Filling the gaps -- the essence of Midrash

A couple of quotes from Daniel Boyarin on the nature of Midrash:

The text of the Torah is gapped and dialogical, and into the gaps the reader slips, interpreting and completing the text in accordance with the codes of his or her culture. . . . Midrash is a portrayal of the reality which the rabbis perceived in the Bible through their ideologically colored eyeglasses.

What I like about these quotes (from pg. 14-15 of his seminal Intertextuality and the reading of Midrash) -- despite the fact that they're just plain wonderfully clear! -- is that it opens the way towards an understanding of Midrash that can span both the ancient product of our rabbis and today's efforts to create contemporary Midrash. It puts the text of the Torah at its center and characterizes an important key aspect of that text that has shaped the way the Jews have related to their Holy texts through the millennia -- by charging into the 'gaps' to (incredibly!) both preserve the integrity of the ancient words, while also infusing them with free and contemporary meaning.

I am grateful to have been assigned to again read these words of Boyarin. One of the great gifts of this semester of my doctoral work is that I am privileged to study with two of the greatest contemporary readers of ancient Jewish texts -- Jeffrey Rubenstein and Elliot Wolfson. I'm enjoying it!

Finding our voice at the edge of the unknown: a workshop at JTS

It's so easy to get lost. When you're caring for somebody who's really ill or really suffering, their pain -- including feelings of hopelessness they may have -- can overwhelm not only them but also us. Skilled chaplains learn to walk alongside people in their pain and uncertainty -- to get down in the pit with them -- but skilled chaplains also need to be able to step out of that pit, to reconnect with God and their holy sources of support, purpose, and meaning. Through this kind of act of reconnection from places of despair, the chaplain can also help the suffering person to find their own way out of the pit and to reconnect with the sources of holiness and meaning in their own lives.

This week, Minna and I worked with pastoral care students at the Jewish Theological Seminary to help them grow in just this type of work. We brought together elements of workshops we had done separately before. Minna's great skill is with voice -- both using her own voice as a singer and helping others to find their own voices in her role as a voice teacher and spiritual guide. My focus has been on what I call personal Midrash or spiritual reflection -- a way of finding meaning from our own experiences with the help of our holy texts and other resources. The moment where I really felt our work coming together into one was when Minna used a holy resource -- an ancient Midrash on the Song at the Sea -- to ask people to reflect on their own moments of victory and of uncertainty in their life experience.

Minna asked us to stand and sing the opening lines of the song together -- the song the Israelites sang in joyous gratitude after God saved them from Pharaoh's soldiers by splitting the sea. As the sound of each other's voices washed over us, Minna asked us to imagine something with the help of an ancient Midrash, one that suggests the Israelites actually sang the song while still crossing the sea. "Imagine your own preemptive victory song," she asked. "Your own song anticipating a victory in your life."

As I switched in my own mind to imaging myself singing of victory while still in a moment of fear and uncertainty, I was stunned to realize I had moved -- while singing the very same words! -- from an expression of thanks to an expression of sincere prayer; to an expression of humbly asking God for the victory, for the redemption from moments of fear. Around me, I heard the words of the song coming from my own mouth and others:

Ozi v'zimrat Yah, va'y'hi li lishu'ah.
עָזִּי וְזִמְרָת יָהּ, וַיְהִי-לִי לִישׁוּעָה
Yah is my strength and my song and has become my rescue.

As one of the rabbinical student participants expressed, being amid people singing the same words created a community experience -- I was being pulled along by the others in my prayer amid my fear. They were helping me find my own way out of the dangerous sea.

Later, I wondered what an experience like this could mean to a person truly standing at the edge of the unknown amid illness, suffering and profound uncertainty: to feel pulled along by others, or even just one chaplain, an act of healing that would be assisted by Holy resources like the song, but that would also be rooted in the most physical of experiences, the experience of using our own physical voice. This is truly what I would call spiritual reflection, or even personal Midrash -- the use of our spiritual imaginations in dialogue with our Holy resources.

After our singing and reflection, Minna invited us to actually write our own preemptive victory songs, to create something that we could carry (and that could also carry us) as we face uncertainty or the unknown in our own lives or in the lives of those to whom we minister. In the songs we heard, one student beautifully combined parts of a holy resource we talked about during our presentation -- Psalm 30, which we say in the morning liturgy just before Pesukei d'Zimra/Verses of Song -- with her own pleas and questions, including questions about the role of women and women's voices in Judaism. Another student adapted the tune of the Beatles' "Long and winding road" giving it words that reflected her own current life concerns and questions, and concluding with the original song's plea for help to find the way.

I was also impressed with the way one student's song reflected a kind of deep tension that many of us feel with our holy resources -- they are both sources of profound meaning for us, but can also be difficult and troubling. She took a hymn whose melody she loves but whose words she finds troubling and adapted it with new words. And the part of me that sometimes feels I'm stumbling through life was moved by one student's story of riding a bicycle race with a bent wheel. In his song, I saw a resource for continuing on in the face of difficult circumstances and disappointment.

