Ḥazak, Ḥazak, v’Nit’ḥazek: Building Spiritual Strength in a Broken World
- offered by Rabbi Diane Elliot Erev Rosh Hashanah 5785 ~ October 2, 2024 at The Aquarian Minyan, Berkeley, California L’shanah tovah, my friends, l’shanah tovah. I speak those words tonight with the full force of my deepest, most urgent longing, praying, hoping with my whole heart for a good year, a better year ahead. This has been a year of dreadful loss. Many of you may remember that I last stood before this community on the Friday night of the Aquarian Minyan’s Golden Jubilee Shabbaton back in June, the night before my beloved husband, Rabbi Burt Jacobson of blessed memory, one of the Minyan’s early leaders, passed from this world. My deepest heartfelt thanks for all your support and messages of comfort during this very sad time. This past year we’ve also mourned Marty Potrop and Abigail Grafton, two of the Minyan’s g’dolim, and just within the past month, we’ve lost two more of the founding generation of Jewish Renewal leaders, the brilliant and complicated Rabbi Michael Lerner and the great hazzan and teacher Jack Kessler, zikronam liv’rakhah. May all these souls be lifted up. May the blessings they bestowed be amplified and any pain they caused be washed away, leaving only healing and the gifts of their lives to bless us moving forward. As we’re all painfully aware, there’s a much longer litany of loss in this past year. Hamas’s vicious October 7th attack on the southern Israeli kibbutzim and Nova music festival goers turned a day of rejoicing, the culmination of the High Holy Day cycle, into a nightmare of shock and horror. Twelve hundred Israelis brutally slaughtered, many more injured or taken hostage, and since then, an estimated more than 40,000 Gazans killed, many of them civilian women and children. The heart-shattering murders of Israeli hostages, the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, and now yesteray’s massive, terrifying missile attack on Israeli cities. In our country, an explosion of antisemitism, strife on college campuses, the looming prospect of a frighteningly uncertain presidential election in November––one in which a candidate with a proven track record of inciting violence has lately declared that, if he loses, it will be the fault of the Jews. And globally, the collapse of ecosystems, fast-spreading wild fires, increasingly violent storms, floods, earthquakes, famine, whole species dying, people displaced…. Waves of grief wash over me, flashes of anger, stabs of fear. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been holding my breath this whole year. Meh’ayin, meh’ayin yavo ezri, from where, from where will help come? From where will our strength come, the strength to carry on, to fight for the values we hold so dear—truth, justice, peace––to respond effectively to the certain challenges ahead, to acknowledge and celebrate ha-nisekhah sheh-b’khol yom imanu, the ongoing daily miracles of our lives? The miraculous improbability of life at all, here on our beauteous, beleaguered planet Earth? In his book On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old, the author, activist, and educator Parker Palmer writes: Suffering breaks our hearts, but the heart can break in two different ways. There's the brittle heart that breaks into shards, shattering the one who suffers as it explodes, and sometimes taking others down when it's thrown like a grenade at the ostensible source of its pain. Then there's the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, the one that can grow into greater capacity for the many forms of love. Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life. In this time of polycrisis, it is this supple strength of heart and mind to which we are being called, the kind of strength embodied in the soft, open, readiness of the tai chi fist, a strength that is determined, focused, flexible, and resilient. A strength that defies the myth of isolation, the primacy of the single strongman or superwoman, president or commander-in-chief. A strength welling up from the earth, pouring down from the heavens, shining through every molecule, every cell of Creation––HavaYah, Shekhinah, HaMakom. A strength manifest through community, like the faithful circles of giant redwoods, these havurot of the forest, the world’s tallest, oldest trees, whose roots entwine in a sturdy web of collective support and care, teaching us invaluable lessons in mutuality, endurance, and longevity. So, short of planting ourselves in a garden of Minyanites and sprouting a tangle of intermingled roots to keep one another from toppling over––though we can certainly show up for Shabbats in Bob Jaffe’s magical garden––how shall we support one another to incubate the special strength that these extraordinary times are calling forth? In his book on teshuvah, Reclaiming the Self, Rav DovBer Pinson writes, “Teshuvah