An Irish Catholic's Prayer for Rosh Hashanah 5772

I'll celebrate the head of 5772 tonight.  There will be apples, honey and challah bread on my table.  I'll await with excitement the sound of the shofar, and know hearing its sound will run right through me, electric, charged with light.  I wont swing a chicken around my head tomorrow, but I will walk to a body of living water and throw bread in. I'll cheat with a coffee before fasting on Yom Kippur, and I'll plan a special meal for Shabbot Shuva (the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur).

I'm not Jewish. I'm a never-misses-mass-on-Sunday Roman Catholic.

Unlike many who practice other Christian faiths, Catholics don't usually co-opt Jewish customs or rituals as tools for better reflecting the Jewish nature of Jesus.  As a whole, we, for the most part, seem to grasp how disrespectful that approach has the potential to be. The last thing in my mind when I touch my prayer book to the Torah or say a name aloud at during Yizkor (mourning prayer) is Jesus.  I know some Catholics and other Christians would say that makes me a lousy Catholic and Christian. Let each take a number. They are legion.

How can I find any prayer without Christ in it meaningful and valid?  Part of the answer is that because Christ is in me and with me I don't feel the need to parade Christ the concept and victor into places where doing so would be disrespectful.

Why then, does a Catholic observe the Jewish High Holy days at all?

My children have a Jewish father. He does not share my affinity for organized religion; I am the believer in the family. I want our children to see how important Jewish worship is to me. I want our children to see how beloved Torah and Jewish prayer and ritual are. I think I can help my children grow toward Jewish worship.  I want them to identify as Jews.  I want them to learn to pray as Jews and to see how expansive - and inclusive -- Jewish ritual, practice and prayer is and can be.

How then, can a Catholic observe the Jewish High Holy days and actually feel something if Jesus is not involved?

I feel the connection to the Jewish people through being the mother of children with a Jewish parent. I feel the God of the Psalms as a poet, and as a person trained in another religion that uses the Psalms. I grew up being guided by Mosaic Law and hearing and reading the Hebrew Bible.  I have hosted and in part conducted a dozen Passover Seders. I have written a Hagaddah.  I prepare a Shabbos dinner about 40 nights a year. Prayer tends to build on itself and I have prayed enough in temples to create an climate within me in which Jewish prayer can build on itself.

I saw a Torah up close for the first time on the occasion of the Bar Mitzvah of a friend this past spring and it was one of the most walloping spiritual experiences of my life. I nailed mezzuzot on my doorposts a few years ago because I couldn't stand not having them there.  Jewish prayer rousts a particular religiosity in me that is always there. A girlfriend Jill, said one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me at Yom Kippur services two years ago; "You should become a Bat Mitzvah." It won't happen but she was onto something.

As I see it, the main goals of all worship are something most faiths share: to express gratitude, to ask for help for all who need it (self included), and to seek God.  The aim of prayer should never be to look to men and women who claim to have the bottom line on who God is and what God wants so as obey them.

On the other hand, I think too much mixing of faiths, like colors on a palette, becomes muddy. I like the lines to be clear and not too perforated. I get that many Jews would say that the prayers of a Christian have no place in a temple.  I respectfully disagree.  I can't know -- but I believe God hears my Shema and deems it legit.

I get that many Christians would argue that praying without Christ makes me a lousy Christian. They are wrong. It's a mistake to be daunted, in prayer, by those who would presume to know the mind of God.  One of the great failings of organized religion, in my opinion, is the propensity of faithful people to mistake chauvinism for devotion.  I get that many Jews think my children are not Jewish. That's their problem, their loss.

I like the discipline of practice, but I believe over-focusing on obedience and doing religion right stunts one's metaphysical growth. The illusion of perfect compliance and unwavering adherence may feel good to some, but I think a lot of the God bleeds out of prayer when the rules and regulations are the main focus. Under such conditions prayer becomes hollow, shallow. The poetic turns prosaic.  The proper aim of practice and religious ritual is to reinforce spirit, elevate it not pound it into the ground like a corpse. When doctrine, ritual and rules in organized religion fail help those who pray to magnify the God within, they taint all they touch.

I don't want to get worship exactly right.  I want to struggle with it.  I distrust faith that is tidy.  Why search if you have all the answers? The deeper I go into practice, the more doubt I develop.  I think this is a good thing. This doubt does not send me fleeing.  It is just there. To be wrestled with.

