Recognizing and Valuing Our Own Contributions

Another quick hit from a day when transcribing last week's Torah study session has sparked a few thoughts: "Teruma", the gifts people brought in building the tabernacle in Exodus 25, was translated in the context of our group's session as "free will offering". Each person in the group was asked to ponder their own free will offerings to the world. Several people said they were proud of the time they had contributed to Beyt Tikkun and found that to have been most rewarding for them in different ways.

Students, like the retirees more broadly represented in our synagogue, are generally in a position to better contribute time than money as well. Our brains and enthusiasm cannot be overestimated in their importance to creating and sustaining movements to transform the world. Even lending our mere presence to burgeoning groups an have its own meliorative impact, letting organizers and those tentative about their own participation know that there are more people out there who care enough to spend time in meetings about a cause. So often I have heard the question, explicitly or implicitly, "OK you're going to a meeting for sds, but what are you going to DO?" And I have come to realize that if there were more of an emphasis on incorporating BEING into our DOING we could enhance both.

The Quaker meeting style exemplifies this well, linking the importance of silently being with one another in worship, and practical, logistical and political stuff that gets worked out in the same setting. I witnessed this both at Friends Camp and at the Berkeley Friends Meeting on MLK.

My own contributions to groups that I am proud to have participate in have often been modest, but I feel that even humble contributions are significant in small group organizing and am proud of the little things I have been able to do. Sports coaches often laud the indispensibility of players who "do the little things well", like hitting the cut-off man (less violent than it sounds, Will) or filling the lane on a fast break (on the basketball court, not in the bedroom). Movement organizers should recognize this and promote it as a theme of their groups as well, because such contributions really are integral to activist communities.

Electoral Disappointments

While we're waiting to see whether Norm Coleman and Ted Stevens or their opponents/replacements will be the old white men of choice in the Senate as of the swearing in of the 111th Congress in 2009, here are a couple sobering tidbits from the last week:

Darcy Burner- One of the reasons I was so excited to move to the West Coast a couple months ago was the liberal atmosphere, and I have found that in abundance. Peace Action West has helped me keep up on a lot of the progressive campaigns out here that I haven't had time to be personally involved in. One of my favorites was that of Darcy Burner, a strongly anti-war, "practical progressive" (OK, that appellation churns my stomach a little bit) candidate. She was running against a former sheriff in Washington's 8th congressional district and lost narrowly. Like a good Red Sox fan, I let myself get excited by the joyous potential (another strong ally in the congressional battle to end the occupation of Iraq, a cause even more morally righteous than keeping the Yankees from an AL East crown [speaking of which see Dave Zirin's piece on the new Yankee Stadium in the latest issue of The Progressive on newsstands or at your school/local library]) only to witness a jarring late-season collapse and loss of lead.

The Passage of CA's Gay Marriage Ban- on the political "scale of losing", this one ranked somewhere between Bush's re-election and the Corrupt Bargain in terms of pain for its supporters. Seeing my gay friends morosely ponder life in Massachusetts as the results came in took a lot of the edge off of Obama's victory speech. Those of us living in the Bay Area can luckily still attend the on-going "No on 8" rallies and protests, gatherings which now, more so even than usual, can mark collective spiritual togetherness and uplift as one of their primary positives. In the week before the election, our house received material from the "Yes on 8" campaign prominently featuring Obama and Biden, and their quotes about opposing gay marriage. Obama's 200-point electoral victory would not have been jeopardized by speaking out firmly against constitutional bans on gay marriage. This is one area where greater courage and leadership from him during the campaign could have made a concrete difference in national politics beyond his own race. His appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff makes me wary that more such cautious decisions will become the norm from the President-elect. However, that he is considering John Podesta, CEO of the Center for American Progress for a Cabinet position as well is a hopeful sign. While not the most liberal voice at CAP, Podesta would nevertheless represent an important counter-balance to Emmanuel's dogmatic centrism.

In other news, check out the new issue of Tikkun, available at tikkun.org!

