Message From Rabbi Liz to the OrH Community
When we first began to put our services, programs and events on line, it seemed like we were embarking on an unbidden yet short-term adventure. It has become abundantly clear that the new realities imposed by the international COVID-19 pandemic will be with us for a long while.
It’s important to say, up front, that we are being confronted by a multitude of losses, and that with loss comes grief. As individuals, as citizens, as family members, and as a part of a community not able to gather, we are missing out on one of the things we do so well together, in person. At the same time, over the past few weeks I have witnessed and participated in extraordinarily supportive and comforting gatherings through “the screen” for shiva minyanim and funerals.
As awkward as it may sound to say this, they gave me great comfort as I, along with thousands of other Jewish clergy and lay leaders, deepen the work of re-imagining what we do for the long haul, for with change, and loss, and challenge, come the need to look in different directions.
As we take those steps, though, some things do not change: our core values, our friendships, the stories and experiences we have shared, and the anticipation, together, of what lies ahead. We can’t sing together, nor can we share a delicious potluck Kiddush – oh, how sad it feels even to type those words! Yet there is so much we can do, and are doing.
My first supervisor as a student of chaplaincy, Rabbi Dayle Friedman, offers a 3-fold teaching from the Hasidic master and rebbe the Baal Shem Tov, who lived through a time of great unrest and uncertainty in 18th century Poland:
Yield to the Reality: we must grasp, understand and accept what we are facing, in order to be able to make constructive choices. In the yielding, we can see what will emerge.
Discern the Present: after yielding and grieving, we explore, bringing our curiosity and excitement, along with our core values, to what might be new and fresh.
Sweeten the Experience: as we create and discover new vistas, we can bring joy and delight to the process and the opportunities.
Along with key members of our community, I’m learning new ways of discerning how to bring the reality of the present to the kinds of experiences we are accustoming to sharing together – Bart Mitzvahs, the High Holy Days, family and adult learning, to name a few. We’ll be putting our heads (screens?) together, purposefully, with new tools and new approaches. And while some of them might formally fall under the rubric of “virtual” contact, there is nothing un-real about the caring, the praying, and the connecting that we have been able to experience over these past several weeks.
We are being confronted, like some of our mythic ancestors, by a great test of biblical proportions. Our health and well-being, and the health and well-being of kol yoshvey tevel/all who dwell on earth, is being profoundly challenged. As a sacred community, we will make our way through the sacred cycles of the year, and our lives, with caution, concern, and a renewal of commitment our core values. We’ll be working diligently, together, to cohere around a set of plans and practices that hold up those concerns and values, while maintaining this precious, loving, caring community.
OrH is its people. This, and the great vista before us, buoys me. With a lovely graphic, my colleague Rabbi Ariana Katz shared a poster that speaks to my soul in this moment (see it here as a colouring page): May we grow back, not to what was, but instead towards what we can become.
Ken yehi ratzon – May it be so.
- Rabbi Liz
