Don't Just Do Something, Sit There

Hello, and welcome to Contact Chai. At our March 1st Saturday morning service, Rabbi Lizzi shared a drash about the dangers of trying to drown out our boredom with distraction and silence our doubts with idolatrous certainty. How can we find God and make meaning when life gets chaotic and scary, or worse — really, really boring?

You Are So Not Invited To Mishkan's BMitzvah
Mishkan's Grownup Purim Party is on March 13th at the Chop Shop from 6:00 - 10:00 pm and features a hilarious spiel and a full Megillah reading!
https://www.mishkanchicago.org/event/you-are-so-not-invited-to-mishkans-bmitzvah-purim-2025/

Dancing Queens: Mishkan Family Purim

Our Purim for families is on March 9th at Copernicus Center and features activities for children in grades K-5 and more activities for kids ages 5 and under. Check the link for more information.

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/event/dancing-queens-mishkan-family-purim/

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

Transcript

Transcript

This sermon was delivered at our service on March 1st, when we celebrated the BMitzvah of Selah Helphand. You can listen to this drash on Contact Chai podcast or watch it on Mishkan's YouTube channel.
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I’m really happy that Selah talked so much about art, both in this week’s Torah portion and in her own life. I’m so happy she raised up the juxtaposition between the Mishkan and the Golden Calf. The former is the magnificent divinely inspired community volunteer building project that we read about this week in the Torah (also the namesake inspiration for our community), while the latter, the iconically not-divinely inspired community volunteer building project we will read about in next week’s parasha. 

Although the Torah describes the Mishkan first, and then the incident with the Golden Calf, our sages tell us that the order in which things actually happened is the other way around. After 40 days at the foot of Mount Sinai, the Israelites were getting impatient waiting for Moses. They wanted clarity, they wanted a leader, they wanted God, and they wanted God now… so they made one. While the Mishkan comes together out of the generosity of people’s hearts, the Golden Calf comes together because fear and insecurity lead to a mob mentality in which many thousands of people are swept up. The Golden Calf was born out of the Israelites’ inability to live with even a few moments of boredom, discomfort and uncertainty.

Chassidic masters describe the Golden Calf as being one of the Jewish people’s original sins, not because it was so deviant (although it was, building an idol violates the Second Commandment, which God had just given, "Thou shalt not build graven images in place of God."). After all, there are plenty of places the Israelites in the Torah go against God’s instructions. Rather, what makes the Golden Calf incident so uniquely important as a cautionary tale is because it’s so relatable. How many of us struggle to sit with uncertainty? How many of us reach for something to soothe that inexplicable, irritable feeling? What is your guilty pleasure when you can’t sit still and wait, when you’re feeling bored? Going to the fridge? Opening up literally any app just to have something to direct your boredom toward? Work, email, social media, a game, doesn’t matter. I know! I do it too. We all have moments when we replace the feeling of the discomfort or boredom and uncertainty with doing something. 

So I’m not saying every time we reach for our phones or for food when we’re bored we are building an idol. I’m saying that the solution to the existential uncertainty that is inherent in life isn’t finding a quick fix, it’s learning how to tolerate uncertainty. The solution to the discomfort of boredom is the literal opposite of the idea of “don’t just sit there, do something!" Rather it’s "don't just do something! Sit there!" What’s so powerful about the Mishkan is that it takes all the same elements, as Selah described: gold, silver, lapis lazuli, dolphin skins, textiles. But instead of creating something solid that people can satisfy people’s need for a replacement for God, the Mishkan opens up space so that people can experience God, out in the world, in each other, in the process of collaborating and building to create something transcendent. God becomes not a thing, but an experience, a presence, a shared undertaking, a verb. Which is to say, in order to find God one has to become comfortable with, to embrace open, unstructured space, with uncertainty unfolding moment by moment, which can surprise, delight, disappoint, and frustrate, of course. But ultimately, this unfolding series of moments comprises a life fully lived, unfolding at the pace that it is supposed to unfold, which admittedly often feels too slow, but is in fact, just…life. The more comfortable we can become with those moments of boredom and uncertainty, the more God we can truly experience, and importantly, the fewer poor decisions we will make in our quest to temporarily soothe our discomfort with screens and substances. Praising the unexpected virtues of boredom, “Lin Manuel Miranda has said there is nothing better to spur creativity than a blank page or an empty bedroom.” 

