When you’re dizzy, fix your eyes on the horizon. Find a faraway point and focus attention there. I don’t remember learning this; it feels like something I’ve always known. I suspect this is a piece of wisdom that came from my parents. As a kid I used to get queasy in the backseat of their big old Cadillac. (This was in Texas, back when gasoline was cheap and no one worried about the climate.) They must have taught me this trick. Somehow it can smooth the bumps of the ride. 

I’m spending a lot of time looking at the horizon these days. We live surrounded by hills, and I love admiring the spot where they meet the heavens. I’ve taken a near-infinite number of photographs of the sky at the horizon as it changes. Lately, gazing at the horizon feels like my childhood exercise of seeking balance and inner stillness in a moving car. The world is moving fast, the road is full of turns, and it is difficult to trust that we’re headed in the right direction.

So as I look at the place where sky kisses the hills, it becomes my fixed point when the world is spinning. I look at the landscape and I think about what lasts longer than we do. I think about how Judaism was around long before any of us were, and how it will be here long after we’re gone. I think about the slow arc of human progress as we try to bend the moral universe toward justice. We’re not the first generation to struggle with how long that’s taking.

Long ago, chronicled in parashat Vayetzei, the patriarch Jacob journeyed from Beersheva toward Haran. He stopped for the night at sundown, and he placed a stone under his head. He dreamed of a ladder planted in the earth with angels going up and down. When he woke, he declared that God was in that place (Gen. 28:16) and he hadn’t known. Spiritual life is a series of these awakenings. We lose sight of what matters, and then we regain it. And again.

And again. Judaism has long embraced the tension between imagining God in particular holy places (e.g. Beth El, the spot where Jacob had his revelation – or the Kotel – or the Temple Mount – or Jerusalem – or the Land of Promise writ large) and imagining that God is everywhere. In Isaiah’s words, “All the earth is full of God’s glory.” (Isaiah 6:3) After the fall of the Temple our mystics imagined the Shekhinah, God’s indwelling presence, in exile with us.

Where is God? The Hasidic master known as the Kotzker rebbe famously answered, wherever we let God in. Jacob figured that out: “God is in this place, and I did not know.” God is always in this place, even in our places of uncertainty. It’s easier for me to see God in the fixed point on the horizon that helps me stay stable and ethically upright. I struggle sometimes to remember that God can also be found in every stone along the twisting path. In this place? Really? 

I find comfort in looking toward the horizon. It’s like looking toward the messianic future of a world redeemed: I don’t for an instant imagine that humanity will get there in my lifetime, but it’s a direction, an orientation. This year I’m trying to learn better how to look down at my own feet on the circuitous path. I want to seek (even if I can’t see) God here in this place. Even when it feels like we’re going the wrong way – even like the whole world is going the wrong way.

Lately a lot of you have told me that you feel like the world is going the wrong way. Some of the rights we take for granted here, like the right to reproductive health care or the right to access the healthcare our doctors prescribe for our children, no longer hold true across the country. Measles seems to be returning; polio might do the same. The climate crisis is in everyone’s backyard, including ours – the Butternut fire in Great Barrington was only just contained. 

It’s so easy to get bogged down in every injustice. So much is not as it should be, which cues up the existential carsickness. But if all I ever do is look at the horizon, I’m not here and now. I’m projecting myself into an imagined future, or maybe into an imagined past. Neither one of those helps anyone. I don’t want to just be a passenger, gazing at the sky. Jewishly I also feel an obligation to do something: to feed somebody hungry, to comfort someone who’s afraid…

I think that’s the real work. It’s ok to feel afraid. And, we need to help each other move beyond the paralysis of fear and instead do something to help someone in need. Find one small good thing you can do for someone in the coming week. This week maybe it’s standing up for trans kids who need support. Donate to the ACLU. Connect with the Reform Action Center, the tikkun olam arm of the Reform movement, to support the LGBTQ community here and elsewhere. 

God is in the fixed point of distant steadiness and is wrapped around us as we traverse every switchback. God is in our hopes for a better future, and God is also in this deeply imperfect present. I think if we can really hold on to that, we might feel centered even when the world feels upside-down. “God is in this place, and I did not know” – I think when we help each other, when we stand up for each other, together we manifest God’s presence in the place where we are. 

This is the d'varling I offered at Shabbat morning services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

Reading the news
is like
waking into
still having
dead parents.

Microplastics
and wars
persist.
Permafrost melts.
Hillsides burn.

Soon, in charge
of health:
a guy
who doesn't trust
vaccines.

No limbic system
was made
for this.
I am
a cracked jar.

I don't like
what I've woven
from my outrage,
every ugly headline
a bold slash
of the wrong color.
What dissonant plaid,
plasticine fabric
dyed with arguments
about who counts.
Righteous indignation
too easily curdles.
Every choice
lays a thread.
Source of Mercy --
Shekhinah wearing
embroidery glasses,
Your golden scissors
like the ones
my mother used --
untie my tangles.

