THE YOUNG WOMAN STOPPED ME on the sidewalk as I was rushing to my car. Where is the best place to see fireflies? Do you bless people?
She was away from home. There are no fireflies where she lives. She’s an orphan, she said. Her father died before he could give her his blessing. Her mother’s blessing? It’s trapped inside her, she said. She needed a blessing from an elder, I guess.
Friday afternoon. The conference (she was attending; I was teaching) was winding down. I was in a hurry to get home for a quick, early Shabbat dinner after which I would return to campus—my campus, as luck would have it—for the closing ceremony. For more than thirty years, I’ve spent most Friday nights with a small group of dear friends to celebrate Shabbat. I rarely do anything else on Friday night.
She knew her Bible, the young woman. Jacob’s blessings for his sons: “Dan shall be a serpent by the road…. Benjamin is a ravenous wolf.” The priestly blessing: “May YHVH bless you and protect you; may YHVH shine YHVH’s countenance upon you; may YHVH turn YHVH’s face toward you and grant you peace.” This wasn’t surprising. The annual conference offers a home for folks interested in the intersection of religion—especially but not exclusively Christianity—and the arts.
I knew exactly who to ask for recommendations on fireflies. But a blessing? What did she see in me that made her think I was capable of giving them? Was it that I was Jewish? Was it something I said, or how I presented myself during my talk on the opening night (“Three Edens: The Gardens of Eden, Andalusia, Asheville”)? I wasn’t sure I was the person to offer her—or anyone other than my kids and grandkids—a blessing.
From The Book of Questions, Edmond Jabès:
To the deaf-mute who begged for his blessing, Reb Yekel gave
a bottle of oil so that his lamp might celebrate the night.
Reb Yekel is one of several fictional rabbis who offer lyrical, metaphorical, mysterious teachings in Jabès’s The Book of Questions. Poetry and prose, aphorism and comment-ary, The Book of Questions is one of the texts I turn to for artistic, intellectual, and spiritual inspiration.
The young woman (I’ll call her A) wasn’t begging for a blessing. She merely asked, politely if somewhat urgently. If only I’d had a bottle of oil to fuel a lamp that would fill with light whatever was missing and dark inside her.
Thirty-one years earlier, during a short break between presentations, Reb Zalman hastily gathered a small group in a circle. Prior to his visit for a weekend of teaching and prayer, I’d written to ask him for a blessing. And now, late on a Sabbath afternoon, in a dimly lit hall outside the synagogue’s main sanctuary, Reb Zalman blessed my wife and me, recently married, in the company of our friends.
As a young adult, in the early years of my engagement with Jewish spiritual practice, I’d read “A first step: a devotional guide,” Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s contribution to The First Jewish Catalog: A Do-It-Yourself Kit, modeled on the Whole Earth Catalog and published in 1973. “I imagine you, the reader, in the following way,” writes Reb Zalman. “You are a ‘seeker.’ This means (to me) that you are trying to find a way to express some spiritual stirrings in yourself and to develop that holy source within you, so that it may begin to flow freely.”
Do-It-Yourself: Maybe I had whatever I needed to allow a blessing to flow freely from the holy source within me to A. Or maybe the holy source was something I needed to seek outside myself.
I sought your nearness.
–—With all my heart I called you.
And in my going out to meet you,
–—I found you coming toward me,
as in the wonders of your might
–—and holy works I saw you.
That’s the great Hebrew poet of Muslim Spain Yehuda Halevi (1075–1141).
Whether what Reb Zalman calls “a greater reality” was to be found within or without, I felt that I couldn’t bless someone unless I were tapped into it.
Ashrei yoshvei beitecha, od yehallellukhah, od yehallellukhah. Happy are those who dwell in Your house; they forever praise You.
I began “Three Edens” by leading the group in a chant of this verse from Psalm 84. After we chanted the words five times, I invited everyone to close their eyes and direct their attention to how it felt in their bodies and spirits to be sitting in an auditorium filled with more than a hundred others. Then I invited them to recall a house (bayit, in Hebrew; beitecha, Your house) or another space where they felt uplifted, alive, deeply connected, held, comforted—where they felt at home and most fully themselves. Then we chanted the verse one final time. Through this practice, I hoped to begin creating a sense of temporary home on this campus, in this community, in Asheville, North Carolina. God’s house.
Chanting and contemplative practices: some of the innovations that Reb Zalman and others inspired by him brought into Jewish spiritual life.
Following that, I gave a conventional (though, I hope, interesting enough) talk on home and exile as represented in Jewish texts—Torah, Zohar, Hebrew poetry of Muslim Spain and modern Israel—and as experienced in personal lives, in particular my life as a Jew in the South.
Eden: our mythic home from which, because of our transgressions, we were banished. Or, as the Zohar reads the story, our home from which we banished God.
Andalusia: a place where, during a moment that has been called, somewhat romantically, the golden age of Spanish Jewry, we Jews were at home among Muslims. Where the tenth-century innovator of Hebrew poetry Dunash ben Labrat wrote, “Let Scripture be your Eden / and the Arabs’ books your paradise grove.” At home in Spain, that is, until we were banished, or worse.
Asheville, North Carolina: my home these past three decades.
Heading west toward Asheville on I-40, just after climbing Black Mountain, crossing the Eastern Continental Divide and dipping into Buncombe County, the first thing one sees is the towering cross at Ridgecrest, a Christian spiritual retreat center.
As I prepared to move from Charlotte to begin a job at the local university, a realtor showed me a small house for rent in West Asheville, then a working-class neighborhood. The third time I returned to walk around the house, peer through the windows, and get a feel for the street, a neighbor came out to meet me. Where do you go to church? she asked. I’m Jewish; I go to synagogue. That’s okay, honey. My church is right up the street. I’ll get you straightened out when you move in.
