housemates over the past couple of years.)

Trump Thoughts, Part 2

OK, here's part two of my post from last night.

Regarding the comparisons of Trump to Hitler: I'm glad that people are taking the threat posed by Trump seriously, but I don't like this rhetorical move.

I don't like it for the reason that making analogies between two atrocious situations is always a risky business (because it runs the risk of trivializing one or the other situation, because it's generally an exploitative move, etc.).

I don't like it because it ignores vast differences between 1930s Germany and contemporary America (Germany had just lost a major war and was in serious economic straits, it was the Great Depression, and Germany was a young nation-state with consolidated ethnic nationalism as its raison d'etre; whereas the US is currently the world superpower and doing relatively fine from an economic perspective and, however convincing it may or may not sound, is founded in explicit rhetoric about ethic diversity).

I don't like it because it is a kind of fear-mongering that seems inauthentic: if Trump is so scary, then he's scary enough by virtue of being Trump -- he doesn't also need to be Hitler.

I don't like it because dramatic tactics are by their nature short-term -- the focus here is on this person and this moment, not on the massive lead-up that got us here (like, if he loses, then everyone will be like "Yay, defeated Hitler/Voldemort! Now back to business as usual," which I don't think is the right reaction).

And I don't like it because it's a kind of avoidance of contemporary reality -- it's a kind of "othering" Trump to be part of another, "not us" era. But he is us. And it's harder to look at that than to call him Hitler.

Sorry to say it, but I think Trump's gonna win

I'm not sure exactly why I feel the need to post this, but here it is:

I am expecting Trump to win in November.

It is very unlikely that after 8 years of a Democratic president, another Democrat will be elected. For that reason alone I expect Trump to win. Beyond that, I think that if he has been able to get this far, he is likely to get further. If there were going to be significant popular opposition to his election, we would have seen evidence of it already. I think that "Progressives" have a tendency to be a little bit naive about this type of thing, like "Oh, that couldn't POSSIBLY happen, it would be too terrible, America has its problems but we're not totally a lost cause."

Well, not wanting to imagine something undesirable doesn't make it impossible or even unlikely. Candidates that seem to many of us like buffoons have won before, in recent memory, and for some reason they generally seem to do well in elections. (Also, regardless of what I might personally think or wish about Clinton, I don't think she has the charisma or show(wo)manship to compete with a figure like Trump, apart from any of a zillion other considerations.) I think it's also important to keep in mind that the last few elections have been EXTREMELY close, and the person who won did not win because of having the support of a significant majority of the country, but because of a very minor tip in the scale. So to the degree that when Obama replaced Bush, many of us felt some sense of relief, "Oh, this country's finally beginning to see sense" -- no! It was not far from a fluke that he won and didn't reflect a real shift in public opinion in comparison with the previous two elections.

I think that these are all things that most of us are in denial about, and if and when Trump wins in the fall, there will be a lot of pearl clutching and "How could this have possibly happened?" It can and probably will happen because it's where we're quite clearly headed! I think that anything else is basically denial. I'm not saying don't fight it -- by all means fight it! But fight it knowing that it's a real possibility, it's a likely outcome, that reflects a giant percentage of American public opinion -- it's not an outlier or a fringe deviation.

I also have various thoughts about how Trump is being framed and feared as a particular type of threat in ways that seem to me to miss some basic points about how racism and xenophobia work in the US and how US imperialism works in the world, but I think I'll leave that for another time...

And now for something completely different...

Had a tough interaction with a colleague today, and it made me think again about something that, as it turns out, I've thought about A LOT (and been on both sides of multiple times).  So, here's a few thoughts I've thrown together on the topic.

Tips for when you feel like you are acting, or are being perceived as, too needy or clingy!

Questions to ask yourself before you perform a communicative act (speech or otherwise):

~By doing this, am I asking for some kind of support?

~If so, what kind?

~What am I hoping will be the outcome of this act?

~Is that outcome likely? / Does the person I am asking have the resource that I am asking for?

~If not, can I ask someone else for support, who will be more likely to be willing or able to help?

~Is there something that I can do for myself in this situation instead of looking to someone else for support?

Why it's a good idea to eat your feelings sometimes.

