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January 2025

In hope

Shnirele-guitar

Shabbat morning: I sat down in the sanctuary to tune my guitar. I like arriving early and playing a little bit of music for God. In summer I sing to the birds and the trees and the herbs in our pollinator garden. At this season I sing to the snow-covered landscape. And always to the silent Presence that fills every room when I open myself to notice. On this particular morning my fingers plucked their way to chords that fit a half-forgotten melody. It was insistent in me. It wanted to be remembered.

I sang the melody haltingly to myself. After a few minutes I realized it was Shnirele Perele, a Yiddish folk song I learned 25 years ago from Rabbi Arthur Waskow. I remember tears in his eyes and his voice as he sang it. He was so suffused by fervor for the hope of a better world. He is in his 90s now, still writing contemporary midrash, still working toward a world redeemed that he will surely not see. Then again, these days I don't imagine I will live to see it either. It was easier to feel hopeful then. 

The Yiddish lyrics were written down a mere 125 years ago. They promise that Moshiach will come this very year; that our redemption is at hand. What a fervent prayer that must've been in 1901, after the pogroms that characterized Jewish life in Russia and elsewhere in the late 1800s. (And after the centuries of persecution that preceded those.) Can we even imagine a world without injustice or suffering or hate, a world where we can be who we are as Jews without fear? 

When the first daveners arrived, I taught it to them. We used it as the melody for Modah Ani, our morning gratitude prayer, and for Adon Olam. My subconscious brought it back to me, I decided, as a reminder to lean into the messianic hope inherent in Shabbat. As broken as our world has been over the last week, Shabbes comes to remind us that we can live into the hope for better. Is there any more quintessentially Jewish act than that? Amidst the world's shards, we live in hope.

 


Shnirele Perele performed by the Klezmatics in Berlin, 2007

Na'aleh L'artzeinu: a simple melody with an intricate story, the musical history of this melody in both Hebrew and Yiddish modalities

Lyrics in Yiddish, English, and transliteration

Coming Soon, a daily April poem inspired by this Yiddish folksong, 2013

 


The only way is together: Beshalah 5785 / 2025

Together-Beshalah2025

This week’s Torah portion contains one of the most visually beautiful passages in Torah. Some compare this calligraphy to brickwork, like the bricks Torah describes our ancient ancestors making for Pharaoh. Others compare it to waves, like the sea we crossed en route to freedom.

Hebrew

This is the Song at the Sea, which linguistic scholars tell us is one of the oldest passages in Torah. It’s the origin of the words of “Mi Chamocha,” the song of liberation which we sing at every service: “Who is like You among the gods, Adonai? Who is like you, wondrous and holy?” 

These are the words our ancestors sang upon crossing the sea and escaping Pharaoh. For our mystics, this story is an example of deep inner faith. After all, we walked into the sea not knowing if it would part (and many midrashim suggest that it didn’t part until the last minute.)

In every era we find ourselves walking into the sea hoping it will part. Sometimes this is individual. We each cross challenging seas in our personal lives: a diagnosis, a job loss, a grief. And sometimes it is communal, as in our ancestral story where we all seek safety together.

Torah teaches that a mixed multitude left Egypt. Just so in our day: we are not seeking freedom alone. On the contrary, I believe that the only way to freedom is together. The only way to a better world is together. The only way to a world of greater compassion and justice is together. 

This week our world has felt very distant from compassion and justice. I’ve felt crushed about the shuttering of USAID, which had been providing AIDS medication across Africa, defusing landmines in southeast Asia, and caring for malnourished babies and toddlers in Sudan. 

Some of you may know that my ex-husband Ethan lived in Ghana. I was blessed to travel there with him twice in his years running Geekcorps (“like the Peace Corps, for geeks.”) I only spent a few weeks in Ghana, but it was enough to give me a lifelong feeling of connection.

The people I met in Ghana were amazing: musicians, teachers, traders, digital entrepreneurs and more. And every Western geek I met who spent time in the developing world through Geekcorps came away spiritually transformed (though that’s my term, not theirs.)

