November 28, 2018 • 42 mins
LabShul’s founding spiritual leader, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie says we never stop becoming so we should mark pivotal moments throughout our lifetime, not just in our teens.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
My own personal journey, or trying to make those relationships
between who I am and who I want to live
authentically in the tradition that I inherited got me to
make confusions and to sacrifice some certainties for some ambiguities.
And in that murky space of discovery and curiosity is
(00:23):
where art lives and where I think spirit lives. And
that's how it becomes an interesting milestone, because I'm not
just doing what Roundma would have wanted. I'm standing up
to who I am. Welcome to you turns the podcast
(00:49):
where we talk all things change. I am Lesa as
I am Jill Hers. You know, one of the things
we talk about here are moments of dramatic transition in life,
and they happen all the time, and yet there are
there are so few ceremonies or rituals or ways that
we mark them, and so we don't even have moments
(01:14):
or spaces to talk about them. And that's I mean.
We came up with this podcast as a way to
clear some space for that, right exactly. And I think
as a culture we don't know how to and we
just don't talk about them, right And and some bubble
of transformation alone, and you feel like you're the only
one who's going through big shifts in your life. And
(01:37):
yet you know the tagline of our podcast, because shift happens,
because shift happens all the time, and you are so
not alone, but you don't feel that way, which is
why today we have with us Rabbi Amahai la la vi.
How did I get that? Okay? Absolutely, thank you, thank
(01:57):
you so much for being with us. I'm going to
try and avoid say in your name from now what
did you say? Your friend called you Omaha? I have
a friend who's kept the Amai Semitic part in the
wedent straight to Omaha's. Amahai is a rabbi and the
founder of lab School, which is very intriguing and um
(02:18):
stora telling, which I love the idea of. But as
a rabbi, one of your very important functions is bar
and bat Mitzvah's because in the Jewish tradition you do
have a rite of passage from one phase of life
childhood to being a functioning member of the community. So
(02:39):
it exists there, but there are no other places, like
from middle age. You know, women transitioning after childbirth from
being like the maiden into the wife, the mother, the mother,
the mother. Right. Uh. There there are so many times
in our lives I think where we one part of
(03:00):
us dies and we are reborn as someone else. And
I was just wondering if you have any ideas on
marking transitions. I was so glad to get your invite
for this conversation because this is something I've really been
dealing with and in my community and in my own
personal life forty nine and fifties, beckoning people like what
(03:20):
are you doing? Fort like, I don't know, I'm really busy.
We'll get there. But this is a question that I
think and I increasingly complicated urban digital device of lives,
people are looking for out of mark milestones in meaningful
ways beyond the tribal or spiritual paths we may have
come from, and meeting us where we are today as
(03:42):
as complicated people with many needs. Um So, as you mentioned, Lisa,
the the reality of what we call the barbat Mitzvah
is a about a fift dred year old Jewish tradition
of basically inviting a young person to step into adult responsive.
When it was created, thirteen was considered the age where
(04:03):
you're basically left home got married started you're grown up
life today. Of course that's not the case. So we're
struggling with how to make that transitional ritual meaningful to
both of the tweens, teens and their families. Um and
we started off by renaming it from Barbat Mitzvah to
be Mitzvah, which is gender neutral, and it's also about
(04:24):
a coming of age reality where for some teens in
that age gender is not a definitive and so they're
going through many questions of becoming. So be Mitzvah is
what we do with primarily tweens and teens. There were
tweens as awful if we've been structed not to use it,
but there's not there, not yet a better ones, but
(04:46):
the almost teens. And at the same time, we've had
many of the parents of these young people who do
it with us come and say, oh, my kid has
now engaged in a year long process of asking big
questions about values and about becoming a story tale because
we totally revamped what happens at these be means of
a ritual. It's not about world world quoting. It's about
being a critical thinker and a storyteller and a public speaker.
(05:10):
Because I have been too many many our empartments Fez
and Um, I can say that not all of them
feel very meaningful. Sometimes it's they can be parties fund
to throw marshmallows at the end. And it's incredibly impressive
to listen to these, as you say, tweens, some of
whom look like tiny, gangly children, spit out this long
(05:35):
recitation of Hebrew. But it's not necessarily something that seems
like it's resonated with him. I don't think that's the
purpose of the ceremony. We've completely reinvented what it's about,
and I can tell you more about it in the
context of grown up than come to us, whether the
parents or relatives or people who have been to all
the ceremonies we create and say, oh, this was actually
(05:55):
I understood it. It was meaningful, and it wasn't about
a kid reciting the leg see, but taking on the
hero's journey of who am I in this world? Other
master stories that I can relate to that can give
me values and a roadmap, And can I be the
critical thinker who talks back to the text and presents
(06:15):
my thoughts and asks the audience community guests for inspiration.
It's an interactive learning, storytelling ritual. So grown ups come
to us and say, hey, whatever I mean my thirties,
I mean my twenties, I mean the fifties, I mean
my eighties. I need a life cycle ritual to help
mark my becoming exactly like you said someone else. So
(06:36):
in two weeks, Ruth, who's in her seventies, who was
one of my students who was a lapsed Jew as
we say, uh, discovered that Judaism actually could be meaningful
to her modern into faith, feminist, activist life. So she's
becoming a beam. It's well at a storytelling ritual that
(06:56):
she has been working on four year. She's doing it
for a grandchildren and she wants to mark her being
an elder and her passing on tradition to her grandchildren
who are like her in multi faith families. So she's
been working four year on telling a story. I'm thinking
about what ritual means to her, what does public service
(07:17):
means to her? And that's part of her journey. And
she is our guinea pig for a grown up be
men as well. And then we have John whose son
is doing it later this year. His son is thirteen
and John said, you know, I grew up by was
raised by two psychoanalysts, very ambivalent shoes. There was no ritual.
There's a lot of psychotherapy. And now I want to
(07:39):
think what does it mean to me as a father,
as somebody in his fifties to think about my intellectual
spiritual legacy. So he's going to do the b midst
of alongside his son. I don't know what it looks
like yet, but it dawned on me through just these
two examples and others that are coming to us, that
what you're onto is exactly a need, not just for Jews,
(08:01):
for people. How do we mark midlife? How do we
mark evolution from one phase of life to the other.
How do we mark divorce? How do we mark um
moving to a new home. If religion in God's center
community is not what guides most of us, the need
for some kind of spiritual emotional resonance still does. So
(08:25):
it's about a reinvention of what we do and a
reclaiming of language that our homo sapien entities know. But
we've been robbed of the access because of like Lukewarm
at best, religious institutions that haven't given us these tools
and the last thing I'll say, oh, that is that
informally there have been this rites of passage in old traditions.
(08:49):
It's true for the indigenous shamanic traditions, it's true for
Judeo Christian but um, it hasn't been activated. I think
the industrial revolution in some way robbed us of the
tribal villages where people were able to acknowledge, witness and
support each other. I guess weddings are left right and
they too. Party is great, there's a ritual um. People
(09:13):
often UM don't take the time to really prep the
wedding as a life journey, right, that's and that's what
you do do with these mitzvahs. It's a year long
you said, a year long between a year and two
and there's the whole storytelling learning journey before and there
was a what we call paid forward communal service after UM.
(09:36):
When I work with wedding with couples who want to
get married, I usually insist on six months because I
meet with them at least six or seven times. So
has anybody ever decided not to do it after the
six months session with the rabbi? Yes? When I work
with couples and it's interesting you mentioned, because that's obviously
a huge life transition at whatever age we do it,
(09:58):
and people are doing an increased only older. Um. I
work with couples on three prenups. On a financial prenup
that I invite them to do, to you encourage a
financial prenup regardless of their finances, and like talk about money,
and then I'm asking to talk about spirituality and politics
and cultural values, just see like where are we aligned,
(10:20):
where are we not and how can we handle that?
And finally a sexual prenup, talk about how's our sex
life and how's o erotic life and how is it
now and what might it be in five years? And
how can we have a process? Will be are honest
about it, mostly because when people come to me and say, look,
will you buy an iPhone that's not going to work?
