GOD IS IN THE DETAILS
What, then, are the things I can share which might be useful to klei kodesh who will and already are serving in the midst of both Covid-19 and the climate emergency? There is so much that has already been done to compensate as best we can for the losses we are experiencing. We have been forced to use technology to bring us together even though so many rejected that very same technology prior to the pandemic. Where shul services had become fixed, they are now much more creative. Zoom allows us to participate in those services from home, opening them up to people shut in and people like me who live more remotely. Venues as different as OHALAH and my granddaughter’s school talent show permit the inclusion of both skills that don’t lend themselves to on stage performance (my granddaughter danced using silk ropes and another student snowboarded) and the opportunity to bring together panelists who otherwise could or would not attend in person. I have loved the way in which ALEPH has created events for people to share their gifts even as in person shabbatonim and travel have become so difficult.
At the same time, we also know that the corona virus has not so much created a new situation and awareness but rather has thrown into stark reality those divisions and injustices which have been around for decades and much more. And, while we talk about building back better, many still hope for a return to the status quo ante which, if it did happen, would allow the forces of climate destruction, systemic racism, and the terrible concentrations of wealth to resume in full force. Indeed, even making the assumption that our access to the power needed to sustain this digital culture is risky. Living in a rural area, where wind storms amplified by climate disruption knock out power on a regular basis and where broadband connections are both slow and unstable, make this not hypothetical but reality.
More than has been the case over the past several decades, klei kodesh need to model a healing presence which accepts and even embraces the insecurities about which we are now more conscious than we were before the pandemic. For klei kodesh, then, I see two aspects of being a healing presence. First, we need to prioritize maintaining personal inner health and second, we need to manifest a healing presence and witness in the collective.
One reason why I value a personal, liturgically based daily practice is that liturgy provides markers and reminders of the person I strive to become. Which of these impacts me most intensely depends on what the circumstances are with which I’m forced to include when I think of my work and presence in the world. This past Rosh HaShanah, I was feeling deep disappointment leading into fear about the state of the world and particularly that of the United States. At that point, the verses placed in this sequence jumped out at me:
רבות מחשבות בלב איש ועצת ה’ היא תקום
עצת ה’ לעולם תעמד מחשבות לבו לדור ודור
Many designs are in a person’s mind, but it is God’s plan that is accomplished.
What God plans endures forever, what God designs, for ages on end.
And so I absorbed into my being a surrender to the forces beyond my control which, guided in ways by the Holy Blessed One that I could not, allowed me to focus on those aspects over which I could, also with God’s help, have some influence. This is what I mean by embracing and freely choosing that which is being forced on us.
Another reason for maintaining and prioritizing a personal, daily practice is that it can help us to remember that, while each of us is important and of great value, none of us is actually responsible for the entire human race. At one stage of my life as a rabbi, I rationalized being casual with my daily practice because I led myself to believe that my work was my practice, a belief that increased my susceptibility to guilt and feelings of failure.
In the sidra Va’era, there is a strange interlude. Moshe and Tzipporah, together with their two sons, leave Midian for Egypt. Moshe has reluctantly agreed to become the healer and liberator of the Hebrews yet, on the way, God confronts Moshe at an inn and seeks to kill him. Tzipporah grabs a stone and circumcises their baby. Implicit in this text is that Moshe had postponed the circumcision of his second son so that he could avoid any delay that might be caused by the baby’s need to recover (since they believed that the third day after a circumcision was the worst). In other words, he was going to neglect his personal practice in favour of the mission to others. Here is how the Ramban puts it:
ובעבור כי היה דבר המלך נחוץ לא מל אותו ולא קרא לו שם.
Because the word of the sovereign was urgent,
Moshe didn’t circumcise his son nor give him a name.
Reading the text this way says that, no matter how important we think we are, how absolutely necessary we are to the world’s redemption, we still must remember to practice, to celebrate, to meditate, or we will not be of much use.
