Ahz mah (So what)

I knew that the self-imposed challenge of writing a blog post every day would mean facing the inner voices of judgement, doubt, shame. No different than any other daily practice. This week the voice of doubt has been whispering louder, deleting entire paragraphs soon after they are written. Yesterday it stopped me from posting anything, even though I was filled with thoughts and ideas. Why are you writing this? Ahz mah? Last month I read this quote from an interview with Zadie Smith about her essay writing, which felt so right to me at the time: “Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.” It’s the “being overheard” piece that is tripping me up right now. And it’s all okay. Grist for the mill, as Ram Dass would say.

A young Black man, who I admire for his activism but do not know personally, recently posted a classically anti-semitic statement on Facebook. When I say classic, I mean right out of the medieval Church playbook. No need for oblique dog whistling here – just slamming “The Jews” directly with language of Christ-killing and the “crucifying” of Black people who dare speak truth. Talking with white Jewish friends, I notice how many of us speak of anti-semitism in terms of personal prejudices, or “ignorance” that could be resolved through better education about cultural differences. That frame – locating the anti-semitism within the individual and the interpersonal realm – is valid, necessary, and insufficient; there’s another frame I find more compelling. Expressions of anti-semitism – especially coming from a young Black man, for example – need not be experienced as a personal attack by an individual or group whose moral character is in need of correction. Instead of focusing on problemat...

This is the time of year that I write sermons for the High Holidays. My summer ritual. And suddenly, it isn’t. I mean, it should be, but it’s not happening. Yet. Nothing is what it once was. Of course. Pandemics change everything. And now my writing practice is different, and the sermons are not happening. Yet. And our services will be on Zoom, which changes everything. The thought of sharing a carefully prepared sermon on Zoom is... unmotivating. To say the least. I feel like saying the least. I feel like not saying anything. But the Rabbi gives sermons on the High Holidays. Of course. It’s a ritual. But nothing is what it once was. And what could I possibly say in the face of all that has been happening? That Black lives matter? Of course. That love is all we have, really? Of course. Even if I have said these things before? Of course. Do not imagine that anyone remembers. Do not imagine that it sinks in. And imagine that every word sinks in, that this ritual has meaning and power. Im...

My mother wanted to buy me a gold heart locket, from Fortunoff’s. I was in my 30s, and a gold heart locket to me was the epitome of everything my mother wanted me to be that I was not. I often called it her “other” daughter, the one she wished she had. But I was not that other daughter; I was the actual daughter who chose not to share her valuing of material signs of social status. We fought a lot about things like this: gold jewelry, fine linen suits, Italian-made shoes... The more she pushed, the more I viciously ridiculed. And now it was a gold heart locket. I mentioned the conflict to Sandy, an older friend of mine. In response he told me the story of how his father, who had died recently, had once wanted to buy Sandy a “real” coat. At some point Sandy realized that for whatever reason, it meant a lot to his father; and that he could choose to say yes and accept the coat as a gift without being critical... and without feeling compelled to actually wear it if he didn’t want to. He s...

Imagine this: The pandemic has given each of us a customized, independent study curriculum. Part of our task is to discern what that curriculum is, although it’s still our personal curriculum even if we aren’t aware of it. What is it that we are learning, either explicitly or implicitly? What meaning are we finding in our experiences? Aware of the privilege I have to live safely at home during the pandemic, I feel obligated to make the most of the independent study curriculum I have been given. At first I thought that my independent study would be an extended mindfulness retreat, modeled after the retreats offered at meditation centers. But lately I am aware that my independent study is more like a mashup of mindfulness, compassionate communication, anti-racism, and challah baking. There is much to be learned.

In the absence of sufficient sleep, the mind is mush. I wrote that line half an hour ago. After staring out the window for a good long while. A really long while. Mind and body are not two distinct entities. In the absence of sufficient sleep, we experience this truth viscerally. Right now I am a fog of wispy, half-formed thoughts, a thrum of tension. A head which feels too heavy to be held upright. A heart which is weary of pumping. I’m also feeling humbled, because yesterday I was judgemental about someone who was so tired they weren’t thinking clearly and said and did things they “shouldn’t” have. Part of me wants to defend myself – at least I have the sense to keep quiet when I’m this tired – but the body/mind can’t maintain focus on a single line of reasoning, and the argument fizzles. Give it up. If there is any meaning at all to be gleaned in this moment, let it be compassion.