Plasticine fabric. I just read the fascinating essay Ghana Must Go, so those ubiquitous bags are on my mind. 

Arguments / about who counts. This moment in the United States seems full of those: are immigrants fully human? Are trans people? (Yes and yes, obviously.)

Every choice. In the words of the Maggid of Kozhnitz on Chayyei Sarah, "The days of our lives are garments for the soul." 

Source of Mercy... untie my tangles. See אנא בכח, part of Friday night liturgy.

The hills in my back yard, a few weeks ago. They were still colorful then.

"I lift my eyes up to the mountains. From whence comes my help?" (Ps. 121) I am fortunate enough to live in a valley ringed by mountains. I remember when I moved here, thirty-mumble years ago, and I said that to one of my hall-mates in my dorm. She was from Alaska, where there are real mountains. She graciously refrained from laughing. Compared with Denali, the Berkshires aren't mountains.

To me -- coming from south Texas, where the closest thing I knew to a mountain was Enchanted Rock, the pink granite batholith where the seventh grade once went camping -- these hills are miraculous. Yes, there are actual mountains in west Texas, seven hours away by car. Those didn't feel local to me any more than did Colorado, where we went by plane. It's different to live surrounded by hills.

They cradle the valley. They make the horizon feel like an embrace. I take considerable comfort in that. I watch them change colors over the course of the year. They've just put on their late autumn garb: in the distance they look light purple, with patches of dark green where the evergreens have sway. It's not as dramatic as their early autumn splendor, or summer greenery, but it's still beautiful.

The hills remind me that I am trying to take a long view. Not a geologic view, but a generational one. I suspect the rights to our own bodies that we lost a few years ago will not be restored in my lifetime. A few days ago I saw someone comment online that right now feels like living on the coast and bracing for a hurricane, knowing that it will cause untold devastation, not knowing yet exactly how.

How do I minister when so many are devastated and afraid? How do I help those who are not afraid understand those who are? Sometimes I can't wrap my own mind around the harm that I fear is coming. How do I serve from here? One answer is in trying to take the long view. Humanity will persist, and Judaism will persist, though any one of us might not. I try to sit with that knowledge every day.

"My help is from the Holy Blessed One, creator of the heavens and the earth." (Ps. 121) I think of the old joke: "I sent two boats and a helicopter!" But we are the boats and the helicopter. God helps my heart keep beating, at least for now, but what I do with them are up to me. What can any of us do but keep lifting up whoever we can, rescuing whoever we can, however we can?

Attached to the filing cabinet in my office there is a quarter of a piece of posterboard. On it are the following words: “I want to connect people with God.” I wrote them as my rabbinic mission statement fifteen years ago. I was at a retreat for emerging Jewish and Muslim spiritual leaders, and I was very pregnant, which is how I know exactly when this happened. We were asked to write down one phrase that captured why we were going into this work, and that was mine. 

When I was ordained a rabbi almost fourteen years ago, I received a blessing from Rabbi Jeff Goldwasser for stepping into a lineage of teachers. It begins with Moses on Sinai giving the Torah to Joshua, who gave it to the elders, who gave it to the prophets, who gave it to the men of the great assembly. I received another blessing that day offering a parallel lineage that began with Miriam, sister of Moses – a lineage that was lost in history and then recovered again.

I was charged with teaching and preaching and accompanying those whom I serve in a way that brings healing and uplifts wholeness. And a few months later I signed a brit, a sacred covenant, with the first of many lay leaders whom I’ve had the privilege of serving alongside. We’ve updated the brit a bit, but it’s still fundamentally the same: I’m here to serve and to lead, to teach and to uplift, to accompany you as a community and as individuals in whatever life brings.

Looking back on thirteen years of service, what I remember most are intimate moments of connection. An unveiling with only a handful of mourners present. A baby naming around someone’s kitchen table. A pastoral visit with someone who was preparing to let go of this life. The big moments matter too, like Kol Nidre this year with the sanctuary packed full, or for that matter Kol Nidre during the first Covid year when we were all sheltering in place at home…

But in the kaleidoscope of images that arise for me, many are from one-on-one or small group settings. My brit is with CBI as a whole community, and yet I most often experience it as a hundred individual little covenants: with you, and you, and you... 

I still want to connect y’all with God. Though these days I always put an asterisk after “the G-word,” as a reminder that if that word doesn’t work for you, you can substitute words that do. Maybe you want to connect with meaning, with justice, with hope. Maybe you want to connect with our traditions, with the generations that came before us and the ones that will come after. Maybe you want to connect with something that endures even when the world feels bleak.

