There is a prayer in Hebrew that goes

Hareyni mekabel alai et mitzvat ha’boreh v’ahavata lereacha k’mocha reacha k’mocha

The Urban Adamah translation of that prayer says

It is upon me to receive the connection of the Creator, to love your neighbor as yourself.

This translation reads a little awkwardly, but the sentiment of it is beautiful: that it is through loving our neighbors as ourselves that we receive “the connection” of the Creator, or that in receiving that connection, we will inherently be loving our neighbors as ourselves. In one way or another, it makes it such that the idea of feeling the connection of and with the Creator (in whatever way that concept makes sense to us) is tied inherently to empathy and compassion.

While the use of the word “connection” is powerful in the UA translation, it is also the source of its syntactical awkwardness. “Connection” is used here to translate the Hebrew word mitzvat, more commonly translated as “commandment.” The common translation of Hareyni would read more like, “It is upon me to receive the commandment of the Creator, ‘To love your neighbor as yourself,’” but Urban Adamah opts for the more neutral translation of mitzvat as “connection.” This is interesting to me because it provides a different understanding of what we mean when we talk about “commandments” in Judaism, and also of how we understand the relationship between God and humankind. Rather than looking at the commandments as orders sent down from an anthropomorphized God-on-high, the translation of mitzvat as connection reframes the concept as useful strategies through which we as human individuals can feel some closeness to the at once transcendent (unknowable) and immanent (all-present) Divine. It generates a more reciprocal understanding of the relationship between God and humanity, one that can be opted into, that is consensual. This understanding of mitzvat more closely relates to my personal understanding of the Covenant within Judaism, the supposed pact between God and Israel (the Jewish people) from which our entire national identity is derived. In my understanding of the Covenant, “God” is accepted as the infinite source and Creator of the universe (after all, that is Their intellectual/conceptual role), but at the same time, it is equally important to emphasize the role of the Israelites and of Jewish God-consciousness in the generation and articulation of a Jewish-specific concept of God. There exists between God and Israel a mutual bond of creativity. For me in particular, I know that it is through acts of creativity that I have felt some of my clearest moments of connection to my concept of the Divine.

On Wednesday afternoon, the other Fellows and I went to Studio Am – The Jewish Studio Project where we spent a few hours with Rabbi Adina Allen talking about the intersections of Jewish spirituality, art-making, and justice work. In her introduction to the day’s activities, Rabbi Allen drew our attention to the fact that God’s first act in the Bible was one of creativity—in fact, it was the titanic creative act of producing the universe. The God of the Hebrew Bible is primarily a creative deity. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that in my experience, many of the moments where I’ve felt the most “transcendent,” when I’ve felt a certain power flowing through me, a connection to something higher and outside of myself, have been when I’ve lost myself completely in a piece of writing. It’s those long hours that pass like minutes, when the moon’s high up in the sky and I seem to know exactly where I should be going next in a piece without having to step back and think about it. When the story writes itself. It’s in those moments when I feel the least myself, the least rooted in the world around me, but the most awake and energized, the most connected to the deepest place within me, the place that is so easily blocked out by things like ego and daily life. Even before I started to become comfortable again with the idea of God, I’d say that in those moments I truly felt like I was tapping into something spiritual, something more meaningful than the limited physical world around me, and especially more meaningful than whatever words it was that I’d just put on the page. That’s the thing I’ve come to realize about writing: that, in writing, I am trying to capture and portray something that transcends materiality but am stuck with tools that themselves are only crude, false representations of the material world. It’s frustrating. It’s futile. So too is the search for God. I cherish both pursuits all the same.

