Praise on My Lips

I dreamed an ancient desert,
a wilderness of copper and gold
under skies of infinity blue
and heaven.

God dwelt there, made the ground holy,
built a Temple of canvas
and devotion,
and we sang, each morning,
my sisters and I -
Hosanna!
Hallelujah!

I woke then, with praise on my lips -
sweet, and it buzzed against my tongue,
made my body a holy Temple
of sacred grace.

And so I sang a song of rising,
under heaven and infinity blue,
a song of devotion and desire,
sweet benediction to the glory
of God.

Speak

Speak of ritual and rules,
of purity and piety
Speak of celebration and time
that drifts and flows
in a spiral of
light and dark
and bounty and decay.
Speak, in each season
of coming and going and rising
like smoke, like breath,
effortless as thought
and rising, ever rising
kadosh, kadosh, kadosh.
Speak of light and dark
and oil that is holy
and bread that sustains
a bounty, a banquet, laid
before you in My presence.
Speak of betrayal and death,
of oaths and lies.

Speak of life and all that is -
Life, filled and whole
and pushed to the
edges of everything.
A life that is filled with weakness
and strength
and holy and profane.
With sacrifice and binding.
This shall be for all time
in every season under every sky
empty and filled,
broken, whole.
Speak of the whole
of life.

Sanctuary

I counted out the measures
In cubits
and inches
and baskets of grain
And made a sanctuary
From a field of grass
And cornflowers,
And it was pleasing to behold,
And silent.

Beyond those borders,
Beyond the altars and their
Sacred, silent beauty,
Lay the wild lands--
Choked with weeds
And shadows
That stretched in still echoes
Back
Over miles
And unmeasured days,
Leached of color
And light.

They came,
Crossing the wilderness
With steps of infinity,
Measured in endless cubits
And dusty inches,
And gathered here,
In my field of glory,
Carrying baskets laden with their gifts
And sins
And doubt:
Their sacrifice,
Offered in silvered longing.
And laid on that altar
Their gifts and broken burdens,
All together and all at once.

They gathered there
In the field of grass
Bounded by cubits; and inches
and meters and measures
They lifted their voices
In  an endless hosanna
In aching need,
And sang

Hallelujah.

It was benediction--
Prayer,
A bounty of sweet and
splintered offerings.
They sang
Into that holy stillness--
That glorious sanctuary
Of unbounded measure
And sweetly bending grasses,
And mist that hovered
Like the breath of God--

Filled.

Hallelujah.


For the ending of the counting of the Omer
Stacey Zisook Robinson
c 2014

Lingering at the Center of Holy

Nestled
In the center
Surrounded by the sizzle
and the hiss and the
Plenty

Surrounded by voices and
Steam and flicker flames
Rising
Ascending

A prayer of thanks.

We prepared the banquet
Together
Laid the harvest in fragrant baskets there
Lingered among the sweet and
Liquid smells as the air

Settled
As the sun lowered
And the windows darkened
And the day quieted.

We lingered there
Nestled there
Around that center
Around that heart
And we rested.

05 Nisan -- Prepare

I am not ready. I'm not close to being prepared. Life. Work. This day. This week nor next. Not ready for parenting (don't even get me started on parenting (let alone single parenting). I would need to climb a very tall ladder to get to the ground floor of unprepared in parenting). I'm so unprepared that this essay was due yesterday. It is now 9:13pm on the sixth of Nisan (though given the Hebrew division of days, it's probably the seventh of Nisan. Oy.).

I have good intentions. I have plans. I make lists. I talk it-- out loud, in my head, alone or in groups-- I understand the concept. Really and truly, I get how much easier, how much smoother life flows when I am prepared. I may even have experienced the whole prepared thing once or twice, somewhere along the line. It felt-- good. Right. It all just fits.

Mostly though, I'm the one who hasn't read the instructions; the one who's forgotten to print the presentation on the day of the big meeting; the one still cleaning the living room even as the doorbell rings. I am grateful for convenience stores in airports, so that I can buy the eleventy sevev items I managed to forget. I would continue in this tirade, but I was running late and left all my notes sitting on the kitchen counter. Or in my car. I think.

Mostly I spend my life winging it. I have become the Master of the ad lib, tge Queen of last minute projects and cramming. I can hit the target 98% of the time when shooting from the hip.

I am NOT ready. Ever. I am not prepared.

So what?

What difference does it make if I'm prepared or not? I'm not hurting anyone. Well-- not really. I'm the one who is frazzled. It is my life that's in (total) disarray. I am not a Boy Scout (for several obvious reasons), although I was a Girl Scout, but I was a horrible and unprepared Girl Scout, if preparedness is even a thing for them.

So what?

It's Passover. Or close to it. It's the season, the celebration of our redemption. And there is something important, something sacred and holy about preparing for these days.

