Morning Minyan with Yiscah Smith: Planting Seeds of the Divine

In this special Morning Minyan, Rabbi Lizzi is joined by Jerusalem-based thought leader, spiritual activist, and author Yiscah Smith for a discussion of her new book, Planting Seeds of the Divine: Torah Commentaries. Yiscah will be returning to Chicago for Pride Weekend in June and doing an in-person talk at Mishkan, so this minyan is a teaser for that visit, as well as a spiritual boost to enliven your day!

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

WEBVTT

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Open my lips.

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Speak your…

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I'll just take a moment of quiet here.

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ideas, and there have been

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any ideas and concepts raised and shared in the last

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28 minutes, feeling how they settle into your body.

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shallow mode.

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May I go.

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We will add.

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Yeah, I say shalom.

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Yeah, I say shalom.

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I see shadow.

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Yeah, I say shalom.

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And we're gonna do, oh my gosh, Torah service. No, no, no, we're at the wrong Ose Shalom, we're gonna go into Kaddish Yatom.

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Warner Scottish. Um, I'm always…

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astounded by how quickly

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Half an hour goes by.

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I'm gonna just… just… there we go.

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Um, and for…

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Everybody who's able…

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Um, Yizka, who is the author of Planting Seeds of the Divine.

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a book on spiritual Torah commentaries that is out now.

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She will be joining us in Chicago.

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The Thursday, right, like, going, moving into Pride weekend in June, I think June…

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25th, and then we'll be a scholar in residence.

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for the full weekend of Pride weekend at Anshay Emma. So we'll be here in Chicago, we'll be teaching us, we'll be over at Auntie Emmett,

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brings a beautiful personal story,

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but also a beautiful Torah, wherever she goes. So, um, she's here on our Minion this morning.

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Partially just to teach us, and also to give us a little bit of a taste of what to expect.

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Um, when she comes in

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June, so we're gonna go into Kadisha Tome Mourners Kaddish, and if you're able…

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stick around. We'll, you know, we'll chat.

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You know, it'll just kind of be an open conversation.

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Cisco will be able to share, and will be able to learn.

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Um…

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to where we were remembering this morning, with a lot of love.

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Our wonderful, joyous, loving, reliable, steady, calm king of common sense, fabulous father.

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husband, Miles Wertheimer. Do you just sit around, Holly, and think about adjectives to describe

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Your dad, it's really incredible.

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Your dad, her Weintraub.

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Norm Singer, I would have been 89 yesterday. Bill Friedman.

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miles per hour. Luke, let me share it…

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Dick Jacobs.

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Take Sufi and Adam Berg.

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Now, Janice Ross.

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Marcia Pepper. You can also unmute if you'd rather just say the name out loud.

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Um, is there anybody who would…

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Want to lead Minion this morning, or lead Kaddish this morning?

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Could have find meaning in…

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meeting Mourner Scottish.

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the words right here.

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I can't lose it.

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Thank you, Andy. Yehizi Kronam Libracha. May all of their memories be blessings.

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Amen.

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I mean…

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Kadash, Shema Rabbah.

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I mean, yeah,

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I mean, you hear me?

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Amen.

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grateful.

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Any hoo.

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resume.

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Beautiful.

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Amen.

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Let me…

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Amen.

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I mean.

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I mean…

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Yeheslama Rab Amin Shemaya. O sessionav. Amen.

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Vang.

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Amen, amen.

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made all of their beautiful memories be blessings.

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Amen.

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Thanks, Andy Ashakach.

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Um, alright. Transitioning.

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Hi! So…

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You know, if people are wondering, like, where did we find this teacher? Who is this teacher?

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Um, I will just say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna…

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Piggyback on Spotlight, if that's okay. Everybody sees enough of…

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season up in my face, you know? I don't know if we can do double spotlight.

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Add Spotlight, oh, that's fun.

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Look at that! Um…

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Look at that. Um…

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Now, 11 years ago at this point,

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Um, I think I've mentioned this to you, I was invited to go to a conference in

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Birmingham, England, called Lee Moore.

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We've talked about this. We moved this kind of amazing

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conference that got started in England.

