Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation

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Malchuyot Drash

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By Deb Kraus

Malchuyot is about majesty, kingship, power.  

Because this past year I finally visited Israel and Palestine, I can’t think about power without thinking about the abuse of power.  We don’t usually tackle this problem from the Bimah and while I know what I’m about to say is pretty mainstream in our core community, I am aware that some visitors may be shocked by my candor.  But Marge Piercy challenged us in a poem last night, “where have I spoken out? Who have I tried to move?”  And the message I picked last night from theblessing box said, “may my words 

So here goes: 

Our group went to several Palestinian communities where power, on the part of the Israeli government, and the  soldiers and settlers they support, has been institutionalized:

 Ir David (city of David) is a national archeological site in disputed territory that appears to exist solely to document the presence of ancient Jews, so as to lay claim to the area.  18 year-old soldiers stand around in their crisp brown uniforms chatting with each other uzi’s strapped to their belts.  In Silwan, which is where Ir David continues to expand, Palestinians are being thrown out of their homes, and to add insult to injury, they are expected to pay to have their homes demolished.  

On another day, we picked olives near Bethlehem with a Palestinian family whose home has been destroyed not once, not twice but four separate times.  We used our power as Jewish Americans to prevent them from being bullied during the harvest.

But the situation which was the eeriest to me happened when we visited Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust Museum.  We were stunned to realize how many of the same tactics were used by both regimes.  For example, people’s homes are routinely broken into in the middle of the night and those detained have no due process. Palestinians can’t travel without going through slow , crowded checkpoints and out-of-the-way airports.  It is illegal for our guide, a Palestinian Christian, to live with her husband, an Arab Israeli.  Palestinians have few rights and no voice, and constantly live in fear that their basic needs will be taken away, if in fact, they ever could count on them at all.  

I know what collective trauma can do to a people, and I want to emphasize that I get “never again,” truly I do.  But in this case the new Israelis made the calculation that military strength and personal intimidation, humiliation, were the ways to insure “never again.”  And over time. this results in those 18 year-old soldiers I mentioned already, acting like this is normal.  And it results in settlers, some now in their third and fourth generation, militantly believing that this land, which is clearly within Palestine, is indisputably theirs.  

And so the oppressed became the oppressors.  Most ironically, of course, this has not resulted in peace or security for anyone.

I knew about all this, of course.  I’m a good progressive Jew.  But to see the many facets of this was mind-numbing.  And as an American Jew, this happens in my name.  In all our names.  

Sheila Weinberg, who we just quoted in her prayer for peace in the Mideast, was our trip leader along with her husband Maynard.  One day she pondered, “Jews never had power before.  And you never know how you’ll deal with power until you have it.”  This was after visiting Hebron, where settlers daily rain garbage and human waste down on Palestinian merchants… just meters away from where Abraham—Ibrahim—is buried.

While the Mideast is not simple, the overall message is: Power is so easily misused.  

So as we rise and prostrate ourselves for the Grand Aleynu, let us think about our relationship to our power and privilege and vow to become more aware of it.  And to stand up for the powerless, in our groups but also beyond them.  Do what you can, when you can, even if just so Marge Piercy’s words don’t sting as much next year.  For awareness is always the first step towards change.

Kavanah Alef 3

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By: Jim Morgenstern

One of my favorite aphorisms says:  Institutions [and religion, universities, corporations all qualify!] … “Institutions by their nature transform experience into dogma.” 

The inference that is drawn [ albeit subconsciously!] is that by practicing the dogma we will recover the actual experience.  Clearly not correct.

Yom Kippur is a Jewish moment in the year where we have the great desire for recovering the experience [of t’shuvah / Kipur /  atonement].  And we do not lack for dogma or rituals or practice: Consider:  We have Five services in lieu of the usual one or two or three or four, we have more prayers in every service than usual, we recite the  confessionals aloud as a group, we fast for 25 hours, we retell the ritual of the scapegoat and Temple service, etc.  Tennis shoes, anyone ?  I do not mean to ignore these pieces of dogma – They are all useful tools in our toolbox or arrows in our quiver – choose your metaphor!  