I belong to a church whose hierarchy is, as anyone who reads the news knows, diseased -- in a state of crisis.  Why do I stay?  The short answer is because I think there's something to it; it's somehow tribal; it's my practice. I keep showing up because I believe there is great good in the gorgeous mess my church is. Perhaps that's what belief is-- a blazing, ineluctable urge; a flaming, driving hunch.

During my junior year in college I lived in a campus apartment with three other young women.  One of my roommates, Jody, came in one April afternoon with a bag of groceries, cleaned out the fridge and claimed a Passover shelf therein.  Jody had grown up in a kosher home and was, in the limited ways she was able, trying to keep the kashrut (kosher) ball in the air.  I came into the kitchen to find two of the roommates and Jody engaged in a conversation about her plan to claim a kosher for Passover section in the fridge.  Our apartment was hardly kosher, her friends pointed out. Jody's plan seemed to make no sense. Sometimes there was even bacon in the fridge. I chimed in: "Of course it makes sense! Every time she opens the fridge for one of those yogurts she has to think about Passover, God and being Jewish."

I wasn't practicing much of anything then, but I think that remark was a faith affirmation of sorts.  Since then, Jody and I have been having the God conversation -- for more than thirty years.  Sometimes talking with her about being Catholic has helped keep me faithful to worship when I've floundered.  Our conversations have been helpful to me in figuring out how to teach my children about Sabbath and Torah.  Without Jody and the Chabad website, I wouldn't be half the Irish Shabbos Balabusta I am today.

Last week Jody and I went together to the temple I occasionally attend on Friday nights. "My" temple is a Reform one; Jody's Sephardic tradition is quite traditional. As I looked up at the pretty female rabbi with the lovely singing voice, I had to laugh, for I surmised that Jody was probably feeling a bit like I did the first time I attended an Episcopal mass celebrated by a woman priest. Stirred, but shaken.

I suspect it required an imaginative leap for her to pray in "my" temple.  But the "Mi Sheberiach" (a prayer/song for the sick) was the one she knows, the "Kaddish" and "Shema" were the prayers she knows and standing to welcome the Sabbath like a bride through the door was standing to welcome in Sabbath like a bride through the door.

Some fellow Roman Catholics inform me that what they would call my "pluralism" makes me a terrible Catholic.  But because I take seriously the idea that the mind of a creator God defies parsing and fathoming, I am comfortable imagining that my conception of the true God may be just a glint or shard of the infinitely more colossal Divine. I'm reasonably intelligent but I don't know God's mind -- neither does anyone else.  I recognize that at the "end of days" we might all be right.  Or wrong.  Or that some of us will be correct and others, not. Or that maybe our whole conception of being "right" might be rendered moot by a God that exists beyond the reach of our knowing and imagining.

When I read religion news, I am dismayed to see how devalued imagination (perhaps the greatest tool any worshipper really has!) is in the context of organized religion.  The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qu'ran are holy texts, but so are Whitman's "Song of Myself." Believing is not the same as knowing, and truth is not the equivalent of fact. Human understanding of God can not exceed human imagination, but it seems to me that imagination -- because it does have such reach -- should always attend prayer.

We human animals might live in a world without war were we to figure out how to worship more imaginatively --  which is why my own Rosh Hashana prayer - or hope, for those who prefer hope to prayer-- is that the forces of imagination and prayer will marry, and ferry us all toward peace in 5772.

Troy Anthony Davis and Georgia's Plan to Commit an Irreversible Sin

In 1991, Troy Anthony Davis was convicted of murdering off duty-police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia. He is slated to die by lethal injection today for his role in this crime.

According to the New York Times MacPhail's widow offered the following remarks about the Davis and the State of Georgia's plan to strap Davis to a gurney and use intravenous fluids to stop his heart:

"He has had ample time to prove his innocence..." 

Her choice of words is telling. Ms.MacPhail-Harris is correct in pointing out that Troy Anthony Davis has indeed failed to "prove his innocence." Correct, yes. But she's not right.

The widow of Mark MacPhail is not a jurisprudence expert and should not be expected to speak as one. She speaks emotionally. Nonetheless, she raises an interesting question. We all know a little something about the presumption of innocence in the American criminal justice system, and most of us hold dear the ethical (at least) principle that it is for the state to arrive at the certainty that Davis is guilty -- not for Davis to prove his innocence.

