This Friday, due to popular request, I will be leading a special virtual healing service for comfort, hope and peace (October 13th, 6PM Atlantic (5PM Eastern/6:30 PM NFLD). Please email me for the zoom link. Services will be virtual, in English with some Hebrew which will be translated and transliterated. We will have a guided meditation, along with music and trauma-informed prayers for healing comfort.
The Jewish national anthem is Hatikvah: the hope. This is because hope is what has kept the Jewish people alive for 2000 years: hope that we can return to our homeland that was colonized in the year 70 of the Common Era after our Temple was destroyed. At the time, our captors left us one wall fragment to “wail” upon- the Western Wall. Our grief and wailing entertained them then, and sadly they are rejoicing now. They were scared that we were winning the fight toward justice. We have to double down on our values and turn hate into Love and Justice. It is hard and scary to realize this, but may this painful awakening as to who is safe and who is not safe, ultimately lead us to make decisions that make us safer.
In addition, this prayerful reflection represents my hope that we can work to transform all that is negative into something that I pray can bring some semblance of healing blessing respite in our broken and colonized/colonizing world.
Please note, that if you have not read my previous post about how a commitment to decolonizing can coexist with a love for Israel, (or if you only read the early email version, but have not seen the new and improved version that has evolved with the changing situation, and are interested in how it evolved), then please read this for a more comprehensive analysis of the situation in Israel. For tonight, this post represents an attempt to nourish and heal by helping us to fulfill the biblical commandment that we continue to choose life and transform curses into blessings. Please feel free to share!
Eternal Source of Compassion
Be with us when our rage fills us and we want to scream and cry and shake with horror and feel like giving up. Embrace us with your unconditional Love when ours falters and we yearn to fight in ways that might hurt us more than help us. Hold onto us that we may learn to hold onto one another tenderly and with hope illuminating our hearts.
Teach us to choose love over hate, faith over fear, life over death and unity over division! May we learn to answer the call of hatred and terror with a deep love and a willingness to advocate for compassion and justice for all people, even those manipulated by hate propaganda into thinking that senselessly killing or hurting other humans is the right answer.
May Love and Unity, Truth and Restorative Justice triumph and may healing peace and understanding rain down upon this massive global human family conflict that is emerging to try to pit us against each other.
Let us give thanks for all the people who see beyond the false binaries of colonial hatred. Let us give thanks for those brave enough to ask questions and search deeper. Let us give thanks for everyone who dives through the darkness to find the Light, and then does whatever they can to amplify it in their corner of the world.
Let us give thanks for all the Jews and Muslims and so many other humans who are united in their fight against a colonized hatred that dates back thousands of years, and teaches us to hate our neighbors as we are taught to hate ourselves.
Let us do what we can decolonize our fragile planet that we share and fight back against intersectional hatred that predates the Assyrian invasion of Northern Israel in 722 BCE, and that is continuing to try to convince people to turn on those they love because of lies, hate speech and misinformation.
Let us give thanks for all those people who have helped to preserve our faith in humanity and for all those people who have shared messages of comfort, support and affirmation. May we learn to redirect our attention away from those who hurt us, and toward those who help us and encourage us. While we grieve, may we also make space for hope and healing.
May we learn to focus upon Light over darkness, Love over hate, and Life over death.
Eternal Source of Torah, grant us the strength, courage and wisdom to transform this pain into a Torah that can help others.
Eternal Source of Refuah/healing, watch over all of us who are so terrified that we have almost forgotten how to breathe.
Remind us that we are all vessels for Your Love and Compassion, and guide us to turn our rage into a Torah of Restorative Justice.
Guide us to the words and actions that can yield a softening of hearts and a Tikkun/healing repair that will be beyond what our minds can begin to fathom.
Teach us compassion with ourselves, as we struggle to figure out how to sleep while rockets rain down upon our holy land and our family and friends.
Bless us with a Shabbat of comfort and peace. Watch over each of us in our coming and going, in our lying down and awakening, that we may follow the words that we repeat but struggle to hear:
- Shma– help us to listen and help us to be heard
- Yisrael– help us to be heard for our true selves, not for whom others have heard that we are… and may all our struggles lead to redemption like that of Jacob so long ago
- Adonai- You are the Source of our Power. Help us to draw strength in You when our intergenerational trauma causes us to feel afraid to trust You
- Eloheinu– Your Name cannot be pronounced and this Name is plural and embracing: help us all to remember this plurality in a world of terrifying binaries. May we learn the deep humility in Your Name and essence and may such humility become tonal in all faiths
- Echad– You are One in the midst of Your inscrutable plurality and despite all seeming duality. Help us to embody Your Image of Unity in all that we do, and help us to discern that which can unify us in a world of manufactured divisiveness
- V’ahavta– as You Love us, heal our collective hearts that we may love one another, more fully and more courageously and through this Love, may Your blessings of heaking peace rain down upon us all.
May this Shabbat be the beginning of our collective healing: may we transform darkness into Light and grief into relief. Help us not to withdraw when fear attacks, nor when comfort comes. Help us to remain steady and firm in who You created us to be, and remind us that, we do not need to solve all the problems on this planet to nevertheless be able to do something. Each of us has been created with our own unique potential, and the ability to be a healing balm for someone else. May we recall the power that we do have, and use it with wisdom, compassion and courage.
Teach us O Holy One to turn darkness into Light and help us find ways of translating these words of prayer into action.
Help us to remember that the fear and rage and despair we feel is the central to the strategic win that Amalek (terrorism and hate) seeks, and to understand that their strategy is to divide and silence us. Even more than before, let us commit to celebrating diversity and fighting for the equity and justice for all living beings.
If terrorism works by making us feel terror so we pull back into old survival strategies that will kill us all, then let us take this moment to heal our brains by intentionally disrupting the traumatic endocrine brain chemistry flood and causing our neurological synapses to realign with Healing Wisdom (Torah).
This Shabbat, let us stop, breathe and heal our brains, not as a form of avoidance, but as a necessary pit stop in the long journey that is ahead of us. We did not ask to walk in this wilderness, but now that we are here, what is the Torah we can learn and how can we transform this darkness into Ligh?
Let us rewire our brain to focus on ways we can continue to advocate for our values and beliefs, no matter how seemingly countercultural. Some ways we can help are big and others may be imperceptible, but each one has its own sacred purpose in connecting us to one another and unifying the human family.
The Talmud teaches: one life is worth the life of a world. Instead of doomscrolling on social media, let’s try to make this Shabbat a time to just reach out to those we know who is struggling and let them know we are thinking about them. That text or call might be what saves their life, and in the process, it may help us to feel less helpless. Ultimately, this is the way we fight back on those who hate us: by advocating more loudly for what we believe to be true not as much through our words but also through our heart and actions. .
Bloom where you are planted. And reach out to someone who is near you and not blooming as well as you. Together we can hold each other up, link arms, and we will be stronger. Don’t look at those who hate you/the darkness… look at those who need you to rescue them from hate. Share your Light with someone else. It will grow stronger. Together, our little lights can shine.
This coming Shabbat, may we stop long enough to catch our breath and begin to hear You… Your guiding Torah that can inspire us to discern a way forward that can redeem us all…
Until then, may this beautiful song and video from the Bahai community give us hope and remind us of the real purpose of all religion: healing unity.
Emerging Torah as Rabbi Nachshon emerges 