Cantor Vera's Corner
June 2023
Dear chevre,
The secular school year is concluding; the weather is bursting with heat and the promise of summer salt, sweat, and ocean. Within our own community, we are getting ready for a big change. I am preparing to leave Temple Emanu-El for a new job at the end of June, with a heart full of love and gratitude for my time here and the work and relationships with which you have entrusted me. And you, beloved members, are preparing to welcome, receive, and covenant with a new clergy leader: Rabbi-to-be Ashira Stevens, who will be ordained on June 4 at Hebrew College and will start work as Temple Emanu-El’s spiritual leader at the beginning of next month.
Change is, by its nature, disruptive. It interrupts and remakes what has been. It can be a source of stress and distress. But change is where new growth begins. I want to offer you a framing for change in this time of transition for our temple. What if we start thinking about change as not just complicated, but divine in its messiness? What if we think about change itself as God?
Rabbi Toba Spitzer, in her book God is Here: Reimagining the Divine, imagines God as the process of becoming. She digs deep into the words of God to Moshe at the burning bush, when Moshe asks God to define God’s self so that Moshe can properly answer the Israelites, who will be anxious to know the name of this ancestral deity who’s newly present to their suffering and working on their liberation. God answers: “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.”1 Rabbi Spitzer translates this as “I am Becoming That I am Becoming.”2 God is not bound up into a solution or a certainty or even a powerful act of salvation. Rather, Rabbi Spitzer invites us to believe that God is potential. Whenever we, as humans, create or interact with newness, that’s where we find God. When we surprise ourselves with a thought or an act, that’s God. When we help someone else respond or innovate or grow in a way they hadn’t thought possible, that’s God. Rabbi Spitzer writes that “for [philosopher Alfred North] Whitehead, God was the answer to the question: If there are possibilities for becoming that have not yet existed, where does that possibility come from?”3 Some of our Jewish texts call God “M’kor haChayyim,” wellspring of life. If to be alive means to have the capacity to change, then we can translate this name for God, too, as “Source of Possibility.”
Potential is not neat, or comfortable. Something new requires an ending of what was, and loss hurts. Author Aleksandar Hemon retells a midrash of creation from B’reishit Rabbah 3:7 that holds both that pain and that potential, in the beginning of his exquisite novel of love and destruction and transformation, The World and All That It Holds. “The Holy One kept creating worlds and destroying them, creating worlds and destroying them, and then, just before giving up, He finally came up with this one.”4 I have to believe that God mourned the destruction of part of God’s creation—but God believed in the benefit of potential, and kept going. Like God, we believe in potential; we change, and allow our world to change with us, and look for new growth and new good in each new world we make. Perhaps we channel God when we change.
When we are in the midst of change, we don’t have answers to the big questions. What will this next part be like? How will I feel in it? The poet Rilke advises:
"I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now; they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer."5
For change to root and grow, we need more than just the uncritical capacity to create and accept difference. We need a purpose to guide us, and we need to pay attention and check in with ourselves and one another as we go. Social justice activist adrienne maree brown calls this “adaptation with intention.”6 This June, I invite you to create intentions for yourself by asking yourself these big questions, and then spend some time loving the questions themselves and living into, rather than chasing, the answers: What do you want your new rabbi to know about you? How do you want to relate to her? What are your personal Jewish values and goals? What are your worries? What do you dream of for this community? These questions will give robust kavannah, intention, to the adaptation that Temple Emanu-El is making, and the whole community will benefit.
On the evening of Saturday, June 10, my friend and colleague Rabbi Sarah Noyovitz will lead you in a Havdalah ritual to acknowledge the shift from me to Rabbi-to-be Ashira. This ritual will support you, beloved community members, in setting intentions, framing questions, and sharing dreams for this next period of growthful change that you’re stepping into. I hope you will all take advantage of this opportunity and come participate in the ritual; it will be both healing and helpful.
I’ll close with the words Rabbi Spitzer imagines Moshe saying as he tells his enslaved siblings the name of the One who sent him, Ehyeh-asher-Ehyeh: “There is a Power in the universe Whose name is Becoming. What is now is not what will be in the future. This Power of transformation … makes possible the most audacious change.”7 Temple Emanu-El, we are capable of holy and audacious change, and I know in my bones that there is a world of good that you and Rabbi-to-be Ashira are going to create together.
Chizku, chizku v’imtzu. Wishing you every strength, every success, and every joy in this next stage, dear Temple Emanu-El. Thank you for the gifts you have given me, and for being exactly who you are. I can’t wait to see what you do next.
L’shalom,
Cantor Vera
1. Sh’mot (Exodus) 3:14.
2. Toba Spitzer, God Is Here: Reimagining the Divine (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2022), 219.
3. Spitzer, God Is Here, 217.
4. Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2023), 4.
5. Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Damion Searls (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021), 22.
6. adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 69-70, quoted in Spitzer, God Is Here, 229.
7. Spitzer, God Is Here, 220.
The secular school year is concluding; the weather is bursting with heat and the promise of summer salt, sweat, and ocean. Within our own community, we are getting ready for a big change. I am preparing to leave Temple Emanu-El for a new job at the end of June, with a heart full of love and gratitude for my time here and the work and relationships with which you have entrusted me. And you, beloved members, are preparing to welcome, receive, and covenant with a new clergy leader: Rabbi-to-be Ashira Stevens, who will be ordained on June 4 at Hebrew College and will start work as Temple Emanu-El’s spiritual leader at the beginning of next month.
