Blog by The Velveteen Rabbi

Written with tears

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I recently read this blog, and I felt it was fitting for me. I'm not sure if it's okay to put someone else's blog in my blog, but I did it anyway. Maybe it's okay if I make sure to give credit to the author. It's a blog written by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat. You can check her out at by clicking on this link http://velveteenrabbi.com/about/ Or go right to her blog by clicking here The velveteenrabbi If the links don't work, sorry, it's due to my lack of tech savvy. Try just googling this: Velveteen Rabbi : Now Running & Playing With The Real Rabbis! Anyway, all that technical stuff aside. I cry when I write this blog. My story now is written with tears. Maybe I should be more diligent in keeping this blog up to date, but sometimes I just feel that it's the same thing over and over. Written with tears Posted: 10 Feb 2016 12:27 PM PST I belong to a small group of local Jewish clergy which meets once a week at a coffee shop to study together, and for the last year or so we've been slowly working our way through Heschel's encyclopedic masterwork Heavenly Torah. Recently we read something about the final verses of the Torah which continues to reverberate in me. The book of Deuteronomy ends with the death of Moses. This poses an interesting challenge for the classical tradition: if Torah was dictated verbatim by God to Moshe, then how can it contain verses about Moshe's death? How could Moses have told the story of his own death if it hadn't happened yet? The tradition offers a variety of different answers, among them "he didn't write those last eight verses; Joshua did." But the answer I find most moving is that as Moshe heard about his own imminent passage out of this life, he wrote the final eight verses not with ink (or not only with ink) but with his tears. Moses didn't get to cross into the Promised Land, but he did cross that threshold from this life into whatever comes next -- as everyone eventually must do. When he wrote the last verses of his story with his tears, what was he feeling? Were they tears of gratitude, or of longing? Tears of regret, or tears of joy? Each of us, the tradition says, is to write a Torah. That's understood in a variety of ways: one should learn the scribal arts, one should fiscally support a Torah scribe, one should contribute commentary to the tapestry of tradition... and, perhaps, one should recognize consciously that one's life is a sacred text unfolding. One of my favorite passages in this Heschel chapter holds that Moshe could have written the whole Torah with his tears, but then it would be too luminous for us to read. There are chapters in everyone's Torah of lived human experience which are written with tears -- tears of sorrow, and tears of gladness. What would it be like to name those moments in our lives which are washed with tears not as something to be hidden away or avoided, but as luminous connections with the undercurrent of spirit which enlivens all things? What scripture might we write if we allowed ourselves access to the invisible ink of our cracked-open hearts?

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