One of the early lessons in nonviolent communication (NVC) training is to notice how often what we think of as objective observations are actually filled with judgements, evaluations, and diagnoses. Even the simplest attempt at describing a situation, such as “you yelled at me,” turns out not to be an objective observation. What was it about your vocal expression that I experienced as yelling? Someone else in the room or watching the incident on video might not experience it as yelling (or might have an even more extreme evaluation, such as that you were “enraged” or “out of control”). Why does this matter? Here’s the thing: If I give you “feedback” laced with judgements, evaluations and diagnoses (masquerading as “fact”), how likely is it that you will be open to hearing my thoughts and feelings? How likely is it that either of us will get our needs met? The more I learn NVC, the more I see how powerful this habit is in our culture. Attempting to swim against the current feels difficu...

Here is when I feel my age, and the pull to despair: A young friend posted a cheery meme that said “I’m going to teach my sons how to cook and clean; it’s not just a lady’s job.” Wait, we were saying that – and much more – back in the 1970s! Are there really people for whom this is news? But really, now that I think about it, why am I surprised? Haven’t I noticed over the decades that the gendering of toys and games has never stopped? and that the sexualizing of girls’ appearance, at younger and younger ages, is more pervasive? and that the culture of toxic masculinity has gotten more toxic? and that sexuality and violence have been irreparably bound together by the white male dominated entertainment and pornography industries? And then I hear the voice of hope, not wanting despair to have the only say this morning. But today, I think I will just let it be.

There’s a part of the mind that I affectionately call Guy. This is the part of the mind that has been going full steam since I woke up a couple of hours ago, compulsively attempting to solve all the ills of humanity before breakfast. Not because anyone has asked him to. Not because he has the intellectual capacity, really. But because that’s just what he does. He’s analyzing, sorting, categorizing, associating, figuring things out... ALL THE TIME. Sometimes his voice is loud enough to be heard clearly, like this morning, but other times he’s whispering just below the surface of consciousness. (And yes, I am gendering Guy as a he, because that’s just how it feels to me.) A random comment on someone else’s Facebook post can get Guy going on a rant for hours. Often, like today, he can insidiously show up before I’m fully awake, offering to be “helpful” about what I could write about this morning. I almost fell for it today. I almost sat down to write a treatise on the conflicting definiti...

I am a lover of words. A quick random flip through my old hardcover dictionary yields a delicious harvest: perspicacious... luncheonette... deuteronomic... flannel... quench... slovenly... deign... slugfest... electrostatic... harbinger... wobble.... I recently wrote down 100 of them from a dictionary hunt, every one a tasty treat. What makes words so delightful? The phenomenon of language itself is such a profound mystery. What is this awesome capacity humans have to breathe out sounds (or form symbols) to express our thoughts and feelings – often with the intention of influencing others to think, feel, and act? It is tempting to argue that words are “just words,” and that they don’t have the power to wound or influence us unless we choose to let them – which may be true some or even most of the time –  but it does seem that there are some hateful, blood-soaked words that convey the very real threat of physical violence. Aside from those few powerful words, though, might it be pos...

I love the classic “how are you” question of nonviolent communication (NVC), first formulated by Marshall Rosenberg (may his memory be a blessing): What is alive in you? It is a question intended to elicit reflection on our immediate body/heart/mind experience. Part of what I love about this question is that it implicitly corrects our misperception that intense inner experiences are a problem in need of fixing. In the world of NVC, our feelings and judgements – no matter how uncomfortable in the moment – are understood to be expressions of our life energy, pointing us in the direction of our deepest needs. An inner guidance system. A gift, really. So inquiring into what is alive in us is also a practice of gratitude. What is alive in me this morning? The high-pitched inner whine of a headache, a judgement that somehow it is wrong to have this headache, a need for tranquility and ease... and a sense of joy in connecting with a friend through a series of silly text messages. What is ali...

The ultimate test of a daily morning writing practice: power tools in the neighborhood, at close range. The mind scrambles for cover. Maybe headphones with loud Mozart? Maybe give it up and try to write later? But wait – how is this any different from sitting and listening to the birds this morning? The opportunity to observe the mind is the same. Notice that the sounds are followed by very different mind/body responses: Birds –> delight. Power tools –> distress. Can I play with the possibility of powerful tools –> delight? Or that both birds and power tools simply are , without emotional response? I have to stop writing and be very still.

An early morning thought in my sleep felt insistent enough that I woke up, grabbed my phone, and dictated it to a text note (something I never do): When my father died, I inherited the idea that there was somewhere else you could go to get away. Then I fell back asleep. And now, downstairs and reasonably awake, the question arises: Huh? Is this something meaningful, or just the random detritus of a fitful sleep? For the sake of contemplation, I will choose to find it meaningful. And then a long-dormant memory surfaces, from about 20 years ago: Not long after my father received his pancreatic cancer diagnosis, he confided to me that he wanted to leave my mother and move away, alone. Somewhere, anywhere. To start a new life, unburdened. The recollection of his desperate imaginings, this last futile gesture at asserting his own needs, moves me to tears this morning. And now I hear my dream thought as a pandemic message: Watch for that fantasy that it is possible to get away from your sor...