If I go through my to-do list of ritual today and check off each item as I accomplish it – will I therefore automatically experience the feeling of t’shuvah?   Is it sufficient to focus on V-ing all my check-boxes? Or is there a gulf between the practice and the experience and if so how do I bridge that gulf?  and no – I do not have the magic answer to this.  moreover, I think it unrealistic to expect that a single answer would be applicable to all in the community.  

It strikes me that one of the key aspects of today’s Judaism is that our spiritual experience is the responsibility of each of us individually — I do not now have go-betweens between me and God … no pope, no ‘high priest’, no “spiritual leader” to intercede for me.  To me,  the beauty of the Reconstruction Movement is that it recognizes THAT individuality of practice.  

But I need to ask the burning question:  How can I during the course of my day transform the practice of the dogma of Yom Kippur into the experience that I seek? 

I think that the best I can do for myself is to recognize that this gulf exists – between executing the rituals, practicing the dogma as it were,  and recovering the experience.  I think that aspiring to the Yom Kippur experience extends beyond executing the checklist of rituals and I need to open myself to the search towards recovering the experience.

gmar hatimah tovah

Cultivating Gratitude in Challenging Times

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By Carole Caplan-Sosin

I was out in the hoop house when I got the call. It was late march and all of my winter planning had turned into spring planting, and I was now surrounded by hundreds of tiny seedings which were to become the farm’s produce and products for the coming year.

I hesitated to answer when I saw that it was her. There’s no planning, no preparation, you know, for a call like that.

“Hello dolly,” I finally said.  “Mom”, she answered, “it’s cancer.” A blackness that had almost devoured me ten years earlier, began to grow thick around me and threatened to suck me in. 

I’ve been asked to speak this morning on how one cultivates gratitude in challenging times. I honestly thought this would be an easy piece to write. After all, I’ve had my share of challenging times, and as a yoga teacher and teacher trainer I’ve been talking about gratitude practices for years. But the truth is, as I sat down to write, all that became clear was just how difficult it is to cultivate gratitude—especially in challenging times! Sometimes gratitude simply seems out of reach.  It’s ok.

In the US in 2022, an estimated 290,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer were diagnosed among women and over 40,000 died from the disease.  At age 30 you have less than one-half of a percent chance of being diagnosed. Elana had turned thirty less than three weeks before her diagnosis. We were stunned. I packed for San Diego, where she was living with her father, not knowing when I would return. 

It was on the plane ride out that an unwelcome but familiar fear began to take hold. Ten years earlier her father had dragged me—and our family— through a long, unnecessary and devastating court case. With good therapy, however, I had learned to refer to this time of my life simply as “the crash,” and see it mainly through a rear view mirror.  Still, I realized I hadn’t spoken to this man in years, but would now have to be with him daily for months to come. But the panic eased with incredible gratitude I had that a friend was letting me stay in her beautiful San Diego home, and that, somehow, amazingly, her home was no more than 8 or 9 houses away from his. Sometimes gratitude comes gifted from and for what others do for us. Let them.

Every night at dinner since they were very small, I would ask my kids to share their best and worst thing of the day. Rules were you could have two bests, but never two worsts. My first night in San Diego Elana announced her worst was that she had been diagnosed with cancer, but her best was that her parents were together with her, sharing shabbat dinner in her father’s home. Sometimes gratitude just shows up and blows your mind.