Maybe you want to connect with Torah. With the Five Books, lovingly handwritten in these beautiful two hundred year old scrolls that need our repair. With commentaries on them, and commentaries on the commentaries. With Jewish legal writings, or ethical writings, or poetry, or music – all of those are also Torah, which means all of those point “in” or “up” or “back” to the Source of All creativity, the source of love and justice in this world we’ve been blessed to inherit.

Maybe you want to ask big questions, like, “Why?” and also “How?” Maybe you want to know how to make meaning when life feels full of grief, or how to stay grounded when life feels full of joy. Maybe you want to find meaning in the passage of time, the holiness of the seasons, our changing planet, the waxing and waning moon, the stages of a human life. Maybe you want to know how the world could have changed so much, or why it hasn’t changed nearly enough. 

To be clear, I don’t personally have the answers to all of these questions. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have the answers to any of them. But I know deep in my bones that Jewish tradition does. And I know that I have the best job in the world, because I get to help you find your answers. And because we’re all growing and changing all the time, sometimes the answers that speak to us need to change as we do… which means the work I get to do is literally never done.

The work of spiritual life is never done. The work of becoming is never done. As long as we’re here, we’re growing and changing – or we can be. My covenant with each of you is a promise to accompany you in whatever life brings your way. 

The verses I chanted this morning also speak of a brit, a covenant between Avraham and Avimelekh. There’s an exchange of some female sheep, which is slightly funny because my given name means ewe. Avimelekh agrees that a nearby well was in fact dug by Avraham – which of course our mystics understand both as a physical well that delivered much-needed water, and as a spiritual wellspring for Torah’s neverending flow of wisdom and insight.

And then Avraham plants an eshel, a tamarisk tree. What’s interesting to me is, our sages don’t exactly agree on what the tree represents. The well is clearly both water and Torah, but the tree might represent new beginnings, or maybe deep roots. Tamarisks can grow almost anywhere, making them akin to the Jewish people. Rashi says maybe the eshel was an orchard, or an inn. Both are symbols of hospitality, which is a quality our mystics often attribute to Avraham. 

I love the idea of planting a tree to mark a covenant. To the Board, please don’t worry, I am not planting another tree on our grounds. I saw how much work went into watering our tiny orchard of baby fruit trees! I’m thinking about a metaphorical tree. A tree is a lot like a community, it turns out. Both need deep roots in order to flourish. Both need an outer growing edge that’s open to new ideas and change, and deep inner rings that record and remember. And both offer shelter. 

My blessing for us, at this celebration of thirteen years of service, is this: like Avraham’s tamarisk, may we be shelter for each other when shelter is needed.  May we sink our roots deep into the aquifer of tradition so that our hearts and souls are nourished. And may we bear the many fruits of sacred community, including spiritual authenticity, readiness to take care of each other when times are tough, and readiness to celebrate together and lift each other up.

This is the d'varling I offered at Shabbat morning services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires as we celebrated my first 13 years of service (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָ''ה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃

יהו’’ה said to Abram, “Lekh-lekha / Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. (Gen. 12:1)

Torah uses many different names for God. This is considered the most holy of God’s names, the one that seems to enfold all possible permutations of Was / Is / Will Be. This is God-Who-Is-Becoming, God Whom we mirror in our human capacity for growth and change. That’s the voice that says here to Abram, lekh-lekha: there’s a journey ahead of you.

This is not the journey any of us hoped to be on right now. I’ve spoken this week with so many of us who feel shellshocked and reeling. Me, too. We’re mourning the loss of a future where immigrants are welcomed, where no kid goes hungry at lunchtime, where climate science and vaccines are honored and understood, where trans and queer people can live without fear. 

And so much more. Our world changed this week in ways I know I can’t yet wholly imagine. One of the most useful things I’ve read in the past few days was an article in Scientific American called Election Grief is Real: Here’s How to Cope. It’s an interview with therapist Pauline Boss, who originated the concept of ambiguous grief in the late 1970s. Pauline says:

We should normalize the anger and the sadness. I think we jump too quickly to pathologize emotions that are scary. I think you need to be patient with yourself if you’re feeling angry, sad, grieving right now. I think that’s a normal reaction to a surprising outcome and an outcome that, in our view, is going backward and not forward.

So accept your feelings. Know there’s no closure to grief. Know you had a loss.

We need to take our time in feeling this – even though frankly it feels terrible and none of us want to dwell on it. But a seismic national shift of this magnitude is going to have enormous impacts, on us and on the world, and if we pretend that away we won’t be in a position to navigate those impacts wisely or well. So the first thing I can offer is: let ourselves feel.

And then here’s a subtle inner shift, when we are up to it. We don’t want to dwell on these feelings, but we can dwell in them – and God* dwells in them with us. (Whatever that word means to each of us right now: source of meaning or justice or hope.) Another of our tradition’s names for God is Shekhinah, meaning God Who Dwells In this broken world… and in us. 

