#parshathashavuah

[torahgalus]

Terumah

and this is how much I love you, she says-- enough to retract myself from the Heavens, to take my expansiveness and make it presence, to take my dwelling and make it singular-- here, between the two keruvim, I alight on the ark and I will speak to you beneath the shelter of their wings, their faces almost touching but not quite, my presence almost finite but never just, your face alight and my voice shaking the flaps of this goat-hair tent.  this is how much I love you--enough to shrink myself, momentarily. to slip between the hairsbreadth dividing these angels’ lips.  to gird myself in goats’ hair and whisper, through the shadows of seven soft flickering lights.

build me a home and paint it  blue. I will come to you.

[torahgalus]

Noach

it’s okay, you know-- I, too, have often begun  my projects without heeding other’s warnings, have charged recklessly and hopefully into a path of possibility and creation, have known there lay equal potential for growth and destruction, and so tipped the scales-- slightly.

one always hopes to be proven right, in these cases; don’t you wish you could have held us before the melakhim on your palm, cupped us gently and uncurled your fingers before emet and shalom, watched the wonder as it crept across their faces, slowly.

it must have hurt to admit that you had failed--that in all your perfection, you had made something too deeply imperfect, that you had tipped the scales and watched the earth lurch wildly out of control.

is this why you qualified your promise, when you swore to  Noah--hedge your bets and fill the sky with fractured light, tell the melakhim we are a failed project that you have nonetheless chosen to continue.

[torahgalus]

Bereishit

bereishit hay’ta cavar  ahava, and she shouldered the name nothingness and chaos curved upon herself, a disordered end-beginning-end without שמים to hold her and אדמה to ground her and אדם וחוה to make her home.

it wasn’t just the humans G-d banished that day, and with every step further from  גן עדן she felt herself revert to chaos--could not remember, as she wrapped her arms desperately round Cain and still held him as his arm rose and fell, what it had been like those first and few days. how it  had felt to be both in order, and at home.

[torahgalus]

Vayakhel-Pekudei

and I hope, so fiercely, to see your actions mirrored in this world-- to see shelters overwhelmed with gifts, to see mutual aid spreadsheets spanning thousands of pages, Excel boxes plated gold and heaps of food left on doorsteps, bundled in blue and crimson  wool.  imagine, for a second, us giving so freely and so fiercely that we were told to stop--being told everyone has given, at minimum, more than enough.  imagine us casting off our jewelry and comforts for a holy cause. and vayakhel, imagine how close we’d all draw, as our  bodies stayed home. 

we built a mishkan with absurd precision, every spun tapestry, every pole and socket and altar rendered in utter perfection-- because to manifest G-d, we’re willing to take instruction.

[torahgalus]

Vayechi

you were born Ya’akov and you died Ya’akov, Israel, born chasing and dying curled and content, and in between, Israel, you sat on your bed upright and firm eyes weak hands shaking hands switching God strengthening you son correcting you, gently, lovingly-- not seizing your hands to uncross them; not substituting one son for another. you sat on your bed upright and firm sons kneeling before you receiving blessing curse and something in between, and when you sigh, soft, draw your feet up to the bed, Ya’akov, and sleep, every one of them falls upon your face-- weeping.

[torahgalus]

Chayei Sarah

imagine her three, small, stumbling toward him with a jug wobbling between her shoulders, half her size-- kneeling before the kneeling camels, head level with hooves, hurrying to and from and to them, drawing water impatiently, little feet pat-pat pat-pat kicking up dust in her wake.

imagine them sitting her in their laps cradling her head softly and saying Rivkah, akhoti, will you go with this man? and she nods lips stiff and sure says I will and we let  her, we have to, this was decreed by hashem and we cannot say good cannot say bad cannot say no--and we  cannot take her, this child, small, a day past three, without her consent; we can pretend that she, three, is capable of giving consent, now; we adorn her with gold nose rings  and slim arm bands intended as  bracelets.  

imagine her on the camels, glowing-- she can see Isaac, barely, between the tips of its ears, a form advancing through the field and leaving dust in his slow, measured wake.  she falls from the camel, tips ungracefully to the ground, and rights herself alone-- no one else had yet dismounted.

imagine her swaddled in veils at the camels’ feet, curious, waiting. now Isaac sees her.  now Isaac sees her, small, tufts of hair spiraling out from her veil like horns, and he loves her, and he loves her, and he is the first to love, and he can still, somehow, love, and he wasn’t certain that he should. he loves her, and Rivkah is silent-- we can’t read her face behind the  veils.  Isaac loves her, and she lies prone at the camels’ feet, covered, small, nose ring glinting in the fading light.

[torahgalus]

Lekh Lekha

you chose him as Abram brought him out from Ur Chasdim and shaped his name new in your mouth Abraham for hashem Abraham a new man and we can never call him by his old name call him by his first name but we do, every day--

you change your name line to line we call you elohim adonai tzvaot el shaddai el elyon shekhinah yhwh ha-shem, the name, kel’s and tetra- grammatons tripping off our tongues and they all trace the barest outline of you, edges left gaping by the names we still don’t know--

but we each only get one. one name to be born with, one name to wrap around us as shield and shelter, one name from  us or one name from you and once the ה the ha-shem is inserted there’s no going back--this is me, now.

only you’re given the reshut to contain multitudes, to be simultaneously everything you are, have been, will be, might be;

Hagar knew her name was fixed, knew the ה lived already on the tip of her tongue her outline already filled in with mis-placed-ness and her son’s name stolen from her mouth (god who will hear, I don’t feel heard) but you--you she could plant a new name in like a flag, call out el-roi--

god who sees me.

in my loneness, my singularity. and boldly, simply, she named herself anew in your eyes.