I’m imagining us in Noah’s ark.
As the Hebrew month of Cheshvan begins and a new cycle of Torah reading is initiated, we read Parshat Noah. We encounter an ark; Noah, his family and a few of every living species; and a flood of utter destruction that wipes out all life on earth.

For the past two years, I have been holding the narrative of Noah’s ark close to me as a source of spiritual inquiry and practice, engaging with questions like – What qualities did Noah cultivate that preserved him in a violent generation? What is the spiritual practice of taking refuge in the midst of the flood of corruption and chaos? How did sanctuary in the ark school Noah’s heart and mind during the three hundred and seventy-eight days he lived in it?    

These are worthy questions but in the fragile newness and uncertainty of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, I am holding a different question. I am folding into this other question all the feelings of witnessing the return home, finally, of twenty living hostages with weeping, relief and something adjacent to joy but too cracked and broken to wholly call it joy, and with heartbreak for the families who are still waiting to receive the bodies of their killed loved ones, and with unresolved questions about sufficient aid entering Gaza, and witnessing Palestinian families returning to the rubble that was their homes, and holding my breath (and still breathing) as the unclear, unstable future of these two nations slowly takes shape amid layers of profound grief, pain, possibilities and an unclear road ahead. The flood is not over but, perhaps, the worst of the destruction has ended. I’m imagining us in Noah’s ark, coming to rest, finally, on the peaks of the mountains of Ararat as the floodgates of heaven and the deep are stopped up and the waters begin to recede. I’m asking – What spiritual guidance can we draw from Parshat Noah about the beginning of transition out of destruction and survival, and into the next stage of reclaiming life?  

After a hundred and fifty days tossed on unstable water, the ark comes to stillness on a mountaintop. Tenuous as it is, there is enough solid ground for the ark to rest – va’tanach ha’teyvah. The ark rests. Noah rests. And he opens a window to the wide sky, an opening to the air, to light and to the devastation outside. Then, in order to track the slow progress of the receding waters which takes another two hundred and twenty-eight days, Noah first sends out a raven. Later, in multiple attempts, he sends a dove. 

What is the dove/yonah? The dove is a small, slender bird. Be’er Mayim Chaim notes that in the Song of Songs, the dove is referenced as yonati, tamati – my dove, my love. It is the tender, cherished beloved. It becomes the symbol of peace. But so soon after horror, loss, anger and fear, this tenderness cannot be released first. It will not have anywhere to land. 

So before sending out the dove, Noah sends out the raven/orev, a large, rough squawking bird that “went back and forth.” Hasidic commentators understand this movement as a reference to the changing dynamic of spiritual expansion and contraction – ratzo va’shov. Spiritual growth in general is not a linear progression. All the more so in extreme circumstances – we are constricted, we fall open, we expand and we shrink. Be’er Mayim Chaim adds that orev also means “a mixture.” The raven embodies a complicated mixture of opposites, “of bad within the good and good within the bad.” What a mixed, fraught moment this is, in which the heart floods open, washed with relief, able to finally take deeper breaths, and the heart grips with pained constriction, back and forth.

At the Jerusalem rally on October 11th, after the ceasefire was declared and the return of the remaining hostages was imminent, Rachel Goldberg Polin expressed this potently. Speaking about the book of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, which we just read on Sukkot, she said that Kohelet teaches, “there is a season and a time for everything. But now, today, we are being asked to digest all of those seasons, all of those times, at the exact same second – winter, spring, summer, fall – experience all four right now. It says there is a time to be born and a time to die and we have to do both right now. It says there is a time to weep and a time to laugh and we have to do both right now…It says there is a time to tear and a time to heal and we have to do both right now…and it says there is a time to sob and there is a time to dance and we have to do both right now.”

This is not only descriptive of what so many of us feel. It is prescriptive of the soul-work that is ours to do. This is a time to consciously feel and know the intense mixture of expansive joy and the contraction of pain, of release and anger, grief and celebration, all at once. It is exhausting, messy and intense. It is also alive, agile and true. To attend to each one means not letting opposing truths or feelings cancel each other out. As we turn to face all the realities that are present and all that have been present over these two years, the wild mix of emotions deserves space, patience and mindful attention so they can move through us and so that we can keep our hearts as agile and our thinking as clear as possible. 

