There's a stillness at the end of the year. In my home right now that's literal: my son is at his father's for a few days, so it's quiet enough to hear the hum of the heating system trying its best. (Usually there is a soundtrack of bass practice and YouTube.) But it's an existential quiet, also. A hunkering-down. I am wrapped in blankets. My soul feels like a small ember protected by cupped hands. 

I read an essay this morning by Rabbi Jay Michaelson titled Check In on Your Elephant. He means the mental elephant in the room, the anxiety or fear or whatever we each are feeling about the next four years. He writes about how basic mindfulness can help us "notice the seed of a political thought before it germinates into poison ivy." I like how he writes about pursuing truth as a spiritual practice. 

I laughed out loud at his description of getting comfortable with the itchy feeling of wanting to click over to the news constantly. "It me," as the kids say. Over and over again during the day I catch myself wondering, I wonder what new outrage has been reported, I should go look. But should I really? Does it help anyone, or does it just ratchet up the anxiety and leave me marinating in cortisol? 

(It's the latter.) Jay proposes that "ordinary people can resist, simply by continuing to live our lives. We can and should continue to build communities we want to live in that are inclusive, welcoming of intelligence and culture and creativity and, gasp, diversity." We can and should and must. It doesn't feel like "enough," but then again, what would feel like enough in times like these? 

Mit en drinen, amidst everything, here comes Chanukah. I read a good essay by Talia Lavin about Chanukah (Gilt by Assonciation; find it beneath the photo of the panel from the Arch of Titus.) Talia knows how to turn a phrase, and her essay is worth reading -- not least because she unpacks and explores many of the elements we associate with Chanukah and shows where they came from.

But one thing she doesn't talk about in that essay is the theme of enoughness, which for me is the most resonant element of the Chanukah story. Yes, even the letters on the dreidl are borrowed from somewhere else and the motto "A Great Miracle Happened (T)Here" was mapped onto them. But the miracle that in our sacred story, what little we had was enough...? That's still real and sustaining.

I don't need the miracle of the oil to be a historical truth, any more than I need the Exodus to be a historical truth. What matters to me is that since time immemorial these are the stories we tell about who we are. As a people we have known tight straits, and we choose service over servitude. As a people we choose the leap of faith of creating light, even when our spiritual reserves feel low.

It is easy to feel as though nothing is enough. Nothing we can do to protect human rights feels like enough. Nothing we can do to welcome and uplift and protect the immigrant or the stranger feels like enough. Nothing we can do to mitigate the climate crisis feels like enough. Chanukah teaches otherwise. Chanukah says: our souls are God's candles, and together we bring light into the world.

The other text that is rattling around my mind and heart today is Katherine May's Wintering, which I have been slowly reading over the last few months. It took me a while to get into it, maybe because there's so much I want to resist about winter -- both its reality and its metaphorical meanings. But there is a lot of wisdom here, if I take it slowly and give myself time to let the words sink in.

My favorite line (at least today) comes toward the end of the book, and it is this: 

"Like the robin, we sometimes sing to show how strong we are, and we sometimes sing in hope of better times. We sing either way."

Jacob had twelve sons, and his favorite was Joseph, to whom he gave that “technicolor dreamcoat.” (R. Danya Ruttenberg argues that it might have actually been more like a stripey princess dress.) Joseph recounts dreams of his family bowing down to him, which might be why his brothers can’t stand him. They consider killing him. They sell him into slavery.

In Egypt, he’s purchased by Potiphar. That’s when Torah first tells us that God is with him. (Gen. 39:2) Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him, and then falsely accuses him of seducing her. He’s thrown in prison, where again, Torah tells us that God is with him. (Gen. 39:21) 

Abarbanel (15th c.) understands “God was with him” to mean that God was always in his mind. I noticed this year that Torah only begins to say God is with him once he’s in tough circumstances. Was God “not there” before, or was he just not aware of God until then? Did something change within him that enabled him to live with awareness of the holy? 

