Well, the important thing is to journal, to keep on writing. And I have been. Simply not in here. I am up for a bit to sneak this quiet time with my own soul and with God who lives in my soul. It's been a long while since I've posted it on here and we are in the week before Passover, in the mont of the Nissan. Last year and in years before I had theorized that the reason Christian placed the passion around this time, when most people think it happened at Succoth, was because this was the only story they knew that could explain what Jesus did. Passover was the only way they knew to explain what they had experienced. Now, as I have felt many times in the last year sicne finally embracing this life, I have stripped away the middle man. I have entered, sans dealing with a passion and resurrection that I do not udnerstand, into the celebration of the season of our freedom. Clearing for chametz is a long and difficult as I thought it would be. It turns out just to get it out of the kitchen takes three nights, not two.

There is chametz in my soul. Like the cleaning i've had to do under the sink there is clutter and unnecessary shit, unthought out mess, things that have no purpose in me. I am leaving Egypt. What does not belong here? I am leaving the place of my bondage and leaving quickly. What is the mess that is far to heavy and ugly for me to take with me? That I couldn't pick up and take in a hurry if I had to run into the desert, that I could never haul on my fat ass and take into the sea?

i love the morning prayer. Or all the prayers for that matter, but Shararit is the longest and the one that confronts you with the most. It hits you fresh out of bed. Every prayer is a matter of trust. You are not left to your own devices or feelings. You are not even left to your own thoughts. All of our ancestors navigate us through it. The ancient rabbis, which in a way is just a word for all the many ancient people who made the prayers or recorded the prayers or ordered them, all the different people who did the trnaslation, all the people who said them before you and are saying them with you, uphold you. And of course it is sung and, if done properly, I think, sung in Hebrew. You awake to navigate through this thing. Or I do. My main prayer is that this become a song, that I actually can sing this, that my heart and my voice can get around these words and sing this song to God. My prayer is that my life become a song.

In a way the whole morning prayer is a large Kaddish, which is why it is peppered with Hatzi Kaddish and ends in full Kaddish. The Kaddish is essentialy praise in the face of the ultimate hardness of life, and singing when one nearly cannot. It is the prayer to get ones song back, to be able to make music out of life. This is the morning prayer, but it is the other prayers as well. At their times, throughout the day, we must get up from what we are doing and plead with God to be able to make music to him once again. This is why we say adonai sifotei tiftach, adonai open up my lips that my mouth may declare your praise.

I had said only a few days that in Judaism I felt, for the first time, no longer the need to pull, to test the boundaries, to strain. I said that in Judaism there was a house big enough and wide enough to put all of my crazy ways.

But the itch in the last week or so points to the fact that I am straining again, that I am like the leper at the edge of the camp. I can't stay inside the camp. If there is an edge or a boundary that is where I have to go, and it is with the lepers that I need to learn. All life comes from the edge, and so I am itching to go back to it. It is my home.

It is good to remember that liberalism is only liberal in comparison to something, and in the case of Reform it is liberal compared to conservative and orthodox. Democrats are liberal compared to conservatives, but everyone is a little conservative No one really wants things to change. My liberal friends who make so much of thier liberalism, both in and out of synagogue want the same nice houses that the others want. They want things to remain mostly the same. In that regard I am not liberal, but libertine. I want to be on the side of those who have very little use for the way things are. I wish to overturn EVERYTHING. It is the space age Judaism that bleeds out from the sides into all things and touches the gods of Canaan and the Christs of today, the limitless Judaism that I wish to be a part of. Not going in, no, but going out and in together!

It is easy to get lost. Many people will help you do it. There are all of these dies to choose from, none of them worth choosing. If I can keep remembering why I came here, why I came to Yeshurun, if I am not seduced or not worn down by representing these superficial sides or seduced by the welcome of a congregation, but if I can remember the sacred fringes, if I can remember that I came to help unite the flower to the bee. The fringes are everything, the borderlands are our power. The danger, I think, of liberal anything, but especially liberal religion, is that it has little place for the libertine. We already know we don't want the conservative world, but the liberal world has cul de sacs, decency and two car garages too. The liberal world in its own, often weak ways, lovingly comes to clip your wings and set you in a new type of box. To assert ones freedom, to stand on the dizzying edge, to not be lulled by believing what you want to hear, this is true liberty. I do not wish for a liberal Judaism, but for a libertine one.