So often, only after the worst is over, only when it is safe enough to let go of the ways we have been pushing or gripping in the face of looming danger and teetering vulnerability, can we begin to attend to the extent of the wreckage, and also begin to heal, build and hope. Our hearts are raw and tender from these past two years. The flood is not over but this time of receding waters asks us to learn from Noah’s waiting, meeting each stage of transition with presence and patience and discerning what is needed. This period asks us to exercise our hearts and awareness with a different kind of diligence, a different kind of attention to the many oppositional dimensions that exist together at once – to meet them, feel them, know them and release them into flight. Only then can we access the tenderness underneath. Only then can the dove, the tender wings of loving and new life, leave the protective shelter of the ark and find a genuine place to begin to build its nest.

I want to leave you with an excerpt from Leonard Cohen’s poem, Prayer for Messiah, giving these images moving expression.

O send out the raven ahead of the dove
O sing from your chains where you’re chained in a cave
your eyes through my eyes shine brighter than love
your blood in my ballad collapses the grave

¹ Hasidic commentator, Rabbi Chaim Tyrer of Czernowitz (1760–1816).
² The mother of Hersh Goldberg Polin who was murdered in Hamas captivity.

I was a teenager the first time I was in Jerusalem for Hannukah. Coming from Christmas-centric life in Toronto where every grocery, pharmacy, and book store was splashed in tinsel and endlessly rang out Christmas muzak, I remember how surprising, how moving it was to be in Jerusalem and feel the presence of Hannukah everywhere. Sitting in an Italian restaurant, the whole dining room was brought to a hush as the owner lit the candles of the hannukiah and everyone in the restaurant sang together. Entire main streets of store windows had electric hannukiah bulbs shining into the night. But I found the most striking sight walking in older neighborhoods where the four-story apartment buildings with little courtyards in front of them had low stone walls abutting the sidewalk – and there, sitting on the stone walls, at the edge of each building’s property, were glass aquariums with lit hannukiyot inside them. Along the length of these quiet streets, the sidewalks were flanked with these glowing, flickering outdoor flames.

The Sages of the Talmud teach – it is a mitzvah to place the hannukiah at the entrance of your home, on the outside.  And if you live upstairs, they alternatively assert, place the hannukiah in the window, facing the public domain. Igniting the flame (hadlakah) is only half of the practice at the heart of lighting the Chanukah candles. The lighting is partnered with the act of placing the candles (hanacha) so that they are visible to the outside world. This can be within the warmth and enclosure of your home, shining outward, but if possible, we are called upon to bring this light to the outer edges of our property, to the farthest boundary that our personal domain can reach, touching the public sphere.

What a beautiful image for practice. Chanukah candles serve such a different purpose than Shabbat candles. Shabbat candles are meant to give light to our individual homes, to bring pleasure as well as utilitarian light to the intimacy of our meal and to the company of those gathered around our Shabbat tables. Even the circling gesture of waving our hands three times around the Shabbat candles gathers their light inward. The placement of Chanukah candles, on the other hand, is guiding our intention and attention outward. It is striking that the light of the Chanukah candles should not be functional. It is not intended to light up our homes and we are prohibited from making any mundane use of it. We are instructed simply, subtly, just to look at the light of the candles, and to make it accessible, available for others to be able to look at it too. It becomes our conscious intention for the light that we ignite to touch all those whose lives brush past our own. The boundary between inside and outside dissolves along with the boundary between insider and outsider. And it’s the light that connects us to one another.   

So let’s ask the question that carries the literal flame of the candles into the illumination of our souls – in this dissolving of boundaries, how do we strengthen and direct our inner light so that it extends to the outer limits of our reach, enabling many, many others to be lit up by it? 

R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev (18th century Hasidic master) teaches that hanacha, placement, comes from the same root as menucha, rest. He states, “And menucha – rest is called the container in which you put love.” The practice of lighting and placing the Hannukah candles is teaching us to locate a quality of restfulness within. There, we create a container within us for love to be nurtured and amplified so that it can be felt by others, so that it becomes visible to others in the softness and warmth of our gaze, our presence. As the hours of sunlight grow brief and night stretches long, as the air gets colder and the impulse to hibernate and withdraw might feel strong, we are invited to instead extend warmth and light through our whole beings to everyone we encounter.  We’re invited to be creative about the ways we reach beyond our usual circles, to extend loving. We’re invited to be daring in thinking of the directions we extend ourselves – to reach toward painful places, to meet people in the rifts of conflict, in the dissonance of difference, to find delightful strangers and mirror to them their beauty and goodness and to receive others mirroring your own beauty and goodness back to you.

We have the opportunity to help each other in this. Know that we are in a collective project, generating collective energy in reaching light outward with compassion and kindness. Know that you can bring relief. Know that you can bring love into much needed places. The more we practice, the more radiant the inner container becomes, and the further and clearer its light can extend.