Elegy: for George Floyd

Mama, oh mama,
The sun is too bright.
This knee on my neck
carries the weight of
centuries and stone.
Oh mama, I can't breathe!

The street smells like heat
and the sweat of ages
upon ages of silence,
my face pressed like a wildflower
into its creases and grime.
My blood runs, and mama,
I can't breathe!

Mama, oh mama,
what can I do?
I'm dying amidst brotherhood blue,
while the spring breeze
brings a hint of glory
that I know is meant
for skin more fair
and pockets more full.

Mama, oh mama!
I can't breathe.
The weight of the centuries
is crushing.
A single knee
and I am done.

A Handful of Stones

You were laid, just so, in the damp heat and cicada song
of summer. Now, so unlike your sleep, always tangled and damp, there is precision in your rest. Yet today there is nothing stately in our shared unrest: all this felled granite - a suddenness of violence; a riot of grey. I meant to visit you sooner, to bring you a handful of stones. I meant to grieve more softly, but the chaos has made my grief razor sharp again. Now there is no place to leave my offerings.

A Mourner's Kaddish: a response to desecration

Your fingers are warm
under the coldness of this stone

that once marked the final place
of someone's loved one,

that stood guard over time-
worn mounds and still-life flowers,

but now guard nothing,
criss-crossed granite toppled by hate.

But your fingers are warm
and I see your breath hang for a moment

in this almost-warm winter air,
and my breath puffs out to meet it.

This stone of soft edges and blurred
letters hides your face, but our breath meets.

I don't know if you wear a kippah
or a hijab, or nothing at all but hair; I can only

feel your fingers, warm, and see
your breath hang in frozen wonder, and mingle

with my own, as we lift, together
these stones to mark again the lives of my people.

Yitgadal v'yitkadash, shmei rabbah.
Exalted and hallowed be God's great name.

Kaddish for an absent father

I knew you, God,

in my mother's breath,

and her sighs

that she thought I 

couldn't hear,

late at night,

and sometimes in the evening,

when she reached for 

a dish,

or a glass,

or a box 

kept on a high shelf,

and the effort

of her stretch

added to the effort 

of her days,

and Your name 

escaped her, unbidden,

hidden by the rustle

of days and time.

She thought I didn't hear.

But that is how 

I knew You first.

She taught me

effort and stretch

and the glory of Your name,

the simple in and out of

breathing,

that is awe,

and fear,

and mercy,
and love. 

I knew you, God,

in my father's absence,

a hollow presence

that became

faded

over time

and the wheeling of stars.

Stars are impossibly

beautiful and 

improbably far,

and silent,

like solitude,

or the grace

of longing.

Absence settles in,

a blanket of Almost 

and hoped-for.

And I could feel 

You there

in its folds

and tattered edges,

and the 

absence of 

my father's 

touch.

And I know you God,

in this ache

of loss 

that breathes through me,

this grief that 

began with absence 

and time,

and ends

with a single 

breath

a last

sigh

a whisper of Your 

Name.

An Absence of Color and Light

We sat among the willows,
and we wept,
there by the river
that flowed
clear and cold and swift,
--branches dancing,
barely dancing--
as they swayed
and swept the ground.

We stood among the weeping trees,
Prayers mixed with
visions of ash.
and smoke
that rose and billowed,
Black against purple-stained blue
-- the blue of periwinkles
and royalty--
and a sky smudged with soot and
an absence of color
and Light,
and the altars we had left behind.

How can we sing
with no stone walls
adorned with lapis and gold:
-- the blue of royalty
and the blaze of the sun--
How,
before that pillar of fire,
that billowing smoke
that is empty of God
and absent of Light?
That raged in a fiery, metallic storm,
licking at loose rubble,
that once was strong walls,
that once was adorned with
the presence of God?

We wept,
and did not sing,
and found no music
in our unstrung lyres
and broken harps.
We wept,
for how could we sing?

And after the weeping
and the fire
and the absent,
Empty,
broken altars--
Pale morning.
and skies of purple-stained blue
shot through with scarlet and gold.
Mist tangled in those willows,
their branches dancing--
barely dancing--
barely skimming the swiftly flowing waters.

A moment--
A breathless,
silent
sacred moment.
that was a psalm,
A hymn of color,
and holiness
Made anew.
And there was no absence.
And there was light.

And there,
among the willows
by that swiftly flowing river,
We found a new prayer
And sang.


For Tisha B'Av

The Anticipation of Grief

The anticipation of grief
Lingers and catches
On the softly slurred murmurs
And the mostly-whispered conversations
Of remembrance
and shared sorrow,
Laced together with
Quiet conversations of daily life--
Of forgotten milk and
Late for work
And love.

