Observing Our Desires

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Good morning, everyone. I always wait to put my talus on with you, because I always feel like it's just such a nice moment to connect with everybody who's here,

and for you also in whatever position you're in, whether or not you've got a tallit to sort of gather yourself, if not under alongside me putting on a talus as we create a little Minion here. So

just breathing in, getting settled and

getting connected to this group, to the moment, to this morning, wherever you are, in Chicago, in Colorado, on a beach, in a house, on a train with a mouse. I'm going to wrap myself in this chalice.

Take a moment to just breathe. Feel your body breathing.

Send up a prayer of gratitude for the day that you've been given, the body you've been given, the breath you've been given.

Baruch hat, Adonai, Elohim, a shakiff, Betsy, sits it. Oh, and I see Ricky there with the shofar ready to rock and roll. So Ricky, will you awaken us? Great for everybody who's joining minion, you know, who's on on for your first Wednesday since the month of Ella will began, or whatever it is, wherever you've been, Ricky or whoever's got a shofar helps awaken us with the sound of the shofar, as is customary every day during the month of Elul. And so here we are. Thank you. As you're grabbing that, I looked up. I looked up, does one need to stand during the shofar? Because, like, of course, during the High Holidays, you stand. You know. You say the blessing, you listen. It turns out you do not actually always need to stand while listening to the shofar. It's good on the High Holidays to do it. But like if you're sitting right now, as I am, it's okay. You can. You can be awakened in a seated posture, too.

Oh,

uh, Ricky, thank you.

Thank you. I'm going to turn right from there to the text of ahasha AlTi Psalm 27 the psalm for the season. Because when, when we hear shofar, you know, Maimonides says, the sound of the shofar. He says, Well, look, you don't have a choice. You got to listen to it, because it's a commandment during this season. But he says, but there's a hint in it, and the hint is so well accepted. Now, you know when he when he shared it? It was like, Oh, this is, let you in on a little secret. Now, I think we take it for granted. He says the secret is, what the shofar is really saying to you is, wake up you slumbers, wake up you sleepers. Wake up from your frivolity and vanity and things that don't save and things that don't matter, wake up to the things that matter. Remember your Creator. Remember what you're here for in this lifetime, in Psalm 27 you know, you get these, these lines that you may have seen before, God is my light and my help. Whom should I fear? God is the stronghold of my life. Whom shall I dread? It's interesting because every one of these lines of the text, when evil men assail me to devour my flesh, if they my foes my enemies, it is they my enemies who will stumble and fall. Should an army Besiege me, my heart will still have no fear. Should war beset me, I will still be confident. It's just it's interesting that this psalm, Psalm 27 begins with the imagery of a battle and the fear one feels going into battle, and so do our Torah portions of this time of year that we're reading throughout the month of Elul, as we're going to see in a minute. But it seems pretty clear that for the author of this psalm, those battles are metaphors. Those battles are

they're good imagery to kind of get the heart and imagination working

so that you can really feel like, what would it take? What? How scary would the scary thing need to be to make me shake in my boots? And what would I need to have the kind of stability, fortitude, confidence that the author of this Psalm has. Should an army Besiege me, I would have no fear. I would still be confident. And so the author of the psalm writes, acha AlTi me eta donai OTA a keish, shifty bvet, Adonai Ko.

Hello. One thing I ask of God, one thing I seek to live in the house of God all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, to frequent God's temple. We talked a little bit last time about this isn't really one question. It's actually three questions. But I think when we when we hear the shofar, it's, it's calling us, like, what's your one question? What's the thing that's trying to pierce through the noise? What's your achat? Shah t, you know, what is it? What is it? And sometimes it takes, every single day, multiple times a day, to come back to that question, to actually let something begin to rise to the surface that shares with the chair your soul is sharing with you. Like, what is it right now that I need to look at? What is it? What

is it? Hello. Do you know now?

