Presence As Intimacy: a Torah-Dharma Talk

This is a talk given at the Presence as Intimacy Retreat on May 10, 2023 at the Crossroads Retreat Center in Lebanon Township, NJ. The audio file embedded below includes songs as well.

“Presence” doesn’t have a direct translation into the idiom of Torah.

Perhaps there is no such thing as a direct translation. Translations are the byproduct of embodied language. So I am going to share, through words and music and affect, how these three words — presence as intimacy — make meaning through me.

Presence as NOCHECHUT

If you look up presence in a Hebrew dictionary you will find the word NOCHECHUT/נוֹכְחוּת. In the Book of Lamentations (2:19), we have the phrase NOCHACH PNEI HASHEM/שִׁפְכִי כַמַּיִם לִבֵּךְ נֹכַח פְּנֵי אֲדֹנָי. To place oneself before God; to interface with the divine. In my last conversation with Reb Zalman, when he told me he was ready to give me his SEMICHA, his ordination, he told me it was because when I DAVVEN, when I lead prayer for the community, I put myself NOCHACH PNEI HASHEM — in that posture of permeability before the face of the Divine. Present with God.

We can also understand the mode of NOCHACH PNEI HASHEM as Bearing Witness. I spent five years plunging with the Zen Peacemakers on their Bearing Witness retreats in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Bearing witness to the joys and the suffering in the world and in each other. These plunges provide the context and opportunity to practice giving up all ideas of self and other and to encounter an inconceivably vast field of interbeing. I remember the second year I arrived at the brick entry tunnel at the edge of Birkenau I and the utter shock of knowing, intellectually, that I had been there before but surrendering to the profound disorientation of the feeling that I had never seen it before in my life. I had been there, but I had never been there before Now. And Now is synonymous with that entity known as Here. The Here that David Wagoner in his poem “Lost” urges us to treat as a powerful stranger. Here and Now are powerful and strange. Presence is powerful and all-pervading and constantly, flamingly Queer.

Presence as Shechinah

I also suggested, at the opening of the retreat, that Presence is a synonym for Shechinah. Shechinah has been redeemed and rescued from obscurity by many of our fierce, formidable, and fabulous feminist teachers. She is the Divine; the Goddess; the Queen. The Divine Feminine is a potent antidote to millennia of erasure of women and the female experience, especially in religion, academia, and in access to power. I am humbled and quite shy about my honorary ordination as a Kohenet, as a Hebrew Priestess, by my teachers and friends, Rabbi Jill Hammer, Rav Kohenet Taya Ma, and Rav Kohenet Shoshana Jedwab. One of my most proud achievements is having designed and published the Siddur HaKohanot, their Prayerbook of the Hebrew Priestesses. This exceptional and unique prayerbook transforms the gendering of the traditional Siddur — whose default, like so many languages, is to the masculine gender. Every instance is inverted: MODEH ANI LEFANECHA becomes MODAH ANI LEFANAYICH. Davvenen this inverted path is at first disorienting and then liberating, a dizzying undoing of deeply inculcated calcifications of the Divine. Flipping the script, literally and metaphorically, provides a radical reframing to address and redress female-identified experience and the Feminine Divine. 

Presence as Shechinah elevates and animates Space itself; She indwells as the sanctity of the Sanctuary; we are altered/altared by the enigma of the ever-present Earth; invited into the immediacy and mystery of the divine encounter in our bodies, in our breath, in our blood. When we give weight to these things, KAVOD/כבוד — honor, glory, gravitas — when we presence our emotional body and social situation as breathing, bleeding, birthing, earth-bound beings, we can be caught on the rebound from spiritual bypass in a birth pool. We discover boundless bounty is the depths of embodiment and belonging. Here. Now.