The workshop had opened with one of Minna's own songs -- a beautiful song called Edge of the unknown that she wrote while she was engaged in her own pastoral training (the video is from a performance she did in Reading a few months back):



I had also shared with the student's some thoughts I have about the theology of the book of Psalms, a book that (in Psalm 30) cries out with the words (verse 10):

'What profit is there in my silence, in my going down to the pit
מַה-בֶּצַע בְּדָמִי, בְּרִדְתִּי אֶל-שָׁחַת:

Can dust praise You? Can it tell of your truth?
הֲיוֹדְךָ עָפָר; הֲיַגִּיד אֲמִתֶּךָ.

It was a great experience!

Shabbat Shalom!

What is Midrash, what is Holy imagination (the view from Oraita)?

Midrash -- from the Hebrew language root for seeking or demanding -- is sometimes described as a Jewish method of Bible interpretation. But this is much too narrow a view. Midrash is about imagination. In its classic form, it is the imaginings -- imaginings often in the form of story -- of our Sages about the things they found in their Holy scriptures. They added story onto story, in the process creating new meaning that made the biblical text their own, relevant to their lives and concerns.

We, too, as I have argued elsewhere, can make our own Midrash -- by composing our own new stories that we can layer along with the holy texts of our tradition. Some, however, would say that even my definition of Midrash is too narrow, and that Midrash need not even relate to the biblical text.

This week, I am at Oraita -- a gathering where rabbis and Jewish scholars come to learn together. This meeting is focusing on Midrash. Natan Margalit -- Oraita's director -- made his own effort today in opening the meeting to say what Midrash, or the conversation about it, is about: "Truth is a conversation of discipline and passion over time," he said, borrowing from Parker Palmer. He continued, "This conversation we share -- that's where truth is." He made reference to the metaphor of water, the idea that the Torah is like water and that our conversation about Torah is like drops of water: "Torah wears down that resistance to truth."

I'm looking forward to learning with the scholars who are here, including JTS' Burt Visotzky, who says he will be teaching four classic Midrashim that touch on a Jewish approach to a topic so important to the practice of pastoral care (to being a spiritual caregiver to people who are suffering) -- theodicy (why God would allow bad things to happen to good people, etc).

I hope to bring this learning back to my community -- and my chaplain students -- to enrich our learning together this summer.

It's exciting!

Keeping it real -- doing Midrash with the pastoral care pros

I used to think of myself as a person with very little visual imagination. But, a couple of years back I heard about a different way of working with my chaplain students when they share the experiences that they have with their patients -- a way that asks us to pay special attention to the images that come to mind when we hear about these powerful encounters and to then try and connect those images with the "big questions" (about the meaning of life and death and of God's place in the world, etc) that they bring to mind. After exercising my imaginative -- my Midrashic -- "muscles" by leading these workshops (called verbatim as theological event) for a while, suddenly I found that I had grown to have a rich visual imagination, one that was always able to offer visual images in these workshops.

So, I have been anxious to share this work with other Jewish chaplaincy professionals and to put before them this idea that we can increase our imaginative capacity by exercising our midrashic muscles together. So, at the National Association of Jewish Chaplains (NAJC) conference in Boston last month I presented a workshop I called, Working the midrashic muscle -- using images to uncover the Holy in the mundane. Over 20 people attended the workshop, and they all seemed very excited about the work we did together, offering up many of their own images and associations with our Holy texts and traditions.
I started out by sharing with them how I think about midrash in this context -- because I don't think midrash is just any kind of imaginative thinking. It's an especially Jewish way of doing imaginative thinking, a way that connects us with our tradition -- with God, Torah and Israel -- on the way towards our finding meaning in our most powerful experiences. In thinking about this, today, I was reminded of how Ari Elon -- in his From Jerusalem to the edge of heaven -- contrasts midrashic analysis with scientific analysis:

Science grinds raw symbols in the mill of analytic conceptualization; midrash turns concepts into raw symbols. Scientific discourse abstracts; midrashic discourse makes things concrete. (pg. 37)

That is, midrash -- to use the language of pastoral education -- takes us out of our heads and into our hearts (where feelings and images lie). Midrash draws us towards our meaningful experiences -- towards the concrete details of those experiences and the emotions connected with them -- instead of doing what an intellectualizing analysis does (take us way from the reality of our experiences). Midrash helps us to keep it real.

So, here's what I did in the workshop, step-by-step (and you can follow these steps to do your own personal midrash work, either in groups or with individuals, or just for yourself):

1) Reentering the experience. I asked for a volunteer to describe an experience that felt particularly meaningful, but where the person did not necessarily know why it felt so meaningful. In recounting the experience, the most important thing is to try and put your ideas and judgments about your experience aside for a while. This is because what you already think about these experiences will block you from coming to new insights -- from singing a new song, a shir hadash/שיר חדש, if you will -- about the experience. One of my favorite quotes from Heschel's The Sabbath -- "Things created conceal the Creator" -- helps me here. It reminds me that we often need to put our own creations -- including the creations of our thoughts -- aside to see the Holy in the world.

