Grasshoppers and Spiritual Growth? OK, Sure!

When I undertook the task of cross-stitching 4 verses from the Book of Leviticus for the Torah Stitch by Stitch project conceived by textile artist Temma Gentles, I knew it might be a bit of a challenge to mine these particular 4 verses for some deeper theological or even spiritual meaning.  What profound message from the divine was there in the short litany of insects that are ok to eat?  How did it nourish my soul in any way to know that I could eat a grasshopper (especially as I have never had a wish to eat a grasshopper, not even when they are presented in lollipops)?

 Leviticus 11:20-23 

²⁰ “‘All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be regarded as unclean by you. ²¹ There are, however, some flying insects that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. ²² Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. ²³ But all other flying insects that have four legs you are to regard as unclean.

 I studied what commentary I could find, to see if perhaps I was missing something that would’ve been obvious to another theologian, and without exception, commentators explained (in rather less detail than commentators often use) what the text already said: here are the insects you may eat, and here are the insects you may not eat.  This couldn’t be the point, surely.

 Leviticus is a book full of laws – thou shalt and thou shalt not, verse after verse, chapter after chapter. So what was the point of the laws, then?  Well… they could have been intended as a test of our obedience (though we didn’t prove ourselves so attentive with that apple…).  They might have been intended to teach self-denial (you’ll note that escargot, even sautéed in butter and tucked into mushroom caps, are not on the approved list!).  Perhaps this list, like many such lists, was to ensure that the Israelites remained a distinct nation – Jews have also been taught to make distinctions between what we call the sacred and the profane, the holy and the unholy, and it may well be that this list of insects was another exercise in this differentiation.

 

And while this makes some sense, it didn’t really lead me to the spiritual enlightenment for which I had hoped.  Was I expecting too much from this project?  Recalling the work in embroidering my tallit, I remember well the constant feeling that each stitch was, in a sense, a prayer.  I remember the surprising joy that accompanied the tying of the tzitzit.  These things weren’t happening with my 4 Levitical verses.

Would I have felt different if I’d been cross-stitching a different verse?  What if I’d been embroidering the Shema?  And if that could be the case, then did I mean to suggest that these verses weren’t as important?  They are part of the canon – we’ve kept them for millennia, and so they must still count.

I wasn’t coming up with any definitive answer, so I simply continued to work at my verses, and in July, something began to happen.  I was on vacation, needlework often in hand, and I discovered that cross-stitching the Torah makes for an interesting conversation.  In fact, it makes for many interesting conversations.

Sitting in the sun in the Public Gardens in Halifax, NS, sipping coffee, listening to the hum of conversation around me, the laughter of children, the letters seemed to be stitching themselves.  I was kind of in a cross-stitch zone and really enjoying the work.

Then one day, I realised that someone was watching me.  I glanced up, and a woman said, “That’s really beautiful!  What is it you’re making?”  So I told her about the project, and about my verses. I told her about the challenge I’d been experiencing in that I’d thought that this might be a valuable spiritual exercise, as I got to work intimately with the verses – kind of the way a Torah scribe might do. She had done some needlepoint in the past but hadn’t done any for a while – still, she knew the technique and the work involved.  There are things you just don’t have to explain to someone who knows how to do cross-stitch! Her husband was interested in the letters – “Hebrew, obviously,” he observed.  He wasn’t Jewish, but rather, Muslim, so it’s not such a great surprise that he’d recognised the lettering.  “What are your verses about?” he asked.  Who could have imagined when I told him that he would find it quite as interesting as he did?  Well, when you talk to an entomologist about insects in the Torah, you will find that he is interested! (I even wrote down the passage reference for him to look up at home!)

Another day, but still in the Gardens… a woman sitting across the patio from me came over and excusing the interruption, asked what I was working on.  Again, I explained the project, and again we talked about why I was doing it, and whether it was having the effect I had anticipated when I undertook the project.  She told me that her late mother had done a lot of cross-stitch – “Between the 5 children, and my dad, and her projects,” she said, “her hands were always flying.”  I knew that feeling myself – right down to being one of 5 children!  My own mother had been an embroiderer, a smocker, and a knitter, and children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and friends all benefitted from her talent.

