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."

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?

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.

The news out of the Middle East is not good. (Understatement.) It looks like the wider regional war -- the one everyone's been saying all year that we need Israel and Iran to avoid -- is beginning. Which might mean that, as horrendous as the last 360 days have been, we may be headed for worse.

It's a good thing I spent part of this year learning how to recognize and work with trauma reactions, including my own. The panicked feeling in my stomach, the shortness of breath, the tears banging at the back of my eyelids, the paralysis and fear -- hello, trauma. I don't want to welcome you back in.

But I've learned that trying to pretend trauma away doesn't work. And neither does squeezing my eyes shut and begging God to make the world different. The only path forward is to soften, thank the trauma for trying to take care of me, and use my meditation tools to help the grief and fear drain.

You know what I can't fix? The Middle East. Anything happening in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, or anywhere else. (While we're at it: I can't fix American xenophobia, one political party's plans to deport tens of thousands, or the likelihood of post-election violence, either.)

I can't fix climate crisis denialism, or the impacts of Hurricane Helene, or rising antisemitism and Islamophobia and transphobia, or any of the things that are ratcheting up anxiety until I feel -- so many of us feel! -- like an over-tightened guitar string that's about to break. I cannot fix any of it.

So I make challah dough, listening to psalms, softly singing the Thirteen Attributes. "Adonai, adonai, el-rahum v'hanun -- Yud heh vav heh, compassion and tenderness..." I run the dishwasher and put away clean warm plates. I set the table for the new year 5785, literally and metaphorically.

I think of everyone whose holiday table will be incomplete. I think of everyone who won't have a table or a place to celebrate at all. I think of scenes of devastation, from the Middle East to Appalachia, and I pray for safety and tranquility and kindness. I pray for all of us to be able to take care of each other.

Most of us don't have the power to fix the big things that are broken. It's simply not in our hands. But we can fix what we can reach. We can find the next good thing to do. "We must love one another or die," Auden wrote. It's and, really. The second part of that line is inevitable. The first part is up to us. 

Reading B’ha’alotkha this year, what jumps out at me is Pesah Sheni. God spoke to Moses saying, the children of Israel should make the Passover offering at the appropriate time. Except there were some people who couldn’t make the offering because they had come into contact with death. So they came to Moses and said, what about us? 

Moses asked God, and the answer he received was: anyone who couldn’t observe Passover at the right time, because of an encounter with death or because they were on a long journey, can make the offering at the next full moon. (Num. 9:10-12) In other words: if we miss the appropriate time and place for Pesah, we get a second chance.

We've all regretted something we didn’t manage to do. Maybe it’s something personal: I wish I’d done more to encourage people to vote. Maybe it’s something communal: the conversations we began after last month’s initial Israel/Palestine film screening were amazing, I wish we’d started listening and learning together years ago.

Here come these verses about Pesah Sheni to remind me it’s not too late. If there’s something that will bring us closer to God (remember, that’s what a korban / an offering was, from the root that means to draw near; and if the G-word doesn’t work for you, think Justice, or Compassion, or Truth) we get another opportunity.

Granted, Torah goes on to say that if we could’ve made the Pesah offering at the right time, and for some reason we just didn’t, “our soul will be cut off from our people.” (Num. 9:13) For me that’s a descriptive statement, not a prescriptive one. If we don’t engage in mitzvot or connect with community, we’re going to wind up feeling disconnected. 

So much in modern life can make us feel disconnected. I don't think I need to list those things; I imagine each of us could make our own list. And this year, on top of that, painful divisions in Jewish community around Israel and Gaza have made many of us feel alienated and disconnected in spaces where we most yearn to feel otherwise. 

But Jewish life is predicated on the premise that community matters. And I increasingly believe that figuring out how to be in community even when our views on Palestine and Israel differ is some of the most important work we can do right now – as Jews, as Americans, as human beings. 

