In the face of despair we are called upon to redouble our covenantal fidelity to one another. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
Next week I am scheduled to receive my third COVID booster. This one is a bivalent vaccine. It contains two messenger RNA components of the coronavirus. Half of the vaccine targets the original strain, and the other half targets the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariant lineages, which are predicted to continue circulating this fall and winter. I am in awe of our scientists who have the knowledge and skill to read viruses and to quickly develop vaccines. I am grateful to be inoculated against serious deterioration of my physical health.
Long before COVID-19 spread across our shores, another infection had already taken hold of us as a nation and had spread to every community. One for which there is no vaccine. A dark sense of despair has taken hold of our civic life and has corroded our trust in institutions we once relied upon to inform us, negotiate differences among us, and to create venues for exchanges of ideas and the possibilities of compromise. Many of us feel abandoned, aware more of what divides us than unites us.
The story of the Jewish people is full of episodes of feeling abandoned by the One who would protect them. Exiles, massacres, pogroms, genocide. In its wisdom, Judaism has not discouraged us from crying out our misery, weeping in anguish, or even railing against God: “My God, my God/why have You abandoned me/why so far from delivering me/and from my anguished roaring?” (Psalm 22:1)
Tradition’s answer to this sense of abandonment, of a crushing despair, has not been to believe more fervently. It has been to behave ever more ethically. When economic, social and political divisions brought to a halt the unifying project of rebuilding the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians, the prophet Zechariah’s message was not about more fervent ritual expressions of faith in God. He proclaimed: “Render true judgments, show kindness and compassion to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the stranger, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.”
In the face of despair we are called upon to redouble our covenantal fidelity to one another. We are to engage in a practice of restorative neighborly actions.
The narrative of the Jewish story is not about how we got settled. It is about how we are always on the way. It is about being ever on the threshold of homecoming. And it is at the threshold where we are most reminded of the need to act towards one another in a way that builds the most important structure: a place where the presence of God can dwell.
The succah is an in-between shelter. It is neither a place of complete exposure nor one of secure protection. It is a threshold living space. The Zohar teaches that when we dwell within it the divine Presence joins with us there. But if we fail to feed the hungry, that Presence will depart from us. Now is always the time for acts of neighborly compassion. We have the power to rebuild our communities, to rebuild our cities, our nation, and our world.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PDT) Thursday October 13 as we explore at the threshold of homecoming.