The framing of creativity as a modality through which to connect with the Divine also attaches an important ethical and communal aspect to the creative process. If we recall the words of Genesis, we realize that God’s creativity is inherently tied to an aspect of “goodness” (“God saw all that [They] had made, and behold, it was very good.” Genesis 1:31, NASB). One might also look again at Hareyni and remember that the particular mitzvah involved there is to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We might feel a connection to the Divine through our creative acts, but the imperative to “Love your neighbor as yourself” as a part of feeling that connection reminds us that our creative acts don’t exist inside a bubble; that they must, in some respect, be undertaken with a love and consideration for one’s neighbors in mind if they are truly to connect us to God. To me, this strengthens the purpose of creative acts such they are not just an arbitrary outpouring of some pent-up mental and/or spiritual energy, but rather serve as intentional efforts to connect more deeply both with God and with other human beings. It reminds me of one of the most important lessons I received as a creative writing student at UVA, that a writer must consider their audience. After all, while there is much to be said for what I feel like I personally receive from writing, what is the point of making art if not to share it with others? To try and make your reality known to other people and, perhaps, somehow inspire them to connect more fully to their own personal truth? For me, for my writing to feel important, it must serve the ends of spiritual and political uplift. Connecting my understanding of how and why I write to my understanding of the Divine and my particular relationship to that as a Jewish person helps to refine and deepen that goal.

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Modeh ani lefanecha ruach chai v’kayam

“I am grateful before You eternal living spirit”

From the Modeh ani, traditional morning prayer, Urban Adamah version.

In my first few weeks here at Urban Adamah, gratitude keeps emerging as a central theme. At first I didn’t recognize it. It was just a subtle feeling I had been carrying around, something I felt when Chloe, our Fellowship director, transformed Lake Anza into a mikveh (ritual bath) for the twelve of us Fellows, and when we were hiking back down through Tilden Regional Park in silence afterward. It was something I felt when, within just a few hours of meeting them, I began to have intimate and meaningful conversations with my housemates, talks which made me feel seen and heard and at home. It’s something I’ve felt every time I’ve noticed a seed sprouting or a stalk growing or a flower opening up in the greenhouse, where in the span of a few weeks I’ve gone from a known killer of succulents to, somehow, a nurturing plant-parent. Gratitude has been with me from the very beginning, from the moment I stepped off the plane in San Francisco, saw a few queer couples, and knew, thank God, that I’d arrived. It just took me about a week and half to be able to put a name to it.

Every Thursday, Kate—another Fellow—and I bike down from Berkeley to West Oakland to work at People’s Grocery, a community garden on the property of the historic California Hotel, which opened in 1930 and by the 1940s had developed into an important Black cultural center. In its heyday, the hotel hosted such iconic figures as James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and many more. It began to decline in the 1960s and eventually (but only temporarily) closed its doors. Today, California Hotel serves as subsidized housing for West Oakland’s low-income and disabled communities. With its awesome presence and history, California Hotel and its gracious, welcoming residents are enough to inspire gratitude in and of themselves, and it was while working there on our first Thursday in Oakland that it clicked for me that gratitude was the common thread that ran through so many of my experiences.

On that first Thursday, Kate and I helped set up and got to stay for “Flavas in the Garden,” a weekly event where California Hotel residents and community members get to gather in the garden, eat, and engage in facilitated discussion. Topics can range from racial equity and politics, to food justice, health, and pretty much anything else. The first week we were there, the topic, as it turned out, was gratitude, and all of us in the circle were invited to share a few things we were feeling grateful for on that particular Thursday. A lot of people shared their gratitude for Heather, the gardener extraordinaire and sole staff member at People’s Grocery, whose birthday it just so happened to be. A lot of people thanked God for waking them up to a new day every morning. I gave my gratitude to Berkeley, and to Oakland, and I think expressing that has helped me feel closer to both cities.