What about now? So we have all of these different ways in, you know, these different words of liturgy, these different sounds designed to try, during this month to help us get to that question. You know, because even who can answer the question unless you know what the question is, so I'm going to play a version of acha Aldi for us. I think these questions, you know, it's like, what's on your heart? It could be quite personal. Could be something you don't actually feel like sharing with a group, but if there's something you actually sort of feel like, you know what, I know exactly what it is, and I appreciate the accountability of a group knowing what it is. For me, I would you know and you feel comfortable, feel free to put in the chat like, what's the thing that that right now, the thing that is rising to the surface, trying to pierce through the noise for you. So here is this tune. And for anybody who like grew up singing this song, this is a tune that may be more familiar. So here we go. The

Oh, Deena,

She May I

Oh,

hey,

Hey, hey, hey.

Hey,

thank you for people who are beginning to share the things that are on your heart and on your mind.

Oh, wow. Susan, just reading this birth of granddaughter last Friday. Daughter's hospitalization on Monday with preeclampsia, pushed me to both show up and

lean hard into faith that all will be well. Susan, yes, yes, yes, yes. All right, so as we go, we'll go into Misha Barak, right on the heels of the Shema. Okay, let's, let's just go straight into Shema. We've done our warm ups. Let's let's direct our prayer toward her. As you can see, I've moved over to Shema over here, and you know what? Thank you, Emmett for dropping, for dropping the thing that you're thinking about in here. I'm going to fix something in here that has always bothered me, that I am now, after five years of using this online, sidur now going to fix and that is, as you can see with the Shema, I just made larger the AYin and the dalid, which, if you look in any sidur, this is how the word is, how the phrase is written.

The AYin and the dalid are much larger than the rest of the words in the Shema and AYin and dalid together spell the word Eid witness. So actually, like, you know what, as we go into the Shema this morning, let me turn to turn it to you. Why does that make any sense at all? Like, symbolically, truthfully, you know, in terms of the meaning, in terms of the metaphor, like, what is that about? Shamayse or Eilat on Elohim, ichad, Eid, what

is that about? You all can see what I'm talking about, right? Oh, Ahmed, okay, the divine patiently witnesses. It seems that the onward witness sums up the whole Shema. Oh, the one word, witness sums up the whole Shema. Okay, thank you for the clarification that helps. How pretty you want to say one more thing about that, just to explain, how does it sum up the whole Shema?

Well, it sounds like that's what the saying, listen,

pay attention. As as there's a rabbi who who is deaf. His name is Darby Lee, and he says it's not listen, even though I wrote listen here. Let me fix that too. It's pay attention, because anyone can pay attention, even if they can't hear. And so he says it's pay attention. It's, you know. And so I think that even drives your point home more you know, that you can really only witness. And this is you as a, you know, as an attorney, somebody who deeply knows the legal like the word witness. You can only really do that if you know a subject matter deeply. You should not witness if you are just a passing, you know, sort of somebody with passing familiarity with a thing. So the idea of shemai, Israel. Hey, pay attention. Jews. God, wrestlers. Pay attention. Be here now, just like Anne Merle wrote here, notice, awaken God, past, present, future. Presence. You know, however you want to translate this word, God is a poor translation. But ever presence, this, this is what is our God, our orientation, and this is, is one. We are all connected in this oneness, and now knowing that

aid be a witness to that oneness. Yeah, and then Jan says right when we say the Shema out loud, where we're literally witnessing Emmet, it's really clear from all your comments, where your heart is right now, and I'm just I, I feel you. You know how, in in many prayers, the last word is EMET, then you say it again, Emmet. And it's almost like it's a confirmation of the truth. You know, could it be that perhaps that's what this is, too. Is sort of a confirmation, like the repetition of Ahmed. What's interesting about what you just said is actually the custom is with the word ek you're supposed to really lengthen the ekhad, which is weird because the d at the end of a word is hard to extend. But just to your point, it's like you're supposed to really hold on to this. You don't repeat it, but you lengthen it, which is one of the reasons why we do, you know, when we do the Shema, we kind of take our time with every word, but almost so that when we get to, yeah, so Emma Emmett is saying it might, once upon a time that de might have been more like a you know, so,

but yeah, you're supposed to hold on to it and really kind of extend it, whatever you feel like. That must mean I was asking about the word Oh, Emmett, sorry. So maybe I'm talking to and about Emmett, who is a member of this community who's typing in the chat. No, I know. Yeah.

