FAITH HOUSE Manhattan

A Sabbath Poem (Polacco)

THE TASTE OF WARM BREAD
~ by Stacey Polacco (New York City)

A child stands outside
The bakery window staring at the
Freshly baked bread,
the scent of hot dough rises up into her imagination and
she can taste the softness between her lips,
the hard chewy crust delicious on her tongue
she continues to stare and sees pure perfection
As if nothing in the world ever looked so good
So desirable, though she’s not unfamiliar with
Being hungry and staring at what she can’t have
Which at first – makes her wonder why…?
Why she can’t havea piece of what she desperately hungers for
Why so many others can
But then understands somehow that starving and staring
Is exactly where she’s supposed to be
As if the bakery was created to reveal her hunger
And there is a delight in that, as there is a delight in the dough
And she breathes in what she knows she can’t have
filled with a sense she somehow created it.

(Thank you Stacey for this gift!)

Thank you!

The first big news is that on June 14 about sixty of us had our first preview gathering!  Next week, expect a special newsletter about the event. For information on July 26 and August 23 preview sessions click HERE.

Secondly, after four months of searching, processing a number of applications, and conducting interviews, we have found our three co-leaders!

After the last phone call of this exhilarting and exhausting process, I went to my bedroom/office, sat down and cried. They were tears of happiness and gratitude to God. And to you.

Their names are Jill, Bowie, and Rabia--yes, all women! Click below to read their bios, see their pictures, sense their dreams. They are responsible for guiding, nurturing, and growing individual members and our community as a whole.  Below is a picture taken in my apartment on May 28, 2008, when three of them met for the very first time.

Jill Minkoff (Judaism), READ BIO

Bowie Snodgrass (Christianity), READ BIO

Rabia Gentile (Islam), READ BIO

To support Jill, Bowie, and Rabia, click HERE.

Those of you who have been thinking about contributing but never took time to do it, please take time right now. Click on the link below and help us move the heart all the way across the city!

Samir Selmanovic and Lauralea Banks, New York City

A Sabbath Poem (Oliver)

 

PRAYING
~ by Mary Oliver

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

(from Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 2006)
Thank you Rabbi David Ingber for sending us this book!

God and the Human Face: A Shavuot Reflection

~ Rabbi Or N. Rose is an associate dean at the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College and the co-editor of Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice (Jewish Lights Publishing). Rabbi Rose is a friend  and precious source of wisdom and encouragement to Faith House.

The festival of Shavuot celebrates God’s revelation of the Torah to the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai.  Throughout the ages, Jewish thinkers have interpreted this foundational narrative in a variety of ways, reflecting their beliefs and experiences.  One teaching on matan Torah (“the giving of the Torah”) that I find particularly inspiring is a sermon by the Hasidic sage, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi of Ropshitz (1760-1827), recorded in the book Zera Kodesh.*

The Ropshitzer (as he is called by Hasidim) begins his commentary by quoting his teacher, Rabbi Mendl of Rymanov, who asserts that at Sinai the people of Israel heard “nothing from the mouth of God other than the letter aleph of the first utterance—‘Anokhi, I am the Lord Your God’ (Exodus 20:2).**”   In other words, what the Israelites heard at Sinai from God was undifferentiated sound or the “sound of silence,” for a freestanding aleph makes no sound at all.  In either case, this interpretation is a significant revision of the biblical text (see Exodus 20:1), as it denies that God articulated any specific content to Israel. 

What leads this Hasidic master to reach such a daring conclusion?  He bases his comment on a statement from the book of Psalms, “One thing God has spoken but two things I have heard” (62:12).  That is to say, while the Divine-human encounter is pregnant with meaning, it always requires interpretation to determine its significance for an individual or community.

Following his teacher’s comments about the aural dimension of the revelation, the Ropshitzer inquires about what the Israelites saw at Sinai.  This is a thorny question because in the book of Deuteronomy there are two contradictory statements about the issue. Deuteronomy 4:15 states, “You saw no image when the Lord your God spoke to you,” but just one chapter later it reads, “The Lord spoke with you face to face at the mountain” (5:4).

The Ropshitzer’s resolution of this contradiction builds upon Rabbi Mendel’s insight about the aleph.  He states that while God was indeed formless at Sinai, the people did see a representation of the Divine—the letter aleph.  Where did the Israelites see the aleph?  Was it projected in the sky as a sign of God’s presence, did it take the form of a pillar of fire or a cloud of smoke?  No, the aleph appeared on the faces of the people of Israel.
 

 

Thinking visually, the Ropshitzer explains that if one deconstructs the figure of the aleph, detaching the upper and lower markings from the central line, the components can be restructured to create two eyes and a nose, the outline of a human face. 

He goes on to say that each eye resembles the letter yud (the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet), and the nose between them looks like a vav (the sixth letter).  And when one adds up the two yuds and the vav they equal 26 (10+10+6=26).  Amazingly, this number is the same as God’s most sacred name—Yud, Heh, Vav, Heh (10+5+6+5=26), sometimes rendered as “Yahweh” in English, but considered ineffable, unpronounceable, by Jewish authorities.

