Extreme Reality New Year

I sat in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah with my exemplary son and my younger grandson, Asher, who lifted the spirits of the congregation by blowing the shofar. He was particularly strong on teruah, the series of short honking sounds representing a plea for mercy. I’m not sure if his conscious mind had yet, at 15, encountered the concept of mercy, but his whole being cried out for it with that sound. Later, the entire family sat down at our house for Frank’s soup with my matzoh balls and baked North African chicken plus chocolate cake and a challah Isaac and Jonah had made. Everything was perfect. Everything was as it should be except for the massacres on arid strips of land that gave birth to the Bible, the Torah’s terroir, and the rains of biblical proportions that fell in North Carolina. The Appalachian catastrophe struck me in an entirely new way. It wasn’t rising water breaching seawalls in coastal cities or rivers overflowing their banks. It was just plain rain. Way too much rain falling on mountain communities that didn’t see it coming. People stuck in places only mules could get to, the iPhones surrendering to the mules. We were being sent back where we came from.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I would not want to be a rabbi in these painful and perilous times. The rabbi in the homey Minnesota Reconstructionist synagogue where we davvened struck just the right note of making space to celebrate the sweetness of the new year, the blessing of being alive as the year turned, while drawing our attention to the arenas of slaughter that stain the Jewish conscience, invite diaspora survivor guilt,  and imperil the Jewish sense of safety all over the world. Afterwards, on the way down to the lower level where we broke bread together, I said to her “It must be so hard” and she said “It’s so hard.” At the communal lunch that followed, I met another rabbi, the director of a group called Hineni, Hebrew for here I am. I said to her “Listening is the essential spiritual practice” and she said “Listening is everything.” This is true in international relations and it is true at the kitchen table. It is true because when you listen to another person, or to the earth or the non-human world, you occupy a place of stillness. You do not interrupt to assert your own point of view. You do not wander off into your own private reverie. You remain present and receptive as if chanting hineni, here I am. The rabbis, working overtime in this new year of extreme reality, are called to listen and to hold the heartache of their congregants, grieving and fearful and untethered. There are no easy answers to the deep and anguishing problems we face. The only way for me to monitor my own response is to tune into my body. If I’m closed off and unwilling to listen to someone else’s suffering, my body tenses, my shoulders inch up around my ears, and my stomach becomes defiant. If I rest and nourish myself sufficiently so that my body has the strength to witness the extreme reality of this new year, or at least glimpse it fleetingly, I can sometimes be present as these rabbis are called to be. I honor them.

Meeting this moment cannot happen in the thinking mind and it cannot happen alone. It’s so much larger than that and calls for cavernous space and deep connection. In this space, we sing, we weep, we embrace, we listen to the shofar. We don’t expect to solve the tribal struggles, the casual normalization of violence in Gaza and its expansion into the West Bank and Lebanon, the drowning of communities where prior to Helene children studied for their spelling tests. The hurricane, like the Nova music festival thousands of miles away, took them by surprise, an incident of extreme reality that happened to someone else but - believe it -  could happen to you or me. Our only defense is looking each other in the eye, listening to one another’s stories and loving the world that gives birth to them. There is something that is even larger and deeper than what I’ve called here extreme reality. It’s our interbeing, our collective vulnerability, and our yearning to be there for one another as best we can.

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