A breast cancer diagnosis is a portal through which you pass and are changed forever. We agreed that we would look towards the BEST POSSIBLE outcome—whatever that might be, grateful for the incredible privilege we had to get Elana the care that she needed. Elana extracted and froze her eggs, proactively shaved her head and thoughtfully donated her long curly hair. We bought wigs and scarves to adorn her beautiful baldness, but we also bought donuts and bagels to bring to each chemo and doctor visit, consciously offering thanks to those who devoted their lives to helping families like ours. Elana decorated each box with colorful markers as we waited in endless waiting rooms. It wasn’t a lot. But it was something we could do. Sometimes gratitude comes from and for what we can do for others. Just do it.

You will not hear me say that ‘everything happens for a reason’. I’m just not convinced life works that way.  And I will never say that I’m grateful for Elana’s cancer. Yet who knew a possibility existed where my ex and I could talk and laugh and sing karaoke and love our child together as she went through the horrible thing she did? Who knew that Elana’s cancer journey would allow me to so deeply heal that part of me horribly damaged years earlier? Sometimes gratitude disguises and surprises. Let yourself be amazed by it.

But can we actually cultivate gratitude? I don’t know. Maybe the best we can do is surrender to all that we can’t control, and learn to live with radical acceptance of what shows up in our lives. Perhaps work to cultivate a lifestyle that allows for the possibility of moments of gratitude to become accessible. I walked early every morning in California and consciously took notice of the flowers, the sun and the sea. It filled me just enough so that I would have something to offer her when I arrived as she woke each day. Sometimes gratitude is no more than the by-product of softening inner spaces that we hold so tightly closed. Let gratitude set you free.

While I was in California tending Elana, the weeds on the farm grew uncontrollably, swallowing perennials whole. Fruit trees bent and broke under the weight of untended fruit. Those seedlings that I had nursed that previous winter and early spring—they all died. But tomorrow is Elana’s cancerversary- and together we will celebrate her being one year cancer-free. Of the 4 million breast cancer survivors in the United States today, it’s easy to be grateful that my daughter is one of them.

I pray that this year we all may find gratitude, or that gratitude may find us so that our minds may be a little more open, and our hearts a little more free.  G’mar tov.

Zichronot Drash

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by: David Erik Nelson

Zichronot, “Remembrances.” This is the second of the three major themes of Rosh Hashanah. It’s the meat sandwiched between Malchuyot—”Kingliness,” which is the All-of-Everything of the physical Universe we enjoy—and the enigmatic sounding of the Shofar.

There’s a tendency to treat Zichronot as being about self-inspection: The High Holidays are a time for taking stock of the prior year, for looking to how we can avail ourselves better in the coming year. So we remember what passed, and try to mend the misses.

That’s a good practice.

But I wanna suggest that its liturgically off the mark, and overly negative. 

Zichronot is rooted in the word Zichor—the command to “remember“. And Zichor is more often used in Torah to talk about God remembering or noting someone, not people reflecting on past deeds.  

In Pslam 25, David writes: 

Remember, Adonai,

Your compassions and Your mercies—

for they are from eternity.

Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my rebellion.

According to Your mercy remember me,

    for the sake of Your goodness, Adonai.

Those “remembers” are Zichor. Likewise, it’s Zichor when HaShem remembers Noah and the beasts in the ark, and so makes the floods subside.  It’s Zichor when the Eternal remembers Hannah and Rachel and gives them children, and Zichor again when Elohim remembers that we were slaves in Egypt. It’s Zichor Samson cries out for when he needs a little more oomph to crush the Philistines.

Additionally, while our modern reading of this Season of Remembrance often fixates on the negative —the errors we’ve made, the harms we’ve done —more often than not, those ancient Zichors are asking the Universe to recall what has been good in us and worthy.

I raise this only because we have an awful habit of only remembering what is shameful, only fixating on what hurts.  No one thinks about their stomach when it feels fine; none of us can think of anything else when it aches.

So that’s my hope for this year . . .  that we be willing to ask of ourselves, and of each other, the thing that ancient Jews asked of that Terrifying and All Powerful Being They Sensed Encompasses Us All:

To remember fondly, to see what’s good in the person sitting across from you at the dinner table, to accept and seek to expand and amplify the good in what you are, and have been, and will be in the coming year.

