No raspberries in the Torah

Last week, during the rehearsal for our adult b'nai mitzvah next week, I had a panic attack while reading the Torah.  I didn't realize it until the next day, when I said to someone, "When I was reading the Torah, I got all flushed and sweaty and couldn't breathe or think."  I had thought it was some sort of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" God moment.

I had had the same experience last time I faced the Torah for the first time to chant a passage, last summer.  I figured that this was a repeat, that something like a divine wind, a ruach, would rise from the Torah and strike me every time I approached it for a new reading.  After the initial experience, the Torah turns back into a fairly normal awesome bit of parchment and ink, but those first experiences are spectacular floods of energy and adrenaline.

I'm kind of bummed that it's just a panic attack, since Raiders is one of my favorite movies.

This week, I had a different experience.  I'd gone back and practiced with the Torah twice during the week, I'd been rehearsed by an expert friend of mine, and I was ready.

My portion is Va'era, specifically Exodus 7:19-25.  There I was, chanting along, feeling really confident and relaxed.  And then I got to the hardest word in the portion.  You can see it here in typeface Hebrew, fully vowelled and cantillated.

Va-YAY-ha-fe-koo.  Five syllables.  Most Hebrew words are three or fewer, so this throws me off.  I don't know Hebrew, so every syllable is unfamiliar.  Looking it up, it means "and they were changed."  It's approximately the middle word of my portion.  It has a standalone trope, tvir.  In the actual Torah I'm reading from, in calligraphy and with no vowels, it looks like this:

Easily confused with other words, right?
Last week, the rabbi spent some time with me after my panic attack, helping me with the places I was most stuck.  This word.   He told me to really rock the second syllable, YAY, to celebrate that I am embracing this challenging word. 

This week, in my confidence I cruised right over the word.  My mind told me it was a different word, and I chanted something else (still in tvir, however!).  Because every word must be pronounced correctly, the rabbi, reading along with me, quietly corrected me. 

And out came the raspberries. That word!

We were practicing with the sound system, so the incredibly obnoxious noise I made echoed throughout the sanctuary. 

The rabbi turned to the three other b'nai mitzvah and said, "Now, we know that that is exactly what we are not supposed to do during the service when I correct you, right?"

I cruised through the rest of my portion, no issues, giggling all the way.  No panic attack.  I think I will be OK next week.

The best Christmas ever.

Merry Christmas! I am having such a wonderful time at my own Christmas party. Just me. I've had an emotionally and logistically complex few days, and today I finally got some me time: time to spend in my own life and at my own pace.

So after a brunch in Burlingame this morning (hitting the road when it's empty and the sky is clear is a great way to start the day) I took a nap and was awakened to my first Christmas present: my phone was ringing. For the past four days my home phone has been out of service, causing me to have a variety of meltdowns while I wait on hold to ask again when it will be fixed. I finally emailed the CEO of the company (whom I know -- it's not AT&T!) as well as the head of customer service, and the latter called me back within the hour on my repaired line.

A cloud lifted.

I walked on this beautiful sunny day to the local Borders to do Christmas shopping for niece and nephew. I knew what I wanted to get nephew, but I forgot who the author was, and the self-service stations weren't spitting it out when I searched for it. It also appears that Borders blocks access to Amazon.com from iPhones. I was, however, able to easily get into Amazon if I googled a specific book. After an hour, I figured it out: Bad Kitty Gets a Bath. Perfect.

And now I'm listening to KFOG's 24 hours of Christmas, which is incredibly fun and diverse, and I made myself dinner -- for the first time in weeks, between eating out, eating at others', and eating crap here. Me time!

Tomorrow won't be so me, but it's filled with tradition:

1. Open the box of Christmas presents that my father and stepmother have sent
2. Stop at my sister's to exchange gifts
3. Party of Torah studiers in the afternoon
4. Chinese food and a movie in the evening

Then on to New Year's, which will be in Tahoe for the first time in memory and promises to be its own unique adventure!

Torah study: VaYera

My favorite moment from Torah study this morning occurred when we were hanging out afterward drinking coffee. D. was really annoyed at the God in this week's portion, who does things like enabling the exile and almost death of Ishmael, telling Abraham to kill Isaac, and destroying Sodom and Gemorrah even though there were probably good people there. "Isn't God supposed to be about forgiveness?" D. asked. Together, 70-year-old M. and I looked at him and, in a tone that implied "you're crazy," said, "No."

