August 2015
On Love and Brokenness
Dear Friends,
As I write, it is a warm and breezy day outside. Summer is in full swing, and people in my neighborhood are walking leisurely, as if the rush of life has melted with the giant piles of snow.
For my August Newsletter, I was going to write about how we might embrace the pace of summer, to learn from moving more slowly. I was going to write about how today, July 31st is the holiday of Tu B’av, a sort of Jewish Valentines Day and celebration of love.
Then, yesterday in Israel happened, shocked reports arriving in my inbox and Facebook feed. First, an Ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed six peaceful marchers at Tel Aviv’s Gay Pride parade. Then, last night, Jews burned down a Palestinian house in the village of Douma, killing a baby and wounding his parents and brother. The arsons wrote in Hebrew on the burned house in graffiti, “Revenge,” and “Long live the Messiah.”
I am left speechless. Each of these acts feel to me like a clear Chilul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name, an act done by Jews in the name of God, which actually diminishes God’s presence in the world and shames all Jews. As my friend, Rabbi Lila Veissid wrote in response from her Kibbutz pulpit in Israel,
Both these crimes were committed in the name of Judaism. This isn’t Judaism. This is extreme murderousness, baseless hatred, the reason why Jerusalem was destroyed. The knife, the incendiary bomb and the horrendous words that accompany those deeds, are an offense to the Torah and to the Honor of Torah. They are blasphemy, chilul ha-Shem.
So what do we do with all this? How do we hold this clash of realities and responsibilities – to embrace the gorgeous days of summer and the Jewish celebration of love on the one hand, and on the other, to acknowledge, mourn, and condemn these heinous hate crimes done in our names?
Responding to Lila on the Hebrew College rabbinical listserv, my friend Rabbi Rogerio Cukierman offered this helpful teaching from his community in Brazil. Rabbi Rogerio points out that this week’s torah portion is Va’etchanan, where we find the words of the Shma, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Rabbi Rogerio teaches that the Chassidic rabbis interpreted the final word of the Shma, “Echad” not as “one,” but as “everything,” as in, “God is everything, and everything is God.”
So the rabbis ask, “How can everything be God, when many things in our world are so painful?”
The Chassidic master, Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi answers, “That is why we have the second line, “Baruch shem kivod malchuto l’olam va’ed,” “Blessed is God, whose glory is manifested in every different aspect of God’s kingdom and is renewed forever.”
In other words, the first line of the Shma offers a vision of ultimate unity. The second line acknowledges the multiplicity and fragmentation of our world, and still invites us to believe that God is in every aspect. As worshippers and as Jews, it is our job both to discern and celebrate the oneness and beauty of God and of the world, and to acknowledge the fragmentation, and commit ourselves to Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world and the reunification of what has been broken.
It is hard to hold both ideas in our hearts, of love and pain, unity and fragmentation. I close with a reflection on this challenge from E.B. White, author of Charlottes Web:
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy; if the world were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I wake up each morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it very hard to plan the day.
I pray we may find the strength to do both.
Rabbi Margie