Children and Stories
Friday December 22, 2023
We don’t get many opportunities in our life to return to our past and relive our most significant experiences. But these days, for about five minutes every Saturday morning, I get to do just that. Saturday mornings at 11:30am, outdoors behind our preschool building, at the top of the amphitheater of our Outdoor chapel. About twenty adult members of our Library Minyan are sitting in rows under the large shade umbrellas, singing and praying, and then before moving into the Torah service, we invite the children to come and sit on the ground in front of the Ark. There on a blanket spread over the concrete, I get down on the ground (which is getting harder and harder to do) and tell the kids a story out of the weekly Torah portion. I am now a grandfather and these children are our new generation; the generation of my one-year old granddaughter who will soon be old enough to understand the stories.
Noah on the ark, sending out the dove to find dry land after the flood. Abraham smashing his father’s idols. Rebekah at the well, watering the camels. Jacob sleeping outside for the first time in his life, dreaming of a stairway stretching from earth to heaven.
The kids are three years old, four years, five years old. I have their attention for about five minutes, at most, and those are five of the most important minutes in my week. I try not to put too much pressure on myself, but I do feel that I have to get it right. We are laying down the foundation of their Jewish identity; they are taking the first steps of what we hope will be a lifelong relationship with the Torah.
In my storytelling at the Library Minyan, I am returning to the same daunting, high stakes storytelling that I did with the children of the Isla Vista Minyan thirty years ago, when my own kids were little. I had never done much storytelling before my own kids were born, and I really had no idea what I was doing. But I was clear about one thing. Whatever I said to the kids had to feel deeply true to me. The idea of lying to our children was anathema to me.
The most difficult stories to tell were stories about God, for just this reason. I had never really pushed myself to clarify: what do I think about God? Honestly. The truth. How do I experience God? I had always loved the stories of the Torah and I wanted my kids to love those stories. But this was a different question: how do I want my children to think and feel and experience God? As a person? As light? As love? As the wind?
At four years old and five years old, children are so receptive. They are hungry for stories; they have a million questions, and they are not rebelling…yet. They just want to know. What will we tell them? This question haunts me as a rabbi, but I’m not the only one who has to find an answer. Every parent. Every grandparent. Every teacher of little children knows that our children are watching us carefully, and learning deeply from us. And they want to know about God.
In this week’s Torah portion, Joseph speaks to his brothers about God, repeatedly. It is the dramatic climax of the long narrative, the intensely emotional moment in which Joseph finally reveals himself to his brothers, who sold him into slavery twenty years earlier. He reveals himself to them and they are stunned, unable to speak, unable to believe that this powerful man, the Prime Minister of Egypt, is actually the brother whom they had hated and thrown into a pit and then sold as a slave. They are filled with terror and dread of him and he speaks to them gently, reassuringly. He speaks to them of God.
Four times in the space of just four verses, he tells his brothers: “You sold me, but it was God who sent me here. God sent me here to save life. God sent me here, ahead of you, so that I could provide food for you and save your lives. It was not you; it was God who sent me here to become ruler over all of Egypt. Now go back to my father, he says, and tell him; Your son Joseph says “God has made me lord over all Egypt. Come down to me, without delay.”
And incidentally, Joseph has spoken about God before. Back in the prison, when the royal butler and baker tell him that they have dreamt dreams, he says to them halo l’elohim pitronim. Interpretations belong to God! And when the Pharoah says to Joseph “I hear that you can interpret dreams” Joseph replies “Biladai! Not I! God will make you whole.”
No other character in Genesis speaks about God as frequently and as passionately as Joseph, and yet we are left wondering: this is what Joseph says. But what does he really think? Honestly, four separate affirmations in the space of four verses; who exactly is he trying to convince? Perhaps himself.
It must mean something that, unlike his father Jacob, and unlike his grandfather Isaac, and unlike his great-grandfather Abraham, Joseph never hears the voice of God. In the entire lengthy story of Joseph and his brothers, God never speaks to Joseph. And Joseph never speaks to God. He never prays. At least we don’t hear about it. We see and hear Joseph speaking about God, telling the God story….to the butler, the baker, to Pharoah and to his brothers. But for all of us who are trying to tell God stories to our own children and grandchildren, it would be nice to know. What does Joseph really believe? Does he believe his own stories?
There is one other setting, in addition to storytelling with little children, in which I as a rabbi have had to clarify my own thoughts and beliefs about God. And that is here, in communal worship. I remember being asked, in my interview for rabbinic school 45 years ago, “do you believe in God?” I don’t remember how I answered, but I remember being glad that they asked. Over the years since then, one of the most important tasks I have set myself was to create a prayerbook. When I was in rabbinical school, I created a prayerbook for the Jewish summer camp where I was hired as “prayer specialist.” And when I was the rabbi at the Hillel Foundation at UCSB, I created a prayerbook that I felt would work for that community, and with English translations that I could honestly pray. And after I had been the rabbi here at CBB for a few years, I began working on a siddur, a prayerbook that I felt would be right for this congregation, and which would also feel honest to me. This book, which we have been using tonight.
Since publishing this siddur eleven years ago, there are a few things that I wish we could change, but in general I think it has held up well…..both for us as a community and for me personally. I hope that you feel the same and would be happy to meet some time to study the prayers and translations together. But for tonight, before concluding, I would like to show you one thing about this book, and the approach it takes to speaking about God, and to speaking to God, which are two different things.
Have a look at page 23, the translation of the Evening Creation Prayer, the Maariv aravim. Like almost all of the translations in this siddur, this is not a literal word for word translation. I hope that this does not come as a shock to you. It is a poetic translation that attempts to convey the meaning of the Hebrew, but in a way that will sing, and that will open our hearts, and allow us to pray. It was a big decision to begin with the darkening sky, the setting sun, the rising moon and the wheeling stars. Not to begin with God. Our siddur committee spent a long time discussing this, and we finally agreed (as much as any group of Jews can agree) that the opening line “word by word” hints at God, refers indirectly to God, but the translation does not push the reader to speak openly about God until approaching the end. We begin with our human experience of the Creation, and then come at last, at the end of the prayer, to theology, a few words putting us in relationship to God, the Composer and Singer of Creation.
After all these years of living, and thinking and praying and telling stories to children, I have learnt that it rarely works to begin a story by speaking a name of God. In my experience, it is best to begin with a human story. To awaken memory and imagination, with colors and sounds, tastes and smells. People we have known, a place we have been, words we have sung, emotions we felt, long ago but which remain in our bodies…ready to be brought back to mind. And then, having arrived at the palace of memory and imagination, to give it a name. Singer of the blue-black night; Loving Teacher of Israel, Life and Death Dancer.
Each of these names opens a door for us.
Then in a receptive hour, we may step through and enter, with love and with awe, into the Presence of God. Shabbat shalom.