Probably not. They're getting married. It's about fifty percent success rate. Right,
(10:46):
So you're coming to me to officiate. Let me help
you get the three main reasons people split our sex,
money or politics, And there's in laws or something whatever. Families,
it's the it's the opinions of in laws about sex, money, political, right,
So let's talk about these things. So the pre nup.
So the conversations about values and about how we want
(11:07):
to be in a relationship are very rich. And there
are times. It happened once that a week before the wedding,
a couple that met with me about five times. Um.
This was over a combination of money and religion. You know,
we were at the last meeting of really planning the
last things and I they were back and forth, and
I said, you know what, I'm going to leave now
(11:28):
call me. I think we need to have another you'll, you'll,
you'll need to talk. And she called me the next
morning and said where we were not doing it? That
a kid spared them a world of pain, That's what
she said. And she said it's going to be really ugly.
And they went to court, but they did not get married.
Because the process of inquiry, this heroic journey of going
(11:51):
into a life changing milestone with thoughtfulness and open heart
and eyes wide open, allows to add some hard questions.
And I think in our society we go for a
lot of quick download that's wipe, click and done next.
That's good for some things, you know, that's good for seamless,
but it's not good for life long cooking. No, definitely not.
(12:13):
When we come back, we're going to delve into how
you came to have all this resta. We are speaking
with Rabbi Amachail la Lay and we've been talking about
(12:37):
marking transitions, preparing for transitions, approaching change in a conscious way,
and I just wanted to take the conversation back to
your life experiences and how what you expect, what you
lived colored the way that you teach and I guess
(13:00):
preach mhm um. In the context of what we're talking
about creating meaningful moments and milestones, I would say it's
a combination of a few shared paths. I grew up
in an Orthodox Jewish home in Israel, um with my
(13:20):
father who now deceased, a Holocaust survivor, and my mother
British Jews, with an emphasis on the aesthetics of home
and Sabbath table and and the rituals. The home rituals
that I would say, maybe it don't mark the huge milestones,
but but mark moments in time. Sabbath was a thing,
(13:41):
Holidays are thing rituals, lifecycle rituals. Up, it's a thing, right.
It's a Jewish home and it's a religious home, so
there's both the anxiety and the obligation, but the commitment.
We do this because we have to. We do it
a lot. So there was a sense of what happens
when we come together and what happens when it's not
just autopilot but actually meaningful. So I took that, and
(14:03):
then in my late teens, I came out and I
was in a big conflict between the religion of my
youth and the Bible and the God and the laws
that I grew up with, and the fact that it
wasn't in sync with who I was. And either I
was an abomination and the Bible was right. Oh, I
was right and the Bible was wrong. And I sort
of went for a both and approach where it needs
(14:23):
to be talked to and revised. So I began a
long journey now thirty plus years later, of figuring out
a synthesis of old school patriarchal Judaism and new queer feminist, radical,
non binary type of spirituality that works. What happened when
you came out to your family? Tell us a little
bit of the story. It's interesting my mother, who is
(14:44):
now eighty nine, is writing her memoirs, and she has
recently come around to the notion that she can actually
write about the fact that she has a gayson. She's
still in the religious community. So she and I were
trying to remember what happened, and we have different versions
of what happened in the kitchen why I'm like, did
you cry? Did you not cry? But I have to
say I'm very blessed. My parents and family mediate family
(15:07):
are rose with some level of confusion, but they rose
to say okay, and over over the years it was
a little more accommodating and accepting as we all learned
how to lean into each other more. Um. But that
was you know, it's funny with my many queer and
LGBTQ friends, we'll talk about we lament the lack of
(15:28):
initiation rights for young queers, like you come out right
national coming out. They just happened. And then what where
where are the elders? It will say, hey, welcome, you're fourteen,
you're sixteen, you think you're gay. Let's tell you about
some of the goods. You know, it'll it'll get better stuff.
But also here are some things to know, and how
(15:49):
about an elder to walk you through it? Not in
necessarily know the Greek model of the elder you know,
initiating potentially slash molesting. Want no about what you do
want is the type of an elder walking a youngster
through the ropes of life initiation in a in an
apprentice way. I mean, there's the whole it will get
better movement, but that presupposes that you're in a place
(16:11):
of desperation, which you know, for teenagers today it might
not be. It might be looking for a joyful way
to come out, for a way to embrace this as
this like happy leap forward in their life, and there's
there's not a lot of modeling of that exactly. So
so that's one So I think between you know, growing
up orthodox and then discovering my path in a complicated
(16:33):
gay world and looking for role models and looking for
rituals and looking for a way to really fuse the
spiritual Jewish with a queer you know, wherefore many many years,
being gay and Jewish was considered really not cool. Like
I spent out of I guess my twenties being very
ambivalent about being publicly Jewish or spiritual in gay contexts
(16:54):
because that wasn't considered cool nowadays, and the two years
old it's it's it's it's much more. Did you reconcile
orthodox very um specific literal Judaism with being gay? I
mean because you said that we used word you use
the word abomination doctrinally as a rabbi, How do you
(17:21):
reconcile that? Is the Bible wrong or not? I mean,
it's just wondering how you why do you interpret it?
So my interpretation stems from the belief that the scripture,
the holy texts, in this case Jewish, but I think
it's true for all of them are a split screen reality.
There's the book, there's what's written, the PDF, the cannon
(17:43):
they inherited heir loom right. I'm not missing with the
text of the Bible. Well, I'm missing with it is
in the margins, in the interpretation, in the oral tradition,
that is part and parcel of the written. So that
is exactly, But that's actually the Tora, Like we say
that Tora is a two part symphony. It's what's written
(18:05):
and codified, and it's how in every generation we talk
back to it. So I we received the Bronze Age
document written by filling the blank that is considered holy
and in it women a second class citizens, and slavery
is permitted, and polygamy is awesome, and sacrifices are the
(18:25):
way to get to God. And there's many kids and
if they misbehave, well, Judge, she sacrificed his daughter because
she was the first thing that came out to greet
because you offer children in as many ancient ways, and
we didn't go. I don't know. That doesn't really work
with my digital reality. So then the question, how do
(18:45):
we talk back to the text and when the Taurus
says abomination, what's the socio political context of a three
thousand year old text? How do we retranslate it so
that human dignity and celebration is at the forefront and
not just adherence to the ancient So I'm not alone
in this. The entire field of liberal Judaism or you know,
the Protestant and some of them will liberal Islam is saying, okay,
(19:06):
we gotta holy text. We like it between the baby
and the bathwater. We need to be a little most
elective here because it's not all going to honor who
we are. It's not gonna honor women, it's not gonna
honor LGBT, it's not gonna honor how we look at
human dignity beyond enslavement, et cetera. So let's upgrade, let's update. Right,
(19:26):
the PDF is as is, but we can talk back
to it. In fact, I'll go back to a moment
to our rights of passage when we do with the
midst of us. That's what we teach our initiatives. Here's
a text, right. The Jewish tradition is once a week
we have a storytelling ritual. Take out the Torah. Hi, everybody,
let's share in the traditional Orthodox and now other traditions denominations.
(19:50):
The kids chant from the Torah, which was once a
very useful tool because you were part of the community
and we need to Tora readers. Nowadays it's not the
most useful tool. So where we teach kids and now
grown ups is to maybe chant the Hebrew, but most
importantly to translate it, to interpret it, to wrestle with it,
to create a script based on it that becomes an
(20:12):
interactive performance. And so we talk back to tradition, and
we'll say, okay, what's the twenty one version, the twenty
one century version of the ancient text? And how am
I is a thirteen year old or seventy five year
old wrestling with my inheritance in a way that can
meet me where I'm at, and I can say, thinking
out loud here that my own personal journey of trying
(20:35):
to make those relationships between who I am and who
I want to live authentically and the tradition that I
inherited got me to make fusions and to sacrifice some
certainties for some ambiguities. And in that murky space of
discovery and curiosity is where art lives and where I
(20:57):
think spirit lives. And that's how it becomes an interesting
milestone because I'm not just doing what Grandma would have wanted.
I'm standing up to who I am. Have you had
conflict with members of your family who are still in
the Orthodox you know, tradition, who don't love your fusions? Yeah?
