Ahz mah (So what)

Hitler was elected democratically. I read that deceptively simple sentence to a group of teens this week in an introductory discussion about the Holocaust. The discussion moved on, but that sentence triggered a chain of associations in the mind for hours afterward. Eventually I came out of the trance of thought-spinning, recognizing – knowing again – that the mind has a propensity to attempt to solve the grandest mysteries of the human condition. This effort to “figure it all out” feels compulsive, tiresome, and pointless; it feels like throwing the body against a wall, over and over and over. Yet somewhere within the tumult is the flicker of recognition – the knowing again – that there are other options besides either figuring it all out or turning away in despair.

 My Rosh Hashanah teaching: This summer, while scrolling through random Facebook posts of some of the young people who I am connected with in different ways, I happened upon a classically anti-semitic post. It was written by a young Black man, someone who I do not know personally. It was apparently in response to something happening in pop culture, something about a sports celebrity. I didn’t know the details, nor did I need to. When I say it was a classically anti-semitic statement, I mean right out of the medieval Church playbook. No attempt at oblique dog whistling here – just openly slamming “The Jews” directly. As we say in Yiddish: Oy. This is not a congregation, thank God, where people tend to say things like “Why should Jews bother caring about Black people and racism?” But I know that the question is being asked by some Jews elsewhere, and I can imagine that after reading this young man’s post, and the many others like it, some of us might begin to wonder “why bother.” Yes...

A significant number of people very dear to me have experienced the breakdown of a relationship in the past year or two. I have been witness to much sorrow, confusion, anger, hurt, mourning, and exhaustion. And I have also witnessed, sprouting up through all of that, glimmers of insight... resilience... hope... the clarifying of needs... sometimes for the first time in a lifetime. Over and over I am humbled by the power of the process itself. Over and over I am reminded that there is nothing to fix, no one to judge, and often nothing to even say. Sinking into the fertile composting of pain, seeds are sown which eventually sprout and blossom on their own inner time scale. In this I have faith. And meanwhile this witnessing stirs up in me ample grist for the mill of compassion. Old memories stirred up from the soil of my own relationship breakdowns, composted long ago.

 Since I think late February, I have been sitting outside every morning, for 30-45 minutes. Just sitting, outside. I have never done this before in my life. Me and morning and meditation and outside have never happened in the same sentence, certainly not in any sustained way. Except perhaps if I count walking to school when I was a child. Three moments, all within the last few days: One morning, while sitting with the intention to simply be present with a “bad” headache, an image flashes into awareness – not even an image, more of a... whiff, or an intimation, or a felt sense – of a hug and caressing of my aching head. I am moved to tears. One morning, a praying mantis sits on the deck railing in front of me. I have never seen one before, up close like that. One morning, the squirrels in two nearby trees emit harsh, alarm-like sounds. I open my eyes in time to see a hawk swooping low across our long, shared backyard and up onto one of the roofs. Of course, I am always accompanied b...

 My temple’s high holiday services will be on Zoom this month. This is my reality. It’s not “virtual” for me, it’s actual. This is what is happening. And when I consider the likelihood that less people will be participating than in the past, I also notice the mind scrambling for explanations, justifications, comparisons, judgements, solutions. As though – as always – there is a problem in need of solving. But what if there is no problem at all? Or what if the problem is so big that it is beyond comprehension or solution? In either case, I am free to simply have the experience I am going to have. That’s all. Whatever happens – including the possibility of total Zoom or internet failure – I am free to choose how it will be for me. And perhaps this is one of the messages of the high holidays this year: This is what is happening. How will you receive it... with a tightly clenched fist, or with an open hand?