The next conversation was with a woman visiting from Australia, who’d also been watching me work and finally came over to take a look and to talk stitchery.  She was equally fascinated by the project – this seemed a universal response whenever I shared it with anybody – and told me that she also enjoyed cross-stitching.  (She is currently working on family trees – one for each of 5 grandchildren!)  We talked about the challenges of making round letters look round when cross-stitching.  And I explained to her about the challenge I found in cross-stitching Hebrew – we read and write Hebrew from right to left, precisely the opposite to writing English, and I found that if I were stitching from left to right, as I did at the start of a new line in a new section, the zen of my work was abrupted, because I knew I was doing it backwards!  If I didn’t know any Hebrew, it probably wouldn’t have mattered, because the characters would simply have been characters that had no particular meaning to me as letters.

And now I think I’ve got it.  I think I know what it’s about.  The spiritual connection here is perhaps not precisely with the text, but with the conversations that the work has encouraged!  I’ve gotten to share my work, and Temma’s awesome project, with people from several countries.  And while it may be that not one of them will decide to sign on for a passage themselves, the conversations about the project have taken place with people who were genuinely interested and who learned something new.  There have been conversations with people who probably didn’t ever think of Torah (and why should they, really, if they’re not Jewish themselves?), and with people who didn’t necessarily believe in God at all. Despite the many differences between us, there was space for common ground, for learning, and for connection.  And maybe that is the point.  And it’s a pretty good one.

 

 

Fancy a grasshopper?

No grasshopper?  What about a locust, then?  A cricket, perhaps?  Me, neither.  And why the heck am I even talking about insects, anyhow?  Well, I’m glad you’re thinking about that!  It’s not a conversation I expected to take up before breakfast, that’s for sure.

I’m participating in a most awesome project, in which women and men, Jews and Gentiles, each commit to needlepoint 4 verses of Torah onto a piece of fabric, which will be returned to the artist who conceived it, Temma Gentles.  She will have all those individual pieces of work stitched into a massive Torah scroll, which will be exhibited publicly.  You can read lots more about that here:  http://torahstitchbystitch.temmagentles.com/ - and you can also sign up to participate.

But I digress.  Let’s get back to the insects.  The reason I’m thinking about them is that this week, I received word of my 4 verses for the project.  Temma’s email said that they were from Leviticus.  “Oh,” I thought.  (Leviticus is not one of my favourite books of Torah – it’s very prescriptive and has rules upon rules upon rules.)  And my verses are Lev. 11:20-23.  Here they are, so you don’t have to look them up:

²⁰ All winged swarming things that walk on fours shall be an abomination for you.  ²¹ But these you may eat among all the winged swarming things that walk on fours: all that have, above their feet, jointed legs to leap with on the ground – ²² of these you may eat the following: locusts of every variety; all varieties of bald locust; crickets of every variety; and all varieties of grasshopper. ²³ But all other winged warming things that have four legs shall be an abomination for you.

 

To be honest, I was kind of hoping for something more… beautiful, perhaps.  Or profound.  Perhaps something from the Song of Songs – “Ani le dodi, ve dodi li…” (“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”).  Or maybe from Exodus, the Song of the Sea (which my father used to sing, albeit not the melody we use at synagogue), Oz ya shir Moshe…  I just love that one.  But no, I get locusts.  And grasshoppers.  And crickets.  And what am I going to do with this?!

Well, firstly, I am going to honour my commitment, and do the best work I can do at stitching my verses.  That goes without saying, really.

Let me introduce you to some kosher insects.  Below, top to bottom, we have a bald locust, a grasshopper, and a cricket.  I have never had any desire to eat any of them.  Several years ago, I was given a gag gift (and I did kind of gag at it, actually) – a lollipop with a cricket inside.  I couldn’t even lick the candy to taste it.  The ewww factor was way too high!  (But if it had been prepared under rabbinic supervision, it would've been kosher!!)