(21:17):
My my father side of the family is a heavy
Rabbinic family. I mean, you go back the family, the family.
Myth um it is yet to be quantified, is that
I am generation thirty nine consecutivety of rabbis as we speak.
My first cousin is the chief Rabbi of Israel, and
his father and my uncle is the former chief Frabbi
(21:39):
of Israel. They're all lovely people. They wear black hats
deep in the patriarchal Judaic Orthodoxy that I am honestly
fighting and they know that. So we say hello, hello,
and we meet in family events and we're very cordial.
But it is a divide, and um, I'm you know,
(22:00):
this is a sidebar. But I had this conversation with
a couple of rabbits last week of a few different denominations,
including very Orthodox, and I asked them, we at the
point of the Catholic Protestant break yet are we becoming
two distinctly different religions of Judaisms And one of them said, oh,
(22:21):
that happened in the eighteen sixties. We like, we've been
different for a long time. And the other said, we're
not quite there yet. And so I think it's an
interesting question. Would you look for a different name? Would
you want? You know, if you got conservative, you've got reform,
you've got Orthodox, right, always says she's Jewish, So that's
(22:42):
my line, so on the same page, a Jewish all
the time, And um, it's really good question. I think
from a branding point of view, this Jewish thing, the
Judaic thing, is both a good brand and a complicated brand.
So we're a toying with it. I will just say
I don't have the the you are all on this yet,
(23:05):
but I've been playing with Shebrews because we're deeply about
the feminine and the feminine divine. And but I think
Shebrew might not be the best pitch. But you need
guys in there too. Well, I'm a Shebrew. Like, if
you can be a Hebrew and you can be a woman,
that you could be a Shebrew and be a guy. Yeah,
that's true. So those of us who are not Jewish
(23:27):
at all, although I think I have, like I did
ancestry dot com. I think I'm like five somewhere someone
was falling around in my ancestry that I didn't know about. Um,
how do we take these your idea of fusion of
doc because it's endemic to all religions, as you pointed out,
the taking a holy text that is is part of
(23:52):
our collective tradition and forms our values and whatever that
text is, whether we're you know, it's the rig Veda
for for Hindu or Buddhist text or the Koran. How
do we take your idea and make it universal for
all faiths. That's a fantastic question that I'm busy writing
(24:14):
up right now for two reasons. Number one, A lot
of the families that we work with already Ancestry dot
com related a mixed multitude. We'll all mixed d n A.
So I get a lot of families that are Jewish
and other. And I am working right now with a
beautiful young woman whose mother is Muslim, whose father is Jewish,
(24:36):
and a family one parent is Hindu and the other
is a Hinjew. And we have Jews of different stripes,
and we have atheists, and we have like and and
yet everybody wants to create the ritual. Where at the
core is this grappling with narrative, with myth and with storytelling.
There's no reason to limit this to Jewish, right, If
we need rights of passage and this complicated human reality,
(25:00):
then reimagining what be mitzvah is, coming of age, marking
this this passage for people of different ages and different ethnicities. Um,
and this is like this is like um, um, you
know a dropped penny of recent months, which is why
this conversation is completely serendipitously perfect. Um. We're thinking, well,
(25:24):
well why not do that? Right? And is it happening
through religious institutions Is it happening through community cultures? Is
it sort of taking sell cycle to the next level
of like you're going to invest some time and asking
big questions about your body and your soul and your
values and your community. Um, and you're going to create
(25:45):
structures for where, let's say, whatever hitting middle aged is
for you. I mean, is it is it around menopause,
is it around the age fifty or thing? Is it
about retirement? Is it about like a milestone such as
empty nesting or divorce that happens very often in a
(26:05):
certain moment um. I'm beginning to ask these questions because
but what we're seeing is the organic grassroots show up
of people coming to us and saying, huh, okay, I'm
not a kid, raised a family or whatever. I've got
some bandwidth to ask a big questions. Yeah. I mean,
(26:27):
you just became a rabbi a few years ago. Um,
you decided to follow in the crazy long tradition of
your family, and it seems like that maybe did that
offer you this opportunity of reflection? Maybe we need to Yeah,
I would say before I turned forty, I said it's
now and ever just sort of a myth to you know,
(26:48):
for whatever the forty gate. But Um, I thought this
would be a fantastic way to spend a few years
asking myself big questions about the values that I want
to live and how I want to be helpful in
the world, and how I want to take my tradition
in a relay race and reinvent something with it. And
it felt the perfect age. My kids were just young enough,
my career was sort of in a mid spot, and
(27:10):
I think it's helping me think about future in a
very um, very healthy, balanced way. When we come back
more wisdom with Rabbi Anachai lou Lave, we've been talking
(27:33):
about transition and marketing transitions, and it seems from our
conversation that probably the most powerful tool you have is
the text. Are these stories in the torah um, because
that is the preparation for these for the marking the
(27:53):
bamtz is to see ourselves in these stories. And you
also have what you call s dora telling. Um. Can
we talk a little bit about why you feel. I
happen to agree with you, but that storytelling in and
of itself is such an important part of the human
journey and why these stories, in particular, these biblical stories
(28:18):
are so crucial to our understanding ourselves. Um. I like
to think of stories as oxygen, and we don't think
that we see it, but without it we will die
a little bit like germs too. Write have lousy stories
that feed our individual and collective mythologies, and we live
(28:38):
and pass on toxic messaging such as some of the
stuff in the Bible, or you know, working now with
my kids and students about things giving and we like
to talk about what really happened here and can we
talk about gratitude but also but responsibility for the indigenous
story that emanated and involved here. So alas can be
(29:00):
helpful in stories can be toxic. I believe that in
order for us to grow as individuals and as a society,
we've got to look out of eye into the stories
we live and forgot how we tell them, who tells them?
How we can tell better versions of the stories that
we inherited. It so happens that in the Jewish tradition
(29:20):
to an extent, and the Christian and the Muslim differending others,
the ritual of storytelling is central. And if you think
about the way um indigenous people in Africa, in Asia,
or in North America initiate kids into adulthood. Those would
be vision quests on there will be out back journeys
and how to hunt or how to fish or how
(29:42):
to be part of the universe. For Jews, it's about
becoming a storyteller. It's being part of the storytelling ritual.
Take the wheel and drive us for today, young man,
young woman, you are storyteller for the day. Maybe because
we were nomad's and we were refugees and immigrants, and
packing stories is lighter and packing your slipping your jot
(30:04):
keys um. And maybe because we understood the story is
core to the human experience of mystery and becoming and
so the metaphors in the myths that we engage with
give our souls and our minds and our community the
tools to grapple with life's challenges. So I think stories
(30:27):
are critical. We're living in a culture where you know,
from HBO to Hollywood to you name it, stories is
the biggest industry and we love it, we need it.
We process our own stuff through other people's stories. So
what happens when we take our story and meet an
ancestful story of whatever background and grapple with what the
values are UM are you familiar with the with the
(30:51):
with the concept of bibliotherapy. No, no, well, bibliotherapy is
a little bit like drama therapy, but instead of a
group coming together and acting out a situation or some
kind of a social drama, you open a text Little
Red Riding Hood and you say, okay, let's read a
Little Red Riding Hood together. Which character do you like?
(31:12):
Which character would you like to talk to? If you
would to tell Grandma something right now, if you would
like hang out with the wolf, what would you say? Now?
It's great with kids, it's great with all ages. It's
been used in multiple therapeutic and art therapy context But
basically what happens You get into the story and our
soul knows which part of the story we resonate with
and what I want to play with today, and then
(31:34):
you go through there and you slowly build a narrative
that meets who you are with this master story, Cinderella,
Tower of Babel, you know, the Last Supper, the Rise
of Muhammad, story of in draw you name it. That's
what myths are for. They're there to give our lives
meaning and tools. And I think we've been not taught
(31:57):
how to use stories and how to use myth. So
if we can have rituals of storytelling, that is not
the only way people come of age, but is one
of the ways. I think it gives us the as
if safety net to air out our big questions about
becoming in a way that's safe because I'm not talking
about me. I'm talking about little at viding Hood. I'm
(32:19):
talking about Isaac, right, I'm asking questions about Okay, So
there's a story of the binding of Isaac and one
day a father takes his kid up on the mountain
because the voice of God says, sacrifice your child for
me so you can live on. And that's the story
of might be Metzwell, so I'm going to stop in
our storytelling way and say, okay, hey, Barry, talk to Isaac.
