Drash: Rethinking T'shuvah in Chodesh Cheshvan

We're a couple of weeks into Cheshvan now, and I've been thinking about Mar Cheshvan, this month without any holidays. This month can be a big relief, or it can be kind of anti-climactic. Our year-cycle offers us build-up to the High Holidays, starting in Elul – or even starting with the three weeks leading up to Tisha b'Av. I tend to think of Yom Kippur, and specifically Ne'ilah, as being the climax of the High Holidays. After that, we have Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah as a way to wind down and wrap up the holiday season. But then Cheshvan comes – and no holidays. So what happens to all the teshuvah we did during the High Holiday season? Does it just fade away? Do we drop back into our old habits?

I was wondering what kind of guidance our tradition has for how we should approach Cheshvan. So I started by looking in the Bible for mentions of Cheshvan. As far as I could find, it is mentioned only four times, under two names: “Hachodesh Hashmini” (the eight month), and Bul, which is an older Hebrew name for the month. It's mentioned in 1 Kings 6:38, as the month in which Solomon finished building the Temple; in 1 Kings 12:32-33, when King Jeroboam ordains a feast day for the Northern Kingdom that is kind of like a second Sukkot for the Northern Kingdom so that his subjects won't go down to Jerusalem for the regular Sukkot and get tempted to stay in the Southern Kingdom; in Zechariah 1:1, which says that prophecy came to Zechariah in the eighth month, and in 1 Chronicles 27:11, which tells the names of the commanders whose army division served King David in the eighth month.

Dvar Tefillah: Barchu

For some reason, I have never really thought about what the words of the Barchu mean. I tend to think much more about the role of the Barchu in the service, as a call to community and to the part of the service where having a minyan is more crucial. While there are many worthwhile questions to ask about the pros and cons of the traditional emphasis on praying with a minyan, I am currently really appreciating the idea of a community that is committed enough to mutual support that it will pull together a minyan for prayer, especially in cases where that has personal significance for a member (such as a shiva or kaddish minyan). I also appreciate halachic aspects of this -- it doesn't matter if we love or even like each other, we are committed to each other and to doing this with and for each other for reasons that go beyond individual chemistry (and therefore into a realm of some kind of unconditional, perhaps divine love).

Sooooo therefore, I am currently thinking about the text of the Barchu in this way:

Barchu et hashem hamevorach:
Let's bless God who is the focal point of our communal blessing

Baruch hashem hamevorah l'olam vaed:
It's awesome that we have God to be the focal point of our communal blessing, hopefully that'll keep being the case forever!

Drash: Haftarah of Parashat Bereishit

The Haftarah for Parashat Bereishit ends two verses before an interesting verse: Isaiah 43:12 (“I have declared, and I have saved, and I have announced, and there was no strange god among you; therefore ye are My witnesses, saith the LORD, and I am God”).

In Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai interprets Isaiah 43:12 in an unusual way. The end of the verse reads “And you are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and I am God.” Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai teaches: “If you are not my witnesses, then I am not God.”

This reminds me of one of the irritating habits of English-grammar sticklers, in response to the apparent misuse of a conditional clause. For example, Sam invites Jennifer to a party. “I'm leaving at 8PM if you want to come,” he offers. Jennifer, our hypothetical grammar-stickler, responds victoriously, “What time will you leave if I don't want to come?”

Bo'u Nishtachaveh (Melody)

Some parts of the liturgy don't get enough airtime.  Psalm 95:6-7 is an example 😛

Writing about Reading

My friend SP (who writes an excellent blog at no power in the 'verse) recently shared with me one of her struggles: feeling obligated to write about every book she reads before she lets herself return it to the library (even to the point that she sometimes racks up library fines!).

Now, I certainly have my share of reading-related compulsions.  I keep a spreadsheet in my GoogleDocs with an alphabetized list of authors I like, and I try to read their works in chronological order of publication, resorting to interlibrary loan and field trips to research libraries as necessary.  I have other GoogleDocs for collecting quotes and for keeping track of books I want to read in the future.  Etc.  But until I listened to SP talk about it, I had never thought about whether I feel the need to write about each book that I read.  In my head, reading and writing constitute two fairly separate portions of my life -- but I'm starting to realize that I do have more of a need to connect the two activities than I previously realized.  This has become most evident in my foreign language reading.

Immobile

 in homage to the Yiddish poet A. Leyeles
 who published a poem of the same name
                  in New York in 1926

Standing under the awning of the trolley station
watching raindrops fall into puddles
poor drainage
troughs of water sloshing on the platform and between the tracks

the way the plashes bubble outward
creating intersecting perfect circles
an everyday miracle that for once seems miraculous to me.

It's not exactly the raindrops that amaze me, it's the circles.
I remember screensavers from the '90s
fluorescent circles plinking here and there on a black field
expanding to intersect, like these raindrops
imitating the electronic dance entitled Sonic or Ripple.

A whiff of geranium, the sunroom where the computer lived
full of leaves and light
and air colder than in other rooms.  At one end of the house
where I was already discovering my love of edges, corners
having my back to the wall
where I could not be caught in the middle of anything.

A chaise longue where I went to make long-distance phone calls
to read Harry Potter
to scratch rashes.  The computer, for homework
for wondering
for covering my tracks
and for the absorbing games I made up myself
like clicking all the tabs in file hierarchies to show all the subfolders
then going back and clicking them all again
so they'd telescope down into a one-page list.

After eight years of summer camp
the ninth we traded screennames
a suggestion that it didn't have to end just then, a portal with potential
like a hand-me-down tape player
later a Walkman, a beat-up Honda
each machine too good to be true
too free to be mine when it appeared.

Later, subways
all that mobility for only two dollars.
Dreams of trying to run through air thick as molasses
make me wonder now if it was never the house
but rather my own body that tied me down
so slow, so immobile
so much slower than eyes or words.
A dream of items, clothing, shampoo,
relentless, the wrong item coming to hand
so that I cannot finish showering and dressing
and be on my way.

But I seem to go places
even if I notice only when I get back
even if leaving is so hard every time.
Even if the stillness accompanies me
heavy, sinking, adhesive
when I am flying at five hundred knots.

I want to try running on my own two feet
so I can leave faster.

About Me

Devotion.

If you take my pen, I will hunt you down.

"...beyond even self-doubt no writer can justify ruthlessness for the sake of his work, because being human to the fullest possible extent is what his work demands of him." - May Sarton, A World of Light

"The world is too wounded/not to write..." - Rachel Klein, "For Joy"

"What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive." - Susan Sontag

"We can't accelerate our lives now beyond the normal.... No, what you must come to discover is where your own deepest need lies -- that is hard enough....We live by faith in the end, not by reason. If you are a real poet you'll never be sure -- there'll always be the enormous risk to take, the risk that you are following a will-o'-the-wisp, as my father used to say. And you may not even know when you die, whether you had the right to take the risk." - May Sarton, The Bridge of Years

"For must one not try to be at every instant the whole of what one would choose to be for eternity? To fail now, to be less than the utmost possible, was perhaps to fail for all eternity.” - May Sarton, The Bridge of Years