It hasn’t been three weeks, and I am already tired of waking up with a pit in my stomach. Waking up out of dreams of danger or dread. I suspect I’m not alone in this. So many of my waking hours are filled with the work of rabbying – teaching, meeting with congregants, planning – that it is often in the quietest hours and the sleepiest hours that the fear catches up with me.
I look at the news and I look at my inbox and can only take in a fraction of what is coming my way. People send me essays they’ve clipped – some help me feel more determined or more in control; others are so full of outrage right in their subject headers that I can’t even open them.
Meanwhile I feel like it’s my job to say something, or to lead a charge, or offer some piece of leadership meaningful for the moment. But I sometimes don’t know who I am in all this. If people look to me for courage and if I’m not feeling courage, what do I do?
I notice how physical and present my fear feels to me. So much so that it requires effort for me to remember the fact that I am not in any specific or imminent danger in this moment. So my fear isn’t exactly personal. It’s global. It’s spiritul. It’s ancestral. I am responding to the dread of an unknown future and to the conditioning of my own past.
I come by my conditioned fear honestly. We all do. There is some fear in me that is undoubtedly ancestral. Feeling the flight of the great-grandmothers right in my DNA. And then there’s the way life has conditioned me. I see young me, waking up with a pit in his stomach, not wanting to get out of bed, afraid to go to school, because some bully or assemblage of bullies has threatened to beat me up today. The beating up almost never happened; the goal of the bullies was my fear, and they succeeded in that, and they succeed still.
When I see the new administration in Washington, both the official one and the shadow one, my body recognizes them as bullies and responds with very old, very deep fear.
Not only is the past at work in me, but so is the future. Looking at an unknown that I can’t imagine; or where I can imagine, and the imagining doesn’t look good. My fears for the future may be accurate, grounded in current circumstances, or they might not. But fearing things that haven’t happened yet, as if they have, makes the now much harder. It makes me feel small, ill-equipped, and already defeated. And I’m not sure anyone is helped by my helplessness, least of all me.
So I think about how to make a different choice in a moment where really all I’ve got is past and future fear. How do I find the courage for this moment?
One lesson might come from our Torah portion this week, B’shallach, in which we see the Israelites on their exit from Egypt. Pharaoh’s armies are behind them, hemming them in. In front of them an untraversible Sea. They, like us, are in an unprecedented situation. Nothing in their experience has prepared them for the bravery they need in this moment. They are conditioned to be submissive; enslavement is in their bones.
The way Torah tells it, help comes through miracle. Moses prays to God and God says, “Raise your staff over the water.” He does and a wind comes and parts the Sea. Miracle.
But Midrash, written later, at a time when our people were living under Roman oppression, tells the story differently. Midrash has Moses lost in thought, praying. But the people do not wait. They step into the water. One Midrash says they go in up to their necks. Another says they are already in over their heads when the waters finally part.
Midrash clearly has a different idea for us. The people did something important, brave, maybe desperate. But what they did was not what they were conditioned to do. Everything in their personal and family histories would have had them turn around and surrender. Or their fear of the great unknown ahead would have rendered them immobile. Instead, despite fear, despite conditioning, despite dread, they step forward.
Midrash tells us not to wait for the miracle. You act now, even if you are afraid. It doesn’t say “don’t be afraid.” It says that you stay in the present and take steps despite being afraid.
And this is a model for us now too. To stay in the present, where we are needed. And to take present-tense steps. Each of us can find a way to be of use in the now. Some of us will march and some will do research. Some of us will build new alliances. Some will focus on immigrants and some will protect transgender youth. Some will watch electoral politics and some will watch the courts. And some of us will keep the rest of us informed.
And besides these politically savvy acts, all of us can continue, in the present moment, without regard to conditioned fear, to engage in acts of kindness. Spreading care and leaving a trail of civility wherever we go. This we can do now, in the present moment. Courage begins in the heart, so let’s work our hearts. Keep them open and strong. That is courage and that is how we can be of use.
I know that despite these words I am going to continue waking up with a pit in my stomach. I know I will feel waves of dread. But when I do, I commit to saying this to myself:
I am not the prisoner of my past
Or the captive of my conditioning.
Dread is not destiny.
In this moment I am strong.
In this moment I am unassailable.
In this moment I am needed.
Let me be of use.
Maybe try saying it yourself.
I am not the prisoner of my past
Or the captive of my conditioning.
Dread is not destiny.
In this moment I am strong.
In this moment I am unassailable.
In this moment I am needed.
Let me be of use.
And together we can step into this Sea, and in the wake of our courage, the Parting of the Waters will come.