“Pour out your heart like water in the presence of God.” (Lamentations 2:19) Sometimes the injunction to unburden ourselves completely before God seems at odds with the Jewish tradition’s emphasis on the communal, formal, and prescribed nature of prayer. Water is after all free flowing, amorphous, fluid while every word in the prayer service is scripted, sifted, and weighed. The contrast between raw emotions — of grief, thanksgiving, shame, or gratitude — and the archaic forms, the setting of public solemnity, and the requisite decorum in communal prayer is great. The gulf between spontaneous emotion and ceremonious prayer services is even wider if we factor gender into the equation. Synagogue services were originally designed to complement or replace the Temple service in which only men played a public role. Public prayer did not so much mark momentous turning points in the human lifecycle as it enacted the covenant between God and His people. Particularly during the High Holy Days, prayer services mark the majesty of the Creator, His bond with His people, our duty to embody the highest moral virtues, and our plea for forgiveness when we lapse. Lofty and important goals indeed, but how to unlock the dam and pour out our hearts before God?

If Jewish men have a tradition of direct dialogue with God, Jewish women over the ages have won the right to set ground rules for worship from the heart. In the First Book of Samuel, Hannah, tormented because of her childlessness, turns to God in a silent and private prayer. Her whispered entreaty transformed our notion of prayer. Tkhines, a strain of Yiddish women’s prayers written for every occasion in the life of Jewish women, became a popular prayer tradition centuries later with the advent of the printing press.

But the power of women’s domestic prayer is not limited to days of old. It has been rediscovered and revitalized often in modern times. In 1854, 35-year-old Fanny Neuda was devastated when her husband died, leaving her with three young children. As a way to reach out to God and seek consolation in her time of loss and grief, Neuda composed a book of prayers — brief devotions to be offered at various junctures in the Jewish calendar cycle as well as in the lives of women. Fanny’s book became a best seller, and was reprinted many times. By composing a book of prayer, Fanny appealed to women like herself who desired to turn to God at critical times in their lives but found existing prayer books insufficient for their needs. Neuda’s Stunden der Andacht, Hours of Devotion, nourished by the book of Psalms, owes a debt as well to the tkhines and the medieval tradition of Books of Hours, to which her title refers.

A century and a half later, the poet Dinah Berland stood at a painful and critical turn in her own life when she encountered Neuda’s book, still powerful enough to speak to her across the divide of time and language. Berland has absorbed and reformulated the volume to create something rooted in the old yet entirely new. Berland edited and selected from the various editions to create a book of prayers from the heart. She has rewritten and updated them with a poet’s clarity and depth; each word, each line, is polished yet deeply affecting. God has become a parent rather than a father, and Berland has softened the emphasis on temptation and sin. The prayers open with daily entreaties, special prayers for the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, followed by prayers for various life circumstances. While some prayers, such as prayers for brides, mothers-to-be, childbirth, and widowhood “belong” to women, most of these prayers have a universal human appeal. Thus, a prayer for a parent with a child in the military, a prayer to withstand the spiritual dangers of poverty (and one for wealth), a prayer for safe return from travels, provide wonderful examples of the many instances when we turn to prayer for consolation, encouragement, and thanks but would not find the words to express these feelings in a standard siddur. Berland’s verses transcend the boundaries of time, gender, and formula. For those who seek a new vessel to help them pour out their heart like water, Berland’s reinterpretation of a classic is a welcome discovery.

The relationship between teachers and students has taken on multiple forms and shapes in our tradition. The Zohar (III 153a) sees them as the sun and moon — the foundation of our world. The Rambam (Avot 1, 6) equates that relationship to the highest form of friendship. The Chernobyl Rebbe, the Maor Aynayim, perceives their connection as the kiddushin (matrimony) of husband and wife.

The first word in the Torah, “B’reishit,” is read in Seder Raba D’Breishit as the acronym of six words that to my understanding explain the potential and the actuality of what transforms teaching into a holy and Godly endeavor:

“B’reishit: There is no B’reishit other than six attributes of the acts of an artisan/governess, and these are:

1. Bet – B’niyut, building
2. Reish – R’kimut, embroidering
3. Alef – Amitzut, steadfast-holding/strengthening
4. Shin – Sharshut, enrooting
5. Yud – Y’shivut, sitting/stabilizing
6. Tav – T’michut, supporting/upholding

The Holy-One, Blessed-Be-S/He said: B’reishit, I built, I embroidered, I strengthened, I enrooted, I sat/stabilized, I upheld, the heavens and the earth.”

