I am just back. I got back in the middle of the night from the Ohalah conference – sort of the Renewal rabbi jamboree. There’s the joy of the hotel air and the banquet room food. But also being with the people you went to school with, and if you count the people ahead of you and the people behind you, that’s quite a wide swath. A lot of people to catch up with and find out what their rabbinate or cantorate or rabbinic pastorate is like. There are new students to meet and they are more interesting all the time. There are the elders to see and learn from. And there are the folks who died over the last year to remember, whose work we could bring into what we learned and how we prayed over the week. And the chance to welcome the new rabbis at their smicha ceremony, which was very different from my ordination ceremony as you might recall. I loved what we created in a Zoom ordination ceremony in the first year of COVID lockdown. But there was something special about being in the room, as the blessing is made, as the hands are laid, as the new rabbis emerge from practically an incense cloud of blessing and lineage.
So there was lots of beautiful. We were also not impervious to the world outside. Our minds were often on the fires in Los Angeles. It came up in conversation and prayer. We have colleagues who lost their homes and they were in our hearts and minds, and so there was a lot of checking of phones.
And there was a lot of talking about the political situation – about the regime that is about to begin, about the harms we could be witness to, that we will need to be in relationship with and in resistance to. In fact much of the conference revolved around how to hold Jewish leadership in the years ahead. Lots of study and conversation about resilience and resistance and endurance and inspiration too.
Mid-day on Wednesday, Rabbi Diane Elliot and I were meant to teach a mid-day workshop together. It was called “Deep Listening Across the Generational Divide” and it was going to be an exploration of our work these last seven years in Taproot, a program for which she and I are co-founders and faculty. The program has evolved over seven years, but now I would probably describe it as an opportunity for young activists and thought leaders to do Jewish learning and practice, to deepen in a community of peers and with the support of elders and mentors, to support them in their work in the world. The work we do together includes prayer, study, and ancestral healing work. And Rabbi Diane and I have learned much about working across generations, which from our end includes being open to what emerges – not imposing what we think people should learn and how they should learn it. And when the moment suggests that something else is necessary we follow the impetus of the moment.
And that’s what we got to do Wednesday in practice. Because just before our session, news broke that there was a ceasefire agreement. Now of course when the news comes in, you picture something that is more complete, more thorough, and more instantaneous than is actually the case. Immediately the rabbinical students and other youngers began singing and dancing in the hotel lobby. There was a wave of that and then some of the juice of the initial elation ebbed and more emotions began to arise. The tears; the fatigue; and the doubt.
So in Taproot fashion, Rabbi Diane and I yielded to what was happening and we discarded our plan. We invited everyone back into the banquet room where we were slated to be teaching, to come and be present together. We led some singing to help hold what was happening in our emotional cores. As the mood changed we invited people to form a circle on the ground and there we were able to share. And we heard stories, how people have experienced this war. Some of them are rabbis living in Israel, some of them are campus rabbis, some of them peace activists. And as we learned that the agreement did not mean the immediate release of all the hostages being held in Gaza, that sadness entered the room too.
Rabbi Diane and I just held the space until every person had said what they needed, and had felt supported and seen. Rabbi Diane and I had let the moment lead and we had followed, serving it – and the people in it – as best we could.
From there I packed up my things – my big boxes full of unsold books – and packed them into the car my sister just gave me, impatient that my husband and I have not been able to get around to buying a new car for the couple years in which we had been down a car, while she had replaced her old car with admirable and characteristic dispatch. So she gave me the old car, with record of every repair ever done in the past 14 years.
I put all of my books and my clothes and Rabbi Diane’s unsold books and Rabbi Burt of blessed memory – his unsold books, and I hit the road. I left, and all of what had happened that day was this still churning inside me. The possibility of peace. The pride in our congregation for having called for ceasefire so many months ago. The sadness that it was so many months ago and nothing had changed. All the sadness that reviewing this war brings to the forefront. And sadness that it is not over, and it is in the hands not of the people who want peace but the leaders who want advantage.
But the road helped. I drove from Denver home, first to Grand Junction, and then on to Highway 50, which is called the Loneliest Road in America. It’s a road where you can drive for twelve hours and hardly see another car. It’s high chapparal, so it’s scrub and not trees. So plant life is limited and animal is too. You go from vast valley to vast valley, with rings of mountains on the horizon in every direction. At night, the other night, I was driving in the dark and the waning moon of Tevet was overhead and it was illuminating the mountainsides and the cliffs and the mountain formations. Not as bright as my headlights on the road, but every once in a while I would pick something up in my peripheral vision and turn and see that there was a mountain right here next to me that I hadn’t seen coming but now here it was in intimate space with me.