When I say that God dwells in us, I mean possibility lives in us. Hope lives in us. Kindness lives in us. Truth and justice live in us. No amount of cruelty or coercion, bullying or gaslighting, can take these away. They are our birthright, and they are eternal. This is one of Judaism’s core tools for navigating difficult times: knowing that we are part of something that endures.

Pauline Boss goes on to say, one risk of grief is that it can immobilize us. We need to help each other forestall that possibility. She says, “You need to do something active in order to deal with a situation you can’t control… It will help to be active, not just to sit back and grumble and not just to lash out either. Action is psychologically what helps when you’re feeling helpless.” 

This is true from the micro scale to the macro one. One night this week my teen and I baked cookies for one of the kids in his Shakespeare play. It was tangible and grounding: breathing in the scent of chocolate, feeling dough under our hands. And it brought unexpected joy to another kid’s afternoon. Little things like this matter a lot right now. Making and giving are acts of agency.

And on the macro scale: there will be forms of community care and community organizing that we can do in months and years to come, and they will be more necessary than ever before. And that brings me to the other most useful thing I’ve read this week, 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won, an essay by teacher, activist, and author Daniel Hunter.

He begins by pointing out that after pandemic and insurrection, amidst climate crisis (I would add: after a year of horrors in Israel and Gaza, which have had a deep impact on many of us) we are already exhausted and destabilized. “Authoritarian power is derived from fear of repression, isolation from each other and exhaustion at the utter chaos. We’re already feeling it.” 

His first suggestion? Pay attention to our inner state. Trust our own emotional reality, trust what we know and feel and experience, because authoritarianism thrives by sowing and strengthening mistrust. Before we can begin to face trying to do good in this painful new world, we need to tend to our spiritual lives. We are running on empty. We need to care for our souls.

Some part of me frets, reading this: but there’s so much that’s already broken! And it’s going to get so much worse! Yes, there is, and it is. And that’s exactly why each of us must do everything we can to be steady inside, and to trust our own moral and spiritual compass. Judaism has tools for this. (Shabbat and regular gratitude practices are my first two go-tos on this front.)

Judaism has a lot of tools for this, actually. We are not the first generation of Jews to live through massive upheaval. Or to navigate increasing Christian nationalism. Or to figure out how to maintain our ethic of caring for the vulnerable in a time of rising fascism and authoritarianism. Much of human history has looked like this. Much of the world looks like this now.

And some of Judaism’s tools for this moment are a lot like what Daniel Hunter articulates in his essay. We need to let ourselves grieve, even sit shiva for what could’ve been – because if we don’t, some essential part of us may be frozen in the shock of this week, and that’s not good for us or for the world. We need humility, to recognize the vastness of the things we can’t change.

And then we need to find something we can change, and focus there. As I said to my teenager the morning after the election, we will figure out how we can help people who have it worse than we do. “Yeah, Mom. We’re white, we’re middle-class, we’re cisgender – we’re going to be fine. But other people won’t be.” Our job is always to help people who are more vulnerable than we.

So how are we going to help? Daniel Hunter suggests a quadrant of four possibilities: protecting vulnerable people, civil disobedience of unethical policies, defending our existing civic institutions, and building alternatives to what we know now. Sit with those, and see where your heart pulls you. And know that as you sit with this, you are not alone. We are in this together.

“Go forth,” YHVH says to Abram. Go out into the world and make a difference. Or maybe “Go into yourself,” because that’s another way to translate lekh-lekha – go deep, engage in soul-searching, plumb the depths of who you can be. The beauty of Torah, of course, is that the one phrase can be both at once, and both are instructions we need to take to heart this week.

We don’t know exactly what the future will hold. I don’t expect it to be easy. And yet there will also be joy and celebration and care for one another – because no one can take those away. In Brecht’s words, “even in the dark times there will be singing.” He wrote that in 1939, the year my mother and her parents fled the Nazis for what was then the safe haven of America.

No matter what the coming years hold, we know what our tradition teaches: it’s our job to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Source of All. (Micah 6:8) It’s our job to care for those who are vulnerable. To help people who have it worse than we do. To stand up for what’s right. That is always Judaism’s call: in the best of times, and in the worst of times. 

This is the d'varling I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

The verses I chose to read this morning come from the very end of our parsha, when Noah and his family have just emerged from the ark. They release all of the animals, and then Noah builds an altar and makes an offering to God. In return, God makes a promise to Noah and implicitly also to us: never again will God attempt to destroy the earth and all who dwell upon it. 

I gravitated toward these verses because they show us Noah and those under his care emerging after the storm. The worst is over. Now they rebuild. I would love to be able to fast-forward to that part in our collective story. Right now, a lot of us feel like we’re battening down the hatches in preparation for… well, we don’t exactly know what’s coming. 