Amen.

Shofarot: Rosh Hashanah 2023

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By Anita Rubin-Meiller

I am an early morning person, so it was not surprising that as I was wondering what to offer for this brief drash, I awoke with these words of the Sufi poet Rumi on my mind:

“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you- Don’t go back to sleep”

Every year we gather together at Rosh Hashanah to hear the same message sounded through the shofar: wake up, wake up, keep returning to waking up. What is this awakening we are meant to be engaging with this day, the whole month of Elul that preceded it, and the 10 days of Teshuvah that will follow it until we gather again? In his seminal book for the High Holidays, “This is Real and you are Completely Unprepared”, Rabbi Alan Lew offers us many possible answers to that question. In a chapter entitled “the horn blew and I began to wake up” he writes: (this is a time)”to devote serious attention to bringing our lives into focus; to find out who we are and where we are going.” If I am like most human beings, than we all know that this is NOT an easy endeavor. It is a challenge to accurately and clearly assess ourselves, to be completely honest about all the dimensions of our aliveness – our physical, mental, spiritual, emotional and relational states.

I am an early morning person and it is easy for my heart to open to the secrets the breezes of the dawn might hold. It is easy for me to delight in the early morning quiet, in bird song and sunrise and to engage in meditative, contemplative, self-reflective practices at this time of day…feeling openhearted and close to God. But as the day progresses it is easy to be possessed by habitual mind states – expectations, planning, dissatisfactions, wants and to move through at least parts of my day on “automatic pilot”. 

“Don’t go back to sleep” Rumi and the shofar shout at us; return again and again to awakening.

My daughter Melissa and I have had a very close and loving relationship with many shared joys and adventures and with plenty of challenges that we have both worked hard at resolving. Her visit home last December however was experienced by both of us as fairly disastrous. We each held the other to blame in numerous ways and after she left, I felt that I did not want to talk to her for a very long time. That feeling was an awakening, a call that I had better look within.

The second line of Rumi’s poem reads: “You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep.”

What I really wanted then and now is for a loving, non-reactive, honest and understanding relationship with my daughter. I knew that that had to start with me and so I journaled a lot and went to see a therapist. In that way I came to see what stirred inside of me that contributed to our difficulties during that visit. I saw how guarded I needed to be growing up; how risky it was to be vulnerable or speak my truth. I saw how frequently I was judged and criticized and deemed “too sensitive”. I saw how I have continued to carry this protective impulse even in my most dear relationships where it is the least necessary. I saw how that interferes with honest communication, especially when I am feeling concerned, critical or hurt. I awoke to knowing more deeply that to have what I really want in all my relationships I need to bring awakened attention to hearing the messages of my mind and heart clearly and to discerning if something needs to be communicated even when it is uncomfortable, or if it is something I need to work on within myself. 

I know that what I want to manifest in my life, what I am most called to live from are qualities of love, compassion, gratitude and joy. I know that the path to doing that includes actions of connection, deep listening, daily spiritual practices and faith. This does not mean I am capable of staying awake to making them manifest at all times. Sometimes I will lose my way. Sometimes the world, or the dynamics of a relationship will overwhelm.

Rumi concludes: “People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.”

We go back and forth across the doorsill many, many times, with and without awareness, knowing and forgetting our intentions. We can only do our best to return again, to awaken to being genuinely who we are. Don’t go back to sleep.

Poem for Rosh Hashanah 2023

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By Emily Eisbruch

Summer ends, fall comes near

The Jewish days of awe are here

With prayer and music we manifest our tradition 

As we co-create this year’s edition 

Unetaneh tokef, Who shall live and who shall die

This is serious and somber, no way to lie

Honey is eternally golden and sweet

But at the days of awe, many forces meet

Apples are good, yet sometimes tart and sharp

Well, thank goodness for Rav Gavrielle’s harp

As we gather at the new year’s start

We open our spirit and our heart

Let’s work to grow, stretch and learn to love more

Welcome new friends and embrace the year 5784

Looking Forward with JCOR

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By: Jeff Basch and Alice Mishkin

Jewish Congregations Organized for Resettlement (JCOR), the all-volunteer Jewish community collaboration that includes our Congregation—in partnership with Jewish Family Services of Washtenaw County—is excited to report that our very successful and fulfilling first year will be complete the middle of August! 