Recently I read an interview that Roxane Gay did with the author Lamya H, included at the end of the e-book of Lamya’s memoir Hijab Butch Blues. Lamya says:

“I was lucky enough to be part of a very intentional queer Muslim community…. Not everyone was someone I would be close friends with. But because we were building this thing that was deeply intentional, everyone showed up for everyone else. It’s where I learned a lot of organizing skills, in terms of navigating conflict and being around people whose politics are different from yours, who live in the world in ways that don’t match yours – but who you deeply, deeply connect with, and who become chosen family. Navigating all of those things taught me so much about the value of kindness.”

Roxane Gay responds, “When you engage in community with kindness, it makes it possible to navigate all kinds of terrain, both good and challenging.” I read that and I thought: this speaks to me as a member of a broad Jewish community that’s struggling with the challenge of deeply-held views on Israel and Palestine, all rooted in Jewish values, that don’t align.

This year some of us are grieving what our Israeli cousins are going through, and some of us are grieving what our Palestinian cousins are going through. We may feel that difference keenly. But I believe our hearts are big enough to hold it, alongside the common ground that we all want a better future for our beloveds in that beloved land. 

We all want a better future in this beloved land, too. When I read about the plan for a "post-Constitutional" Federal government or those who want this to be a “Christian nation” – when I think about other rights that we could lose – the stakes feel impossibly high. We need each other in Jewish community now more than ever. 

Which brings me back to this week’s parsha. The Hebrew word mitzvah / commandment is a close cognate to the Aramaic word tzavta / connection. A mitzvah is something that connects us: to God (whatever we understand that to mean), to tradition, to community, to each other, to ourselves. 

Torah’s talking about someone who missed Pesah because they were in contact with death or on a long journey. But Rashi expands that. He says, it doesn’t need to be a long journey that keeps us away from mitzvot and community. Even if we were just right outside the door, we can still seek a do-over. 

Framed in modern terms, we could say: no one’s going to police what’s kept us from the mitzvot, from community, from building a more just world. We might feel like our failure to do these things before disqualifies us from doing them now, but Torah says otherwise. Torah says, re-orient, re-align, and try again. That's the work of teshuvah, which is the work of Jewish life.

In an ideal world, Pesah happens at the full moon of Nisan and sets us on a path toward covenant. “We were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, and God brought us out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm: out of servitude and into holy service, partnering with God in building a more just world.” That’s our core story.

In an ideal world, we’re already on that journey. And if we’re not, it’s not too late to start. It's not too late to welcome the refugee and protect the vulnerable and tend to the climate crisis and uplift human dignity. Like the saying goes about planting a tree: the best time to do it would’ve been then. The next best time is now. 

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.)

Image by Stellalevi.

Content warning: there's a disturbing antisemitic quote in the 9th paragraph.

Maybe it’s because I hang out with a lot of rabbis: I can’t count the number of people this week who sent me a link to the current cover story of the Atlantic, The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending. [gift link] It’s a powerful essay. It has much to say about American Jewish history, liberal democracy, and the resurgence of anti-Jewish hate on both the left and the right. 

It raises big questions. Are our safest years over?  What if the acceptance we’ve taken for granted as American Jews has been a historical anomaly? What if liberal democracy turns out to be a historical anomaly? Is it all downhill from here? Add to these the current question of: does soaring public support for Gaza necessarily translate here to hatred of Jews?

These questions precipitated a slow-motion anxiety attack that knocked me out for most of a day. Maybe you've had this experience too: chest feeling constricted as though by an iron band, no ability to draw a deep breath, tears coming in waves like a storm system that just won’t quit. The next day the heart and body feel leaden. One's insides ache. It takes a while to “recover.”

That word is in scare quotes because I’m not sure what it means to recover from an anxiety attack when the sources of the anxiety persist. Here we are, five months in to the Hamas-Israel war that began on Shemini Atzeret. It has been longer and more terrible than I could have imagined.  I don’t think I know anyone in congregational service who isn’t struggling. 

I have congregants on every “side” of this divide, from ceasefire activists to oldschool Zionists. I feel-with all of them: the one who asks, “how can we not condemn indiscriminate killing?” and means Hamas, and the one who asks the same question and means Israel, and the one who says Judaism feels like a burden now because the world uniquely hates us again. 