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Whose purpose is to gather Jews from across the spectrum of different denominations,

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that are often siloed and don't have exposure to each other,

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might even be judgmental of one another and judge each other's Jewish practice, and, you know, and bring them all together in one space, and basically, like, create an open calendar of…

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Teaching and learning. And basically, like, anybody who's got a session that they want to teach can teach, and anybody can go to anything, and there's, like,

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Jewish pickling and, you know, um, like, filter fish making from, you know, like, the

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filtera in, um, in Brooklyn,

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There's an actual group of Jewish hipsters who…

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Hey, get filled to fish making, whatever the point is. There's, like, that,

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And there's the Haredi rabbi doing his thing, and there's the Haredi Rabbitzin doing her thing, and then there's this progressive rabbi from Chicago, and then there's this Orthodox teacher from Jerusalem,

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So, Yizka and I found ourselves in a morning minion that I was leading there.

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I don't know if you want… do you want to mention… do you want to talk about it? Because I… when you talk about it, it makes me look really good.

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So, maybe I will just, like… you can talk about it, but that's… we met in this minion, and Gizka has never let me forget it, which is so wonderful, because it means that whenever she's in town, she reaches out to me.

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You want to pick it up because maybe that's actually an entree into kind of the teacher who you are.

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Yes. Yeah. So when we met, when we met at that point.

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I was beginning to leave the Orthodox world and be more in the post-denominational world.

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where Jewish law, instead of defining me, informed me, but… and continues to. But I… I really did leave the Orthodox, like, dogma, so to speak. That being said, it included really being honest with myself and realizing going to the synagogue following the Siddor, and here I am saying this to a rabbi in a…

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in this time, but part of what you do is what I really love.

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The daily routine of page, page, page, it began to, at best, bore me.

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And become, like, irrelevant. Because I can get not stuck, but I find that my soul wants to be anchored, let's say, to a phrase. It could be for 20 minutes when everyone has even leaving the synagogue, and there I am, still meditating on one prayer in the Amida.

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So I found going to the Beta Knesset through today in the Yerushalayim, I don't go that often.

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The reason I came to your morning mignon. was I have heard of you, we have met one time before, I believe, but what you did with the Barakota Shakara.

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You combined it with body movement. And do you know, since then, every morning, I'm not, as we say in Hebrew, I'm not exaggerating.

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I have an abbreviated, if I look at the CDORA as the fall, I have extracted from that pieces that I recite every morning in my beautiful garden, which you have seen in Yerushalayim. It includes these preliminary morning blessings.

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And that's from you, the way you did it. Really, the way you shared your embodied and spiritual and emotional and intellectual.

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Understanding of each of these one-line brachot, that so many people just rattle off so quickly, and I think it took us 45 minutes.

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Yeah, it was like a… it was like a 45-minute yoga asana, like, through the morning blessings, right? Yeah.

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I mean, I walked out of there floating, and I had been floating ever since with these blessings, the way, yeah.

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Thank you.

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That's very nice, but um…

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Thank you.

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I'm dead, you know, when you go to one of these conferences, you don't really know how anything you do lands, because mostly you don't see anybody ever again.

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So, um, so it… anyway, Yizka actually came to Mishkan back in

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I don't know, I want to say maybe 2014.

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Um, or no, it couldn't have been 2014, couldn't have been before it.

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No, yeah, whatever, it was maybe 10 years ago when our office was still up on the fourth floor.

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Um, that much I remember.

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Mm-hmm. And it had been right, I think right after your first book.

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And what? No, it was 2014.

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came out. Um…

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And you've been on a journey of Jewish teaching, you teach at Parades,

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You teach all around Jerusalem, you wrote,

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book that was sort of, like, was it autobiographical?

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I'm 40, it was 40 years memoir, my journey to a 40 years in the wilderness, my journey to authentic living.

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And so, do you want to tell us a little bit about the book that you just wrote, or, you know, what do you want to tell us about?

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I would… Well, okay, that book helped, I shared with my readers the angst, the struggle, the celebration, really of being in my personal wilderness, my own wilderness for 40 years from when I was 20 years old to 60 years old.

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That led into bringing now a settled a more tranquil, um, at peace with oneself, to really go into much more depth of research.

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An inquiry with different texts that address the soul. Because I cannot be clean. I didn't have, like, hidden agendas within myself, not with the rest of the world.

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And I began learning very, very studiously the PSS in the Rabbi, Rabbi Colonymus Thomas Shapira. Some people called him the Ishkadish after his last book.

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They also have, like, the Warsaw Ghetto rabbi, right?