This week a friend pointed me to a sermon given by Doug Muder at a Unitarian Universalist church. He starts off with a metaphor I heard a lot last month: waiting to find out the election results felt like waiting for the results of a biopsy. And then he tells the story of his wife’s literal cancer journey, offering wisdom about living with uncertainty… which is something we all do. 

Facing a miserable situation like chemotherapy, there’s a temptation to say: okay, I’m going to put my head down and bull my way through this, and once I make it to the other side of this obstacle there will be happier days to come. But there’s no guarantee, and cancer makes that very clear. It’s possible that this is what the rest of life will be. What do we do with that? 

Doug writes: [W]e developed a practice that we eventually started calling “How is this day not going to suck?” Looking at the particular opportunities and limitations of each individual day, what could we do to appreciate being alive? 

Sometimes they could go for a walk. Sometimes his wife was weak from the chemo but they could go for a drive. Sometimes he could read to her in bed. They found what they could appreciate about being alive. 

Maybe because I read Doug’s sermon alongside the parsha, I thought of Joseph. He literally descends, over and over again: into a pit, into slavery, into prison. By any reasonable metric, things just keep getting worse. But as things decline, Torah tells us that God is with him. Another way to say that might be: he found access to hope. He found meaning. He found gratitude. 

I know that many of us are feeling anxiety and fear. Fear of stronger storms and more wildfires amid the rejection of climate science. Fear of the resurgence of diseases like polio and measles amid the rejection of vaccines. Fear of school shootings, like the one this week. Fear of bans on the healthcare that we and our loved ones need. Fear of discrimination and loss of civil rights. 

And I know that in many of our lives there are also personal challenges and difficulties. A diagnosis, or injustice in the workplace, or a sick family member. Sometimes these are invisible to everyone around us, which makes them feel even more difficult – “I’m going through this and no one even knows!” Like Joseph, we might feel that our circumstances are getting worse. 

So what can we learn from Joseph in this week’s parsha? It looks to me like what got Joseph through these downturns was the fact that, as Torah says, God* – asterisk: whatever that word means to each of us: God far above or God deep within, a relational God or a transcendent God, or maybe not “God” at all but rather Love or Justice or Meaning – God* was with him. 

And God* is with us, if we allow that to be true. If we notice. If we cultivate awareness of the holy. The Kotzker rebbe asked, “Where is God? Wherever we let God in.” When we choose hope, seek meaning, and cultivate gratitude, that’s one way to understand God being “with us.” We experience the world differently when we make a practice of those things.

A community member pointed out to me this week that African Americans are not new to thriving despite injustice, and can be our teachers. In the words of Rev. Gerald Durley, a contemporary of Martin Luther King: “I talk to people who are depressed… and I remind them, this is not our first [struggle].” We shall overcome someday is a fierce expression of hope. 

Hope is a discipline, and we can always engage in it, even if life has dealt us the worst hand of cards. Meaning is something we make, and in the words of Maria Popova, we “make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair.” Gratitude is a practice, and every day gives us opportunities to get better at it. (“Yippee, another effing growth opportunity.”)

All of these come with the risk of spiritual bypassing, using spirituality to pretend away brokenness. Suleika Jaouad writes beautifully about this: both about seeking small joys during cancer treatment, and about the spiritual danger of toxic positivity. But lately it seems to me that many of us are erring on the side of feeling the brokenness too much, rather than too little. 

I invite us to be like Joseph. Even in tight circumstances, we can experience God’s presence with us. We can seek hope, and meaning, and gratitude. We can ask, “How is today not going to suck?” We can help each other ask, “How is today not going to suck?” – because sometimes when we can’t find hope for ourselves, we can find it for someone else. 

This is the balancing act: being present to what is, even when “what is” is difficult – and cultivating an appreciation of how lucky we are to be alive. And, like Joseph interpreting dreams for his fellow prisoners, we can attune ourselves to how we can be there for each other. Often helping someone else turns out to be the best way to lift ourselves up, too. 

May we take strength in that work in all the days to come… starting now, with the winter solstice and the return of the sun’s light.

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.)

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.