As I begin with the physical tasks of preparation-- cleaning out the cabinets, polishing the silver, figuring out the menu (because all of that is part of the holiness of preparation) all of that creates a shift-- from the physical to the spiritual. I am changed. I move into a slightly different rhythms. There is a purpose, a minfulness, a thoughtfulness that washes over me, so that I become ready for Passover-- not just my house, but my heart.

I don't always finish the physical stuff, the cleaning and polishing, the cooking. I'm still, you know, me. Chances are I will have started late, with no real plan in mind, other than some vague, inchoate and amorphous idea that I should host a seder and invite a bunch of people.

But my heart-- my heart changes, quiets, is so much more present. And it changes enough, exactly enough, for me to enter into that holy andsacred place joyously, mindfully grateful that once we were slaves now we are free.

#blogExodus #Exodusgram

c stacey zisook robinson
05 April 2014

Who Opens the Eyes of the Blind...

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha'olam, pokei'ach ivri'im

Blessed are you, Adonai, Sovereign of the universe, who opens the eyes of the blind.

From Nisim b'chol yom, for daily miracles 

The morning liturgy

I chant this prayer every time I say the morning blessings.  It is not as often as I'd like, but at least every Saturday morning, for Shabbat, I chant it. It's a sacred moment.

At least, it would be if I thought about it. I think moments are not inherently sacred or holy. They become so, with our thought, our mindfulness and intentionality.

Today, as I stood under the rickety, shivering roof of the Sukkah, where  pale morning sky peeked through a roof of haphazardly-laid dried corn stalks, and the light wind presaged the certainty of autumn-to-come (though the valiant sun, not-quite blazing, but shining brightly nonetheless, did a tango with the still-chill air before it started to warm) -- today, wrapped in my tallit and a soft sweater and the holiness of that moment, my voice rose with those other voices of this lovely community, praising God for the miracles of the day.

Praising God for opening the eyes of the blind.

That's when it hit me. Again, after all those other agains, when I've struggled to see my computer screen, and the road just beyond the hood of my car, and the last bit of dried-up milk at the bottom of the glass that my son has left on the counter again (for a whole different tirade of "agains"). More, for the struggle to see the breathtaking beauty of the words of Torah as I lean down to chant their ancient melody. They've worsened, those struggles, steadily, now somewhat exponentially, until today, this moment as I sing out my praise of God for the miracle of sight -- and my vision is a cubist nightmare, a blurred and darkened view of the world around me. Tough to see a miracle right about now.

So this morning, I chanted those words, where I so often sing them rather than pray them, and today they became holy and that moment shifted into rare and exquisite sacredness. And I wept.

I'm terrified that I am going blind.

Before I continue, let me say: my condition is, so my doctors assure me, treatable. Not cureable, but treatable. They may be able to arrest its progression. Or at least slow the pace of it. I may not, in fact, be going blind. Tell that to my fear.

I know, I know-- fear is a liar, and this is Sukkot, the season of joy. So I stood under the shelter of this very tenuous, very temporary shelter that was draped in God's bounty, that was filled to its very edges with prayer and hope and gratitude, and I sang and prayed and tried so desperately to lose myself in my prayer-- or maybe to find myself there, and God and benediction and something holy and pure, something transcendent and free of the fear that lay coiled around me, that bound me and tethered me to its dank lies and dirty promises. I tried so hard to rise with my prayers. 

And when I came to chant from Torah-- and really, not an incredibly inspiring passage, from a particularly troubling parasha, but it is Torah, and the blessing of it is that we are given the whole of the Torah, not just the pretty passages and happy stories, because it is ours to struggle with and dance with and learn from, to teach and carry and study and live-- so I stood at the makeshift bima and I bent to read those silly words, about bullocks and rams and offerings for drink and meals and sin-- and I stumbled and faltered, because although my eyes were open, I could not see.

The service leader was kind-- chanting Torah is difficult under the best of circumstances (considering there are no vowels or punctuation), he explained, but I was laboring under some heavy duty eye problems for which I would be operated on later this week. I walked back to my seat where I proceeded to break down. 

A woman, a friend, came to sit next to me. She put her arm around me, to offer strength and comfort. "What do you need?" she said, and would not accept stiffening shoulders or my mumbled answer of "Nothing. I'm fine." She was merely the first in a parade of others. Some I had known for years, those casual, intimate acquaintances who fill our lives with pleasantries and conversation and shared experience. There were a few I'd never seen before, though their concern was no less sincere. Included in that jumbled mix were a few real friends, people who were part of the regular ebb and flow of my life, whose presence was a steady and shimmering light.

What do you need? What can we do? And then: Never mind; I'll come over. I'll drive you. We'll bring you...

My skin fairly crawled. I am the Fixer of Broken things, I wanted to cry out. I do not get Fixed. I do not get taken care of. I am not fixable, I wanted to whisper. I cannot afford to need.

And in the midst of my fear and pain, draped in my pride-- a miracle. 

My prayer, my blindness: it had nothing to do with sight. It had nothing to do with vision, with rods and cones and color and light. There is holiness in giving, in caring for, in being present for another. There is also a sacredness in accepting that care. Community is about connection, a give and take of love and experience, a binding of joy and sorrow. 