   

So what does all of this fanciful exegesis mean?  It means, according to the Ropshitzer, that “every human face” represents both the essence of Torah—the aleph—and the sanctity of God’s name—Yud, Heh, Vav, Heh.  It means that at Sinai the community of Israel came to a heightened awareness of the holiness of every person in their midst—from the prophet to the water carrier, from the priest to the wood chopper.  As the Ropshitzer points out, this notion is first articulated in the book of Genesis (1:27), where the Bible describes Adam, the first human, as a being created “in the image of God.”  

The implication of such teachings is that every person—Jew and non-Jew alike (since we are all descendents of Adam and Eve)—must be treated as a holy being, as a bearer of revelation, as a unique manifestation of the Divine.  This is the meaning, says the Ropshitzer, of the teaching in Psalm 16:8, “I set the Lord before me continually.”  In his words, “The seal of the Holy Blessed One is literally on our faces.”

May we be blessed this Shavuot to experience the great and ongoing revelation of God and Torah in the faces of all those who we encounter.

______________

* I wish to thank my teacher, Rabbi Arthur Green, for sharing this text with me.  See his brief comments on this teaching in Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology, pp. 111-112 (Jewish Lights).

**  My translation is based on that of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner in his The Way Into Jewish Mysticism, pp. 65-69 (Jewish Lights).

A Sabbath Poem (Frost)

A TIME TO TALK
~ by Robert Frost

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, "What is it?"
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

(from You Come Too, by Robert Frost, Owlet, 2002)

And Not But: Celebrating Contradiction in Relationships

~Nancy Shainberg-Colier was raised in the traditions of the East, primarily Buddhism, and is now most closely connected with the Vedanta/Hindu path, but always learning and seeking. She is also a psychotherapist, writer and Focusing practitioner.  With her husband Frederic and a five year old daughter Juliet, Nancy lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I met Samir recently at an interfaith gathering and it was there that I first learned of Faith House.  At the ceremony he raised the question (and I am paraphrasing here) of how we could be alive, engage in dialogue as human beings, and not talk about God or meaning of life itself.  This comment resonated deeply within me. Having grown up and lived in New York City for many years, I have felt the great need for a place where people are talking about the real issues of being alive, of having been "given" life.  There is definitely a place in this city for an intergenerational interfaith community that includes the "all" without diluting the weight of the "each."  So too, I share the desire to participate in raising our particularly American consciousness out of its materialistic malaise and into something that includes our whole being and is ultimately more satisfying.  Here is my reflection about relationships between people and the role of contradiction.  This can be applied to relationships between groups or religions as well.

The Problem with Contradiction

Nature abhors a vacuum, or so they say.  Similarly, it seems that human beings abhor contradiction, particularly in the context of intimate relationships. People attempt to package their feelings as positive or negative, believing that contradictory feelings cannot and should not co-exist.  In approaching their relationships, people use the word but to connect their contradictory feelings, as if the positive wipes out the negative and vice versa.  In fact, for a relationship to succeed, and not but must be the approach we take when linking the inconsistent feelings that are at the heart of all relationships.  

All relationships resolve in contradiction. Why then is it so difficult for us to accept contradictory feelings inside ourselves?  First, we are trained to believe that consistency is the basic nature of all things, that there is an answer to all questions, one answer.  Human beings ask the question “Is it good or bad?”  Science asks the question “Is it true or false?”  Religion asks the question “Is it right or wrong?”   We like simple, clean, straightforward answers.  If it’s both simultaneously then we are in for a more complicated consideration, a more unsettling resolution. 

We seek to obliterate internal contradiction because it causes discomfort and pain.  As humans, we are always trying to grasp pleasure and avoid pain. It doesn’t make sense that we can feel both love and hate, appreciation and disappointment, relief and frustration, all at once.  In relationship, when we open to our full experience we must face the truth that all of these contradictory feelings exist in our experience of our partner.  Such an openness of vision means accepting that we are receiving certain joys and being deprived of others.  This can be quite painful and unsettling to live with. 

Celebrating Contradiction

And not but is perhaps the most important concept in relationship.  Contradiction is truth; there is always both positive and negative existing simultaneously.  When we recognize difficulty in our relationship, we must relate to that difficulty as an addition to the positive, as an and.  It is not a but, not something that eliminates the positive. 

When we operate from a place of and, we can stand back and look clearly at the entire landscape of the relationship, make room for the full spectrum of our experience.  From this place of clarity we can make free choices.  By laying out what we are receiving and what we are missing, we can choose if we want to stay in the relationship and/or how we want to stay in it.  We can determine if what we are receiving is that which matters most, and conversely if what we are giving up is acceptable to give up. Being able to allow the whole relationship to exist with all of its contradictions, all its ands, allows us to get to know ourselves, our truth, our priorities.  It helps us determine our “non-negotiables,” those aspects of a relationship or life that we are unwilling to do without. Further, in recognizing the places where we are sacrificing, we can more fully appreciate the places we are receiving.  We generate compassion and appreciation for ourselves when we are able to accept the whole picture that is relationship. It is a compassion borne of  awareness, recognizing the profundity of the choices we are making.  Free to acknowledge and experience our partner’s value in our life, we can now fully appreciate our relationship, which is ultimately what makes it work.