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And other books… Yes, yes, some people call him the Warsaw Ghetto Rabbi, and he really helped me move out of Orthodoxy, even though he would be considered quite an ultra-Orthodox externally, quite an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Warsaw during the interwar period. He was anything but that.

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I mean, he really, for those who have learned some of his teachings, and it's not Dhaka because he taught radical teachings that it's negative… In light of the Orthodox traditions, he just really felt a very deep calling.

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to really sense the divine presence, which is my deep calling when I first came into traditional Judaism. I came from a home on Long Island, we had to bar bat mitzvah, we went to the Hebrew school, we went to the synagogue a couple times, you know, the three times a year. We had the Seda with the family, and no one understood it, but yet we read the words.

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So I didn't have the most positive experience. I wasn't negative, I just wasn't positive. And then I came to Israel the first time, and it woke up my identity as a Jew. And like right now, a lot of what I'm doing on my talks, I'm addressing this idea of Jewish identity redefined.

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So, that's what happened to me 50 years ago. I go into the ultra-Orthodox world while I'm pursuing a master's degree of Jewish ed at JTS, and I really thought because of the way they dressed, and the way they were so committed.

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They would help me be able to sense the divine presence.

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And yet, after 15 years, I realized it's not happening. Externally, I became like them. That was the expectation in the community. It wasn't good, wasn't bad, there was no malicious intent, but I never received the answers to my original questions.

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So, I left that world and took a… what I call Shanat Shabbaton. I took a breather, where I really was out of the Torah learning world, the Torah-observant world, and then I discovered the PSSna Revi, and he brought me back.

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He… I really felt maybe some of you in the room have felt this with Rabbi Lizzie.

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You may say something, and someone in the room says, well, it's as if you're talking right to me.

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Even though you're talking to, let's say, 100 people, I felt everything he wrote, like, he's talking to me, and he gets me. He allows me to be human.

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He honors me for my ups, and he holds me when I fall.

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And… That brought me into more of a renewal, like New York Hessianism started actually by Buber and then Heschel, and the PSS. I mean, what was going on in Warsaw, era of Shoah, was quite amazing. Just these three giants that really produce.

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and gave us the gift of Jewish identity redefined through Neo-Hasidism. And then Heschel brought that to the United States, charted JTS, and then we have the likes of Reb Zalman especially, who, because of Reb Zalman, the first book, one of the seven books of the Pia Cessna.

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Angioconkina, who is a disciple of Rev Zalman, may his memory be for a blessing, he asked her to translate that into English. And I thought that was so telling of all the books of the PSS, of all the Rebbies that he was steeped.

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I was gonna say, there are, like, hundreds of Hasidic books to choose from.

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Right, and so it says a lot.

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Exactly. So that said a lot to me that I feel I'm on the right path in terms of where I'm going with my recoming back to Judaism. And it was through this renewal until today, once a month in Yerushalayim.

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Rabbah Ruth Khan Gagan, who learned with Reb Zalman in Balder for two years. She picked up her whole family with her husband Michael, the kids were younger, and they lived in Boulder for two years, and she's created Navatahila.

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And just like brochota Shecha was 45 minutes in Limud, we do Ka'ba, and you've been to Kaaba Lat Shabbat. We take one verse from each of the… and it's two hours, two hours!

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If people are wondering why Mishkon services are so long,

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Which, by the way, if you Google search, this is, like, we learned this at Quorum last year, if you Google

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Why is Mishkan, and then you

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They'll fill in the rest. Like, the sixth hit down is service is so long.

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Anyway, but, um…

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The answer is because I spent 6 months as part of the Levites learning with Ruth, and… I mean, I love the connections you're drawing, because it's like,

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My entree into the renewal world was through Ruth in Jerusalem, and she came to, you know,

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coming to Boulder to learn with Zalman Zalman, who learned from the Hasidic masters back in the old country. Like, there's so… there's so much…

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It's, like, incredible teaching and learning.

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across Atlantic, you know, international, across time and space, because these acidic masters also were learning from their teachers going back to the 17…

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hundreds who, you know,

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I'm teaching a practical Kabbalah class now, so learning a little bit about the history of Kabbalah.

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any of those Hasidic masters that might have been drawing on

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Kabbalistic ideas, like, that was very… it was, like, subtle teaching and learning that was done.

