From
the Washington Post earlier this week: “On
July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely
missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. …Had this event occurred a week earlier when
the point of eruption was Earth-facing, a potentially disastrous outcome would
have unfolded.”
There
but for the grace of God, right?
There
is so much that is out of our control, all the time. And take that on any level: from the small
stuff that seems big when it is happenings – like getting stuck in traffic jams
when we have someplace to be to the big stuff that is actually immensely
significant – like life-altering events that we’ve done nothing to invite. For a species that thinks itself so powerful,
perhaps we’ve missed something along the way.
I’ve
been thinking a lot about this lately. As
some of you know, I am a participant in a 2 year fellowship of the Institute of
Jewish Spirituality. In addition to
intensive study year round, the fellowship includes four 5 day retreats, one from
which I just returned late last night.
The retreats are silent, meaning that the only sounds participants intone
for the majority of the time are words and melodies of prayer during worship
time. We spend significant time in
contemplative meditation, Torah study, and embodied practice. Most of my time during this last retreat was
spent contemplating this issue: in this
world where so much doesn’t make sense, where so much seems beyond our will,
what is within our grasp to hold on to? What are the atmospheric conditions of
our lives that we can actually control?
The
Chasidic masters of Jewish tradition answer that question: The only thing that
any one person can actually control is the climate of their own heart. Is my heart warm and open today? Or is it
cold and closed? That is it. And that, they say, is truly a matter we can
direct. The condition of our heart is
the seat of our dominion. And who and
what we let into our hearts is ultimately the only measurable that
matters.
I confess
I am with you this Shabbat with an aching heart. The pain of our world, both near and far, is
something that I feel most deeply. And
with each divide, each blinded us versus them, each skewed news report stewing
in its own sanctimoniousness, each hateful remark, each tunnel and bullet and
bomb, the walls of self-justification amass higher and higher, obscuring the
light from entering our hearts. And I
swear to you I can feel the cosmos cracking.
I do
not want to speak with you tonight about right and wrong. About justification. About what is fair or not. About any of the things that speak to those
parts of us that stimulate our egos. If
there is a time and place for those things, it is certainly not in this moment. I don’t want to speak with you about Israel
or Hamas, about politics and media, about Europe and anti-Semitism, about a
shot down airplane carrying the world’s best hope for a cure for AIDS now lost
along with hundreds of other souls, about families that have no home or food, children
alone on a border in Texas or shot down in Chicago’s streets. About people who
sit with us together tonight here in this sanctuary who feel more alone than we
could ever know. I want to talk about how our hearts respond when we encounter any of
these and more.
This
Shabbat puts us smack dab in the middle of the three week time period called Bein Ha
Meitzarim that carries our people from day we memorialize the walls of Jerusalem
being breached to Tisha B-Av - the
day we remember the destruction of the Beit
HaMikdash, the Temple in Jerusalem.
Of note is that, although there is certainly historical detail about the
events leading up to the Temple’s destruction and our people’s subsequent
exile, our tradition frames our memory of the events differently. When explaining why the Temple was destroyed,
instead of citing reasons like the enemy army’s strength, the Talmud instead
teaches that the Temple was destroyed on account of moral failures, the most
well-known narrative rooting the cause of the destruction to something called Sinat Chinam – translated most often as
baseless hatred, but if taken literally, it is the condition of hating
graciousness – the denial of benevolence, the abnegation of mercy, the rejection
of compassion. What, according to Jewish
tradition, led to the destruction of the place where we felt most connected to
the Divine? The condition of
closed-heartedness.
What
leads to the destructions of our deepest connections to ourselves, each other,
our world, to the Divine? In our day as well, the condition of closed
heartedness.
We
cannot control the disasters that loom in the universe or the wars that rage on
battlefields and in other’s souls. The
only question for us is what is the climate of our heart? Is it heat or ice? Vulnerable or locked up
tight?
I
wonder what it would be like if we could go through our days entirely
open-hearted? I wonder if our hearts
could sense the echoes of isolation, fear, and despair that our ears cannot perceive?
I wonder if we could find a way to hold each other with increased sensitivity
and compassion? I wonder if we could
heal the brokenness in each other’s hearts with our own hearts? And if we did so, what sort of Seat of
Holiness, what sort of Mikdash we
might build together again? Shabbat
Shalom