These six Divine attributes should drive us to make manifest the holiness of teaching: Can teachers embody these demands when in the presence of their students? Do students have the experience of “B’reishit moments” when encountering their teachers?

These are the guidelines and challenges:

Building: Do our students walk away greater than when they walked in? Is more of who they are available to them?

Embroidering: Do our students have a greater capacity to adorn the garments of their souls in new ways? Do they have the tools to weave together parts of themselves that previously felt disconnected?

Steadfast-holding/Strengthening: Do our students turn away feeling held by their teachers? Do they feel that they are walking in God’s world with a loyal partner? Do they have a sense of resilience that has been enriched?

Enrooting: What part of ourselves, as teachers, have we planted in our students’ hearts? What part of God’s world do they call “home”?

Sitting/Stabilizing: In this ever-evolving world, do we offer our students a sense of stability? Do we gift them with a sense of security and freedom that enables them to explore the world?

Supporting/Upholding: Do our students know that no matter where they find themselves, no matter how far or low they wander, we, their teachers, will find them and nurture them to resilience and independence?

It is in the interplay of light and darkness, the meeting of heaven and earth, that godliness is encountered. It is here that the teacher/student relationship acquires an element of holiness, sanctity.

The Talmud teaches that the Torah was transmitted as black fire on white fire, and we, in line with this tradition, must maintain the integrity of the black letters along with the white spaces of the parchment to render a Sefer Torah (a Torah scroll) fit for sacramental reading. Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev teaches that two letters glued as one would compromise the manifestation of the white spaces — the words of revelation complete but the silence and secret of revelation blemished. The holiness of teaching is created when both realms are embraced — the known and unknown, the past and future, the revealed and the ever-unfolding. Teachers and students alike are configured from black letters and white spaces. In that encounter, students and teachers embrace in the realm of holiness.

I recite Tehillim/Psalm 121 prior to every class that I teach and every meeting that I have with one of my students. I’ve been saying this several times a day for the past fifteen years. I do this to acknowledge the mystery and blessing of the encounter that is going to take place. I do this to honor the unknown and the journey my students and I are to embark upon — like one who recites Tefillat Ha-Derech (the traveller’s prayer). I do this as an act of gratitude for the trust and love that we will share, regardless of the content of the learning or conversation that is going to take place. I do this as a humbling agent as I dwell between “anyone who has taught the child of their friend Torah it is as if they have birthed them” and “my help is from God, Creator of heaven and earth.”

I have been birthed in my life by many blessed men and women. I have birthed in my life, thank God, many beloved and holy children. “Eli, Eli, sh’lo yigamer l’olam”/My God, My God, May this never end. (Chana Senesh)

Mussar is the general term used to describe the central spiritual discipline in Jewish tradition: the integration of middot, character traits or more generally, ethics, into all other aspects of Jewish expression. Understood this way Mussar transcends distinctions between movements, geography, and philosophy as it outlines the core characteristics of Jewish living. The goal of spiritual life is the transformation of human personality such that the central virtue of the Torah, V’ahavta l’rayecha kamocha, “Love your neighbor as yourself,“ can be enacted. How to achieve this transformation became the central question of Jewish spirituality. Even among the greatest of Jewish mystics, unification with the Divine was understood to be dependent upon the rectification of middot.

In this context the role of Torah and specifically the rabbinic value of learning Torah, and by extension learning in general, requires some clarification. Of what value is learning in the cultivation of character? Does one’s learning Torah lead to acts of goodness that are indicative of this personality transformation? Can someone without Torah learning achieve ethical transformation? These questions assume, naturally, that Torah is instrumental, that it has — as a goal — the performance of specific acts and that learning is subservient to this instrumentality. We learn in order to do and it is the doing that counts. Yet, within rabbinic tradition there is also the idea of Torah l’sh’ma, that is, learning for its own sake. This is a concept particularly upheld within the Mussar tradition. Thus our questions are deepened: What is the relationship between learning Torah and spiritual transformation when that learning is not instrumental but rather an end in itself?

The answer to these questions emerges out of a particular understanding of Torah, and hence of learning, within the Mussar world. Torah is not conceived of as a text, but rather as a spiritual garment. The goal of spirituality is to refine the soul in order for this garment to affix itself to one’s soul. Mitzvot, then, are the specific cultural expressions of “wearing“ this spiritual garment and halakhot become the historical form these cultural expressions take at any one time. But prior to the conceptualization of mitzvot, Torah must “affix“ itself to one’s soul. The actions that prepare the soul to bear Torah are contained within the middot , the character traits such as humility, kindness, righteousness, patience, and equanimity. The middot precede mitzvot and make Torah in this fundamental sense possible.

