Deanna's Pop Up Shul

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Today is the end of Hannukah. I hope yours was filled with light and love.

The Groundhog Day nature of this pandemic remains. The moment things begin to open, a new strain and a new slew of fears re-cycle the entire emotional process. My family was supposed to be in Israel right now (again), but we were literally turned away at the gate, due to rules of non-citizens (even spouses) being altered that day.

My husband has not been home in two years. My in-laws had prepared car seats and rooms and hearts for the arrival of our ten-month-old, who has yet to meet two of her uncles and all of her dear cousins. Though not a tragedy, it was disappointing and exhausting.

So much of this pandemic has left us saying – can we have a do over? Can we postpone this one more year? I have friends who have postponed weddings, memorials have been changed, travel pushed back. Even this sentiment is nothing new.

This past May I had a student who focused her Torah commentary on Pesach Sheni – the second Passover. It’s all about second chances – whether they are good or bad, or if they set bad precedents. She, too, had postponed her Bat Mitzvah. It led me down a path of questioning if other holidays also provided second chances.

Turns out, Hannukah is one big second chance.

While in modern times we celebrate the miracle of the lights (and the oil that lasted 8 days), this tradition (and story) was established later, by Rabbis who wanted to rebrand away from "military prowess" to "divine light" for political reasons.

Hannukah itself means “rededication.” What was rededicated was the Temple after a clash with the Assyrian Greeks and assimilated Jews. According to the Book of Maccabees, the Greeks had not allowed Jews to practice the fall holiday of Sukkot and/or the guerrilla armies weren’t able to celebrate.

So, when the Temple was rededicated, it was time to party - Jew style. Sukkot was the ancient Jew’s most important holiday, and Hannukah was the do-over.

"They celebrated it for eight days with gladness like Sukkot and recalled how a little while before, during Sukkot they had been wandering in the mountains and caverns like wild animals. So carrying lulavs [palm branches waved on Sukkot]…they offered hymns of praise (perhaps, the Hallel prayer) to God who had brought to pass the purification of his own place." (II Maccabees 10:6-7)

It tracks: both are joyous, both are eight days, both have Hallel included. Even though Hannukah wasn't even included in the Torah, it now had its origin.

Our last Pop Up Shul gathering was in-person for Sukkot – a gorgeous top of a hill in Los Angeles scene filled with music and joy (a huge belated thank you to Shana Weiss for the glorious space). Sukkot is supposed to be so joy-filled that it lasts all the way until Hannukah, the next Jewish holiday in the lineup. This is a long stretch for Jews, especially after the High Holiday barrage. (I have finally uploaded some photos of the event so you can catch a glimpse.) Hopefully the joy from Hannukah can also stretch us through winter.

While our lives cannot be do-overs, Hanukkah is a reminder of how creative and resilient people can be and our insistence on living fully in the face of challenges. So much so, that sometimes the do-over holiday becomes even more celebrated than the original.

While I may not be abroad, we had the blessing of being longer with family in Chicago, and attending baby showers and a beautiful closing Hannukah with friends in Los Angeles. May we carry all of the light of the past eight days into winter. May our do overs and postponements outshine all previous plans.

Thanks everyone for coming today. Happy Sukkot!

FIRST BORN

This year Passover was very different for me personally, and not just because we’re in a global pandemic. Two months ago, I gave birth to a tiny human. My first child. I’ve been spending most of my time nurturing her with my body and spirit. Motherhood has taken me away from my Jew life a bit, but I do hope to have another Shabbat and virtual content soon, and hopefully we’ll all be able to meet in person in the near future.

Last night was break fast, the end of Passover, and the past eight days I’ve found myself mulling over the ritual and the story. Through my new mom goggles, the Passover story looked near-obsessed with babies, birth and the parental relationship.

First of all, the Torah isn’t exactly known for focusing on women or naming them, but the Exodus story is filled with them: We get Shifra and Puah – two midwives who decide to save the babies against Pharaoh’s decree to kill the Israelite’s first born children; Miriam, Moses’ sister, who watches after him; and Yocheved, Moses’ mother, who breastfeeds him into adulthood and saves his life. (As an aside, I always love my uncle’s identification of Yocheved as the first lawyer – Pharaoh’s decree was to throw her baby into the Nile, and she did! He just happened to be in a basket.) We even get an appearance by Batya (only named in midrash), Pharaoh’s daughter, who comes to save baby Moses and pull him out from the water. As a new mother I connect even more deeply with the female heroines, the sense of protectiveness, and I even appreciate the logistical elements of how you might breastfeed an adopted child.

Having just given birth, Pharaoh’s decree of infanticide following a proliferation of Israelite babies, seemed especially cruel to me now. To carry a child to term and deliver it into the world is a huge feat. Monumental. Painful. Transformative. To have women cast their babies into the Nile after this experience is unfathomable. Sometimes I sit at night staring at my baby in the dim light of my nightstand and think, this is the greatest investment of time, love, effort and energy I will ever make in my life and I will stab out the eyes of anyone who tries to hurt her. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt a child.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of child hurting in the Passover story, particularly of first-born children. The first-born child is a biblical obsession, both in conveying its significance and, in other stories, in its attempts to overthrow the primogeniture. (There is also a very strange ritual of “redeeming” the first born, who were formerly the designated high priests of Israel, but that is for another time.) In the ultimate plague, God kills all of the first-born children and animals in Egypt. God explains this horrible decree in an earlier conversation with Moses: “You shall say to Pharaoh: This is what the Lord says. “Israel is My son, My firstborn. I have told you to let My son go, that he may worship Me. If you refuse to let him go, I will kill your own firstborn son.” (Ex. 4:22–23). To make sense of this horrible tenth plague, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “When God told Moses to say to Pharaoh, “My son, My firstborn, Israel,” He was saying: I am the God who cares for His children, not one who kills His children. The ninth plague was a divine act of communication that said: there is not only physical darkness but also moral darkness. The best test of a civilisation is to see how it treats children, its own and others’." This God-as-parent trope is all over religion and Judaism, in particular.

The Exodus story makes God a first-time parent of a nation. The Israelites literally cross through a narrow, flooded opening from a “narrow place” Mitzrayim, to freedom. If it doesn’t scream birth canal, I don’t know what does! The nation is born in the Passover story, and Exodus is the first time in the Torah that the narrative moves from a family drama, to Pharaoh calling the people an “Am”, a people. Though historians contend the name “Hebrews” (Ivrim) may come from Habiru, a specific name of ancient, Semitic people, the root word for Hebrew is E-V-R, which means to pass or cross over. Jews are a people who have crossed over a great threshold, a sea, to be born. Incidentally E-B-R, the same letters in Hebrew is also to impregnate. And of course, Passover is the spring holiday, the time of birth and renewal. The egg on the seder plate hatched in perfect fertility toward the future.

I hope to see people virtually or in person soon as I continue to emerge from this monumental experience in my life. Let’s hope this spring brings new connections and an emergence from the depths of this pandemic.