Sunrise is never a new day and Shaharit never represents the beginning of the day. It represents the first prayer of the day and often that occurs several hours, nearly ten or twelve hours into it, after hours of sleep, after much doing. It is nearly six a m and my face is greasy with sleep, my eyes are heavy with them. Morning prayers took a little too long, namely because I am using a new prayer book, and I got up a little too late. Some mornings are like this when I do not come to bright life but it is as if they exist to exercise the last half demons of the night before. Blessings come with the morning prayer as well as exorcisms, as well as revelations. I am behind in writing. I mean, I did not write anything last night and it is hard writing in the day. i'll need the entire afternoon for that.But then, I am behind in this, and my journal has gone long untouched. In these few moments between the two sleeps, I let my heart be touched with what needs to be expressed, read, written between my soul and God and my soul and my soul. Quiet.

the power of story

With a sort of lightning swiftness i move through the new book and soon will be into the second. It started with me not knowing where it was going, but now it seems it was going into an old story, a story I didn't know how to continue. It took me ten years nearly to span this bridge. Storywise, the pieces I've found give this new novel a depth and a history it was looking for. The old story is given a fullness and a continuity I was never able to bring it to inthe original form. This is mainly because i had not lived it. The book was written by a virgin and needed to be finished by a sexual, homosexual man. The book was written by someone quite young and starting to look for a new way. It needed to be completed by someone well on that way. I was making a divorce from the world around me. The book needed to be completed in another world after I had finally broken with that first.

Now while I work on it I see how much it trule is my story, how the two stories, one current and looking back, on written a while ago and not knowing where to go are two parts of my story and uniting them, I am finding a unity in me. That is part of the power of writing and reading and living in a story.

So much has been happening lately, I haven't had the chance to journal here, or even in a real completely uneditied journal for some time. Then I was caught up in writing poetry, and also cuaght up the creation of a nother novel. Creation is always a gift. In creative writing seminar, the messageboard is full of people who say they cannot write and their main problem is being self consciosu. They cannot write past themselves. They cannot express anything. They are doubting themselve,s firstly, and then they are thinking soull of themselve,s hwo they come off, ifthis writign reflects well upon them. And so, in theend, they can't do anything good.

To create is a gift. This week the Mishkan is finishedalong with first Adar,. As we go into second Adar we go into the book of KLeviticus and enter this special month of the leap year, the mystery of the joining the sun to the moon. In the story of the exodus there is the account of God joining heaen to earth, the call from above to below. But the building of the mishkan is the recetion of Sinair on the earth, not vertically, but horizontally, court after court unto the holy of holy. The building of a palce for God draws down God, and God spreads out to encompass Israel, the male Yah in heaven is balanced by the Shecinah, the wide expanding mother beneath, the vertical to the horizontal, the male to the female. God is made one in what my friend remakrs is The Sign of the Cross. That sign is everywhere. What is it that i must join together and cross today? In the Christian scriptures one sign that Jesus is the Chrsit is that he draws what was far to what was near, and what is gentile to what is Jew. The drawing together of opposites is the sign of God's presence, the desire to do so is the sign of holiness/ What is it in my life that I must draw to me today?

Soon the Sabbath will be upon us. The Sabbath, among many things, is a damn in the river, a break in the round that would become endless and spin itself into nothing. Day by day more pages of the story come. Three more pages to trickle out tomorrow and then the rest of Sabbath, a rest that, i admit is incompatible with waking up at 8:30, pounding coffee to get ready to head out into the cold for shul, and then into more cold for the bus and to go from the bus to the store. In some ways it is the busiest of days and yet it is a busyness that makes sense and takes me from what would become deadly routine. The other option is sleeping, sleeping late, sitting in the house till twelve, coming back and sleeping till five Masturbating? None of that wss ever any good.

The bulk of my religious growing up was me telling myself all the things I should believe in, repeating over and and over again bits of the Bible I could not yet fully buy. Do not worry, consider the lilies of the field. How one stopped worrying, how one let perfect love cast out all fear, was never fully explained.

Last night when I hear Dick Gregory say: I learned a long time ago that fear and God cannot occupy the same space, it is like at last I am ready to say Amen. All this year I have been under the miracle kiss of this. How full of terrors my life was. God was always there, but he was at a distance and these days he has moved up quicker. He is the first thing I stumble to in the morning, singing his praise, lifted up by his nimble fingers. He is in the lighting of the candles, the baruching of the atah adonoying and then elohaiming of the melech haolams. Gradually, together, as we move through praise and then through solemn memory, and then praise again and dedication and repentance, as we move through the acknowledgement of dark things I do not understand and redemptions not done before we come to asking, day by day, and hour by hour we undo the knots of distrust, of fear, or dis-grace that all the years have weaved.

