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Mah
Nishtanah ha laylah haZeh mikol halaylot?
How
is this night different from all other nights?
No
I haven't lost my place in the rabbi's manual! I am sincerely asking: How
is this first shining night of the year 5766, different from all other Rosh
Hashana eves? How might we distinguish
this particular evening in time, from other Erev Rosh Hashana's we
have spent together or elsewhere?
On
all other Rosh Hashana nights, we are festive and expectant, filled with the
freshness of fall and new possibilities. On this Rosh Hashana night, our festive
air may be somewhat muted, and appropriately so. And expectant? Well, it's
hard to know what to expect these days
or what possibilities lie ahead.
On
all other Rosh Hashana eve's we come to reconnect with our friends and community,
and our prayers extend to to Klal Yisroel, the entire Jewish people. This
year, to focus on ourselves and our families alone, and
on our own tribe, is not enough; it would almost be unJewish.
On
all other years the rabbi comes with a story from tradition, that gives context
and perspective to the year past. Satisfying images or allegories that characterize
our spiritual work and give it meaning. But on this night, kings and princes,
God's name engraved on our foreheads, and letters in our pockets won't take
us where we need to go. There is truthfully no image, not from Torah or from
our holy books, (or even from the collected works of Carl Jung!) that could
evoke more, or send us deeper into our hearts than the images of our world
today.
On
this night, I believe, the only haggadah we need is the Torah in which we
are living. It's called reality-Torah and the pictures
that illustrate it are the same ones we have all been seeing and watching
together these past months and days.
Photos from a city washed away. Of elders
left to die in rising waters, of small children looking for their parents
and desperate parents looking for their children. If our eyes were open we
have been seeing pictures of an AIDS pandemic in Africa that is devouring
an entire generation of parents, leaving
over 10 million orphaned children. And we have been seeing rivers of blood
flow daily in Iraq, and abuses in our military prisons that make us turn away,
snapshots that shame our nation, and our young. But perhaps the most lethal
of all photos are the ones that we are not shown by our media: American coffins
lined up in Iraqi hangars awaiting their final airlift home; And perhaps the
most hidden from view: the ethnic cleansing in the Sudan at the hands of the
janjaweed horsemen as they blaze through Darfur with their swords, whips and
truncheons, burning villages and trampling every living thing in their path.
How
is this first night different? than
other first nights of other years? This year the Torah is Us. This year, our
world and its suffering is our shofar, blasting, howling, piercing our sense
of reality and flooding us with waters of grief and despair. Tonight we must
ask the deepest of questions:
What
does it mean to be a Jew in this world? What does it mean to celebrate RH?
To what are we turning this year? And if we are turning to our own interior
process, to our own individual teshuvah, even to our own spiritual betterment,
will it be sufficient?
Mah
Nishtana HaLaylah HaZeh? The rabbis originally posed this question in the
time of Bar Kochba, the 2nd century, when the fist of the Roman
Empire bore down so hard that it became almost impossible to live as a Jew.
They were not asking about Passover alone, mind you. Their language was pointed:
How is this night: this
darkness, this bleakness different? unique? The word Night was code for the dark exile that they were suffering.
They were asking: How do we respond to this particular
spiritual night? What can be learned from this particular situation?
We
Jews have known many nights, many periods of dark despair throughout our history,
the exile of our people, the exile of our principles.
And
just as other generations have looked and studied their moment in history,
so let us too, look and study and get perspective on ours.
This
Rosh Hashana finds Jews the world over relatively safe and prosperous and
free. Of course, there is the presence of anti Semitism. And on a personal
level, each of us carries our own private losses and challenges. But of
our general state as a community in the 21st century,
we can fairly report that we are fortunate: safe, and prosperous and
free. And if we question this, we have simply to look at the pictures in tonight's hagaddah. For the most part,
we are not in those pictures.
Yet
we unquestionably find ourselves living in laylah hazeh, a dark night.
A dark world. And the darkness, this time, is not ours alone. Kol haoylam
is a goylem is an old Yiddish expression. It means: All the world is
a golem, a man made hulk, a Frankenstein. A beast gone mad. The expression
doesn't give God any credit for this creation, it is the world of our making
that is on a runaway course.
