Merle Feld's Blog

At this time of year my work with rabbinical students and rabbis coincides perfectly with the rhythm of the Jewish calendar - turning inward, exploring to find your best self, what makes you full, joyous, a holy instrument. The High Holidays call to us - turn. turn, remember your sacred and most authentic center, return to it, nourish it, so it can nourish you as you move through the new year. Below are some of the writing prompts I share with my students in this season, but they are an open menu for us ordinary folk too, Jews and those of other faiths, and those in search of faith. Sit with each of the prompts below that call to you, give yourself the gift of quiet time just for you, find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed, listen to the neglected voices within, write by hand, 15 minutes today, and again tomorrow...


Preparing for Awe: High Holiday Warm-ups and Stretches


1- Recall a situation or perhaps an image, from this summer or this past year, in which you felt wonderfully yourself, a situation in which some special aspect of yourself was expressed. It doesn�t need to be Olympic gold - though maybe it was a public achievement - but perhaps it was something small, subtle, something private only you were aware of. You felt, this is the "me" I am so happy to be, my best self. Tell the story, describe the situation, letting the details return to you in all their fullness�.


Follow-up for 1- Now that you�re done writing it down, reflect on why/how the best part of you came out in that situation. What did you do to make that situation possible? How can you be that fully realized, special �you� more often in the coming year?


2-How have you cared for yourself this year? Make a list of all the ways - things you do every day, things you do sometimes, rarely. Read your list over, notice what you�d like to increase.


3-To whom do you feel grateful this year? How might you let them know?


4- Think of your family and closest friends: are you conscious of ways in which you may have harmed any of them, caused them pain in the past year, fallen short of the mark? How? Choose one person and focus on him/her: what is the regret or guilt you feel toward this person? What do you want the relationship to be like? What can you do to make amends, to bring about change? (repeat as needed)


5- Has anyone sinned against you this year, hurt you? How? What do you need from them to achieve healing? Is there something you can do to help bring about that healing, justice, reconciliation?

Perhaps that won�t be possible; if it�s not possible, how might you help yourself to find inner peace and move on?


6- We struggle not to become overwhelmed by the need for help and healing in our broken world. Decide on one or two specific places/issues/needs where you will commit to spend some time and energy on tikkun in this new year. Reflect in concrete terms on what that will look like for you.

This is what my mother used to call "a changeable day" - sunny, then overcast, sunny again, and then a sun-shower - such a delight - now dark, stormy looking.

Not needing or wanting to say much, so good to be still, to be in nature, simple gratitude.

Yesterday I gathered four old friends around my dining room table to enjoy and model a poetry beit midrash which was being broadcast live on a webinar for Reform Jewish educators in preparation for Shavuot teaching. The session was titled "The Journey to Sinai" and webinar participants listened and then joined in on our conversation about my poem "We All Stood Together." Fascinating that as often as I have led conversation about that classic poem, and as well as I knew the four around the table, this conversation was alive, exciting, deep, new - that is the gift of the poetry beit midrash - one or a few well-chosen poems, some carefully crafted questions to elicit meaningful sharing. Below are the questions we considered - my gift to you for your Shavuot tikkun Saturday night.


Beit midrash questions for �We All Stood Together�

-What is the pshat of this poem, what�s going on here?
-What is the dilemma the poet is describing, what is her experience of Sinai? How does her experience differ from that of her �brother�? What is the �journal� her brother kept?
-What is the significance of the poem�s title?
-How does the poem speak to your life, your longing, your understanding of revelation?
-The poem explores a tension between �particulars�/�hard data� and �feelings� � how is your Jewish life and practice informed by each side of that tension? How do you mediate that tension in your understanding of revelation, of Torah?
-Are there ways in which, like the poet, you feel �outside the norm� of Jewish experience? How do you find yourself in the Sinai story?

NOTE - when you reproduce the poem for the study sheets you must properly credit it at the bottom - (c) A Spiritual Life: Exploring the Heart and Jewish Tradition by Merle Feld - revised edition 2007 SUNY Press All rights reserved.