And now JCOR is planning to co-sponsor with JFS a new refugee family.  To make this possible, JCOR must raise approximately $7,000 initially to get the new family settled in, with a goal of $20,000 for the full year to underwrite the co-sponsorship obligations.  Generous donors made it possible for JCOR to help the current family.  Our incoming refugee family needs that same help now.  Federation provides fiduciary services to JCOR, and donations to JCOR can be made on their secure website.

Two additional opportunities to lend support are coming up fairly soon.  On September 10 at JCC’s Apples & Honey, the Kona Ice truck will donate a portion of their sales to JCOR.  On October 22, the community is invited to JCOR’s “Folk with a Klezmer Accent” fundraising concert featuring well-known local talent.

As individuals and as a Congregation we can help support the aspirations of the next refugee family.  Please consider adding JCOR to our synagogue and your household charitable-giving allocations.  Contact JCOR at jcorannarbor@gmail.com if you have or know of affordable housing that will be available by early fall; or if you or someone you know can communicate in Spanish or French, Tigrinya or Kituba, Farsi or Dari, Arabic, Ukrainian, or another language. 

Please consider joining JCOR’s all-volunteer corps.  This is a wonderful opportunity for all of us to seek to better the world, to express Tikkun Olam in ways that our interests and skills guide us to.  Information about the teams and a volunteer sign-up form are available at JCORAnnArbor.org.  

And, finally, we want to share a brief update on JCOR’s Colombian refugee family who arrived in Ann Arbor in mid-August 2022.  Now, twelve months in, both parents are fully employed, both children have completed their first year of school in the United States in good form and planning for the first day of classes in late-August. The father has earned a driver’s license, and the family has purchased a (used) car, which saves $700/month that previously paid for contracted transportation to and from work.  The family has completed their first year in the U.S.—both financially and operationally independent

Thank you for your support and interest in JCOR.  Contact me (Jeff Basch, jeffreybasch@gmail.com or 734-223-6377), AARC representatives to JCOR, for more information.  

About JCOR: Jewish Congregations Organized for Resettlement is a participant in JFS’ refugee Co-Sponsorship Program. JCOR member congregations are Ann Arbor Orthodox Minyan, Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation, Beth Israel Congregation, Jewish Cultural Society, Pardes Hannah, and Temple Beth Emeth, with administrative assistance from the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor.  JCOR’s goal is to help refugee newcomers become our independent neighbors over the course of their first year

Reconstructing the 10 Commandments

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by Deb Kraus

We gathered after services on Shavuot to reconstruct the 10 commandments.  I’ve been wanting to talk about this for awhile, and Carol let me add a group to the study sessions that Kathryn and Seth were doing.

WE had a multigenerational group: from Odile, celebrating her 76th birthday tonight, to Sidney and Elsie, our young sages.  It was hard to stay on track, but I think we treated everyone according to the commandments we reconstructed beow.

First we talked about the ones that either we had problems with or the ones that while good, probably wouldn’t make the cut of being one of the “ten.”  This included “do not commit adultery,” presumed to have meant something more at the time and presumably there to promote the patriarchy.  We ended up including it under “having ethical relationships.”  In fact, we ended up combining 6-9 into this commandment, after many conversations about when murder, stealing and lying might be understandable, but realizing that this was the underlying principle.

