Choosing Life in a Pandemic (Erev Rosh Hashanah)
Over the past many months, many of us have understandably become numb in the face of overwhelming cruelty, injustice, and death we have faced personally…. As we armored our hearts against the horror of the past year, we may have found we became less able to fully receive positive experiences: the love of friends and family, the taste of good food, the beauty of the natural world around us. Rosh Hashanah, yom harat haolam is not a time to judge ourselves for this: rather, it’s an invitation to wake up to how we are choosing to live. It’s an opportunity to return, to start over, to renew ourselves; to use our awareness of life’s fragility to live with a bit more intention, to open our hearts once more so they can respond to the challenges we face, and fully receive its joys — so we can live and feel more fully.
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Shabbat Ki Tavo
Even though we are still in the midst of exile, confronted with unthinkable suffering, the prophet calls on us to imagine what it could look like to live as if the world is suffused with divine light….Just weeks after the breakage of Tisha B’av, Isaiah tells us to envision the world’s hidden wholeness. To recall our endless capacity to heal and find new hope, as individuals, and as a global community.
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Shabbat Shoftim
When we are indifferent towards the suffering of another, anochi, anochi: there is my “self” here and other “selves” separate from my reality, and capacity to care. By contrast, we all know the sense of wholeness that comes from being truly present to another person. This feeling, Kedushat Levi claims, moves us -- if only for a moment -- from the world of separation, into the world of wholeness, and unifies God, makes God echad, one.
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Shabbat Eikev
It is too easy in normal times – when we feel safe, healthy, undisturbed to mistakenly think we are self-sufficient, to, in Isaiah’s words this week, “walk by the blaze of [our own] fire.” During times of great disruption, like our ancestors faced, like we face today, we see the walls of the familiar structures around us laying in ruin. We confront our own vulnerability, our deep dependence on each other; are reminded anything that happens to any part of the great web of life in which we and the natural world are bound, affects all of us.
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Shabbat Chazon
Right now, we are in a time in the Jewish calendar, called Bein Hametzarim, “between the narrow straits.”… This period asks us to attend to the ways we feel ourselves in exile, disconnected from the Divine Presence, the web of life. It is an invitation to journey through a dark night of the soul…our own lived reality of abandonment, brokenness and alienation – so that we can see how far we are from where we want to be, in order to do teshuva, and eventually return to what matters most to us.
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Shabbat Pinchas
As a new generation rises, and demands justice, its declaration “Black Lives Matter” demands our policies and institutions root out racial injustice in order to authentically uphold the value of human life. This week’s Torah portion gives us a three step model for how to respond to this historical moment: when our God is confronted with injustice, The Holy One responds: the daughters of Tzelofechad speak rightly! It’s time for things to change!
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Shabbat Korach
Korach is not like Eldad and Medad; he is a demagogue, he tries to get power by dividing the community, defining himself only by what he is against; by contrast, Eldad and Medad, give voice to what they stand for. These uncertain days invite us to turn away from demagogues, and find the prophets in our midst: people who are a voice not just for themselves but for the oppressed in their midst…
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Pride Shabbat
This week, Torah instructs us to hold a commemoration, each year, of our people’s liberation, called Pesach. It is to take place bein ha’arbayim: at twilight. Why? To recall the uncertainty and chaos before we were free, that only afterwards marked the tipping point in getting free, and an inspiration for future liberation movements of other oppressed peoples. That night, Moses instructed our people to be ready. After so many attempts to get free, no one thought this night would be different than any other night. Even so, we prepared ourselves at twilight: in that space between day and night, between freedom and captivity, between what was and what could be.
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Shabbat Shavout
on Shavuot, we are invited to peel away all these layers of ordinary perception — our sense of space, and time, life and death that separate us from each other and from generations that came before and will come after us to remember the most fundamental ways we are still connected.
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