Or maybe grief
Trickles through them,
A rhythmic--
No:
Arrhythmic
And messy.
A back and forth circling surge
That licks and tickles and laps
Against your heart
And catches your breath.

We wait.
We linger in doorways and
Along narrow aisles
To remember
To witness, at last,
The last gift
This last gift:
A processional of grief
Of Death
and Life
That stumbles
In remembered rhythms
And flows still
In broadening ripples
Tangled with the frayed edges of
This sorrow.

We wait,
In growing expectancy,
In quiet, murmuring patches of
Soft-voiced sadness,
To begin
This ending.
Until the murmuring,
And shuffling
And settling
Stills.

A final anticipation
In that first benediction:
Expectant and holy
and filled.
We witness.
We remember.

And together, we grieve.


In honor
In love
In remembrance of my friend, Larry Kaufman (z"l)

In the space of Tekiyah: reflections on the start of 5773

This is about the 19th iteration of my personal reflection.  The 19th of today, and the 19th written down.  There have been infinitely more than 19 iterations playing in my head, ever since I was so kindly asked me to write one for Rosh HaShanah.  Knowing what I want to write has not been the issue.  Getting it right, finding all the words and hearing the flow of it--- that's been a bit of a challenge.

You see, there are too many words, too many ideas and things to say, floating around in my head.  I know, somewhere, somewhen, that they connect.  I can feel that, feel them all jostling for position, taking up residence in some little known and cobwebbed corner of my head, leaving a faint pattern in the dust and clutter.

"Pick me!"

"Pick me!"

"Start here..."

Except, when I poke around, to find which of the eleventy-seven stories running around loose in my head is whispering "start here..." I get lost.  That internal torch gutters, sending bizarre fun-house shadows to distort my visions, and then they all go skittering about, playing hide-and-seek with the shadows and light.

And so, since I can't find the beginning of this thread, can't seem to be able to tease and coax the end out from the tangled ball of string it has become, I thought about starting at the end.  I could, but I don't know what that is yet either.  So, I will pick one bright and shiny things to start with, and see where that leads.  It may be a beginning, though more likely, it will be a middle.  There are many more middles than beginnings.  I will pick one thing, and see what happens.  I'm pretty sure I'll at least recognize the end, whenever we get to that.

So.  First -- redemption.  It's all about redemption.  My redemption, to be exact, and my quest for it.  And my fear that I will never find it.  Or receive it.  And it's about God.  It's all about God, too.  Always.  And my quest for God.  And my fear that I will never find God or forgiveness.  And that I will never be able to forgive God.  The pain of this fear is almost unbearable.

I spent a couple of decades denying God and redemption both.  That pain was unimaginable.  I am reminded of the midrash of King David and the origins of the Adonai S'fatai, which is the prayer we say at the beginning of the Amidah.  David, the rabbis tell us, had sent a man to his certain death for the sake of satisfying his own selfish need.  The man, Uriah, was a man of honor.  He would not be  dissuaded when David had a sudden change of heart.  He was killed in battle, along with most of his troops.  David got word of Uriah's death just before eveing prayers.

What was he to do?  He knew that he would have to talk to God, to ask forgiveness.  But-- and here's the hard part-- David's fear: what if God said no?  What if God refused?  David ran into the fields, running from himself, from his fear, from God, until he could run no farther.  How could he ask God for forgiveness, when he couldn't forgive himself?  He stopped, just as the setting sun hit the horizon, staining the sky with crimson and gold and purple, and he cried out, in his fear and longing "Adonai s'fatai tiftach ufid yagid t'hilatecha..."

God, open my lips, that I may declare your praise...

And with that prayer-- filled to its very edges with pain and humility and hope and despair, David was forgiven.

Well sure, the voices in my head whisper, God can forgive David.  Let's face it: he's, well, David.  His very name means "beloved..."  And you're not.  You're... you.  All bet's are off.

It is my greatest longing, my unrequited quest-- to be redeemed.  To be forgiven.  To dance in the palm of God's hand.  To believe, if even for an instant, that though I may not be David, though I may not be Beloved, I may find a small piece of it, and that that may be enough.

So it is fitting, I suppose, that I was asked that I give a personal reflection at this morning's service.  Today is such a busy one!  The Book of Life and Death is opened and the Gates of Justice swing wide.  It's the birthday of the world.  Today, we stand with awe and trepidation as we undertake the breathtaking majesty of diving inwards, a deep and long and solitary dive, into murky waters that make us gasp and shiver with cold.  But eventually, the water warms and the silt and grit settle and we learn to see, to shine a light on the inside, all the beauty, all the pain, all the hope and need.