When the punishment is irreversible, the moral and ethical burden of proof (if not the legal one) should rest, all the more, with the state. Despite that a preponderance of doubt still attends the Troy Anthony Davis case, it looks as if the state of Georgia will strap him to a table tonight and end Davis's life. He will, in a sense, die as a consequence of having failed to prove his innocence in time.

That is exactly what what do when we we "fry" the wrong guy -- we kill him for failing to prove his innocence.

Davis may not be guilty. It is for this reason that so many death penalty supporters -- people like former FBI chief William S. Sessions -- have petitioned the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole not to put Troy Anthony Davis to death by lethal injection.

"... We are not killing Troy because we want to,"

 says the widow of he man Davis is accused of murdering.

"We're trying to execute him because he was punished."

 Again, the language reveals the underlying truth of this matter.  Like so many, the widow would execute Davis because he is punished -- not because he is the murderer.  Not because his guilt is certain.  But so as to have a body. So as to trade a body for a body

"We are trying to execute him because he was punished."

One can understand a widow's longing for an outcome that feels balanced. But if Davis is executed tonight it will be done in the hope that the sacrifice of the life of a man who may or may not be guilty will satisfy and soothe. The killing will be conducted with the aim of providing those who yearn for it with a sense that justice has been done, but it will be simulated justice, not the real deal.

"I'm not out for blood. I'm for justice," said his {MacPhail's} mother, Anneliese MacPhail. I'm sure Mrs. MacPhail speaks in earnest, but what she says is not true. The call for the death penalty is always a call for blood.

I oppose the use of the death penalty -- on religious grounds. But many who favor the use of it have reservations about ending the life of Troy Anthony Davis.  Furthermore, people on all sides of this complex and controversial issue generally agree that in the United States must strive never to use execution as a means of punishing a man for his failure to "prove his innocence." I pray regularly for the day that the United States joins the nations of Europe, North America and all but a few of our South and Central American neighbors in recognizing that state-sanctioned execution is, in practice, racist; in essence, immoral; and in too many instances, murderous.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the case of Humberto Leal Garcia who was executed in Texas in July.  In "Can the Death Penalty Deliver Justice or Peace?" I discuss Leal's crime, how my faith shapes the way I view his punishment, and the important and, I believe, heroic work of former warden and (now) anti-death penalty activist Ron McAndrew.

In Leal's case there was little doubt of his guilt of the crime. In the Troy Anthony Davis case, doubt abounds. According to Amnesty International nearly a million supporters of justice and human rights have raised their voices to ask Georgia's Board of Parole and Pardons to offer clemency to Troy Anthony Davis. Those seeking to save the life of Davis include (former U.S.) President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, three jurors from Davis's murder trial, and many who support death penalty in general but oppose the use of it in this case. According to Amnesty International, some of the witnesses whose testimony led to the conviction of Davis have recanted, the account of one witness who is currently suspected of having taken part in the crime is now questionable, and the conviction is fraught with doubt.

In Georgia, the governor lacks the power to stay executions; therefore Davis' s fate rests in the hands of the state's Board for Pardons and Parole which has already once before blocked (2008) Davis' s execution citing the need for more confirmation of Davis's guilt. Today the board denied Davis clemency.

I believe the death penalty is wrong yet I recognize that many principled people do not share this view.  However, in matter of the plan to execute Troy Anthony Davis, there's plenty to make even the most strident pro-capital punishment advocates uncomfortable, and the Troy Anthony Davis case offers a dramatic example of how human error always figures into an ethical analysis of the death penalty.

We can simply never have 100% certainly that the man we tether to a gurney in order to facilitate the stopping of his heart is guilty.  So long as physical death remains irreversible and we remain unable to be be sure, we who execute convicts will always risk engaging in the very behavior we seek to punish. When we erroneously execute a man for a crime he did not commit, we punish ourselves. We  become murderers.

This margin of error is the most compelling reason to follow the lead of all of Europe and most of the Americas -- and abandon the death penalty. As I Catholic, I tend to believe that any Christian who advocates the death penalty pushes Jesus out of the way in order to do so. As a woman who loves life and cherishes freedom, I suspect I'd prefer lethal injection to life in a cell, and recognize that it must take courage to fight a death sentence. I know that life in prison is not an easy way out.

