the ten plagues, or how to practice buddhism and still eat chocolate cake.
Here are the ten plagues that the Holy One, Blessed is He, brought upon the Egyptians in Egypt:
blood, frogs, lice, a maelstrom of beasts, pestilence, boils, and hail-full-of-fire, locusts, a clotted darkness--too thick to pass. The killing of the firstborn.
My impulse has always been to recoil from this moment in the Passover service, even, as a child, to giggle at the impossibility of such old-fashioned, or strange, or ancient woes: boils? locusts? To pretend that a God I wanted to believe was merciful, a God I want to believe is merciful (for all of us now pray to God that I will be delivered from cancer, every stray eyelash, every birthday candle, every time the clock reads 11:11, we, meaning the tiny circle of people impacted every day, who watch my body like hawks, we all wish for such a miracle) is not capable of taking away the breath of children, of our collectively beloved first borns. My Cameron, your Willa, your Justin.
These plagues are not simply useful metaphors, though, and the lesson about freedom and the cost of freedom is heavy and its own burden to bear. Is there and has there ever been the defeat of evil without cost to the innocent bystander? Is there ever an innocent bystander?
I know I'm a Jew, one of the enslaved, and my part of the Seder is the Dayenu part, but I can't help thinking about the Egyptian mothers. What was it like to wake up on the mornings after the Hebrews left? Without the enslaved who the enslavers depended upon not just to do the work they did not want to do, the work none of us wants to do, but depended upon to understand who they were? Their very identity depended upon the enslaved. And the emptiness, the terrible emptiness of the homes without their beloved first borns, the light may have been back, but to what end? what light could lift the darkness which must have settled in their hearts without their darling first children, the children who made them parents, who made them mothers? The grieving burdened with shame, their desperate pleas to their gods who had betrayed them still echoing in their minds. All of the burnt offerings, all of the trickster high priests and pharaohs laid low by all of the betrayal and grief.
Did the Egyptians feel remorse? Was that when God turned back to them with mercy? Was that how it was here, when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves and Reconstruction burned its own history of remorse into that part of the country? Has the South been forgiven? Have we been forgiven for the trail of tears which burned an invisible map over the map of the United States such that none of us, not a one, can trace our story back to innocence? It doesn't feel like we live in a land of forgiveness these days, to me.
You bet I'm uncomfortable when my God sweeps in with a mighty sword and takes the lives of children, because I know I'm no better or worse than your average Egyptian in the Passover story, would that we all be traitors to our nation when our nations are treacherous. Would that we all be morally courageous enough to risk life and limb to do what is right, instead of quietly pulling the shade, shutting the screen door, turning off the television, looking away from the Youtube video where the man is dying on the front seat of his car, the back yard of his grandmother's home, the sidewalk in front of the convenience store.
The hitch in the story is that every first born is slain. The first born of the mightiest, meanest, slave holder of them all, the first born of the secret abolitionist Egyptian. The rabbis say that mercy should outweigh justice, don't they? Didn't I read that somewhere? It feels awry here in this last terrible plague. All justice, no mercy.
Dayenu. It would have been enough. Had he taken us out from Egypt without delivering judgments against them, it would have been enough.
Passover is on my mind. The Brown, Faget, Gutfeld, Edwards, Dorsey families had our own mini plague of pestilence sweep through the family over Passover weekend. Did it start when my father woke up tremendously ill on Tuesday night? Did it start when the twins threw up in a bizarre tandem fashion on Friday night? (I'm going to throw up, said Elijah. Me too, said Asher. And it commenced). No matter, it continues to level adults and children alike, one by one. My mother keeps me apprised of the latest victim of the scourge by texting me: Dan has succumbed. Cameron has succumbed.
My mother herself missed Seder with our extended family on Saturday night because she was so ill. This from a woman who prides herself on not getting sick, and who perhaps would take a baby aspirin for a raging fever, but only perhaps. The consequence was that my Aunt Rose and I shared the leader role for the service, partitioning various parts out at will to different guests (the artless son: Uncle Steve, the dayenu refrains: Uncle Charlie.) It was not lost on my children that I may not be here in Jersualem next year, and getting a chance to be the leader out of order, before my time, was something of a gift. But again, a merciful gift while my mother lay alone, feverish, during Seder.