(32:41):
If you Isaac and your dad would do this, what
would you do? And Barry says this happened two weeks ago.
Barry says, I would say, hell, no, Dad. I had
a dream, and in my dream, my God spoke to
me and said, you got to sacrifice your dad in
order to be happy. Let's have a duel. Great, now, Barry,
let's try a plan B. What would you mom say,
(33:02):
Let's talk back to Abraham, and suddenly the Binding of
Isaac opens up as the story of a young person's
asking about what how am my p parental obligation? Where
is my voice coming out? And it becomes a journey
of discovery, The story becomes the text becomes the pretext
for an honest conversation about who we are. That's the
beauty of story, that's the beauty of storytelling. And storytelling
(33:24):
is this method that I came up with twent years
ago where we talk about to the tour and that's
my drash. It's you know, writing in the margins basically
and challenging the norms and having fun because we love storytelling, right,
we know it innately we are homo storytellers. I'm messing
(33:47):
up the actual how do you say? Storyteller? And like
homo sapien homo. It's funny. I think you're also, um,
maybe a no, only defending theberal arts education because you
know so much, which is which is really under attack
right now. But the idea that you're going to analyze texts,
(34:09):
you're gonna you're gonna read deeply, You're going to think deeply,
You're going to write on on on texts, um, novels
and poetry and all the rest of it, cannon and
modern um. You know the idea that that's not just
honing an analytical mind, but it's bibliotherapy. It's helping you
work out who the hell you are, yeah, right, and
(34:31):
allow you to have a voice. Like I often tell
these now young people, when you stand up in front
of your community, you'll be mitzuvah. Yeah. There's one bottom
line is now you remember the Jewish tribe and you
know your Jewish literacy jobs. Great. The real bottom line
is you're standing in front of your community and you're
opening your mouth and you're telling a story. You're teaching
us a listen. You're asking us a question that you
(34:53):
don't know the answer to. People are going to give
you answers. You're learning how to stand up and your
voice and that Jewish not Jewish human. Can you stand
up as a human being in today's world and not
just be safely behind your screen. But I had to
eye with people you know and love, elders and youngsters,
peers and strangers, and say something at the time in
(35:14):
your life when you're probably terrified, more terrified than any
other time in your life, maybe of standing up in
front of people and being seen and looked at your
thirteen years when you want to be invisible. And it's
and it's a test. I mean, I tell a lot
of these teams, like we get a couple of weeks
before the ritual and they rehearsed them, have their lines
and if there's rituals or blessings or whatever, their speech
(35:37):
and say, look, this is a test. It's like a
driving test. Right. Our modern ritual of initiation in America
and the West is driving. Right, that's when we put
young people in front of the wheel and saying go
for it. And after that you might get killed or
kill us. So this is a it's a test, and
you could fail. So I tell him, look, you'll be
Mitzvah is a test and you could fail. It could
(35:58):
be horrified. And I said, well, here's how you could fail.
You could suck right. You can stand on stage and
you'll be so horrified because you haven't been rehearsed. When
we're gonna rehearse with you, or you're gonna be so
scared of of shining so many of us are that
you will stammer, or you will talk really quickly, really quickly,
and then we want understand. Now you're not going to
get an F and no one's gonna say, oh honey,
(36:22):
that was awful. No one's going to do that. But
you will know that. So there's ways of passing this
test with flying colors, and you'll know. We'll know because
you'll be grinning and you will shine. And there's ways
of failing because you haven't prepared enough. And there's a
test of you being publicly in fun of people, and
you will know honestly, we will know too. So don't suck.
(36:43):
I need you to come like before I do public speaking.
You get like like a month before. Everything you've just
said sounds like what some of our other guests have
told us about putting yourself out there in moments of
transition and stepping into a new role. You know the
the fear of risk, but you crystallize it for them.
(37:05):
You say, you know prepared, do your best, because otherwise
you'll know that you sucked. And and it's funny because
some of our other guests have said, do it anyway,
make the leap. But but but you're a little bit more,
you apply a little more pressure. Well, the fact is,
and it's going to be different with grown ups, which
is really interesting to tell us about. Well, because the kids,
(37:27):
I do not do a be mediva with a young
person in our community. We do not begin the process
before the kid looks me in the eye and says
I'll do it. And there have been cases where their
parents really wanted and the kid said no, and I
said no, we're not doing it. The kid needs to
say yes because they need to understand that they're going
to spend a year once a week and then spending
(37:49):
a Sunday once a month doing the justice work there.
They need to say yes to this, and then they
say yes for any number of reasons. But the pressure
point of saying, hey, this is a and you don't
want to suck and here's how you won't is because
partially they are doing it because they have to. They
said yes, but there's pressure. Let's not kid ourselves. That's
(38:12):
different than someone in her forties who wants to spend
a year or two doing adult education and thinking about
meditation and is there God in my life? And will
I embrace the story? And who am I in this
crazy shmortgage board reality? And and I haven't done those
but often yet to know but I think it's going
(38:32):
to be I'm hoping it will be a little easier
as far as take the leap and take the risk,
and you know the twos you need to step up. Um,
then the complication of being mid puberty. Yeah, that has that.
You just we've been talking to a rabbi for forty
five minutes and the word the name God has just
(38:56):
come up at the end. And I just wanted to
touch on something you've been quoted as saying with your
with your groups, is that you want people to show up.
Everybody's show up is all open. God is optional. I
just want to know how you how is God optional?
How do you how do you get to that point
in because I can understand different faiths all getting together
(39:18):
as a as a man of God, But how is
God not part of the equation? So the word God,
it's so baggaged G O d well. A lot of
Jews don't say it, right, I mean you don't you
like my have a rabbi friend who's Levit and he
won't write the oh, he's like g underlying right. So
that's so that's that's sort of an English way of
(39:39):
translating the Hebrew way. We can't pronounce or say because
it's so ineffable, right, But I think we've got a
branding issue that g O D is For many people.
It's patriarchal, it's masculine, it's hierarchy, it's punishing. It's that
dude with a white beard on the phone of judgment.
From all of Judeo Christian Islam reality. Um, they are
(40:03):
better brands and definitions for the divine mystery. UM. One
of my favorite is the Hebrew have Ayah, which means
becoming existence, you know, comes out of the Torah, comes
out from Kabbala and mystical um, poetic renderings that say, look,
there's something going on. Is it on Mother Earth? Is
(40:26):
it existence? Is it life? Is it our father who
art in Heaven? Is it Kali? Is it Allah? What
the right? We're living in an age of unprecedented fertilization
of all these cultures. So when I say got optional,
I tell people, look, I don't know what you believe
in or don't. That's complicated. We inherited a lot will
(40:47):
trying to make sense of it, of mystery. And when
I say got optional, I say come with whatever you
got as you are. I do not expect you to
believe in an entity that listens to you. I am
wrestling with what it means to be present at any
given moment. That's as close as I can get a divinity.
So when we do liturgy at lap Stual, we have
(41:09):
no books. It's all screens, which means we can keep
editing them. We completely retranslated them, so there's no addressing
a deity, and there's no g O D. There is soul,
there's mystery, there's presence, there is becoming. There are words
that we can relate to if we're Atheist, Agnostic, Jewish, Jewish,
none of the above, all of the above fourteen years
(41:32):
old or five years old, tapping into presence, and I
think we all can do that, Like the meditation is
a human skill, but we can cultivate how to build
scaffolding into a more theological worldview that takes what we
inherited whoever we are, and rebuilds our spirit home. I
(41:55):
think these milestones and these rituals of becoming can be
helpful towards that, because there is no school that teaches
us how to live with that level of of um
of inquiry. Well, even without the school, you have been
a great teacher for us, so thank you so much
for ally fantastic questions. Thank you so much, Um for
all of our listeners. Go find more at lab school
(42:17):
dot org. That's s h U dot org and also
follow Rabbi Amaillivi at on Facebook and Instagram just at
Alakai All connect with us at you turn to podcast,
share up your stories
My own personal journey, or trying to make those relationships
between who I am and who I want to live
authentically in the tradition that I inherited got me to
make confusions and to sacrifice some certainties for some ambiguities.
