Tap Into The Angel You Could Be

Don't tap that screen — tap into your best self! At our October 20th virtual service, Rabbi Lizzi delivered a drash connecting the themes of Parashat Noach to our own present catastrophe. Sometimes, even if we want to stay informed, it does us a lot of good to unplug, step away, and rest. Thankfully, Shabbos is here to invite us to do just that!

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

RABBI LIZZI:

Y'all!

This was not an easy week to think about words to share on the Parsha. And I will I will be honest with you, I am very emotionally exhausted, as I imagine many of you are.

So anyway, before I offer thoughts on the Parsha and US this week, I want to suggest that if you are watching this with children tonight, you say Shabbat Shalom to Rabbi Lizzi. And you listen later on the podcast, as I will be dealing with mature content

and mature content that there are plenty of children having to encounter and live right now. But not by choice. And so I would say to your children, Shabbat shalom. You know, I want I desperately want, I always want to give us a sense of solace in the midst of the storm. And that feels incredibly challenging to do with words, which is why

spaces of music have been so meaningful for me. And I know for many of you over the past few weeks,

you know, and there are points of light. But there is also so much darkness and pain it even my peacemaking friends who live in Israel, both Palestinian and Israeli, are really, really scared. Even the people whose lives are defined by hope and persistence, are on the verge of abject despair right now.

They're in post traumatic shock and grief. And well, they are not the only one. They are not the ones giving directives, you know, in how how to respond to these attacks to drop bombs on Gaza, for example, they don't really have a sense of what the right response is to these horrific attacks Israel suffered two weeks ago. And I don't either and in talking to many of you, I have also gathered that you just hold a deep sense of loss and despair as you also consider options for what comes next and nothing seems good. And so of late I have been taking comfort in poetry in Torah, and in this community and in knowing that members of this community have been traveling all week, some across the country, some across the world to be of service to help people suffering in whatever way they can to be mela theme to the angels.

So in the spirit of Shabbos, and the spirit of rest, I want to bring some poetry and Torah into the room. Maybe not the most uplifting poetry as you will see.

But we'll see how taking a step back might open our hearts tonight and help us cry and heal and help us create a space where that still small voice may emerge with a sense of what the next right step for us is.

The diameter of the bomb by Yehuda Mihai.

The diameter of the bomb was 30 centimeters, and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters with four dead and 11 wounded. And around these in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard.

But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from at a distance of more than 100 kilometers

She circles the circle,

enlarges the circle considerably.

And then the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won't even mention the crying orphans that reach up to the throne of God and beyond making a circle with no end. And no God.

By yolmer, I don't I

am at

a share Bharati May Allah Pinay had a man and God said, I will blot out the earth. I will blot out from the earth humankind who my creative humans together with beasts, creeping things and birds of the sky for I regret having made them

But Noah found favor with God.

This week, we open to parsha Noah you know, the one where God sends a flood to wipe out humanity because violence which in Hebrew, awfully is Hamas was rampant on the earth and God deemed this commerce to be so pervasive that it needed to be completely washed away. To be clear, Hamas is the organization Hamas the organization in Hebrew is an Arabic acronym, meaning Islamic resistance movement, but the similarity in sound is not lost on Hebrew speakers.

Anyway, Noah was righteous and blameless in his generation. So deep victim Nehemiah Dora tab, and he is the one guy God picks to survive this delusion. And one of the first instructions God tells Noah in building the ark is to put a Sohar in the ark. So hard to say le Teva. And the commentary writers wonder what is eight so hard? What is this, we've never heard this word before. And some say that it is a window to let light in, in the otherwise completely dark and sealed Ark. Sounds like a good idea. Some say it is like a pearl or a gem that was translucent during the day and lit up at night, kind of like a nightlight No, like some special thing to let know and know that God was with him. But a simple close reading of the text reveals that it was just a window, you know, letting in not just late but visuals. Because after the flood has raged for 40 days and 40 nights, the texts tell us that somehow no one knew the water had receded and the mountaintops became visible, and no one opens up the window and lets out the Raven, and then the dove and then seven days later the dove again. And then he knows it's safe. In any case, he had a window, God required him to have a window.

