Tag / Faith

by Michael

Interview with Rabbi Zoe Klein & Book Giveaway

I am happy to bring you the next author interview with Rabbi Zoe Klein.  Rabbi Klein’s novel, Drawing in the Dust, tells the story of an archaeologist who risks her reputation to excavate beneath the home of an Arab couple to make a miraculous discovery.  I’d like to give away a copy of the novel, so look into that at the bottom of the interview.  Rabbi Klein inspires me.  As a spiritual leader and writer, she gives powerful answers to how she thinks about what she does, how she wobbles all her plates.  Enjoy…

MW: When did you first know you would be both a writer and a rabbi?

RZK: Hi Michael! Thank you for bringing these questions to me, it is an honor to participate in this interview! Long before I ever could imagine that a little girl like myself could grow up and become a Rabbi, I knew I loved to write. I wrote stories all the time. I remember writing stories on those beige thin sheets of paper on which the lines were two inches apart, filling in scenes with chubby crayoned letters. I even remember one of my first stories, about a magical species called the Giringos, half giraffe and half flamingo.

I remember a powerful moment, the first time I told my father I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. He is an artist and I remember standing beside his dawing board while he worked and saying I wanted to be a writer. He said, “That’s great. But you cannot call yourself a writer until you finish a book. Even if it is never published, even if no one reads it, once you finish a book you will be a writer, but until then you are not.” It sounds like a strong thing to say, but it was a valuable lesson. For my father, it was very important that I learn the value of taking a creative idea to its completion. Lots of people have wonderful novels in their souls, but very few put in the tedious effort to realize it. When I finished my first novel in college, an as-yet unpublished story called “The Goat Keeper”, it was such a proud moment to hand it to him and to become a writer!

It wasn’t until I was in my Junior year in college that I truly understood that the path to the rabbinate was even a possibility for me. I had always thought that it was something only men could do. Even though there were female rabbis around, I hadn’t met any. However, I always loved religion, studying faiths and myths and cultures. The kinds of conversations and debates I had with people with strong faith identities in many ways mirrored the conversations I’d hear between my parents and their artist friends. The artists would always talk about such things as mortality, man’s fragility, the futility of monument, shattering dogmas, the supremacy of blank space…it was art they were discussing, but it filtered into my mind as theology, and I loved it.

In many ways I think of myself as a rabbi with the heart of a novelist, rather than the other way around. I started as a writer and then expanded my material from the confines of pen and ink to people and community. As a congregational rabbi, I have the opportunity to help craft the story of a community of families, engage in their sacred and profound moments, adding our chapters to an ever-unfolding scripture of a people.

MW: I realize both roles relate to one another, if I’m reading your interview in Drawing in the Dust correctly.  But does writing serve your role as a spiritual leader? If so, how?

RZK: Sometimes I think my rabbinate is almost like fieldwork for writing, and my writing is soulwork for the rabbinate. Writing is interesting in that it is done in physical solitude, and yet it is never lonely for me. I am full up with characters, with vivid dreams and scenes, demons to wrestle, I’m haunted and vexed and also ecstatic and weeping. In contradiction to that, in the rabbinate there is no solitude, you are continually working with people. It is a very social position, and yet for me there is loneliness there. There is a lot of what the mystics call “tzim-tzum,” a kind of spiritual contraction one does to make room for others. You retract yourself enough to allow space for other’s voices. You become an expert active listener. When I write though, that part of me that contracts in order to give center stage to others’ stories and needs, suddenly unfurls its great wings and jets about wildly.

The short answer to your question is that I think my writing allows me to be a whole person as a spiritual leader. Without it, I think I’d be fragments of a mosaic, chipped with no clear design. I think when you take the time regularly, whether through writing or meditation or running or whatever, to reflect on your decisions and desires, face your darkness, and emerge with a burning but joyful heart, you can better take others by the hand and lead them through a courageous process of reflection and growth.

MW: Talk about your experience as a person of faith—indeed a leader—writing biblical fiction for a broad audience.  Were you concerned that you wouldn’t be received well, that you might misrepresent yourself, or that your story might be misperceived?

RZK: While I was perhaps concerned about the story being misperceived or not received well, it was not a deterrent for me. I was encouraged by a great editor Al Silverman to forget while I wrote that I was a rabbi, a mother, a wife, and just write from a place of uniqueness, without titles, and I’ve always tried to do that. I am a person of faith. I believe that stories which are filled with metaphor and myth are a form of prayer. I never feel far from God when I write, in fact I feel close, even if I’m writing a scene that is sexual or violent or both. It is a process of exploration into human nature, into fantasy, into longing and fear, and it is not too different than the best kind of worship experience, where you are completely honest and raw, repentant, mournful, terrified, awe-filled, trembling with humility, romanced and swept up in all your smallness into the impossible arms of the infinite. There is no doubt that it is scary to write for a broad audience, and that no matter how much you try to hide your truths under layers and layers of plot and characterization you always end up realizing that despite your efforts you ended up publishing your very private diary, but it is also freeing to realize that the things that you say are the honest voicing of your humanness, what a relief to not be a spiritual leader hiding behind a façade, with word locked into routine platitudes! How refreshing to be real, to have a faith that wrestles, breathes, challenges and confounds!