It is the hard way out. Men like Troy Anthony Davis, who challenge the legality of execution while awaiting on death row, choose life over death. Why? Because they recognize that even life without freedom is a gift. There is religious feeling in this struggle, which, in my opinion, those who would call themselves religious ought not ignore.

People who call for the death penalty but say they are "not out for blood" are not being truthful.  Blood is exactly what they are "out for."  It is easy to understand how suffering gives way to the thirst for the retribution, but as we set the stage for execution, countenance it, and in some cases even applaud it; we ought to at least be clear about what it is we seek. We should know what it is we do. We should acknowledge that it is blood we are after.

According to the Times piece, the mother of the murdered man has said she will not attend the execution.  Good.  My heart goes out to her; a mother should never have to bury her son. I am glad she will decline to attend the execution of another woman's son.

"I can finally get peace. I can never get closure, but I can get peace."

Unfortunately, the mother of the man Davis may or may not have slain is mistaken. She has it backwards. She may get a speck of "closure" when the spirit of this man runs out of his flesh, but the last thing in the world she will have once Troy Anthony Davis's life has been snuffed out and his soul is released -- is peace.

I wish her peace -- but the truth is only dead men get peace by means of murder.

Please contact Amnesty International to learn how to support efforts to save the life of Troy Anthony Davis.

Poetry, Prayer and God's Place at Ground Zero on the 10th Anniversary of 9-11

As I listened to President Obama read Psalm 46 on Sunday at "Ground Zero" in New York City, I kept thinking he should have kept God out of it, and maybe gone with Rilke.

I practice an Abrahamic religion. I like the psalms. I pray the psalms. I have no problem with people seeking consolation through prayer as they aim to heal in the aftermath of the bombing of the Twin Towers, but not every person who rescued a stranger, lost a loved one or died in the attack on the World Trade Center was a believer, and religion gone amok played a role in the bombing. As long as men and women believe that  God is on their, a god who awards gold stars to those who murder in his or her name -- religion will cause wars.

I commemorated the tenth anniversary of September 11th by attending a Roman Catholic mass for a NYFD engine company which lost nine firefighters on September 11, 2001. I go to mass every Sunday -- and to that particular mass every year on September 11th because I think people who risk their lives to protect others are miracles.  In their honor I go. I go because I have a need to remember and mark the day with a sacred ritual.  In gratitude, I go.

I had just dropped my 6 year-old daughter at school in our Brooklyn neighborhood when I learned about the attack ten years ago.  Her twin brother and their father had changed trains at the World Trade Center subway station about 20 minutes before the first plane struck the towers.  I watched smoke flood the sky with soot and black smoke from our Union Street corner as I hurried home to await my husband's telephone call. The call came, but every time I remember it, I ache for the women I know who never got their call that day.

By 10:00 a.m. that morning I knew my husband and son were safe.  I strapped the two-year old in the stroller and hurried to retrieve her sister.  Perhaps my most vivid memory of that day is the sight of the principal and school staff behind the partition in the main office shuffling through blue cards.  A former teacher, I knew what to make of that.  They were preparing for an emergency.  My girls and I wound up in the church I'd begun to attend two years earlier. There we saw many new faces.  Atheists in the foxhole?  No.  Human beings grasping what a temple can and should be, a "man-made" sanctuary, a place of tranquility in which one can feel the pulse of one's own soul in relationship with the souls of others. A bridge not an island.

Like many or most New Yorkers, on September 11th ten years ago, I went about my day, straightening up, shopping, giving my children lunch, conscious that I might doing housework in a war zone. I stopped at the market for extra rice and water and tuna in cans.  I shut our windows sealed them with plastic and tape. I kept our home quiet with the television off and the radio low.  I sat my daughters on the floor with stickers and magic markers, and I began to write a poem.

I felt obliged to write. I was a poet, after all. If not us, I thought, then who?  Some poets think that's an out-moded way to look at things; that linear, "accessible" poem of experience has no real place in the post-modern literary realm.  I seem not to be one of those. I kept thinking of those lines from Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem": "Can you describe all this?" The speaker is asked. "Yes, I can."

Every year in early September, I set aside a little time to work on the poem I started that day. It could be a while before I even know whether the poem I started a decade ago is finished. Some poems never get finished; their writers just stop and move on. The "ritual" (that word again) of working on it leads me to suspect "Black Cloud, White Ash" may be more a devotion than a poem.  A false distinction, perhaps -- I tend to believe that all poems are prayers.