Similarly we had a long conversation about “honoring your mother and father, “both in terms of whether honoring was the right verb and whether mother and father were the right objects of that verb.  It turns out we wanted something that was more inclusive of the powerful mentors and teachers and other elders in our lives, and at one point we decided to include children in here as well.  And then we realized that welcoming the stranger, mentioned 36 times in the torah, might fit in here too, although when I got home and wrote this out, we only had 9 so I gave it its own number.

Sidney, our young sage, echoed (without knowing it!) what Caleb Shoup talked about in his bar mitzvah d’var on this topic several years ago.  How he asked, can you say it’s wrong to have a feeling?  He was referring to “do not be envious of others,” the coveting commandment  He suggested we should focus more on gratitude.  This is how “have gratitude for all you have” came to be part of our 10.

People had problems with the idea of using God’s name in vain.  It was one of those things where it felt too ubiquitous to condemn ourselves for it.  That didn’t convince me, but when Rena said “We should talk about not disrespecting or misusing God,” that resonated with everyone more than anything about language.  It’s Shulweis’ predicate theology once again.  Act Godly!

“Do not make or worship idols” provoked a lot of conversation about how what we pay attention is really what we worship, whether it be money, food, video games, power….so we changed #2 to “Don’t lose sight of what’s important.”

We didn’t mess with the first commandment, figuring that monotheism is too central to Judaism to reconstruct.

Then we turned our attention to what isn’t here and found that we wanted to pay more attention to the earth and all creatures.  And we wanted something about caring for ourselves, which eventually got combined in with Shabbat.

Lastly, “Make liberal use of apologies and work to right your wrongs.”

Here is our list:

1.      I am God.  Don’t’ have any others.

2.     Don’t lose sight of what’s important or worship other things or Gods

3.     Do not disrespect or misuse God.  Act Godly.

4.     Take care of your body, mind and soul.  Have a day of rest to replenish yourself and keep it holy.

5.     Honor your elders, whether they are teachers, parents, elders.  Honor your children.  In fact honor everyone.

6.     Love and welcome the stranger.  Humanize everyone.  Respect individuality and work to have empathy for everyone.

7.     Have ethical relationships.  Treat others how you would want to be treated and don’t treat others how you don’t want to be treated.

8.     Make liberal use of apologies and work to right your wrongs.

9.     Honor the earth by caring for all life’s creatures and the natural world.  Work to repair and tend and heal the world back to its original condition.  Remember there is no “away” and every place is someone’s back yard.

10.  Have gratitude for all you have.

Isaac Meadow Presents Benefit Concert for Ukraine  

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   Isaac Meadow, of the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation, will present a humanitarian aid benefit concert for Ukraine on Thursday, June 15, at Zion Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor, at 6:00 p.m. The concert will feature music by multiple composers, played upon the piano and the organ in the church’s main sanctuary. Admission will be by free-will donation.

      The concert will be performed as a “mitzvah project” ― a community service associated with Isaac’s Bar Mitzvah.  Isaac was inspired to take on this particular effort by the confluence of compassion, love of music, and familial ties to Ukraine. 

      At the age of five, when Isaac first received money as a present, he wanted to give it away to a beggar he met in the streets.  In the following years, he has remained empathetic to people in distress, particularly the homeless. When Isaac started following the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he knew he wanted to act. “I was horrified,” he said, “particularly by the violence against children ― children being killed, or forced from their homes.” A benefit concert, he thought, might be a way for him to raise money to help.

      Isaac has a long-standing love of music. He has studied the piano since the age of five under the tutelage of Renée Robbins, and recently has started to study the organ with Carol Muehlig. He is looking forward to an intensive organ study at Interlochen fine arts camp later this summer. He has played piano for the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation’s High Holidays services, and looks forward to serving the congregation musically again in the future. The concert will feature pieces that Isaac has learned especially for the occasion, as well as several pieces that he has been playing for longer. The concert will also include a brief demonstration of the types of sounds and musical techniques achievable on the piano and organ.

