Rosh Hashanah 5787
Shabbat Shalom and Good Yontiff. I want to wish you each a good year – a healthy, happy year. More than that, I wish you strength and courage. As Psalm 27 says, chazak v’ya’ametz libekha. Be strong, and may your heart be fortified. That’s what I wish for you.
Because this is a time when our hearts could easily fail us. Here we are smack in the middle of what my husband would, in Commonweal parlance, call “the polycrisis” – that is, the interlocking system failures that we are witnessing at home and around the globe: democracy, economies, climate. Giving rise to famine, to migration (and with it the fear of strangers), authoritarian governments and the rise of extreme rightwing parties. As Jews, we see, not unrelated, rising Anti-Semitism. And this is also a time of intensive reckoning with the extreme rightwing government in the State of Israel and the damage it leaves in its wake – a topic that I will have much more to say about next week.
So yes, a complicated time, this polycrisis, when our hearts sure could use some chazak v’ya’ametz, some fortifying.
I know that I sound dire. In fairness, I want to acknowledge what our friend and community elder, Gesher Calmenson, always points out to me when I am being dire. He says this might be an evolutionary moment rather than a survival moment. In other words, there is opportunity and potential transformation in what we’re experiencing. And that might be true; at this very moment something new has a chance of getting birthed. As our Jewish tradition reminds us every year on Rosh Hashanah – hayom harat olam – the world gets born today – and everyday. So we have a chance to be among the midwives. To have a role in what comes next. But even if this is the case, it nonetheless calls for courage, for strong hearts. Birthpangs are birthpangs, after all.
So wherever we’re headed right now, courage is called for. And I so often feel lacking in courage; starved of it; numbed out of it by my news feed.
So I wasn’t certain what to say to you all tonight on the topic of courage, and our High Holy Day theme of “Courage and Connection” requires me to say something. Do I give you a pep talk? A rallying cry? Do I have enough platitudes about courage to fill 20 minutes of precious drash time?
I could start with some of the old chestnuts. For instance that “courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it”; or “courage is not the absence of fear but the assessment that something else is more important.” The exact wording of this famous insight varies depending on whether you’re drawing it from Nelson Mandela, or FDR, or The Princess Diaries.
I am not qualified to talk about courage. I know it has something to do with the heart; the word “courage” itself comes from the French word for “heart”. The Hebrew phrase for courage, ometz lev, literally means “stoutness of heart.” But I don’t know quite what that is, how to develop it, or what it demands of us.
Our cultural images of bravery tend to be the romantic notions based on books and fairy tales and Hollywood – these are kinds of bravery involving quick reflexes, physical prowess, perfect timing, or the ability to formulate words that melt the hearts of bullies and despots, all before rolling the credits.
I know nothing of this kind of perfectly executed heroism, or even if it really exists. It didn’t for me. I grew up a little gay boy in the 1960s and 70s, which made me ultimately have to act bravely in some ways, I guess, for my own wholeness and survival, but all of it built on a foundation of always being afraid.
So more than tell, I now ask: How do we be brave in these terrible times?
How do we be brave in these terrible times?
And as soon as I ask that, I feel a tap on my shoulder and hear a voice in my ear.
The voice I am hearing is that of my friend, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who died last month, and whose funeral service was here at Ner Shalom. She was, as many of you know, an author and a collector of people’s stories. From each story she would draw a lesson, usually about how to live more fully, with more purpose, more meaning, more wholeness. A couple weeks ago, as her loved ones were clearing out her house, they found and gave me a folder they found that had my name on it. It contained sermons of mine that Rachel had printed out at home, and in the margins she had offered her comments and lodged her objections. And so, as if this conversation in the margins were still taking place, in my moment of asking, “How do we be brave,” I hear her voice in my ear, and what she is saying is, “But darling, that is the wrong question.”
And just as when she was alive, I wait quietly to hear the continuation. She says, “The question is not how do we be brave, but how do we be present?”
I keep listening and she continues: “How do we be present to what is. To the suffering, to the needs of our fellow human beings, to the needs of the Earth itself. And also present to the beauty around us and to the wild life of the soul. In a time when many people would like to close their eyes, how can we be fully awake?”
This is what my friend Rachel would say. That courage is presence; courage is being with What Is, no matter what is. It doesn’t require extraordinary acts or swashbuckling abilities. It just requires leaning in and being present.
Formulated this way – leaning in and being present – I am drawn back to the last verse of Psalm 27. These are words you heard tonight from Jill in her original song, and will hear again tonight from Suzanne and Sheridan in theirs. The full verse goes like this:
קַוֵּה אֶל־יְיָ חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יְיָ
Kaveh el-Adonai chazak v’ya’ametz libekha, v’kaveh el-Adonai.