The path to putting our the creations of our thoughts aside -- the path to keeping it real -- is to focus on the concrete details of the experience when we retell it, especially the things we perceive with our senses, with sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing. And so, as the facilitator, I tried to help the volunteer when she seemed to be moving towards her thoughts in the recounting: "What did you see at that moment?" "Can you tell me about what you saw on the person's face?" "What was the light like in the room?" "What did you smell?"

This volunteer told about seeing a person go into the room of another resident of a long-term care facility she was working at. The one resident gazed down at the face of the other resident, who was in a bed. Something meaningful seemed to be happening between the two faces amid silence. And then the person in the bed breathed her last breath, and the still-living resident left the room.
This simple, wordless encounter is very short and it did not take long for the volunteer to retell it. And yet I am amazed to think about how full and rich the hour of discussion following it was. We were able to slow down, in effect, and search together for our midrash about it. And so here are the rest of the steps we went through. [I do, by the way, owe a debt to a book called The Art of Theological Reflection by Christian scholars Killen and De Beer for helping me think through these steps.]

2) Paying attention to feelings. I asked people to share the feelings that came up for them as they were listening to the retelling of this encounter. I reminded people that feelings are not thoughts, and that feelings are very often things that have resonance in our bodies -- if we're feeling tense, for example, there might be a tightness in our shoulders. Looking to see if there is resonance in our bodies can help us tell the difference between a thought and a feeling.

Many feelings, some of them, contradictory, came up. One person felt sad. Another a sense of connection. There was joy, too. Even some feelings of loneliness.

3) Look for images that relate to the feelings. Images don't necessarily have to be visual. One person's image was just of a flow, from this world to up above. Others were more visual and some were borrowed from art or popular culture. One, very topical one, came from the hit movie Avatar -- the floating, jellyfish-like things, from the great, connecting tree in that work. Another person imagined vertical strands, with beads of lights on them.

The images, at their best reflect what we think the essence -- the ikar/עיקר -- of the encounter is (sometimes, people call this the heart of the matter). Although there is certainly not a single ikar to be found -- the essence may be different for each person who heard the retelling of the encounter.

At this stage, what we have done is stam/סתם, or plain -- secular -- reflection. We could have gone straight from here to the final step -- trying to assign a new meaning to our experience. But then we would not have done spiritual reflection; we would not have done midrash. To make it midrash, we need to bring our encounter -- the personal experience we found meaningful -- into dialogue with the Holy Sources we find meaningful. In a Jewish context, that means a dialogue with our collective and historical experience, as reflected in our Holy texts and elsewhere. It means a dialogue with God, Torah and Israel.

The below diagram reflects how I think about this. We take our meaningful personal experiences and read them together -- interpret them -- in a dialogue with our Holy texts. The result is a new midrash

And, so, there is a fourth step to do this work of bringing in God, Torah and Israel.

4) Dialogue with our sources of Wisdom and Holiness. Sometimes I call this step, Holy Writ, but I am avoiding that terminology here because I want to make clear that this stage is not limited to ancient sources like the Bible -- it doesn't even have to be religious sources. It can be any source of wisdom or meaning for us, including poems or motion pictures (movies -- especially ones by deep-thinking, if not so religious, Jews like Woody Allen or the Coen brothers -- are particularly important for me here). [PS. If you haven't gone to see the Coen's A serious man, don't wait a minute longer!]
But -- not surprisingly in a group of Jewish chaplains, many of whom were rabbis -- most of the sources in this group were ones from Jewish Holy texts. One person saw a malach -- an angel -- with a shofar, in effect blowing the person upward. Another person thought of the death of Moshe (Moses), with a kiss from God.

Another had an association that made me see the encounter from a totally different perspective -- he thought of the dramatic reunification of the two deeply estranged brothers, Jacob and Esau, as adults and how they made peace in a moment that had so much potential for violence (and how they seem to have never met, again). This raised the possibility for me that there may have been unseen forces and history keeping the two residents apart before the magical moment of unification the person telling the story witnessed, adding added drama to what she saw.

I got a wonderful surprise from another association. There was a man in the room who had been silent through the whole workshop, and his silence made me wonder if he was somehow disapproving of what we were doing. But then he offered this beautiful association from the daily liturgy (from Talmud Shabbat 127): "These are the things for which a person not only enjoys their fruits in this world, but also their principal -- hakeren kayemet, in Hebrew -- in the world to come: honoring parents, practicing deeds of loving kindness (gemilut hasidim) . . . visiting the sick, making marriages possible (haknesat kalah), and accompanying the dead. . . "

The final one is generally understood as attending funerals, but this person's midrash was to extend it to the moment in this story -- to being with a person as they were dying!