Asheville: Jews have lived here since the 1860s. Home to three thriving congrega-tions: Reform, Conservative, Chabad. The smallest city in the United States with its own Jewish Community Center, we local Jews like to say. And yet, at the gateway to the county, that cross.
Welcome home.
Are Jews at home anywhere?
I failed to follow the steps outlined in Reb Zalman’s guide: setting kavvanot, intentions, to offer my pains and pleasures to God; examining my conscience (cheshbon hanefesh) before going to sleep; cultivating my nefesh, the lowest of five levels of the soul, through meditation; placing God’s presence before me at all times; practicing hospitality to God on Shabbat; praying communally in synagogue. But Reb Zalman’s voice stirred something inside me that had been dormant for some time.
I hadn’t seen Rabbi Yarish, my childhood rabbi, since my bar mitzvah on December 10, 1966. Rabbi Yarrish wore a gray suit under his midnight-black pulpit robe. Rabbi Yarish bowled. Rabbi Yarish played the stock market. At the age of fifty-five, Rabbi Yarish left the rabbinate and turned his hobby into a second career as a stockbroker.
I, a typical middle-class assimilated American Jew, had studiously stayed away from Temple Emanuel, the reform congregation to which my family belonged, since becoming a man in the eyes of Judaism (that is, a bar mitzvah: an adult responsible for living according to Jewish law). When she learned I was dropping out of religious school, my Hebrew teacher told me I was making a big mistake. Instead of praying, I smoked pot, dropped acid. I practiced yoga. In my bedroom I lit candles. I meditated. But in time I came to Reb Zalman, who spoke my language. Or who spoke a language I wished to speak.
Happy are we who dwell in a house in which our language is spoken.
Our language. There aren’t many places one can go in the art world where artistic practice and religious engagement are taken equally seriously and allowed to inform one another. This conference was one of those places. And though my religious practice as a Jew with some Buddhism thrown in differed from that of almost everyone else in attendance, we spoke a common language. Artistic practice can deepen one’s religious life; religious practice can deepen one’s life in the arts. Happy are those who speak each other’s language.
Do you bless people?
“Who Am I to Give Blessings?” is a short chapter in Reb Zalman’s Davening: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Prayer. “Every one of us has inherited from Abraham, our first Jewish ancestor, the power to give blessings,” writes Reb Zalman. In parashat Lekh Lekha, after God tells Abram to leave his home for the place God will show him, God promises to make Abram a great nation and to bless him and that he will be a blessing: “I will bless those who bless you.” The words avarekhah mevarakhekha can also be understood, writes Reb Zalman, as “I will bless those whom you will bless.” Later he explains that the Hebrew word for blessing, berakhah, shares a root with the word bereikhah, which means pool. “Imagine a reservoir of blessing, waiting for the person on some high level. All it needs is someone to be the pipe, the conduit, to draw the blessing down to this plane.”
Who am I, an undisciplined Jew (shrimp tacos for lunch today, skipped shul on Shabbat to mow the lawn and go hiking), to offer a blessing to a young woman of faith, of Christian faith?
I texted a few friends for recommendations on where to see fireflies. In our backyard, a leader in the Jewish and broader community instantly replied.
I don’t remember a single word of Reb Zalman’s blessing. I’m not even sure I believed in blessings at the time. But Reb Zalman seemed to have a channel open to the divine.
A’s request was earnest. She had suffered. She was suffering. She lacked something she believed I had and could offer to her. Did she see me as a descendant of Abraham? Do I see myself that way? Would I listen if God told me to leave everything I know for a destination I will, eventually, be shown? Would I be willing to demonstrate my faith by offering my beloved son? I haven’t even given up cheeseburgers. And I’m often reluctant to leave my house. Leave me to my routine, to what’s familiar.
Still, there we were. For reasons I still don’t understand, I couldn’t turn away. As far as I knew, I wasn’t a conduit for anything. To the contrary, caught off guard, uncomfortable, I felt more tightly drawn into myself. But I felt something in my abdomen. Say something, I told myself, anything that might provide some comfort, some light.
Though I didn’t visualize a reservoir of blessing, I drew on what I knew: the priestly blessing. Because I didn’t feel an open channel to God, I left God out of the blessing. I offered what I could from my human heart to hers. May you be blessed with protection. May love shine its face on you. May peace turn toward you.
Ashrei yoshvei beitecha, od yehallellukhah, od yehallellukhah. Happy are those who dwell in Your house; they forever praise You.
The house in this verse is the ultimate bayit, the temple in Jerusalem. I like to believe that we can find ourselves in God’s house anywhere and at any time. It need not be a majestic building on a mountaintop in an historic city, a site that, for many years and many reasons, has been a place of contention rather than a place of peace. I like to think that for one moment A and I found ourselves in God’s house on the sidewalk across from the student union and in the shadow of Phillips Hall, the offices of the chancellor and the deans all empty on a late Friday summer afternoon. We met each other there, each with our own vulnerabilities, needs, and desires.
Right after the conference’s final reading, I dashed out of the student union without intending to meet anyone, indeed hoping not to. I found a stranger coming toward me. She blessed me. Her blessing? Seeing in me what I could not see in myself: my inheritance from Abraham, the ability to bless.
Blessing: a bottle of oil so that a lamp might celebrate the night.
Blessing: a flash of light, firefly that says, here I am for you.
for Lia Purpura
Richard Chess is the author of five books of poetry, including The Loneliest Monk (forthcoming from Orison). He is professor emeritus at UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for thirty years. He is a founding board member of Yetzirah, “a hearth for Jewish poetry.”
Photo by Akin Cakiner on Unsplash