And in that murky space of discovery and curiosity is
(00:23):
where art lives and where I think spirit lives. And
that's how it becomes an interesting milestone, because I'm not
just doing what Roundma would have wanted. I'm standing up
to who I am. Welcome to you turns the podcast
(00:49):
where we talk all things change. I am Lesa as
I am Jill Hers. You know, one of the things
we talk about here are moments of dramatic transition in life,
and they happen all the time, and yet there are
there are so few ceremonies or rituals or ways that
we mark them, and so we don't even have moments
(01:14):
or spaces to talk about them. And that's I mean.
We came up with this podcast as a way to
clear some space for that, right exactly. And I think
as a culture we don't know how to and we
just don't talk about them, right And and some bubble
of transformation alone, and you feel like you're the only
one who's going through big shifts in your life. And
(01:37):
yet you know the tagline of our podcast, because shift happens,
because shift happens all the time, and you are so
not alone, but you don't feel that way, which is
why today we have with us Rabbi Amahai la la vi.
How did I get that? Okay? Absolutely, thank you, thank
(01:57):
you so much for being with us. I'm going to
try and avoid say in your name from now what
did you say? Your friend called you Omaha? I have
a friend who's kept the Amai Semitic part in the
wedent straight to Omaha's. Amahai is a rabbi and the
founder of lab School, which is very intriguing and um
(02:18):
stora telling, which I love the idea of. But as
a rabbi, one of your very important functions is bar
and bat Mitzvah's because in the Jewish tradition you do
have a rite of passage from one phase of life
childhood to being a functioning member of the community. So
(02:39):
it exists there, but there are no other places, like
from middle age. You know, women transitioning after childbirth from
being like the maiden into the wife, the mother, the mother,
the mother. Right. Uh. There there are so many times
in our lives I think where we one part of
(03:00):
us dies and we are reborn as someone else. And
I was just wondering if you have any ideas on
marking transitions. I was so glad to get your invite
for this conversation because this is something I've really been
dealing with and in my community and in my own
personal life forty nine and fifties, beckoning people like what
(03:20):
are you doing? Fort like, I don't know, I'm really busy.
We'll get there. But this is a question that I
think and I increasingly complicated urban digital device of lives,
people are looking for out of mark milestones in meaningful
ways beyond the tribal or spiritual paths we may have
come from, and meeting us where we are today as
(03:42):
as complicated people with many needs. Um So, as you mentioned, Lisa,
the the reality of what we call the barbat Mitzvah
is a about a fift dred year old Jewish tradition
of basically inviting a young person to step into adult responsive.
When it was created, thirteen was considered the age where
(04:03):
you're basically left home got married started you're grown up
life today. Of course that's not the case. So we're
struggling with how to make that transitional ritual meaningful to
both of the tweens, teens and their families. Um and
we started off by renaming it from Barbat Mitzvah to
be Mitzvah, which is gender neutral, and it's also about
(04:24):
a coming of age reality where for some teens in
that age gender is not a definitive and so they're
going through many questions of becoming. So be Mitzvah is
what we do with primarily tweens and teens. There were
tweens as awful if we've been structed not to use it,
but there's not there, not yet a better ones, but
(04:46):
the almost teens. And at the same time, we've had
many of the parents of these young people who do
it with us come and say, oh, my kid has
now engaged in a year long process of asking big
questions about values and about becoming a story tale because
we totally revamped what happens at these be means of
a ritual. It's not about world world quoting. It's about
being a critical thinker and a storyteller and a public speaker.
(05:10):
Because I have been too many many our empartments Fez
and Um, I can say that not all of them
feel very meaningful. Sometimes it's they can be parties fund
to throw marshmallows at the end. And it's incredibly impressive
to listen to these, as you say, tweens, some of
whom look like tiny, gangly children, spit out this long
(05:35):
recitation of Hebrew. But it's not necessarily something that seems
like it's resonated with him. I don't think that's the
purpose of the ceremony. We've completely reinvented what it's about,
and I can tell you more about it in the
context of grown up than come to us, whether the
parents or relatives or people who have been to all
the ceremonies we create and say, oh, this was actually
(05:55):
I understood it. It was meaningful, and it wasn't about
a kid reciting the leg see, but taking on the
hero's journey of who am I in this world? Other
master stories that I can relate to that can give
me values and a roadmap, And can I be the
critical thinker who talks back to the text and presents
(06:15):
my thoughts and asks the audience community guests for inspiration.
It's an interactive learning, storytelling ritual. So grown ups come
to us and say, hey, whatever I mean my thirties,
I mean my twenties, I mean the fifties, I mean
my eighties. I need a life cycle ritual to help
mark my becoming exactly like you said someone else. So
(06:36):
in two weeks, Ruth, who's in her seventies, who was
one of my students who was a lapsed Jew as
we say, uh, discovered that Judaism actually could be meaningful
to her modern into faith, feminist, activist life. So she's
becoming a beam. It's well at a storytelling ritual that
(06:56):
she has been working on four year. She's doing it
for a grandchildren and she wants to mark her being
an elder and her passing on tradition to her grandchildren
who are like her in multi faith families. So she's
been working four year on telling a story. I'm thinking
about what ritual means to her, what does public service
(07:17):
means to her? And that's part of her journey. And
she is our guinea pig for a grown up be
men as well. And then we have John whose son
is doing it later this year. His son is thirteen
and John said, you know, I grew up by was
raised by two psychoanalysts, very ambivalent shoes. There was no ritual.
There's a lot of psychotherapy. And now I want to
(07:39):
think what does it mean to me as a father,
as somebody in his fifties to think about my intellectual
spiritual legacy. So he's going to do the b midst
of alongside his son. I don't know what it looks
like yet, but it dawned on me through just these
two examples and others that are coming to us, that
what you're onto is exactly a need, not just for Jews,
(08:01):
for people. How do we mark midlife? How do we
mark evolution from one phase of life to the other.
How do we mark divorce? How do we mark um
moving to a new home. If religion in God's center
community is not what guides most of us, the need
for some kind of spiritual emotional resonance still does. So
(08:25):
it's about a reinvention of what we do and a
reclaiming of language that our homo sapien entities know. But
we've been robbed of the access because of like Lukewarm
at best, religious institutions that haven't given us these tools
and the last thing I'll say, oh, that is that
informally there have been this rites of passage in old traditions.
(08:49):
It's true for the indigenous shamanic traditions, it's true for
Judeo Christian but um, it hasn't been activated. I think
the industrial revolution in some way robbed us of the
tribal villages where people were able to acknowledge, witness and
support each other. I guess weddings are left right and
they too. Party is great, there's a ritual um. People
(09:13):
often UM don't take the time to really prep the
wedding as a life journey, right, that's and that's what
you do do with these mitzvahs. It's a year long
you said, a year long between a year and two
and there's the whole storytelling learning journey before and there
was a what we call paid forward communal service after UM.
(09:36):
When I work with wedding with couples who want to
get married, I usually insist on six months because I
meet with them at least six or seven times. So
has anybody ever decided not to do it after the
six months session with the rabbi? Yes? When I work
with couples and it's interesting you mentioned, because that's obviously
a huge life transition at whatever age we do it,
(09:58):
and people are doing an increased only older. Um. I
work with couples on three prenups. On a financial prenup
that I invite them to do, to you encourage a
financial prenup regardless of their finances, and like talk about money,
and then I'm asking to talk about spirituality and politics
and cultural values, just see like where are we aligned,
(10:20):
where are we not and how can we handle that?
And finally a sexual prenup, talk about how's our sex
life and how's o erotic life and how is it
now and what might it be in five years? And
how can we have a process? Will be are honest
about it, mostly because when people come to me and say, look,
will you buy an iPhone that's not going to work?
Probably not. They're getting married. It's about fifty percent success rate. Right,
(10:46):
So you're coming to me to officiate. Let me help
you get the three main reasons people split our sex,
money or politics, And there's in laws or something whatever. Families,
it's the it's the opinions of in laws about sex, money, political, right,
So let's talk about these things. So the pre nup.