And that’s hard. As my friend R. Jay Michaelson notes (How To Survive This Week), it’s easier to live with a known outcome than an unknown one, and there’s a lot right now that we can’t know. We do know that, according to a recent Axios poll, a majority of Americans expect that there will be violence on / after election day. And that’s scary. So in R. Michaelson’s words,

[I]t’s quite alright to be anxious as hell. It is justified, it is not an illusion, and things have gone very badly in the past. So whatever you do, please don’t scold yourself for not being enlightened, balanced, wise, mindful, rich, or calm enough to not lose your cool. I’ve met dozens of spiritual teachers in my time, and the ones who pretend to be awesome all the time are faking it… to you or themselves or both. 

If you’re feeling anxiety as the election approaches, you’re not alone, and you’re not “doing it wrong.” You’re just in touch with your feelings. (Mazal tov.) R. Michaelson is a teacher of mindfulness and meditation practices, and his essay has some good suggestions for managing our anxiety, so if that sounds helpful to you, check out his writing today.

I can’t tell you how the next week will go, or the weeks that follow. (Though for my part I am trying to ignore the constant breathless reporting on polls. Polls actually don’t tell us what real people are going to do in real time… or how other real people will respond. Life is a giant multivariable experiment and no one can solve in advance for what the future is going to be.) 

(Yes, my teenager is taking algebra II, how’d you guess?

I also can’t tell you the best way to spend this last Shabbes before Election Day. Some of us may need a Shabbat away from these anxieties, a time to rest and allow our souls to be restored. And some of us may need to be “praying with our feet” – knocking on doors (or phone banking or text banking) to make sure people have the information they need to vote. 

As is so often the case, Judaism supports both of these. Taking today to rest and be restored is a very Jewish thing to do! And pounding the pavement after shul to urge full participation in our democracy is also a very Jewish thing to do. You’ll know best what your own soul needs. 

I can tell you that Jewish tradition offers us next steps, no matter what. Feed the hungry, protect the vulnerable, act with integrity and honesty, engage in community life, take care of each other. The mitzvot give us a road map for building toward a better world. That road map is true and enduring, right and real, no matter what happens next week or in the weeks that follow. 

I can tell you that Jewish values call us to choose honesty rather than deceit, hope rather than despair, uplifting others rather than grinding them down. Jewish values call us to kindness, never cruelty. They demand that we love the stranger – the immigrant, the refugee. They invite us to center the pursuit of tzedek / justice and actions of  tikkun olam / repairing our world. 

The thing I don’t like about the story of Noah is that he doesn’t push back against the Divine plan to flood all of creation. He rescues his own family and the animals, as instructed, but he doesn’t say to God, “Wait a minute, aren’t there some innocent people out there?” As my friend and teacher Rabbi Mike Moskowitz writes, justice isn’t justice if it’s “just us.” 

Whatever arks we construct – whatever structures we build together in our community life – need to be big enough and broad enough to uplift everyone. I pray that our government can be an ark that lifts all of us out of harm’s way, that helps all Americans and ultimately all the world live with dignity and safety, not at the mercy of floodwaters whether metaphorical or literal. 

Maybe our task this weekend is to trust that no matter what Flood might arise, we have the spiritual tools we need to help each other through it, and to help those who are more vulnerable than we are through it. Our task is to remember that whatever the coming weeks may bring, we can and will lift each other up as we work toward the promise of the rainbow on the other side.

This is the d'varling I offered at Shabbat morning services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

"Make the ark with rooms and pens."
Include thick creamy paper, soft
as brushed cotton, and enough ink
to write our way through.

None of us asked to be born into
the generation that might lose
everything: not just homes
falling into the waters

from North Carolina to Alaska
but also democracy. Not just
a free press, freedom to be Jewish,
freedom to not be pregnant

but also the capacity to draw
a full breath. Who does that anymore?
God, please tell me that somewhere
on this rickety boat, tucked

beside hay bales or the barrels
for collecting rain, I'll find hope.
We understand the physics
behind rainbows now, but

I'm still holding You to Your promise
that the cycles of day and night
will never again be blotted out
from the face of the earth.

"[Make it an ark with compartments (kinim)” - with rooms (kilin) and pens (medorin).]" Genesis Rabbah 31:9. Yes, I know the original text is referring to animal pens, not fountain pens.

North Carolina to Alaska. I'm thinking of Hurricane Helene on the east coast, and of recent devastating floods in Kotzebue in the far north and west.

But also democracy. See Trump tells supporters they won't have to vote in the future.

A free press. See We must fear for freedom of the press under a second Trump administration.

Freedom to be Jewish. See Trump says Jewish voters will bear 'a lot' of blame if he loses.

Freedom to not be pregnant. See If Trump wins the election, Idaho's extreme abortion ban could go nationwide. 

Capacity to draw / a full breath. See What is the no. 1 leading cause of stress for you?