And then yesterday during the day, I had the opporunity numerous times to stop the car. I only once stopped the car in the middle of the road and got out just to prove you could. After that I did dutifully pull over. When I was tired I would pull over and open the window to breathe the below-freezing air. And the quiet was so complete. There were no large animals, no wind blowing through trees because there were no trees. There were no squirrels in trees for the same reason. The loudest noise was the ringing in my ears.
So I just got back in the middle of the night and have been wondering what lessons I’m bringing back and wondering what lesson there is for us in this moment of possible, still unconfirmed, delicate ceasefire; and two days away from the beginning of a presidential regime in which the rich will get their way and many people will suffer. I haven’t talked about this much because I suspect we’re all reading the same news and because there’s hasn’t quite been anything to do about it yet. That’s how it’s felt.
As is so often the case, the week’s Torah portion provides a lens through which we can look anew at ourselves and our situation. This week is Shemot, the opening of the Book of Exodus. We meet Pharaoh. We see the enslavement of the Hebrews. We witness the birth of Moses and his escape in a basket downriver, into the arms of Pharaoh’s daughter. We see his upbringing as a bicultural child and young man, both privileged and aware of his secret identity as a Hebrew. We see him kill a taskmaster who was abusing an enslaved Hebrew, and we see his flight to Midian, where he marries and, for 40 years, is a shepherd.
And that is all just two chapters.
Then he is shepherding and sees a bush aflame but not being consumed. So a flame maybe with no smoke at all, a flame that our mystics say wasn’t even there physically but was appearing from another world, a vision of flame sharing space with the bush. An angel calls to Moshe and a conversation with God begins. Moshe is instructed to take off his shoes because this is holy ground.
God then gives him his deployment. He is to free the Children of Israel from slavery. To bring an end to the great crisis of his people. To escape tyranny. To uproot his family. To stare down Pharaoh, the most powerful ruler in Moshe’s known world. To administer a migration of hundreds of thousands of people who would all have to eat and be sheltered.
Moshe asks the key question:
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר מֹשֶׁה֙ אֶל־הָ֣אֱלֹהִ֔ים מִ֣י אָנֹ֔כִי כִּ֥י אֵלֵ֖ךְ אֶל־פַּרְעֹ֑ה וְכִ֥י אוֹצִ֛יא אֶת־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מִמִּצְרָֽיִם׃
But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?”
The immediate answer given is:
וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ כִּֽי־אֶֽהְיֶ֣ה עִמָּ֔ךְ
“I will be with you.”
God does not give the reasons why Moshe is the right person. God doesn’t even say Moshe is the right person. Maybe Moshe is the most available person in that moment. The only one who got out.
Ki ehyeh imakh. I will be with you.
And that might be the best we can do right now. That might be the best we could do ever in response to our own fears of being unequal to the moment.
How am I to respond to any of it? To the work of liberation? The work of comforting? The work of preservation? The work of rebuilding? The work peacemaking? The work of protecting. All of this is ahead. No, all of this is already here.
I know at my age I feel fatigued. Haven’t I done enough? Can’t I just rest? But the flow of time is not for our benefit; not to give us the reward of well-deserved rest. Time brings new and more complex challenges to our doorsteps. The time we are in is the time we are in, regardless of our age or experience or skill set. We are definitionally inadequate to meet the moment.
Who am I to do any of it?
But in the Torah portion we hear the echo of the Divine promise, ki ehyeh imakh. I will be with you.
Let’s take a moment to breathe in that promise. Ki ehyeh imakh. I will be with you.
Who knows what will be demanded of any of us? Who knows the ways we will be invited or required to serve?
But in none of this are we alone. Mi anokhi? Who am I? It doesn’t matter. We don’t have to have a life story like Moshe’s. We just need to know that we are on Holy Ground, and that we are not alone.
I spent many hours yesterday on the Loneliest Road in America. And I wasn’t lonely. I was accompanied by sky and brush and sometimes a bird. The Divine was with me. Obvious once you slow down and notice.
We have a hard road ahead, but it doesn’t have to be a lonely one. We have each other. We have the voice of this beautiful planet. We have many creative people whose leadership or poetry or art will inspire us. And we have the Divine at our side, at our back, and within us. Ki ehyeh imakh. I will be with you.