As you all know, I'm a terrible Jew. Most of you have already heard the story about the time when I happened to be sitting down for dinner with all of my first round of older children, who really were children at the time, on one of the Jewish holidays that usually passed without notice in our household, let's say Rosh Hashanah, and I said, hey, it's Rosh Hashanah, and then prattled on for a few moments about the holiday, until a moment of blessed silence reigned and Zoe piped up: "Do we know anyone who is Amish?" This led to years of my friends referring to me as Amish and countless hours of fun with jokes about zippers and rumspringa.
We're more observant, in a certain way now, and it's completely connected to how much time I have (much more than in my early years as an associate, when traditions had to be dyed-in-the-wool to be honored), and to the fact that my parents moved here from Ohio, and joined a temple, and to Kyle's love of Judaism (she was in a long relationship with someone who was very observant before she had ever heard of me). The boys are in Hebrew school--although as many of you know, there was an evening earlier this year when the boys attended Hebrew school dressed as Santa's elves, so the cognitive dissonance continues.
I have spent a fair amount of time asking questions of the universe of late, including some long sessions with our rabbi at the temple to which we all now belong. The answers have not always been forthcoming or easy, because, well, there aren't lovely, nicely packaged answers in Judaism to questions like what happens when I die? is there something else after I die?
This is not a religion with images of angels in heaven, welcoming you in with backlit golden wings. The answers my rabbi metes out have to do with me getting comfortable, less anxious, shall we say, about not knowing.
In my support group for people who have metastatic cancer (shit, that sounds like it sucks doesn't it? talk about a group you never want to join), we have people of all manner of faiths. Last week, a new person showed up with a crazy hair dye job--her medium-length hair was more or less green. She just switched out of the ovarian cancer support group when her cancer metastasized to her liver, or maybe it was to her kidney. She ruefully told us she knows she is going to lose her hair, so she went ahead and colored it green. Sure, we nodded, of course.
There's a woman in her seventies who was a tennis pro in her previous life in the group. She looks the absolute picture of health, and she is tanned and super calm, radiating calm. She practices Buddhism. She told us that she often says to herself: death comes without warning; this body will be a corpse. I went to google this, to be sure I got that right and not only is that right--it's part of a series of things one says to oneself when one is a Tibetan Buddhist--it's also a t-shirt you can order on Amazon. So she, apparently, is comfortable with impermanence. I'm jealous of her calm, centered self. She has breast cancer which has metastasized somewhere. She cheerfully told me, after I burst into tears talking about watching the boys at hip hop class last week, that her sister has the Chinese lung cancer too (see earlier blog if you think I have finally lost it), and she and her sister joke about being related to Genghis Khan. This is what funny is in the metastatic cancer support group.
Tonglen is the Buddhist practice of exchanging oneself for others, a bodichitta practice for activating loving-kindness and compassion. In Tibetan, the word tonglen literally means "sending and taking." As far as I can tell, tonglen mean being willing to take in the pain and suffering of ourselves and others and sending out happiness to us all. The basic idea is impossibly simple: breathe in what is painful and unwanted with the sincere wish for an end to suffering and breathe out the relief from pain with the intention of happiness. What the hell does that mean? I hear you, Stephanie Brown. I have to admit I am reminded of a moment of internal eye-rolling I experienced my senior year in college when I was wearily brushing my teeth at the long institutional sink of the dormitory bathroom and a hippy sort of girl cheerily admonished me, chirping at me to breathe out the black air and breathe in the pink. Good grief.
I have a friend who sent me a book of psalms. Psalm 13 is the plain spoken version of Gerard Manley Hopkins anguished line in Carrion Comfort: "That night, that year/of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God." The psalm reads: "How long, my Beloved? Will you forget me forever?"
The story of Passover seemed remote to me as a child, an ancient story with impossible occurrences--a plague of frogs, and doorposts smeared with blood, and angels of death, and seas that parted. The idea of humans stricken by fear at the idea of being alone in the night, without God listening, or perhaps worse, with only a God capable of justice with vengeance is, of course, completely familiar, whether writ small (please let me live to help usher all my children pass over into adult lives, where the death of a mother does not threaten in the same way) or writ large (please let this country begin to heal the divides that make living, just living, so unsafe for people with brown and black skin), new stories (where do we find God in worlds mediated by phones and computer), old stories (Egypt. Israel). There can't be any justice served, I insist, when people are really swept away in tsunamis.