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I think this final association is especially worth of the lablel, midrash, as it is, in effect, a new story (see new story's place on the diagram above). My good friend, Rabbi Benjamin Katz reminded me that my diagram promised the creation of something new -- a midrash at the end. I'm still working to clarify how we can best do that!

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5) Meaning and action. This is where we try to pull the insights we have come found together. We ask ourselves, have we learned something new? Have we taught ourselves (or others) something new about how to be better caregivers? Better people? Better Jews?

There are so many ways this kind of work can be helpful. At the beginning here, I suggested that this is a process of "working our midrashic muscle," of strengthening our spiritual imagination to make us more sensitive to seeing the Holy in the world and to help others also come to a greater awareness.

Those "others" can be other chaplains, as they were in my workshop. Or they could be patients or congregants. This work can be healing (one participant suggested it could be an important part of self-care for chaplains in danger of forgetting how important their work is amid its many stresses -- I agree!).

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One participant said the workship reminded her of Rabbi Dayle Friedman's "PaRDeS" method (which you can find in the book, Jewish Pastoral Care). But she drashed it a bit of switching things around into a PaRSaD method:

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  1) Peshat (plain meaning): the first step in my process -- the retelling of the story with the focus on the plain concretes (of things like touch and smell).


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  2) Remez ("hint"): the feelings.


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  3) Sod ("secret): the images.


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  4) Drash: the association with Holy text, and the new meanings -- and midrash! -- we make out of it.

[Or at least that's how I best remember what she said. I hope I got it right! (I'm not sure who it was? Ruth Smith? If it was you, let me know!]

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Rabbi Katz shared wth me that many in theatre have worked on this facilitator's work in step 1 of asking people questions to help them focus on the concretes of their experience. Minna has often suggested that it might be helpful for us both to get some acting training together. Maybe we will!

We have our dreams -- Midrash, Jewish chaplaincy and MLK

I have Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, now president of Boston Hebrew College, to thank for showing me that Martin Luther King day can be more than just a day the banks are closed: we can treat it in the ways the Jews treat all their holidays, as an opportunity for study -- for study of Torah. Implicit in this kind of Torah study is an assumption that Torah goes far beyond the canonical texts of Judaism like the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. It can extend to anything that connects us with wisdom and Ultimate Meaning -- that feeds our dreams as Jews of a pursuit of a more perfected, more just, world. Even to the works of an African-American preacher from Atlanta, Georgia.

King's work -- especially his famous I have a dream speech -- is certainly once such source of Torah. But, as you can see if you really study it as Torah, King gives us an example in that speech of a particular kind of dreaming much akin to our practice of Midrash. That is, King does not just put forth dreams in some way disconnected from his tradition. Rather, he spins his dreams using the images and language from that tradition -- subtly paraphrasing and quoting from the Bible and his other foundational sources to make his points, his dreams, clear.

Last week, I gave a workshop -- entitled Working the midrashic muscle -- using images to uncover the Holy in the mundane -- at the annual conference of the National Association of Jewish Chaplains. In that workshop, which I'll write more about here soon, I made the case that in order to create our own new Midrash from our own spiritual experiences, we need to bring those experiences into dialogue with our tradition -- with God, Torah and Israel.

That's really what King did, from his own tradition(s) in the I have a dream speech. Five years, ago, I created the handout you see a small version of on the right (a full pdf version you can use yourself is freely available here) for a study session I led as part of the MLK Day activities Rabbi Lehmann had organized at the Gann Academy where he was then the head of school. In the center of the handout is the text of the speech itself. On the edges are the many sources that King borrowed from in the speech, including Amos, the Declaration of Independence and Shakespeare. It's fascinating to see how he used these things to construct his speech!

[If you are going to use the study handout, I recommend you enlarge it about 1.5x onto 11x17 paper.]

On this MLK Day, I hope you can find the courage to dream. And that, in doing so, you will not be alone -- that you will have the full force of the rich traditions of your people(s), and their Holy Texts, behind you -- true dreaming, true pursuit of justice, is a shared experience!

Making it our own -- the key to Jewish survival (and chaplaincy)

On my iPod I have a list of songs I call "He Made it his Own." It was inspired by Johnny Cash's hit rendition of the song "Hurt". Listening to Cash's stark voice amid the spare acoustic accompaniment, it's hard to imagine anyone else ever having sung these words, not to mention them being sung by the heavy metal band (Nine Inch Nails) which had performed the song originally and had made it a hit (for the first time).

It's something like the Passover Seder, the grand and ordered holiday meal where we retell the story of our people's redemption at God's hand from slavery, and that was the center of the Judaism in which I was raised. It's such a quintessentially Jewish practice that it's hard to imagine that anybody else ever did it. But scholars tell us that much of the Seder's practices were borrowed from the Roman practice of a symposium meal.

My Jewish heart -- and its desire for all things Jewish to be something purely and uniquely our own -- could be discouraged by what the scholars tell us about the Seder. But I've learned to see things a bit differently.