The underlying philosophy of our conversation during “Flavas” was that the energy you put out into the universe is the energy you attract. While that might sound a little esoteric and New Age, it’s a concept that has found itself expressed in many of the world’s prominent religious traditions. Think of karma. Think of prayer. Rabbi Michael Lerner, in his book Jewish Renewal, writes:

Judaism places transcendence on the agenda of the human race. Human beings need not be stuck in a world of pain and oppression. We can regain contact with a deeper level of being, a level more consonant with who we really are — namely, beings who are created in the image of God, who embody an inherent tendency toward goodness and holiness, toward being ’embodied spirituality.’ Transcendence is not transcending this world, but rather our ability to bring more fully into being in this world aspects of ourselves and aspects of reality that surround us but to which we have become tone deaf. Every inch of creation, every cell of being, not only contains atoms stored with physical energy, but also contains and reflects the spiritual and moral energy that we call God. Much of the pain and oppression we experience in this world is a reflection of the way we do not recognize God in the world, in one another, in ourselves. (Lerner 29)

This path of transcendence that Rabbi Lerner identifies within Judaism sounds to me a lot like a path of gratitude. Gratitude is a strategy by which we can open our eyes and ears again to the positive aspects of our experiences, to the things we want to acknowledge and manifest in the world. The expression of and meditation on gratitude actively shapes one’s perspective into one of positivity, even if that gratitude feels forced or hard to find. It’s not about ignoring the things about the world and ourselves that we would like change, but about transforming the world and ourselves through the filter of our perceptions. A world characterized by positivity is one in which it is easier to move and breathe and create change. There is a political element to this as well. Practicing radical gratitude can be seen as a strategy for self-preservation, a crucial praxis of resistance in a time when the struggle is as all-encompassing, ongoing, and daily as it is today. If oppression operates through a strategy of dividing people and making us feel small, radical gratitude serves to unite us and remind us of our collective power. It reminds us that, even as there are institutions and systems of oppression we wish to dismantle, there are values we wish to preserve. Let us not forget our values.

Thinking about gratitude in this way, something I’ve come to realize is that the dominant mode through which I have tended to relate to myself and the world around me is one of negativity—focusing on aspects that I do not like, that I want to suppress. Flipping that and focusing instead on positivity, on the things that I enjoy, the qualities of existence for which I am grateful and which I want to foster at least feels healthier, more productive. I’m trying to put that into practice. It’s a slow process—I have a lot of unlearning to do—but I believe in my ability to achieve my goals. After all, I have people to help me along the way.

To get started, here are a few things I’m grateful for:

The source of life, which wakes me up every day

My body, which protects and cares for me, and which I hope to protect and care for in return

The Earth, which houses and nourishes us all

History and tradition, which guide us

Fiona and Inana, the goats at Urban Adamah, who bring happiness to all of us here

Thank you.

For updates about the PLT Summer Internship, click here. We also post updates online using #PLTinterns. To get these updates please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @LivedTheology. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

“For in six days God made the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, God blessed Shabbat and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:11)

Today, Friday, marks the beginning of the end of my first week here in Berkeley as an Urban Adamah Fellow. Sundown on this day will also mark the beginning of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest which continues until the following sundown on Saturday. As I’m writing this, I hear the peaceful sounds—with the occasional expletive sprinkled in—of a house full of my newfound friends preparing to welcome in this time-honored Jewish tradition: the cooking of the Shabbat meal, pairs of feet padding lightly up and down the carpeted hall, a shower running. Already, I can feel the sense of rest and ease sifting down like a gentle snowfall over our home, a welcome respite after a long day of Avodat Sadeh (service of the field) at the farm. They say it usually doesn’t get up into the 80s in Berkeley, but this has been a particularly hot week. By now, I think that even the hardiest of us are ready to lay down our tools and take a break.

Shabbat is not a tradition that we observed in my (half-) Jewish home growing up. Although it is a weekly holiday “guarded” (to borrow from Deuteronomy) throughout the millennia by generation after generation of Jews, Shabbat is still a relatively new observance in my life, and so tonight’s Kabbalat Shabbat (welcoming in the Sabbath) holds a double significance for me: as our community welcomes in the Sabbath for the first time together, I will be welcoming it as a new tradition into my life, one that I will perhaps observe in one way or another for the rest of my days. Given the double meaning for me of this particular Shabbat, and the conversations we’ve been having about the tradition today, I’ve been thinking a lot about its meaning and particular resonance in my life right now. In some ways, it seems to me, these three months at Urban Adamah are something like an extended Shabbat, a time for rest. This might seem like a strange claim given the fact that most of my time here is going to be spent doing farm work, but bear with me.