Of course, the end of the golden age of being an American Jew (as Franklin Foer writes about it) isn’t “just” about Israel and Gaza. It’s a bigger picture of social trends, the liberal dream perhaps dissolving, Trumpism and more. But the fact that hating Jews has become acceptable both on the Right and on the Left is a central piece of the sense that an era has ended. 

This morning’s email from the Forward included one headline about Israeli hostages invited to the State of the Union, and another about a bar in Utah that refuses service to Zionists, because in today’s progressive understanding people who think Israel deserves to exist are often considered akin to Nazis and white supremacists. The cognitive dissonance is staggering. 

A poet-rabbi friend told me recently about a literary magazine now specifying, "No misogyny, no homophobia, no racism, no Zionism." Is this really where we are? Disavow the right of Israel to exist, or be considered as morally repugnant as homophobes and racists? I remember one of the most harrowing lines of Foer’s article: 

“Are you Jewish?” one mop-haired tween asks another, seemingly unaware of any adult presence. “No way,” the second kid replies. “I fucking hate them.” Another blurts, “Kill Israel.” A student laughingly attempts to start a chant of “KKK.”

Foer may be right: it’s possible that our best and safest years as American Jews are over. And in a certain sense, so what? In that case we’re like the vast majority of our Jewish forebears over the last few thousand years. When has it ever been easy or safe to be a Jew? The last 50 years, maybe. But 50 years isn’t even an eyeblink in the long span of history. 

I used to think that humanity had evolved beyond antisemitism, but that seems to be as false as the white liberal American dream that our nation was evolving beyond racism (a dream in which I also partook, until it came crashing down around us). That doesn’t mean we stop trying. It just means the work ahead is long, and the dream of something like redemption is still far away.

What do we do with these feelings? Well, in a few weeks, we dance with them. We make merry. We celebrate Purim – another story in which someone wanted to wipe us out across an empire. (And we wrestle with the violence at the end of the Purim story. Knowing that we’ve been hated for centuries can damage the soul, and so can revenge fantasies, if we let them.) 

Esther has something to teach us this year about the bravery it can take to openly be who we are. To be Jews, even when it isn’t easy. To name the bigotry of Jew-hatred as the cancer it has always been. There is a spiritual lesson here about wresting "light and gladness, joy and uprightness" (Esther 8:16) even from the panicky grip of despair. Even in times like these.

Last week I added wheat flour.
My son had asked for challah rolls
for his lunchbox. My mother's voice
in my mind's ear tsked to think
of all that white bread. Besides,
I reasoned, shouldn't I save
the best loaves for Shabbat
so he'll want to make motzi
on Fridays the minute he's home?
The rolls were fine. More heft
than usual, and stiffer -- still
better than most of what we buy.
This week I said screw it, made
a double batch of the real deal.
Life is short. I learned today
the wife of a friend of a friend
died without warning. When it comes
to obits, the newspaper runs over.
If he gets a foretaste of Shabbes
amidst the din of the cafeteria
is that really so bad? I could use
some Shabbat when I read how
that man called his opponents vermin.
May these knots of pillowy dough
soothe the shudder that word
sends down my Jewish spine
on this brief November day.

[H]is opponents vermin. Learn more at Forbes. (Content warning, Hitler.)

The trees are greening. The vibrant chartreuse of brand-new tender leaves is making its way across the valley and up the hills. There is nothing like this color at any other season. I love it so. 

How can I write about the glorious leaves of the burning bush outside my window when lawmakers across this country are stripping rights from trans people and banning life-saving medical care?

I feel powerless to do anything about Missouri or Montana -- or Texas, where the state Ag department now bans clothing that's "[in]consistent with biological gender." I wish I were kidding about that.

(I mean, Texas has done plenty worse. The governor issued an order classifying gender-affirming care as child abuse. The clothing guidelines are just a surreal topper to an already awful situation.)

There's so much injustice. We must not look away. The Dobbs decision and its impacts. Book bans. Regulating what history teachers can teach. "Don't Say Gay" and all that flows from it. 

And now gender-affirming care bans harming trans children in a third of our country... with every indication that their proponents intend to come after trans adults next. (They're already doing so.)