There's something I've been thinking about around the discourse about emotional eating. It's so annoying to me when people are like "I'm eating my feelings" (for 100000 reasons), but one reason is that I think that part of what gets mixed up in that is: there are feelings that are in your life that perhaps you are eating as a way to distract from them, self-soothe, etc. But there are also feelings in your life that are "not real" that are caused by having low blood sugar or otherwise mood instability that is caused by not having eaten. So like, PLEASE eat those feelings, cuz those are feelings whose purpose and only meaning is to instruct you to eat.

Another gem from high school history class

This one from European History, senior year:

On Montaigne's Essay "XVII. That to study philosophy is to learn to die"

"Cicero says that 'to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one's self to die.'" So begins Michel de Montaigne's twenty-seventh essay, in which he attempts to train his mind to overcome fear of death. Ignoring death, decides Montaigne, doesn't work -- first of all, death is impossible to ignore, because it surrounds us; secondly, if one ignores death, it is all the more devastating when it appears. Let us then try the opposite: thinking constantly of death. Constant awareness of death causes the mind to numb to its horror; what is more, it prompts one to order one's affairs in anticipation of death, so that when death arrives, nothing is left undone. Montaigne believes that he has found his solution:

"For my part, I am, thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations; my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do."

But if Montaigne were indeed so reconciled to death, he would be able to let the matter rest. He belies his professed comfort by listing many other reasons that death is harmless -- far from being fearless, he is still trying to convince himself not to fear. Death cannot be so bad, he says; like birth, it is merely a transition from one world to another; the worth of a life is not measured by its length; death is natural; death and life are equally pleasing; nothing is known about the afterlife, so it should not be feared, etc. At the very end, he realizes that he is still uncertain: exasperated, he concludes with the sentence, "Happy is the death that leaves us no leisure to prepare things for all this foppery."

My first scathing book review

I just found a cache of my high school papers, and here's one gem (written for a US History course in my junior year):

The Metaphysical Club: A Herculean Feat of, Well, Research

In the middle to late nineteenth century, four great men were born. They came of age during the Civil War, and in their adulthood, they contributed to a great transition of ideas. These four men were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. In The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Louis Menand follows the threads of these men's lives, in the process revealing the growth of a new way of thinking: pragmatism. Menand's book is a magnificent specimen of research, describing not only the ideas but also the denizens and characteristics of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century; however, the book offers little beyond simple information.

The central focus of the book is the progress of philosophy. The great transition of belief that was made was essentially from the idea that truth was something hidden and discoverable to the idea that all accessible truth was defined by our beliefs. Advances in science and mathematics helped trigger this transition, especially Darwinian evolution and probability theory. Darwinism provoked philosophers to ask whether the world was evolving toward a particular planned state, or whether the progress was random. Probability theory and its bell-curvian statistics led to two thoughts: first, just as more scientific trials lead to a more accurate measurement, more people thinking might lead the collective consciousness closer to the truth; and second, society has certain habits at any given time: murder rates stay relatively constant, for example.

העברית

כמעט מעבר לסף הזיכרון
היית שם, עם פנים שזופות
מלאות נקבוביות שהרגשתי ממוזלת לראות מקרוב.
באמצע הלילה שכבנו בשקי שינה
וחיכינו לצאת לטיול זריחה שלבסוף לא התקיים
(בעטיים של עננים שהסתירו את השחר העולה).
אני זוכרת את ההקלה ואת האכזבה --
ללכת שוב לישון בלי לעמול עבורו נראה כהנאה ריקה.
אבל קודם לכן, בשעה שחיכינו
הסתכלנו זאת בזאת, ודיברנו
ונגענו בידיים, עד שאמרת שאולי זה לא מתאים.
והייתי יותר מדי צעירה, אבל העמדתי פנים שהבנתי
והרגשתי מבוגרת ונבונה, כאילו הפקדת סוד נדיר בידיי.
בשדה התעופה, קראת בספר עברי
שורה על שורה של תיבות קטנות, עם מילה באנגלית פה ושם.
לא הרגשתי שאיבדתי אותך ביום ההוא
כי אם ששלחת אותי לדרכי, ושהייתי מסוגלת לו.

שמך אינו זכור לי
אבל השתכפלת בחלוף השנים.
היית ציפי, ששרה ביער כשהלכה להשתין
(זה היה רק לאחר שנה אחת).
והיית נעמי, שישבתי ברצפת הפרוזדור ליד משרדה, וידעתי שאסור לי להיכנס
אולם חיכיתי אף על פי כן, מלאת תקווה ובושה.
והיית אביטל, שקראה לי ספר ילדים כשבכיתי בבית קפה,
ועשתה קולות שונות לכל דמות.
והיית גם שירה, שלימדה אותנו את מילות היחס
והשתמשה בתיק שלה כדוגמה -- חפצים "ב"-משהו --
אך חדלה לפתע, והייתי בטוחה שהיא נזכרה ששם היה לה טמפון.