"Your promise." See Genesis 8:21-22.

Every time I reflexively twitch
toward news or polls or news about polls
I will write a line of poetry instead.
No, that won't be sustainable, I'd write
an infinite poem. Did you know
there are infinities bigger
than infinity? That's how much
we're carrying this season, bursting
through the flimsy walls of our hearts
like the floodwaters we all just saw
on the news I am resolutely not checking.
Every time I stop myself from doomscrolling
I will study some Torah. That might work.
"Turn it and turn it, everything is in it."
If I lift high enough I remember God's
in everything, even the wrong lawn signs.
Still, all mental roads lead here:
anxious and agitated, restless as Cain.
This is a problem as old as humanity,
though the welter of computer monitors
and phone notifications can't help. I almost
wrote minotaurs. I might feel calmer
in a Cretan labyrinth: only one monster.
Uneasy thoughts, I welcome you
like Shabbes guests. You want to warn me
the world is ending? Message received.
Let's root ourselves again in breath.
The moment I turn myself around
I'm no longer lost. Every time is now.

Turn it and turn it. See Pirkei Avot 5:22. 

Restless as Cain. See R. Yisroel Hopstein / the Maggid of Kozhnitz, Sefer Avodat Yisrael, Bereshit.

Anxious thoughts, I welcome you. Thanks for your teaching, R. Sam Feinsmith.

And as always, to my hevruta partner R. David Evan Markus, thank you for learning with me. 

I don't know what to say as this yahrzeit draws near. Last year we woke on Shemini Atzeret / Simhat Torah (the two festivals are celebrated on the same day in Israel and by Reform Jews everywhere; for other Diaspora Jews they fall on subsequent days) to the news of the Hamas massacre. That night we gathered to dance circles around our sanctuaries with our Torahs, shellshocked and uncertain.

Almost Simhat Torah again. How can we dance in a world so broken? And yet how can we not? Jewish history is filled with times of trauma and terror, and we've never let that stop us from cleaving to mitzvot. The Aish Kodesh wrote that even in grief we must open ourselves to whatever joy we can find, and allow joy to flow in and lift us. (He was talking about Purim, but the point stands.)

Last night I was rehearsing with our Simhat Torah band. One of our hakafot (circle dances) will be to the song Bashanah Ha-ba'ah. "You will see, you will see, just how good it will be..." But sometimes it's hard to hold fast to the faith, or the dream, that better days will come. Here, or there, or anywhere. The drumbeat of sorrow and loss and injustice feels relentless. Here, and there, and everywhere.

This path is a deep groove worn in my heart from a year of grieving. I step outside to mail my ballot and I'm startled by how warm the air is, how beautiful the sunlight filtering through yellow leaves. What if I stop trying to find the right words (as though there were right words) that would make meaning out of all of this -- and just let myself be, breathing here, in the beauty of the broken world?

This old phone no longer charges.
The solution's simple,
a silvered circle. Current
soaks in, awakening from below.

I think about that in the sukkah,
layers stripped away by holiday
after holiday. Low battery so familiar
I forget I was ever otherwise.

The answer is to sit and wait.
Don't close up. Trust
that sustenance exists.
God, remind me how to shine.

I went outside to bentsch lulav -- to take up the Four Species of date palm, willow, myrtle, and etrog, bring them together, make a blessing, and shake them in all six directions. I waited until the temperature rose to 40F (4.4 C) and the white rime of frost had melted. Even so, a plastic flowerpot that had filled with rain had frozen over. I could see my breath. I came back inside pretty quick.

Sometimes I'm mildly envious of people who live in Mediterranean climes at this time of year. I see photos of sukkot in California: open, airy spaces decked with tapestries and pillows because rain is unlikely. It was like that in Texas where I grew up, too. Here in New England, especially when the holidays are late on the secular calendar, Sukkot is cold. We wrap up in lots of blankets. 

Torah doesn't explain the taking up of the Four Species. Maybe in antiquity they just made sense. A lot of people see them as fertility ritual (the etrog could be analogous to the womb; bringing it together with the phallic lulav carries some pretty clear symbolism.) We know that lulav and etrog were taken up and waved in the Temple daily at Sukkot during the centuries when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. 

Midrash teaches (Lev. Rabbah) that of the four species, one tastes good (dates / palm), one smells sweet (myrtle), one is neither sweet-scented nor sweet-tasting (willow), and one is both tasty and delicious (etrog). These in turn represent people who study Torah but don't do good works, people who do good works but don't study Torah, people who do neither, and people who do both. (Be an etrog.)

Sometimes they're understood to represent four parts of the body with which we might serve the One (eyes, lips, spine, and heart), or the four letters in the Holy Name. And they can also evoke four ecosystems in the land of Israel. The lulav / palm hints at the lowlands; the aravot / willows suggest the rivers; hadassim / myrtle, the mountains; and the etrog, the irrigated areas where people farm.

