Basketball in the White House

There will be basketball in the White House
Basketball is a fast game
A fluid game
Basketball is a quick American game
A finesse game
It takes a natural skill
The White House will be full of basketball players
For the first time.

All the world loves basketball
It’s an American game
Nobody plays basketball like we Americans
Play basketball.

It was in the beginning an outside game
Taken inside –
A peach basket with the bottom cut out nailed onto a pole
Elevated ten feet high over an indoor track.

It’s a game of integration
Spiritual physical
Inside outside
Skill and grace
You can learn it
But not excel at it
Without a natural gift.

Basketball is a soothing game
When played alone
And elegant when played in a team.

There’s a healing in playing basketball –
Let the healing begin.

Football turns on the physics of force
Baseball is wonderful but methodical and generally unspontaneous
Only basketball’s essence is beauty
A body in basketball is capable of illogical movement and grace
Its lure is essentially esthetic
Like ballet
There will be basketball in the White House.

Our President-elect walks like a basketball player
I am a basketball player
And I always go to the Court
For more than sport.

jsg, usa

Prayer After Voting

I voted
O holy God, I voted,
I felt good voting.
I honored my predecessors –
My grandparents, my parents of blessed memory –
Knowing, for them,
Voting
Was an ascendant experience.
They had complete confidence in our country
To provide opportunity for us
Their children
– That they did not have.

That is a matter of memory
Because I have had all opportunity,
But their stories reminded me that they
Did not.

I voted with the intention to honor them.
This year I voted from frustration too.

I voted against negativist language
Stiff, formal, and unbelievable to me –
The handlers speaking through puppets
Playing off fear in our country
When I want to vote for hope.

I voted for hope.
I voted for a deeper level of discourse
For a lower timbre of speech
Don’t yell at me pundits and politicians
And don’t think I am so easily played.
You couldn’t reach me with your strategies –
This year your strategies were transparent
And ugly –
And I turned off your voices
When they weren’t honest voices.

The problem is always discernment –
This year it was easy.
I know the truth when I hear it.
I voted out of discernment.

I voted for hope
I voted with the intention of honoring
Those who voted before me
During periods of higher expectations.

O holy God, I voted for higher expectations
Authenticity
Purification of purpose
Real talk from real people.

Politicos — don’t sweet talk me.
I’ll vote again.

james stone goodman
united states of america

From: Standing at the Cemetery
Over the Graves of my mother, father
grandfather, grandmother

August 14, 2008

I am about to turn sixty

I was visiting their graves in Detroit
They are buried within jumping distance of each other
Where time elapses
Ten years twenty years
Equalized underneath a bed of petunias newly planted.
The road jumps between generations
At the cemetery.

I stood on their graves and told them about the events
Of the last year or two
Filled them in on our children
Remembered the duty I have
To fill in
For my children
Who my people are
And how they walked in the world.

I think we mourn too easily
The people I bury hardly ever spend shiva
In seven days of mourning
I think shiva should be seven years
We should throw ourselves onto the ground
Spread dirt on our faces
Live in squalor on the floor
Until we can stand up again
Drag ourselves to our feet because
Our reservoir of tears has finally dried up

I am in mourning all the time for everything and everyone
I have loved the most.

Visiting with my people
There was no one else in the cemetery that day
I forgot to bring stones
There are generally no stones lying about
But that day there was one stone on my grandfather’s grave
Which I had placed there the last time I visited.
I found a stone in the grass nearby
And placed it on his daughter’s grave
My mother
Who mourned for him ferociously.

I am just like my mother
My grandfather
My father
My grandmother.

We are all born before
And we are born
Again and again.

For my children

The Soul On Friday

When her soul made her passage
I sang one of the tunes she preferred
Into Your hands I entrust my spirit
All the words that day
Read or sung
Jumped off the page
As if the white fire turned soft bluish green
The black fire leapt differently off the white fire.

Some of the words changed significance entirely
Soul
Healing
Recovery
Angels
they became nuanced
In a way I never heard before.

The above-mentioned bluish green
Was the color of her soul as it was finding its way home.
Her soul was catching fire and burning Itself into new form
I felt it.
It had called to me the night before
And I awoke
I didn’t pay enough attention so I went back to sleep
But I knew in the morning
That I had been visited by her
Roaming soul that night.

Some friends and family gathered around her bed in the morning.
Every word I sang to her
Changed
Into Your hands I entrust my spirit
At the time I lie down
And the time I rise up
I had to pause after that
To let the words relax
They were banging all over the room.

With my spirit my body too
God is with me
I shall not fear
I thought I was going to be swallowed up into the ground then
My feet became so heavy
With the weight of my own soul
Settling into my body.

I thought it was going to take hours
Perhaps days for her soul to leave her body
Because her color was deep in her flesh and life-like
Her eyes open and seeing
And her breathing was labored but steady
Her eyes open with a sense of recognition
As we all spoke to her.

Everyone thanked her
Told her that they were going to be fine
And wished her soul courage for the journey
To the ancestors and the meeting with God.
We wished her soul well along its way.

Her soul departed her body some time before noon.
The color had of course faded
And her soul had begun its journey
And the vessel of her soul
No longer looked like the soft skin
Smiling at the world from underneath
Her mop of hair.