How can I write about spring coming to the Berkshires when so much is so profoundly broken? It feels like fiddling while Rome burns, or admiring pretty wildflowers while ignoring forest fires. 

Then again, how can I not write about spring? To live in this beautiful world without noticing it, without being grateful, is a dereliction of my responsibility to see with open eyes and to offer praise.

I do not help my friends and beloveds suffering oppression in red states by cutting myself off from the beauty around me. I think of these lines from Bertolt Brecht, from Svendborg Poems, 1939:

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.

There is still beauty, in dark times. There is springtime. There is singing. There are parents who love our children fiercely and want to support them in growing into whoever they most deeply are.

And there's also the terrible shadow cast by those who want to impose their fear of difference or their narrow theology on everyone else. What gives them the right to impose their beliefs on others?

If you're standing between someone and their doctor to ban the life-saving medical care they need (whether reproductive healthcare or gender-affirming care), you're not the good guy. 

And always in the back of my mind now, there's the the awareness that they would enact these controlling policies nationally if they could. Ban reproductive healthcare. "Ban transgenderism."

So I am here to tell you that spring has come to the Berkshires. Daffodils are nodding their heads. The leaves are breathtakingly beautiful. And our world remains broken, and we have work to do. 

What can we actually do?

• Sign Keshet's open letter calling on the Jewish community to take action to defend trans lives. (You can sign as an ally; I did.)
• Join Thrive, The Jewish Coalition to Defend Trans and LGBQ+ Youth.
• Contact legislators (link provided by Keshet) to speak up for trans and LGBQ+ youth. 
• Learn. Read Our state is at war with our family in the Washington Post (gift link). I also recommend Erin in the Morning.

Phone, shut up about the news.
War in Ukraine, assault on trans rights,

a perp walk and its possibilities --
even the very Facebook where people

will find this poem: none of them help me.
Alert me to pay a different attention.

Listen: the red-winged blackbirds are back.
Forsythia blooms across the muddy lawn.

The angle of light has changed -- even when
the mercury drops, the sun's irrepressable.

From here the willow trees look smudged,
sunny haze hinting at leaves to come.

There will always be seasons to notice.
If all else fails, there's always the sky.

our children have to learn
we need libraries
we accept children

I felt so bad for that boy
taped to the cross with
duct tape

God
keep us safe from people
whose parents ban books

Amen.

I am new to the art of erasure poems (and am deeply inspired by Dave Bonta's erasure poems -- here's a recent one that's particularly excellent.)  But I found myself struggling for words this morning. 

Language itself becomes debased, meaning comes unmoored, when people repeatedly insist on things that are not true. This form felt right today. It's my attempt to make meaning out of gibberish. 

(The original text claims to be Sarah Huckabee's "rebuttal" from last night. If you want to read her words, you can easily find a transcript of what she had to say. I won't reprint her words here.)

While I'm here: trans rights are human rights, gender affirming care saves lives, banning books is grotesque, and God is a far vaster reality than what any single religious tradition might claim. 

Updated to add: Thank you to the reader who let me know that I've been hornswoggled -- this is not in fact the text of her rebuttal, it's satire. The fact that I couldn't tell satire from reality does say something about the world we're living in, and about the degradation of truth in an era of misinformation, and about how easy it is to get caught up in the digital outrage machine. I've been reading on Twitter about horrendous anti-trans bills in Missouri and elsewhere, and the ugly rhetoric and triumphalist theology that underpins those, and I was all too ready to take this satire as fact. I should have better media literacy than that -- I should have searched for a corroborating source before getting so angry. I apologize.

Then again, I do like the poem I came up with, so there's that. 

Left: photograph by Leah Millis, part of this series.

Right: poster for today's Stand Out for Democracy.

Two years ago today an armed mob, fueled by lies of a stolen election, violated the United States Capitol. Some carried Confederate flags; others wore white supremacist insignia. The broken glass and splintered doors from their attack on the Capitol have long since been cleared away. The work of reconsecrating the sacred space of our democracy continues. 