I am drawn to the idea of Tonglen because it is a practice that can be focused on people you know--please let me allieviate the suffering of those in my family who are afflicted by mental illness, so acutely painful for some right now, as I write--and people you don't know--please let those suffering in Syria, those families living in war, right now, as I write. I haven't the slightest idea how to really practice it, though. When I am meditating, when I am taking my qi gong class, when I am listening to my Buddhist tennis pro calmly talk about her body as a corpse, I hold within me this brainy Jewish girl who just will not shut up. She won't stop quoting poetry and thinking about youtube videos and recipes for chocolate cake and how terrified she is of dying. She harangues God, in between pretty peaceful moments of meditation and ever-curious readings of Pema Chodron.
The way I know best to take in the pain and suffering of someone else is to bring that person into my house, seat them down at the table, cry with them, laugh loudly, too loudly, at how hilarious and witty we both are, make fun of something or someone (I'm pretty sure this is totally against Buddhism), push them into reading a favorite book (right now I am recommending, for those of you who want something delightful and light, Meddling Kids, a novel about, you got it, a group of meddling kids who solve mysteries, thank you Hanna-Barbera), and feed them: Thai peanut chicken, coconut cake, broccoli and cheddar soup, homemade bread with thick slabs of salted butter. I'm really trying to be Buddhist and meditate and seriously, I have a book called the How Not to Die Cookbook--it's really true, google it. I might buy the shirt about the my body will be a corpse, but I can't help it, when I wear it, if someone comes up to me at the soccer field and tries to engage in a serious conversation with me about it, I'm going to crack up and tell them I'm terrified, and I might have had a kale smoothie at breakfast, but by lunch, I drove to Kimball Farms and had a scoop of grapenut ice cream with hot fudge (and that is a reason to drive to Carlisle, friends, that, and come by for some bread and a hug). As Walt Whitman said, I contain multitudes.
blood, frogs, lice, a maelstrom of beasts, pestilence, boils, and hail-full-of-fire, locusts, a clotted darkness--too thick to pass. The killing of the firstborn.
My impulse has always been to recoil from this moment in the Passover service, even, as a child, to giggle at the impossibility of such old-fashioned, or strange, or ancient woes: boils? locusts? To pretend that a God I wanted to believe was merciful, a God I want to believe is merciful (for all of us now pray to God that I will be delivered from cancer, every stray eyelash, every birthday candle, every time the clock reads 11:11, we, meaning the tiny circle of people impacted every day, who watch my body like hawks, we all wish for such a miracle) is not capable of taking away the breath of children, of our collectively beloved first borns. My Cameron, your Willa, your Justin.
These plagues are not simply useful metaphors, though, and the lesson about freedom and the cost of freedom is heavy and its own burden to bear. Is there and has there ever been the defeat of evil without cost to the innocent bystander? Is there ever an innocent bystander?
I know I'm a Jew, one of the enslaved, and my part of the Seder is the Dayenu part, but I can't help thinking about the Egyptian mothers. What was it like to wake up on the mornings after the Hebrews left? Without the enslaved who the enslavers depended upon not just to do the work they did not want to do, the work none of us wants to do, but depended upon to understand who they were? Their very identity depended upon the enslaved. And the emptiness, the terrible emptiness of the homes without their beloved first borns, the light may have been back, but to what end? what light could lift the darkness which must have settled in their hearts without their darling first children, the children who made them parents, who made them mothers? The grieving burdened with shame, their desperate pleas to their gods who had betrayed them still echoing in their minds. All of the burnt offerings, all of the trickster high priests and pharaohs laid low by all of the betrayal and grief.
Did the Egyptians feel remorse? Was that when God turned back to them with mercy? Was that how it was here, when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves and Reconstruction burned its own history of remorse into that part of the country? Has the South been forgiven? Have we been forgiven for the trail of tears which burned an invisible map over the map of the United States such that none of us, not a one, can trace our story back to innocence? It doesn't feel like we live in a land of forgiveness these days, to me.