I recently found myself drawn into in a conversation about 9-11 on Facebook. The guy (a poet) who had started the conversation articulated of a feeling of numbness in the face of 9-11 fanfare.  I take his point.  So much of the television coverage of anniversary has been pornographic (and not in a good way).  So much of the punditry was imbued with an a particularly virulent fervor for those who would imperil "our way of life."

It seems my "comment" on Facebook came off as the protestation of a pathologically patriotic American.  Which is funny if you know me. The edification that ensued was somewhat wasted on me; the guy who reminded me that people suffer bombings regularly all over the world and the one who pointed out that the United States exports devastation were preaching to the choir. When it comes to my own sense of "patriotism," it's not my nation's "might" I take pride in, but its "right": our commitment to freedom of expression and justice in law, our expansiveness -- our cultural diversity, our record of providing "sanctuary" to those seeking freedom from persecution, war and poverty.

It may be I gave the Facebook guys the false impression that I overvalued loss in my own back yard while undervaluing comparable devastation elsewhere. The truth is that all nations and tribes do this.  All disasters evince both self-centered and generous responses. Americans have no monopoly on this. The "not here" aspect of the attack on U.S. soil is part of the larger truth of 9-11, a part there's no value in pushing away. Because it happened before our eyes, the devastation that occurred on September 11, 2001 gave us the opportunity to better know what it is we (in the US) do when we wage war.

I visited Ground Zero less than a week after the bombing.  I have a good imagination, but no second-hand account could have communicated what I saw and smelled there.  That site offered so many people a tiny glimpse of the kind of devastation that goes on all over the world.  Those who "overgrieve" (to use a term one of the Facebook guys used) 9-11 are not necessarily guilty of viewing the disaster as exceptional in relation to others that happen elsewhere.  They see it as exceptional because it is the disaster they can know. It is the devastation we experience that teaches us what devastation is, and the knowing has great power to arouse compassion within us.

Many who mourned loved ones this week also mourned the coming to know what war is.  Ironically, those who dismiss feeling the anguish ten years later as a jingoist overreaction wind up in the same place as do those who swaddle their reactions in the flag. Both drown out the cries. Both dispositions isolate, create islands, not bridges.

One of the first thoughts I had as I began to write at about noon on September 11th ten years ago, went something like this: so this is how it feels -- the fire, blood and thunder of war. My next thoughts were arrogant, petty and insular.  I made it all about me, the poem's "I." "Not here, " I wrote, "not here on the island of my birth." Obnoxious?  Of course. Lyric poems run naked. Being embarrassed is in the poet's job description. Arrogance, shame, sorrow and terror often coexist in poems.  Maybe those organizing this past Sunday's event at Ground Zero originally envisioned poetry as the optimal mode for expression on the tenth anniversary of 9-11 for precisely that reason.

Yet some of the ceremony at Ground Zero struck me as a prayer service. I longed for the intoning of the perfect non-prayer for the many atheists who died and lost loved ones in the Twin Towers that morning, and thought maybe the list of the names was it -- what poets call a "found poem."

The recitation of the names of the dead packed the kind of walloping power we behold in Homer's catalog of ships, the "begats" of Genesis and the Litany of the Saints. In a sense, all we need to know about the "dark night of the soul" that was the aftermath of 9-11 2001 (or of any massacre) is contained within and projects out from that list of names. That roll, the names of the 3000 dead, would have been sermon and poem enough.

The Psalms are poems -- and indeed they are exquisite -- but I'm sorry the president wasn't able to keep God out of it. His "Interior Castle" would have been God enough for that moment.

Obama might have gone with an American poet: Emily Dickinson and her "Hope" ("... is a thing a thing with feathers") or a few lines out of Langston Hughes' "Freedom's Plow." Or this, written by a Civil War battlefield medic:

How the true thunder bellows after the lightning-how bright the flashes of lightning!
How Democracy with desperate vengeful port strides on, shown
              through the dark by those flashes of lightning!
(Yet a mournful wall and low sob I fancied I heard through the dark,
              In a lull of the deafening confusion.)

                                      -- Walt Whitman, from "Rise, O Days, from Your Fathomless Deeps"