ואחר כך היית סיגלית, שהשאילה לי את צעיפה כשהיה לי קר בכיתה.
הופתעתי מחציית הגבולות הזאת, מתנה כה פשוטה שהרעיפה עליי חמימות
שהחזקתי בה למשך השנה השלמה הבאה.
אצל סיגלית בכיתי במרכז ההדפסה במרתף, ובמכונית, ובכיתה
וסימסתי בתעתיק, ודאגתי על כאב חלציה.
שלחתי לה מכתבים וחיבורים וגלי אור.
ישבתי אצלה כמו עמוס עוז הצעיר אצל זלדה, וקראנו על זלדה ועל עמוס עוז הצעיר.
היא לא נבהלה מכאב ולא מתשוקה
ועלה על דעתי שאולי אינני כל כך נוראית.
אחר כך, בעולם אחר,
מישהי קראה לי אמיצה.

באתי אפוא לארץ הבוערת מקנאות ומאדישות
לחפש את מורות מורותיי ומורותיהן וכן הלאה
(ואולי מורה אחד או שניים גם כן)
ולהיות מורבצת על ידי אחת, צְוֵויי, תַלַתֶה שפות
ולזכות, אם ירצה השם, לאהבה הבוטה כל כך
שמנפצת אותי לרסיסים
ויולדת אותי
שלמה
חדשה
וישנה נושנה.

Tefillat HaDerekh

Dear G!d,

Please get me there safe and help me with the transition.

Help me set my work aside and be present when it's time to be present, and help me relax my mind so that it can make space for each thing, even when it feels like there are too many things.

Help my body let go of its clenchedness and fatigue and help me find the energy to get more energy.

Help me to let go of commitments that don't deserve to be at the center, so that they make way for the work that's mine to do.

Help me ask for help and help me accept it when it's offered.

Help me to have the courage to walk into the dragon's mouth which is full of the flames of poetry and love and hope for redemption, personal, communal, and global.

Help me rest whenever I can and need to.

Help me to remember that it is You who opens up the path of least resistance, and that Your hands are human hands and human hands are Your hands.

Help me surrender to Your plans and let go of my own effort.

Help me let go of trying to return to You so that I can be free to walk towards You, fly towards You, fall towards You, swim towards You, learn towards You, love towards You, write towards You and voyage towards You.

Amennnnnnnnnn.

"Mindful eating" is not always a helpful concept

I've been having the following thoughts and feelings for a long time, but I think due to handling things better lately, I'm finally at the point where I can articulate them more clearly.

Here they are, in short:

When I first started working with a nutritionist, I didn't understand the point of mindful eating at all. I'm not sure what I thought the reasons for it were -- I guess partly it's so often used to try to get people to eat *less* (which is the opposite of what I need) that I was wary of it for that reason; and also, just a sense that it's part of a "culture of spiritual 'virtue' / perfectionism" that I feel very suspicious of in general (which to be clear I do not think is intrinsic to the Eastern religions from which the concept of mindfulness emerged -- but I do think it's intrinsic to the way the Western world has appropriated it for its own Protestant-Ethic purposes).

Dvar Tefillah: Avot

My initial reflection about Avot is that it is one of the prayers that I learned at a young age, which has certain effects: First, I can't read the words without hearing the Shabbat major nusach in my head (the way I learned this prayer at summer camp), and secondly, it's extremely hard for me to see this as a text that is made up of words that mean things, rather than just a collection of extremely familiar syllables. Just now I was trying to read it and pay attention to the meaning, and I find that indeed, all the words are Hebrew words whose meaning I know, but it's quite difficult to hold the meaning in my mind and not just slip back into the meaning-free oblivion of "this is a very comfortable set of sounds that I like to chew in my mouth." (I feel similarly about Adon Olam, Birkat, and perhaps Lecha Dodi, the most prominent specimens of ur-liturgy from my early childhood.)