Last week, at the Oraita retreat, I was privileged to study with Zohar scholar Melila Hellner-Eshed (as well as the great Art Green). Hellner-Eshed drew this rich picture for us of the world the authors of the Zohar -- the great work of mysticism in Judaism -- lived in as members of a minority group in 13th c. Christian Spain. One of their challenges was the attraction of the surrounding religious culture and its seductive promise of a more loving (and more human ) God than the seemingly harsh God of the Hebrew Bible.

The Zoharists created a rich symbolic system that described a God that was not only loving, but that was in an intense love relationship with the people Israel. That is, this was a spirituality manifested as an intoxicating dance between lovers constantly seeking union and the (holy) products of that union. In effect, the Zoharists were saying -- "you Christians have a loving God, I'll show you a loving God!"

As professor Hellner-Eshed taught us at Oraita, "the project [of the Zohar] is molding something that feels more Jewish. This is a kind of Jewish religious genius. . . You do that midrashic dance [with the Jewish tradition and its Holy texts] and you have to give it enough time so it slowly becomes Hebrew and it feels good."

That is, the Zoharists took some things that may have first come to them because of their contact with Christians but they then imposed Jewish forms, language and styles of biblical interpretation (that is, midrash) on them. With time, this grew into something uniquely and quintessentially Jewish (kabbalah) that has helped sustain and preserve the Jewish people throughout the ages. In effect, they made it their own.

Making it our own remains the central task before Jewish leaders, today. The "it" changes, surely. For me, right now, the biggest "it" is the world of pastoral care (chaplaincy) and especially the task of training the spiritual caregivers of the future (as a CPE supervisor, which I am training for).

When I first started to hear about "pastoral care," I recoiled. Just the word "pastoral" bothered me. It sounded too much like "pastor", which was a Christian word. How could a Jewish person be involved in such a Christian project?

But the study of pastoral care is no longer brand new to the Jews. We've been living with it for a while. We've been playing with Jewish language and forms for it. We've wondered whether calling it "spiritual care" instead of pastoral care helps at all. We've been teasing out which pastoral care assumptions and practices are antithetical to Judaism and which ones are not.

And, yet, I don't think we've done enough midrash with it to feel in any way like the project of making pastoral care our own is anything but in its infancy. What's really lacking, in my view, is the application of serious scholarship to this project. Our midrash with pastoral care has to involve our finest minds and has to be deeply grounded in a serious understanding of our tradition and its texts -- the kind of understanding of those things that the Zoharists had. It's that grounding that allows us to truly make things our own. This is the project that I really hope to dedicate much of my rabbinate to -- doing the serious midrash required to make pastoral care and CPE our own. And some of what I've written here on this blog is very much about this project.

It strikes me that the kind of people needed for such a project were the very kind of people who were the teachers at the Oraita retreat. As Natan Margalit -- the organizer of the retreat -- said, the teachers he was looking for were people who can teach in a way that is both 1) intellectually rigorous, and 2) deeply meaningful. Too, often, in the Jewish world we see these two things in an "either/or" kind of way -- either a teacher is a brilliant (but boring) academic scholar, or he or she is indeed a charismatically spiritual teacher, but has no serious intellectual grounding.

This false division leads nowhere. This is especially true regarding the making it our own project that is even more important to me than the spiritual care one -- the project of preserving the Jewish people here in North America. Most people are pretty smart. So, while they may be attracted by a dose of spiritual religious charisma at first, that will not sustain them in a lifelong pursuit. So, too, intellectual challenges may interest a person for a while, but if it doesn't have real spiritual content, folks are just going to move on to another (non-religious) intellectual challenge. Only a leader -- or a movement -- that has both can be successful in a making it our own kind of project.

I call the project of preserving the Jewish people a making it our own project because the great challenge before our people is the seductiveness of the surrounding culture (just as the Zoharists faced the seductive challenge of their surrounding culture).

We live in our own time where our people are being seduced away by the surrounding culture. Endless words have been written in universities and on the op-ed pages of Jewish newspapers about the decline in the number of Jews affiliating with Jewish organizations. We are afraid of disappearing.

Our response has to go back to the same Jewish religious genius -- the genius to make things our own -- that the Zoharists used to help sustain and renew our people.

This, of course, leaves us to ponder what it is that is so seductive about the surrounding culture and what parts of it we might make our own. I don't know the answer to that, but I think one thing we have to think about is the way people -- especially young people -- play with their identities these days. The anonymity of the Internet, for example, has created a possibility for folks to safely try on different "faces" and folks seem to do it often. How can we bring that into Judaism?

One obvious answer is Purim, that holiday where we turn things "upside down" and where wearing costumes and masks is common. Purim was certainly put forward as a "solution" at the Oraita retreat, especially because of its miraculous nature, and the potential that miracles and wonder have to attract people. But more on that another day.