It took some time for the funeral parlor to arrive
I sat with her vessel in the typical way that we accompany
And honor the vessel
That works so hard to house our souls
Because our souls
Are flamboyant
They are hard to contain
They burn bluish green,

And light up
From within
Our holy bodies
Temples
Bodies
Temples.

So I sat with the Temple that housed her soul
At the edge of the sea
The place where we push off from into the unknown
The Sea.

Blessed be her soul
As she moves out from her Temple
To the Great Sea
As she makes her way home to her ancestors
Who inhabit a far-away place –

Far away from
Buffalo
Where they once dwelled.

Why I Wear A White Tallis At Night*

Out of the narrowness [MeiTzaR], I called to HaShem – Psalms 118:5
If your sins are red like crimson, they shall become white like wool [TzeMeR] — Isaiah 1:18

My tallis is white
Made of wool
Tzemer
Tzaddi Mem Resh
I wear it in the night time
Only once a year
When I am drawing down
God’s complete mercy
On my little life.

Out of the narrowness
I call on You
Meitzar
Mem tzaddi resh
Narrow.

When I am in Meitzar
narrowness
I need compassion
Drawn down from within
My cloak of Tzemer,

My sins turn white
The nature of my deeds
Transformed

Narrowness to Wool
Meitzar to Tzemer

That’s why I wear
A white tallis
At night.

*I heard this from the Breslovers, said Blue. Everything else seemed theoretical,
this was about forgiveness and the weight that we carry around with us.
Every year we release the burden of the past,
and we intention ourselves for the future.
It’s about forgiveness. And whatever it was?
It can be re-worked.
Only God has such big floppy hands.

I am an imperfect perfection
God has blundered more than once
in creating me whole

with broken parts.
I have learned
that all my broken parts are whole

and even if not –
none of us are partial
we are all miniatures of Hashem

in some inscrutable way
that will clarify if not in this world
in the next.

I apologize
for anything I have said or done
intentionally or inadvertently

in the past year
or I may do or say in the year to come
that has hurt or may hurt

in any misconstrued way –
forgive me.
I need you more than you know,

your friend always,
jsg, usa

If I run into the angel Gabriel
I will tell him how fine you are.

Knots, for Slichot

Images of Teshuvah and Change
Distance and Connection
In 4 [5] Images As Derived From Zohar, Chassidut
and other Sources of Abstract Truth

First image: teshuvah is becoming unstuck

How the Baal Shem Tov Taught Teshuvah*

This way,
said Rabbi R,**
he shuffled into our meeting
introduced us to the teaching
he brought down from the Baal Shem Tov.
Exodus 3:3, Rabbi R said, God speaks to Moses
the bush burning but unconsumed.
Moses turns away,
I will turn away now
and see about this bush
how it remains unconsumed.
Turn away?
Check the Rashi.

The Rav became Rashi
I will turn away from here
and approach There.
Now the Rav became the Baal Shem Tov
that’s teshuvah, he said.

Now I know teshuvah, I said,
process not performance
journey not destination
not goal-taking
movement.

Unstuck.

*Teshuvah – a transformative, days of awe preoccupation of inner life.
**On September 7, 1993, I was sitting sleepily at the Rabbinical Association meeting at the Brith Sholom Knesset Israel synagogue. The room was underground, though the walls were white, it was dark within. Rabbi R came in, gave us a short teaching that he brought down from the Baal Shem Tov, on teshuvah.

I didn’t know if it was day or night, whether I was awake or dreaming. The person sitting next to me said, if I had come into the world only to see hear these words, it would have been enough.

O holy Shabbes Inspiration Shoftim

Maqam Ajam begins with a Ajam trichord on the first note and another Ajam trichord on the 5th note (the dominant), so for example:

Every Shabbat is associated with a musical figure called a *maqam, Arabic cognate to Hebrew maqom, Place.

This is the portion of justice
tzedek tzedek tirdof
righteousness righteousness
mentioned twice
you shall pursue it [Deut. 16:20]
what follows:
the bride of God
you shall not plant an asherah [Deut.16:21]
some sort of Canaanite goddess
a cult tree
planted near the altar of God.

It took so long to separate
God and his bride
That their return to each other seems unlikely –

Not for us.
The bride of God will be reunited with her consort
Every Sabbath
we are talking about justice here too
the myth of return.

Tonight
the holy Shabbes
the King and his consort
the goddess and her beloved
the Queen and her lover

will be re-united and it feels good
good the symmetry of return
rectifying something broken
separated so long ago –

tonight
they are love-making.

jsg

Inspired by the Republican National Convention

What Matters

Nachman turned to the Prince and said
I have seen in my visions
the wheat will be tainted this year.

Whoever eats of it
will go insane.
What should we do?

Let’s grow something else
said Prince
we’ll only eat from the new crop.

Then we’ll be the only sane ones,
I don’t think I could live
like that, said Nachman.

How about this –
said Prince
we’ll each make a mark on our foreheads.

Then after we eat
we’ll look at each other
and know we’re crazy.

But we won’t know, said Nachman,
then it won’t matter,
said Prince.

No, it matters, said Nachman
it matters
even if we don’t know it.

jsg, usa

I keep three weeks

There is a hilltop in Jerusalem
Where heaven and earth touch
After the destruction the bride began to weep
The ground wept too
The bride returned as a bird perched

At the wall
For three summer weeks I sat low in sadness
I planned to bleed
To wash myself clean

This I have been taught:
After a legacy of tears
Expect the messiah