I wasn't, I wasn't specifically referring to Ahad at the end. I was referring to the ED, the witnessing. Oh, got it. Got it. Thank you. That's great. Yep, maybe so, maybe so, this is one of these things where I think it's written this way, in the Torah and in our prayer books, and we get to, like art critics, kind of imagine what the meaning must be. And I think everything that y'all have said

is entirely plausible and probably right. So all right, with all of that in mind,

we're gonna go into the Shema. Like remembering. It's both about paying attention, but then also when we lie down, when we rise up, the whole thing being a witness, like behaving in the world, like we know this, like we know this truth. So take a moment. If you're wearing a talus, you can gather, gather the four corners of your seat, seats over your eyes, take a full breath For each word of the Shema.

Shema,

Yisrael,

Adonai,

Eloheinu, no,

it's

hard

to do. I

The hafta eight, Adonai Aloha, the whole love of whole national the high you had very male share, I know he MITs,

hey yo Mala vashin on time, levinaka, vidy bar Tabata

over after Hava Derek. All

right, move down into a healing prayer this morning.

So I think Blair already mentioned the names of a couple folks. She's thinking about Susan. We're thinking about your daughter and about her baby granddaughter, about your baby granddaughter, Karen and Howard, everybody on high as Liszt, here.

Lena,

Lauren, Jenna Mimi, Sydney Abbi Hi as eldabot, Miriam Shane, Linda Greenblatt,

Dalia, Eric, Sintra, Lillian, Lynn,

miktron Feld,

sending healing energy and prayer all of their way, all the minion mamas, Mama B and Shirley, Maya, Felicia, Karen, cousin Sharon.

Rick.

Am I?

I

On

hell

Na,

now.

Sending a refuah shalema, healing of body and spirit

to everybody on your lists, to everyone in need of a prayer,

everyone whose body and whose mind and heart need a little bit of salve, little bit of a hug, from across the airwaves, from across the world,

just sending a whole lot of love and healing to everybody who's struggling right now in every way that they're struggling,

struggling trying to fight tyranny and injustice, struggling to try to eat,

struggling to try to make their voice heard,

struggling to Try to get pregnant, and try to stay sober,

and try to discern what their next path is in life.

Try to discern how they're going to get through the day. Sending a healing prayer to everybody who is held captive and everyone who is held captive by governments who refuse to make peace,

everyone who believes in peace sending a prayer to everyone who continues to work for it,

and all of us who continue to just live in this world so torn asunder as it is, that we can find the places that give us meaning and strength to continue to make our voices heard.

I mean,

before we go into Keith schiato mourners, Kaddish, do a little bit of learning, just a little, just a little, all right, so

the place in the Torah that our guide through the High Holidays, Rabbi Alan Liu, picks up his learning, you know, because basically, for every week during the month of Elul, he looks at a section, the section of Torah that we're reading that week, the Parsha, the Parsha, you know, it's long, and he does not Focus on the whole thing. He picks one little picks one little thing in it to use as a jumping off point, an emotional jumping off point for some

kind of reflection during the month available. So

this is what he's thanks Martin.

So this is what, this is what he picks up on. And it is not pretty. This is where he stated, is not pretty, where he starts. And, you know, Ricky, I'm thinking about you. You brought this up last week. How do we read all this stuff in the Torah that is pretty unpleasant about what war looks like and about what us, you know, the Israelites. You know, although I want to say in the Torah, I think we are all the characters. I don't think we're just the Israelites. So we have to resist our urge to just see ourselves as Israelites. I think we're the Egyptians. I think we're Abraham and we're Sarah and we're Hagar and we're Isaac and we're Ishmael, you know. And we really have to,

you know, think about who in the text we are on any given day or in any given situation. But here we are in the book of Deuteronomy. Keith eight new Adonai, alohe,

the Chevy, chevita. Shivu. Shivu, oh, Shiv, oh, when you the Israelite warrior, take the field against your enemies, and your God delivers them into your power, and you take some of them captive. Oof how the tables have turned.

