This Shabbat, in anticipation of the election, I wanted to uplift our collective grit and determination and resilience. For me, the long, long road to this election has been an exercise in anxiety management. I confess that when the Democratic presidential candidate changed, I joined you from afar, from my Sabbatical in Germany, in the shared state of elation and possibility. I felt that elation and that sense of possibility for a solid chunk of time.
But then other things started intervening. For one, there are the increasingly unnerving fundraising pitches. Among the many that I receive every hour, some are kind and coaxing, and these I tend to respond to. Others are shaming and passive aggressive (“Irwin, we’ve tried you six times and haven’t heard from you”). And others are simply apocalyptic, tapping right into our fears: all will be lost if I don’t donate $10 right now.
My dread is also brought on by news polls. We all know their uses and also their limitations. Nonetheless, we hang on every word and graph, like staring at a wreck, until we force ourselves to look away.
But none of that is as dread-inducing as the rhetoric of the right. So filled with hate and venom. So much bullying and belittling. I hear snippets of speeches and I feel tears well up and my breath grow short. I feel my instinct to hide. And I realize that it is not the experienced adult in me that is responding, but the bullied child. I hear their words, or their tone, and I am in 3rd grade, threatened, powerless. And I realize that their language is calculated to do just that: to make anyone who has ever felt powerless feel powerless again.
It is because of all of this that I am so in admiration for friends and family and members of this congregation who have been postcarding and going door-to-door or flying to other states to go door-to-door. You inspire me. You remind us of our power. You rally our hearts and give us courage.
I don’t know what is going to happen next week, but I want us to remember that the time that we are in is much bigger than the election. Our role is bigger than getting particular individuals into office. There is a field – I don’t know what to call it – a spiritual field, a cultural field, a metaphysical field that needs to be restored and protected. It is formed of our greatest communitarian values: being kind and holding fast, chesed and gevurah. I feel like that is our task, tending this field. As we receive election results next week, some of which we will love and some of which we won’t, I want us to remember that that is only a piece of what we are here to do. We are here to be guardians of the field. Guardians of a wholeness that has become torn and tattered.
We have challenging times ahead, no matter what Tuesday brings. So we need to have grit and resilience. We need to tend and heal the field.
In a Torah portion just a few weeks down the road, Isaac goes out in the evening. It says:
וַיֵּצֵ֥א יִצְחָ֛ק לָשׂ֥וּחַ בַּשָּׂדֶ֖ה לִפְנ֣וֹת עָ֑רֶב
“And Isaac went out to . . .” Well, here’s where it’s not quite clear. Lasuach basadeh. To speak to the field? To meditate on the field? Possibly to cultivate the field? He does this lifnot erev – at evening-fall. Not in the bright morning of clarity, but in the time that is part shadow and part starlight. And then the verse continues,
וַיִּשָּׂ֤א עֵינָיו֙ וַיַּ֔רְא וְהִנֵּ֥ה גְמַלִּ֖ים בָּאִֽים׃
“He lifted his eyes and saw a caravan approaching.” Something about his engagement with the field, his being present with it, gives him the clarity to be able to lift his gaze and see what is approaching on the horizon – in this case the arrival of Rebecca, his basherte, his beloved.
That is my prayer for us now and over this weekend and next week and on into the future. That we hold firm to our labor of repairing the field, of sewing the tatters. That we help the field breathe and become strong. That we infuse it with values of kindness and peace and the ever-rarer respect. So that down the road, as the psalm says:
יַעֲלֹז שָׂדַי וְכָל־אֲשֶׁר־בּוֹ
“The field shall rejoice as will everything that is in it.” And all of us – all of us – are in it.
Let us be guardians of the field. For the sake of everyone at risk – for the sake of women, and people of color, and newcomers, and transgender kids. Let us be strong and resolute. Let us not succumb to feeling alone and insignificant. Because we are not alone and we are not insignificant. We are here with each other. We are myriads. We stand shoulder to shoulder and we have other’s back. Here to tend the integrity of the country and the world we live in.
So I go into this weekend and the next week and this whole twilit time not as a spectator waiting to see what will happen. I go as a Guardian of the Field among beloved, powerful Guardians of the Field. We will lift our eyes and be grateful for the beloved future that is arriving at our invitation.