Yom Kippur Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom
Welcome to the River of Transformation. The world around us is plainly transforming. It is re-birthing itself and you might notice that the contractions are getting closer together. The pandemic, widespread anger and grief, the erosion of the democracy, the planet's cries of distress, fury at historic and continuing racial injustice. Birthpangs all, at least I hope.
And here we are, wondering how to be part of this transformation, how to tend and cultivate it; how to keep it from becoming something dreadful and instead inch it toward something beautiful. I somehow picture it like that befuddling Olympic sport, curling. We can't force this rebirthing world to move forward the way we want. But we can skate alongside with brooms, and create the subtle conditions for it to gently incline toward blessing.
Change is difficult always. We want it, we campaign for it, we make bumper stickers about it. But we also resist it. At least I do. Because change involves risk and uncertainty and loss. To make space for transformation, something's gotta give. What are we willing to sacrifice for the transformation we want? In a truly just world, I would not have ended up with the privilege I have enjoyed; privilege that is, that must be, at someone else's expense. And at the planet's expense. I want a just world; I dream of it. I will sacrifice what must go. But I will undoubtedly grieve the death of the kind of life I have lived.
So inevitably, if we are midwifing the birth of the world we want, then we are also midwifing the death of the things that must go. And both of these are holy tasks.
And so, midwives, I want to say a few words about transformation, and how we might hold it and be part of it. I don't have political strategies for change to offer. up tonight. But my heart tells me that there are spiritual tools that might better equip us for the transformative work ahead.
In my drash on Rosh Hashanah, I warned that we should not mistake this world of politics and rancor as the only world in which we exist. And I illustrated the idea with a river metaphor.
Tonight I will switch metaphors midstream, and remind us of our Jewish mystical idea of the Four Worlds. This tradition – along with our instincts and, for many of us, our experience – tell us that we inhabit more than one realm at the same time. At any moment there is more operating in us and around us than we can see with our eyes or measure even with the most delicate of instruments.
Most of our day-to-day time we spend in the world our mystics called Asiyah, the "doing" world. It is the world of our physical bodies, of politics, property, and profit. It is the world that requires most of our attention. It is also the world in which we are most separated from each other and most disconnected from the rest of Creation. It is the clever trick of Asiyah to make us think that it is the only world that there is.
But we have all felt ourselves reverberating in other worlds. In Yetzirah – the world of emotion, dreams, imagination and angelic intervention. In Beriah, the world of pure thought, Divine intellect and creative power. Atzilut, the least embodied of the Four Worlds, where we might get a khap, a hit, of Infinity, of the fullness and seeming emptiness that saturate all existence.
The problems we are facing in the current polycrisis reach into all the worlds. But we have mostly created them and experience them in the world of Asiyah, this "doing" world. And it is in this "doing" world that we have been trying to find solutions, largely of a political nature.
But, as Einstein once reflected, "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them." Because at that level we are trapped inside the rules, limits and conflicts that created the problem.
Our mystical tradition shares Einstein's insight; Rabbi Miles Krassen has articulated it by saying that the problems of Asiyah cannot be solved in the world of Asiyah alone. Instead, we must access the other worlds, opening to the flow of thought, imagination, association, connection, compassion and Divine energy that reside there. We need to get unstuck, and get a different view – from a higher altitude, and at a level where we are not quite so isolated from each other and from the Earth.
Even doing our own self-transformation work, we need a way to get outside of ourselves. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, of blessed memory, likens the problem to that of driving a car with a flat tire. In the case of the car, you can pull over and turn off the ignition and change the tire. But our lives? There is no way to put ourselves in park.
Reb Zalman says, "On the one hand, I have to go deep within in order to tranform and, at the same time, I have to continue steering the vehicle which is my life. No one else can do the transforming for me; it is something I have to work on myself. If I don't practice, then it's not going to happen. And, if I have to be the person who can change me, how do I manage that when I can't stop my life from continuing to unfold at the same time? Somehow, I have to reach out to forces and powers that are greater than I. Even self-transformation cannot be done by myself alone. I need what we call siya'ata di-shmaya – heaven's aid."