High Holidays

Happy New Year's 5769 everybody!

High Holidays this year kicked off in a fashion with Selichot Sept. 20. "But," ye well-informed protest, "Rosh Hashanah wasn't until Oct. 1, why the extra week?" Normally, Selichot would come on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, it's true; but this year that would not have left enough time to prepare to repair and repent to God and on earth. So this year, when even the folks who were fired because they wouldn't stop saying "Merry Christmas" at Kmart were scratching their heads and saying "Mid-September Selichot?", candles were being lit and passed and professions of sins sung and chanted across the world. Here, we had the first go-around of the ashamnu, my favorite song from the machzor, singing: "Who are we? We're light and truth/ And infinite wisdom, eternal goodness/ Yet we've abused, we've betrayed/ We've been cruel, yes, we've destroyed...Wipe it out! Clean it out!/ Yes, throw it all out!" It's like the Jewish Renewal movement managed to combine the Catholic acknowledgement of guilt with the Unitarian forgiveness and acceptance...um, and then travel back in time hundreds of years to claim them in their own rituals.

By Rosh Hashanah (if you are reading this out loud, you get style points for putting the emphasis on the last syllable in most cases with the Hebrew words), the observant folks have a big jump on the "twice-a-year Jews" who don't start coming until the Erev or day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. However, "twice-a-year" Jews are a different breed than their Christian counterparts. Aside from, in most cases, having to give up a day at work to come to synagogue, we are talking about marathon worship services complete with dancing, singing and fasting. If you show up early and stay late to help, you can get in as many hours on those two days as people in many denominations rack up in six months; throw in the Erev services and you've got a year's worth of summer-skipping Unitarian attendance lined up there. I remember as a child sitting in church and looking at Mom's watch so I could think to myself, "Sweet, only fifteen minutes to go until I can listen to the Pats pregame show" (for more on this check out Things Bucky Didn't Put on His Divinity School Application, Volume XII: When Spirit and Sports Collide.) Now, I go to church and mistake the Postlude for a landmark that there's only 10 hours left until the potluck.

About 3/4 of the way through Kol Nidre/Erev Yom Kippur (or 11/4 of my original estimation of the time), Rabbi Lerner followed my favorite machzor song, "To Dwell in the House of the Lord", with an explanation that to acknowledge our sins and ask for forgiveness was the true meaning of living in the Lord's house. He preached that not just a general prayer of atonement, but rather in-depth, specific contemplation of ways to be better people in our communities and our lives was what it meant to come closer to God (whatever one's conception Thereof may be). He enjoined each of us present to spend the time before sundown the next day praying in a very specific manner of examining our shortcomings and planning ways to do better by those around us. And to help those of us who get that "who, me?!" look every time sin is brought up, there was a list of things we as a community could atone for. These ranged from "for not helping singles we know to navigate the marketplace of relationships" (Will and I, in charge of passing out the forms, took a highlighter to this one in advance and wrote down his and Dan's phone numbers next to it), to "for not speaking out against the continued occupation of Iraq as effectively as we could have" (ditto- gotta cover all your bases).

Will and I finally stumbled home in the wee hours, he burdened with enough left-over salad greens to cleanse the collective GI tracts of the greater Milwaukee area, I with the beginnings of an upper respiratory infection. Still to come, however, was the Sukkot. Marvin, the Beyt Tikkun carpenter and guitarist, and others put together the outdoor dwelling, roofed with tree branches to let in the rain and a clear view of the sky, and hung with fruits and vegetables representing the harvest and the myriad ways that God provides. Ironically, the one day during which you are not supposed to come together in it during the week-long celebration is Shabbat, right when we did it; however, that injunction is based on the assumption that people will be carrying their esrogs to the Sukkot (carrying is one of the forms of work prohibited on Shabbat), and since Rabbi Lerner was clever enough to know none was actually going to bring an esrog we went ahead with it anyways (I mean, they're basically lemons that can cost up to $60, come on!)

But next year ought to be easier- High Holidays start yet another week earlier, so there will be less to atone for.