Friday Dispatch: Worlds Within Worlds
Passover reflections
Good morning, dear reader. Today’s Dispatch has been published in Times of Israel blogs:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/oy-are-you-ok/
Friday greetings,
Our Little Free Library was wiped out again yesterday. But because of the outpouring of local generosity the first time this happened, I was able to raid our front hall closet and restock it immediately. I posted in our community forum thanking folks for this, and a whole new wave of goodwill came forth. I hope whoever took the books is ok.
I cringed a little as I wrote the word “ok.” I started writing some sentences about what OK means these days. Hint: It’s just one letter different from OY. (I learned about this – two words with seemingly opposite meanings that are different by just one letter – from a wonderful writer in my Tuesday group. Thanks, Adrienne! I thought of one!)
I’d rather tell you about the waterfall my mom and I drove to, and how not a mile after the “GUNS GOD TRUMP” flag we ended up at the most rainbow-heavy café I have ever seen.
It’s hard to resist the urge to catalog all of the heinous things happening, but the thing is, if you are paying attention even a little, you already know about those. This is obviously not a news source, so unless I am going to reflect on something in some depth, I see no purpose in laundry listing my grief and outrage.
At the same time, it feels strange to write only about what’s happening in my own world. I mean, my own world and your own world and THE world – are they really different worlds? What do we mean when we say “world”?
A longtime favorite passage, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Notebooks:
“He looked at his Soul with a Telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and showed to be beautiful Constellations; and he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds.”
Every single one of us contains worlds within worlds, layers of consciousness and experience and memory, cellular, conscious, prehistoric, timeless.
Inside these worlds, you will find waterfalls, country roads, goodwill, forsythia, the blush of new red buds, and so many books. You will also find hate speech, cruelty, and unbearable pain. You will find moral and spiritual corruption and bankruptcy. You will find treasure troves of kindnesses that will never be headlines. You will find grace and grievance. You will find pieces of me and pieces of you and pieces that make no sense and pieces that fit together so beautifully they make you cry.
Oy. Are you ok?
Passover begins tomorrow night. (For those unfamiliar with the holiday, here’s a primer.)
As we move through the Haggadah and recall the story of our liberation from slavery, we read about God appointing Moses to lead the people out of Egypt and inflicting the 10 plagues on the Egyptians. We wrestle with the final plague: the death of each firstborn Egyptian boy. We follow the seder, stopping along the way to reflect on how this story relates to our present-day realities and our role as Jews. And of course, we eat.
God led the Israelites out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Moses led the people, despite his initial reluctance, with the help of his brother Aaron.
But throughout all of this, what about the people whose names we do not recount at the seder? The ones whose names we will never know at all?
Who carried the babies? Who steadied the elders when they grew tired? Who talked everyone down when they wanted to give up and turn back? Who told stories to toddlers under a star-studded desert sky? Who offered reassurances that things would be ok, when they had, in fact, absolutely no idea that things would be ok? Who kept the faith and who lost the faith and who lay awake missing the old ways, even with their constriction and misery? Who sang? Who wept? Who remembered the story even as it was unfolding, step by step?
Never has the metaphor of Egypt felt as visceral, as concretized, as fathomable, or as palpable as it does today.
While the Passover story doesn’t change from year to year, the way we relate to it and experience it does. (Fun fact: the National Library of Israel alone houses 15,000 editions of the Haggadah. Harvard has more than 6,000 different Haggadot.)
The Exodus may have been led by Moses who may have been appointed by God, but as I write today, what dawns on me is that it was also a team effort. Would we have made it across the miraculously parted sea without Miriam’s song and all the voices who joined her?
How do we keep singing?
Are we ok?
We are not ok.
And yet, in our not ok-ness, we are here. Are we in Egypt? Are we in the wilderness? Are we on our way to some promised land and if so, how do we get there without maps? Who are our leaders? Where is God?
Oy. Big questions.
The families that are still waiting for their loved ones who are trapped in Gaza. The families whose sons and daughters are serving in the IDF. The families who will never be whole again. The families who have begged for a deal only to be treated with violent contempt by those who should be protecting them. The families, our families, my family.
Yet my family is here. And here we face a different face of Pharoah and a different version of hell. (Just one example from this week: The SAVE Act, if it passes in the Senate, will effectively jeopardize or strip 21 million Americans, disproportionately younger voters, married women, and people of color, of the right to register or re-register to vote.)
My family is here and my family is there. I live in this world and I live in that world and within me are worlds within worlds, some of them ancient and some of them not yet born and all of them simultaneous, swirling, a cloud of stardust, a desert sky, a perilous crossing, a little free library, the windows rattling, the cold April wind, the door wide open so that Elijah can come in. We are waiting, we are waiting, we are still waiting.
We recline, we eat, we ask the questions and drink the wine. And yes, it is ritual and tradition, but it is also a living, breathing story, a group project, a work in progress, a sentence that keeps getting its head cut off like a rattlesnake, a machete, a threat that will not fade, a responsibility to ask: In our times, in these days, what does it mean to get free?
My heart swells with pain and, weirdly, hope. The former is easier to explain. The latter, well, maybe it is another inheritance, the one that has enabled us to reach this day in this season. The one that whispers, keep going. The one that insists. The one that grabs me by the shoulders and says, YOU HAVE TO TRUST ME. The one that speaks in dreams and metaphors and also leads me to the El-Al website, where I bought round-trip tickets to return to Israel this July. The one that holds us together even as we have come so completely apart. The one that reminds me that love is a muscle. And that the worlds we carry and the ones we create are all connected.
Shabbat Shalom and, if you celebrate, wishing you a meaningful Passover.
Love,
Jena
Dear readers:
I am vulnerably and humbly asking you to help me return to Israel this summer to study for a second time at the Shalom Hartman Institute, now as a rabbinical student.
My deepest gratitude for any amount you can contribute.
From the Hartman Institute:
“Our intellectually rigorous and spiritually renewing Rabbinic Torah Seminar (RTS) enriches rabbis and cantors of all denominations; empowers them to lead courageously on the issues facing Judaism, Jewish Peoplehood, and Israel in the 21st century; and gives them tools to return home and inspire their communities.”
xo
Praise for Fierce Encouragement: 201 Writing Prompts for Staying Grounded in Fragile Times
This is so beautiful and true.