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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.

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.

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.

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.