You bet I'm uncomfortable when my God sweeps in with a mighty sword and takes the lives of children, because I know I'm no better or worse than your average Egyptian in the Passover story, would that we all be traitors to our nation when our nations are treacherous. Would that we all be morally courageous enough to risk life and limb to do what is right, instead of quietly pulling the shade, shutting the screen door, turning off the television, looking away from the Youtube video where the man is dying on the front seat of his car, the back yard of his grandmother's home, the sidewalk in front of the convenience store.
The hitch in the story is that every first born is slain. The first born of the mightiest, meanest, slave holder of them all, the first born of the secret abolitionist Egyptian. The rabbis say that mercy should outweigh justice, don't they? Didn't I read that somewhere? It feels awry here in this last terrible plague. All justice, no mercy.
Dayenu. It would have been enough. Had he taken us out from Egypt without delivering judgments against them, it would have been enough.
Passover is on my mind. The Brown, Faget, Gutfeld, Edwards, Dorsey families had our own mini plague of pestilence sweep through the family over Passover weekend. Did it start when my father woke up tremendously ill on Tuesday night? Did it start when the twins threw up in a bizarre tandem fashion on Friday night? (I'm going to throw up, said Elijah. Me too, said Asher. And it commenced). No matter, it continues to level adults and children alike, one by one. My mother keeps me apprised of the latest victim of the scourge by texting me: Dan has succumbed. Cameron has succumbed.
My mother herself missed Seder with our extended family on Saturday night because she was so ill. This from a woman who prides herself on not getting sick, and who perhaps would take a baby aspirin for a raging fever, but only perhaps. The consequence was that my Aunt Rose and I shared the leader role for the service, partitioning various parts out at will to different guests (the artless son: Uncle Steve, the dayenu refrains: Uncle Charlie.) It was not lost on my children that I may not be here in Jersualem next year, and getting a chance to be the leader out of order, before my time, was something of a gift. But again, a merciful gift while my mother lay alone, feverish, during Seder.
As you all know, I'm a terrible Jew. Most of you have already heard the story about the time when I happened to be sitting down for dinner with all of my first round of older children, who really were children at the time, on one of the Jewish holidays that usually passed without notice in our household, let's say Rosh Hashanah, and I said, hey, it's Rosh Hashanah, and then prattled on for a few moments about the holiday, until a moment of blessed silence reigned and Zoe piped up: "Do we know anyone who is Amish?" This led to years of my friends referring to me as Amish and countless hours of fun with jokes about zippers and rumspringa.
We're more observant, in a certain way now, and it's completely connected to how much time I have (much more than in my early years as an associate, when traditions had to be dyed-in-the-wool to be honored), and to the fact that my parents moved here from Ohio, and joined a temple, and to Kyle's love of Judaism (she was in a long relationship with someone who was very observant before she had ever heard of me). The boys are in Hebrew school--although as many of you know, there was an evening earlier this year when the boys attended Hebrew school dressed as Santa's elves, so the cognitive dissonance continues.
I have spent a fair amount of time asking questions of the universe of late, including some long sessions with our rabbi at the temple to which we all now belong. The answers have not always been forthcoming or easy, because, well, there aren't lovely, nicely packaged answers in Judaism to questions like what happens when I die? is there something else after I die?
This is not a religion with images of angels in heaven, welcoming you in with backlit golden wings. The answers my rabbi metes out have to do with me getting comfortable, less anxious, shall we say, about not knowing.
In my support group for people who have metastatic cancer (shit, that sounds like it sucks doesn't it? talk about a group you never want to join), we have people of all manner of faiths. Last week, a new person showed up with a crazy hair dye job--her medium-length hair was more or less green. She just switched out of the ovarian cancer support group when her cancer metastasized to her liver, or maybe it was to her kidney. She ruefully told us she knows she is going to lose her hair, so she went ahead and colored it green. Sure, we nodded, of course.
There's a woman in her seventies who was a tennis pro in her previous life in the group. She looks the absolute picture of health, and she is tanned and super calm, radiating calm. She practices Buddhism. She told us that she often says to herself: death comes without warning; this body will be a corpse. I went to google this, to be sure I got that right and not only is that right--it's part of a series of things one says to oneself when one is a Tibetan Buddhist--it's also a t-shirt you can order on Amazon. So she, apparently, is comfortable with impermanence. I'm jealous of her calm, centered self. She has breast cancer which has metastasized somewhere. She cheerfully told me, after I burst into tears talking about watching the boys at hip hop class last week, that her sister has the Chinese lung cancer too (see earlier blog if you think I have finally lost it), and she and her sister joke about being related to Genghis Khan. This is what funny is in the metastatic cancer support group.