MW: How has your congregation responded to your writing life?

RZK: My congregation has been celebratory and wonderful. I am fortunate to share this journey with them! We have many writers, thinkers, professors and experts-in-their-field in our community, people who love and appreciate art and don’t shy away from its darker sides…

MW: When I connected with you about this interview, I mentioned my gratitude for the seen and unseen work behind this novel.  I’m glad you’ve labored in all the ways you have to give us this work.  What don’t people know about what it takes to write a good story for publication?  Will you give us a sense of some of what it took for you?

RZK: Ah, that’s a good question. I don’t think people understand the sheer mass of hours that it takes. People don’t realize that once the book is finished and you feel completely beaten and your hair is grayer and thinner because of the process, and your eyes are dim from staring into the computer, and every time you blink you see bright blue squares, and your wrecked with fatigue after months of not sleeping, once you’ve gotten that far, you have to STILL muster the strength to face rejection after rejection after rejection…years of rejection and pitching your story, and trying even after years have gone by and you’ve already become passionate about a NEW idea retaining the freshness about the book that no one seems to want…and then after you finally find an agent and an editor, realizing that there are two of three or four more Everests to climb with revisions, revisions that keep tearing out your heart and then sewing it back in. Every time I’d get to a new mountain where it would be so easy to just drop the whole thing, I would think to myself, “This is a filter, and only the most determined get through.” And I was determined to be determined enough! I think people understand how steep the climb is from conception to publication, but I don’t think people know how long it is, how much stamina is involved.

I also tend to like to write stories that have a lot of different characters and layers of interpretation, and it is hard to keep track of all of those little pieces over the course of 600 hundred pages, which was how long DRAWING IN THE DUST originally was. When I was editting it at one point I realized that if one added up the years and scenes carefully for one of the very peripheral characters and tried to figure out her age, she would have to be something like 130 years old. Keeping track of all these strands of lives is hard!

MW: I’m pretty sure you have many things to do.  I could be wrong.  I’m probably not.  How do you serve both these areas in your life well?  And how do you do anything else?!

RZK: Sometimes I feel like one of those cirque-d’soleil contortionists with the spinning plates on top of sticks, except that while they make it look so graceful and beautiful, all the plates spinning perfectly, my plates are often pretty wobbly! And some of them crash. If I were to label my plates, there would be the Writing Plate, the Rabbi Plate, the Children Plate, the Husband Plate, Friend Plate, and of course lots more. I think while I’ve made time to keep the Writing Plate spinning by devoting Mondays, my one day off, to writing, and the Rabbi plate I devote much time to, and the Children Plate keeps spinning even though it’s hectic, I admit the Husband Plate often wobbles and falls (luckily it’s a sturdy, rebounding plate!), and I haven’t been able to devote much time to the Friends Plate (I have friends, we just don’t see each other at all, I haven’t been able to nourish that part of my life)…there are a lot of sacrifices! As I’ve gotten older, I am trying to redistribute my energy, focusing more on my family and building relationships, and trying to approach work with less frenetic energy and more joy and appreciation. Everything is not always in balance as people like to believe! But up until now I think I’ve lived my life is a giant rush, and I really want to learn to slow down and appreciate BEING instead of eating up every hour with DOING.

MW: I read Eugene Peterson who is a pastor and writer, and he encourages clergy to read fiction.  He says that artists have become his allies and have taken a place next to theologians and scholars in his formation as a pastor and as an artist.  You talk about the power of fiction in your provided interview.  How does fiction nurture a person in general and a religious leader in particular?

RZK: That is beautiful. I think that fiction unlocks people’s hearts in a particular way that nothing else can. You take fiction under the covers with you, give it the heat of your breath, and like the genie in the lamp it has an enchantment. Somehow entering the world of fiction, our vault of tears is more easily unlocked, particular drama reflects universal understanding. There is an intimacy in fiction, partly because of the intimacy it took to create it. In terms of a religious person, I think that today we tend to sterilize the idea of a person of faith, turn that person into a kind of sexless judge. Piety is purity. But dancing with God is an intimacy, it’s a cosmic affair, filled with subordination and abuses, mastery and humility, and of course love. I once wrote a new definition for love — Reverence for Mystery. I think fiction nurtures a person in general and a religious person in particular because there are very high truths that can only be expressed in metaphor. God, for example, can only be expressed in metaphor, as shepherd or teacher or lover or parent or guide.  I believe Fiction, ironically, is Ultimate Truth’s master key.