So
how is this night, our world different than that of our Yiddish grandparents
? What is different is us. Whether we can own it or not, we are part
of this world and its powers, in a way that Jews never have been before. Our
bubbes and zeides prayed that their descendants should have
better choices. They prayed that their grandchildren should be free of the
oppression they suffered, have the luxury to pursue an education, and finally
make a decent living already. And their prayers were answered. God said yes.
Our
lives are the Yes! The answer to their prayers. Our freedom and our stature,
as the wealthiest and most powerful minority in this country's history is
the answer to their prayers. Look at us! In the context of Jewish history
our lives are unprecedented! We have choices, and we have freedom, and we
have power. Now, what are we going to do with it?
First
of all, will we be able to stay awake? With all of our choices, that's difficult.
You've heard of "the drug of choice?" It's tue, choice is
our drug. In a culture bent on escape, there are millions of opportunities
to go to sleep, to lose consciousness, to lose track of what is important.
Our grandparents prayed for choices? We've got choices! Talk about media!
We can browse the web for hours, get lost in wi Ðfi, blog fog, X-box, fantasy
football, reality TV, or if I am feeling introverted, on-line solitaire, wild
mind or I-Pod. Bored? I can check in with my blackberry, cruise my serius
radio, take advantage of my cable options, and know more about nothing than
ever before.
If
we can stay awake, there are other choices we can make, too. Our privileged
American lives afford us myriad
ways to cross the boundaries of consciousness: Spiritual texts of every great
tradition in the world are available tous, the world itself is available to
us, we can travel outwardly and inwardlyÉwe can tune into the worlds of possibility
within us; to endless levels of personal growth, to the sheer mystery and
magnificence of Spirit. If we can stay awake in this culture, there is an
endless journey of discovery that gives us meaning and joy, and I dare say
this is why many of us are here tonight.
My
questions tonight are autobiographical, but I'm hoping they aren't mine alone.
I am asking: How do we live in such joy, in such privilege, with so many
choices WITHOUT forgetting the world, the night, the gravity of our
situation? It is so easy to do! There is the other side of the
question, too. How do we engage in the darkness WITHOUT forgetting the
sheer brilliance and joy and beauty of our lives?
Either
one without the other is impossible.
Both
sides of this coin are true and real and both call to us! To those of us who
hesitate to roll up our sleeves for fear we might get overwhelmed
by the work, or lost in the darkness, the rabbis of the 2nd century
said: Lo alecha haMlacha ligmor: yes, there is an endless amount of work to do. But don't get carried
away. Or inflated. You can never complete it all.
But
many of us are guilty of falling to the other side, of going unconscious,
if not to our magnificent media options, than guilty of becoming entranced
by the drama of our own spiritual unfoldment, and our own amazing process,
to the point of serious myopia, to the point of tuning out the gravity of
the world's situation. To this the rabbis warn us: v'lo ata ben chorin
l'hibatel mimenu.
The
world is yours. You are not free to give up. Yes the night is bleak and the
work is great. You wont complete it all, But neither are we free to go oblivious.
If
there is beauty in the terrible events of the world today it is that for
more and more of us, our hearts are opening. We are coming out, taking responsibility,
responding to the call of the shofar of our world.
"What is at stake, Elie Wiesel said recently, is nothing less than
our humanity."
I
believe that our humanity requires both our "inner work," self exploration,
self care, personal growth, AS WELL
as OUR OUTER WORK in the world. This is how
our lives as Jews today become meaningful. This is how our lives as Jews today
are different than our bubbes' and our zeides', why this night is different:
We have a place in the world, an ownership in the world that we have never
before had. We also have the capacity and the opportunity to work in both
realms: the light and the dark, the inner and the outer work, the privilege
and the responsibility.
This
is what it is about to be a conscious human being in our day.
This
is what it is about to be a Jew in our day.
It's
easy in Boulder to downplay one's Jewishness. For many of us our Judaism is secondary to being Americans, or Buddhist practitioners,
or global citizens. But Golda said it best.
She
was Prime Minister of Israel at the time, and trying to encourage Henry Kissinger
to make Israel a top priority in Washington.