There was so much to do last night and all the important things done, and still more I wish for. Right now I think of some part of some book to write, but this is not the time. This is early morning time is what this is. I think of all the fears I don't have. Sharon Olds, in a poem, wonder who she will be now that she had forgiven her mother. Now that she is no longer hating, who can she be? That is like me. Now that I am not longer afraid, who can I be? Now that I am not most of the harmful things i was, what can I be? I will have to be made over. Only you can make me over.

Derekh Yeshurin, the way of love and desire. That is my Judaism, reform is just the temple I am in. Should I go somewhere else, my Judaism would be the same, it would be the path of desire, it would be the path of love. This God that I always wanted to love, I am gradually coming to have a crazy love for. This path that I began to tread I am not loving. The people around me I want to love and desire. I want to indulge in how wonderful they are like candy. I want to be lush with life and not tread it day after tiresome day.

I did not even know it was possible, Lord I did not know it

The truth is a thing so seldom required of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell. People want to hear what they want to hear. Often they want to reconfirm the lies they have already told themselves. Sadly, people see themselves in your eyes. From the moment your mother says tell the truth, and you do and then she grounds you or your father spanks you, and they continue to insist you tell the truth, you realize, if you have any worldly wisdom about you, that what is required is not honesty or, for that matter, integrity, but merely agreement. I say this is so, you say it is so and all shall go well with you or, at any rate, better than it will if you don't play right.

Now wonder we hardly know what truth is. Rather than go on like some who would convince us that their particular ideas are absolute, I will say that truth is mainly concerned with our honest, or true perception of things around us and in us. By this definition there is no final word and no ultimate truth in this world. Many of us are so out of touch with who we are, though, that to them this last paragraph will mean absolutely nothing. This is what the philosophers call "living in bad faith".

It is all fine and good to talk about rejecting none and embracing all, but his is hard work. I mean just to keep up this desire is hard work. Firstly, let's admit, most people resist embracing. They resist the embrace of each other, they resist the embrace of God, they resist loving themselves. After so much resistance and so long in this world is it any wonder that the soul that has chosen to love is worn out? Add to this that love, which is the most difficult commandment, is one that many religious people think is so simple they have roundly chosen to ignore it.

This morning at prayer I feel the circle of people I pray for widening to those it did not touch before. When I sing Shacharis, the morning prayer, how do I pray for others? It is like a net, or like the wings of the eagle in the psalm, it is like the chuppah in the night prayer spreading over myself, over those in my heart. As my heart widens so does the chuppah, As my heart widens so do I.

Every morning we thank God for his miracles which are with us everyday, and in so doing not only vow to see his hand in all places and things, but pray for this gift of seeing. The first miracle in love is how we become greater, our souls becoming part of the souls of those we lift in our morning prayers.

BEADS

Every morning we are reminded that God himself renews every morning and remakes the world, every morning we are invited by our ancestors who first wrote these prayers to open our eyes to wonders of God. A miracle is not, as I once learned, something that has no other explanation, for in the end all things tend to have their explanation and the jaded heart can find a mundane reason for everything. Rather, the miracle is the seeing ofGod's hand in everything, especially the very ordinary. This is what life is made of anyway. We are invited to see the mriacles he creates everyday, rather that be blind and callous and say that we will acknowldge God, acknowledge the spiritual, change our ways, open out hearts only when God attempts to get our attention, if he does. We reshift our minds every morning and pray that we be drawn to the Torah so that our hearts be changed. Every morning we repent, we renew, we encoutner God anew. I find the people I have dealth with will deal with the fireinds andfamily I shake my head over, going through my mind s I pray. I find all the work I must do in the day going through my head, being blessed and sanctified. The events of the day pass through the fingers of my mind like rosary beads, common and often unlovely things now prayed over and suddenly sanctified.

Oh, Lord the Soul you made in me is a pure one. You have blessed. Amen.

The more I persist in this, the more I am sure that you have always been our only hope and there is no help outside of you, for every hope is you.

unbelief

This morning, praying the Aleinu out of Gates of Prayer, I hear it afresh. One of the things we pray for is an end to unbelief. Here i realize how many of the people in my life have great beliefs about what is important, what isn't, what should be believed in, what should not. Skip the particular--and fairly new--beliefs of various groups of Orthodox Jews, what Jews think is important is belief. We firmly hope for the day when the world is full of presence of God and unbelief-which we equate witha type of blindness-ceases. In Christianity unbelief garners a punishment. If you do not believe, you cannot be saved and then you burn. Your burn forever. There are Chsitians who deny this, but that comes more from a willfui misinterpretation than from anything in the religion, I think.