May it be the will of the Blessed Holy One that you should find great teachers in your life, teachers of both rigor and spirit. Teachers who can help you find your own path to making the things before you your own.

Working the midrashic muscle -- imagination, the search for God, the path to action

I was heading up a steep wooded trail last week when I saw Daniel Matt -- one of the world's greatest scholars of the Zohar and of Kabbalah -- coming down the other way. He surprised me by stopping to talk. "It's easy to miss the turnoff to the overlook," he said. "Look for the tree shaped like an ayin with a little tzitzit hanging down."

It was a beautiful moment that said a lot not only about what a beautiful man Matt is, but also about how we can make Torah a living thing in our lives: Matt was clearly walking through the woods with his imagination -- an imagination primed to see the things of Judaism and the Torah everywhere -- alive and at work. But this mystical imagination was doing anything but taking him away from the world and his responsibilities to other human beings; he was still very much ready to stop and take the action of helping a person in need on his way.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of imagination in our spiritual lives. With my chaplaincy students this summer we did something called verbatim as theological event (VTE). Here, a student shares with a group the story of a visit with a patient. Then the group searches for images that describe the "heart of the matter" in the encounter with the patient.

I don't think of myself as a very visual person, but this summer I found myself growing in my imaginative abilities (what I call, exercising the midrashic muscle) through my participation in these seminars. I saw one encounter as a boat tossed in a storm with somebody on a larger ship reaching out trying to save the person inside, but unable to reach that person. In another encounter, I saw a glass wall standing between two people desperately trying to connect with one another. [Click here for a step-by-step description of how to carry out a VTE seminar.]

If this process stopped with image-making, it would just be an intellectual exercise. But what makes it about faith is that it is in fact meant to lead to action -- action inspired by where we see the hand of God in the encounter and what that tells us about how we can better walk in God's ways in what we do. This process of moving from examining an intense personal experience to taking action inspired by God and Torah is sometimes called theological reflection (see The Art of Theological Reflection by Christian scholars Killen and De Beer for an excellent description of a general approach to this process). But I prefer to call it Midrash HaHayyim, or Living Midrash (I first wrote about this in May).

Midrash, traditionally, was the ancient and highly imaginative process of interpreting the Bible. The ancient rabbis especially loved to "fill in the gaps" in places where the biblical story is especially terse. They did so in a way that often related to the situations they saw around them -- including the injustices from the oppressive empires they lived under. In this way they linked up their experiences with the wisdom of the Torah text. [See what I wrote about in May for a more detailed description of how the Rabbis did Midrash by filling in the gaps.]

This is exactly what we do in Living Midrash. We take an experience that was meaningful or deeply troubling in our lives. By ourselves -- or better, with a group -- we examine our feelings about this experience and the images that arise in our minds from that experience in our search for the heart of the matter. And then we look for what Torah tells us about this kind of experience. What stories in Torah are like our story? What characters in Torah are like us or other people in our story? How is the Torah the same or different from what happened for us? What can we learn from how it was the same or different?

It's the Torah component that makes Living Midrash different from some other kinds of contemporary Midrash. Sometimes people think Midrash is just about imagination and they will call any sort of imaginative process Midrash. But that's not enough. Midrash -- in order to be truly living -- has to be linked back to the tradition, to Torah. It's the link between imagination and tradition that makes it Midrash.

But in order to be truly Living Midrash it also has to follow in the spirit of this famous debate recorded in the Talmud (Kiddushin 40b):

תלמוד גדול או מעשה גדול

What is greater (as a way to serve God), study (Talmud) or action?

נענה רבי טרפון ואמר מעשה גדול נענה ר"ע ואמר תלמוד גדול

Two rabbis disagreed: Rabbi Tarfon says action is greater and Rabbi Akiva says study is greater.

נענו כולם ואמרו תלמוד גדול שהתלמוד מביא לידי מעשה

The Sages answered and said -- study is greater for it brings one to action.

That is, the study we make in this process of Living Midrash should inform us about what the Torah informs us about how to run our lives. It's not enough to stop at insight and imagination. It has to also lead to action.

But we do indeed need to cultivate our imaginations to be able to do our own Midrash and make it alive. That's what I learned from Dani Matt. Not only did he bring his imagination into the woods with him, but the heart of what he teaches has to do with the Jewish imagination. Few works are more imaginative in the Jewish tradition than that great medieval mystical work in which Matt specializes, the Zohar.

The Zohar imagines God and our relationship with God in incredibly fantastic ways. The Zoharist stares at a candle flame and sees not just the blue, white and red of gases combining, but also images of God and Israel and Moses. God sits above the flame in another invisible light. Israel cleaves to the blue-black light below, seeking unification with God. Moses is in the white. (Zohar Bereishit 1:51).

Unification is in fact is a key concept in the Zohar and in Kabbalah. One of the top three contributions of the Kabbalah, Matt taught, is the idea that it is human action that brings about the unification of the "divine couple." That is, the Kabbalah imagines God as having both feminine and masculine attributes (sometimes called Shekhina and Tifferet) and that the great task of the human being is to help bring the unification of these attributes through the actions of the mitzvot.