It is interesting to notice that, but also good to take this opportunity to try to really read and understand the meaning of the words. Which seem to be a combination of power (גדול, גבור, נורא, עליון, קונה, מלך) and love (גומל חסדים טובים, באהבה) and then a couple things that are maybe a combination of power and love (עוזר, מגן, מושיע, מביא גואל) and then a couple things I'm not sure how to categorize (זוכר חסדי אבות and למען שמו). Also it is interesting that it is מביא גואל and not מביא גאולה, which brings me back to something I mentioned last week: the question of human versus divine leadership of the Jewish people (and specifically in bringing redemption / liberation). And maybe that's the key to the two things that I didn't know how to categorize -- maybe both of them are ways of bringing human leadership into the picture while still "hekshering" that leadership with a divine seal: חסדי אבות names the ability of humans to act for love -- but G!d still has a role in that action, by being the זוכר of it; and as far as למען שמו, the phrase is referring to the bringing of the גואל -- G!d is bringing a human hero (arguably) but it's still למען שמו.

So I suppose I could (elliptically and freely) translate the bracha this way:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה' אֱלקינוּ וֵאלקי אֲבותֵינוּ. אֱלקי אַבְרָהָם. אֱלקי יִצְחָק. וֵאלקי יַעֲקב. הָאֵל הַגָּדול הַגִּבּור וְהַנּורָא אֵל עֶלְיון. גּומֵל חֲסָדִים טובִים. וְקונֵה הַכּל. וְזוכֵר חַסְדֵּי אָבות. וּמֵבִיא גואֵל לִבְנֵי בְנֵיהֶם לְמַעַן שְׁמו בְּאַהֲבָה: מֶלֶךְ עוזֵר וּמושִׁיעַ וּמָגֵן: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה', מָגֵן אַבְרָהָם:

Blessed are you G!d of our ancestors -- great and mighty G!d of power and lovingkindness. You remember the lovingkindness of our ancestors, and you cultivate powerful human leaders who do Your work with love. Blessed are you, G!d who uses Your power to protect Your people.

Dvar Tefillah: Mi Chamocha

I looked at the context in liturgy and in Tanakh (Shmot 15, Shirat Hayam), both of which make it clear that this cry is a cry of awe about God's power, in its reflection in the drowning of the Egyptians in the Sea of Reeds. I've been thinking about the issue of what God does to the Egyptians through the plagues (and especially in hardening Pharaoh's heart to extend the plagues). So my first reaction is disappointment -- "Ugh, why can't this cry of awe just be an uncomplicated celebration of God's power, instead of being a celebration of God's violence?" But then looking at the text of Mi Chamocha itself, I can see that the words itself reflect this complicatedness -- נורא clearly emphasizes the fearfulness, and even נאדר and עושה פלא emphasize God's scary, unfathomable, unbearably radiant aspects. In that sense, it actually feels less complicated to me to cry out in awe in response to this incredible act of violence, because the words of this cry truly express awe -- not celebration, but fear and wonder and perhaps some doubt about whether it's safe to be in relationship with a God like this one.

Dvar Tefillah: Shema

The Shema is a prayer that I have struggled with, mainly because of its centrality – I've felt a sense of pressure to experience it a certain way, and also a sense that it embodies all my tension about whether or not I am Jewishly connected enough (and specifically how I am or am not connected with the type of Judaism that I grew up with). I also often feel irritated by the practice of saying the Shema with one word per breath, because it can feel like “enforced kavanah” (and also maybe kind of fake or performative kavanah) in a way that I don't necessarily want to buy into, but also can't find a way to opt out of, when it arises in the service. Finally, I've felt a sense of overwhelming energetic charge in the words because of their association with deathbed confession and martyrdom – their connection to “the last moment – what if you don't do it right?”, similar to the energy of Neilah (which also makes sense considering that Shema is one of the repeated phrases at the end of Neilah, again marking this moment of “last chance”).

After thinking and writing about this last year, I found that I came to a new place with the Shema. Once I understood the arc of shacharit liturgy leading up to the Shema, I understood that saying the Shema could serve as an act of consciously receiving the ol malchut shamayim (yoke of the sovereignty of heaven), which was helpful, since I had not previously found that the words of the Shema held particular meaning for me. After I understood this, I came to understand that accepting the ol malchut shamayim can also be a matter of “submitting to what is,” and experiencing divinity in the sense of the aspects of the world and experience that are beyond human control. Since then, I have had the practice of treating the Shema as an opportunity to come into the present moment, no matter the nature of that moment: to be with whatever my experience is in the moment that the congregation arrives at the Shema (similar in some ways to the shofar blast as a call to presence and consciousness).