Intimacy as Limit Consent

But merely offering an antidote to the poison of the gender binary, simply code-switching all the He/Hims of a Divine Sky God with the She/Hers of an Earth Mother Goddess doesn’t go far enough for me. Even the hieros gamos, the sacred unification and divine wedding of the traditional hetero-binary parts, isn’t queer, complex, or cacophonous as the cauldron of Presence demands. Intimacy is risk. Intimacy is beyond consent. Intimacy is getting in over our heads. Intimacy is drowning in the ocean and being reborn utterly unintelligible. Intimacy is total surrender of knowing, of knowing that you don’t know, can’t know, won’t know. Intimacy is never stepping into the same river twice; never breathing into the same body twice; intimacy is being breathed. Is Being, Breathing.

אָמַר רֵישׁ לָקִישׁ מִשּׁוּם רַבִּי יְהוּדָה נְשִׂיאָה:
אֵין הָעוֹלָם מִתְקַיֵּים אֶלָּא בִּשְׁבִיל הֶבֶל תִּינוֹקוֹת שֶׁל בֵּית רַבָּן

Reish Lakish said in the name of Rabbi Yehuda Nesia:
The world only exists because of the breath of schoolchildren.
(Shabbat 119b)

Trans-cending/Trance ending

Shoshana just came off of a retreat entitled Transcending Identity. I love the title, especially the trans part. In terms of the alchemical arts, transcendence is connected with the air element. Transcendental contemplations can and sometimes do give us elevation and lift; sky-borne perspectives to see how our identity structures obscure reality. How a tiny cloud can block out the immense sun.  

Transformation, elsewhere in the alchemical mandala, is connected with fire, the forge, the furnace; the fierce, uncontrollable vicissitudes that violate and undo the fibers and flesh of our small self-identification. 

Whether by fire, water, or air, our identities are inevitably elementally disintegrated. As Hillel instructs:

 הִלֵּל אוֹמֵר… וְאַל תַּאֲמִין בְּעַצְמְךָ עַד יוֹם מוֹתְךָ

“Don’t believe you know who you are until the moment of your death.”

And as we all know, but somehow frequently delude ourselves from knowing or conveniently forget: Death always gets the last dance.

I have discovered for myself that if God is going to have any use or purpose or function well in my practice or on my path, then They very likely use plural pronouns. Yes, god is they/them. The theo-form ELOHIM/אלהים is a singular plural. God is genderqueer. God thinks aloud in Genesis (1:26) saying, NAASEH ADAM BETZALMEINU KIDMUTEINU/נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ, “let us create Adam in our image and our likeness.” Our image is from the root word TZEL/צֵל, shadow. In modern Hebrew, a photographer is a TZALAM/צַלָּם, one who plays with the presentation and representation of shadows and light. Rilke, eavesdropping on another divine conversation, hears: “Flare up like a flame / and make big shadows I can move in.” God dwells even in our facades and our blindspots; what we know and what we don’t know and what we don’t know we don’t know — about ourselves, about each other, about our world.

Psalm 40

Psalm 40 is a chapter of the Torah full of a manic pathos familiar to many of us. The Psalmist goes from ecstatic songful celebration, to the depths of despair to fantasies of vengeance and back to subtlety and softening, all the in the course of a few verses. But right in the crosshairs of the chiasm (v9), we hear this beautiful, plaintive, revelation:

לַעֲשׂוֹת־רְצוֹנְךָ אֱלֹהַי חָפָצְתִּי וְתוֹרָתְךָ בְּתוֹךְ מֵעָי׃

“To do your will, my God, is my desire...”

Thy will be done. Once we catch a glimmer of the tenacity of our identities, or the repetition compulsion keeping our patterning in place, we can become desperate to have them removed. They feel like hindrances, obstacles, and obscurations. Just let me know RATZON HASHEM, God’s will, and get “me” out of the way. I have yearned and yearned, desired and strived, just be done with me! Several self-protective strategies come to the aid of the now-foundering small self: deny god; or dig in and defend autonomy, agency, and freewill at all cost; or perhaps as a last ditch effort outsource and abscond responsibility altogether. 