For me, the great action where I am involved in the unification of God involves my work with patients and my effort to help bring them comfort and healing. It is a form of Tikkun, or repair of the world.

But I could not do it if I did not know that God was there. I could not do it if I did not have the faith that I am serving Torah. I just couldn't do it on my own. It would just be too hard to stand. I just would not be able to stand before the death and pain and suffering I find in the hospital's halls. I need God.

And it's my need of God -- and my desire to draw God in -- that is truly really the only source of what it is that I have to offer patients. I can't transform bodies. I can't work magic. I can only offer the rewards and comforts of faith. I only have my example of how I have tried to invite God into my own life. That's all.

It is the kind of Torah study I did with Dani Matt -- and my own processes of Living Midrash (including VTE) -- that invites God in and makes my work possible.

That's why it's Holy.

Personal Midrash

Over the recent holiday of Shavuot, I helped a friend of mine to put together a workshop on Personal Midrash at a synagogue in Las Vegas. It was an effort that I am very excited about and it went extremely well.

Midrash is the ancient rabbinic practice of interpreting the Bible. The text of the Bible can often be extremely terse, giving few details of events and sometimes refraining from explicitly describing important elements. The rabbis who created the ancient Midrash, loved to fill in these gaps with highly imaginative descriptions of what they thought might have happened. Sometimes they did this to explain things that seemed troubling or inexplicable otherwise. Sometimes they did it to enhance the spiritual meaning of the text for them.

A wonderful example of this process is a midrash on the Akeidah (the sacrifice of Isaac by his father Avraham). The text (Gen 22:2) says that God told Avraham to "take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah; and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering." And, then the text says, Avraham promptly got up early the next morning to perform this deed. No objection is recorded

But the ancient midrashists were not satisfied with this. And so they imagined an entire conversation between God and Avraham, where Avraham expressed objections and disbelief. In this way, the midrashists gave the text a richer meaning for them and helped it live spiritually.

It's worth pausing to consider something peculiar about the way the Rabbis added meaning to the text. They did not, for example, say, 'this is the meaning of this passage' or 'this passage is the Bible's discussion of this abstract concept'. (An abstract concept would be something like obedience or free will or grace.) Instead, they added meaning by adding concretes to the text. That is, they added meaning to the story by telling another story. They added another layer onto it that shifts what it means to us.

This adding stories to the story is a fascinating way to create meaning. The question for us is, can we do the same thing with our own lives?

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We generally think of texts as something written down on a piece of paper. But our lives are texts, too. They are full of stories and experiences. They are rich and varied and complex. Just as the Rabbis put an intense focus of examination and imagination on the biblical text in their attempt to find meaning in it, so too can we find spiritual meaning by doing a midrash on our own lives. And this meaning, just as it is with the Bible, can be taken to the next step -- we can use it to find insight and wisdom. Insight and wisdom that can lead to action that can transform our lives for the better and can give us a better understanding of what God wants from us.

Clinical Pastoral Education -- a type of chaplaincy education I am deeply involved with these days -- is based on a process that is something like this. Its founder, Anton Boisen, taught us to think of our patients as being "living human documents" -- that is, as texts -- from whom we can learn. We engage in an intense examinations of these "documents" by holding seminars where we talk about our encounters with our patients in great detail. From these seminars comes a greater sense of the meaning of the encounter and what was spiritual about it. And we also gain wisdom and insight that helps us take actions in the future that can allow us to better serve our patients.

During the course of my own training in Clinical Pastoral Education, I was introduced to a fascinating book (The Art of Theological Reflection by Killen and De Beer) about how Christians can find meaning and direction by going through a process of finding meaning through a way of intensely examining events in their own lives and then reflecting about it. My effort to create a path to Personal Midrash owes a debt to Killen and De Beer's work.

They postulate that there is an observable pattern to the way people form insight that changes their lives (page 31):

When we enter our experience, we encounter our feelings.

When we pay attention to those feelings, images arise.

Considering and questioning those images may spark insight.

Insight leads, if we are willing and ready, to action.

I will explain how I understand and use this process as we go, but I want to start by focusing on the question of experience. What Kileen and De Beer propose is akin to a core theology of mine (and, I believe, to an important part of the theology of the branch of Judaism to which I belong, the Conservative Movement) -- that God's transmitting of God's message to us did not just happen at one place and time.

Rather, this revelation happens constantly, in every generation. It happens through our various efforts to connect with the Holy. It can happen through study. It can happen through prayer. And it can also happen through our meditating on the moments in our lives that had the most meaning for us and attempting to reenter those experiences to find meaning in them that we might have missed the first time. Just as Jacob was surprised (Genesis 28:16) to realize that God was in the place he was but that he did not see it (until he dreamed), we often miss the full presence of God on our first look, even when we feel deep meaning on that first look. Like Jacob, we need to dream.