And you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire her, and would take her into your household as your wife. You will bring her into your household. She shall trim her hair, pair her nails, and discard her captives garb. She shall spend one month's time in your house, lamenting, mourning her father and mother, and after that, you may come to her and become her husband, and she shall be your wife. And I'm just gonna, I'm gonna stop there, and only because we've got so little time, I'm going to share with you what Rabbi Lou does with this, and then after, after we do mourners, Kaddish folks can feel free to stick around and we can keep talking. So he says this passage deals with the rather ugly human impulse that is as ancient as the hills and as current as the day before yesterday. Men victorious in war, raging testosterone, unleashed by battle and now utterly unrestrained, grab and rape the first woman they see on the streets of the city as they have just vanquished ancient art and literature and yesterday's NEW.

Newspapers are full of this disturbing human tendency, desire run amok has always been and continues to be one of the most troublesome human impulses. Nor are the implements for arousing desire any less universal or current. And Elul always falls in the late summer, and I do weddings almost every Sunday during that season, he writes

standing under the chuppah with the bride and groom. We read the week of Parshat. Keith teitze, I'm often reminded that carefully done fingernails, well coiffed hair and the alluring dresses are still frequently employed to arouse a passion in a man sufficient to get him under the wedding canopy.

He says, the Torah, I don't think, is really concerned with the specific case of the women in battle. It seems to be suggesting a method for dealing with the tyranny of passion and desire in our lives in general,

the raging lust of the victorious soldier is one mere instance, one mere example of the desire for which we humans throw away our lives, the living death we bring upon ourselves.

Given how pernicious and pervasive such impulses are, how much damage they could do to us, we might find ourselves asking this, why doesn't the Torah just do away with these impulses altogether? Why doesn't the Torah just tell us not to take the woman captive in the first place?

And he says, I think there are a few ways of answering this question. First off, it would have been unrealistic for the Torah, and the Torah is, above all, an extremely realistic work. The Torah never permits too much distance between the values it proposes and the way people actually behaved at the time, because it recognizes that to do so would break the connection between our actual lives and the Torah, between our lives and the will of our Creator, so the Torah can't afford to do too much violence to the way that we are, and this left lustful impulse, unfortunately, has been repeated throughout human history.

But trying to efface the impulse altogether might not only have been unrealistic, it might not have been desirable, like everything we have been given in this life, this impulse might also have its use, its place. This impulse might be part and parcel of the process of human creativity. This, at least, is the suggestion of a story that is told in the Talmud in Masechet yomah. That's the section dealing with Yom Kippur, the children of Israel. It seemed, once prayed to God that the impulse that tempted them into sexual misconduct be handed over to them as a captive, that they put it in a box. And so they fasted for three days and three nights, and this tempter was, in fact, handed over to them. The Prophet warned them that if they killed it, they would bring the world down with it. So they they just put it in a box and imprisoned it. And during that time, there wasn't a fresh egg to be found in the entire land of Israel for three days. So finally, as the story goes, they just put out its eyes and let it loose again.

The Talmud seems to be saying that this business of desire is the basis for our creativity, our productivity, our desire for the apple in the Garden of Eden got us kicked out of Eden, but it also propelled us into history, and if we try to squelch it or bury it, we might stop being productive. History might grind to a halt,

but since we both can't and probably shouldn't repress our desires, and since it's often a calamity when we follow them, what should we do?

And so he says, this section from Keith teetse points us to an answer, but before I go on to the answer,

I think we should do Keith shito for folks who gotta take off, and then I'll give you the answer. Good cliffhanger to stick around. Barry cost Dolores, Godley, anyone else you're saying Kaddish for this morning? Yes. David Soufiane, Tom John, is there anyone who would like to lead us in Kaddish this morning? And Leonard Simon, I can't, I can't do Lizz

Larry, furstenfeld, Joan Carlo, Carlos, jenish, Sergio, curlo, Jean, prop Stella, beer, I can do it all right. He's equal. No Leave Raha. May their memories, every single one of them be blessings.

Rabbi, I mean,

I mean, halal.

Rabbi

Osei shalom, who ya I say Shalom aleinuvil, call your straight a val being ruin a man. I mean, he's a horn. I'm Libra, huh?

The memories be blessings and goodbye to folks who are signing off.