It is all about redemption.

Today is redemption and majesty and reflection and God.  It is joy and celebration and hope and...

Whatever today is, whatever the ritual and tradition that surrounds this day may be, what today is, what today will ever and always be, is my brother's yahrzeit.  While my head hears whispers of "pick me" and "start here," my heart hears a steady murmur of "this is the second anniversary."  And last year, for all the pomp and circumstance of Rosh HaShanah, for all my desperate yearning for redemption and God, drowning out the music and prayer and the triumphant sounding of the shofar that opened the Book and flung wide the Gate-- all I could hear was the steady cadence of "This is the first anniversary of his death."

This is one of those days that I am less forgiving of God.  This is the second thing.

I know-- absolutely know-- that God is not at fault in this.  God didn't set the butterfly's wings to flapping that ended in the hurricane of my brother's death.  There was no Divine Plan here.  Randy smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, existed on caffeine and nicotine.  He was diagnosed with stage four metastatic lung cancer when he was 45, and died when he was 47.  Not a day goes by that I don't miss him, though I don't think of him every day like I did.  Stretches of time go by-- a handful of days, a week, some small length of time, and I will suddenly stop, feeling the ache of his loss like a stitch in my side, sharp and hot, receding into a dull throb until it is more memory than real.  My breath doesn't quite catch in my throat when I think of him.  Mostly.  I say kaddish every Shabbat, and I do not weep.  Mostly.

He died because he smoked.  He died because he got cancer.  But he died today, two years ago.  On Rosh HaShanah, the day of pomp and circumstance and joy and celebration.  I was with him in the hospital when he died, literally as the shofar sounded down the hall from his room,  And so the Book was laid open and the Gates swung wide and my brother died, all in the space of tekiyah.  And so today has suddenly become hard.  And I am suddenly less forgiving of God.

And for all of that, when I stood in prayer and my knees began to buckle from the weight of my sorrow, when I was filled with an ocean of pain and loss, when I wanted to curse God-- when I did curse God-- there were hands that reached out to hold me steady, and strong arms to carry me through to firm ground.  When I demanded of God, to God-- where the hell are You?  I was answered: here.  No farther than the nearest heartbeat, in the still small voices of all those around me, who showed me, again and again, that I was not alone.  Even in my pain, even in my doubt and despair, I was not alone.

And so, the third thing: Redemption.

I started there, I know.  Perhaps my ball of string, with its jumble of tangled threads and hopeless mess, was less eleventy-seven different things and more a giant mobius strip of one.  Perhaps it is all reflections and variations on a single strand.  Perhaps, at least for me, it is all about redemption.  And God.  Ever and always.

I have spent a lifetime yearning for redemption.  I have spent an eternity of lifetimes searching for God.    I have declared my disbelief in God even as I feared that God didn't believe in me.  I have shouted my rage and demanded answers and whispered my praise.  And the thing I come back to, again and again, like a gift of impossible and breathless wonder--

It is not what I pray that matters.  It is that I pray.

For all my yearning, for all my longing, what I don't ever realize is that I am redeemed.  I have not been abandoned by God.  Neither have I been forgotten.    David had it right in his psalms: we cry out to God and we are healed.  He didn't tell us "God only hears the pretty words.  Speak only of love and praise, only then will you be heard."  No, it's pretty clear: we find healing and redemption because we cry out in our anger and our fear.

I do not believe in a Santa Claus god, who bestows presents on the deserving: God does not provide parking spaces or jobs, nor do we win wars or sporting events as the result of our faith and prayers.  Good people will die, evil people will prosper, the sun will continue to blaze in the noonday sky. world without end, amen amen.

In my faith, in my prayer, what I find, again and again-- what I am given, again and again, is grace.  What I get is strength and courage to face what life has placed in front of me in that moment...even if that thing is the death of my beloved brother.  My faith is not a guarantee that I will never know fear, or that only good and happy things will happen.  My faith, my prayer allows me to put one foot in front of the other and know that I will be carried through.  And in that exact moment,  the moment I take that step, I am enough and I am redeemed.  And in that moment, I dance in the palm of God's hand.

For my brother, Randy (z'l)

May we all dance in the palm of God's hand

L'shana tova u'metukah

May you have a good and sweet year

For Herschel (z"l)

He straddled continents
and countries
and oceans
and time,

With clear eyes
and big dreams
and whispered hopes
of change
and tradition.

He was last.
He was first,
and strode through centuries
Seeing the turn of revolutions,
the flare of war
the startlement of peace;
Witnessing the birth of nations
and the death of ideals.