I don’t just mean the literal Capitol building, though anyplace where public servants gather to govern with integrity is a holy place in my eyes. Democracy flourishes most wholly when each of us is accorded a full measure of human rights and dignity – in Jewish language, when we honor the innate holiness of every soul. 

Senator Raphael Warnock expressed it this way in his first speech to Congress in 2021: “Democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea: that we are all children of God and therefore we ought all to have a voice in the direction of our country and our destiny within it. Democracy honors the sacred worth of all human beings.” 

As you probably know, in addition to being a public servant Senator Warnock is a pastor, so he frames that idea in religious language. I’m a rabbi, so I do too. But the inherent worth of every human being is a pillar of democracy whether or not the God-language resonates. And let’s be clear: this is an aspiration and a value that our nation is still growing into. 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal..."

That originally meant white property-owning men. Black people were considered ⅗ of a person. White women lost autonomy, property, and rights the moment we married (which we didn't really have a choice about doing). Thankfully human wisdom continues to evolve. Today we sanctify our democracy by equally valuing people of every race, creed, gender expression, and marital status.  

We sanctify our democracy by repudiating the white Christian nationalism implicit in the Jan. 6  insurrection, and by rededicating ourselves to pluralism. White nationalists think that diversity is a weakness, but that limited and limiting worldview tarnishes the splendor of what humanity can be. Our diversity is an integral part of the America we want to call home. 

We sanctify our democracy with every act of justice – with every act of truth-telling – with every act of integrity. We sanctify our democracy when we resist falsehood and demand accountability. We sanctify our democracy when we live up to our responsibilities to one another and our responsibilities to those who are most vulnerable. 

Rep. John Lewis z”l taught that “Democracy is not a state. It’s an act.” Which is to say, an action. Democracy is something we do – and keep doing. Our nation’s highest ideals have yet to be realized, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying. As we learn in Pirkei Avot, “לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה / It is not incumbent on us to finish the task, but neither are we free to refrain from doing what we can.”

These are the words I shared at the Stand Out for Democracy at First Congregational Church in Williamstown on the second anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.

Sometimes it feels like we're living in an absurdist novel. "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth." (Yep, that's Orwell.) Many today declare lies to be truth. And it's entirely possible that they're succeeding. "I can declassify documents with my mind" is literally absurd, and yet here we are.

Also absurd is the claim that "antifa" was responsible for the January 6 insurrection, when evidence makes abundantly clear that the Capitol was stormed by supporters of the former President and he knew he'd lost. What really worries me is that people who accept "The Big Lie" may be unswayable by evidence, and many of them are avowed Christian nationalists. (That's never good news for us.)

There's a tactic used by domestic abusers known as DARVO: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. (The term was coined by professor Jennifer J. Freyd.) It feels like an apt description for a lot of what's happening the public sphere lately. Did it begin with the reversal of, "No, you're the puppet"? I'm not the first person to make this comparison, but I've been really struck by it lately. 

There is an abusive-bully quality to so many of today's interrelated abuses of power. There's an abusive-bully quality to the authoritarian disdain for diversity. There's an abusive-bully quality to the love of power -- after all, when you're a star, you can do anything to people who have less power than you. And when that's how you treat the disempowered, it makes sense to be afraid of losing power.

Sometimes I wonder how worried we should be that the party of election deniers really admires Viktor Orbán. Orbán proudly champions Christian nationalism. Under his rule, Hungary is no longer a democracy. Authoritarian, nativist, homophobic, wants white Christian men to rule -- how awful and regressive. I tell myself that won't happen here. But it may already be happening here.

What does any of this have to do with Judaism, I imagine you asking. Why are you writing about this, rabbi? Because in naming what is, there is agency. Because the only response I can bear is to double down on our values: truth (there's no such thing as alternative facts), diversity and inclusion, care for others (especially for those in need), equity and justice. Even, or especially, if everything falls apart.

I found the image that accompanies this post via a beautiful essay at On Being: The Absurd Courage of Choosing to Live. The image is by Olivier Otelpa, and the essay by Jennifer Michael Hecht is worth reading.