MW: What are you reading these days, by the way?

RZK: To be honest, I’m reading a lot of Science Fiction! I just printed out the top 100 Science Fiction books, and right now I’m reading Ender’s Game. It’s just a field I had never read before, and I am surprised at how much I’m loving it! Before this new kick though, I read Cynthia Ozick’s novels, The Shawl, The Putterman Papers and Heir to The Glimmering World, and my goodness, her language was like cashmere, so rich and sumptous.

MW: You’ve talked about God as the Reader of All Life—language that I love.  What are you working on, preparing, and “offering skyward”?

RZK: I just finished a novel called Origin of Color which will be released in summer of 2012; it is going through its editing process now. I went to Swaziland and Tanzania to research for it when I was on sabbatical this past December. The book is about an American couple that accidently falls into the middle of a crime ring of witchdoctors and politicians in East Africa who sell albino body parts to be made into potions. I met with East Africans with alibinism and families whose children with albinism had been butchered. I wove these experiences into this novel. It was an emotional novel to write, it is a thriller, and it even scared me as I was creating it. I’d be writing in the middle of the night and leaping up to make sure the doors were locked…jumping if I thought the curtain moved! The “offering skyward” part of it is that it is also a contemplation about perception. I am very excited about it.

I am also leaving in two weeks to go back to Africa, to Ghana, with the American Jewish World Service. I will be in Winneba, Ghana with American Jewish World Service’s Young Rabbis’ Delegation. The Young Rabbis’ Delegation brings together a group of rabbis from all over the country to experience first-hand the power of grassroots development and explore issues of social justice and global responsibility from the perspective of Jewish texts and tradition.  The group is working at Challenging Heights, an AJWS-supported NGO devoted to providing education to former child slaves and resources to families whose children are at risk for slavery and human trafficking.

MW: How can readers stay in touch with you and support your work?

RZK: On my website www.zoeklein.com, or by emailing me at zoe@zoeklein.com. Thank you so much for inviting me to participate on your website. Abundant blessings to you and to all of your readers!

As for the book giveaway, if you know of a clergy person who would benefit from reading this novel, post a comment, a sentence or two, about why they would.  Do so by Friday, midnight, CST.  I’ll choose a winner randomly and you can give a copy to your clergy person.

by Michael

Faith, Doing Good, and Voting pt 2

Voting is an act of faith.  That’s  my point.  I started writing about this a few posts ago, and you can see that it the Previous Addresses to the right.  Whatever your faith–and I’m thinking in terms of some kind of real, religious, spiritual, or otherwise related-to-those-words kind of faith–you exercise it, express it, and practice it when you vote.  Not that the gesture of voting proves that you have faith or doesn’t.  But that voting, when you do it, is an act of faith. 

Faith comes from the unseen, though it is tutored by what is seen.  To vote is similar.  You choose or select and give your support to a person based upon something that can’t be seen.  So it’s an act of faith.

Lately, I’m thinking of voting as a chance for believing people, if you will, to think and to act upon their best thoughts.  As a leader, I see a part of my role in people’s lives as enabling people to make the best choices.  As a Christian leader, I don’t separate those choices from faith in Christ.  Christ is foundational, in my view and life and work, when it comes to good choices. 

Leaders sometimes tell people what to do or what not to do.  Leaders also present people with their options and make connections between those options and what those folks value.  I think helping people see voting as “an expression of your best options” is a good thing.  Why wouldn’t I push people to do good at every possible time, at any available chance?  It’s not at all that voting is the only chance to live into your faith, to make visible your belief, but it is one such chance.  Making faith real and tangible requires using every option, including voting.

That’s what makes voting, the small and non-ultimate act that it is, a critical one.  It adds itself on top of the rest of what a person does when doing good.  Voting becomes a part of that person’s life as he or she lives toward the good.  I have no delusions that voting is indispensable to a healthy life.  To think that would suggest blindness of several levels.  But I do think that the expression of the civic gesture is one more way to make tangible the desire to do good.

What about you, any thoughts?

by Michael

Relationship Abuse & Faith pt 2

Religion does great good and great harm and the deciding factor between the two options is often tied to how a person interprets that religion’s sacred text.  That is true for my faith and probably every other faith.  How I interpret and interact with the Christian scriptures will influence and shape what I do with those interpretations.  Another way of saying that is that theology effects ethics.  How I live is influenced by what I read.  And so on.