He
sent her a letter: "Mrs.
Meir, I would like to inform you that I'm first an American citizen, second
Secretary of State and third a Jew."
"Don't worry about it, she replied.
In Israel we read from right to left."
May
we remember our Jewishness. May we remember the shoulders upon which we stand.
May we help the world remember.
One
of my personal heroes, Rabbi Harold Schulweiss, recently said this about the
Sudanese crisis:
We
Jews possess a terrible knowledge, an awesome wisdom we
gained
not out of books, but out of our own bodies.
Speaking
about the ethnic cleansing that is going on which has finally been classified
as genocide, he says:
We
experience a collective deja vu even as we speak. We've heard before the treacherous excuses, the lying
alibis, the
rationalizations
from church and state and international bodies.
Are
these reports really
genocide
or just propaganda?
We
prayed and
hoped
for a cry/ a protest, some proclamation, some sob of conscience that could
pierce the hardness of the heart:
We
Jews remember what we expected sixty years ago.
Can
we do less?
It
is always easy to deceive ourselves into thinking we are already doing enough,
too much. One person recently remarked to me: "I'm in my 50's and I've
done enough. Let the world do something for me for a change." The world
is doing something for
us. It is giving us the opportunity to break open our hearts. What greater
gift we could receive?
What I am describing tonight –to live awake, to be engaged in
the pain of this world just as we are in the joy of our lives–This is
to live in a state of paradox, which can only be found in the heart. This
is what is different about this night.
I
believe with all my heart that there is a vein of gold buried deep in our
world. Buried deep in the night. Ohr
Zarua la'Tzaddik. The Light is hidden deep down and only the Tzaddikim
of this world know exactly where. The rest of us must rely on signs.
Most
recently, my sign has been my tears. My tears these days are like a river
breaking through my own well-built levies, leading me to what is most true
in my life right now. When I get close to that kind of knowing, it is as if
an internal dowsing rod shakes and trembles inside, pointing the way to my
next steps. For me, my next steps face outward toward the world, and into
the dark night. The question that accompanies my steps is: How can I leverage
myself, my skills, my talents, to do the most I can do in the remaining years
of my life?
My
tears are my sign; what is your sign? What makes your divining rod tremble?
What is your defining truth that takes you down into your vein of gold, into
your deepest knowing, into your heart of hearts, and beyond your heart, to
the heart of the world?
I do
not know what the answer is for you but I do know the following:
-My
tears flow at the power of prophesy, Ruach Hakodesh, that came through our
beloved Rabbi Bronstein in her call to take action in the Sudan last year,
an action that is changing the course of our community, and the course of
the lives of young Sudanese women.
-My
tears flow when I hear 28 year
old Mikelina, tell her story of escape from rape and slavery in the kukuma refugee camp in Darfur. (She will be at CNK services
on November 4th to tell us all her story.)
--My
divining rod trembles to be a rabbi in Boulder in 2005; to be working respectfully
and lovingly with the other rabbis despite very different understandings and
practices of Judaism. I am moved that our community is joining with two of
these communities in Boulder, to bring 14 young Sudanese women here to Boulder
this November.
-My
divining rod trembles to know that the heart of the Nevei Kodesh community
is opening to a larger goodness, in the form of this project and others, that
we are reaching out of our own comfort zone into the worldÉreaching
out right here in the Boulder community as well as beyond. Many projects are
in the air. But as my husband David tells me: Talk is cheap.
Let
us act. I invite you to join me in taking action this year, in crossing
the boundaries of our personal lives, crossing the boundaries of our personal
comfort, to face into this dark night with all of who we are.
Because
buried underneath the mess and morass that we find ourselves in, beneath the
unspeakable shame of our culture, I feel certain, is a vein of redemption.
We must find this vein. Each of us in our own way. Putting our ear to the
ground, listening for how the Shofar is calling to us, individually. Tehom
el tehom koreh el kol tzinorecha,
I believe that deep calls unto deep; That in the wet depths of our hearts
lies redemption, and that if we are listening, each one of us will feel the
pull to our deepest knowing, to our deepest share of the work. May this night
truly be different. May we have the courage to stay awake and face into the
darkness, and turn it into a blaze of love.
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