So the conversations about values and about how we want
(11:07):
to be in a relationship are very rich. And there
are times. It happened once that a week before the wedding,
a couple that met with me about five times. Um.
This was over a combination of money and religion. You know,
we were at the last meeting of really planning the
last things and I they were back and forth, and
I said, you know what, I'm going to leave now
(11:28):
call me. I think we need to have another you'll, you'll,
you'll need to talk. And she called me the next
morning and said where we were not doing it? That
a kid spared them a world of pain, That's what
she said. And she said it's going to be really ugly.
And they went to court, but they did not get married.
Because the process of inquiry, this heroic journey of going
(11:51):
into a life changing milestone with thoughtfulness and open heart
and eyes wide open, allows to add some hard questions.
And I think in our society we go for a
lot of quick download that's wipe, click and done next.
That's good for some things, you know, that's good for seamless,
but it's not good for life long cooking. No, definitely not.
(12:13):
When we come back, we're going to delve into how
you came to have all this resta. We are speaking
with Rabbi Amachail la Lay and we've been talking about
(12:37):
marking transitions, preparing for transitions, approaching change in a conscious way,
and I just wanted to take the conversation back to
your life experiences and how what you expect, what you
lived colored the way that you teach and I guess
(13:00):
preach mhm um. In the context of what we're talking
about creating meaningful moments and milestones, I would say it's
a combination of a few shared paths. I grew up
in an Orthodox Jewish home in Israel, um with my
(13:20):
father who now deceased, a Holocaust survivor, and my mother
British Jews, with an emphasis on the aesthetics of home
and Sabbath table and and the rituals. The home rituals
that I would say, maybe it don't mark the huge milestones,
but but mark moments in time. Sabbath was a thing,
(13:41):
Holidays are thing rituals, lifecycle rituals. Up, it's a thing, right.
It's a Jewish home and it's a religious home, so
there's both the anxiety and the obligation, but the commitment.
We do this because we have to. We do it
a lot. So there was a sense of what happens
when we come together and what happens when it's not
just autopilot but actually meaningful. So I took that, and
(14:03):
then in my late teens, I came out and I
was in a big conflict between the religion of my
youth and the Bible and the God and the laws
that I grew up with, and the fact that it
wasn't in sync with who I was. And either I
was an abomination and the Bible was right. Oh, I
was right and the Bible was wrong. And I sort
of went for a both and approach where it needs
(14:23):
to be talked to and revised. So I began a
long journey now thirty plus years later, of figuring out
a synthesis of old school patriarchal Judaism and new queer feminist, radical,
non binary type of spirituality that works. What happened when
you came out to your family? Tell us a little
bit of the story. It's interesting my mother, who is
(14:44):
now eighty nine, is writing her memoirs, and she has
recently come around to the notion that she can actually
write about the fact that she has a gayson. She's
still in the religious community. So she and I were
trying to remember what happened, and we have different versions
of what happened in the kitchen why I'm like, did
you cry? Did you not cry? But I have to
say I'm very blessed. My parents and family mediate family
(15:07):
are rose with some level of confusion, but they rose
to say okay, and over over the years it was
a little more accommodating and accepting as we all learned
how to lean into each other more. Um. But that
was you know, it's funny with my many queer and
LGBTQ friends, we'll talk about we lament the lack of
(15:28):
initiation rights for young queers, like you come out right
national coming out. They just happened. And then what where
where are the elders? It will say, hey, welcome, you're fourteen,
you're sixteen, you think you're gay. Let's tell you about
some of the goods. You know, it'll it'll get better stuff.
But also here are some things to know, and how
(15:49):
about an elder to walk you through it? Not in
necessarily know the Greek model of the elder you know,
initiating potentially slash molesting. Want no about what you do
want is the type of an elder walking a youngster
through the ropes of life initiation in a in an
apprentice way. I mean, there's the whole it will get
better movement, but that presupposes that you're in a place
(16:11):
of desperation, which you know, for teenagers today it might
not be. It might be looking for a joyful way
to come out, for a way to embrace this as
this like happy leap forward in their life, and there's
there's not a lot of modeling of that exactly. So
so that's one So I think between you know, growing
up orthodox and then discovering my path in a complicated
(16:33):
gay world and looking for role models and looking for
rituals and looking for a way to really fuse the
spiritual Jewish with a queer you know, wherefore many many years,
being gay and Jewish was considered really not cool. Like
I spent out of I guess my twenties being very
ambivalent about being publicly Jewish or spiritual in gay contexts
(16:54):
because that wasn't considered cool nowadays, and the two years
old it's it's it's it's much more. Did you reconcile
orthodox very um specific literal Judaism with being gay? I
mean because you said that we used word you use
the word abomination doctrinally as a rabbi, How do you
(17:21):
reconcile that? Is the Bible wrong or not? I mean,
it's just wondering how you why do you interpret it?
So my interpretation stems from the belief that the scripture,
the holy texts, in this case Jewish, but I think
it's true for all of them are a split screen reality.
There's the book, there's what's written, the PDF, the cannon
(17:43):
they inherited heir loom right. I'm not missing with the
text of the Bible. Well, I'm missing with it is
in the margins, in the interpretation, in the oral tradition,
that is part and parcel of the written. So that
is exactly, But that's actually the Tora, Like we say
that Tora is a two part symphony. It's what's written
(18:05):
and codified, and it's how in every generation we talk
back to it. So I we received the Bronze Age
document written by filling the blank that is considered holy
and in it women a second class citizens, and slavery
is permitted, and polygamy is awesome, and sacrifices are the
(18:25):
way to get to God. And there's many kids and
if they misbehave, well, Judge, she sacrificed his daughter because
she was the first thing that came out to greet
because you offer children in as many ancient ways, and
we didn't go. I don't know. That doesn't really work
with my digital reality. So then the question, how do
(18:45):
we talk back to the text and when the Taurus
says abomination, what's the socio political context of a three
thousand year old text? How do we retranslate it so
that human dignity and celebration is at the forefront and
not just adherence to the ancient So I'm not alone
in this. The entire field of liberal Judaism or you know,
the Protestant and some of them will liberal Islam is saying, okay,
(19:06):
we gotta holy text. We like it between the baby
and the bathwater. We need to be a little most
elective here because it's not all going to honor who
we are. It's not gonna honor women, it's not gonna
honor LGBT, it's not gonna honor how we look at
human dignity beyond enslavement, et cetera. So let's upgrade, let's update. Right,
(19:26):
the PDF is as is, but we can talk back
to it. In fact, I'll go back to a moment
to our rights of passage when we do with the
midst of us. That's what we teach our initiatives. Here's
a text, right. The Jewish tradition is once a week
we have a storytelling ritual. Take out the Torah. Hi, everybody,
let's share in the traditional Orthodox and now other traditions denominations.
(19:50):
The kids chant from the Torah, which was once a
very useful tool because you were part of the community
and we need to Tora readers. Nowadays it's not the
most useful tool. So where we teach kids and now
grown ups is to maybe chant the Hebrew, but most
importantly to translate it, to interpret it, to wrestle with it,
to create a script based on it that becomes an
(20:12):
interactive performance. And so we talk back to tradition, and
we'll say, okay, what's the twenty one version, the twenty
one century version of the ancient text? And how am
I is a thirteen year old or seventy five year
old wrestling with my inheritance in a way that can
meet me where I'm at, and I can say, thinking
out loud here that my own personal journey of trying
(20:35):
to make those relationships between who I am and who
I want to live authentically and the tradition that I
inherited got me to make fusions and to sacrifice some
certainties for some ambiguities. And in that murky space of
discovery and curiosity is where art lives and where I
(20:57):
think spirit lives. And that's how it becomes an interesting
milestone because I'm not just doing what Grandma would have wanted.
I'm standing up to who I am. Have you had
conflict with members of your family who are still in
the Orthodox you know, tradition, who don't love your fusions? Yeah?
(21:17):
My my father side of the family is a heavy
Rabbinic family. I mean, you go back the family, the family.