PS - a number of people have emailed me that they can't find the poem on the website - that's because I can't put it on the website - my publisher would have a fit!! But the poem is everywhere - in my book A Spiritual Life, in several prayer books and in many many anthologies - I'm sure you all have it on your bookshelf in more than one place even. So I am inviting everyone to find the poem and then email back to the website where they found it - have fun!

[a few simple guidelines to set up the beit midrash] -

Read the poem with everyone gathered together. Invite those who've come to study to find a partner or a threesome - I encourage people to choose as partners someone they don�t know, don�t know well, would like to get to know better � it sets a tone of inclusion and openness. Each person gets study sheets with the poems[s] and discussion prompts. Tell them how much time is allotted (in this case with just one poem, 20-30 minutes is good) and explain it's a free-flowing not a linear process. You don�t need to move from one question to the next, rather let the poems, the questions and your chevrusa take you on a journey. The goal � finding and deepening meaning.

I like to end a poetry beit midrash by asking participants to reflect a bit on the process they�ve just been engaged in: What was this experience like � with this text? with each other? Do you have some new awareness of yourself? of your study partner? What is special about this way of talking together and where might you want to go from here? Finally, they have the texts and questions to take home, to continue exploring later and with others � a successful beit midrash workshop is deliciously infectious!

I�ve repeatedly been told that participants who had sat at a polite distance from one another, perhaps for years, through this text study suddenly came to see each other as if for the first time. The payoffs often reach far beyond the session itself in the ongoing life of a group or community.

On Saturday night May 26 we will be celebrating Shavuot, the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. In the past few weeks as many of us count down to Sinai, I've been hard at work preparing for a webinar on May 21 sponsored by the National Association of Temple Educators (NATE), the professional organization of Reform Jewish educators. In the webinar I will lead NATE members through the steps of creating a poetry beit midrash in which a large group breaks off into two's or three's to intensively study a particular text.

Broken Matzah


On the New Jersey transit train
I pulled my particularity
out of a brown paper bag:
one of four broken pieces of
buttered matzah.
Slowly, delicately
I proceeded with my dinner.

The young man across the aisle
in his dark business suit
pale skin, wavy black hair
looked to me Italian
but I admit I'm not good at that.

He seemed uncomfortable,
not so much with the chremzel
I carefully dipped into
a little puddle of sour cream,
nor even with my public
consumption of food--
probably I was brought up
to know better, but I was brought up
so long ago I've misplaced
some of my mother's niceties--

No, I think it was the matzah
that did it, it was the matzah
that singled me out,
the unmistakable display
of my particularity:
four broken pieces of buttered matzah.

Or maybe he didn't care at all
didn't notice
maybe his breathing didn't
become slightly irregular
maybe it was all
my imagination
or my breathing
becoming slightly irregular.

How like my mother I am, after all,
who trained us in our largely
Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood
not to wear our old playclothes
outside on Sundays
so as not to offend our Christian
neighbors on their way home from church.

In those days I took her at her word;
now I wonder as the train
pulls into Penn Station
if Marie Brady who lived across the street
ever noticed us in our Sunday finery,
ever thought it curious
that we dressed up on her Sabbath,
ever questioned our carefully guarded
particularity, ever saw close up
a buttered piece of matzah.

Living as a poet means you are acutely attuned to the voices within, you seek to listen, to discern the words that best capture your own inner truth. But I am a poet who is interested as well in the inner lives of others

I often feel I have the world

I

One delightful bonus of the 25th Rosh Hodesh reunion I traveled to last week was that as the weekend approached, many of us went searching through old files and the backs of drawers for memorabilia of our years together. One dear friend, a young member of the group who celebrated her marriage in our early years together, found the compilation of advice ("mama-lings" we called it) which we created as a gift after she gave birth to her son. She xeroxed each of our contributions and presented them to us at the reunion. I was fascinated reading what I wrote for her 20 years ago this month when I spoke as mother of a 13 year old and a 9 year old...


Mama-lings for Amy

1- Love counts for a lot. Children know when they are loved and that knowledge feeds them.

2- There are times when you are too tired or too empty to love them and that's OK. They will survive those suspensions of caring and be none the worse for them.

Last week I traveled to be with old friends for a 25th reunion of our Rosh Hodesh group. We came together in the aftermath of a tragedy, slowly found ways of being together, our sharing evolved, and we became a group