In June of 2023 I said yes to joining an 18 month fellowship called the Wisdom of Not Knowing, that would be starting the following fall, taught by Rabbi Adina Allen, the founder of the Jewish Studio Project, and Rabbi Lisa Goldstein, a well known meditation teacher. The idea of the fellowship is that we’re living in times that have been appropriately called VUCA — times of volatility, uncertainty, chaos and ambiguity — and they wanted to give a group of Jewish leaders tools to meet the moment to bring back to our communities. Think back to June 2023. Biden was president, October 7th hadn’t happened yet… and yet, even then, we could feel the extent of how "VUCA" (volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous) our world felt. When the group of 12 of us gathered at the Covenant Foundation office in New York the following January 2024, it was so much worse than any of us could have imagined, for all the reasons you can imagine. And there we were, gathered around a long board room table with large pieces of thick drawing paper in front of us, along with a smattering of sheets of colored tissue paper, oil pastels, water colors, newspaper and magazine clippings, mod podge, paint brushes, fancy felt tip pens in all colors and sizes. And we, rabbis, community organizers, Camp Directors, Day Schools Heads are thinking, “The world is on fire, and we’re supposed to meditate and make art?”

Yes, yes, actually. Rabbi Adina Allen described, that when she was a kid, whenever she had a hard day or didn’t know what to do about a situation at school or in the world, her mom, who is an art therapist, would say to her: “Have you made art about it yet?” And the truth is — unlike Selah, here — I hadn’t made any art about my feelings. Certainly hadn’t done what this fellowship was creating space for: studying Jewish text, prayer and song, silent contemplating, and then, turning on a Lo-Fi Beats playlist on Spotify so that I could mod podge my way to greater lightness, clarity, and comfort in this VUCA moment. I had not done those things, not in that order, some not at all, and certainly not in a group setting. 

I was nervous I couldn’t do it, wouldn’t know what to do with the open space, the blank page, lacking an agenda or goal or outcome I was working toward. I was worried I wouldn’t know how to make art, or that the art I made wouldn’t be good. But we were in a group setting, so I didn’t have the option of tuning out my discomfort — going to the fridge or checking my email. So in the discomfort I sat. As we sat passing markers, dipping paintbrushes, ripping magazine pictures and gluesticking them to our pages, we were instructed not to chit chat, not to comment on each other’s work, not to think too hard, but to move from a place deeper than rational, logical thought, rather, to be moved, like the builders of the Mishkan, from heart and soul. 

And then suddenly I understand, “V’ahavta et Adonai Eloheikha… And you shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your everything” in a whole new way. Because God isn’t a thing to love — God is a process to feel, to embrace, to be present with, even in the discomfort, with all your heart and soul. It’s these parts of us that generally lay dormant beneath the surface of our constant drive toward busy-ness, and it’s these parts of us that are calling out for attention, and that are perpetually unsatisfied with our usual quick fixes because generally those fixes address our bodies when what is calling out is our spirit. So, instead of trying to quick-fix our disappointment, our rage, our frustration with the world, for two days we channeled those feelings onto the page, in community. And somehow, even after just the first 45 minutes of making art like Kindergarteners (though we were all probably much more self-conscious than your average Kindergartener), we emerged feeling lighter, with a sense of greater calm, and a newfound space inside of us that could imagine healthier, more creative, and more resilient ways of responding to the world. Same world out there, different capacity for response in here. 

You could call that space inside of each of us a Mishkan, a space within which to envision our way out of the uncertainty, or at least sit in it with a great sense of expansiveness and possibility. The Anti-Golden Calf.

Now I don’t think this crowd needs me to convince you of the transformational power of art to help us connect with the divine, in the world and inside of us, to raise our sights above the mundane, tragic daily realities of our world and help us remember the beauty, resilience, creativity, subversiveness, brilliance and persistent triumph of the human spirit that keeps us going and makes life meaningful. Thank God for art and for artists doing this holy work. Selah, may you have all the success as an art maker and may our leaders and lawmakers understand the unique and important role artists play in our society, and may they support it and fund it.