And I am struck by this essential feature of the Ark baked into the architectural plans in the Torah for the ark. This was not optional. The window meant that as the floodwaters rose, and all of human and animal life on Earth was drowned, no one would see it happening in real time, frame by terrible frame.

But he could only see what was outside his window.

He could see a whole family drowning, but probably only one family at a time.

This animal that destroyed home, one at a time.

And this, of course, is the difference between Noah's limited perspective and God's limitless circle of perspective and care.

Noah's ability to take in a little suffering and go on living quasi normally inside of the ark, feeding the animals caring for his family. You know the difference between that and God's ability to absorb limitless emotional damage all over the world all at once. And I think God had wisdom in giving Noah only that one window because seeing the suffering of others affects us and makes us hurt too, especially if that suffering is people we love and are connected to and especially if that suffering is our family.

It hurts. And even if it's not just our family, our human hearts are evolutionarily designed to empathize when we see pain and to try to help if we can. If we see too much of it, we begin to shut down or malfunction in the presence of too much suffering and pain. And any of us who live in the city right now, or for the past few years with the homelessness and now migrant crises happening simultaneously. You know what that feels like? That shutdown, that emotional malfunction. You know what that feels like? And it's not good for us. Certainly not good for the folks that we actually want to be helpful to.

And I sense that this is what is beginning to happen for many of us as we witnessed the events unfolding on the other side of the world in Israel and Gaza.

let alone having seen and heard about the war for the past year and a half in Ukraine, let alone the daily sufferings that we are witness to or experience ourselves, trying to manage day to day life and the relationships in our homes and our friendships. For many of us, the weight of the world feels like we're not just seeing it through a window in manageable doses, but like we are in the De Luz itself.

And of course, we aren't,

for the most part, if you are here in Chicago, or listening from somewhere in the States, you know, most of our Oh,

of course, we aren't in the daily wish itself, at least when it comes to Israel and Gaza right now, if you are listening from Chicago or somewhere here in the States.

Many of our people don't have the choice to take in only a little at a time, just one window fall right on some hostaria. They were completely overtaken, and remain in a state of grief and shock.

I keep speaking with Mischka knights, who keep learning that family members of theirs have been killed in one way or another in the recent weeks in Israel.

And I imagine this will continue.

And here in Chicago wanting to be close to our people over there, you know, doing what we can do. So we're like following the breadth of news and perspectives and articles and stories and op eds and commentary and opinions and images and images and more images and images and images, and stories and voices and WhatsApp groups and email chains describing in detail the destruction on a level that really only God could possibly absorb and not break.

And that was true when it was just our people when we were reeling after this infrastructure massacre. But it grows now that we are confronted with images of Whole neighborhoods being flattened in Gaza and the body count rising there as well.

And almost everyone I know including me right now is close to breaking as we watch from our Ark, but with far more access to the diameter of the bomb, so to speak, then no one ever had.

And we are not God.

And so how this destruction neatly fits into a narrative of cleansing and healing for the future doesn't readily emerge like it might have for Noah.

And we sit with paradoxes and questions to which we do not have answers.

Which makes the loss and the disruption even harder to witness. And

this week, because there's there is so much pontificating and ideating and you know statement making and counter statement making I wanted to invite us into a different headspace and so I

I asked in our Slack channel, we have a community Slack channel, ISRAEL PALESTINE and mourning minion by the way, sorry, their children being children downstairs.

It's not too distracting.

So I asked, I asked people in our community Slack channels, you know, where we try to have conversations or share articles and musings in supportive and curious space? I asked you what questions you are sitting with right now, as these days unfold.

Here were some of the things that you wanted to know.

What is the endgame for Israel? What is the endgame for Hamas?

In a world, is there a world in which this war will result in increased peace for Israelis and or autonomy for Palestinians?

What is going on behind the scenes with Israel and Egypt?

