Rosh Hashanah Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom
Today's loss of Justice Ginsburg makes it hard to talk about anything else. Hard to think about anything else. Hard to move past the fear that is undoubtedly setting in.
I'm still going to share some of my drash tonight. It's one about enriching our spiritual lives, about shoring up our ability to feel whole so that we can be doing this work of this world fiercely, compassionately, and not in a constant panic.
It is too early tonight to speculate on what will happen next. But it is not too early to feel into our love for each other, and our connection with the many people in this country who honestly crave justice and kindness.
It is hard being in a time of flux. Flux. Even our language about such times is liquid, watery. We are in a river of change. That has been clear all year. How we respond politically and practically, those are matters we will keep discussing over time, here and with all our friends and all the communities we're part of.
But how do we stay whole during these times? Maybe another kind of river holds the key.
Last month, Oren and I took a trip to the southwest. On our second night, we were at the home of a friend in Boulder, Utah, which is in the Escalante region of the state. At night we stepped outside and the sky was brightly lit. For a moment I thought I was seeing city lights reflected in the sky, as I would here or almost anywhere I've been. But when my eyes adjusted I realized that all the brightness was coming from the stars themselves. Escalante is an official "dark zone." There is no light from any city that makes it far enough to penetrate this place. And dominating the sky was a vast river of light – the Milky Way. So thick, so dense, it utterly ceased being individual points of light. Instead it was a liquid brightness painted with a watercolor brush. And although this light was hitting my eyes for the first time, it was all ancient light, arriving from long ago. Who knows, maybe some of it all the way back to the Big Bang. I was seeing the history of the Universe streaked right across the sky.
In medieval Hebrew the Milky Way is called nahar di-nura. The River of Light. Which for our ancestors was a little redundant. Because the Hebrew word for river, nahar, and the Aramaic word for light, nahora, are virtually identical. Our pre-modern ancestors clearly understood something about the shared nature of light and rivers, each being both particle and wave.
That night in Utah, I received the waters of the River of Light. I was able to set down, for a little while, so much of what I had been carrying for months. It was before this year's specific fire and smoke, and obviously before today's news. But still I was carrying the generalized fear of catastrophe; in addition to the isolation of the pandemic, fear for the democracy, the unceasing violence against people of color, the rancor in all public conversations, the peril to the planet itself. All those things. And underneath that burden was the grief that runs like groundwater under our feet.
"How can this be, in a Universe so splendid..." I wondered.
But for those minutes, the Milky Way, the River of Light, lifted me and drew me into a higher consciousness. Is felt like the fate of the world wasn't on my shoulders; that Creation was not so much depending on my words, my actions, my ability to mobilize votes. I didn't stop knowing how much depends on words, action, and mobilization. But for a few moments I was relocated to a part of my own existence that wasn't tied to the particulars of striving or suffering or solving. A part that is connected instead to the unfolding Creation itself. For an instant my connection to the whole expanded and my importance – my self-importance – subsided.
Hayom harat olam, we say on Rosh Hashanah, as you well know because I often talk about it. "Today the world is born." And so on Rosh Hashanah in years past we've looked at our Creation stories to see what they might be trying to say to us. One year we looked at our 7-day "In the Beginning" story. And last year we retold the birth of the world as a great cosmic tree rooted in infinity, a Tree of Life of which we are the leaves and the blossoms and the fruit.
But this year I will tell you about a river. The first river. It shows up in the Book of Genesis (2:10), where we read:
וְנָהָר יֹצֵא מֵעֵדֶן לְהַשְׁקוֹת אֶת־הַגָּן
"A river pours forth from Eden to water the Garden."
You could probably roll right past this verse and not notice it inside the larger Creation story. Except that it's unlike all the verses before and after it. Those verses are in the past tense. They tell the story as something that happened long ago. God breathed life into the human. God planted a Garden. God put the human in the Garden. All ancient, mythical acts. But this verse, the verse about the river, is not in the past tense. It is in the present. It doesn't say "a river poured forth" but rather, A river is pouring forth.
Our commentators and kabbalists noticed the unusual tense, and they saw in it a hint that there is something from the Beginning, from the launch of Creation, that is still flowing. We are still in the current of a primordial stream; the Garden is still being watered.
