Don't Rush a Miracle
Blessing Shaya last Rosh Hashanah in the park
Dear friends,
Believe it or not, two weeks from tonight we will be celebrating a new year, and I’m starting to feel the excitement. “Listen! My beloved is knocking,” sings the poet of the Song of Songs. These strange and beautiful gatherings that we do every year are many things, but at their heart they are soul meetings, where each of us searches for our deeper self, and brings it out to interact and play with others.
I’ve been in touch with many of you over the last few months to try and understand what people need right now. There are differences. Some are in despair, others with hope. Some need their community to speak clearly to the present moment, others need it to go beyond it. Some need words and others silence. Some are entirely focused on the midterms, others don’t want to hear about it. Some need an acknowledgement of what is happening in Gaza, (where since the ceasefire 10 months ago 1,286 people have been killed by Israeli security forces) others need to talk for real about the rise in antisemitism.
Thank God we are a diverse community. Truth is, even if we weren’t - who are we kidding - we’d still be arguing.
What appears to me to bring us all together is the desire to explore things on a soul level. This can’t and doesn’t mean ignoring the world. What happens in our collective reality is our current language. It is how these souls of ours chit chat, so that we might look someone else in the eye, hear another’s voice, feel another’s presence. Even at the most transcendent moments in our lives, we break a glass. Jews only know how to celebrate with both the brokenness and the possibility in the room.
There is, however, another language that we use during these holidays, which is more primal, more familiar to the soul than to our contemporary ears. I am speaking of course of the prayers, which come out of our mouths as if by some magic, using our tongues and mouths and vocal cords to break into the shared space and mix together in a song that rises like a plume of smoke from a sacrificial altar. Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, the sounds and melodies that escaped the lungs of all the generations before us will appear one after the other and carry us into the place where a very different version of reality lives: Where we are less ossified in who we have become. Where we are in touch with our dead. Where we not only can but want to hear one another. Where we know the gift. Where we stop judging. Where opinions are worthy of observation. Where convictions are so real, they are unnecessary. Where forgiveness is as easy as pulling a feather out of a bowl of water. Where for the blink of an eye, we have no end.
I don’t want to stir up some artificial feelings here. I don’t want to poke love in the belly to wake her up from her late summer nap. She deserves her sleep God bless her. As Miracle Max said: “Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles." Or in the language of the Song of Songs:
Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you:
Do not arouse or awaken love
until it so desires!
If we now start getting our minds, bodies and souls ready to receive her, and if we come without the expectation that she will grace us with her presence, and if we come together for the holiday for no other purpose than coming together for the holiday: then love might show up to help us kick off our lunar, Jewish year.
I can’t wait.
Shabbat shalom,