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basically, not in secret, but, like, they were chosen, there were specific, chosen students to receive

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specific knowledge that was not available to everybody, but then they kind of popularized it through their teaching and

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You know, it's like this is… you're coming in a long line of people receiving

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you know, receiving from wherever they got it from, and…

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Yeah.

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You know, internalizing it, and…

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sharing it from the wisdom of your own personal experience.

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It's beautiful.

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And that's part of what brought me to write the book, because I wanted… I needed, and then I wanted to share, because I believe the way the Shekhinah, the way she guides me, is because I am called to share.

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text. I love text. I'm in love. That's one thing that the Haredi world gave me. People ask me, do you regret going into that world? Because I left feeling my questions were unanswered. No, I don't regret, because I took… I'm glad I went in, I'm more glad I left when I left, but I took with me this passion for text.

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Not that the Hawaii world owns it, I mean, there are many other people that… but that… my experience, coming from where I did, was I really was inspired by their passion for text.

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I have a very different goal and destination than perhaps they did, but they did give me that. So, I really wanted to share with me and do the research over decades, and really explore and meditate and contemplate on something in the Parsha each week.

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If that can help me feel closer to the divine, because that was always my question. And I really believed if this is our sacred document of the written Torah, that it's the one book that has been translated into more languages than any other book.

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It has not gone… changed, it's been unchanged for 3,400 years. It's the one book you find in everyone's bookshelf, whether Israel, Chuta, and the diaspora, Ochocharidi, ultra-reform. It's the same 24 books of the Bible.

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So, it has to teach me something, something that I needed to extract, and that that produced my book. And it's Torah Commentaries to not know the law, but Torah commentaries to cultivate your spiritual practice, which is the practice according to the PSNA.

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Of gently and organically moving from a… what's called the lower consciousness, a mochene det, to a higher consciousness, a mochinda Gadlut, and that literally means small brains and big brains, but it means in the… Jewish meditation renewal world, a lower consciousness I could be learning Torah, I could be in Beitakanaset, I could be keeping the laws very strictly, but I could still be in a lower consciousness because I'm not sensing the divine presence in that.

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On the other hand, I use this example with myself. I could be on the floor playing with my grandchildren with the magnetiles, and like just being amazed at these 2 little miracles in the world.

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Well, that's a higher consciousness. So it's more how we do what we do than what we do.

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And that's what I share with the reader, 47 different C's, the… like, each week we get a seed to plant, and to cultivate, and to blossom through the Pashat, through the Hasidism and neo-Hasidic thinking, and then my own thinking.

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It's a big deal for me to admit like and JPS said, we need more of your own Torah if we're going to publish this. And it was a very big growth experience for me to realize I do Torah to teach. That's my Torah that I was not mine, but it downloaded through me. And then I offer a practice.

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And I invite the reader from Sunday through Shabbat of that week, like this week is Amor, you can be doing the practice, so by however you celebrate Shabbat, you're in that… you're in that Parsha spiritually.

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And emotionally, and even in an embodied way. So that produced the book, but the first book, what that records is how I did what I needed to do to clear my mind, to clear my heart, to really deal with the demons that were really pulling me apart so then I could write this book.

00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:19.000
So there's a there's a connection to my past, and hopefully it'll bring me further into the future.

00:50:19.000 --> 00:50:22.000
Yeah.

00:50:22.000 --> 00:50:27.000
We've got a couple more minutes. Does anybody have any

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Questions of your own?

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or observations.

00:50:39.000 --> 00:50:40.000
Well, since you brought up that this week is Emore, like, what… what can you…

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Come on, bring it on!

00:50:43.000 --> 00:50:47.000
give us an elevator speech about what your practice is for this week?

00:50:47.000 --> 00:51:02.000
Yeah. So here's the elevator speech, and the rabbi did ask if I wanted to talk about it, but it's such an in-depth reading. Okay, I'll give you the elevator speech. It has to do with the repetition in the pasuk when it says.

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I just happened to have the book next to me. I I don't go anywhere now without this book.

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In Leviticus 21, 1, God said to Moses, Speak to the priests, the sons of our own. So, the commentaries ask, why does it say, speak to the priest, and then the sons of Aaron? We know that the priests are the sons of Aaron. So basically, in critiquing the commentators, in critiquing the text.

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Look… look, like, when there's a redundancy, there's something to be learned from that. Not that just God made a mistake.