In Judaism unbelief is its own punishment, It's own torture. God and glory show up where they are invited, and where they are denied, they are restrained so that unfaith creates more unfaith. In the face of unbelief we maintain silence, and so does God. We do believe in the great power of mankind. A torah, which contains the presence of God, is not a Torah unless it is handwritten by a human being. Torah cannot be followed unless in the midst of the people and by people and God cannot exist in our lives unless we invite him. Some people feel this is a rather upbeat belief, but in its own way, I think it's a little scary.

the power of prayers

This morning I set the clock wrong, which means waking up much to late to pray Shaharis on time. Might as well go back to bed, hich I do,and get up at ten. Praying Shaharis at ten in the morning is necessary, but it is not the same as Five A.M. I've been reading Peel A Pom where she talks about the different elements, so often used in the Craft, and how they are used in Judaism. I was reading her article about the void and I realized that, getting up at five is like getting up and praying into the void. That is the most wonderful prayer to start the day. Sharharis, prayed in the darkness has a wonderful power.




Praying in the void of darkness is so powerful that Cistercians do it twice before daylight and once at sunrise. Maybe this is also not only because of how powerful praying in the dark is, but maybe it also has to do with the power of certain prayers. Minha ought to be prayed in the afternoon. Maariv works best at the liminal time between sunset and night.

I haven't looked at the descriptive heading of this blog, which is essentially the descriptive heading of my life, of my practice of Judaism. I think I have moved from a marginal and more far out form to something more conventional. Always I was on the very edges of Christianity. I am so used to having to severely tweak a religion before it can make sense, that this crystallization, this becoming more and more Jewish is new to me. I become more desirous to pray in Hebrew, not less, not curious about the origin of a ritual. The Nekra becomes more and not less sacred. my fellow Jews more and not less important. I steadily find myself rejecting certain things, realizing how much of a Jew I really am, how much of a christian I never was and how much ofone I never want to be. How strange. Is this, too, part of uniting the flower to the bee?

There is no magic religion that will connect you to God, though there may be the path that has a magic for you. There is no gift of the spirit that comes attached to the right religion or the people with the right credentials. There is only the ability to keep silence. While there may be no magic religion, there is such a thing as magic space. It is the space that unfolds and it is here that praying is done. The reason for so much bad religion and even the insistence that there is no importance to religion is because people have lost the ability to maintain silence. Silence has to be sought out and then it must be maintained. Silence has to be nurtured. This is the only place God is ever known. People are waiting for God to speak, but he is a Man of Silence. In cultivating the quiet place where we turn our back on the noise of the world and even the constant and confused yammering of those who love us, we become quiet and join with God.

Not away from life, but in the midst of it
not out of this wreck but in it
i am the life and the life that bleeds
and if i came to show the world anything
it was the beauty of blood
and the life in the bread
and the time in the wine
i am in love with this aching
come now, lay down beside me
now that we've told this story put it
aside long enough to tell another one
they are all facets of the same
now that you have known me like this
no me by another name
this kiss, smoky
with cigarette and apple joice on your
breath
this bed, soft with the weight of bodies
and the surrender of pretens
this groaning, longing
singsonging
was really all there ever was

This semester I am in a creative writing course, and I've got a couple of options. I suppose I have many, but here are the ones that are really before me: to be lazy, or to challenge myself. It occured to me, last night, that I began writing with certain desires. I made the shift from someone who wished to be published at a great place and recognized by great people, to someone who just wanted to be a working writer. I need to go back to the person I was that first year of graduate school when I decided writing to people was the most important thing in the world.

Baruchu

What a week so far! and not that it has bee na bad one, but it has been one of challenges, one of fits and starts and starting over. We are in a time of blessing. Thinking this morning of the berakhot I am reminded that one of the principal things about berakhot is that, for mthe very beginning of the day we are training ourselves to bless our lives and bless the One who gives them to us. I grew up into a suspcious person, into one who thought it was his job to eye the gifts of God with suspicion and not to see the best in everything, one who believed itwas sacred duty to cry out in skepticism to God, one who lived in a theology where God could not be entirely trusted.