I have no idea what will happen with my eyes. I am still terrified that I will go blind, that something will go wrong with this (fairly routine) operation. That I will not be able to drive, or read or stare in wonder at the color of the sky just as the sun kisses the horizon. Soon, and forever. I am an awfulizer of the first order. My fear is a liar that tells me I will no longer see.

But I will not be blind. How could I be, when I stand with my community, that holy and sacred bunch, under the shelter of heaven, to find strength and compassion and love. 

Blessed are you, God, who opens the eyes of the blind...

01 Tishrei 5774: Happy New Year

I got used to writing and posting every day during Elul. I resented it, and felt under the gun and annoyed, in a free-floating annoyance kind of way, since no one was pushing me to do it except for me. I had made the commitment to myself, thinking it would be a gentle walk in the park. I was (honesty being called for, i suppose, especially today) wrong. Frankly, it would have been much more satisfying to take out my annoyance on You. As it was, I grumbled and had many manic thoughts of chucking the project, more than a handful of times, especially near the end.

I finished, despite my resentment. And now, not a day later, I kinda miss it.

"Hey," I feel like saying, "we made it-- it's a new day, a new year. Wow. We are on the other side. Ta da." And then i toss the glitter and confetti high into the air. Ta da indeed.

So I was thinking-- and you don't have to play if you don't feel like it-- I was thinking that Elul was an astounding thing, the act of preparation, with prompts and a guide (thank you to my friend, Rabbi Phyllis Sommer). Why not continue, through the Yamim Nora'im-- the Days of Awe, these ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur?

What better time than now, to reflect and prepare, than when the Gates are flung wide and the Book of Life and Death is unsealed? I know, I know-- "now" is always the right time, but spiritual f wonkiness aside, this now seems quite apropos.

And forgive me, but I don't have a premade list that someone has so kindly bequeathed me (or the world). So I will have to make it up, right now. I hope you don't mind. I'll try it, see how it goes. Like Scheherazade's King in the Thousand and One Nights, I can always change my mind tomorrow.

Happy new year, my friends, whether you play or not. May the year to come be filled with blessings and light, sweetness, healing and peace. 

Here's my list. Let me know if you like it, and certainly if you think of any other principles that might be good to reflect upon as we gather at the Gates.

01 Tishrei   Celebrate

02 Tishrei   Wonder

03 Tishrei   Yearn

04 Tishrei   Wholeness

05 Tishrei   Peace

06 Tishrei   Ready

07 Tishrei   Fear

08 Tishrei   Mercy

09 Tishrei   Justice

10 Tishrei   Awe

23 Elul 5773: Love

This is the part where I write some lyrical, transcendent passage about love, from the depths of my soul, the flame of my heart. This is the part where I quote some sage or poet-- some really cool and together person who has Figured It All Out and Has The Answers for the eternal and redemptive power of love. This is the part where I write soppy love songs and sonnets, make rhymes with swoon and June and moon.

This is the part where I talk about feelings.

Ugh.

Let's face it: love is hard.  It can be conditional. It is rarely eternal. It is always a risk. It is vulnerability and the chance for pain-- yours and mine both.It's not just hard; it's scary. So much so that, at some point, after enough pain, enough hurt, enough tears in the name of love, I decided I would never do that again, thank you very much. I closed myself off, sheathed myself in ice and watched.

My heart, such as it was, became a mountain of glass-- hard and smooth, with nary a foothold or crack. Nothing was getting in. Nothing was getting out. I was captive and captor both: safe, protected, inviolate.

I was lonely. Desperately lonely. I couldn't imagine being loved. Not ever. And why would anyone, when I pushed away anyone who ventured to breach my heart of glass? How could anyone, when I was so clearly unlovable and broken?

When I got sober, the people in the rooms gave me the greatest gift I'd ever been given: they loved me. Not because of, not in spite of. They just did. And they didn't want anything in return. Free and unconditional. Love. No matter how much I pushed back, they smiled, they nodded (they remembered) and told me to keep coming back. They said "We'll love you until you learn to love yourself." 

And they did. They held out their arms to shelter me and ease my pain. They let me stumble around while I learned to find my way in the dark. They showed me how to face fear and still walk forward. They taught me that I was not broken beyond repair, and that I-- even I -- could find redemption. 

Love is a gift. It can make me giddy and breathless. It can bring comfort and offer hope. It is shelter and strength and redeeming. It is holy-- the holiest act of all: it is me, standing before you, giving you the power to hurt me (and doing it anyway). 

I've been going around and around, trying to come up with that quintessential something-or-other that will tie this all up in a perfect and pretty bow. I can't. As much as love is a holy gift, a sacred act, it is also messy and uneven, a rocky path that twists and turns and veers into unknown waters. There ain't no guarantees. 

And yet-- you do it anyway. 

You love. And with that simple and brave and holy act, you find healing and grace.