is a movement of awareness towards a full-recognition of all-embracing unity, towards one’s own essential self, and towards the Source and Essence of all life… a recalibration of consciousness.” Seen in this way, teshuvah, the process of return, the essential movement of these Days of Awe, requires a shift in consciousness, a change in the way we think, in the way we are seeing the world, ourselves and one another. The liturgy—the prayers and Torah texts that we encounter during these Holy Days—spotlight some potent shifts of vision, moments of heart-strengthening that reveal how we might “hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.” Tomorrow morning, for instance, we’ll read the story of Hagar, cast into the wilderness with her son Ishmael and who, dying of thirst, abandons the boy beneath a bush and raises her voice in a hopeless wail. At just that moment a Voice calls out to her from heaven, a messenger of God, telling her to get up, to lift up her son and to grasp his hand--v’haḥaziki et yadekh bo—literally, strengthen your hand through him. And when Hagar does this, when she takes Ishmael’s hand, lifts him up, and reconnects in that maternal bond with her son, her eyes are opened and she is able to see the well of water that saves their lives. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we’ll hear the terrifying tale of Isaac’s near-sacrifice at the hands of his father Abraham, when, just as the knife is raised to do this awful thing, a Voice again calls out from heaven, a messenger of YHVH, from the side of Hesed, the loving aspect of Divinity, saying “Abraham, stop! You’ve gone far enough!” And at that moment, Abraham raises his eyes, and behold! Ayil aḥar ne’eḥaz ba-s’vakh b’karnav, he sees a different ram, a replacement for his son, caught––literally grasped, same verb, ne’eḥaz––by its horns in the thicket. In that moment, Abraham is able to see differently, from a different angle––or in the Baal Shem Tov’s reading, he calls forth a different vision of divinity, raising up the compassionate side of God. There are many ways to read these stories, but tonight I’m hearing them as tales of radical teshuvah, of the complete surrender of self, the cracking of an outworn identity, that allows a shift in consciousness, a different vision, and a new kind of strength to be born. This teshuvahis an antidote to despair; it gives agency. It changes the way we are in the world, and so it changes the way the world is. One more bit of instruction comes to us from the last verses of Psalm 27, the signature psalm of the High Holy Day season, traditionally recited daily from the 1st of Elul through Sh’mini Atzeret. Filled with affirmations of faith and appeals for Divine protection in times of danger and distress, this powerful psalm concludes: לוּלֵא הֶאֱמַנְתִּי לִרְאוֹת בְּטוּב־יְהֹוָה בְּאֶרֶץ חַיִּים: Would that I had the faith to see God’s goodness—literally, to see the goodness of the Ongoing-Process-of-Being––while I’m alive. And the final verse: קַוֵּה אֶל־יְהוָה חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יְהֹוָה: Direct your hope toward YHVH, get a grip—there’s that hazak again--hazak v’ya-ametz libekha: Get a grip, strengthen your heart, and direct your hope toward YHVH! In other words, while we’re here on this Earth, let us choose to see through the eyes of faith. Let us school ourselves to see the good. Let us lean into Divine support, as we encourage each other to remember and celebrate goodness, amidst all that weighs on our minds and hearts. Let us remember our own goodness, our capacity to choose, to change our minds and our actions, which is perhaps our greatest strength as humans. Let us be strong, strong, and strengthen each other, practicing together suppleness of spirit and open-heartedness, alive to the pain of this world, not naïve, not minimizing the gravity of our situation; nevertheless, strengthening our minds to commit to hope, to work toward change, to live in service of the miraculousness of this existence during these precious moments in time that we share. So that somehow, despite all odds, it may be for us, for our world, a shanah tovah.
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Forgetting, Remembering, Belonging and Compassion -