The thing is, people everywhere are amazing. And that includes people in every place where USAID worked, all over the world. This funding freeze is catastrophic. Even a 3-month pause will result in 136,000 babies born with HIV. (And HIV is only one of the organization’s concerns.)

I want to note that the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global health program implemented by USAID in more than 50 countries, was founded 20 years ago by Republican President George W. Bush. I do not see this as a partisan issue. I see it as a moral issue.

The United States spends less than 1% of our budget on foreign aid. For us as a nation it is a minuscule amount. And for many, that tiny amount of money was the difference between famine and food, between having mosquito nets for malaria or retrovirals for HIV and not having them.

I’m ashamed that our country is withdrawing humanitarian aid from people who need it – especially when we can so easily afford to provide it. I asked our reps in Congress to do something, but I don’t know if they can. And then I donated to the Berkshire Food Project.

The best answer I know to the feeling that we are squeezed tight in the narrow straits of injustice is to do something to help someone else. Join our Hesed (Caring) committee and bring a meal to someone who’s sick. Join the hevra kadisha, the group that prepares us for burial.

Or join up with a secular group that is working toward or supporting a cause you believe in. Maybe it’s supporting teachers in an era of book bans. Maybe it’s supporting immigrants and refugees. Maybe it’s supporting vaccination access to help keep our communities healthy. 

I know this may sound pollyanna. It is a drop in the bucket compared with everything that needs repair. But I believe it is how repair happens: each of us doing what we can to help others. Tikkun olam – “repairing the world” – is a Jewish imperative. It is our obligation as Jews.

Our job is to bring repair, and as CNN notes, right now some people are doing everything they can to break things. If you’re feeling a disjunction around that, you are not alone. Of course, many of us feel deeply connected with one of the places in the world that may feel most broken.

Many of you reached out to me in dismay this week over the suggestion that the United States should “own” Gaza and relocate its population. Many American Jewish groups, including the Reform movement, oppose this as ethnic cleansing and not an expression of our Jewish values. 

I’ve also heard a lot of fear that even this suggestion of a plan may jeopardize the ceasefire and put our beloveds at risk. For my part, I still hold out hope for organizations like Women Wage Peace, Standing Together, and Women of the Sun, who are working toward justice and peace.

Whatever our views on Israel and Gaza, I invite all of us to Drawing Through Conflict, a March 9th program organized by our Israel / Palestine Learning Committee, where we will use art to explore our personal relationships with the peoples and places of the middle east. 

I am really excited about this program, and I really hope you will all come. You don’t need to be an artist to participate. No one’s going to try to convince anyone of anything. All of our perspectives are welcome. And we can learn more about each other, with care and curiosity. 

I believe we owe it to each other to support each other as Jews even when we disagree. I also believe we owe it to our secular community to find ways to support those who are vulnerable, even when that means partnering with others with whom we might not agree on everything.

When Torah says a mixed multitude left Mitzrayim with us, that means it wasn’t just us. The Exodus was for everyone who was seeking freedom, Jews and Egyptians alike. Maybe that was hard for our ancestors. But we did it anyway, because freedom is for everyone, not just for us.

Literally Mitzrayim means Egypt. But in a bigger-picture sense, mitzrayim is wherever we experience being min ha-meitzar, “in narrow straits.” We are in mitzrayim now. The only way to freedom is together, even when we differ.  It’s our job to help each other cross the sea. 

 

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


The big picture

Everything is interconnected. I take this as an article of faith. It is a first principle, like gravity. 

In a human body, everything is connected. I know that sometimes pain over here is actually caused by something wrong over there, because the systems of our bodies are not wholly discrete. Among human beings, everything is connected: no one is an island. And any human being with empathy and compassion feels-with others, which means that what happens to you can have an emotional impact on me and vice versa.

Premium_photo-1712225701707-cab02819c6cfOn our precious planet, everything is connected. Wasn’t that the world-changing insight of seeing our planet from space for the first time? We realized that no matter what international boundaries we may draw, what happens here can impact over there. Pollution knows no borders, and pandemic knows no borders. Thankfully hope, care, and connection don’t need to stop at borders either. 