Change is, by its nature, disruptive. It interrupts and remakes what has been. It can be a source of stress and distress. But change is where new growth begins. I want to offer you a framing for change in this time of transition for our temple. What if we start thinking about change as not just complicated, but divine in its messiness? What if we think about change itself as God?
Rabbi Toba Spitzer, in her book God is Here: Reimagining the Divine, imagines God as the process of becoming. She digs deep into the words of God to Moshe at the burning bush, when Moshe asks God to define God’s self so that Moshe can properly answer the Israelites, who will be anxious to know the name of this ancestral deity who’s newly present to their suffering and working on their liberation. God answers: “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.”1 Rabbi Spitzer translates this as “I am Becoming That I am Becoming.”2 God is not bound up into a solution or a certainty or even a powerful act of salvation. Rather, Rabbi Spitzer invites us to believe that God is potential. Whenever we, as humans, create or interact with newness, that’s where we find God. When we surprise ourselves with a thought or an act, that’s God. When we help someone else respond or innovate or grow in a way they hadn’t thought possible, that’s God. Rabbi Spitzer writes that “for [philosopher Alfred North] Whitehead, God was the answer to the question: If there are possibilities for becoming that have not yet existed, where does that possibility come from?”3 Some of our Jewish texts call God “M’kor haChayyim,” wellspring of life. If to be alive means to have the capacity to change, then we can translate this name for God, too, as “Source of Possibility.”
Potential is not neat, or comfortable. Something new requires an ending of what was, and loss hurts. Author Aleksandar Hemon retells a midrash of creation from B’reishit Rabbah 3:7 that holds both that pain and that potential, in the beginning of his exquisite novel of love and destruction and transformation, The World and All That It Holds. “The Holy One kept creating worlds and destroying them, creating worlds and destroying them, and then, just before giving up, He finally came up with this one.”4 I have to believe that God mourned the destruction of part of God’s creation—but God believed in the benefit of potential, and kept going. Like God, we believe in potential; we change, and allow our world to change with us, and look for new growth and new good in each new world we make. Perhaps we channel God when we change.
When we are in the midst of change, we don’t have answers to the big questions. What will this next part be like? How will I feel in it? The poet Rilke advises:
"I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now; they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer."5
For change to root and grow, we need more than just the uncritical capacity to create and accept difference. We need a purpose to guide us, and we need to pay attention and check in with ourselves and one another as we go. Social justice activist adrienne maree brown calls this “adaptation with intention.”6 This June, I invite you to create intentions for yourself by asking yourself these big questions, and then spend some time loving the questions themselves and living into, rather than chasing, the answers: What do you want your new rabbi to know about you? How do you want to relate to her? What are your personal Jewish values and goals? What are your worries? What do you dream of for this community? These questions will give robust kavannah, intention, to the adaptation that Temple Emanu-El is making, and the whole community will benefit.
On the evening of Saturday, June 10, my friend and colleague Rabbi Sarah Noyovitz will lead you in a Havdalah ritual to acknowledge the shift from me to Rabbi-to-be Ashira. This ritual will support you, beloved community members, in setting intentions, framing questions, and sharing dreams for this next period of growthful change that you’re stepping into. I hope you will all take advantage of this opportunity and come participate in the ritual; it will be both healing and helpful.
I’ll close with the words Rabbi Spitzer imagines Moshe saying as he tells his enslaved siblings the name of the One who sent him, Ehyeh-asher-Ehyeh: “There is a Power in the universe Whose name is Becoming. What is now is not what will be in the future. This Power of transformation … makes possible the most audacious change.”7 Temple Emanu-El, we are capable of holy and audacious change, and I know in my bones that there is a world of good that you and Rabbi-to-be Ashira are going to create together.
Chizku, chizku v’imtzu. Wishing you every strength, every success, and every joy in this next stage, dear Temple Emanu-El. Thank you for the gifts you have given me, and for being exactly who you are. I can’t wait to see what you do next.
L’shalom,
Cantor Vera
1. Sh’mot (Exodus) 3:14.
2. Toba Spitzer, God Is Here: Reimagining the Divine (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2022), 219.
3. Spitzer, God Is Here, 217.
4. Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2023), 4.
5. Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Damion Searls (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021), 22.
6. adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 69-70, quoted in Spitzer, God Is Here, 229.
7. Spitzer, God Is Here, 220.
Cantor Vera's Video Teachings
Cantor Vera's Writings
D'var for Pesach 5780/2020 (video)
"Practicing Failure, Cultivating Resilience," d'var for Yom Kippur 5780/2019
D'var for Kol Nidrei 5780/2019
"Israeli and American Jewish Identity," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5780/2019
"The Geir Without and Within," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5779/2018
"Ki Hinei Kachomeir: Desiring our Yeitzer," for Kol Nidrei 5779/2018
Cantor Vera's Report on Trip to San Diego and Tijuana with T'ruah in July 2018
"Practicing Failure, Cultivating Resilience," d'var for Yom Kippur 5780/2019
D'var for Kol Nidrei 5780/2019
"Israeli and American Jewish Identity," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5780/2019
"The Geir Without and Within," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5779/2018
"Ki Hinei Kachomeir: Desiring our Yeitzer," for Kol Nidrei 5779/2018
Cantor Vera's Report on Trip to San Diego and Tijuana with T'ruah in July 2018