I know that when I was a BAAL TESHUVA, a zealous returnee to Jewish practice, I was desperate to be told what to do. “Just look in the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch and you’ll know what God wants from you. There are lists. Even an index!” Follow the script and all will go well, i thought. It reminds me of the joke: 

Q: How many Baalei Teshuva does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: You’re allowed to do that?!

Deconstruction Zone

Yes, we are allowed to do that. We are able to tinker with the trailheads to god. When we decouple gender and the subject-object binary from the Psalms, and many other prayers in the Hebrew cannon, an opening to the possibility of intimate relationship begins. Psalms are famously difficult to translate, not only because of its exotic language and syntax, but also because tenses are constantly shifting, rapidly oscillating between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person. 

The rabbinic tradition describes Moses as a completely transparent vessel — an ASPEKLARIA MEIRA — who brought down The Word of God, Unfiltered, as the Five Books of Moses. That part of the Torah is called OR YASHAR, direct light. The Psalms, on the other hand, are a human book, composed by fallible and fault-ridden humans, including King David, the sons of Korach, and others. These are referred to as OR CHOTZER, returning or reflected light, a prismatic, perhaps kaleidoscopic refraction.

When I read Tehillim now, I read them through my own neuroqueer lens. King David is an emotionally unhinged, bisexual singer-songwriter with anxious-avoidant attachment tendencies and a profoundly ambivalent relationship to fame and power. I see myself a lot in him. And because he was hacking the software of sacred texts and remixing them into reworked forms, I feel a strange attraction to his blessing for reading and reread him and his works through a new slightly-askew lens.

A grammatical aside

[Insert word nerdery here] and an only tangentially relevant word about nonbinary Hebrew. There are a few evolving systems to working outside of the existing grammatical constraints. I love that some of the innovators in this space arrived at the same vowel sound under the suffix for 2nd-person — EH — as language-hackers in Spanish speaking countries have also happened upon. Latin-derived languages have the same gendering of nouns as in Hebrew, so you may have seen “Latinx” used to include both Latinas and Latinos. And Latinx certainly looks cool on paper; a little like Mx. in lieu of Ms. But I’ve heard from within the enby Spanish-speaking world that Latine (with an “e” at the end) is preferred to the “x” ending because Latine arose organically from within the speakers of that community and not as externally engineered and imposed from the walls of academia. In any case, I love that the “EH” sound at the end is working for some Spanish speakers and the CHEH suffix in Hebrew can replace CHA or ACH anywhere we find it.

Another geeky grammatical diversion: I also love that the vowel now used to designate the nonbinary is the SEGOL. Visually, it’s a cluster of three dots in a downward-pointing equilateral triangle. Itself being a pictogram intimating at a third gender, it also conjurs for me a line from the Tao Te Ching. “One becomes Two; Two becomes Three; Three becomes the Ten Thousand Things.” It is a generative glyph. It is also reminiscent of the Pax Cultura or "Peace through Culture" flag, a movement founded by the artist Nicholas Roerich which sought to protect world cultural artifacts from military destruction. Further, SEGOL also means purple; the AM SEGULAH, the purple people. And we can all agree purple is a pretty fabulous color, no?

A Nonbinary, Nondual Approach to Psalm 40:8-9

In the two verses of this chant at the center of Psalm 40, there are only two words that need to be tweaked to read it as nonbinary Hebrew: RETZONCHEH and TORATCHECH. The remainder, untouched, allows the subject to remain genderfluid. 

Your Will and Your Desire is now free from fixed identitarian forms. My will, thy will, your Torah, my Torah, are now permeable and interoperable to one another. We have a fluid membrane, open to multidimensional access and inquiry. 

