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?