Every time I see someone talking about rights lately, I find myself thinking about mitzvot (commandments), the core of Jewish life and practice. There are spiritual mitzvot and ethical mitzvot, mitzvot involving relationship between human beings and God and mitzvot involving relationship between human beings and each other. Taking on the mitzvot means accepting obligations: to each other, to the community, to God. The whole system is rooted in an ethic of obligation and responsibility.

Ruth Messenger wrote a lovely piece comparing the notion of rights with the Jewish notion of responsibilities or obligations. She observes -- correctly -- that they're not opposed to each other. There's no reason that being Jewish should be in tension with the notion of human rights. But in this moment, I am increasingly feeling that the American focus on rights and individual liberties is getting in the way of our capacity to recognize our responsibilities to each other and to our community.

I told a high school friend on Facebook recently that I can't understand resistance to gun safety measures. Wouldn't a responsible gun owner be willing to operate within greater constraints in order to ensure the safety of others, most especially our children?  In response, he told me simply that he's not willing to relinquish any of his constitutional rights, period. This sounds like I'm setting up a straw man, but this conversation really happened. Our worldviews just don't make sense to each other.

Intellectually I grasp where he's coming from, but spiritually it feels foreign to me. Part of being in community is balancing what I want with what others need. Living in community means we have obligations to each other. Living in community means giving up some individual control or benefit for the sake of the collective. For instance, most of us might not "want" to give up part of our earnings, but we pay taxes because that's how we ensure roads and schools and necessary services, right? 

I suspect I'm preaching to the choir. If you already agree with me, you're nodding. If you don't agree with me, I don't know that anything I say will change your mind. But staying silent feels like giving up. 27 school shootings so far this year, and it's only May. (Not to mention shootings everywhere else.) The ready availability of guns that liquefy tissue means that no one is safe. Not at school, not at shul or church or gurdwara, not at a nightclub, not at the grocery store. How are we living like this? 

Hillel teaches, "Don't separate yourself from the community." (Pirkei Avot 2:5) Torah tells us time and again that we're obligated to protect the vulnerable. Rambam teaches that it's our obligation to give tzedakah -- not "charity," rooted in the Latin caritas, but giving that's fueled by tzedek, justice. Even the poorest person, someone who needs tzedakah, is obligated to give -- because supporting others is fundamental to community. Obligation to others is fundamental to community. 

And yet in the wake of the Buffalo mass shooting, and the Laguna California mass shooting, and the Uvalde mass shooting, who's framing the gun safety conversation in terms of mutual obligation? I groused to a historian friend: had the Founding Fathers only been Jewish, we might have a very different social compact. To my surprise, she replied that the Founders thought about citizenship not just as a matter of rights, but also as a matter of responsibilities to one another and to the whole!

[T]he founders of this country did not believe in unlimited individual freedom.. . [They agreed that] the best form of government was one in which individuals gave up a portion of their total freedom in order to take care of the community. [Source]

I don't remember learning that in school. I wish everyone did. We give up a portion of our total freedom -- the freedom to do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, no matter the consequences for others -- in order to live in community with other human beings.  We balance what each of us personally wants with some responsibility to the needs of others. That's part of what it means to be a member of a community -- a citizen, part of a bigger whole, responsible to that whole. 

I wish I believed that this framing would shift our nation's echo-chamber conversations about Constitutional rights. (Rights that initially belonged only to white men, though that's a different conversation.) What would our nation be if we focused less on our rights than on what we owe to each other? At minimum, we owe each other the space to live and breathe without fear of being gunned down. Why is anyone's desire to own an assault weapon more important than that?

Two poems that moved me recently:

• Hymn for the Hurting, Amanda Gorman
• At My Kid's Gymnastics Class I Read the News from Texas, Hila Ratzabi

I sat with my twelve year old on the deck, and listened as he chanted the first few lines of his Torah portion. His voice cracked once or twice. That's been happening lately. All I could think about was the parents in Uvalde whose ten year olds won't grow up to be twelve year olds with cracking voices. 

Shortly before we started Torah portion practice, I'd told him that there was another school shooting. I wanted him to hear it from me and not from a friend at school in the morning. I assured him that where we live is one of the safest places to be. He said, "I know, Mom," and changed the subject.

I believe what I said to him. The place where we live is as safe a place as any I can think of. And yet I can't promise him that an angry gunman won't break into his school, or into our synagogue, or into the supermarket where his auntie shops with his Black cousins. I can't promise safety. No one can.

And I don't want to tell him my real fear -- that in Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner's words, our country loves guns more than it loves children. That we're so incapable of reckoning with worship of the 2nd amendment that we will never be able to make this nation safe for him or for anyone. 

After 3500 mass shootings in the last decade, and 27 school shootings this year, Republicans remain opposed to gun safety measures. Anne Helen Peterson notes that this is life under minority rule. Sherrilyn Ifill notes that feelings of helplessness benefit the status quo, and we need to resist that. 

I think of the parents of those fourth graders in Uvalde, a scant 90 minutes from where I grew up. Right now some of them are sitting with the most horrific loss there is. I think of the clergy in Uvalde who need to try to provide comfort for an unbearable grief that cannot, should not, be assuaged.

When I dropped my son off at elementary school this morning, I wanted to cry. I don't really think his school will be next, but some school will. It's an article of faith for me that despair is never the answer, that a better world is always possible. But right now it's hard to see how we get there from here. 

This week's Torah portion, Vayishlach, contains the story from which our people takes its name.

Jacob is on his way to meet up with his brother Esau for the first time in years. He sends his family away: he is alone on the riverbank. There an angel wrestles with him until dawn, and blesses him with a new name, Israel -- "Godwrestler." We are the people Israel, the people who wrestle with God.

Jacob -- Israel -- walks away from that encounter with a limp. His hip has been wrenched; Rashi says it's torn from its joint. I imagine he was never quite the same after his night-time wrestle. Maybe he could feel oncoming damp weather in his aching hip, or in the sciatic nerve that Torah instructs us not to eat.

Our struggles change us. They may leave us limping.

I think we all know something about that now. The last eighteen months have been a struggle. We've wrestled with fear and anxiety, and with loneliness. We've wrestled with disbelief at outright lies about the pandemic being a hoax, or about vaccines being an instrument of government control.

Many of us are grappling with climate grief, the fear that our planet is already irrevocably changed. Or with political anxiety, wondering whether "red America" and "blue America" can really remain one nation. Or with the reality that the pandemic is now endemic and will not go away. That's a lot.

Jacob wrestled for one night and was changed.

How will we be changed by the wrestling we're doing during these pandemic years?

Earlier this fall I had a bout of sciatica, and I went to see my neighborhood bodyworker. She reminded me that when one part of the body hurts, most likely a different part of the body needs work. My lower back ached, so she worked on my hip flexors! Pain often calls us to stretch in the opposite direction.

That's a physical truth, but it landed metaphysically. When despair ties us in knots, we need to stretch into hope. Remember what we learned from Mariame Kaba at Rosh Hashanah: hope is a discipline. We have to practice it, and stretch it, and lean into it exactly when our pain pulls us the other way.

Torah tells us that Jacob's sciatic nerve was wounded in his wrestling. And Torah also references his heel; Jacob's name means heel. When I was getting treatment for my sciatica, my bodyworker picked up my heels and leaned back, pulling on them gently. "I feel like you're making me taller," I joked.

She said: that's because I am. Stress and tension and gravity all conspire to tighten our bodies, but we can lengthen. In fact, every night while we sleep we get taller as we unclench. Just as astronauts get taller when they spend time in zero-gee, away from the literal pressure of earth's gravitational pull.

When she pulled on my heels, I could feel my whole body getting longer: legs telescoping, spine lengthening. We compartmentalize -- imagining that this body part is separate from that one, or that body is separate from mind and heart and soul -- but we are integrated beings: everything is connected.

That's another physical teaching that lands metaphysically. When we tighten up spiritually, that manifests in our bodies. Stress and tension and gravity tighten us, but rest can help us loosen. Shabbat can help us loosen. Giving ourselves a break from the relentless press of news can help us loosen.

So can stretching ourselves toward hope. When the wrestle feels most overwhelming, when we feel most ground-down by everything that's broken, that's exactly when we need to stretch our capacity to hope. Our spiritual practices can help us shift, as the Psalmist wrote, from constriction to expansiveness.

Jacob named the place of the wrestle P'ni-El, the Face of God. May we too encounter divine presence in our wrestling. May our wrenched and tight places give us greater compassion for each other and for ourselves. And may we learn, in our times of constriction, to open up and stretch toward possibility.

This is the d'varling I offered at my shul on Shabbat (cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.) Shared with gratitude to Emily at Embodywork. Image by Marc Chagall.

This week we begin again.

In the beginning, or in a beginning, or as God was beginning to create the heavens and the earth, everything was תוהו ובוהו / tohu va-vohu / chaos and void, and the breath of God hovered like a mother bird over the face of the waters. And God said יהי אור / y'hi or / let there be light, and there was light...

Over the summer, my friend and colleague Rabbi Mike Moskowitz pointed out something I had never noticed about this verse. Before creation, there was already תוהו ובוהו / chaos. The first act of creation,  יהי אור / let there be light is an act of gevurah, differentiating between light and darkness, between one thing and another. But before the beginning, before that act of distinction, chaos already was.

Here we are beginning again. Beginning a new year. Beginning a new Torah reading cycle. And I'm feeling a certain resonance with chaos right now. Maybe you are too.

There's a certain scrambled feeling that comes with making it through the holiday season. We've just gone from Elul to Rosh Hashanah to the Ten Days of Teshuvah to Yom Kippur to Sukkot to Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah and whoosh, where did the last six weeks go, what day is it, who am I again? That one happens every year, but that doesn't make it any less real. 

There's also a unique scrambled feeling arising for many of us this year in particular. There was the pandemic, obviously, and then last spring as vaccines became available we thought we were coming out on the other side. Now, for reasons I don't need to belabor, it's increasingly clear that we're once again in the thick of it and it is absolutely not over yet. There was the election, and then there was January 6, and then maybe we thought we were coming out on the other side. Now, for reasons I don't need to belabor, it's increasingly clear that we're still in the thick of it and it is absolutely not over yet.

תוהו ובוהו: a mess, empty and upside-down, "in a chaotic state." Does that feel to you like it describes the reality of the last year? Yeah, me too. And we're not alone. My colleague Rabbi Michael Latz, in Minneapolis, calls this last year "immense tohu va-vohu." Not just chaos, but immense chaos. Sounds about right.

How do we begin again from this place?

I think this morning's Torah verses offer a blueprint. Yes, everything is chaos. So what does God do? God draws a boundary. And God speaks light into being.

New beginnings take gevurah. They always have, ever since The Beginning.

What boundary do we need to draw between the chaos that threatens to overwhelm us, and the new beginning that we're called to create? What boundary do we need to draw between ourselves and the relentless bad news and drumbeat of news coverage? (Here's a thought: how can keeping Shabbat help us draw that boundary?) What boundary do we need to draw around behaviors -- our own behaviors that maybe don't serve us well going forward, or the behaviors that we as individuals and as a community deem unacceptable?

Without a boundary, without gevurah, everything is s תוהו ובוהו / chaos.

And then what light can we speak into being? Every morning we bless God Who speaks the world into being. Our sages point out that we who are made in the Divine image and likeness can also speak worlds into being. Okay, I can't say "let there be coffee" and cause the coffee to manifest in my hand like Janet from The Good Place. But our words shape realities. Our words impact other people. Our words impact our own internal landscape, too. We can choose to use our words to bring light and uplift and hope, or to perpetuate chaos and falsehood and despair.

This week we begin again. The world begins again. Our story begins again. May we begin the new year the way God begins creation: with gevurah, and with words chosen to bring light into dark places and uplift to counter despair. As my friend and colleague R. Mark Asher Goodman writes,

God made meaning out of the chaos -- something beautiful and wonderful -- and we who are created in the image of God can do the same.

Kein yehi ratzon, may it be so.

This is the d'varling I offered at Shabbat morning services at my shul (cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.)