June, 2024 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
I was just in Philadelphia for the ordination ceremony at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I’ve had the pleasure of being a mentor to one wonderful student there for the past two years, meeting with him weekly on Zoom as he has built an exciting new congregation in his hometown of Durham, NC. When he invited me to come to his ordination, even though I’d never met him face to face, I decided I really wanted to. Besides, I have a bunch of wonderful rabbi friends in Philadelphia, and I always love the opportunity to hang out with these smart, empowered, reflective people.
As you all know, there’s been a lot going on in the Jewish world and in the college world lately and I stepped off the plane to the urgent voices of anxious friends. The next morning I was walking with two of these friends through the lovely tree-lined streets of Mount Airy, on the way to see their beautiful new food coop. As we strolled, I shared a dour, if unsurprising, thought: as challenging as things are now, they could get to be more so in the future. In particular, I’m thinking a lot about the upcoming presidential election, which may usher in new levels of destruction and repression. Immediately, exactly in tandem, these two friends said, “What can we DO?” This tandem moment under the elm trees sent me into a bit of a reverie.
The holy Ba’al Shem Tov, known as the Besht, the founder of the Hasidic movement in the eighteenth century, offered a teaching that I learned from my own holy teacher and friend, Rabbi Dayle Friedman (with whom I also had a wonderful visit while in Philadelphia). “When facing unwelcome experiences, the Besht counsels that we cope through hachna’ah (yielding), havdalah (discernment), and hamtakah (sweetening).” Dayle applies this teaching to the difficulties of facing dementia in oneself or in a loved one. In “Wisdom from Unwelcome Experiences” (myjewishlearning.com), she writes:
When things take a turn from what we expect, our first reaction is often resistance. The Besht teaches that our first task in meeting such realities is hachna’ah—which means yielding or submitting. We are called to let go of the hopes, expectations, and dreams we had for this moment, and to soften to what is. This act of yielding relaxes the tension and suffering caused by denying or avoiding reality.
She continues:
The Besht means by havdalah that we are called to discern the exact nature of the spot we are in, to distinguish fact from fiction, in order to act wisely. We need to engage our curiosity to find our way around and learn about our new normal.
She concludes:
This time of isolation and slowing down is not just filled with loss. There are also surprises and opportunities for growth. The Besht calls this aspect of unwelcome experience hamtakah—sweetening. When we are open to what is, and curious about what we can find and become, we will notice new things growing—even if they are tiny and subtle as the first, fragile buds on the trees.
It may seem odd to turn to a teaching about dementia (or, in the Besht’s original iteration, distracting thoughts during prayer) to think about politics. But I note a line not from the Besht but from Dayle: “When things take a turn from what we expect” (or, I’d add, what we want) “our first reaction is often resistance.”
In the political realm this is certainly often the case. When faced with something unjust, we are oriented to resist, to organize, to protest, to challenge. We ask right away, as did my friends on our walk, “What can we DO?” The last thing that feels right in these moments is yielding.
I am wondering these days about that impulse to resist and to DO. Some months ago I read a powerful essay by Indigenous philosopher Kyle Whyte called “Against Crisis Epistemology.” It’s a beautiful and complicated essay. Whyte writes about the “structure of newness that permits the validation of oppression.” If something is “new,” “unprecedented,” “a crisis,” this gives cover to the most powerful actors to impose whatever kind of “solution” advances their own agenda. We have only to think about the Iraq war in the aftermath of 9/11 to understand this misuse of crisis.
None of us, thankfully, has the power to start a war. But we can use our relative power to be loud and underfoot and to impose solutions that may not work and may not be desired by the people (or landscapes, to whatever extent landscapes can desire) most affected by current circumstances.
At the end of his essay Whyte offers the model of “hospicing” a system in decline. I am intrigued by this thought: what if, rather than resisting crisis after crisis, we sat with our community and country and world as we would with a dying friend, realistically, thoughtfully, trying to bring comfort where we can?
What if, as in Dayle Friedman’s reprise of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s teaching, we “let go of the hopes, expectations, and dreams we had for this moment, and [softened] to what is”? And “engage[d] our curiosity to find our way around and learn about our new normal”? And became “curious about what we can find and become, [so that] we will notice new things growing—even if they are tiny and subtle as the first, fragile buds on the trees”?
For me now these are questions, not answers. Maybe there are places where our resistance is exactly what is needed. Maybe slowness and discernment and sweetening are fiddling while Rome burns. I wonder…
PAIGE NOTES
As the moon wanes toward “newness,” we will enter the Hebrew month of Sivan. Sivan means “time” or “season” in Akkadian. All months track time and seasons, so why might this month be the namesake for it? I can’t help but suggest a correlation with the Summer Solstice, the time of year when we feel that we have the most time. Here on the Coast, we’re nearing daylight from 5:45 AM through 8:45 pm. Fifteen hours! That’s five & a half more hours of sunlight than we had on the Winter Solstice, over a third more of the day! Sivan celebrates the abundance of time during this season.
In English etymology the word “time” shares a Germanic root with the word “tide,” given that a natural way to track time is through the tides. When kayaking on any of our gorgeous local rivers—Navarro, Albion, Big, Noyo, Ten Mile—it’s usually helpful to time your trip with the tides to avoid paddling against the current both in and out. Right now, though, that’s pretty irrelevant due to our powerful spring winds. Even when going with the tidal flow, the wind will push even a strong paddler backward. A fisherwoman at Princess Seafood was telling me that the winds are so strong that even the biggest fishing boats in Noyo Harbor can’t go out right now because it’s too dangerous. But the winds don’t disturb the unstoppable tides; they continue on their natural time schedules no matter what. This is how I have felt this year with some of our more joyful Jewish holidays: no matter what is going on in the world, it is still Shabbat, or Lag B’Omer, or Shavuot, a time to be joyful, to cease from mourning, to celebrate in community. Even when the winds are blowing hard, the tides stay true.
with blessings for the ebb and flow,
rabbi paige
