We grow not by living within certainty but by living through uncertainty by the choices we make. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
We bear witness these days to the effects of uncertainty on both our human body and our civic body. On the threshold of entering year three of the pandemic, the New York Times published an article entitled “Exhausted World Wonders: Will the Covid Era Ever End?” The unknown future of the virus and the extent of threat it poses have produced a growing anxiety and depression across the globe. Loneliness exacerbated by required isolation has defined human existence for growing numbers. And we don’t know when, or if, life will ever be the way we remember.
American society has experienced within a generation’s time significant changes that have resulted in anxiety within the civic body: shifts in centers of population growth/decline; a growth in ethnic diversity; a decline in the role of organized religion; expansion of social media; restructuring within the economy. Some experience a sense of loss of their social value and influence, while others feel empowered to push further for changes in the American civic landscape.
There is no longer a “normal” that can be taken for granted. Instead, there is a desire for certainty. A contention for power, which for some is to reclaim the familiar and for others to reshape the old into something new.
The ultimate sense of certainty would be to know the future. Jacob, on his deathbed, seems on the verge of sharing with his sons his visionary awareness of all that will happen all the way through to the end of days. And then he stops himself. Perhaps he realizes that what makes us human is our capacity, our need even, to engage uncertainty and to emerge from it more fully developed human beings.
The Torah is a narrative of a series of arrivals and departures. Of getting settled and being uprooted. Indeed, the Jewish Bible concludes its saga with yet another challenge: to remain in exile or to uproot ourselves and attempt once again to build a settled homeland. The conclusion is never resolved, not in the Bible nor in our own lives today. But the challenge and our free will to choose are always present.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PST) Thursday, December 16 as we explore moving about in worlds not realized.
