Hazak, Hazak, v'Nit'hazek

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.