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We begin the new year with a question: Ayecha? the very first question in the Torah: Where are
you? Back
in the Garden of Eden, this question was an icebreaker, an opener to self
inquiry and conversation…and so it is to this day.
First, Ayecha? as community: This year at Nevei Kodesh, we have
experienced enormous internal growth and clarification. Here are a few of my
favorite snapshots from the year:
- In a beautiful mountain setting, thirty plus NK devotees hammering away at
our strategic plan to distill our community’s unique genius and how to make it
sustainable for our next gen’s.
-Praying in nature at dawn: Dew
still wet on the grass, the morning minyan a circle surrounded by another
glorious Wednesday.
-Celebration! 15 fabulous bar and
bat mitzvahs called to the Torah, many have profound impact on us adults. One
Snapshot stands out: Shash Dimson chanting his haftara, first chapter of
Isaiah, to Pink Floyd’s THE WALL. The entire crowd is singing along. While unconventional, this is a haftara that will never be
forgotten.
These are many other snapshots point to what we at Jewish
renewal have been working at for a generation now: All answering our core
questions:
-How to bring Judaism
to life in meaningful and relevant ways today?
-How to pass on the joy
and power of what we’ve discovered to our
But this year, it seems
that our core questions about Jewish continuity have been overshadowed by the
tremendous upheaval and heartbreak we are experiencing in the world around us. When I was growing up
there was one central question that buzzed within Jewish life: Will
the Jews survive? Today that
is no longer the question for most of us. Today the uncertainty is not for the
Jews but about the world at large.
This has been an incredible year. We find our selves at
the flashpoint in so many areas: There is probably no one here who has not
been moved, exasperated, troubled, fired up in some way by what is going on
in this country. (Not to mention the world.) We are feeling the changes in our kishkes and under our feet, the crumbling of our investments
and of our old patterns and dependencies; our ailing environment that
alternately storms and burns, the heavy karma of another year of war and the
wounds inflicted through our own human arrogance. Ayecha? Where are we in all of this? And, for that matter,
where is God in all of this upheaval?
(God? She asks? Why
bring God into this? What’s God have to do with it? And who after all, is God?
All these pages littered with god names…you don’t really believe in that do
you?) This year it was this very question
that led me to lead several
month-long seminars on theology here at Nevei Kodesh, in which we asked some
gutsy questions: Not only what do we believe, but what do you really believe? Giving ourselves permission to excavate and
name our image and experience of God.
I would say that for every single participant, the concept
and experience of God was showing up in radically new ways since childhood.
Gone was the Scorekeeper in the sky; gone the King; gone the Father in Heaven,
the Shepherd and even the Wise old man out there. Nor did their experience of
God have all that much to do with Judaism…At first I thought: Oy
vey. What did I open up here?
- God is possibility peeking through our life’s events, even horrible tragedies, asking us to make
meaning.
- God is human
kindness, help, showing up unbidden.
- Still others mused that God is like the totality of all
souls, the sum of all human and creature consciousness together. Something like
a world-wide web.
- God is an energy that I feel
pulsating in my body, palpable in the redwoods, and unmistakable when I dive into fresh cold bodies of
water.
We had broken open the box and out were pouring new
truths. It reminded me of the Chasidic Master Rabbi Baruch, who taught that God
is in the world, just behind the veil, playing hide and seek with us, calling: Come
look for me! Reb Zalman would say God is flashing us… And if we believe fully what we proclaim as Jews, many
of us every day of our lives, Adonai Echad! that God is ONE, then we cannot see God as separate from the
chaos, even the ugliness, of world events. You know I am not an activist. I’ve
always been one of those God people,
If God is possibility,
inviting us to create meaning, urging us to wholeness, then what is that
pounding in my chest if not God, when I read the newspaper and see so
transparently corruption masquerading as doe-eyed sincerity; and watch unending distractions and
finger pointing to avoid resposibility for the most blatant corruption and
underhandedness, to secure personal gain, on the backs of the poor and laboring
classes, I have to wonder: If God is the urge for wholeness then who but God,
the divine urge is screaming inside of me to take action?
And if God is the totality
of souls, then God must be undergoing an upheaval in Her guts, as the gaping
chasm between rich and poor, leaves behind millions of souls who will never
know privilege unless they steal it. If God is the totality of souls, then
there may yet be a riot in God’s quarters.
I believe that God is here
unfathomably within us and among us. Inviting us to break free of our old
identities and allow new images of Her, and more importantly, inviting new
images of ourselves to emerge this new year, so that we can become the
champions of our own destiny, and the destiny of our world.
And just as God is not
separate from the unfolding of world events neither is our Jewish path. We have
survived for thousands of years morphing our language, our customs, but never
our message. It’s a radical message that will not let up and it stems from the
next set of questions in the Torah: Where is your brother? Our progenitor like many nowadays asks back: Hey,
what do I look like? Am I my brother’s keeper?
That
question is still hanging in the air, echoes through the world. And the long and the short of it? Yes, we are.
And so the mandate to be a light in the world, to fight if we must for freedom
and social justice, and dignity for all human beings.
So we may be fired up and
ready to go. But beware the catch. It is so easy to get drawn in to the fierce
urgency of now, but in order to be deeply effective in the world, we must
paradoxically, be able to stop, to unplug from the world, press the mute
button on the outward noise, so that we can listen better to our inner signal,
so that we might follow our heartbreak to action, not the knee jerk. Because we must all take action in this
moment of history, but true action, the action prompted by the soul, requires
listening from the deepest place.
And that is what we are
doing here. Our prophets knew that there is no separation between God and the
fires of this world. But there is also another aspect of God: I call it the
cool river of Being. That timeless current of love and mercy, that we all need
so badly.
Friends, this RH we are
sitting at the ledge. We do not know what the coming year will bring. We do not
know how November’s election will go, or when the financial crisis will bottom
out. There are tipping points too numerous to name. But as we sit here, in the
presence of each other and the changeless and ever changing God, let’s seize
this precious moment to dip into the cool river of being. To be washed clean,
and reinvigorated by timelessness and peace.
May our time together
during these holidays be that dip, allowing us to hear from the deepest place
how we are to be deployed in the year to come, and what area of the world’s
heart break is ours to follow.
Rabbi
Tirzah Firestone
www.tirzahfirestone.com
Please reprint with permission of the author.
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