Yom kippur 2022 : We stand ready
Rabbi Margaret
Al chet sh’chatanu l’faneicha… For the sin which we have sinned before You… Someone always asks: why do we confess in the plural? We know the answer in our bones: because we are plural.
You, my beloved community, have been my most holy teachers of this way that we are plural. I remember when I visited for the very first time, just for a weekend, and I met a young man who was weeks or months away from the end of his life with brain cancer. After my visit I got letters from several of you talking about how you had chanted psalms around his bed round the clock, taken his family’s laundry to wash, built a box for his body, dug his grave and buried him, then finished building the large house that he had begun constructing before he fell ill. The next year I came up for High Holy Days. My host that year had to leave home suddenly, and I remember a neighbor coming to lay out clothes for her young daughter to wear to preschool the next morning. The neighbor knew that the daughter would feel better in a well-chosen outfit. And her mother would feel better too.
I could go on and on with these little stories — on, in fact, to just about the present day. When I first met all of you I was amazed by the ways that you entered each other’s lives to be of support. I knew that this was Torah that I wanted to learn. Now these same kinds of experiences seem blessedly ordinary. We are plural, and when one piece of our shared self is struggling, other parts of ourself do our best to step in and step up. It is the joy and essential strength of my life to be part of this plurality.
Back in 2000-and something I went to a rabbi conference, where I heard a speaker give a talk about aging that inspired me. So I came home, copied a couple of pages from an article he had written, added a few other goodies on the same topic and mailed it out to all of you with a little note saying, “If anyone is interested in chatting about this, meet me for a cup of coffee at Frankie’s next Tuesday at 3:00.” I’d put out invites like that once or twice before, when I’d come across something interesting. I didn’t know if anyone would show up. But off to Frankie’s I went that next Tuesday.
And knock me over with a feather! 29 people came flowing, marching, storming in! We took over the upstairs, and boy did people start talking… I was blown away by the intensity of what people had to say — about healthcare, transportation, home repair, firewood… I won’t go through the whole list, but you can probably imagine it.
Besides the specifics, what I remember most today about that cup of coffee was the shock of realizing that so many people that I thought I knew well, that I thought were doing fine, were so frightened about their own futures! And that so much of it was well-founded.
If I had gone to a conference and heard a talk about childcare, or about finding housing, or about jobs that pay a living wage or about schools— issues that tend to keep younger people awake at night — and invited folks to have a cup of coffee to talk about it, I bet I would have gotten a similar response.
And need I say that healthcare, transportation, home repair, heating, childcare, housing, jobs and schools have only gotten harder to manage than they were fifteen years ago. Many of us are probably walking around with a lot more anxiety now than we had back then about all these practical matters of our own daily life. And with good reason.
Through much of Jewish history the majority of Jews lived in small enclaves, tolerated, or not-tolerated, very occasionally welcomed, by some feudal lord or tribal chieftain. The main function of government, such as it was, with regard to Jews and other vassals, was to kidnap them for ransom, conscript them into armies, tax them, invite them in to do unattractive jobs, and kick them out when they were no longer useful. In most places and times throughout history, the notion — for Jews or just about anyone else except those lords and chieftains — that government would provide or insure basic survival needs like housing, healthcare, food or job security was unthinkable.
Don’t get me wrong here: I am all for the public sector doing all these things, and I applaud the heroic struggle over centuries that has created any degree of public safety net that might be available — however tattered.
But I find myself thinking that — unfortunately — it may be the more natural situation for many of us — in this community, in this country, in this world — that there will be no outside entity that will see to our needs. These days, when I find myself thinking,”Who can we call on to fix this intractable problem?” I often mutter to myself, “There are no adults. We just have to figure it out…”
To whatever degree this is true, who then should see that our children are cared for, that we have homes and food and medical care and all the rest? As Americans we have inherited a Puritan ethos which says that we ourselves are personally responsible for everything that we need. Even to burden our families with our sustenance is a bit of a failure — certainly to reach out beyond the immediate family circle is a reason for shame.
By contrast, Jewish law, tradition and history place a lot of the responsibility for sustenance on the community. Arrangements have differed vastly in different places and times. And they haven’t all been great. But sometimes they are brilliant.
For example the first modern credit union was founded by Jews in Russia in 1896, because government-run banks wouldn’t loan money to Jewish merchants and artisans. These credit cooperatives were virtually destroyed during World War One, but the decimated Jewish communities created twice as many new credit unions as existed before the war.
Not too long ago I mentioned learning from Elana Berenson (now Elana Pesach) about the gemach, in her observant community in Jerusalem. They publish a list: If you need a baby swing, call this person; to use a FAX, call that one, a nebulizer, call so-and-so. Everyone doesn’t need their own everything. And, beyond supplying folding chairs and suitcases for people who need them, the gemach causes people to call each other, to go to each other’s houses. It meets concrete needs, and it builds relationships while it does so.
I am in awe of the ingenuity of these Jewish communities to figure out collective solutions to problems that vex individuals. This ingenuity is part of our heritage. And it emerges from an ethos of interdependence rather than independence.
We are not alone in this: many communities and tribes have richly-developed systems to support and sustain each other. I think of the weaving coops my mom and I visited in rural Mexico. Or loan circles in Bangladesh. Or the “informal orphanage” in Mama Maphosela’s house where I volunteered in South Africa. These systems take care of people where there is no government, no big foundation, no adult to step in and do the caring.