Reb Zalman was not, on that day, speaking in the Four-World paradigm. But he was reinforcing that we need something from outside our usual realm of awareness to bring us insight and support for true transformation.
For Reb Zalman, the reaching out toward the Divine certainly involved prayer, probably meditation. But maybe prayer is too religious for you. There are other ways too. Accessing our sense of wonder – looking at stars or looking through a microscope or taking a walk and trying to imagine the interior life of a tree.
Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav would go into nature and sit on the ground and listen for the song of each blade of grass.
Our species has always had practices to draw us back into a state when we weren't so separate from God or nature or each other. It is insight from those levels of connectedness that are asking to be brought into our work here in the
"doing" world of Asiyah.
Reaching into other realms holds the possibility of great blessing, and some risk also. Tomorrow we will read in Torah about our patriarch Jacob, readying himself to cross the river to return to his homeland. That night he is all alone, having sent his family and his staff and all his property ahead. And there, in the dark, where we all wrestle our demons, Jacob famously wrestles an angel.
It is a transformative moment. Because for so much of his life, Jacob has been trying to get ahead in the world of Asiyah and using Asiyah-level tools to do so, including birthrights, goats, disguises, stratagems, and soup. But now, on the eve of his return, with decades more of life behind him, in the liminal space between lands and eras, he at last struggles with his own nature and this time he reaches into a higher realm. He grabs this mysterious being and refuses to let go until it offers him a blessing.
And the blessing Jacob receives is a new name: Yisrael, meaning "one who struggles with God," as if it were a souvenir of the long night of wrestling. But what we don't notice often enough is that in its form, Yisrael is an angel name. Gavriel, Rafael, Yisrael. Jacob is at last in relationship with his angelic self. That is, the version of himself that exists on other planes. The Yetzirah or Beriah or Atzilut part of himself. He is at last taking the chance of working from another level, a level in which there is more connectedness, compassion, empathy. And indeed, the next morning he crosses over the stream and he and his long-feared brother fall on each other's necks and weep.
Now a cautionary note. Jacob does not walk away from this experience of transformation unscathed. He is wounded in the wrestling. He is more integrated, perhaps, but he carries an injury for the rest of his life.
We also might not get through the transformations ahead unscathed. The challenges are immense, the timeline untenable, the damage our species has already inflicted too severe. Despite this rising tide of vision and determination, things could still get worse before they get better.
So I want to invite us not only to hold our sense of urgency but also its estranged twin, the long view. Change is dynamic; it can never just happen now; it can only happen across time. The long view means sharing the burden with – and having faith in – the generations that will follow us.
This orientation was articulated by late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in discussing what it meant to her to so often be penning a dissenting opinion in Supreme Court cases, instead of writing the majority view. She said, "Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.' But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow."
This is Justice Ginsburg's faith. Not faith of an explicitly religious nature, but akin. A faith that ultimately, given time, the cause of justice, generosity, and kindness will take hold. They will inevitably win the hearts of our nation.
And not just that – she also has faith that our actions today, our words today, have meaning. They have impact even if the impact is time-released. I might say it this way: that while our words and our actions might not always win the day in the "doing" world of Asiyah, they are not lost. They cause shifts in the other Worlds. All of our words and actions, both positive and negative. Nothing in vain. Nothing wasted. All imprinted somewhere, shaping an energetic field that will, in time, form the future.
Think of how the changes that we most value came about. Women's suffrage. Same-sex marriage. They did not come about only through rallies and protests and legislation. But through a softening of the heart and an expansion of the spirit. These struggles required the long view, and belief that nothing was wasted.
So let us not despair in the face of the challenges ahead. We have more tools than we think. All the Worlds are at our call, waiting, wanting to help. And we will be midwives, we will be curlers, we will be travelers moving between worlds. Insistent and patient, loving and connected. Drawing forth blessing from and for the river.