So here I am with Leviticus and the laws of kashrut (Jewish dietary rules).  I’m pretty much ok with them, even though one or two of them cause me to roll my eyes.  I don’t eat pork or shellfish, and I don’t mix meat with dairy (that’s an eye-roller for me, in case you wondered).  My friend Jen says, “Show me a chicken that can give milk, and I’ll stop eating chicken Alfredo!”  I completely get what she’s saying.  Chickens can’t give milk.  And the cheese you have on your hamburger certainly doesn’t come from the same cow that gave you the meat.  My rabbi suggests that perhaps one way to consider it is that by not mixing meat and dairy, we’re not mixing the dead (the meat, obviously) with the living (a cow doesn’t have to die so that we can have cheese).  That makes it a little better, but only a little.  Fortunately, I have no great love of cheeseburgers and am happy with a veggie cheeseburger, so it’s all good.

Because I’m observant, I also don’t eat pork or shellfish, and that’s fine.  Occasionally, I miss some dishes, but generally it’s ok, and I don’t feel especially deprived.  Observant Jews also do not eat snails, though – escargots – not even when they are sautéed in butter, with a bit of garlic, tucked into mushroom caps, and topped with just a soupçon of fine breadcrumbs and cheese and broiled to the perfect moment of golden deliciousness.  Because, you see, I have eaten all these things.  I didn’t start out as an observant Jew.  Not eating pork and shellfish, not mixing meat and dairy – these are changes I have made, and commitments I have made as a Jew.  I don’t think it’s quite the same for someone who has never eaten those things.  And I rather miss escargots.

What if I slip up?!  Seriously!  What if cross-stitching 4 verses of Torah about the things I ought not to eat reminds me so much of the things I’ve given up that I go out and get some escargots?  I am not certain that this could not happen.  It might.  I hope it won’t, but the temptation pops up whenever I smell garlic in a restaurant!  And if I do go ahead and order some escargots, does that invalidate all the work I’ve put into becoming an observant Jew?  Or am I already looking for a loophole?  The commentary in my Eitz Chayim (the book containing Torah readings that we use at synagogue) says, “What is important is to be on the path of observance, to be, in the words of Emet ve-Emunah, a ‘striving’ Jew.”  Well, I’m striving, all right.  But then, I’m always striving. It occurs to me that I shouldn’t be looking at this as a loophole… but… escargots…

I know from having made my own tallit (ritual prayer shawl) that creating a holy object can in itself be a kind of prayer.  In fact, embroidering a tallit turned out to be one of the most profound, most holy, most prayerful things I’ve ever experienced – most particularly when I was tying the tzitzit (the fringes at each of the four corners, that remind us of the mitzvot – the commandments).  I thought that perhaps I would recapture something of that – and maybe even a little more.  Because while I will never be a sofret (a female Torah scribe), I thought that perhaps the feeling of doing this work might be something close to that – it’s certainly as close to writing a Torah as I will ever get.

I had hoped that participating in The Torah Project would help bring me closer to God, and closer to Torah, and found myself a little … disappointed … in the verses I was given.  Disappointed?!  I’m disappointed in Torah?  Well, I’m rather bold, aren’t I?  Every single verse, every single character of Torah, is important.  Are there some that are more important than others?  That’s entirely possible.  Some verses make me incredibly happy, and some of them make me really angry – but whether I am happy or angry, the verses cause me to have a dialogue with God.  Disappointed?!  All verses of Torah are important – but it occurs to me that my disappointment with those verses (not merely with my assignment of those verses – with the verses themselves) is kind of arrogant.  If I am disappointed, maybe I’m missing something.  If I don’t know immediately upon reading these verses why they are important, then it’s high time I blew the dust off my graduate school education and did some exegesis.

While I wait for my fabric and thread to arrive from Toronto, I am going to start looking hard at Leviticus.  The whole book, not just my 4 verses.  I will read it, and study it, and pray over it and with it. I will mine it for meaning, as my professors taught me to do.  I will do midrash.  And when I push the needle through the fabric for the first time, perhaps I will say a Shehechiyanu (Jews have prayers for pretty much everything – including one for the very first time of doing something.  I think that fits here.)