Learning Torah is a complex process, a spiritual discipline that begins by learning middot — learning to emulate the life-skills, if you will, of a spiritual master. The Torah itself places God in this position of spiritual master to be emulated when God denies Moses’ request to “see His face,“ and insists that all we can “see“ of God are God’s acts, God’s middot: forbearance, kindness, and compassion. The “seeing“ of the face of God denied to Moses is transposed into “seeing“ the obligation to serve God on the face of another person.

Learning begins with emulation but requires introspection and conscientious steps toward self-transformation. In the course of this process, as Torah more and more adheres to our souls, the specific content of Torah, the mitzvot and the halakhic and aggadic discourses, become the field upon which our Torah-bearing souls express themselves in concrete acts. Some of those acts comprise the middot/values that have been central in our transformation (that is, acts that incorporate the values themselves, such as leaving the corners of the fields unharvested for the poor), while other acts are interruptive (serving as reminders of the original values that aided in our becoming carriers of Torah, such as kashrut or tefillin).

The specific mode of Torah study that Jewish tradition highlights, an interactive mode whereby learning proceeds always in dialogue with another person, epitomizes the coming together of the various levels of Torah and Torah study that we’ve mentioned. In the very act of study we are always standing before another whose real presence, and real needs, filter the potential meaning of the text. The act of study in this hevruta (face-to-face) model requires prior attention to middot. Moreover, the text we are studying contains a history of such study encounters. The faces of the others who have labored in study over the very same texts transforms the text itself into an “other“ of whom we must be solicitous. It is this solicitousness of the other that distinguishes Torah l’sh’ma from other modes of learning, and it is learning as solicitousness of the other that places it at the heart of the Jewish spiritual journey.

The language of Kingship is not fashionable today; actually, it hasn’t been for years. Many people read “King” in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy and think “man” and “hierarchy” and either tune out, walk out, or look for some other way to engage in the service. But even before the most recent critique of Kingship, a whole generation of (Protestant) Bible scholars demeaned the Temple Priests and the idea of Kingship in favor of what they understood as the more democratic voice of the Bible — the Prophets.

But as usual with liturgical and poetic language, we need to dig beneath the surface and tap into our imaginations to discover how the idea of Kingship, mastery, and dominion can be meaningful to us. This is particularly important on Rosh Hashanah because Kingship is a primary theme of the High Holiday liturgy.

The idealized King is majestic, resplendent, luminous, radiant. He is the embodiment of strength, wisdom, and discernment: righteous in judicial matters, merciful and kind to the poor.

The King’s magisterial presence evokes a state of awe, dignity, and grandeur. The words “ruler” and “sovereign,” which many people prefer, are more disembodied and abstract and do not capture the sense of awe, fear and glory (kavod) that are essential elements of the ritual of this particular holiday. On Rosh Hashanah, it is as if we enter into the King’s holy court to meet with Him one on one to review the trajectory of our lives and to determine how well we have stayed on course with our intended mission. Guided by His benevolence on the one hand, and His clear and exacting judgment on the other, we find our way back to a life of merit and honor.

Kingship has another resonance on Rosh Hashanah — its intimate link to creation. The King is first and foremost Master of the Universe, the One who wrests creation into being, the Victorious Right-Armed One who overcame the watery chaos, and continues to maintain order in the world — the One to insure creation’s very existence.

But God’s kingship and creation’s existence have always been imperiled and continue to be precarious. Chaos/evil threatens to upset the King and undo the workings of Creation at every moment. Chaos enters the system, in part, through humanity’s injustices, our mindlessness, our evil, our obliviousness to the consequences of our acts. Today the metaphor of God as Supreme King, struggling to keep the watery chaos at bay, is particularly poignant as we reflect on the chaotic waters and weather associated with climate change and all the destruction, pain, and suffering that our ecosystems and peoples around the earth must endure because of our vanity.

On Rosh Hashanah, the day the rabbis called harat olam, the birthday of Creation, we are given the opportunity to re-enthrone the King and give creation a chance to reestablish itself. Because only when the King sits securely on the throne will order and peace reign and the glory of God fill the earth.

So how do we help reestablish God’s kingship? On Rosh Hashanah, we set our intention for the year. We re-enthrone the King by reciting the “Kedusha,” Holy, Holy, Holy, the whole Earth is full of His Glory, acknowledging that the entire earth is really God’s Temple and it is our job to protect it. We re-enthrone God as King as we submit to the highest values of truth, compassion, and stewardship. We re-enthrone God as King as we drop to our knees during the Aleinu prayer as an expression of our humility and a declaration of our service to the One. Ultimately re-enthroning the King means mastering and subduing our own egos and coming to terms with the arrogance of humanism.