When will Israel allow humanitarian aid in when will a politician emerge in Israel who can actually look for Palestinian partners and make a real peace with them instead of undercutting such efforts?

What will happen with the West Bank?

Will my nephew survive the war?

Will my cousins survive the war?

Will my daughter be okay? How many hostages will be released? And how many will die? Is Israel correct or short sighted in the belief that they must completely wipe out Hamas no matter what the cost to lives is in Israel and Gaza?

And finally, will this long term fighting between Israel Palestine and the neighboring countries ever be resolved? What will Israel need to do to foster some kind of peace and coexistence with its neighbors and what will its neighbors need to do?

And these are all really good questions. And I was always taught never to ruin a good question with a mediocre answer.

These are all questions that have answers that we just don't have.

Have yet and I want to invite us over this Shabbos to join

our brothers and sisters in Israel who are grieving and do what people do when they are grieving which is show up and shut up. Which is to say

we allow the grieving the suffering to tell us what they need. And we tend to the living

and tending to the living means being a my life and Angel, a messenger, not here to do everything but to do one job. The one thing you can do as you with the resources you have in the life that you have the resources, the experience, the connections, the network.

The one thing you can do this Shabbos might be to turn off your phone.

It might look like

making art students from Tel Aviv University did this week as they put up the faces of all of the kidnapped or disappeared or killed in their auditorium.

Or the artists who put up an empty Shabbat table set for 200 Outside the Tel Aviv art museum that included high chairs, and seats for children and sippy cups, and white roses alongside some of the plates.

One thing you can do might be calling a friend or someone you know who is impacted closely by all of this, who you have not called with to check in.

I have spent the week talking with people here in Chicago, over on the other side of the pond. And as a result, I am basically on the verge of tears all the time, as some of you will know.

But it feels a lot better to have my heart open and broken and sitting in paradox than to be a voyeur of suffering

as is basically impossible not to be in this world.

And I've spoken to many of you who have resigned from your post as keyboard warriors and deleted Instagram. Realizing that the one thing you thought you could do, which maybe was changed someone's mind or educate them in a comment thread when confronted with some ignorant or anti semitic thing

is maybe not the most emotionally healthy thing for you to be doing morning and noon and night.

The one thing you can do might be signing a petition like I did five minutes before logging on tonight, thanking the Secretary of State for his role in bringing home Judith and Natalie Rana

and prioritizing bringing home the rest of the hostages as well as getting humanitarian aid to Gazans. There are so many ways to do one thing.

In a moment when we sing a healing prayer, I'll invite you to share who it is that you might be thinking about tonight, you know, close to home or far.

But also if there is a one thing that you have found meaningful, a particular cubelets that needs something, a particular a particular family whose story has moved you. I have seen many, many going around. And I don't think that there is a right or wrong. And we shouldn't have a scarcity mindset about where we're giving to right now.

Go ahead and put it in the chat if you want.

Rabbi telephone as you know, famously said, you don't have to finish the work. But that doesn't absolve you of the need to do something. And in this case, I think we all know how hard it is to feel like our actions have any effect at all.

But if you don't take a little step who will

when confronted with the enormity and the weight of the suffering of the world, a task that is too big for us and yet, God given to us.

We need to find the spaces to help remind us that while we may be made in God's image, we are not in fact God and cannot in fact, incessantly hold the suffering of the world without a break.

More than we have kept Shabbat Shabbat has kept us

we need time to process and to sing and to grieve and to walk and to dream and to feel our feelings and to let the small voice inside rise to the surface. And so I want to just bless you tonight. And this Shabbat

with Chabad with a space with a sense of openness and possibility with a sense of the dream of the world to come. And I hope that your rest helps you tap into the angel that you could be Shabbat replay is a production of Mishcon Chicago, our theme music was composed and performed by Calvin Strauss, you can always see where and when our next service will be on our calendar. There's a link in the show notes and if you appreciate it, the

program please rate and review us on Apple podcasts I know you've heard it before but it really does help on behalf of Team Mishcon Thank you for listening