The way we make ourselves dream is by reentering our experience. But we do not do that alone. Because we need God to help us find true meaning. And the way we bring God in is by bringing God's word -- Torah -- in. It is one of the arrogances of the modern mind to imagine that we can find true spiritual meaning without God's help. In our search for meaning, we must do as the ancient Midrashists did. They read the Bible intertextually. That is, they understood one part of the Torah by reading it as if it was intimately related to another part, no matter how far away in the narrative the two parts might be.

We must take this same bold spirit to the task of rereading our own lives. We must read our lives as if they are part of the Torah and as if the Torah's story was our story. This is the essence of the central command of Pesach -- to explicate the verse "a wandering aramean was my father" (Deuteronomy 26:5) in a way that is in accordance with what the text of the haggadah states: that "in every single generation one is obligated to look upon himself as if he personally had gone forth out of Egypt."

And, so, to do our own Personal Midrash on our own lives, we cannot abandon the text of the Torah -- we need it to bless our lives with a link to Eternal Meaning and Wisdom (that is, to bless the 'text' of our lives with a link to God). Nor can we abandon our lives and have only the text. This would make the Living Torah a dead thing. It would be a desecration.

Here is how we do it. We reenter our Holy experiences by slowing ourselves down. We must perform a kind of Tzimtzum -- withdrawal -- to purge our minds of judgments. Our judgments are our opinions that we have already formed. They block us from seeing things anew -- from singing a new song (a Shir Hadash) from our experiences. We must withdraw from them. We must purge our mind of them, and get back to just the event itself.

We do this slowing down and this withdrawal by retelling the story (it is best to do this with a group). But we must retell it with this discipline -- no judgments. No how's and why's. Just the facts, as they used to say on Dragnet. Just the things you can recount with your five senses. What your eyes saw. What your hands felt. What your ears heard.

[This process of clearing the judgments you created from your mind in order to try and get closer to where the Divine was in the experience reminds me of one of my favorite Heschel quotes: Things created conceal the Creator.]

When you're done with this, you can move onto feelings. Feelings, like experience, are neither judgments nor opinions. Feelings tend to be something that has resonance in our bodies. 'I felt tension in my shoulders.' 'I felt excitement as my breathing sped up.' Feelings, then can lead us to come up with images in our heads.

It's here -- with images -- that the wisdom of Torah can come back into the Midrash process. We (and, again, a group is helpful here) try to read our lives along with the Torah. Are there stories from the Torah that resonate with the images we have conjured up? Does an image of being visited in our sorrow remind us of Avraham greeting visitors from his tent door at the Oaks of Mamre? Does a feeling of emptiness we had remind us of the pain of Sarah when she thought she was barren? Can we use these connections to conjur up new stories to add onto the stories of our lives?

We can then ask ourselves what we have learned from bringing the text into our own lives. Has it increased our insight and understanding? Has it deepened our sense of the spiritual meaning of the experience? Do the actions of our foremothers and forefathers with whom we have now connected give us new paths of action that we did not see before? How have we grown through this process? This is Personal Midrash.

I would call this "Midrash on Ourselves -- the search for meaning, the search for God. Letting Torah be our guide." It means anything but Midrash being anything we want it to be. It's a dialogue with the tradition and its texts. The texts give our lives meaning and our lives give meaning to the text.

In the coming weeks, I hope to have time to compare this process with some other things that are already out there, especially Bibliodrama. I am only just beginning my journey of learning about Bibliodrama, but I understand that it understands itself as starting from the text. Personal Midrash, on the other hand, starts from the individual's experience. But, I am sure that the two must have a great deal in common as well.

In Las Vegas, by the way, we imagined the workshop having a little different order than what I outlined above. We talked about something like this:

• Introducing the topic of finding God by focusing our attention on our experiences by
• Talking about Jacob's realization that God was in that place, although he did not know it (Genesis 28:16).
• Holding a discussion asking people to reflect on what kind of experiences are ones people find most meaningful.
• Asking for a volunteer willing to recount such a meaningful experience.
• Requiring him or her to do it by sticking to describing it according to the concretes of their senses.
• Then the volunteer is asked to step aside and quietly observe while the group carries out the next steps in the process:
• Reflecting together on what feelings were sparked by listening to the story.
• Reflecting on what images came to mind from these feelings.
• These should not be complete thoughts, but should arise almost out of a stream-of-consciousness process -- whatever just pops into your mind.
• Coming up with links between these images and "Holy Writ". These can be stories from the Bible and the Jewish tradition, but they could also be from film (Woody Allen movies are particularly rich for me) or novels or poetry.
• Finally, the group is asked what spiritual meaning this reflection has sparked for them.
• And as a last step, the volunteer is brought back into the circle and is asked to reflect on what it felt like to hear people talk about his or her experience like this, and what new insights he or she might have gained from it. Do they now understand the event differently or more richly?
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