offered by Rabbi Diane Elliot - Yom Kippur 5785 ~ October 12, 2024 Kehilla Community Synagogue, Oakland, California L’shanah tovah. I’m so honored to be here on this most holy day, to pray with you, to sing with you, and now to speak with you. Some of you know me as the wife of Kehilla’s founder, Rabbi Burt Jacobson of blessed memory. Some of you know me as a rabbi, teacher, and spiritual director in Jewish Renewal. Some of you know me as both, and some not at all. For those who are receiving today’s service primarily through your ears, I stand here on the bima, a woman of medium height, pronouns she/her, wrapped in a great, flowing white silk prayer shawl, with pale skin and short brown hair, a former dancer now creakily bordering on old age, wearing reading glasses, which I may repeatedly take off or put back on, because I can’t tell if they make any difference. I don’t have to tell you—because we’ve said it over and over during these holy days, and because your bones know it—that this has been a hard, sad, gut-wrenching, heart-stopping, awful year—in the world, and for me personally. Caring for Burt at home during his illness, a choice we made together, was a great honor, a profound learning, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done. He passed away on a brilliantly sunny Shabbat morning, exactly 16 weeks ago today. I feel his spirit here with us now, hovering over his regular front row seat (where I’ve been sitting during services), blessing us, and kvelling. I’m going to speak about remembering and forgetting, belonging and compassion in a very personal way today. It ws hard for me to write this talk. Part of what made it so hard to write, to even think clearly, besides grief, is my trepidation about stepping on people’s hearts. I live more from feeling than from theory, and to be authentic to my own lived experience, I can’t pretend to be different than I am––a white Ashkenazi second-generation American-born Jew, a child of the 1940’s and ‘50’s, who has spent much of my life reclaiming my ethnicities and addressing stuck trauma responses––distressing symptoms in my body and mind––and feeling “other” (if not “othered”), even within my privilege. Yom Kippur is a day of viddui, of truth telling, and also a day of selichot, of offering and receiving forgiveness. Maybe some of my experience will resonate with yours, maybe not. I humbly ask your forgiveness if anything I share inadvertently excludes or hurts you or makes you feel othered. Last night Rabbi Dev asked us to attend closely for a few minutes to what it feels like in our bodies when we sit in the judgment seat, and how it feels to move to the seat of raḥamim, of compassion. Today I want to ask a different but related question: what does it feel like—how does it feel, in your body—to belong? How do you know when you belong somewhere? Is it a mind state or more of a felt bodily sense? A combination? Take a moment and maybe remember a time or a place when you felt real belonging. Maybe you feel that here, now. Does your belly relax, do you feel welcomed, comfortable, settled, seen? Like you can let your guard down? This is a question that I’ve long asked myself, because, though I’ve been part of many groups, many communities, even communities I’ve co-created, in some way I’ve never really felt that I truly belonged. Anywhere. My body-mind has never felt fully “home.” Maybe the fact of having lived at five different addresses by the time I turned four and having moved many times since then has something to do with that. Or the fact of being highly sensitive. I am the eldest of four children, born in 1949, at the end of a devastating decade, to a dad who had fought in Italy in World War II and dropped his last name, Goldstein, after experiencing virulent antisemitism in the army, and a mom who, when she was only six, lost her own mother to septicemia in the aftermath of an abortion. While I enjoyed many advantages growing up in white, privileged, upper-middle-class suburbia, unprocessed trauma permeated our household. (Think Ordinary People, only Jewish.) In 1956 a 24-year-old British auto-didact named Colin Wilson shot to instant fame with the publication of his landmark monograph, The Outsider, a study of the archetypal alienated white male in western literature and art. I and so many of my cohort consciously or unconsciously embraced that archetype, rejecting the “establishment,” our parents’ values, their economic and lifestyle choices. We became the “counterculture,” cool, hip, free, mobilized––or perhaps more accurately demobilized––by the phrase coined by psychedelics guru Timothy Leary, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Out. Far out. Dressed in tie-dyed tank tops and homemade bell bottoms, cutting our teeth on marijuana and hashish and those little blue pills, professing free love, grooving to hard rock and folkie protest music, we tried in our own self-absorbed way to say, “Enough already!” Enough of war and bloodshed, enough of genocide and victimhood! Enough of racism and police brutality, of sexism and conformism and every ism! Who would want to belong in a world like that? But even on the outside, I felt outside. Not able to tolerate drugs—when I smoked a joint, I didn’t get a high, just a cold––not feeling so free about loving or sex, not wanting to get beat up by burly Ann Arbor cops or shot at by the National Guard, I nevertheless engaged in my own hot critique of the materialistic suburbia I’d grown up in. I wrote bitter poetry, made jagged