I'm seeing, I'm seeing some of the commentary here about, you know, it's like this is a good book, but maybe that paragraph wasn't Rabbi Lou's finest, fair enough. I'm going to keep going. We can talk. We can talk more about literary criticism. And you know what we think of his analysis here in a second. So he says, okay, Parshat, Keith Tate saying, points us to an answer. First.

We watch our desires. We observe them. The soldier at the beginning of Parshat, Keith Tse, has to live with his desire. He has to watch it as it evolves without acting on it for a full month. And the second thing we can learn from this is that once we have our desires firmly in view, we can strip them of their erotic dress. We can make them cut off their fingernails and their hair as it were. We can make them take off that revealing frock that they were wearing when we first saw them in order. In other words, we can see our desires for what they really are. In his autobiography of his early teenage years, Basketball Diaries, the poet Jim Carroll writes about a moment when he saw his own displaced passion, stripped of its erotic disguise, already a notorious womanizer, Carol, found himself on a long, slow elevator one day with a beautiful woman for whom he felt an immediate sexual longing. He wanted to make a move right away, but there were other people on the elevator, so acting on this longing was not an option. But as the elevator made its seemingly endless ascent, he began to realize that, in truth, he had no desire to make love to this woman at all. That desire he was feeling was a dozen other things. It was the need to have his very weak ego affirmed by still another conquest. It was the need to cover up the bottomless pit of emptiness he felt at the core of his being with a strong rush of sensation, with this impulse, now stripped bare of its erotic dress, Carol understood that not only Didn't he have to act on it, but moreover, he didn't even want to. Why? Why do we run after ambition? Why do we need fame and fortune? Why do we need to have a sexual conquest? If we try to push these desires down, they'll only come up somewhere else. If we kill them off altogether, we may be doing violence to ourselves. We may be killing off the basis of our real creativity. So better to simply strip these desires of their romance and watch them for a month before acting on them, before taking them to yourself. And what better time to do this than the month of Elul the month we are supposed to devote to the regular cultivation of self awareness, the month in which we begin the process of Teshuva by shifting our gaze from the world outside to the consciousness through which we view that world, certainly desire is a significant component of that consciousness, perhaps the most significant component. So this is something else we can do. During the month of Elul. We can devote a little bit of time each day to locating our own particular bel dame, San merci. I think I got that right to identifying whatever desire has distorted our lives, the beautiful delusion for which we've thrown everything away, or for which we stand ready to do it in any case, and then once, once we've located it, all we have to do is look at it. We don't have to kill it. We certainly don't have to act on it. Either we can just let it arise in the fullness of its being, unromantically stripped down to the naked impulse that it is without the finery of romance, the hair, the nails, the dress, just the bare impulse itself. We can watch this impulse as it arises for the entire month of Elul and if after a month it still seems like something we want something we continue to arouse strong feelings in us, then we've learned something useful about ourselves. But if this desire, stripped of its romantic trappings, simply fades away, then we've learned something even more useful. We've learned that there's more to heaven and earth than those things on the surface of the world that provoke desire in our hearts. We've learned that if we always act on our desires, those unmitigated impulses that constantly rise up in our hearts and our mind, we are doomed to always palely be loitering after a lock of hair, a bit of nail or cloth, the ghostly phantoms of desire. It's like a living death, he describes so the last line in the psalm of the season that we began with.

And I'll just show this to you here. It's cavei el Adonai. Chazak ve emets lebecha The Cave el Adonai.

Cavei El Adonai. Chazak ve amitz libecha The cavei el Adonai. So he says, wait on God. Be strong and courageous of heart and wait on God. This is the very good advice that we recite twice a day during the month of Elul. Better to just wait on God, to watch our impulses arise and wait for the truth, wait for something deeper. Better to be strong and brave of heart, Cha zakli becha, than to surrender our lives to the empty stuff of desire and spend our lives palely loitering on a cold hillside where no birds sing. He's quoting a Keith poem.

Hey, you wanna talk Torah? Join us in real time for morning minion every weekday at 8am there's a link to register the show notes. Our Wednesday conversations with Rabbi Lizzi go deep. We talked for half an hour after Kaddish. So if you're interested in real, meaningful conversations about spirituality and current events, get into it with us in morning minion you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai