Universal Good Advice
Sharing my friend's words because regarding the Israel-Hamas war, I think none of us knows what to do or say. But this is universally good advice.
UPDATE: If you wish to donate humanitarian aid, Charity Navigator has put together a resource for the current crisis. For those seeking a nonsectarian organization, Anara is a highly rated NGO with deep roots in Gaza.
From Dancing Into Mourning
Rabbi Jordana Schuster Battis — Temple Isaiah, Lexington, MA
Two weeks ago this evening we gathered in this sanctuary together, dancing with our Torah scrolls as we joined with our klezmer band in our joyous celebration of Simchat Torah. On that holiday each year, we finish our annual cycle of Torah reading and we scroll back to the beginning; we read the story of the death of Moses in the final verses of Deuteronomy and then we roll back to the story of creation and the formation of light from chaos, creation of the first spark of light from the primordial abyss.
In some congregations, the custom is to go from the final verse of Torah to the first verse of Torah in one breath: reorienting ourselves in an instant from death to life-springing-from-chaos and -from-woe.
What a world away that seems now, knowing as we do that only hours aHer we danced our Erev Simchat Torah dance, our world seemed to :p over again from one breath to the next: from the happiness of our holiday to the grief of violence and terror in Israel the next morning.
The grief of this time has been so multilayered: with deep mourning for those murdered in the Hamas terror attack and profound worry for those taken hostage; concern for those we know who are now called to fight or to take care of others during this collective trauma; distress for Palestinian civilians who are now put directly in harm’s way; despondency about the surge of anti-Jewish, as well as Islamophobic, sentiment that is now being freely voiced around the world and in our own towns; fury as media sources and public figures, who have otherwise been allies, take biased views that spur on hatred and violence; anguish about how this conflict is pushing us into corners away from people we love both within and beyond our Jewish community. I have heard stories from people here this week about friendships and families pushed to extremes and tearing apart from each other in response to all of this rawness, fear, and grief.
It is painful in itself that we are in so much pain.
If only we could go back in time to October 6, before our dancing turned into mourning, and wipe the slate clean.
We are one week out now in our new Torah cycle from that story of B’reishit that we started on Simchat Torah and continued last week: the story of crea:on and the Garden of Eden and Cain’s slaying of Abel—the first murder—and how as the first generations went on, the Torah says that God “saw how great was the wickedness of human beings on the earth, that the direction of their thoughts was nothing but wicked all the time” and that God “regretted having made human beings and was heartsick” and decided to wipe the humans that God had created “from off the face of the earth” (Genesis 6:5-7).
Which is how we come to the story of this Shabbat, the story of Noah’s ark. It is so oHen thought of as a children’s story—with its animals counting off two-by-two (or, other verses say, seven-by-seven). But it is really one of our darkest stories of all: the story of how God so despaired about humanity that it felt easier to plunge the whole world back into the primordial depths from before creation than to try to work anything through.
In a week like this, that might feel like our instinct too: too long to just wipe the slate clean and somehow start over again. Before October 7, or farther back. Say, before Rabin’s assassination. Or before the British and the UN drew lines on a map in 1947. Or maybe all the way back to 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Great Temple in Jerusalem.
Though, of course, the world doesn’t work that way. At least, it hasn’t worked that way since God said, after the Flood,
“Never again will I bring doom upon the world on account of what people do, even though the human impulse may incline to evil… Never again will I destroy all living beings, as I have [just] done” (Genesis 9:21).
And God sealed that promise with a rainbow across the sky. A bow, the rabbis say, with its ends buried in the earth, to show that it could not ever again shoot an arrow that would cause such mass destruction.
Even God learned that starting over doesn’t wipe away the problem of evil in the world. As humans, we incline towards evil and we also incline towards good. We each have a yetzer ha-ra and a yetzer tov, and we can’t wipe away the bad without wiping away the good as well.
And, in fact, even within those stories of the beginning of Genesis in which there is so much wickedness, there is so much good as well: Adam’s naming of the animals and Eve’s curiosity; Abel’s shepherding and Cain’s farming; Yaval who is named in one small verse as the inventor of tents, and his brother Yuval who invented the lute and the flute, and Tuval-Kayin, who worked in metal and was the progenitor of all artisans (Genesis 4:20-22). And above all in Genesis the recognition: “It is not good for a person to be alone” (Genesis 2:18) and that we are each our brother’s keeper (Genesis 4:9). We so deeply need each other. Each other is who we have. Even when—even though—so much is wrong.
The Chasidic rebbe Sholom Noach Berezovsky gave a teaching, collected in the volumes of Ne-vot Shalom, based on the story of Noah’s ark about what to do when we feel flooded by the world’s terrors and grief. He taught:
“When a person feels lowly and depressed, the recommendation is [just as God told Noah]: ‘Make for yourself an Ark…’ (Genesis 6:14)
“Within each person, there is extant a godly spark, from which they can derive ethereal powers and therefore can raise themself up. Each person has their own “Noah’s Ark,” that can save them from the Flood. Whatever a person can see, even under the most difficult of circumstances, from which they refuse to retreat—this particular something is their “Noah’s Ark” that can save them during the most difficult of times.”
Or, as Israeli journalist Sivan Rahav-Meir summarized this same teaching—she wrote: “There is always something small but positive within ourselves that we keep watch over, and which actually watches over us. Each person has to ask [themself]: What is my ‘Ark’?”
What is my Ark?
In a dark time, this teaching goes, what we need to do is look for our own inner flame and keep it lit. It is this flame that connects us to ourselves and to the divine and to others as well: when we keep our own flame shining brightly we can be more aware of others’ too. And if we don’t know what our own flame is—when we cannot find it—someone who knows us and cares for us can help us see it in ourselves and help us to breathe it more fully into life. It is not good for us to be alone. We are our brothers’ keepers.
Photo Credit: Anthony Quintano from Honolulu, HI, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
It is that light that we find in ourselves and that we are instructed to look for in others that keeps us from the chaos, from the Flood. It is recognizing that light in each other that keeps us from dehumanizing the other—because our tradition teaches us that every person has within them both the inclination toward evil and also toward good.
What can we do but keep naming things and being curious, shepherding and tilling the soil, creating dwelling places and music and art, and inviting each other in? What can we do but look for the light?
Our dancing may turn to mourning but, the Psalmist says, we will turn to dancing again (Psalm 30:12), whether in moments of light now or in farther off joys.
In this Ark of Shabbat and in being together two-by-two or seven-by-seven—in pairs or in groups—may we name the light we see, and in so doing, dispel the darkness.
Shared with permission from her sermon given on October 20, 2023.