After a week of terror and horror, we gathered together seeking a few moments of breath and hope in the midst of the unfolding and unrelenting violence and senseless cruelty. We gathered in solidarity, from unceded Mi’kma’ki, with beautiful people from around the world who joined us… either from my former congregations (including the other community I helped to co-found, Kol Israel, which is rooted in the Jewish Renewal principles)… as well as so many other wonderful humans who have found me/us through this blog or through our Reform Judaism in Atlantic Canada: Decolonizing Judaism in Mi’kma’ki and Beyond Facebook community.
We gathered to draw strength from one another in a world that is so completely contrary to everything we believe and everything we yearn tos ee actualized speedily and in our day.. to find comfort and solace in knowing that our values are shared when we are surrounded by an increasingly polarizing world of easy slogans and reactive memes… people so traumatized and burnt out by their own intersectional oppression that it can feel hard to survive while having compassion for others or looking at the news. We gathered to affirm our faith in our ability as humans to transcend the darkness and violence that surrounds us… to pray for protection for all those who are hurting and living in the terror of atrocities that we can barely fathom in our brains, let alone feel fully and ever understand. We gathered together in hope, in prayer and in solidarity, praying that the violence escalating way to quickly does not destroy us all.
Tonight we began a new tradition: living in a world that is so increasingly backward and upside down, a world that worships death over Life, hate over Love, fear over Faith… we began in grief and found our way back to Light and hope. We began with the words of kaddish and recited the prayers backwards to candle lighting for Shabbat. Because resting on Shabbat is not easy when we are hurting and so deeply terrified. And yet, this is part of the goal of terrorism: to terrorize us. Research shows that fear causes our brains to misfire and we go into a deeply reactive place: our brain chemistry changes and our capacity to think critically is damaged.
It is therefore imperative that we do what we can to rewire our brains as best we can, so that we can heal. This blog contains some amazing resources on how to reduce the trauma of social media and stay focused on what matters. This is not the same as avoidance, which leads to complicity, but it could be a helpful strategy for those times we do need to rest. This is why G!d gave us Shabbat, because we need to rest. The brilliant and prophetic Rev. Tricia Hersey explains the ways that rest is resistance: it is a profound act of pushing back on a racist, antisemitic, queerphobic and unjust system that seeks to hardwire trauma into us so that we are easier to manipulate. In the same way as our cellphones can’t work if they go dead, so too our brains cannot work unless we refuel regularly. This is the purpose of our commandment to rest on Shabbat, and why our Torah portion for this week states that resting is part of the creative process.
But rest is not easy. We feel guilty in a world that forces us to work so hard that we are burning out faster than any epidemic. And now, the assault on human life in Israel and across the world is dimming what few lights we had inside of us… in order to keep advocating for Truth and Reconciliation, justice and equity, peace and healing… we need hope and endurance, resilience and wisdom. For this: we need rest.
This is easier said than done- as is true for most religious tasks. So the rabbis developed an elaborate system of ways to pray to be able to pray… to get kavannah (prayerful intention) so that we can be in the right mindset to pray. After the Holocaust, it became almost impossible for most Jews to pray, and so we see an increasingly secular Jewish world, because we are so deeply traumatized by what was done to us that our prayers barely make sense. This is not only true for us, but indeed, this is the way colonization works: it attacks the soul and separates us from our body. When we are disconnected from our spirit and values, we are easier to manipulate into doing things that are inhumane, which indeed, is what permits the atrocities that have been the scourge of our world for thousands of years.
And so, tonight we gathered to try to find our way back to prayer, faith, hope and an ability to stand firm in our values despite everything. We gathered to refuel ourselves in ancient words that have sustained our people for generations and in a new way of translating them, so that we can understand them within our current world, which is upside down and contrary to anything we could have imagined even a week ago.
The Talmud tells a story of Joseph, the son of the sage Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who became deathly ill and was thought to have died. Then he suddenly regained consciousness. It was as if he had returned from some far-away place. As he regained consciousness, his father said to him: ‘What did you see?’ Joseph said: ‘I saw an olam hafuch (a world turned upside down). What is above was below and what is below was above … ’ His father said to him: ‘My son, you have seen an olam barur (a clear world), you have seen the world clearly’” (Talmud Bavli, Pesachim50a). The real world that is where faith and hope and trust dwell, this real world feels increasingly distant.
And so it was that, in our upside down world, we began our service backwards: working from grief and kaddish back to candle lighting and blessing. We recorded it because several people requested it, so I am sharing it here, with my own prayer that this Shabbat can be the beginning of a new world- a kinder world, one where we can join together in unity and solidarity, and affirm our faith that it is possible to create justice and peace. May it be so soon and speedily, and may this Shabbat be gentle upon us all…. but especially those in our holy land that are huddling in fear. May our world’s capacity for compassion tip toward the side of mercy and away from the judgment and fear that holds us all hostage, and may we be the first to tip toward that side, that we may model it for those around us. May this Shabbat bring shalom to us all.
Emerging Torah as Rabbi Nachshon emerges 