I gently suggested to yeshiva-trained D. that his ideas about forgiveness and turn-the-other-cheek stuff come from a different religion. Sure, we have Yom Kippur, when we atone for our sins, but that's about ourselves, not others. While I'm certain there is something somewhere about forgiveness in the Torah, it's not one of the ten commandments, it's not a mitzvah, and it's not part of the endless dietary and cleanliness laws. To have God be forgiving, to have God say that we have to be forgiving of others, and then for us to obey is too easy. To me, it is better that this petulant, vindictive, error-prone, laws-obsessed God is leaving room for us to choose how we all behave toward each other. Forgiving is something we do out of our own free will, not because we have been told to do so.

D'var Torah class

Tonight I sat for two hours in my first d'var Torah class, a class to learn how to provide an analysis of a Torah portion, or parasha. I've been looking forward to this for so long. The analysis of the Torah portion is always my favorite part of a service. I sometimes go to Torah study, where a member of the congregation explicates that week's portion (last week, Bereshit, when God creates the universe, was explicated by a Berkeley astrophysicist who pulled in the prophet Einstein and tried to teach us about 11 dimensions, among other things).

It is said that, since there were 600,000 people at Mount Sinai when Moses received the Torah, there are exactly 600,000 interpretations of it. Or of each passage. Or of each word. Or mark. I couldn't help but think of physics analogies: those 11 dimensions, all rolled up so we can't see them; fractals, which retain their complexity no matter how close you get to them. Jews have been analyzing Torah, and then analyzing the analysis, for more than two millennia. And yet there are always new approaches: apparently there was an instant classic analysis done at Torah study this past year when someone took a passage in Deuteronomy where someone got stoned and analyzed it in the context of pot, ending with Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35." That counts as one of the 600,000. We are also going to learn how to recognize when we've found 600,001st, the one that is wrong.

And I am so humbled. One man in the class had three translations in front of him. Another would suggest sort of historical analysis that the rabbi said needed to be tabled because of their complexity. One woman could read the marks on the letters and chant the passages correctly. I think the purpose of the session tonight was to give us a framework for understanding how to approach a Torah portion. But the content of every sentence was so full of new information for me that I took a ton of notes and feel like I know nothing.

Not to mention how to take notes in English and Hebrew when they are written in opposite directions. I really wanted to write a "bet" (the first letter of Bereshit, a letter that is written larger than the others and that certainly has had 11 dimensions worth of analysis), and I couldn't for the life of me, even staring at the printed letter itself, resolve how it should show up on my paper.

The class itself was enchanting. We jumped back and forth through Genesis and Exodus, taking apart passages and pieces of passages and names of passages and diacritical marks on passages ("Abraham | Abraham" versus "Moses Moses"). At one point, the rabbi decided we needed to look at the real sefer Torah, so he reached into the ark and pulled it out; we rolled it out on a tallis. (It was startlingly casual. Where was the standing and singing and praying?) He wanted to show us that there are gaps, like paragraph breaks, in the Torah and that they are so important that they are indicated in the book form of the Torah we are using.

I've got degrees in literary studies. I can take apart any text using a variety of methodologies (Marxist being my favorite). I've been doing this my whole life. But to analyze the Torah is an entirely different process.

It reminded me of when I started playing hockey a few years ago. With absolutely no athletic experience or talent, I knew from day one that I was in over my head. I knew I was pretty bad. I immediately made plans for extra practice -- I had to work three times as hard as my teammates just to keep up with them. Saturday morning 6:15 practices, stick time, skating clinics, hockey camp. And I did succeed in keeping up respectably in beginner's hockey.

So I asked the rabbi for extra work so I can start feeling like I have traction. He was kind enough not to say, "Learn Hebrew," but I will at least brush up on my numbers so I can follow the verse numbers (hah -- I know how to count to one) and my writing (which is screwy because I can write in script and not print, but even most of my script letters are gone). He gave me the name of a book to read and an online Torah to take a look at. This is like starting from scratch. I do not often feel this far from understanding what can be understood.

What I love is that it is a central principle of Judaism that it is all connected. Everything in the Torah has purpose and meaning. Our job is to work to understand it.