      Isaac’s family has a current connection to Ukraine because Isaac’s grandmother befriended Vladimir Sayenko, now a Ukrainian lawyer, when he was studying at the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1994. Sayenko later hosted Isaac’s grandmother, and mother on a visit to Goroshina (alternatively, Horoshyne), the Ukrainian village Isaac’s great-great-grandfather fled in the early 1900s to come to the United States.

      All proceeds will go to “Breathe” (Ukrainian: “Dyhai”), a charity originally founded in 2020 to provide equipment for hospitals in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since Sayenko is an associate of one of Breathe’s founders, Isaac looks forward to keeping a close conversation going about the charity, and to seeing the good that the benefit concert proceeds will be able to accomplish. Thus far, Breathe has provided supplies to Ukrainian hospitals, winter clothing for the elderly, and electronic chargers and other equipment to families, for lighting, communication and for continuing children’s education in the wake of wartime disruptions. Isaac said, “It’s really good to be able to help people – even from so far away!”

Emergent Strategy and Congregational Transformation

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By Etta Heisler

This is the text of a d’var Torah, Torah teaching, that Etta gave on the occasion of the 2022 Annual Member Meeting. If you prefer, you can watch a video recording of Etta reading this d’var on YouTube.

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Change is coming.

What do we need to imagine

to be prepared? 

I know I’m scared.

I know from brokeness there’s whole.

“Change is Coming” song by Molly Bajgot inspired by text in adrienne marie brown’s book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.

Welcome! Wow, it is so good to be here today, and so good to be in community with you always.

In the spirit of thinking about our community and congregation as an ecosystem, I am going to talk today about some ideas from adrienne maree brown’s text Emergent Strategy which draws on wisdom from nature and connects it to both the experience and strategy of social transformation.

A few quick words on brown – she is a writer, facilitator, doula, and activist, and describes herself as “growing healing ideas in public” through her work. What I love about brown, one of the many things I love, is that her world view draws as heavily as it does from the thinking of activists and community organizers like Grace Lee Boggs as it does from somatic healing and the science fiction writings and ideas of Octavia Butler. As usual, women and queer folk of color lead the way in theories of social transformation and I am going to share some of these teachings with you now.

When I was asked to give this d’var, I drove over to my friend’s house who was borrowing my copy to pick it up. I flipped immediately in the book to the 6th chapter called “nonlinear and iterative: the pace and pathways of change.” In this section, brown describes the Occupy movement, and the Movement for Black Lives (also known as Black Lives Matter) as movements that grew from “common longing, from a relinquishing of control, and from a celebration of leaderfull transformation.” (106)

When I reread that line, it hit me right in the kishkes. I felt it like a kick in my stomach. “LeaderFULL transformation.”

I thought of my dread when I learned Rabbi Ora was leaving, the rollercoaster of rabbinic interviews this spring, and the joy and comfort of watching our community at high holidays this fall. Initially, I felt a bit hopeless on the day we learned of Rav Ora’s departure – leaderless and wandering – until you all showed me that in fact, we are leaderFULL. When I read that line, it felt like I was looking at this room of us in the mirror. I smiled. I actually got chills.

After sharing some observations of these movements, brown goes on to describe grief as a “time-traveling emotion.” (106) As many of you know, AARC has been a container, conduit, and comfort for me in my grief through the loss of my beloved Savta, then through the general mourning of the pandemic, followed quickly by my niece’s sudden death last year. It is in this brief side discussion of the emotional experiences that come with transformation that brown talks about the infinite paradoxes of grief. She lists them in fact for nearly half a page, and in that list she writes first that “water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community.” (110) I immediately imagined the room at the UU church where we hold our Yizkor service each fall filling to the ceiling with our tears, and all of us swimming around. A few lines down in the list, brown writes that “that the sacred comes from the limitations.” (110)

At this point, I put my book down and repeated that phrase to myself. “The sacred comes from the limitations.” Into my mind came an image of a Rose of Jericho – or resurrection plant. It is a kind of moss that grows in the valleys or dried riverbeds/wadis in the desert. I saw them often when I was in Israel/Palestine. It stands shriveled and gray until rains come and then it opens up, its stems and fronds fill, and the wadi is briefly full of green. This is one way that nature has evolved for both scarcity and abundance. That in times where resources are low, creation becomes desiccated, curled in, and protective. But it is also alive, resilient, observing, waiting. When the rain returns, it blooms.

