Dear Friends
Here on Hornby Island, it is dark until just before 8am. I get up before seven (usually), light the fire, open the curtains, and make my breakfast. If I’m late enough and it’s already getting light, I go out, fill my two bird feeders, and put them and some suet out for the birds. One set goes in the front of the house and the other in the back.
Then I put on tallit and tefillin and begin to davven. When I look out the windows or go outside, I watch the dozens of birds flitting among the feeder, the suet, and the ground. They know I’m coming and start their morning meal within a few minutes of placing the feeders.
But when I go out on the back deck, usually at least for the amidah, I’m looking right at a young cedar which is just on my neighbour’s side of the fence. And that tree is dying, along with the other two cedar that have already died on my lot and those of my immediate neighbours.
I recite the Sefaradi version of Birkat haShanim, praying that the Holy One make this a good year for agriculture, for full storehouses. I pray this knowing how close to losing huge amounts of farmland India is, how the American mid-west has been damaged by cold and too much rain, how dangerously low the salmon and herring stocks are in the waters just a few minutes walk from my house.
I close the amidah with Sim Shalom, knowing how violent our world is becoming and how crimes of hate, terrorism, and war dominate the headlines. Even just last night, there was an attack on the home of a Hassidic Rabbi, another explosion in Mogadishu, and the list goes on.
On the one side, this world is so beautiful and awesome. On the other, there is so much ugliness, so little willingness to take personal and collective responsibility for the damages we inflict by allowing extreme inequality and treating our mother disrespectfully.
The single most profound spiritual teaching, found in many of the world’s traditions and also in our own, is that everything emerges from the same source. Evil is a perversion of the good and, as the early Chabad rabbis taught, our task is to help the sitra achra see this truth.
This weekend is a powerful one. Yesterday was a rare three Torah day with Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh, and Chanukkah all united. It is also the Chol haMo’ed between Christmas and the beginning of the secular new year. It is a time of darkness and of light, of relief at the ending of a difficult year and the hope and optimism for the new one. It is a time when winter is made easier for the birds of our island because so many of us feed them and it is also a time when precious cedar are dying from the effects of climate change.
May we resolve to place our energies in the service of the yetzer tov, pledge to win over the sitra achra with love, and help to make the optimism and hope of our liturgy into a concrete reality in Assiyah.
Daniel