Our whole country is trying to think about care these days: everything from child- and elder-care to different ways of helping people to earn, save and access money to enabling people with disabilities to participate fully in life to care for people as they die. As Sarita Gupta, the co-director of Caring Across Generations (with the heroic Ai-Jen Poo), explains: “Everyone has a care story. Americans are starting to ask: Why is this so hard? They’re angry, confused and want to do something about it.”
Our own Coast community has much to teach in this regard. I think for just one example of the astonishing Hubs and Routes project created and instigated by our beloved Jennifer Kreger. Hubs and Routes is an instrument that enables people at the neighborhood and watershed levels to pool their resources and know-how to sustain each other in emergencies. This might be the coolest and most brilliant such example of all time — but there are many, many… Another that I vastly admire is the long-term organizing project that the people of Caspar have undertaken to retain control of their land and water and build the kind of community they want to live in. The fact that it seems to take an infinite number of dance parties to sustain this effort is in my mind a feature and not a bug.
Over the years a number of us have been part of “Share the Care” groups — ad hoc teams of friends, neighbors, co-workers, customers, choir members etc. that form around a person who is experiencing a serious illness or other crisis. Using the Share the Care system, these teams assess what their members are willing to do, when they are available to do it, and what the needs are day-to-day of the person needing care. There are forms, phone trees, rotating captains. Share the Care was invented by Cappy Capossela and Sheila Warnock, two friends who had to figure all this stuff out when they were caring for a friend with cancer. I love that someone gave thought to how to care well, figured out some tools and taught the rest of us how to do it.
Share the Care is a good system for what it is: it is useful for one person at a time, for a period of time (usually some months or maybe a year). It only works if there are people available to help. It’s not perfect. But it is an invention, an innovation. It takes a difficult situation and makes it easier to offer needed care.
As a Jewish community I think we do pretty well in a kind of loving, one-on-one way, pitching in intensively when there is a crisis, when there is a celebration, when there is a death. Our mighty little bikkur holim group does a heroic (and nearly invisible) job of arranging practical care for people. Probably just about all of us have stepped up when they’ve publicized a need for a ride, a dinner, a visit. Our hevra kadisha has empowered us not only to care for our dead but also to experience new depth in how we can show up for each other at crucial times.
But these days, when it seems nearly impossible to get a doctor’s appointment or to get your sink fixed, I fantasize sometimes about how we might up our game. So please just imagine with me for a moment:
What if some of us learned how to clean each other’s teeth?
What if we learned how to give each other abortions?
What if we shared cars, so everyone didn’t need their own?
What if we had a Jewish community-wide commitment to learn Spanish — maybe even in place of Hebrew — so that we could show up a little more meaningfully for our Latino neighbors when they are under threat?
What if individuals in our community took pledges, long in advance of the need, that when a particular person older than ourselves could no longer live alone, they would move into our house?
I am intrigued by emerging ideas for community-based security, generated by Black Lives Matter and Jewish Voice for Peace and other activist movements, that call for building alliances with other neighborhood and religious groups, for example to patrol when a Jewish community is celebrating the High Holy Days — rather than relying on heightened police presence. What if we organized a security network with neighborhood churches, businesses, the Latino Coalition, Project Sanctuary?
I suggest these examples not because I think that they are what we most need, or what any of us is best suited to offer, or even that they are all good ideas — but just to stretch our sense of what care can look like. And how we can strengthen our interdependence.
Many of us feel scared and demoralized by the political and environmental landscape in which we find ourselves today. And we might think that cleaning each other’s teeth or conjugating Spanish verbs or sitting with each other when we are ill is completely irrelevant to these huge threats. But I would suggest that this is not the case.
I am inspired by the idea of a politics of care — a way of looking at these large and looming crises, the ones that keep us awake at night — that asks not so much “How can we get someone to fix this mess?” and more, “How can I offer better care in places where care is lacking?” And “Who can I do it with so it won’t break me?” And “How can I make sure that the care I need today or might need tomorrow is available?” And “How can we do it in an interdependent way, so that there aren’t care-givers and care-recipients, or at least so those roles change freely?” And “How can we do it ourselves, for each other, without resorting to big and often heartless providers, without involving big money?”
The brilliant young organizer and theorist Adrienne Marie Brown talks about “emergent strategy.” She says that a small and specific action undertaken in a just and loving way among people who treat each other with honor not only accomplishes its immediate goal but ripples outward, showing the way to the next step and the next, even if you can’t see these ripples while you are fixing someone’s shoes or moving a bed into your spare room. She says that when a giant flock of pelicans flies in formation across the sunset, each bird knows only what the next bird or two on each side is going to do. And somehow the whole beautiful form takes shape. And moves forward. Acts of care, innovations in meeting immediate needs, these ripple outward, especially if we make an effort to connect with others in their local places to support and learn from each other.
What drew me to this community three decades-plus ago was meeting people who knew how to care for each other. I met people who had helped each other build houses, plant gardens, fix cars, nurse babies, educate children. That’s the world I wanted to live in. And I do. I am endlessly grateful. MCJC is a gorgeous mix of rural community values and Jewish community values. We have the heritage. We have the brilliance. We have the closeness.
Tonight we confess in the plural: For the deeds of loving kindness which we have undertaken for each other and with each other… For the rides we have given and the food we have shared, for the financial help we have quietly offered, for the consolation we have extended, for the firewood we have brought and stacked, for the groceries we have delivered, for the bodies we have washed and dressed, for the phone calls we have made and meetings and fundraisers we have attended to make all this possible, we give thanks. And for all the ways that we are yet to be called on to care for each other, for all the ingenuity it will take, all the resolve, all the work, all the joy, we prepare ourselves and we present ourselves. We stand ready. We are each other’s shelter of peace of mind. We are plural.