Myth um it is yet to be quantified, is that
I am generation thirty nine consecutivety of rabbis as we speak.
My first cousin is the chief Rabbi of Israel, and
his father and my uncle is the former chief Frabbi
(21:39):
of Israel. They're all lovely people. They wear black hats
deep in the patriarchal Judaic Orthodoxy that I am honestly
fighting and they know that. So we say hello, hello,
and we meet in family events and we're very cordial.
But it is a divide, and um, I'm you know,
(22:00):
this is a sidebar. But I had this conversation with
a couple of rabbits last week of a few different denominations,
including very Orthodox, and I asked them, we at the
point of the Catholic Protestant break yet are we becoming
two distinctly different religions of Judaisms And one of them said, oh,
(22:21):
that happened in the eighteen sixties. We like, we've been
different for a long time. And the other said, we're
not quite there yet. And so I think it's an
interesting question. Would you look for a different name? Would
you want? You know, if you got conservative, you've got reform,
you've got Orthodox, right, always says she's Jewish, So that's
(22:42):
my line, so on the same page, a Jewish all
the time, And um, it's really good question. I think
from a branding point of view, this Jewish thing, the
Judaic thing, is both a good brand and a complicated brand.
So we're a toying with it. I will just say
I don't have the the you are all on this yet,
(23:05):
but I've been playing with Shebrews because we're deeply about
the feminine and the feminine divine. And but I think
Shebrew might not be the best pitch. But you need
guys in there too. Well, I'm a Shebrew. Like, if
you can be a Hebrew and you can be a woman,
that you could be a Shebrew and be a guy. Yeah,
that's true. So those of us who are not Jewish
(23:27):
at all, although I think I have, like I did
ancestry dot com. I think I'm like five somewhere someone
was falling around in my ancestry that I didn't know about. Um,
how do we take these your idea of fusion of
doc because it's endemic to all religions, as you pointed out,
the taking a holy text that is is part of
(23:52):
our collective tradition and forms our values and whatever that
text is, whether we're you know, it's the rig Veda
for for Hindu or Buddhist text or the Koran. How
do we take your idea and make it universal for
all faiths. That's a fantastic question that I'm busy writing
(24:14):
up right now for two reasons. Number one, A lot
of the families that we work with already Ancestry dot
com related a mixed multitude. We'll all mixed d n A.
So I get a lot of families that are Jewish
and other. And I am working right now with a
beautiful young woman whose mother is Muslim, whose father is Jewish,
(24:36):
and a family one parent is Hindu and the other
is a Hinjew. And we have Jews of different stripes,
and we have atheists, and we have like and and
yet everybody wants to create the ritual. Where at the
core is this grappling with narrative, with myth and with storytelling.
There's no reason to limit this to Jewish, right, If
we need rights of passage and this complicated human reality,
(25:00):
then reimagining what be mitzvah is, coming of age, marking
this this passage for people of different ages and different ethnicities. Um,
and this is like this is like um, um, you
know a dropped penny of recent months, which is why
this conversation is completely serendipitously perfect. Um. We're thinking, well,
(25:24):
well why not do that? Right? And is it happening
through religious institutions Is it happening through community cultures? Is
it sort of taking sell cycle to the next level
of like you're going to invest some time and asking
big questions about your body and your soul and your
values and your community. Um, and you're going to create
(25:45):
structures for where, let's say, whatever hitting middle aged is
for you. I mean, is it is it around menopause,
is it around the age fifty or thing? Is it
about retirement? Is it about like a milestone such as
empty nesting or divorce that happens very often in a
(26:05):
certain moment um. I'm beginning to ask these questions because
but what we're seeing is the organic grassroots show up
of people coming to us and saying, huh, okay, I'm
not a kid, raised a family or whatever. I've got
some bandwidth to ask a big questions. Yeah. I mean,
(26:27):
you just became a rabbi a few years ago. Um,
you decided to follow in the crazy long tradition of
your family, and it seems like that maybe did that
offer you this opportunity of reflection? Maybe we need to Yeah,
I would say before I turned forty, I said it's
now and ever just sort of a myth to you know,
(26:48):
for whatever the forty gate. But Um, I thought this
would be a fantastic way to spend a few years
asking myself big questions about the values that I want
to live and how I want to be helpful in
the world, and how I want to take my tradition
in a relay race and reinvent something with it. And
it felt the perfect age. My kids were just young enough,
my career was sort of in a mid spot, and
(27:10):
I think it's helping me think about future in a
very um, very healthy, balanced way. When we come back
more wisdom with Rabbi Anachai lou Lave, we've been talking
(27:33):
about transition and marketing transitions, and it seems from our
conversation that probably the most powerful tool you have is
the text. Are these stories in the torah um, because
that is the preparation for these for the marking the
(27:53):
bamtz is to see ourselves in these stories. And you
also have what you call s dora telling. Um. Can
we talk a little bit about why you feel. I
happen to agree with you, but that storytelling in and
of itself is such an important part of the human
journey and why these stories, in particular, these biblical stories
(28:18):
are so crucial to our understanding ourselves. Um. I like
to think of stories as oxygen, and we don't think
that we see it, but without it we will die
a little bit like germs too. Write have lousy stories
that feed our individual and collective mythologies, and we live
(28:38):
and pass on toxic messaging such as some of the
stuff in the Bible, or you know, working now with
my kids and students about things giving and we like
to talk about what really happened here and can we
talk about gratitude but also but responsibility for the indigenous
story that emanated and involved here. So alas can be
(29:00):
helpful in stories can be toxic. I believe that in
order for us to grow as individuals and as a society,
we've got to look out of eye into the stories
we live and forgot how we tell them, who tells them?
How we can tell better versions of the stories that
we inherited. It so happens that in the Jewish tradition
(29:20):
to an extent, and the Christian and the Muslim differending others,
the ritual of storytelling is central. And if you think
about the way um indigenous people in Africa, in Asia,
or in North America initiate kids into adulthood. Those would
be vision quests on there will be out back journeys
and how to hunt or how to fish or how
(29:42):
to be part of the universe. For Jews, it's about
becoming a storyteller. It's being part of the storytelling ritual.
Take the wheel and drive us for today, young man,
young woman, you are storyteller for the day. Maybe because
we were nomad's and we were refugees and immigrants, and
packing stories is lighter and packing your slipping your jot
(30:04):
keys um. And maybe because we understood the story is
core to the human experience of mystery and becoming and
so the metaphors in the myths that we engage with
give our souls and our minds and our community the
tools to grapple with life's challenges. So I think stories
(30:27):
are critical. We're living in a culture where you know,
from HBO to Hollywood to you name it, stories is
the biggest industry and we love it, we need it.
We process our own stuff through other people's stories. So
what happens when we take our story and meet an
ancestful story of whatever background and grapple with what the
values are UM are you familiar with the with the
(30:51):
with the concept of bibliotherapy. No, no, well, bibliotherapy is
a little bit like drama therapy, but instead of a
group coming together and acting out a situation or some
kind of a social drama, you open a text Little
Red Riding Hood and you say, okay, let's read a
Little Red Riding Hood together. Which character do you like?
(31:12):
Which character would you like to talk to? If you
would to tell Grandma something right now, if you would
like hang out with the wolf, what would you say? Now?
It's great with kids, it's great with all ages. It's
been used in multiple therapeutic and art therapy context But
basically what happens You get into the story and our
soul knows which part of the story we resonate with
and what I want to play with today, and then
(31:34):
you go through there and you slowly build a narrative
that meets who you are with this master story, Cinderella,
Tower of Babel, you know, the Last Supper, the Rise
of Muhammad, story of in draw you name it. That's
what myths are for. They're there to give our lives
meaning and tools. And I think we've been not taught
(31:57):
how to use stories and how to use myth. So
if we can have rituals of storytelling, that is not
the only way people come of age, but is one
of the ways. I think it gives us the as
if safety net to air out our big questions about
becoming in a way that's safe because I'm not talking
about me. I'm talking about little at viding Hood. I'm
(32:19):
talking about Isaac, right, I'm asking questions about Okay, So
there's a story of the binding of Isaac and one
day a father takes his kid up on the mountain
because the voice of God says, sacrifice your child for
me so you can live on. And that's the story
of might be Metzwell, so I'm going to stop in
our storytelling way and say, okay, hey, Barry, talk to Isaac.