The Rosh Hashanah liturgy does not just address humanity; all of creation is charged to re-enthrone the King: The culminating prayer of the Malchuyot/Kingship liturgy (and the UvChen prayers inserted in the Amidah) bids us and all of creation to acknowledge and praise the Master of All, the Molder of Creation.

All the earth’s inhabitants will know You.
. . . let everything that has been molded understand that you are its Molder and let everything with a life’s breath in its nostrils proclaim, Hashem the God of Israel is King and his Kingship rules over everything.

The corollary to praising God and goodness is holding fast to righteousness in the face of the constant and subtle threats, the vanities and idols that vie for our attention and seek to topple the King, and ultimately creation. As the Aleinu prayer (which originates in the Kingship section of the Rosh Hashanah service) tells us, we have two choices — submit to God and righteousness or to hevel, to vanity, idols, and meaninglessness.

Creation then is not something to be taken for granted. Seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, day and night, water and land, the perfection of each creature adapted to its unique niche — all this is a gift from a benevolent and philanthropic King.

For example, what makes the four cornered garment kadosh is the fringes on the corners, the tzitzit. The fringes remind us of the corners of a field. One can’t establish ownership of the field unless you’re willing to let the corners of the field grow food for the poor, for the landless, for foreigners. At the edges of your ownership (it’s only semi-ownership because God actually owns all the fields) your ownership blurs into the community. The same is true with the corners of myself; my identity fades into the identity of the universe. So what makes the fringe a fringe is that it’s a mixture of my cloth and the universe’s air, God’s air, the world’s air. And if I don’t allow that to happen, if I claim ownership of my cloth to its furthest edges and don’t let the edges get mixed with God’s air then this garment I’m wearing is not sacred and it’s not kadosh.

Zlochower: What’s the connection between kedusha, holiness, and mitzvah, commandment?

Waskow: A mitzvah can be a connection. The world is like a jigsaw puzzle all jumbled and each one of us is a piece in the jigsaw puzzle. To do a mitzvah is to take ourselves and the other pieces in the jigsaw puzzle and begin fitting them together to begin making the connection, sacred connection. While it may have been a mitzvah to affirm the energy associated with men—action, agentic energy—and the energy associated with women—receptivity, compassion, connection making—in our generation it’s far more of a mitzvah to understand that we are not determined solely by biology. Mitzvot change. The mitzvah to be fruitful, multiply, fill up the world and subdue it, may have governed human history up to this point. But now the human race has in fact filled up the planet and subdued it. Today, it’s no longer a mitzvah to multiply the actual number of human beings on the planet because that’s now disruptive. We have to reexamine what the meaning of that mitzvah is. Grow greater, you might say with (inaudible) and all those words as beneath (inaudible). This reflects God’s own change in the world. Ehiyeh, the God who will be, who is transforming.

Zlochower: I want to comment on the question of language, how we use words and the definitions we give to words and concepts. The embedded meaning of terms in Judaism for you are fluid; they have an evolution. Not only do mitzvot evolve over time, but the very terminology itself seems to change. I’m wrestling much more with words and ideas as they’ve been interpreted; those interpretations hold authority for me. And the question is how to fit myself in or how to react to that terminology.

While we would both want more fluid roles for men and women, I would not have used the term mitzvah to describe those roles ever. I would have described them as a social construct that fitted a particular time although there are certain mitzvah implications—like which mitzvot women are obligated to perform and which mitzvot they are exempted from. I’m curious about the various parameters that each of us might draw around mitzvot and acts of holiness.

What role does the tradition play and what authority does it carry? In other words, what are the boundaries of this evolutionary process? When are we still within mitzvah, within God, and within Judaism and when do we leave those realm?

Waskow: I understand the dangers of fluidity but we’re in a period of Jewish history when fluidity is both inescapable and desirable. Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi teaches that we’re encountering a second revolutionary paradigm shift that might be comparable to what happened in the shift from biblical to Rabbinic Judaism. In his book, The Ecology of Eden, Evan Eisenberg argues that the western Semitic tribes who were shepherds, hunter-gatherers, and small farmers on rocky hillsides were transformed, forced into transformation by the invention of mono-crop irrigation agriculture in Sumeria. Faced with this dilemma, they drew on and integrated Sumerian culture into their own spirituality. For instance, in the sabbatical year they became hunter-gatherers again rather than farmers. Once in seven years they reaffirmed their contract with God, which helped them survive and transformed them. And the same thing happened about 2,000 years ago when the Roman Empire shattered biblical Judaism by burning the Temple, which eventually resulted in Rabbinic Judaism.