I wonder how many people just stopped reading because I mentioned the land of Israel. I just wrote several impassioned paragraphs about that, and then deleted them. I shouldn't need to present my progressive bona fides in order to meditate aloud on these sweet ancient earth-based rituals of sukkah, lulav, and etrog, and why they connect my spirit with the place where this tradition began. 

All over the world, Jews don't pray for rain during the Land's dry season. (Ending in a few days.) Our daily prayers remind us when the Land relies on dew, and when the rains might come. Local climate notwithstanding, my lulav hyperlinks me with there. "[A]s wines on far continents prickle / to bubbles when their native vines bloom," as Marge Piercy wrote in her poem about Tu BiShvat. 

I love this 2000-year-old connection with the earth and weather, the plants and seasons, in the place where Judaism began. The older I get, the more meaning I find in remembering that the place where Judaism began shaped it, and therefore shaped the spiritual practices we've been carrying with us for centuries. Sitting in my sukkah I'm part of a chain of tradition bridging both time and space.

This doesn't obviate the fact that Palestinians are spiritually and physically rooted in that place too. (And now I've ticked off a whole different group of readers!) I reject the right-wing fantasy of "Greater Israel." I don't know how the two peoples will ultimately coexist, but along with every Israeli I know, I believe that they must. I yearn for dignity, self-determination, safety, and peace for all.

How will they get there? I have no idea. I suspect the folks at Standing Together have plenty of thoughts. The realm of what I can impact feels very small. At least in my own spaces, like this one, I can push back against those who would use this practice to deny another people self-determination, and against those who would deny the geographic roots of this practice and my religious tradition. 

Engaging in imaginary arguments with people to my right and with people to my left does no one any good. I scratch the etrog lightly with my thumbnail and breathe deep, grounding myself in spiritual practice and in things I can touch and sense. The clack of palm fronds. The spice of myrtle leaves. The knowledge that all over the world we are taking up our lulavim and praying for better days.

Sukkot is approaching, the festival where we build little "booths" and dwell in them for a week, representing the harvest houses of our ancestors or the tents of our ancestral wilderness journey. According to the path we call halakha (with which different Jews have a wide variety of different relationships; that's a conversation for another day) a sukkah must be impermanent. A perennial gazebo won't cut it. It has to be something we build and then take down. "Impermanence embodied," Buddhist-inflected Jews like me say. A reminder that there is profound beauty in what doesn't last.

The roof must be made of something that grew in the ground: palm fronds, bamboo, cornstalks, fir branches, whatever grows and can be sustainably harvested wherever we are. This is one of Sukkot's connections to earth-based practice; in our ancestral story we come from earth and to earth we return. There has to be enough roof there that it registers as a roof, but not so much that it blocks our capacity to see the full moon (Sukkot begins at full moon) and the stars. A leafy roof. "A leaky roof," R. Arthur Waskow once wrote -- a typo that can teach us a deeper truth about bittersweet openness.

Here in Massachusetts autumn has arrived. Yom Kippur was unseasonably beautiful, dappled with golden light through autumn trees. Now we've got cold rains. It will be a chilly week for eating and praying outdoors. I predict that at least once we'll wind up citing the teaching that when the sukkah is unpleasantly cold and wet, it's ok to forego the mitzvah and return inside. This morning I went to the hardware store and bought a 50-lb bag of play sand to place atop one of the bottom struts of my sukkah kit, because last night the winds that accompanied the rain blew it halfway across my deck.

Sukkot lands differently this year than ever before. Last Sukkot feels like a time of innocence. Before the Hamas attacks. Before the ensuing war. You don't need me to tell you; you know what the last year has been. Some of our feelings of permanence were shattered on Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah last year. Granted, Oct. 7 didn't come out of nowhere. The horrors of that day are rooted in the complex welter of choices made by people in power across the Arab world and Israel over the last 75 years. Before Oct. 7, I was able to set that aside, living as if it mostly didn't impact me. But it does.

Before Oct. 7, I never imagined that in my own era I would see the world seemingly rejoice at the slaughter of Jews, though probably I should have. I never imagined that the ensuing war in Gaza would result in the loss of so many lives, though probably I should have. I never imagined any of how this last year would feel, for me or for those whom I serve. The activated trauma. The horrors of war seen from afar. The more intimate wounds of friendships and relationships coming apart at the seams. The hardening of positions. The blame. The feelings of unsafety. The grief -- God, so much grief. 

Who am I to teach about impermanence -- the disability wisdom I gave over on Yom Kippur morning; how a sukkah is like a sand mandala is like parenting; the beauty of living and loving in our fragile bodies and homes and lives -- when there's a literal war going on? When many people I know and love, and countless people I will never know, are displaced or homeless or sheltering from rocket fire or unable to shelter from rocket fire? When Jews and Israelis are under siege, when tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, with hostages are still in captivity, as this awful war expands?