(32:41):
If you Isaac and your dad would do this, what
would you do? And Barry says this happened two weeks ago.
Barry says, I would say, hell, no, Dad. I had
a dream, and in my dream, my God spoke to
me and said, you got to sacrifice your dad in
order to be happy. Let's have a duel. Great, now, Barry,
let's try a plan B. What would you mom say,
(33:02):
Let's talk back to Abraham, and suddenly the Binding of
Isaac opens up as the story of a young person's
asking about what how am my p parental obligation? Where
is my voice coming out? And it becomes a journey
of discovery, The story becomes the text becomes the pretext
for an honest conversation about who we are. That's the
beauty of story, that's the beauty of storytelling. And storytelling
(33:24):
is this method that I came up with twent years
ago where we talk about to the tour and that's
my drash. It's you know, writing in the margins basically
and challenging the norms and having fun because we love storytelling, right,
we know it innately we are homo storytellers. I'm messing
(33:47):
up the actual how do you say? Storyteller? And like
homo sapien homo. It's funny. I think you're also, um,
maybe a no, only defending theberal arts education because you
know so much, which is which is really under attack
right now. But the idea that you're going to analyze texts,
(34:09):
you're gonna you're gonna read deeply, You're going to think deeply,
You're going to write on on on texts, um, novels
and poetry and all the rest of it, cannon and
modern um. You know the idea that that's not just
honing an analytical mind, but it's bibliotherapy. It's helping you
work out who the hell you are, yeah, right, and
(34:31):
allow you to have a voice. Like I often tell
these now young people, when you stand up in front
of your community, you'll be mitzuvah. Yeah. There's one bottom
line is now you remember the Jewish tribe and you
know your Jewish literacy jobs. Great. The real bottom line
is you're standing in front of your community and you're
opening your mouth and you're telling a story. You're teaching
us a listen. You're asking us a question that you
(34:53):
don't know the answer to. People are going to give
you answers. You're learning how to stand up and your
voice and that Jewish not Jewish human. Can you stand
up as a human being in today's world and not
just be safely behind your screen. But I had to
eye with people you know and love, elders and youngsters,
peers and strangers, and say something at the time in
(35:14):
your life when you're probably terrified, more terrified than any
other time in your life, maybe of standing up in
front of people and being seen and looked at your
thirteen years when you want to be invisible. And it's
and it's a test. I mean, I tell a lot
of these teams, like we get a couple of weeks
before the ritual and they rehearsed them, have their lines
and if there's rituals or blessings or whatever, their speech
(35:37):
and say, look, this is a test. It's like a
driving test. Right. Our modern ritual of initiation in America
and the West is driving. Right, that's when we put
young people in front of the wheel and saying go
for it. And after that you might get killed or
kill us. So this is a it's a test, and
you could fail. So I tell him, look, you'll be
Mitzvah is a test and you could fail. It could
(35:58):
be horrified. And I said, well, here's how you could fail.
You could suck right. You can stand on stage and
you'll be so horrified because you haven't been rehearsed. When
we're gonna rehearse with you, or you're gonna be so
scared of of shining so many of us are that
you will stammer, or you will talk really quickly, really quickly,
and then we want understand. Now you're not going to
get an F and no one's gonna say, oh honey,
(36:22):
that was awful. No one's going to do that. But
you will know that. So there's ways of passing this
test with flying colors, and you'll know. We'll know because
you'll be grinning and you will shine. And there's ways
of failing because you haven't prepared enough. And there's a
test of you being publicly in fun of people, and
you will know honestly, we will know too. So don't suck.
(36:43):
I need you to come like before I do public speaking.
You get like like a month before. Everything you've just
said sounds like what some of our other guests have
told us about putting yourself out there in moments of
transition and stepping into a new role. You know the
the fear of risk, but you crystallize it for them.
(37:05):
You say, you know prepared, do your best, because otherwise
you'll know that you sucked. And and it's funny because
some of our other guests have said, do it anyway,
make the leap. But but but you're a little bit more,
you apply a little more pressure. Well, the fact is,
and it's going to be different with grown ups, which
is really interesting to tell us about. Well, because the kids,
(37:27):
I do not do a be mediva with a young
person in our community. We do not begin the process
before the kid looks me in the eye and says
I'll do it. And there have been cases where their
parents really wanted and the kid said no, and I
said no, we're not doing it. The kid needs to
say yes because they need to understand that they're going
to spend a year once a week and then spending
(37:49):
a Sunday once a month doing the justice work there.
They need to say yes to this, and then they
say yes for any number of reasons. But the pressure
point of saying, hey, this is a and you don't
want to suck and here's how you won't is because
partially they are doing it because they have to. They
said yes, but there's pressure. Let's not kid ourselves. That's
(38:12):
different than someone in her forties who wants to spend
a year or two doing adult education and thinking about
meditation and is there God in my life? And will
I embrace the story? And who am I in this
crazy shmortgage board reality? And and I haven't done those
but often yet to know but I think it's going
(38:32):
to be I'm hoping it will be a little easier
as far as take the leap and take the risk,
and you know the twos you need to step up. Um,
then the complication of being mid puberty. Yeah, that has that.
You just we've been talking to a rabbi for forty
five minutes and the word the name God has just
(38:56):
come up at the end. And I just wanted to
touch on something you've been quoted as saying with your
with your groups, is that you want people to show up.
Everybody's show up is all open. God is optional. I
just want to know how you how is God optional?
How do you how do you get to that point
in because I can understand different faiths all getting together
(39:18):
as a as a man of God, But how is
God not part of the equation? So the word God,
it's so baggaged G O d well. A lot of
Jews don't say it, right, I mean you don't you
like my have a rabbi friend who's Levit and he
won't write the oh, he's like g underlying right. So
that's so that's that's sort of an English way of
(39:39):
translating the Hebrew way. We can't pronounce or say because
it's so ineffable, right, But I think we've got a
branding issue that g O D is For many people.
It's patriarchal, it's masculine, it's hierarchy, it's punishing. It's that
dude with a white beard on the phone of judgment.
From all of Judeo Christian Islam reality. Um, they are
(40:03):
better brands and definitions for the divine mystery. UM. One
of my favorite is the Hebrew have Ayah, which means
becoming existence, you know, comes out of the Torah, comes
out from Kabbala and mystical um, poetic renderings that say, look,
there's something going on. Is it on Mother Earth? Is
(40:26):
it existence? Is it life? Is it our father who
art in Heaven? Is it Kali? Is it Allah? What
the right? We're living in an age of unprecedented fertilization
of all these cultures. So when I say got optional,
I tell people, look, I don't know what you believe
in or don't. That's complicated. We inherited a lot will
(40:47):
trying to make sense of it, of mystery. And when
I say got optional, I say come with whatever you
got as you are. I do not expect you to
believe in an entity that listens to you. I am
wrestling with what it means to be present at any
given moment. That's as close as I can get a divinity.
So when we do liturgy at lap Stual, we have
(41:09):
no books. It's all screens, which means we can keep
editing them. We completely retranslated them, so there's no addressing
a deity, and there's no g O D. There is soul,
there's mystery, there's presence, there is becoming. There are words
that we can relate to if we're Atheist, Agnostic, Jewish, Jewish,
none of the above, all of the above fourteen years
(41:32):
old or five years old, tapping into presence, and I
think we all can do that, Like the meditation is
a human skill, but we can cultivate how to build
scaffolding into a more theological worldview that takes what we
inherited whoever we are, and rebuilds our spirit home. I
(41:55):
think these milestones and these rituals of becoming can be
helpful towards that, because there is no school that teaches
us how to live with that level of of um
of inquiry. Well, even without the school, you have been
a great teacher for us, so thank you so much
for ally fantastic questions. Thank you so much, Um for
all of our listeners. Go find more at lab school
(42:17):
dot org. That's s h U dot org and also
follow Rabbi Amaillivi at on Facebook and Instagram just at
Alakai All connect with us at you turn to podcast,
share up your stories
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