Uncharted emotional territory in this new pandemic reality: a rapidly oscillating sense of longing and dread, both generated by the same object – being together with people in person. I am experiencing both a longing to connect with people, and a dread of connecting with people because of the health risk. I know this is hitting a nerve in me, because lately when I hear of or see a social media post of people getting together – at parties, demonstrations, vacation spots, workplaces – I feel tears rising. Longing and dread... and the related emotions of envy and anger. And there’s something else I’m feeling in my gut today which I am having trouble articulating. It’s something about division, separation – along lines of race, class, and now age too. The flip side of the privilege that permits Alan and me to protect our health by staying home is that we are increasingly separated from those who do not have this privilege – while we are simultaneously even more dependent on those people in...

Before there was an internet, I had a little red plaid notebook. Into this little red plaid notebook, I copied – by hand, in pen – quotes from other people; I kept up this practice roughly from 1974 through 1984. Poems, sayings, passages from novels or nonfiction, snippets of song lyrics. Usually in English, occasionally in French (which apparently I once understood). Tennyson, Paul Simon, my best friend Ruth, Dickens, Virginia Woolf, T. H. White... a wondrous jumble of voices. Walt Whitman, A.A. Milne, Jefferson Starship, Simone de Beauvoir, Lord Byron, Erica Jong. I marvel now at the range of my literary tastes back then (as I am simultaneously aware of how narrowly Eurocentric it was). But what I really want to say is that there is something about reading it all in my own handwriting, the sense of intimacy, the sense that these are my accumulated treasures, that keeps me returning to this little red plaid notebook year after year. Here’s the first quote in the notebook: “Man is a my...

Little White Lie. I talked about this film for many months after seeing it at the Coolidge Corner theater when it came out around five years ago. Little White Lie is filmmaker Lacey Schwartz’s story of how she grew up in a white Jewish family in Woodstock NY, in which everyone colluded not to name the physically obvious: that her biological father had been a Black man. The film includes her probing interviews with family members about how and why this happened, and the evolution of her identity in young adulthood. To me the film was a multi-dimensional puzzle, raising a tangle of questions about betrayal, forgiveness, identity, race, family, storytelling. And now it flashes into my mind this morning, and I don’t know why. And now I wonder: Wouldn’t an investigative documentary about any of our families end up raising the same tangle of questions?

I wonder who lives in that coop apartment now, the one my family lived in until I entered 3rd grade in the mid-1960s. Through the miracle of Google Maps, I can see it clearly from all angles, confirming my memories of a vast sprawl of identical four-unit brick apartment buildings arranged to create a network of inner courtyards. I am impressed now by the neighborhood design, viewing it in satellite mode. I remember the sense of freedom, the opportunities for unsupervised play without ever having to cross a street. I remember feeling at ease entering someone else’s apartment (without knocking) because I needed to use the bathroom; I imagine we had the vague sense that apartments (and mothers) were basically interchangeable. I thought this post was going to be about systemic racism and white flight, about how the GI bill allowed my father to buy a modest house in another town just as Black families were able to afford the coop neighborhood. But what is unexpectedly hitting me right now i...

In 2018, I was challenged by a Black friend (as part of a weekly anti-racism practice) to take the implicit bias test on the Harvard University website . After warming up with another test, and discovering that I have a moderate automatic preference for Judaism over other religions (wink), I took the race test and scored “your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African Americans over European Americans.” Huh, really? I had assumed that this test would uncover lurking, unconscious bias against Black people, learned early in life and impossible to uproot. Concerned that I might have somehow gamed the system, I took the test again. The second time, I scored “your data suggest no automatic preference between black people and white people.” Like measuring your blood pressure more than once – slight variation, but basically similar. At the time, I generated an optimistic conjecture as to why I scored this way: that the effort I had been making for several years – to become aware ...

Re-reading my pre-teen diaries, I glimpse a stream of thoughts that were never shared with anyone at the time. Certainly not with my parents; but apparently not even with my friends. A bubbling stream of anxious, sometimes obsessive thoughts. One obsession in particular – about an older boy who was so obviously mean-spirited and callous – took me down a rabbit hole of confusion for years . I can only imagine what it might have meant to that anxious girl if someone had listened to her with compassion. I know there were occasional moments of caring from insightful adults... but not nearly enough. See Advice for my 17-year-old self , posted Aug 3, 2014 – the list still rings true. Know anyone who could benefit from posting it on their mirror? I think I might.