dances, and moved from one roach-infested New York City tenement to another, living the dancer’s bohemian life––but not truly leaving the “home” I grew up in, still benefiting from my middle-class whiteness, even as I rejected it. Maybe it wasn’t just coming of age in the 1960’s, in the long shadow of war and holocaust, that shattered my sense of belonging. Maybe it was a much older strain of outsider-itis, rooted deep in the soil of my Jewish and Israelite lineages, exemplified in those archetypal figures who populate our sacred scriptures: Abraham, who’s told to leave behind kith and kin, jettison his cultural attachments, to follow an all-powerful Deity; or his son, Isaac, who is nearly sacrificed to that God; cunning Jacob, who risks everything to steal his brother’s blessing and then must flee for his life; and his son, Joseph, so hated by his brothers that they vow to kill him, but instead end up selling him into slavery in Egypt, where he rises to power but remains ever the outsider. And what about Moses, perhaps the ultimate exemplar of identity confusion—a Hebrew baby, adopted by an Egyptian princess, who grows up in a palace, separated from his enslaved blood family, until he suddenly realizes he is not of that place, kills an abusive slave-master, and must run for his life to the wilderness? Outsiders, all! Did any of them—or their sisters, wives, daughters--ever feel that they belonged? How did they experience community? Learn to care for their fellow beings? Love the stranger, our scriptures remind us over and over, because you were strangers! You know the heart of the stranger! And perhaps in the set of our nervous systems, in our epigenetic legacy, strangers we remain. Perhaps this is the “land” we’ve inherited, exiles even in the spaces of belonging we strive so hard to create. A story: while living in Minneapolis in the 1990’s, I joined a Jewish Renewal havurah. After a year, a conflict broke out over who should lead the group, and our little community imploded. People stopped speaking to one another; the group scattered, leaving people bereft. A small contingent of us met for nine months, trying to knit things back together. When that effort failed, I invited whoever wanted to, to join me in addressing the question, why do Jewish communities so often blow up in conflict? Why do we so often turn on our leaders and on each other? Seventeen people signed up. Looking for a place to gather, I realized I didn’t feel comfortable meeting in any Jewish space in town, the synagogues or the JCC. So I met with the director of the Powderhorn Phillips Cultural Wellness Center, a space established by visionary women of color, dedicated to promoting well-being of body, mind, and spirit for folks in one of Minneapolis’s poorest neighborhoods. “We’re Jews. We’re not poor and we’re white,” I told her (there were no people of color in our havurah). “But we’re wounded and unwell. Our communities don’t cohere. We don’t know how to love ourselves or each other.” She cried with me and invited us in. When we arrived for our first meeting, we found that someone had put a mezuzah up on the wall near the door, alongside the African, Hmong, and Indigenous American cultural symbols. We felt welcomed. Each month for over a year, we sat in a circle, read, talked, told our family stories, invoked our ancestors. I brought my background as a dancer, contact improviser, somatic therapist, and mindfulness practitioner to facilitating the group. I’ll never forget one session when I suggested that we try a simple movement exercise: to hold a partner’s hands and support them to squat. I explained that there’s a reflex, the tendon guard reflex, in which all the muscles of the back side of the body contract in readiness to fight or flee. When a person is carrying unprocessed trauma, this fight/flight response can get stuck in the body, making it hard to squat, much less stand on the ground, receiving earth’s full support. As people partnered up, holding one another’s hands, sinking toward the floor (we were younger then!), I began to hear sobbing. Words spontaneously poured out, a jumble of stories of parents and grandparents forced from their homes, running for their lives in the night, no ground to stand on, no place to belong. This went on for a long time. We tried to witness—to withness––one another. Some of us couldn’t even stand to be touched or held in our grief. Every year, shortly before High Holy Days on the Shabbat of Parashat Ki Tetzei in the Book of Deuteronomy, and again on Shabbat Zakhor, one of the special Shabbats leading up to Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, these words are traditionally read in synagogues all over the world: בַּדֶּרֶךְ בְּצֵאתְכֶם מִמִּצְרָיִם: עֲמָלֵק לְךָ זָכוֹר אֵת אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂה Remember what the Amalekite people did to you on your way out of Egypt, how