Interconnection is a spiritual truth. As Rabbi Arthur Waskow has taught for decades now, we breathe out what the trees breathe in, and the trees breathe out what we breathe in. In this way we are “interbreathing.” (In the words of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh of blessed memory, we inter-are.) Maybe that’s what our sages meant when they named God as Nishmat Kol Hai, the breath of all life. “God,” that shorthand word encompassing all of our highest ideals of the holy, can be found in the sanctity of the planet's shared breathing in which we keep each other alive.

And yet.

A Gulf researcher at a federal agency, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that her colleagues began removing, pre-emptively before Trump’s inauguration, language from their files that might rile future administrators. Anything related to the climate crisis, of course, but also, she said, any reports that used the concept “One Health” – a term adopted by federal scientists and doctors that means approaching a problem holistically by examining the “interconnection between people, animals, plants and their shared environment”. Seeing the big picture is now verboten. [Source, The Guardian - emphasis mine]

Now apparently reference to the interconnectedness of all things is being edited out of scientific papers. As though fundamental truth could be wiped out with the stroke of a pen.

In recent days, some on the Christian right have named empathy a sin. That’s as baffling to me as saying that we shouldn’t consider the big picture. I believe that empathy is a moral and spiritual imperative. We have to open our hearts to the feelings, experiences, and needs of others. This is a core human faculty. Spiritual life calls us to be compassionate. When I see someone who is hurting, I can imagine what it would feel like to be in their shoes. And, ideally, that imagining moves me to engage in the ethical mitzvot that Torah describes: feeding the hungry, caring for the powerless, loving the stranger. 

Doing right by others can take so many different forms. On a global scale, caring for others might look like providing AIDS medication across Africa, defusing landmines in southeast Asia, and caring for malnourished babies and toddlers in Sudan. Actions like these bring moral principles to life. They’re the right thing to do. Perhaps you’ve already guessed that the actions I just listed are all part of the work of USAID, which seems this week to have been frozen by the same people who deny the interconnectedness of all things. (Evidently they seek to shut it down altogether.)

GioxaTPWkAAfqlEMaybe you saw the image that was circulating this week of janitorial staff at Quantico, where the FBI is headquartered. It shows staff following instructions to paint over a mural that until last week featured the words “FAIRNESS,” “LEADERSHIP,” “INTEGRITY,” “COMPASSION” and “DIVERSITY.” [image source, NYT | article source, WaPo]

The mural isn’t the point, of course. The words themselves aren’t even the point. I just can’t wrap my mind around a worldview in which one would try to erase these qualities or would regard them as a negative. Fairness, leadership, integrity, and compassion are among my guiding lights; I wouldn't want to be otherwise!

And diversity is core to the splendor of creation. Torah teaches that humanity is created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, which means our diversity is a reflection of the Divine. Our diversity is holy. 

What upside-down and backwards world is this, in which empathy, integrity, and compassion are disparaged and the fundamental interconnection of all things is denied?

It can be difficult to cultivate hope in the face of gratuitous cruelty like the decision to withdraw humanitarian aid from people in need. I remind myself, again and again, that hope is not a feeling: it is an action. Hope is a discipline (thank you Mariame Kaba.)

I sustain hope by holding on to what I believe. And I believe that our world is interconnected. Our hearts and souls are interconnected. Empathy and compassion are good things. Human beings have a responsibility to each other. Integrity and fairness are among the highest of human ideals and we should aim for them always. All of these are part of the big picture of ethical life in our world, and none of them will ever stop being true.

There's much in the world that you and I can't control. (Though we can contact our congresspeople to express our views -- here's a useful starting point.) But we can all aim to follow the instruction of our sages in Pirkei Avot 2:5: "in a place where there are no mensches, be a mensch." In a time when a lot of people seem to be making (or overlooking) unethical choices, we can choose otherwise.