Atoning in 5786
From galaxies to individual cells, everything participates in great cycles of return. … Death is the amnesia separating one life experience from another. It is only the enemy for those who seek to hold on to this world in order to control and possess. … Not so for those who share their lives with others. For them, death is simply the final opportunity to give.
—Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, in Honey from the RockAnd Abraham … sent [Hagar] away, and she went wandering through the wilderness of Beersheba. And when the water in the skin was gone, she flung the child under one of the bushes and went off and sat at a distance, a bowshot away, for she thought, ‘Let me not see when the child dies.’ And she sat at a distance and raised her voice and wept. —Genesis/B’reishit 21:14-16, from Robert Alter, trans., The Five Books of Moses: A Translation and Commentary
As sundown approaches, I feel the trap of fear, loneliness, powerlessness, the common background emotions, sensations, intuitions of my life through the surreal horror of the collapse of the world I thought I knew, that I thought I’d grow old and die in. Feelings intensified as Yom Kippur nears, the yearly rehearsal of our own deaths, preparation for the last breath which we may or may not take over the coming year, whether or not we are ready for it to end, a last breath that will mark, at some point, the end of all our efforts to love, to help, to make and shape beauty, a better world. Yom Kippur feels unique in that as a festival, a chag, of individual reflection, moving inward to reckon with our lives, accepting our role and part in harming and hurting others and the world. It can be a day of isolation, a day of standing alone with our shortcomings, sins, faults, failures. When you strip away the ritual and history and tradition of it all, it’s about my end.
As we approach two years since the massacres of October 7th, 2023, since the Israeli government opted for razing a civilization, destruction, mass death, which, as I write this, grinds on even as Netanyahu and Hamas consider their options in the face of a “peace deal” created by the neo-fascist government of the United States. As American Jews caught up in this two-year conflagration, it is hard not to be pulled out of the individual, the interiority, to turn our gaze to the People, am Yisrael, and to the national, global, universal. We can choose to return collectively, as a “we” the Jewish people, to the warnings of the prophets, their almost droning urging that we remember to protect the weak and powerless, the strangers among us, to adopt them into the community and care for them, to feed and clothe them. This year there can be no atoning without asking what these core values of Torah and Nevi’im mean now in the face of a state driven by fear and vengeance.
But tonight, I will stand in my San Francisco community, in the dim light of Kol Nidre, bare before the covenant to chant confessions and forgiveness, all oaths that condemn me, may they be forsworn, may my words not be held against me, may I face the many ways I’ve failed to honor all creation, all of the images of god in the world, failed to strive to be holy, failed to love god and neighbor and stranger. I will stand shoulder to shoulder with others as we think, ponder, and face untimely death and unfinished work and unmended damage we have caused and hope for a return, t’shuvah, the eternal return, to start over and try again.
for a better year ahead
that our lives may be counted as good
— Todd
lovingkindness, curiosity, and faggotry
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