And that's not even getting into the climate crisis and the two hurricanes that struck Florida in rapid succession. Those who live in places that flooded, who are without power, who have lost something or anything or everything -- y'all don't need me to tell you what you're going through. And those who don't live in those places have all seen the footage, and I suspect that none of us feel as safe as we did before. Honestly, who am I to teach about impermanence in a time like this? The world is teaching us plenty. And amidst this, we're supposed to resist hiding under our blankets, and instead build sukkot?!

Yes. Amidst this, we build sukkot. We hammer together our metal kits with mallets, or we pound nails into wood. We make walls out of tarps or tapestries or, in my case, the kind of material that waterproof camping tents are made of. We make roofs out of something organic, branches or bamboo mats or armfuls of cornstalks. Maybe we adorn them with fairy lights and pumpkins, or with the Seven Species that grow in the Land of Promise, or with handmade decorations and garlands. And in them starting Wednesday we will bless wine and bread, we will eat and drink, we will be thankful.

I know I can't imagine what it's like to be in flood-stricken Appalachia or Florida or in the wartorn Mideast. And I know I can't regain the innocence of last Sukkot, before I was constantly and consciously aware of so many excruciating things. All I can do is bring all of this awareness with me into the sukkah, and trust that its flimsy, barely-there walls will be strong enough to hold this vast tangle of emotions. (They always are.) So I build. Because building is fundamentally our job as Jews. We build on ancient foundations; we build toward a world of justice; we build and resist despair.

We build because being part of a thousands-of-years-old tradition is itself a form of resilience. We build because we are links in a chain of tradition. A sukkah is like a human life: here and then gone. But its brevity doesn't make it less meaningful; on the contrary! And Jewish tradition and practice don't die when we do, because we teach them to our generations, as our forebears taught them to us. We are impermanent, but the tradition outlives us, and this is precisely how. We build and we beautify. And then we sit in our sukkahs, and even in this broken world we uplift sparks of joy.

Inspired, in part, by this post from Sarah Tuttle-Singer.

The prayer Unetaneh Tokef, which we recite on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, probably dates back to the Crusades, when Christian soldiers en route to the Holy Land slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews. We don’t actually have exact data on the number of Jewish deaths at Crusader hands, though in 1298 up to 100,000 Jews were killed by German Rintfleish knights – and that wasn’t a Crusade, just blood libel! Those centuries were not an easy time to be Jewish.

In maybe its most memorable passage, the prayer imagines that on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, what our fate in the coming year will be. Who will die by fire and who by flood, who by sword and who by beast. Who will be tranquil, and who will be driven; who will fall down and who will be lifted up.

This year, I’m experiencing that prayer through the lens of Kate Bowler’s memoir No Cure for Being Human, which I read this summer, and which opens with her diagnosis with stage IV colon cancer. Bowler writes: 

While I believe that there may be rich meaning at every crossroad in our lives – each meeting and departure, car accident or choice encounter – I do not believe that God will provide for every need or prevent every sorrow. From my hospital room, I see no master plan to bring me to a higher level, guarantee my growth, or use my cancer to teach me. Good or bad, I will not get what I deserve. Nothing will exempt me from the pain of being human.

There may be meaning at every crossroad, but that’s different from claiming that “things happen for a reason.” 

I appreciate Bowler’s point that sometimes terrible things just… happen. We may learn valuable things in our suffering. And we may make meaning from and in our suffering – I hope that we do. But that doesn’t mean the suffering is “good” or that the learning feels “worth it.” I admire Kate Bowler’s willingness to say: from my hospital bed I don’t see a master plan. 

I don’t understand the Unetaneh Tokef prayer as fatalistic, an angry God making threats about how we’re going to suffer. The prayer says, “At Rosh Hashanah it is written, and at Yom Kippur it is sealed,” but that metaphor doesn’t have to mean that God is predetermining anything. Our tradition regards this time of year as spiritually elastic and malleable. We take a spiritual accounting of who we’ve been and who we want to be. We recognize and confess our screw-ups; we resolve to be better. What’s changeable at this time of year is us.

Earlier this summer I started asking, “what do you want to hear a rabbi speak about at the high holidays?” I got a lot of really powerful answers. One of your answers – actually a question – lodged in my heart: “How can we pray to a God who appears not to be listening? To whom are we praying, and for what?” 

The question wouldn’t let me go. So I sat down to answer it, and I wrote pages about how our ancestors answered this question. And then I stopped myself. The question wasn’t, “how did our ancestors pray in their era.” It’s how can we pray in ours. It can feel like God isn’t listening, maybe like God isn’t even there. I mean, God hasn’t fixed anything, so what are we even doing? Who are we talking to, and why?