00:51:35.000 --> 00:51:51.000
So, what's… what's the deeper spiritual from Ma'ore Inayim and from other commentators? See, I quote, who do I quote here? Yeah, the More Inayim, who learned with the Magi de Mezurich in Ukraine in the 18th, later part of the 18th century.

00:51:51.000 --> 00:52:09.000
that the priests… are not the sons of Aharon, they're us. They're the B'Nei Yisrael, because we're called at Harsinai. So what the sons of Aharon, who were the ritual priests in the Mishkan and in the temple.

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Where they were to the rest of Israel, we are to humanity. And the word kahen does not really mean priest. It means to be in service. Even in modern Hebrew, lekahen means to be in service. So somehow we are in service.

00:52:25.000 --> 00:52:40.000
To humanity. It's part of our mandate as a people. Not because we're better, not because we're higher, it's because we have the Torah, we have the codes, and it's like giving someone, you know, when you go to certain places, establishments, and you need the code to go into the restroom.

00:52:40.000 --> 00:52:56.000
Right? Well, we have the code to go into a more, we hope, a more peaceful, loving, compassionate, unified world. And that's the Torah. And that's our mandate. So, the seed is loving peace and pursuing peace.

00:52:56.000 --> 00:53:14.000
which you will not find in the Parsha, but you will find commentaries that say, like in Pirke Avot, Hillel said, be like the students of Aharon, who was the first Quran. Love, peace, ahesalom, and then bring those people to the Torah.

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Well, who would the students of Aharon in the largest… in the larger perspective, in the larger construct, that's all of us. So all of us are students of our own and how to be in service. And what Arun taught.

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His students. was to love peace, pursue peace, and bring people to Torah. And what I say, what I write in the book, not what we as Jews define as Torah specifically, but the Torah that gives light, because in Aramaic, the word Torah is oraita.

00:53:48.000 --> 00:54:00.000
And there's or in Oraita, so the light of the Torah, which we can accomplish by really being a people that really does love peace and pursues it.

00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:08.000
So that's the our regular chut version of this Parshat emwar.

00:54:08.000 --> 00:54:12.000
I want to tell you that that verse is on my ketubah.

00:54:12.000 --> 00:54:14.000
Um, because, like, when I…

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got married to Henry, like,

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he needed to know he was marrying a rabbi, you know? Like, the fact that

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I, you know, I already had a bunch of children, which is to say, like, the community that I'd started, like, MishCon existed, I had community members, like, I…

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And being a rabbi is not, like, something you do in your spare time. It's, like, all the time. And so if Henry was marrying me, he was marrying my mission.

00:54:37.000 --> 00:54:43.000
But it's not, like, my mission. It's the mission of what it means to actually be a

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conscious practicing Jewish leader, Ohheib Shalom, Veruadev Shalom,

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Love, peace, pursue peace.

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Love God's world and creation,

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And try and bring them close to Torah in the way that you live and practice Torah. I'm not, like, teaching them very sheet bara, Elohima, you know, like, not teaching them verses, but teaching them what it looks like to live that way.

00:55:06.000 --> 00:55:07.000
And I think that's really beautiful. Alright, we got, like, one more hand here. Gail?

00:55:07.000 --> 00:55:12.000
Right, right, right.

00:55:12.000 --> 00:55:24.000
Um, hi, I was wondering how the book is organized. I'd love to see. Do you envision this as something, like, every day, somebody opens it up, or, um… You know, what's the.

00:55:24.000 --> 00:55:44.000
Yeah. But here's how I envision it first, and thank you for the question. There are 54 partial. However, I have 47 portions, because and the reason I'm saying this, many readers have asked me if this is a Parshatashavua book. Why do you have 47 and not 54?

00:55:44.000 --> 00:55:54.000
Because seven Parsayot are doubled. So JPS gave me the option. I could either have 54 portions with less words per portion, because I had a word budget.

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I didn't have to pay. I mean, they… they signed a contract with me, thank God they accepted my proposal, so I didn't have to pay them to publish, but I did have… they gave me a budget, and the budget was words, and for an author, that's very scary and intimidating, because we always have a lot more to say than we are allowed to write.

00:56:12.000 --> 00:56:28.000
So I said either I can have more, but less, or I could have less and more. So I went with the less and more. Meaning I have 47 chapters instead of 54, but they do coincide. It's the weekly… it's the seven that are doubled are the ones that are traditionally doubled.