I would like to extend this another step. Secretly, I believe, many of us (myself definitely included) would very much welcome becoming a healer/savior on a truly grand scale. For the best (and sometimes not the best) reasons, we would love to be rebbes for multitudes, drawing crowds to our teaching and lifting the souls of those who are suffering. It is, then, especially helpful for us to remember that Moshe is also called the humblest of all people and that this label is applied to him not when he is resisting God’s call but when he has already led the people out of Egypt, been at Sinai, and descended from the mountain with his face shining. Humility is about doing whatever it is for which God has deployed us with a simple acceptance of both the possibilities and the limitations.
In a book called שיח שרפי קודש, a collection of stories and aphorisms of Hassidic rebbes, there is a recounting of a conversation about the number of hassidim devoted to a rebbe. The last word goes to the Kotzker who, after becoming a rebbe himself, said:
ואחר זמן רב היה הרבי מקאצק בהיותו כבר רבי אומר כך להחסיד ר׳ הירש מטאמשור
שאין צורך לו בחסידים רבים ודי לו באחדים
After much time had passed and the rabbi from Kotzk had himself become a rebbe,
he said to the hassid R. Hirsch of Tamshor that he had no need for many hassidim. A few is enough.
Remember the story that R. Zalman liked to tell, also about the Kotzker:
A man came to the Kotzker and said that his father had come to him in a dream and told him he was to be the rebbe for two hundred hassidim. The Kotzker replied that when 200 hassidim came to him and said that this man’s father had come to them in a dream and told them that he was to be their rebbe, only then would he take him seriously.
I believe that we are turning a significant corner. Enough of us have been awakened and the need for preachers is diminishing and the focus is on the details, the specifics, which also have to shift. That’s why I supported Stacey Abrams work because, as the people of Crooked Media pointed out correctly, politics is not so much about individual elections as it is about the 24/7/365 work of registering and educating voters one at a time.
I do most of my spiritual work in a very small place with very few Jews. For the most part, I serve as a volunteer and generic spiritual voice. Can I, can all of us who live on Hornby Island, change the narrative by ourselves? Of course not. But may that be a reason not to try?
One more note about the personal leading into the communal. The verse, שויתי ה' לנגדי תמיד, is most often translated as “I place Yhvh before me always.” The Besht offers a different translation and commentary:
שויתי ה' לנגדי תמיד. שויתי לשון השתוות בכל דבר המאורע הכל שוה אצלו בין בענין שמשבחי' ב"א אותו או מבזין אותו וכן בכל שאר דברים וכן בכל המאכלות בין שאוכל מעדנים בין שאוכל שאר דברים הכל ישוה בעיניו כיון שהוסר היצה"ר ממנו מכל וכל. וכל דבר שיארע יאמר הלא זה הוא מאתו ית' ואם בעיניו הגון וכו' וכל כונתו לש"ש אבל מצד עצמו אין חילוק וזה מדרגה גדולה מאד. (צוואת הריב"ש ב)
Shiviti-I have set God before me at all times.” (Psalms 16:8)
Shiviti is an expression of hishtavut (equanimity): No matter what happens, whether people praise or shame you, and so, too, with anything else, it is all the same to you. This applies likewise to any food: it is all the same to you whether you eat delicacies or other things. For [with this perspective] the yetzer hara is entirely removed from you.
Whatever may happen, say that “it comes from the blessed One, and if it is proper in God’s eyes…” Your motives are altogether for the sake of Heaven, and as for yourself nothing makes any difference.
This [sense of equanimity] is a very high level.
(https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/145431/jewish/Tzavaat-Harivash-2-3.htm)
From the base of our personal practice, extend the visualization of the divine within me to the divine within everyone else. I do not teach Torah nor instruct others in how to live. Rather, the God within me reaches out to the God within others recognizing that not only are we tied to each other but that we are all part of the same One.
In the words of Reb Zalman’s poetic rendering of Shir haKavod:
Countless their visions of Your mysterious feats,
In all their forms Your ONEness meets.
They saw You Young, they saw You Old,
They saw You patient, they saw You bold.