Tonglen is the Buddhist practice of exchanging oneself for others, a bodichitta practice for activating loving-kindness and compassion. In Tibetan, the word tonglen literally means "sending and taking." As far as I can tell, tonglen mean being willing to take in the pain and suffering of ourselves and others and sending out happiness to us all. The basic idea is impossibly simple: breathe in what is painful and unwanted with the sincere wish for an end to suffering and breathe out the relief from pain with the intention of happiness. What the hell does that mean? I hear you, Stephanie Brown. I have to admit I am reminded of a moment of internal eye-rolling I experienced my senior year in college when I was wearily brushing my teeth at the long institutional sink of the dormitory bathroom and a hippy sort of girl cheerily admonished me, chirping at me to breathe out the black air and breathe in the pink. Good grief.
I have a friend who sent me a book of psalms. Psalm 13 is the plain spoken version of Gerard Manley Hopkins anguished line in Carrion Comfort: "That night, that year/of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God." The psalm reads: "How long, my Beloved? Will you forget me forever?"
The story of Passover seemed remote to me as a child, an ancient story with impossible occurrences--a plague of frogs, and doorposts smeared with blood, and angels of death, and seas that parted. The idea of humans stricken by fear at the idea of being alone in the night, without God listening, or perhaps worse, with only a God capable of justice with vengeance is, of course, completely familiar, whether writ small (please let me live to help usher all my children pass over into adult lives, where the death of a mother does not threaten in the same way) or writ large (please let this country begin to heal the divides that make living, just living, so unsafe for people with brown and black skin), new stories (where do we find God in worlds mediated by phones and computer), old stories (Egypt. Israel). There can't be any justice served, I insist, when people are really swept away in tsunamis.
I am drawn to the idea of Tonglen because it is a practice that can be focused on people you know--please let me allieviate the suffering of those in my family who are afflicted by mental illness, so acutely painful for some right now, as I write--and people you don't know--please let those suffering in Syria, those families living in war, right now, as I write. I haven't the slightest idea how to really practice it, though. When I am meditating, when I am taking my qi gong class, when I am listening to my Buddhist tennis pro calmly talk about her body as a corpse, I hold within me this brainy Jewish girl who just will not shut up. She won't stop quoting poetry and thinking about youtube videos and recipes for chocolate cake and how terrified she is of dying. She harangues God, in between pretty peaceful moments of meditation and ever-curious readings of Pema Chodron.
The way I know best to take in the pain and suffering of someone else is to bring that person into my house, seat them down at the table, cry with them, laugh loudly, too loudly, at how hilarious and witty we both are, make fun of something or someone (I'm pretty sure this is totally against Buddhism), push them into reading a favorite book (right now I am recommending, for those of you who want something delightful and light, Meddling Kids, a novel about, you got it, a group of meddling kids who solve mysteries, thank you Hanna-Barbera), and feed them: Thai peanut chicken, coconut cake, broccoli and cheddar soup, homemade bread with thick slabs of salted butter. I'm really trying to be Buddhist and meditate and seriously, I have a book called the How Not to Die Cookbook--it's really true, google it. I might buy the shirt about the my body will be a corpse, but I can't help it, when I wear it, if someone comes up to me at the soccer field and tries to engage in a serious conversation with me about it, I'm going to crack up and tell them I'm terrified, and I might have had a kale smoothie at breakfast, but by lunch, I drove to Kimball Farms and had a scoop of grapenut ice cream with hot fudge (and that is a reason to drive to Carlisle, friends, that, and come by for some bread and a hug). As Walt Whitman said, I contain multitudes.
Please invite me to your seat at the table! I’m the tennis player Ju-Bu who loves your writing. Let’s both get the T-shirt and wear it to our next group meeting. Not only is it okay but totally imperative to make fun of everyone and everything as we find our footing along the path to radical impermanence. I’m totally terrified too! But wholesome humor is what gets me through. I like laughing more than crying but do plenty of both. As Joni Mitchell sang, “Its the same release”.
ReplyDelete