We are convinced that what we did was respond, but Rambam teaches that animal sacrifices were never intended to be done forever; they were only an educational process to get us to grow up. Rambam is imagining a God who looks beyond the original rules toward new rules. We need to respond to God’s own inventiveness and creativity by being invested in creativity ourselves.

Zlochower: I’m not sure that Rambam would buy that interpretation of what he was doing.

Waskow: It’s my understanding. We’re in a crisis today—the whole planet is in a convulsion, an earthquake. Politics, economics, and the relationship to the earth and sexuality and violence are all in convulsion. So we need to learn to dance in an earthquake. It’s hard to do and it looks chaotic at first. It looks like you’re breaking all the rules because who knows the dance steps for dancing in an earthquake. I mean, you can look up everything from the samba to the fox trot to the Hasidic shuffle. The moves for all those dances are different in an earthquake; the rules don’t work. In this situation, fluidity is life giving.

Zlochower: What are the criteria for determining if this is such an earthquake?

Waskow: There is no way to know—in the moment. Looking back it always seems clearer. So we try hard. I pay attention to as much of the tradition as I can, I try to affirm what seems to be underneath some of the text, affirm what is actually in some of the text, and who knows.

Zlochower: So we’re dancing in this earthquake and we need to balance out all the forces that are at play. Are there all sorts of paths, then, that could possibly be taken and whether the tradition speaks to someone, or not, determines if one still feels mitzuva, commanded in some way. Does that raise the possibility of all sorts of different dances?

Waskow: It does. And that might crystallize into a new path; how much crystallization there will be, I don’t think we know. It’s like the trek from the Red Sea to not yet Sinai. But in that trek I imagine the people walking single file. The only thing that’s holding them together is I’m in touch with the person in front of me and I’m in touch with the person behind me. And maybe I can even see three or four up and three or four back and what’s holding us together is each one being in touch that way. At Sinai, it becomes not a single file line but a community, a circle centered on God.

Kedusha is not just about being separate; it’s being conscious of your distinctiveness in connection with the distinctiveness of others. Kedusha requires community. As my wife and rabbi, Phyllis Berman, teaches, kedusha/tahara is one kind of holiness and tuma is another type — a spiritual state of inward, laser-beam focus arising from acts such as giving birth, touching death, or menstruating. It takes one not out of holiness but out of a communal version of holiness (so someone who is tamei cannot enter the heart of communal holiness, the Temple).

Zlochower: It’s very hard to map the Hebrew language onto English. Holiness is a larger concept than just kedusha. Is there anything mundane or is everything holy?

Waskow: My friend and teacher Rabbi Max Ticktin teaches that in havdallah we move from kadosh to chol. Chol is from the same route as halil, a wind instrument like a flute that is hollow. It appears also in “chillul haShem.” When we take what looks like the living tree of God and hollow out all the insides, it’s not living anymore although the tree still looks like a tree and looks like it’s living. Max teaches that chol is not profane or ordinary. It is the hollow open possibility place. And on Shabbat we are filled consciously and aware of kedusha and then we move into weekday time when the open hollow time space is there for us to decide what to fill it with. The workaday week is, therefore, potential kedusha rather than actual, immediate kedusha. The world is full of the possibilities of holiness. I’m curious about how you struggle to transform Judaism.

Zlochower: I don’t think that gender roles are mandated. I’m a woman of the late 20th century and very much a product of the women’s movement and the feminist revolution. And therefore those values and my own values are definitely influencing what I’m looking for and what I’m seeing. I’m drawn to the power of a reverent critique from within. Because I draw heavily on my own biography, I was impressed by how your writing weaves your vision with your biography. That honesty is critical to me. I very much value watching how people struggle with different boundaries, how they define the areas of fluidity or flexibility.

Waskow: So let me ask you, was the move to Rabbinic Judaism a revolution or an evolution?

Zlochower: The beauty of the oral tradition is that it’s a joint Divine-human enterprise; human beings in a particular context — historical, social economic, gendered. I’m coming out of a historical and social context, which is critical to the way I look at Judaism but I haven’t put it all together as a whole system in the way that you are pushing. You’ve put together a theology but I don’t see why we must take the values of environmentalism and ecology that don’t necessarily come from Judaism, and transfuse them into a Jewish understanding.

Waskow: Our different biographies and social location influence how we approach the notion of change and seeing the world. I speak primarily to people whose connection to Torah is minimal, so I try to show them how what they thought was just nice and secular is, in fact, rooted in Torah. But you don’t have to argue that fundamental values are Jewish.