they attacked you from the rear, your weary ones, your elderly, your women and children. So, when you are settled in a safe place, the Land that YHVH is giving you as an inheritance — תִּמְחֶה אֶת־זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמָיִם––wipe the memory of Amalek from off the face of the Earth, לֹא תִּשְׁכָּח: –– don’t forget! This is not the club of memory I want to belong to. Yet if I am somehow a de facto member of this club, this club of the long memory of betrayal and persecution, of attack and retaliation wired into my very nervous system––amygdala, hippocampus, cerebellum––how can I simply choose to resign and join another club, one that doesn’t require me to fear and exclude and wipe out the memories of other people, even the ones who have hurt me? Or is this verse possibly saying something else? That when we’re settled, when we have rest from surrounding enemies, when we have some space to breathe, a modicum of safety, we need to remember to forget our fears and enmities, to process them through and to release ourselves from the trauma matrix, so that we don’t unconsciously act out on others the hurts we sustained? So that we can remember to re-member that we humans are all members of the same club, all indigenous to this Earth? What I’ve learned is that in order to do that very difficult thing––to remember to forget in order to remember––which is teshuvah––I have to be willing to face my own shadow, face it squarely, and grapple with the fear that binds me beneath the level of consciousness, the way Jacob wrestled with the dark angel of his own fear and jealousy. We have to wrestle with the instinct to “other” that lives in our bodies, in the very set of our nervous systems, our hair-trigger reactivities. We have to be willing to hang out with uncomfortable bodily states, to support one another in bringing consciousness to those scabbed-over, unhealed wounds that subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—isolate us, leave us feeling alone, bereft, hungry for contact, distant from Spirit. Only by attending deeply to the ways our pain has bound us upon the altar of the wrong god and caused us, in turn, to pain others, can we hope to fully belong here on this earth, in this community, in this room, and to thrive together. Part of what drew Burt and me together was that we recognized in one another a fellow outsider, someone dissatisfied with the way things are, who lives outside the box, who sees what could be and advocates and works for that. But while the “classic” Outsider in white western culture retreats into themself and focuses on self-realization through self-expression, Rabbi Burt, though in many ways a product of his times, broke that mold. After many years of grappling with his own inner demons––something I got to witness at close range––he chose to envision a space, a structure, that would support not only his own, but other people’s expression, a community of and for “outsiders,” a community sensitized to the basic human need to belong, yet not predicated on others’ non-belonging: a Synagogue Without Walls, a real space, and also a holy aspiration, a mandate to gently, with compassion, dismantle our inner walls and so grow our capacity, our tolerance for living in loving community. A synagogue where he himself and others might find a home and aspire and act together to bring about a better, more compassionate, more inclusive reality. He did so with the religious sensibility of a prophet, the esthetic sensitivity of an artist, and the social urgency of an activist. His vision, his invitation, has opened up space for others—for each of us—to bring our gifts, to practice being human together. When Rabbi Burt saw that Kehilla was well launched, now in its third and fourth and fifth generations of leadership––active, alive, multi-generational, becoming more and more fully diverse, gradually over the years building itself into a true “caring community,”––he felt at peace, he felt he had accomplished his life’s work—though he still had one final burst of ambition, and that was to complete his writing on the Baal Shem Tov. Because, as Rabbi Dev shared on Rosh Hashanah, for Burt, the Baal Shem Tov represented the fountainhead of compassion, of love, of non-judging acceptance, the portal to a Jewish spiritual path focused not on surviving as a nation nor on wiping Amalek from the face of the earth, but on rebuilding the sacred Temple of the human heart. And whether or not the Baal Shem was a deeply flawed human being—and Burt believed that he was, and that grappling with his own flaws in a religious context was the very source of the Besht’s spiritual power—we Renewal Jews have chosen the Besht’s lineage of love and compassion. This is where we situate ourselves, where we belong. This is the superpower that drives us toward honoring the brilliance of our differences and, at the same time, recognizing the intrinsic Source of our oneness. The great 20th century prophet, James Baldwin, wrote, “Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can be felt….” We come together on these High Holy Days, and especially on Yom Kippur, naked and empty-handed, eyn banu ma’asim, to enter as clear-eyed as we can into the vortex of uncertainty––“Who shall live and who shall die….”