Perhaps in our AARC ecosystem, we are a field of Jericho roses. The question is, is it the dry season or the rainy season?

As the chapter continues, brown describes a trip to Occupy Wall Street. In some detail she illustrates the variety of ways she observed people contributing and supporting one another in the context of a decentralized, “leaderfull” movement built on people’s longing, needs, and responses. I could smell it, I could hear it – the sound of raised voices rippling across the crowd repeating words on “the people’s microphone,” food tables, medics and tents and art and music.

And then, in a new paragraph, she writes one line: 

“No one is special, everyone is needed.” (111)

We have a similar teaching in Judaism, in a hasidic tale that explains that Reb Simcha Bunam carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one, a phrase from the Talmud: “For my sake, the world was created.” and on the other, a line from Avraham in the Torah: “I am but dust and ashes.” 

No one is special. Everyone is needed. Scarcity and abundance. Sacredness born of limitation. Paradoxes that have been around as long as desert moss and the times of our biblical forbearers.

At this point, brown goes into some wonderful thoughts on anti-capitalism (111-113) that are less relevant to the points I am trying to make today, but it’s still really good shit, so I’ll trust you to check the book out and read it for yourself. All of it leads into her thoughts on how to think about those voices who are critical of change – the questioners, the “what-if”-ers, the “we have to know our goals before we can decide how to get there” voices inside of us. brown observes, rightly in my opinion, that because capitalism was created to make profit off of people, capitalism is best served when everyone agrees and takes predictable action. Well, transformation just doesn’t happen that way.

brown goes on to discuss that while critique is a necessary part of the learning and iteration that transformation requires, transformation, as brown puts it, requires a “high tolerance of messiness and many, many paths being walked at once.” (119) (brown describes this messiness as “chaotic beauty” (119) – though I prefer to think of it as a beautiful cacophony.) 😉 In other words, there are multiple melodies, numerous “right” ways for us to move forward. And furthermore these ways must, by their very nature, be walked and explored in parallel, rather than one at a time.

So, in the tradition of every good d’var Torah, I ask: what are we to glean from all this? What wisdom can we draw as we embark on another year of our congregational evolution? How can we navigate these parallel and divergent paths and be curious and open to the iterations that stand before us even if some of them confuse us or take us way off course? brown has a perspective on this too, a metaphor offered by one of her teachers, Jenny Lee at Allied Media Projects. brown writes that the role of organizers, of change makers, “in an ecosystem is to be earthworms, processing and aerating soil, making fertile ground out of the nutrients of sunlight, water, and everything that dies, to nurture the next cycle of life.” (116) In this paradigm, brown offers, failure does not exist. In fact, everything we do either grows deeper roots or “decomposes to leave lessons in the soil for the next attempt.” (116)

In the AARC ecosystem, all of the efforts we share, all that we discuss, imagine and make – every idea, conversation, question, experiment, disagreement, celebration – all of it makes the fertile ground from which the next blossom of our community will emerge. It will take time. We will stumble and get turned in circles. We will need to cultivate it with our own longing and curiosity. To get there, we must simply do as adrienne maree brown instructs us on page 120 and say “I invest my energy in what I want to see grow. I belong to efforts I deeply believe in and help shape those.”

May it be so. Ken yehi ratzon.
Read adrienne maree brown’s bio or purchase Emergent Strategy to learn more. To dig in even further, you can listen to the Octavia’s Parables podcast hosted by adrienne maree brown.