That said, we need to be careful. Just like the gold and silver could be used either to create the Mishkan or the Golden Calf, for opening up space for dreaming and imagination, or closing it down in favor of the illusion of certainty, we have to be really careful of the ways that art can be used to manipulate, deceive, and coerce us. The ways art can be used as propaganda, whether to reinforce a cult of personality of a dangerous leader, lulling the masses into his (generally his) saving power. For example, the massive statues of Stalin in Soviet Russia, depicting him as a benevolent giant, or even a god. Art can be used to hide or distract from the truth; think of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose artistically beautiful films glorified Nazi ideology and made racism and oppression look heroic and inevitable (truthfully you don’t need to go all the way to back to 1930s Germany to see that). Art can also just be used to coerce us into making choices that are bad or even just unnecessary for us– think of advertising boom of the 20th century, think of whatever the ads on your social media feed are trying to sell you, exploiting our insecurities by creating and stoking within us a feeling of lack, that their product can uniquely solve for us, like an attractive, young, wrinkle-free, tight-bootied Golden Calf. Or a cigarette-smoking Joe Camel or Marlboro Man.

I don’t know how to make an IG post, let alone an AI generated video, but you know who does? Our President’s media team. This week, he posted a AI generated video that plays on all of the harmful dynamics I just mentioned. There’s even a big golden statue of President Trump against a backdrop of hotels, casinos, and skyscrapers in the new and improved Gaza — Trump’s Gaza — with money falling from the sky, Elon Musk eating hummus on the beach, and bearded kefiya-wearing Palestinian men belly dancing in flowing skirts to electronic dance beats "oonz oonz ooonzing" that Trump Gaza is #1. It was bizarre and disturbing, and to be honest it wouldn’t have occurred to me to give this much of a thought if it hadn’t been shared by the President himself to influence public opinion. 

Why do the painstaking work of dealing with the reality of competing historic claims to land, of mutual trauma and fear, of the legacy of European and Muslim antisemitism and its unintentional but real disruption not just of Jewish life, but of Palestinian life, too; why look at Israeli policies that have contributed to Hamas’s rise over decades, or look at Hamas’s persistent claim on the hearts and minds of Palestinians despite the devastating results of Hamas’s attack on Israel… Why deal with any of that when the alternative is so shiny and attractive and easy to picture? “We’ve done the imagining for you!” they tell us. “Forget the past and trust us to handle the future! Turn your attentions elsewhere and let us handle this,” the message seems to be. “Trust us!” But it’s not just him. Anyone whose agenda is better served by closing down and controlling and containing our moral imagination, will now use AI to paint a rosy, oh-so-realistic picture to lure us toward, sowing the seeds of our own distractions, disempowerment, and complacency. These actors will skillfully exploit our discomfort with sitting with the volatile and uncertain reality we have inherited, and replace it with whatever visions they know will make us feel safe and comfortable — even for a moment — lest we push back, lest we envision something for ourselves that challenges their plans.

We can’t fall for it.

The Mishkan reminds us that in the presence of discomfort, we can choose to create, to build community, to offer our time, our talent, our creativity, to build hearts, minds and souls brimming over with love — love of God, love of the world, and love of one another, expressed through investment in and participation in community. And it’s not everything. Many days it won’t feel like much. But it’s the little corner of authenticity, beauty, and care that we can build, starting in our own hearts, and communities, and hope that it reverberates out to the rest of the tribes all over the wilderness so that we can navigate this VUCA world together, like the Israelites did in the wilderness. We live in times not unlike that of those Israelites in the desert, surrounded by forces we cannot control, moving in what we hope is the direction of the promised land. But the truth is, even the promised land does not solve the existential problem of uncertainty and instability in the world, it just changes the form it takes. Discomfort with uncertainty can lead us toward temporary fixes outside of ourselves, or toward training and teaching ourselves to tolerate or even embrace the uncertainty of life with as much clarity, community, humor, health, art, and authenticity as we can muster and reclaiming our world.

Ken Yehi Ratson. Shabbat shalom.