––to join together in the great symphony of living/dying, to tune our instruments to the key of compassion, and to loosen our cherished identities, so that as agudat aḥat, a unified kehilla, we can feel our belonging to one another and help one another swim in the strong current of grief and love ever flowing through the great Ocean of existence. Let us remember and imprint the feeling of this Day of Atonement when, for a little while, we strip off the beautiful clothing of our individual selves, our identities, and float together in the vast Sea of Compassion, so that when we dress again, our clothes are just a little looser, there’s a little more space to breathe, a little more breath to share with one another. This D'var Torah, offered B"H at the Aquarian Minyan Erev Rosh HaShanah service, September 15, 2023 / 1 Tishrei 5784, responds to the community's theme for these High Holy Days: A Sacred Future Summons Us. Shanah tovah. Here we are. We arrive again at Rosh Hashanah, the Head of the Year, the celebration of the birth humanity. Maybe we’re battered, clearly the worse for wear, but we are here—still here together. Hallelujah! Maybe you’ve been engaged these past seven weeks since Tisha B’Av, or these past four weeks of Elul, in teshuvah, the spiritual and emotional work of returning to essence, to core values, cleaning up your human relationships in order to be square with God. All our efforts notwithstanding, I would guess that we each arrive here tonight in some degree of what our tradition might describe as “tamei.” The Hebrew word tamei is difficult to define. It’s a biblical category, often translated as “impure.” Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank z”l, a teacher for so many of us, spoke of tamei as a “state of being “tainted by death residue.” Many of us have lost loved ones during this past year, even in this past week, and our hearts are with you. Tamei. Many of us feel the encroaching ills of body and mind as the breath of death approaching. Tamei. And as we continue to experience and to witness waves of covid, climate disasters, burgeoning gun violence, police brutality, prison violence, racial hatred, war, human trafficking, and ultimately the extinction of life form after life form from our precious planet—it seems that we all find ourselves smudged with death residue –tamei, tamei! I’ve heard that the human organism responds to the presence of the dying and the dead with a natural recoil, an instinctive drawing away. Rabbi Alan Lew related that when he would visit sick congregants, before entering the hospital or the hospice room, he would pause at the threshold, willing himself to overcome his trepidation so that he could be fully present with the suffering or dying person in that room. I think that Reb Dovid was suggesting that “tamei” was the word our ancestors used to describe this instinctive recoil. To be tamei signifies a kind of shutdown, a sense of being separated from the Whole, cut off from the ongoing stream of life. Tamei names our primal terror of not-being, a fear that freezes the soul, tunnels our vision, chokes off gratitude, and silences praise. Our ancient ancestors deemed a person in a state of tamei unfit to enter the holy Temple environs. Torah tells us in great detail about the metzorah, a person afflicted with a contagious skin ailment. Tamei! Purification required spending time in quarantine, outside the camp, until the symptoms resolved and the High Priest could declare the person tahor, recovered, pure, one hundred percent “back.” The Kohen would then perform a ritual, an animal sacrifice and a dabbing of blood and oil on the ears, thumbs and big toes of the healed person, to welcome them back into the community, into Wholeness, holiness. Tahor. We now know collectively what it’s like to be quarantined, to be “outside the camp.” We who have been ill, maybe housebound, know how painful, how isolating the “brush with death” can be. Confined to our homes, unable to gather in public spaces, to be together in community, we shrivel. In our Zoom-saavy age, we’ve learned to overcome some of this debilitating isolation through technology. But we don’t always know how to transform our tamei-ness, to return to wholeness, to become tahor. We’ve lost touch with the power of those ancient purification rituals, the body-and-soul cleansing of the mikveh, the priestly ceremonies of reentry and rededication. Though in many ways our technology connects us—and thank God, so many of