When it comes to intimate abuse or domestic violence or abuse in relationships, this has great weight.  For people of faith, relationships are often viewed and embraced through the lens of faith.  When religion or faith works (i.e., when faith is working on you), everything changes because of that religion or faith.  Everything excludes nothing.  How you engage in and develop relationships will be adjusted or approached through the experience and understanding of your faith.  I think this relates to relationship abuse and interpreting our texts in the following ways.

  1. Staying close to our sacred readings helps us define abuse.  When our readings build on a foundation of love or justice or hope, it is easy to locate abuse or violence when it happens.  In my faith tradition, love is seen in the personal life and ministry of Jesus.  Jesus, in love, lived and died by love, because of love, and in order to extend perfect love.  There’s no way I can express faith in Jesus and not follow that example in my marriage.  That means I’m looking out for my wife’s growth and peace and nurture, not her harm.  Debbie Jansen, in the article I linked in yesterday’s post, says, “If a dysfunctional definition of faith allows one partner to destroy the talents and abilities of their spouse, it can only be labeled as abuse.”
  2. Relationships are places of redemption.  Jesus is not the only exemplar in my tradition.  There are others in our scriptures and there are others in our corporate faith tradition called life.  In other words, another source of how we think and talk about God is people (and the relationships we’re in).  We get to look at the lives of others and witness how God has used those good people to be redemptive in relationships.  So we look for women who use their identities as women to be redemptive, pulling the men around them to be something better, something different, something closer to the Divine.  Or we watch and learn from the men who hold their relationships with increasing gentleness because they have been redeemed or blessed or loved by God.
  3. The reality of abuse changes how we talk about God.  How we speak of God and God’s relationship to creation has always been important.  Always.  And the real and harsh truths associated with violence makes God-talk that much more significant.  For instance, growing up in a Baptist church, we learned to speak of God as a Father to the fatherless and a Mother to the motherless.  But those same Baptist communicators would shudder if I said to them that they were doing the same thing that my seminary profs taught me to do in acknowledging that God can be talked about in both masculine and feminine terms.  The presence of brokenness in the form of relationship violence makes those connections more important, particularly since everybody can’t always relate to the over-used and often destructive masculine images of God.  Those biblical images have to be paired with others that are fresh or new and still biblical.
by Michael

Relationship Abuse & Faith

I was engaged during the last part of my first and all of my second year of graduate school.  Dawn was finishing the last month or so in Urbana-Champaign with my engagement ring on her finger. 

We were engaged for a year, Easter to Good Friday.  When we started our premarital counseling, we saw Rev. Harvey Carey, my wife’s pastor growing up at Salem, and one of the psychologists at the Wheaton College Counseling Center.  I was studying there, and Dawn would come out for the appointment and, afterwards, I would either return to Chicago with her or go to my next class.

During one of the sessions with the clinician at the Counseling Center, we started talking about my personality.  I can’t remember what he asked.  It was a general enough question.  And when Dawn answered, I got the distinct impression that she was describing a person I didn’t know, a person who was cruel, and, worse, a person who was mean.  The counselor looked over at me and said something like, “Michael, what are you thinking?” Or maybe it was, “Michael, how are you feeling as you hear Dawn?”  Whatever it was, I told him and them that Dawn’s description made me sound like I was abusive. 

The counselor said something like Dawn wasn’t saying that and he said that I was a good guy.  I thought he pushed the moment too quickly.  He was right that Dawn wasn’t saying what I heard, but I also felt like he moved that conversation along a tad too fast.

I remember that meeting, that session, at different points in my life.  I remember when my tone gets a little too preacherly, or loud, at home.  I mean too loud for the small space between me and the wife.  I have a voice.  It’s always been a useful instrument, and I tell people that the instruments and tools God gives us are usually the instruments that bring us harm when we’re not attentive.  So I think about that meeting when my voice rises.

The session came to mind when I saw something in my inbox from Christianity Today.  The subject line asked, “Does Faith Hide Marital Abuse?”  I knew the answer was yes without reading it.  I knew that the proper place for faith was, indeed, inside a relationship.  I knew before reading the article that faith–rather than being something to cover or hide abuse–should be the catalyst that sparks change and the vulnerability which precedes it, be it slow conversion or rapid transformation, in a relationship. 

Faith is belief in the unseen but well known.  It is the trust that something is present–something like health and wholeness–because of God’s generosity.  Faith should make abuse impossible.  It should make husbands, boyfriends, and significant others acknowledge our needs for grace.  It should give us permission to admit and accept hard words, particularly when what our partners say about us is true.  Faith should provoke us to be strong and weak or strong enough to admit weakness.  And faith should make us better.

October is the nationally recognized month where people all over pause and say something about violence between intimate partners, also known as domestic violence.  I’m writing at least another post about this but what do you have to say?