When God has no fixed identity, and we have no fixed identity; when we drop the subject-object duality; when we move Beyond I-Thou; are we praying to God or as God? Are we monkeys mouthing empty syllables that only have meaning in a relational context? Are we so absorbed in activity that we’ve forgotten we’ve found the Presence as Intimacy we went looking for in the first place?

LA’ASOT “to do”

Shoshana offered the First People’s proverb: “If you want to know who you are, watch what you do, not what you think.” Our first tether to this prayer is to tie in to the verb LA’ASOT: to do, manifest, physically accomplish in this world, OLAM ASSIYAH.

LA’ASOT RETZONCHEH “to do your will”

What is God’s will? Can God have a will? Can it be known? Do I have a will? Do I understand my own motivations? Do I have blindspots? If I am blindsided by how much can hide in my blindspot can I be sure that I will never be blindsided again? If I am given free will, autonomy, and agency, do I have the right to abscond from that gift? Can I even extricate myself from the persistence of my willfulness?

LA’ASOT RETZONCHEH ELOHAI “to do your will, My God”

In the Amidah, the so-called Silent Prayer, the traditional liturgy has a seeming redundancy: ELOHEI AVRAHAM, ELOHEI YITZCHAK, ELOHEI YAAKOV. “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob.” We add ELOHEI SARAH, ELOHEI RIVKAH, ELOHEI RACHEL, ELOHEI LEAH. “God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Rachel, God of Leah.” Why the repetition of ELOHEI? If God is One, the selfsame God of each of us, why do we repeat this word so often? Torah usually values a hyper-economy of words; what value is there in repetition? What might the repetition be trying teaching us? Each of those ancestral paradigms, each of our ancestors had a unique relationship with the One of Uniqueness. The mark of the Origin is Originality. Even though we are all made in the Image of God, God’s infinite face is infinitely diverse. Here too, “to do your will, my God,” intimates that we make God in our image, in our likeness. 

And further, since we have collapsed the subject-object duality, perhaps these words are God’s to us: to do Your will, my Divine Child, is what I seek. What do you want, babe of the universe? What is your desire, asks God? Can I make your will My will? I sometimes sing this text as, “All I have ever wanted — my god! —  is to feel your feeling for me. To know I am chosen. To not feel so broken. To feel I am desired and free.”

As people turn to me for spiritual direction, or meditation guidance, or prayer practice, I am continually counseling that practice is not one thing, let alone static. It. is highly fluid and idiosyncratic. We cannot, on the spiritual path, conjure up a scene from When Harry Met Sally where we tell a waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.” We cry the tears of Reb Zusha who knows we will not be asked by the divine phalanx on our deathbeds why we were not more like Moses but why we spent our lives not being more like ourselves. 

Every time we encounter Torah, the proverb implores us, as Miriam led us earlier this week in song: DERACHEHAH DARKEI NOAM VECHOL NETIVOTEHA SHALOM/דְּרָכֶיהָ דַרְכֵי־נֹעַם וְכָל־נְתִיבוֹתֶיהָ שָׁלוֹם. There are infinite pathways to the divine; they are known by their implausible pleasantness; and they are recognized if they bring about SHALOM, more deeply integrated complexity. I repeatedly teach: I cannot teach you meditation; I can accompany your journey to discover your self, your God, and your desire to fall back into connection with the Tree of Life. I can help you follow and unfold your own NETIVAH/pathway, the way of your heart’s desire.

Desire. CHAFATZTI. Too often pleasure, desire, ease are erased from our spiritual pursuits. Sure, many of us come to practice for pain relief. Perhaps even the majority of seekers are in it seeking solace, analgesia. And it is fine and well when we come to community, when we discover sangha, that some degree of the affliction of isolation is soothed and we find what we were looking for. And the quest may end there, with a degree of our existential alienation eliminated. What a huge relief. 

But Desire is yet another facet, another face, another gateway to depth. The Divine desires desire. We seem to have a fundamental need for a direction of our devotional energies. An occasion for our dedication. Bhakti. Belonging. Reb Zalman taught that Spiritual Direction begins with the cultivation of Yearning.