He found eternity
in the eyes of his children
And grace
in the heart of his bride
And God
in sweet wine
and gentle flickerflames
and sun-kissed horizons
of sacred nights
and holy days.

Holy, holy, holy.


Zichrono liv'racha
May his memory be for a blessing

Ribbons

The ribbon---
Now cut;
A neat snip of black cloth
On black cloth.
It disappears
Against a background of grief.


The ribbon---
Now cut;
It used to be torn.
Rent.
A whole tapestry,
A whole life.
Ripped and frayed,
Separate from itself.
No neat edges
Or symmetry,
No patchwork grace.
Just tangled threads,
Broken strands,
Dark on darker still,
Seasoned with salt and ash.


That ribbon of black---
Now cut;
Threaded through with light
That dances on hard edges
And skims along soft folds,
Offering a pale benediction,
And a sacred comfort,
A holy silence---
In a ribbon of black
Shot through with light
And cut---
Now cut,
Now broken
And frayed
And ragged-edged,
Woven in grief and praise.

Joy in the Empty Spaces

31 August 2011/01 Elul 5771

I miss my brother.  It has been almost a year now, and still, there are times when missing him threatens to swallow me whole.  In an instant, grief comes racing in from nowhere, and I am wrapped in solitary and breathless sorrow.  Mostly though, it is a gentle missing, filled with love and soft regret-- that he is gone, that my hand is halfway to the phone before I remember that he won't answer, that he will not see his nephew make that sometimes graceful, sometimes gawky leap from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, that there is a small emptiness where he once stood.

And what if he suddenly appeared, filling that empty space?  What would I say?

I have no idea.

I'd like to think that I managed, through grace and luck, to say everything I needed to say before he died.  Words like I miss you and I love you skitter through my head, fleeting as a summer shower.  All our words, all our thoughts:  spoken and unspoken, whispered and trumpeted in our pain and our hope, they were all woven together into the tight space of his hospital room, connecting him to us to God in some eternal tapestry of unutterable and awesome beauty.

I think.  I hope.

I pray.

I've prayed a lot this last almost-year.  I stumbled into that sacred dance of mourning, a stutter step of hesitation, growing in surety and ease, reciting such ancient words to the exaltation of a God who seems both near and far, present and not, just and merciful and cruel.  In the beginning, I wept-- great wracking sobs that stole my voice and my exaltation.  I wept-- and there were hands that reached out, in comfort and with grace.  And when I could not pray, could barely manage to say my brother's name, there were other voices to carry me, to lift me and sustain me and let me find my way.

Reciting Kaddish is no longer a staccato pulse, insistent and harsh and pounding.  Now there is a quiet grace note, starting low, gaining in depth and richness as I stand with eyes closed and fingers laced around my prayer book.  There is such power in this prayer!  I can feel my brother, close as light, as heat or love.  My sorrow washes over me like water over stone, clean and pure, no longer pooling, dank and cold at my feet.  I can feel God again, holy and waiting for me to start the dance, ready to catch me should I falter.

Just about a year.  It has taken me just about a year to find my way to this place of-- if not exaltation, then certainly of celebration-- of my brother, of God.  Even of God.

And now it's time to let my brother go.

Not his memory, or my love for him.  Not even of my sadness.  All this time-- of sorrow and grief and learning to find laughter and joy and hope again, I thought this was his last gift to me, a last lesson: learning to find joy in the empty spaces.  Every day, for eleven months, I have recited Kaddish.  I have stumbled and stammered my way through these words to honor my brother and his memory, to find grace and healing, to rest again in the palm of God's hand. 

Almost a year later, and I finally get that this has been about his journey, not mine.

For these eleven months, our mourning has allowed us to share in his soul’s journey, to help him find his way.  Now he must find that last bit of eternity on his own.   This is about his soul's journey-- to God perhaps, or to Home, or Heaven.  Perhaps everywhere all at once.  But it is his way to find.  We release him, in love and faith, into the sacred space of remembrance.  

We say zichrono liv'rachah: may his memory be for a blessing. He touched the hearts and lives of so many, and the world is different-- better-- because he was in it.  His memory will surely be a blessing.

But there is one other thing.  More than a blessing, let his memory be for a prayer: zichrono li't'filla.  Let his memory teach us to reach and strive and praise and celebrate and hope and love.  Every day.  Even as we mourn, perhaps because we mourn, let his memory be for a prayer--- of comfort, whole and holy.  

What would I say to my brother, if he appeared, if he paused for a moment just before he soars and leaps and dances with God?  I would say I love you; I miss you. And finally--

Let your soul find peace on your journey.

Let your memory shine as blessing and prayer.

And let us say: amen.

Zichrono liv'rachah v'li't'filla