June, 2022 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
Like so many of us, this morning I started my day looking at pictures of murdered children and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas. And then I read calls and pleas by everyone from President Biden to Warriors’ coach Steve Kerr to various rabbis, all saying in various anguished ways, “We must not let this go on…”
Then I went out to do my day. First I stopped at the Albion grocery, where I bumped into someone I know a little bit, wearing her Albion-Little River Volunteer Fire Department uniform. She’s an EMT. We chatted for a few minutes. She was off to staff the weekly food pantry next door at the firehouse. She mentioned that she was thinking about doing chaplaincy training at the hospital. “What else is a retired person supposed to do?” she said, laughing.
Then I went next door to the post office, where I ran into someone else, who invited me to dinner. While she and I were talking, another acquaintance came up and offered some produce from her garden. While the three of us were chatting, a young girl walked shyly up to me and silently gave me a little modeling clay flower—purple and lime green, my kind of colors. Her grandmother was smiling in the background. She said, “My granddaughter asked me who she should give this to, and I said [pointing to me] you’d be perfect.” Then the grandmother, who works at the pharmacy, said, “Don’t forget, I can deliver things whenever you want. Just give me a call.”
I’m sharing in all this detail because I committed myself to memorizing those 15 minutes or so that I spent picking up mail and buying a quart of milk. Even so, I didn’t catch it all. The person who offered me the produce also offered me something that she said only took an hour to make. But I couldn’t quite understand her through her mask, and I was busy getting that cool little flower at the same time. And the person who invited me to dinner offered to invite other friends too in case I might feel more comfortable, since I don’t really know her all that well.
It was all so beautiful and uplifting and nourishing … and funny and homely and slightly awkward in places. Just perfect.
I have long thought that there are two kinds of work worth doing. One is the hard work of trying to fix what is wrong in the world: advocating, organizing, strategizing, campaigning, demonstrating, documenting, suing, dialoguing, fighting, marching, writing postcards, traveling to war-afflicted places and witnessing, sitting in giant redwood trees, raising funds—all that work of struggle. I admire the people who do this work very much, both the famous and the not-famous, the people of global reach and the ones who struggle right here over the most local of injustices and lacks.
The other kind of work that I admire very much is maintaining what is working: delivering mail, teaching school, cleaning teeth, fixing cars, mowing lawns, selling groceries, grooming dogs, serving food, filling potholes, giving vaccines, caring for children.
It’s also the work of saying hello, inviting people over, sharing useful information, checking in on neighbors, telling jokes, volunteering, hosting parties, noting birthdays, giving rides, sharing garden bounty, listening kindly, cleaning up after events. The world needs every bit of this.
So many of the statements that I read in response to the terrible school shooting in Texas yesterday, and the one at the grocery store in Buffalo last week, and all the others before then said, “We must…” followed by whichever prescription that speaker advocates: We must get guns out of the wrong hands, provide mental health care, make schools more secure. I agree with much of what is said (not about arming teachers…), but my agreement doesn’t matter much, because I have relatively little agency to accomplish what I think is necessary, especially if tomorrow’s news will be about asylum seekers turned away at the U.S./Mexico border or the war in Ukraine or the end of legal abortion or rising seas or other crises that my imagination can’t even conjure. I can definitely donate money. I can write government officials. I can show up at marches and write letters to the editor (well, I could do that if we had a functional local newspaper). Like most all of us who read the mighty MCJC Megillah, I participate in various efforts to fix our hurting world. And, maybe like some others as well, I spend a ridiculous amount of time berating myself for not doing more, smarter, braver, more effective world-fixing.
But today as I was looking at the pictures of the students and teachers from Uvalde, Texas, I found myself thinking that a very useful thing that any of us might do to resist a culture of violence and death is to live—specifically to live lives of beauty, friendship and warmth. In that department all of us have a tremendous amount of agency, and the most beautiful and inspiring teachers around us all the time.
I want more of the world to be like the parking lot in front of the Albion grocery as it was at 2:00 PM on May 25th: thick with kindness and friendliness and generosity, and with mail in the boxes and milk in the cooler.
We all know that sometimes it can be tough to get along with our neighbors.
There are people we enjoy more than others. The wonderful little local organizations that we all cherish have to be managed, often by boards of volunteers with inadequate cash and support and sometimes hard feelings and big egos and long, boring meetings.
For all the great people who step up to help, it’s hard sometimes not to resent the other ones who don’t. Running a beautiful local business can be a terrible grind for a thousand different reasons.
It’s not that world-fixing is hard and world-maintaining is easy. But I think that world-maintaining is sometimes undervalued, especially by those of us who see so much that needs fixing in our wounded world. There are plenty of holes that need repair in our local community as well as further afield. There is plenty to worry about and struggle to mend. On this day, like so many days when my heart is bleeding over all the meanness in our poor, hurting world, I want not to overlook the web of decency and kindness and beauty that gets spun day after day in this same world. Today in particular I would like to suggest that this generous way of living, in all its homespun particulars, is itself a kind of resistance against the forces of destruction.