you can be here tonight with us on Zoom—that same technology, misused, abused, makes us even more isolated, as many choose to stay in our homes, doing more and more of our relating on flat, two-dimensional screens. Our world becomes more fractured as lies and vitriol spread through social media and passionately held untruths fuel people’s fear and hatred of one another. Teshuvah in these death-saturated days is of a whole other order. Personal heshbon ha-nefesh, taking stock of my own life, righting my personal relationships is not enough. Now something more global is needed—ongoing processes, daily, hourly, sometimes breath by breath, ways to cleanse my body, refresh my mind, energize myself to take up again and again the small tasks that may cumulatively, collectively lead us toward a renewed world and allow us, please God, to hear and to respond to the call of a Sacred Future. It's taught that our season of teshuvah actually begins with Tisha b’Av, our national day of mourning. We fast. We scrape down to the bottom of our souls, we pray without melody or feeling. We give ourselves a chance to recognize the inner deadness we have allowed to engulf us, and that recognition is the beginning of our return to wholeness. The tears of grief we shed for ourselves, our beloveds, and our Earth wash us clean. They are our mikveh. We chant from the Book of Lamentations, “Shifkhi kha-mayim, kha-mayim libeykh nokhakh p’nei HaShem, Pour out your heart like water before the Mystery.” Weep in the face of the Mysteries we cannot solve, before the Great Mysterious Story of our Cosmos, which we can only glimpse in snatches. Our tears of loss, our wails of grief are the purifying waters, the very waters that begin to render us tahor. Dr. Lewis Gordon, a Jew of color and distinguished scholar, writes, "What many don’t understand about the loss of those we love is their irreplaceability. To love is to see in those we love each day the ongoing possibility of life…. To lose those we love is to experience the shattering of our world, which, for some of us, is identical with losing the world." Surely, we are daily losing our world as we have known it. And yet, just as surely, in the secret spaces of the soil, beneath the surface of the oceans, and in the depths of the hearts and minds of human beings seeking and loving life, the world is being rebuilt, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, breath by breath. Nothing lost, nothing wasted. We, then, become the imaginal cells, carrying the template of the butterfly-to-be during the complete dissolution of the caterpillar in its delicate cocoon. Those cells are the seeds of the Sacred World to come, its beauty and its Mystery. They carry the ancestral DNA of an ethical world, a world founded on the human capacity for empathy, kindness, and the kind of radical love in which, in Dr. Gordon’s words, we “take responsibility for responsibility itself,” in which we humbly know ourselves as part of nature and all humanity, part of a larger ecology of Wholeness. Those seeds have been here all along, are here now, in each one of us, sustaining us even and perhaps especially in our brushes with death, in our losses. We come together on Rosh Hashanah each year to celebrate the imaginal cells that we are, to remember the Whole that we are part of, to reaffirm our love, our commitment, to bless one another with the capacity to remember, so that we can, literally or imaginally, drop to our knees and lie on our bellies on the Earth on the afternoon of Yom Kippur and rejoice in the High Priest’s cry of Tahor! So that we can remember that this is not a once-a-year moment, but a daily sacred charge, to nurture those imaginal cells within, to keep them alive and pass them on. In the final verses of his masterful poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden speaks to this necessary process, a ritual of remembrance and healing, if you will. Written in 1939 on the precipice of World War II and the Sho’ah, these verses affirm the power of poetry to cleanse and heal us. As you take in Auden's immortal words, feel how profoundly resonant they remain, more than 80 years after he wrote them: In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of our days Teach the freed ones how to praise. Hearing these verses, we can each ask ourselves, what is my poetry? What is my art, my prayer, my faith, my work, my play, my joy? What is the part of me that remains tahor, life-focused, begging to be discovered, recovered, resuscitated, eager to answer the summons of the sacred future? In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of our days Teach the freed ones how to praise. Keyn yehi ratzon, may it be so. May fountains of healing spring from our broken-open hearts and praise pour from our mouths, as we turn to face the year ahead. May this be, truly, a shanah tovah. September 2022 - Tishrei 5783 |