VETORATCHEH BETOCH ME’AI “And your Torah is within me.”

Your teaching is in my innards. My kishkes. The blessing before reading from the Torah says CHAYYEI OLAM NATAH BETOCHEINU/וְחַיֵּי עוֹלָם נָטַע בְּתוֹכֵֽנוּ, “the life of the Worlds is planted within us.” Your Torah is on the inside. The Face of God we referenced earlier — PNEI HASHEM — is connected with PENIMIYUT, interiority. The Heavenly Torah we so often seek outside, skyward, is not only in Heaven, but right here on earth. The Sufis say Allah is closer than the vein in our necks. KAROV HAVAYAH LECHOL KORAV — God is close to all who call... all who call in truth. In truth, there are no walls between us and the Universe; the cavity, the cavern within, our gut instincts sting with the lingering scent of the sublime. In our loins, our groins, our wombs, our wombful compassion, our capacity to feel and to feel felt.

But this buried treasure, lost at sea, how do I see the Torah buried deep inside and within me?

AZ AMARTI HINEI VATI “so I say, here I am”

Embodied language is speech that is not separated from its elemental source. Our bodies belong to nature. Our bodies are Nature. AMARTI, from the root AMAR, is an acronym pointing to the elemental integration that Miriam taught the other night: AISH, MAYIM, RUACH, “fire, water, air.”

HINEI “behold.” HINEINI “here I am.” BATI “I come, I go.” The shared arrival, the simultaneous orgasm, hitting the G-spot, the God-spot —  G!D was in this place and I didn’t even know it!?!

“Here I Am, I Come with Your Torah Scroll Unfolded, Unrolled, Written Upon Me”

God lays Her skin bare. We are inked with His holy tattoos. The microfine spiraling nucleic acids, divine transcriptions, incalculable recombinations, epigenetic ancestral storybooks stitched inside every single cell throughout the celestial cosmos. I come imbricated with the signature of the primordial enchiridifer. Your Torah is writ upon my flesh.

Within me and upon me. BETOCH ME’AI KATUV ALAI. If I plunge to the depths of the sea, there you are; if I soar through the cloud ceiling of the heavens, I find you there too. If I stay shallow or if I flow deep, no escape from the landscape of your presence. And what space exists between the two, what is the place of implacable unpronounceable presence?

AZ/אז 

This two-letter Hebrew word — ALEPH ZAYIN — is the discreet cameo in our theme Presence AS Intimacy. That sneaky preposition that does a lot of heavy lifting in this three word koan. What is the time when presence serves to support or reveal intimacy? AZ in Hebrew serves as both a temporal and logical expression. AZ as in “then;” AZ as in “as in.” As in when Presence is like Intimacy. A pre-sense prescience that provides a portal and passageway into into-me-you-see.

Final Metatranslation

I desire, I desire
To do Divining.
Teachings are treasures in the belly.
Here I am, in this fierce strange Now,
Unfurling an infinite scroll
Skimming the asymptotic surface of synesthetic embrace.
Thy will be done;
My will be done;
I and the Beloved are One.

לַעֲשׂוֹת רְצוֹנְךֶ אֱלֹהַי חָפָצְתִּי וְתוֹרָתְךֶ בְּתוֹךְ מֵעָי
אָז אָמַרְתִּי הִנֵּה בָאתִי בִּמְגִלַּת סֵפֶר כָּתוּב עָלָי
בְּתוֹךְ מֵעָי כָּתוּב עָלָי רְצוֹנְךֶ

La·a·sot re·tzon·cheh e·lo·hai cha·fatz·ti
ve·to·rat·cheh be·toch mei·ai

Az a·mar·ti, hi·nei va·ti, bim·gi·lat se·fer ka·tuv a·lai

Be·toch mei·ai ka·tuv a·lai x2 re·tzon·cheh