The Noah Story 2022/5783 - When it seems like another Flood feels imminent...

 This past week we remembered the 11 victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh.  

 

The ADL explains there was a 30% increase in Anti-Semitic acts in the US between 2020 and 2021.

 

Israel and Lebanon signed an agreement about potential offshore natural gas deposits, but they’re still technically at war with each other.

 

Israel’s about to go to its 5^th election in 2 years, Great Britain has its third prime minister in as many months.

 

In a week, the UN climate change conference will take place in Egypt and yet all reports suggest leading nations are nowhere near to the requirements for keeping climate change in check.

 

War rages in Ukraine and Russia tries to steer other East European nations like Moldova to their side.

 

War rages in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, having left at least half a million dead up to now.

 

Part of Wuhan, China is on lock down again.

 

Probably one of the most difficult issues of the day, a former nationals baseball team player is now a legendary athlete for the Philadeplhia Phillies.  Goodness!

 

And to top it all off, this week’s Torah portion, Noah, is about the end of humanity as we know it, and only one small remainder will survive.

 

And is Noah a great righteous person whose family deserves saving above all others?

 

Our ancestors are ambivalent about him, when the Torah introduces him as a tzadik, a righteous person in his generation, they say some interpret this as praise – if he lived in an age of righteous people he would be even more righteous than they, but others say he was only righteous compared to everyone else in his generation, and if he had lived in the time of Abraham he would have amounted to nothing.

 

Let’s put aside the planet for a moment, as George Carlin once said, the Earth, by and large, is a self-correcting system, and it’s been through lots worse than the age of humanity. 

 

Naturally the next question is are we, the people, worth saving?  

 

And the answer of our tradition is yes, we are worth saving – we have to earn it though, we have the opportunity, but we have only our lifetimes, a micro blip of time.

 

I wish I could offer a course of action grounded in Jewish tradition that can directly point the way for us to renew ourselves, renew humanity, reduce conflict, and beyond, but all I know right now is I’m grateful to be a part of the Shaare Shalom community.  Here we can share what we’re struggling with and our fellow community members listen.  And the Rabbis teach us “Teach yourself to say, I don’t know”, and so I’m following the teaching, I don’t know the answer, but I do know that knowing there’s a supportive community around us means I don’t feel like I’m facing the challenge alone because ultimately I’m convinced God judges us not on how well we create new technology or whether we’re able to stop a war, God judges us on how well we take care of each other, since, without that community, without the holiness of respect, honor, and kindness, even the longest life is less a blessing and more a burden.

 

This Shabbat, Purple Shabbat, is an event at the end of Domestic Violence Awareness month, what better a time for us to rededicate ourselves to creating a welcoming, inclusive, and safe community for all of us to try and fulfill to the best of our ability kol yisrael arevim ze bazeh, we are all responsible for one another.

 

 

 

Haazinu - 2022/5783 - The Sounds of Silence

 And in the naked light, I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never shared

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence (From Simon & Garfunkel)

 

As the Torah approaches the end of the story, now coming full circle from the creation of the world, a new creation is about to happen – the creation of a nation returning to and living on its ancestral land.

And God has told Moses the future – the people will enter the Land and stray from the covenant, but a song will remind them of God, the covenant, Exodus, Torah, creation and everything else God wants them to remember. 

The song is this week’s Torah portion and it begins, like the Shema, asking for attention…

Hear, O, heavens, and I’ll speak, Listen, Earth, to the words of My Mouth

But will the people hear and listen?

Or will they hear without listening, like in Simon & Garfunkel’s song?

 

Moses teaches the song to the people.

But as Menachem Chizkuni explains, the song calls heaven and earth to witness, why?

“This is a direct continuation of the last verse in the previous portion, Vayelech, in which he had announced this poem/song to the people. He now calls on the eternal heaven and earth to act as witnesses to what he had to say, seeing that he, as a mortal, cannot do so anymore.”

 

Moses can only speak, he can only plant the seeds…but will the people listen, internalize, and permit the seeds to grow in their hearts? 

 

This is an apt message in these days right after Yom Kippur.  For 10 days we lived in suspended animation, between ourselves of the past year and the selves we want to shape in the New Year.

We acknowledged our wrongdoings, we chanted them together, and the teshuvah journey goes on.

But now, just like the ancient farmers who came to Jerusalem at Sukkot to pray for a successful crop in the new year of planting, planting that begins right after Sukkot, we pray the seeds of teshuvah we planted in our hearts will germinate, grow, and flourish in the new calendar year, 5783.

It’s telling that the next verses of the song speak about God’s words acting like rain and dew, floating down and nourishing the soil of our souls.

And with this image I wonder if Paul Simon, who wrote the song, a son of Hungarian Jewish parents, was inspired by our parsha, listen to the verse toward the end of the song:

 

Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

 

 In the song, there’s no response, only silence.  In real life though here is always a delay between our speaking and someone else hearing and responding.  Good communication skills require us to clarify and make sure we’ve heard correctly, to rephrase what we heard in our own words before we respond.

 

In a way, this skill, of clarifying, checking in to make sure we’ve heard correctly, is the story of all Jewish history after this moment, the story of our ongoing relationship to God, and of Jewish communities all over the world.  We want to keep the line open, but, there’s lots of interference on the line, and the call often gets dropped, and sometimes we get disconnected for an extended period of time.

Sukkot is our reminder of this reality.  When we go into the Sukkah on Sunday night, a structure that is fragile and exposed to nature, we’re reminded of how uncertain the journey often is.

 

With another horrific attack on a school, this time in Thailand, we are reminded, again, about the fragility of life, and with the mounting tension between Israel and Lebanon about disputed sea rights in the Mediterranean, we’re reminded about the thin line between compromise and conflict, and with reports about Russia potentially using tactical nuclear weapons, we’re reminded about how the wicked crave silence around them so they can cause harm to others and the earth without remorse.

 

In these perilous times, may our teshuvah and the song we read today, help nudge the world back toward a place of milk and honey, a place of newness and unlimited potential, a place of hope, and calming sunsets, a place where plants and people grow, evolve, and both see, hear, and listen to know the humanity in one another.