Hebrew, like many languages, is a gendered language that has long struggled with the non-binary, which makes it all the more interesting and alarming that creation was clearly binary and non-binary. Male and female are mentioned, but so is a version of they/them.
“What is dance? In a dance, the people who dance join together, and no one is left [alone]….The dancers kick the earth so as to ascend heavenward. Again and again, the dancer strikes at the lowest part of the world, because [the dancer] does not want to be there [but] longs to elevate…above the surface of the ground….The desire for ascent, for transcendence, makes revelation possible.” -Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
"For many people…the question about where you are from begins with how people define home. One definition of home is, it’s a place you think you can always go back to because it’s as much a pushpin location on a map as it is embedded in your consciousness. The decision to leave home…perhaps indicates a breach between self and other, a fissure, a crevice. Where we are from is an opening inside us. The objects inside a house, moveable as they are, are the telling expressions of what we think of as home, more than perhaps the structure of the houses themselves." -David Biespiel
Ha’azinu translates to “and we listened.” May we open our ears to listen to one another, our hearts to hear anew, our minds to connect to something new and meaningful for us in the new year.
“Is it possible to grasp how to die? Yes, on the condition of not refusing fear, of being ready, like Moses, to turn around to see the future. The future is not in front of us, but behind, in the traces of our steps on the ground of a mountain that we have just climbed, traces in which those who follow us and survive us will read what we are not yet given to see there.”
While I didn’t want to have to explain to my seven-year-old why J.K. Rowling could be a great writer and also could say things we disagree with, it was important to have that conversation on her level to show her how to act when you’re conflicted. Parshat Vayelech teaches us that some situations have no easy answers.
A twelfth grader in the house is all excitement, stands in the place where all is possible. Futures spill out like waters in a fountain, filling every crevice where doubt likes to linger. His unled life is ahead and everything shimmers on the water’s skin, like he did when I held him at three days old.