In Jewish tradition, the Sabbath comes with a long list of rabbinic guidelines about what one can and cannot do during that span of time between when the first three stars of evening appear in the sky on Friday and the sun sets on Saturday. This includes things like not being allowed to handle money, tear paper, drive a car, or operate a light switch. As a highly observant Jew, what you’re supposed to do on Shabbat is stay home (and/or go to temple… but don’t drive!), pray, and be happy about it. To many less observant Jews, these rules seem extremely draconian, just another example of how halakha (Jewish law) wrecks any chance of a Jew having a good time. Thus, for many, Shabbat passes by unmarked. But there is another way to look at the tradition, one that is suggested by the manifold restrictions and yet is not beholden to their strict observance. It goes back to the quote from Exodus above about “God [blessing] Shabbat and [making] it holy,” and it has to do with mindfulness.

What does it mean to make Shabbat holy? If the basis for our observance of Shabbat is that we are following God’s example in “resting on the seventh day,” then how, exactly, are we to follow Their example in “blessing” this specific span of time? The rabbinic prescriptions regarding Shabbat achieve this one way by providing a bunch of rules and practices that set Shabbat apart from any other day of the week. The important thing is that Shabbat is somehow different from any old day, that it is in some way special. The other important thing about all of those rules is that they fall under the general justification of one not being allowed to engage in any form of “labor” during that special time. In this way, the proscriptions allow us to have a special amount of awareness during Shabbat—awareness of the day itself, but also (since we are not working and are not even supposed to be thinking about work) awareness of all the things that we usually shove to the side during our hectic weeks. These are things like our family, our community, our God, and ourselves. Observing Shabbat forces you to step out of the whirlpool of everyday life, to just live and just be, and it is in this way that I feel like my time here at Urban Adamah is something like an extended Shabbat.

Having recently graduated and then now having traveled all the way across the country to Berkeley in order to be here, it feels like the time that I will be spending at Urban Adamah is “special,” in many ways set apart from the rest of the life that I have known. As a recent graduate back in Virginia, I felt myself weighed down by all of these questions about what I would be doing next in life, about where I was going and what it would all amount to. There are so many things that I want to experience in the short time that I have, but as of yet, I still have no idea how to go about accessing those experiences. In addition to these broader concerns, I also carry the basic anxiety of how to survive in a world where money is a necessity and things like food, water, and shelter aren’t a guarantee. But being out here, working with the land, connecting with the amazing people around me, and trying to be of service to the broader Bay Area community, it feels like I can let go of all of those questions, at least for the time being. Like I can just breathe and be. And that, surely, is a blessing.

Another aspect of Shabbat which connects to my experience with Urban Adamah is brought into focus in a line from Deuteronomy, chapter 5: “You shall perform no labor, neither you, your son, your daughter, your manservant, your maidservant, your ox, your donkey, any of your livestock, nor the stranger who is within your cities, in order that your manservant and your maidservant may rest like you.” Shabbat is not just a rite to be observed by us as individuals, but rather that a day of rest is a right to be extended to everyone in our community, including our animals, our servants, and even strangers in our midst. In this way, it can be read as a call to social action, a call to be mindful of the needs of others and to help them satisfy those needs. It is my hope that through the labor that I do perform over the course of my fellowship that I can help to improve the material stakes of underprivileged residents of the Bay Area, if even only in a small way, to lighten their load a little bit so that they, too, can find some time for rest.

For updates about the PLT Summer Internship, click here. We also post updates online using #PLTinterns. To get these updates please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @LivedTheology. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.