Baruch atah Adonai... Blessed are you lord, who removes sleep from my eyelids, blessed are you lord who separates day from night. Blessed are you Lord... Who is present in every moment of our lives, turning all of our lives to blessing. I am afraid, still, to relewnt, to rejoice, to bless you. I am afraid to walk across the waters. There is a part of me still waiting for the sea to come crashing down, still waiting to be shown up for being to trusting. What a fool that part of me is. Forgive him, Lord.

In the ancient world the people from who the Jews came revered places as sacred. They revered stones and mountain tops, holy boxes, the dark spaces behind curtains in the holy parts of temples. Israel said all of these were one, all of these gods were at the end one. We do recognize God in places-- Makom. We still call him our Rock. We are called, in prayer, to recognize the presence of God in everything we see.

Still riding high on the lesson of Shabbat Shirah I am making it a point to dance joyously bofore the God of Israel, to rejoicein h Fer f srael,t sing praise to the Rock of Israe Howlongi my life did I struggle to love a God I could not. Wesing and we dance to welcome the Holy Presence into our life and into our homes. We sing to welcome him into our lives. Like the children of Israel jouneyigto Sinai, led by God we journey to God. He leaps frm heaven to meet us on the mount.

And that makes me think of buying a new Torah scroll

I come to the morning after Shabbat shirah, and the morning after te first Sabbath in a long time since I've gotten to rejoice at Temple Bethel, with a desire to be joyful in God. I was going to say a DETERMINATION, but this seems like a strange thing. At this time of year there is always the tempation to fall inot blackness, to be depressed at every little thing. The days are long and cold and, really, the future seems to promise on more hardship. In the past and sometiems in the present I employ all sorts of psychological tricks to make myself feel better, be more faithful. There is, of course, the guilt about beign faithless, being ungrateful. At these times I suppose its most important to simply simply dwell in God's rpesence, singing and humming and really preparign the heart for a good prayer service, preparing the soul to welcome God, preparing the place of prayer to be God's place. Tat's really the most important thing we can do.




Everything that seems to threaten us can be a sign to us. The fear f the future, the sorrow in the present can lead us to deeper prayer, deeper singing, a deeper surrender to the spirit of God, a deeper commitment to getting of our asses and really making it to shul and keeping our commitments with friends. We don't have to deny anything, but everything can be an invitation from God to enter the dance.

ELEMENTS

Based on To Peel A Pom, I've begun associations with elements of the seasons and how they fit into Judaism. It isn't nearly as easy as I thought it would be.

Winter= Air (cold and sharp, The Swords), Water (snow, ice and rain) Fire and Light: the Menorah, the Festival lights, the Light of Torah. Miracle Earth. Paradox Earth, Magical Earth. The Frozen Earth that gives birth to the Child of the New Age (the Christ) and redemption (Chanakuh)

Spring= Water (spring rain), the unfrozen waters of lakes and rivers, the waters of the parting Red Sea at Passover, flooding. Air, water in the air. The Destroyer in the Air over Egypt. The Pillar of Cloud, Rain Clouds. Fire: The pillar of fire, the Shininah. Earth= the overly fertile earth, the mundanely fertile earth, the earth which provides food, Adonai, baruch atah adonai, elohenie melech haolam, le motzi lachem min haretz amen. The land providing bread.

Dareto be illogical. Dare to deal in what you feel to be true confessing that what we think has limits. Deal with paradox. Enter int othe place where doubt and belief, unbelef and confession become one. One of the greatest prayers is for unity, east to west, male to female, Gentile to Jew. It is said that once Man was one, male and female, divided in Eden. The Aleu prays that God may be one and, who can say, the Shema may not confess that God is one, but insist that one day God will be. Now we experience God and our lives all fractured, then, we believe, all that is divided shall be brought together. I believe this means it already is together, that we are praying not for it to happen, but forthe time when we can see it, just as praying for the eventual sunrise doens
t change the fact that the sun is always there. In that place things which seem so ifferent and often inimical are one, like belief and unbelief, like worship and the insistence that worship is not possible. In this velvet blackness, my God, I come to you.

It seems like this day is already hectic, and its just getting up in the morning time, not even six o clock. After morning prayers I feel the frustration in my stomach and settle for a few moments before the altar. The altar is one of the best things about a Catholic past and an obsession with other religions, especially hinduism. As I go on to the rest of the day, I want to put out how sad it is that Judaism has lost the custom of the altar, or at least mainstream Judaism as we know it. So many Catholci churches are open for peopelto come in and comtempalte, to meet God. But not the synagogues so much. In the future what I hope is to see more places of quiet contemplation in Judaism where people can dwell with, in silence, the God who we meet so many centuries ago.