Take away the judgemental label, the epithet, the charged noun and adjective that elicit defensiveness and denial. What is left? A bare observation: the systems in our culture (government, schooling, business, banking, real estate, policing and incarceration, religion, entertainment, sports) have for hundreds of years perpetuated inequity. It is an observation of a historical reality; not an opinion, nor an accusation directed at individuals. Are there exceptions at the individual level? Sure, but that doesn’t change the historical reality. American systems are fundamentally, profoundly rooted in assumptions of white male christian superiority. Are we perhaps at last able to face it and get real about the violence that has been committed in the name of this phantom superiority and the compulsive capitalist hoarding that goes with it? Some of us have long dreamed of a culture based on a different set of values.

I just finished reading through my recently unearthed childhood diary from 1971. My bat mitzvah was in late June of that year. I turned 13 that November. I am struck by two observations, both painful: First and most obvious, there was so much sorrow about feeling left out, not being liked, not being in the right crowd, etc. Almost daily fretting about who-likes-who, and parties I’m not being invited to, and feeling left out even at the parties I do get invited to. (Like the basement party where, dressed in my beloved navy pinstripe bell bottoms and frilly white blouse, I sat alone and on the edge of tears until it was time to go home.) Oh, poor sweetie. And then there is something else I am noticing in this childhood diary: the occasional nasty judgements of other people. Words like “scuz,” “ugly,” “hood,” “fake,” “pig.” And worse. Often accompanied by dramatic, oversized exclamation points. I am almost embarrassed even to admit this here, except that my compassionate heart understands...

The insidious, serpent-like inner whispering: Not Enough. It sneaks up on me on a quiet summer afternoon. You haven’t done enough. You aren’t doing enough. You will never do enough. It almost had me this time, almost had me giving up and shutting up and going back to sleep. But wake up! – the whisper of “not enough” comes from the culture, not from the soul. It comes from the culture of hierarchy and put-down and smack-down, the culture of never strong enough, never attractive enough, never rich enough, the culture of white supremacy. The progressive version whispers with a different vocabulary – never active enough, never anti-racist enough, never woke enough – but the insidious, soul-crushing effect is similar. Don’t bother trying, it whispers. Give it up. People better than you are doing the real work. But having recognized its voice yet again, I can choose to listen to another voice. Yesterday it was the voice of a friend, suggesting that I simply take another step forward tod...

Heartfelt connection brings joy. To share what is alive in us, with candor and empathy, brings joy. For me even just the thought of connection, just the remembrance of it, brings joy. Communing with a friend while walking in the cold rain with soaking wet feet, arms aching from holding the umbrella against the wind – joyful. Crying with a friend on the phone – joyful. Even speaking with a stranger on Zoom, if the intention is to be present for one another with empathy – joyful. And suddenly I am remembering that colorful little book from my son's childhood: More More More, Said the Baby. Yes – more more more – please.

Waking early to meditate outside on the back deck. Sitting at the kitchen table with my breakfast bowl and glass of water or cup of tea, writing. The rest of the day: emails, Zoom calls, planning, conversations with my husband, walking or working out, eating, more Zoom calls, reading or writing in the evening, washing dishes. There is a sweetness, a comfort, in having a daily routine. And then, lying in bed, the mind rebels against sleep: That’s it? That’s what you did today? That was too much like yesterday, and it was over too soon. A restless stirring of not-enough, battling with the weary body’s need to let go. The mind ups the ante: Is this how it will be from now on, the sense of connection with real, touchable human beings slipping further and further out of reach? What if this is it, what if there never will be any going back to “normal”? And then I’m asleep, and then it is morning, and I am waking early to meditate outside on the back deck. Gam zeh ya’avor / this too will p...

Our schooling system is based on mistrust. Our schooling system is based on the belief that children - all people in fact, but especially children - cannot be trusted to know what is best for them. Cannot be trusted to know how to behave “well,” cannot be trusted to know what is important to learn, cannot be trusted to learn and grow without constant “guidance” and correction and judgement and ranking. Even in the most benevolent-seeming school systems, these assumptions are so foundational that they are invisible. And the adults perpetuating the system themselves grew up in it and were shaped by it, as were their parents, down through several hundred years of generations. But this is a created system; this is not “normal” or “natural.” Can you guess who created the system, and whose hands still hold down the lid of revolution against it? The parallels between the schooling system and the prison system in this country are chilling. And those few of us who see it feel that we are spitti...