I know it might be hard to imagine all that flow. Because we are living in a time that seems so drained of its juice and we are hearing the gears grinding. It's a dry riverbed of a time. And I'm not talking about climate change and California heat. I'm talking about our consciousness, our emotional and spiritual lives, our communal life – our ability to share and to speak and to listen. I notice in myself how much harder it has become to be civil, to be calm, to be brave, creative, and hopeful. You all know that I am inherently a hopeful person, but this year, my well has been significantly depleted.
And this is a bad place to be in. I feel it. And I know you do too.
So how do we cultivate an outlook that keeps us tapped into the promise of this world, with all life and its possibilities? That keeps us juiced up so that we can slip right past despair?
Maybe one way has to do with this river, pouring forth from Eden, still flowing, still there to water our Garden, the Garden of our consciousness, of our spirit, of our hope.
We are not the first generation to face tremendous danger. Dire times can drive people to the narrowest possible view – I only believe in what I can see, and what I can see ain't good.
But we all know there is more. That there are levels of consciousness deeper and higher than the headlines in the morning paper and they are moving in us too. We experience them in special moments. In the first blossom of love, or holding hands in old age. We feel it watching a symphony being performed, or the operas that RBG loved. We might feel it making art or looking at art. Studying. Singing in harmony. Dancing with abandon. Engaging in acts of radical kindness. These are real moments – even if brief – in which we might move to a different level of consciousness. Our hearts cracking open. We feel deep kinship with the strangers sitting around us in the theatre or the animals and plants with whom we just shared a walk in the woods. We also experience a shift in conciousness being close to death – being with the dying, being present at a death. This also alters our consciousness; connecting us with an awareness of the marvel of Life.
This consciousness-shifting flow from the River can reach us in different forms. Torah says that the primordial river from Eden separates into four, as we'll read tomorrow morning at Torah time. So perhaps here is the suggestion that there are (at least) 4 different qualities of consciousness that these waters feed. There's the simple, everyday, present-world consciousness with which we go about our daily activities. But what about the consciousness of our dreams, which flow like a river, sometimes placid, sometimes turbulent, always insightful? Maybe our creativity is yet another flow of consciousness; maybe there is a river of inspiration and creativity that's not bounded by the feasibility of any particular human project. Maybe there's a river of understanding, of compassion, in whose waters we can empathize with the emotions even of the people we most disagree with and see in them tzelem Elohim, the Image of the Divine, something I find challenging in the arid world of my normal consciousness. And maybe there is a river of simple holiness, the light touch of the Divine, misting our thirsty cells.
I wonder what invisible rivers are flowing in us right now. Why don't we take a moment, right now, close our eyes and notice. What is flowing through me?
Now give a thought to how you can open up to receive these waters more fully. Do you just step in? Kneel on the banks and sip? Immerse yourself as if in a mikveh?
I myself have never been a swimmer. It took years and very patient teachers to get me to the point where I could float or tread. But this river, these rivers, I want to dive into. Drench myself. I know for certain that I don't want to keep walking this life parched.
And if jumping into these streams is too daunting, we can do what my grandmother would've done. Just wade in as far as your ankles, spritz yearself, and say, with a full heart, "What a mechayeh."
These Days of Awe are not a holiday. They are not "days off." We are in training season. It's practice time – swimming practice. We have ten days to keep jumping in, to do laps in this River. To let the Garden of our consciousness be watered, soaked, and nourished.
Let us live not only on the narrowest physical plane, but in multiple dimensions at once, accompanied by dreams and angels and ideas and empathy and courage. When we look at the Milky Way, let us not see it as a picture of something far off, unrelated to our lives here on this planet. Because we also live in the Milky Way, in the nahar di-nura, the River of Light. Our planet, our physicality, our evolution, even our individual thoughts right now, are all part of that paintbrush stroke that first hit the canvas at the Beginning and is still in motion. We are part of zohar harakia – the radiance of the heavens. And as the Zohar says about that Milky Way radiance (Zohar I:34a): "what is this expanse illuminating Earth if not the river flowing forth from Eden to water the Garden?"
We are in the River. We are the River.
Let us not mistake this world of politics and rancor as the only world in which we exist. This is a saturated, hydro-charged Cosmos. We can float with the current or paddle upstream; we can flip and flop like an otter to get where we need to be to feel hope. Where we need to be to better serve the interests of all Life. Where we need to be to be compassionate, loving, expansive, even while we're being notorious.
We are alive, we are in the flow, we are buoyant. The thirsty Gardens of our consciousness are ready to drink. We are ready to be nourished; ready to immerse ourselves. May it be – although I suspect it inherently is – a mechayeh.
I owe a lot here to Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (2009).