00:56:28.000 --> 00:56:39.000
And the way you can read it is one of two ways. As an individual, or many… I've received many emails from people I don't even know. Their synagogues have adopted this in their book club.

00:56:39.000 --> 00:56:59.000
for the year. So you can read it as a weekly Torah portion book and you can spend all week, one week, one day or two days you could read the at first glance commentaries, what we call the Pashat. Then another few days you can read the Hasidic, the Hasidic and neo-Hasidic teachings that I bring.

00:56:59.000 --> 00:57:08.000
And then you can read the practice, and then go into the practice. And this can be with a group or on an individually.

00:57:08.000 --> 00:57:14.000
And then by that Shabbat, you will really be in the Torah portion. That was my dream for that.

00:57:14.000 --> 00:57:34.000
That being said. There's another way, and this is becoming, with many communities who do have book clubs. Also, I teach a group at Central Synagogue, Rabbi Angela Bachla's community. I teach a group from our synagogue, and they asked me to teach it in a different way.

00:57:34.000 --> 00:57:55.000
In the table of contents. Next to the name of the Parsha is the seed, the spiritual mida, the seed to plant, cultivate, and blossom. So you may feel thumbing through the table of contents, oh, loving peace and pursuing peace. I really… I could spend weeks on cultivating that.

00:57:55.000 --> 00:58:06.000
I wonder if that comes from the Torah portion. Now, the source of that is Pirke Avot, not the Chumash. But if you look at Parshar, then you could be doing that in September.

00:58:06.000 --> 00:58:21.000
But you feel you really want to work on that more on your personal journey. So you'll go to that piece. And that's why the book can serve… you can go left to right or right to left in that case.

00:58:21.000 --> 00:58:22.000
book is out, one can…

00:58:22.000 --> 00:58:24.000
Yeah.

00:58:24.000 --> 00:58:29.000
buy it online. You can search for it, planting seeds of the Divine, Yizka Smith.

00:58:29.000 --> 00:58:33.000
spelled the way that Yiska wrote her name right here, last name Smith.

00:58:33.000 --> 00:58:37.000
Um, and it's quite easy to find, and we actually ordered,

00:58:37.000 --> 00:58:41.000
Um, we ordered a dozen copies that we'll have at…

00:58:41.000 --> 00:58:47.000
talk in June, so you can also buy them from us. But if you want to get a jump on it, you can go ahead and order your own copy.

00:58:47.000 --> 00:58:48.000
And…

00:58:48.000 --> 00:58:54.000
And and if you do order, bring it with you. If you do come to the… and then I can sign it for you.

00:58:54.000 --> 00:58:56.000
Um…

00:58:56.000 --> 00:58:59.000
And yeah, thank you. I'm so glad that

00:58:59.000 --> 00:59:01.000
All this worked out. Um…

00:59:01.000 --> 00:59:11.000
then it's beautiful, and we look forward to hosting you in June. I'm so glad you could join us this morning. Are you in Washington, D.C.?

00:59:11.000 --> 00:59:12.000
Wonderful.

00:59:12.000 --> 00:59:25.000
Yeah. I'm in Washington, DC. Yesterday I was one of the speakers at the Zionist Rabbinic cohort. I met rabbis from Reformed, conservative, and Orthodox, which is what I love. I love to be with… with also unaffiliated. It was a wonderful afternoon. Yes.

00:59:25.000 --> 00:59:26.000
And then I'll be…

00:59:26.000 --> 00:59:32.000
Beautiful. Are you sticking around in the States for the next couple of months until you know you're going back and then coming back?

00:59:32.000 --> 00:59:44.000
Right, I'll be in Nashville for Shabbat, and then I'll be back in New York to catch my flight, back to Israel, and then June 11th, I come back to the States for three Shabbat Tot. The last Shabbat will be in Chicago.

00:59:44.000 --> 00:59:46.000
Alright, wonderful. Well, we look…

00:59:46.000 --> 00:59:48.000
Hope to see many of you there. Yeah.

00:59:48.000 --> 00:59:53.000
Yes, thank you so much, it was a pleasure having you and seeing you, and…

00:59:53.000 --> 00:59:54.000
You know, safe travels, and thank you so much.

00:59:54.000 --> 00:59:58.000
Thank you.

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Thank you to everybody.