This is a journey, and I’ve barely taken the first step.

Write for yourselves this song, and teach it to the Children of Israel...

It’s said that writing a Torah scroll is for Jews the 613^th and greatest commandment. We believe that we are given the direction for this from the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 31, verse 19: “And now, write for yourselves this song, and teach it to the Children of Israel. Place it into their mouths, in order that this song will be for Me as a witness for the children of Israel.”  In fact, Torah scribes – sofer (or sofret, when we refer to the very small number of women who have written Torah scrolls) ­may dedicate their entire lives to only this work.  Most sofrim are men, not because women are prohibited from becoming ritual scribes (as some believe), but rather, because Maimonides explains that women are not obligated to fulfill this mitzvah.  This is simply because through history, women have been exempt from the mitzvah of studying Torah simply for the sake of studying Torah.  Tradition has dictated that women as the keepers of the home ought to be concerned more with mitzvot that concerned living Jewishly at home - keeping Shabbat in the home, for instance, and lighting candles on Friday evening.

Writing a Torah is a religious act – very nearly a prayer.  The materials on which the scroll is written and the implements used to do the writing are very specific, so that the scroll will be kosher.  The scribe is specially trained, and is expected to approach each letter with great kavanah – mindfulness, or intention – so that the integrity of the finished scroll should be above reproach.

Each letter must be as perfect as the human hand, guided, some say, by God, can make it.  It takes about a year to write one single Torah scroll, consisting of more than 300,000 Hebrew letters, painstakingly calligraphied by hand, and it may in some cases take even longer.  My own Hebrew is poor enough when davening (praying), and so the very thought of ever writing a Torah scroll is not one that has ever held great sway in my mind, as it is so far from the realm of what is possible for me to be confident that it is simply impossible.

Recently, though, I read an article in the Canadian Jewish News (http://www.cjnews.com/arts/project-reveals-torah-%E2%80%94-stitch-stitch), and suddenly the idea of being a part of creating a Torah scroll didn’t seem quite so impossible anymore.  While I will never become a sofret, I could perhaps be a part of something greater than I, and join this group of people committed to a rather audacious act of art.  I have designed and embroidered both my tallitot (the prayer shawls which accompany me to synagogue, and which I use for daily prayer), and every stich of each of them felt to me like a prayer.  Every stitch felt like a conversation with my mother.  I wanted to know more about this!

I checked out the website (http://torahstitchbystitch.temmagentles.com/) and contacted them to ask whether it was still possible to join the hundreds of volunteers already committed to the project.  Very promptly, I received an email message from Marilynne Casse, the Executive Coordinator of the project, who explained how it works – and it’s quite simple.  Volunteers complete a short registration form and make a payment of $18 (probably not at all coincidentally – 18 is numerically significant for Jews, as the letters which form the word also make the Hebrew word chai, or life), which nets you a kit that includes the Aida cloth, embroidery floss, and needles required for you to create a 14” x 14” square on which you will cross-stich four verses of the Torah.  In the end, more than 1,400 canvases will have been completed and stitched together to create a Torah scroll that is nine-feet-tall and about 100-yards-long (approximately 3 M by 90 M).  When it is finally completed – probably in about 3 years – the scroll will be the subject of a public exhibition – this in itself will be another tremendous undertaking, as it will require quite a lot of fundraising to accomplish.

The project is the brainchild of textile artist Temma Gentles, who conceived of it while on sabbatical in Israel as a way for people to connect intimately with the words of the Torah.  Volunteers are not required to be Jewish, nor must they be women.  There are women and men of many faith traditions participating, each of whom has particular reasons for wanting to participate.  For me, it is about Torah, yes, but also because every time I embroider something, I feel closer to my mother, who died in 2003, and who taught me to embroider when I was a girl.  I think that she would love this project.

So the next step is to receive my kit, and to begin my part of this project.  From time to time, I’ll post updates – perhaps even with photos.  Right now, I’m going to contact a friend in Israel, who is herself a textile artist, to invite her to check out the website as well, because she might also like to be a part of this.  And perhaps you would, to - so you should go ahead and click that link, and get in touch with the project!