Sonoma County, CA * (415) 779-4914 * Irwin@irwinkeller.com
The author as a 14-year old summer camp rabbi in Oconomowoc, WI. Photo by Dawn Weiner-Kaplow.
Tomorrow is the simcha of my smicha – my rabbinic ordination. It means so much to me after a wait of more than half a century. But history waits for no simcha, and we have to also look at this week’s insurrection in our capital.
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God, you have made the human slightly less than angels. Which is, I'm sure, meant as a compliment. But just under the angels is a bummer of a spot to be in. Not high enough to really get the big picture we need and want. And not rooted in the earth enough to have the ways of knowing that other animals do, who do not have to try to figure out what is motivating them.
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It is harder to leave the Wilderness than it looks. We are peeking across a border into a Paradise right now, where we could be bigger than we are now; our spirits enormous as giants. But it is easier to stay grasshoppers, shrunken, constricted, hard-shelled, afraid of being trampled.
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Miriam was struck with the disease, but until Aharon witnessed it, until she was witnessed, it wasn't quite real. How powerful is the act of witnessing – the way it draws something into manifestation! Torah this week is saying: witness. Make it real. You can't work with it until you see it. Miriam didn't have a prayer of being healed until her unexpected – and blessedly temporary – whiteness was witnessed.
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Our Jewish European ancestors tossed their tefillin overboard along with their languages, rituals and personal histories. They sacrificed their particularity so that we could be Americans. By which we now understand – so we could be White. Now, to take our place in this movement, we have a task – at least those of us who read and live as white – which is to dissimilate. To unlearn. To unlearn all the lessons that whiteness has taught us about who we see and who we don't see…. And whose breath is essential.
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