In the middle of this verse is the phrase chazak v’ya’ametz libekha, which I opened this drash with: “Be strong and let your heart be fortified.” But these words are sandwiched in between two instances of kaveh el-Adonai, or as we might say at Ner Shalom, kaveh el-Havayah. This phrase often gets translated as “seek Adonai” or “wait for Adonai” or “hope for Adonai” because kaveh comes from the same root as tikvah, meaning “seek” or “hope”. Understanding kaveh this way is a kind of passive stance. “Be strong and keep waiting for God’s help.”
But kaveh has more meanings. When we first meet this Hebrew root in Torah it is in the word mikveh – a “gathering of waters” on the third day of Creation, establishing dry land. So kaveh meaning “gather, draw close.” And later, in the Book of Joshua, the word tikvah makes an appearance meaning a “braid” or a “cord”. So kaveh meaning something like “binding.” What do these meanings have in common? Seeking, gathering, binding.
I think there is an implicit instruction here to draw close to Adonai, to bind ourselves to Adonai. A little more active than waiting and hoping.
But I want to take one more step in this verse, and look at the Divine Name itself – YHWH – that name that we don’t say and instead substitute the unrelated word Adonai. This four-letter name, YHWH is a kind of merger of the past, present, and future tenses of the Hebrew verb hayah, “to be”. This is not a wild flight of fancy; this is in the language. Taking this to heart means seeing God not as a discreet entity, God forbid, but as What-Is. The Was-Is-Will-Be of reality. Not a personality but an experience of All-ness. Take a moment to consider the Divine that way – not as a personality but as an experience of All-ness.
Holding that sense, Psalm 27 now says to us something like: “Bind yourself to What Is. Be strong and of good heart. And yes, bind yourself to What Is.”
When we understand the verse this way – Lean in to What Is! – it feels to me like Rachel Naomi Remen could’ve written it if King David hadn’t gotten to it first.
How do we be brave? That’s the wrong question. The question is, “How do we be present?” The Psalm suggests it’s by leaning in to What Is – which is a very general instruction. For those who like action, it might seem like leaning in to What Is is like doing nothing at all. But that’s not true. Leaning in is specifically not checking out.
Leaning in to What Is means seeing and caring and doing and being with. Acting for the safety of our communities, speaking out against injustice. It means marching when marching is called for, and postcarding when postcards are called for. It means being of service, even if no glory attaches to that service. It is heroism writ small. Loving and laughing, feeding each other, committing to each other, creating culture and community wherever we go, providing refuge and conversation and tea. It is not Voltaire’s barbed ending to Candide, where the characters declare their resolve to relinquish their engagement with the world and instead cultivate their gardens. Instead it is an imperative to be in this difficult and perilous world, and also to cultivate our gardens. Only with both can we be whole.
This is courage. A bravery that is not the product of trying to be brave, but that emerges from simply being present and awake, responsive more than reactive, leaning in with respect and reverence and love. This leaning in will support us in resisting, and also in birthing whatever needs to come into the world.
I want to leave you an image that inspired me a couple weeks ago, that I thought might fit here. I was walking along the bluff in Bolinas and looked up to see a hawk braced against the wind. The gusts off the ocean were powerful – I had to hold my cap on my head – but the hawk, with hardly any apparent movement of its wings, was practically stationary in the air.
You see, what the hawk does on a day of powerful wind is lean into it as if it is beginning a dive. The force of gravity pulls it forward and down while the wind pushes it up and backward. So with its wings braced in a partially outstretched position, the bird plays the forces of wind and gravity off of each other and remains in one spot, with a sweeping view, able to scan the ground below for prey.
We are facing powerful winds, people, powerful winds attempting to blow us backward. We could spend all of our time flapping our wings until we are exhausted and are blown wildly off course. But if we lean in to the gravitational pull of the essential that draws us – family, community, love, care, service, the Divine and this gorgeous planet all around us – we can stay unmoved by the contrary wind, refusing its desire. And from this high and still vantagepoint of insistent presence, we can scan the landscape for our next move.
So this is all the advice I’ve got. This is all I have to preach right now. In the face of troubled times, in this time of so much flux and so much fear, let us be like that hawk. Face the challenges while leaning in to what we know and love and care about as if what we love is gravity.
This is all I have to say. Be strong. Let your hearts be fortified, as we bind ourselves to What Is, and make the choice every day to lean in.
Kaveh el-Havayah, chazak v’ya’ametz libekha, v’kaveh el-Havayah.
