Dear friends,

My Elul practices for the last decade or so have included listening to an album recorded by the poet David Whyte called Solace: The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question (also available here on iTunes). I generally listen to 10 or 15 minutes at a time as I walk the dog in the morning after I drop off my youngest son at the bus. Listening to Whyte’s beautiful and penetrating language, recited in his unique English-Irish brogue, has become one of my favorite parts of Elul.

Over the years I’ve become familiar with the album and the poems and stories Whyte recites and tells. Yet, like a good work of Torah that one revisits year after year, I find that on each listening a different part emerges to speak to me. Without fail, each year there’s a point at which I have to stop because I’m struck by a passage and by the need to note the time on the recording so I can come back to it.

This year, that happened when I listened to this little bit:

One of the great tenets of a beautiful question is that it brings you to ground in your life as it is now. And in some ways, along with the amnesia of what we’ve forgotten, we step into a sense of having forgotten something which needs to be remembered and which is foundational to our future. And one of the remarkable things, I think, about being human, one of the incredible things about being human is, you only have to articulate exactly the measure of your exile, exactly the way you feel far from yourself, exactly the way you feel as if you don’t belong—and as soon as you’ve said it, exactly as it feels, you’re on your way home. You’ve started the journey back, just by describing the way you feel imprisoned, or the way you feel far from yourself, or far from life.

The closing Torah portions of Deuteronomy—which is to say, the closing Torah portions of the Torah—are suffused with the language of exile and homecoming. Here is one characteristic passage from last week’s Torah portion:

When all these things befall you—the blessing and the curse that I have set before you—and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to which YHVH your God has banished you, and you return to YHVH your God, and you and your children heed God’s command with all your heart and soul, just as I enjoin upon you this day, then YHVH your God will return with you and take you back in love. [God] will bring you together again from all the peoples where YHVH your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there YHVH your God will gather you, from there [God] will fetch you. And YHVH your God will bring you to the land that your ancestors possessed, and you shall possess it; and [God] will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your ancestors. Then YHVH your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring—to love YHVH your God with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live. (Deut. 30:1-6)

One of the remarkable things about this passage is the way it fuses teshuva, spiritual returning and renewal, with the end of bodily and political exile. In this passage, to be far from the Divine is to be far from not only our spiritual sense of at-homeness, but also from the more literal sense of at-homeness in the land where our ancestors lived. Yet the vast majority of Jewish history has been lived in a state of political and geographic exile. Thus Rashi, quoting the Rabbis of the Talmud, parses verse 3: “Our Rabbis learned from this that, if one can say so of the Holy One, the Divine presence dwells with Israel in all the misery of their exile, so that when they are redeemed, the Ineffable makes Scripture write ‘Redemption’ of Godself that the Divine will return with them.”

There is a paradox here: The Divine is with us in exile and estrangement, even as our returning to home—in all its senses, physical and spiritual—is also a returning to the Holy One. All, it seems, we have to do is make an internal move—in David Whyte’s language, articulate exactly the measure of our exile—and we’re on our way home. Yet that “all we have to do” is, of course, no simple thing. Again, Rashi: “The day of the gathering of the exiles is so important and is attended with such difficulty that it is as though the Holy One must actually seize hold of each individual’s hands dragging them from their place.”

There is a reason we read these Torah portions in the weeks before Rosh Hashanah. Confronting the reality of our various exiles—whether they take the form of estrangement from our own bodies, our identities, our families, communities, societies, geographies—is the work of this season. Wherever we are this New Year, in any of these dimensions, the sound of the shofar beckons us to wake up and see, courageously and clearly, who we are and where we stand right now, in the totality of our wholeness and our brokenness. It invites us to gaze, with genuine honesty, within ourselves and discover that access to the Creator is not in heaven or across the sea, but on our lips and in our hearts. And in that recognition, we might experience that we are already on the way home.

Shanah tovah, Blessings for a sweet and joyous New Year,
Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD
President & CEO

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a minute to watch the finish from this year’s Kentucky Derby. It’s a sight to behold.

The two leading horses are racing neck-and-neck (literally), jockeying for position (again, literally), as they make the final turn of the one-and-a-quarter-mile track at Churchill Downs. Slowly and then suddenly, Rich Strike, a horse no one even expected to be in the race, comes out of nowhere to win. It’s shocking on every level: Rich Strike had 80-1 odds of winning, the second-highest odds in the history of the 148-year old race. He only became eligible for the Derby a day earlier due to another horse being scratched from the race with 30 seconds to spare before the registration deadline. And then, to top it off, he comes out of nowhere to win the biggest event in horse racing. Someone in Hollywood is surely working on a script already.

The day after the Derby, the writer and climate activist Rebecca Solnit posted a link to the race video on Facebook, calling attention to Rich Strike’s win as a “black swan event.” The term, popularized two decades ago by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, refers to an event that most people assumed simply couldn’t happen—and that, therefore, whole ways of thinking became devoted to assuming it couldn’t happen either. That is, it wasn’t simply an objective question of whether or not something was possible; it was also a psychological question: If my/our worldview depends on the impossibility of this idea, how could I entertain the notion that it might occur? My/our whole world would unravel! So we tend to treat black swan events as not just logical impossibilities; rather, we become emotionally invested in verifying the narrative of their impossibility.

As a climate activist, Solnit encounters this phenomenon a lot. If we read the news, we have good reason to feel like solving the problem of climate change is a black swan. The odds seem increasingly remote that we will keep global temperatures from rising past 2 degrees Celsius. The polar ice sheets are already melting. The invasion of Ukraine isn’t helping. It is totally understandable that a lot of us feel pretty grim about the future. And when we start telling ourselves that narrative, our human tendency toward confirmation bias leads us to reject news that might counter it and embrace news that reinforces it.

But, as Solnit has been doggedly pointing out on her Facebook page for months, there’s a lot of good climate news! Most significantly, advances in battery storage, solar, and wind technology are causing the price of renewables to drop quickly and, correspondingly, their use to increase rapidly. And, while the odds remain quite long, Solnit seems committed to helping the rest of us see the possibility of a black swan. Epicenter and Zandon, the two favorite horses at the Derby this year, had odds of 7-2 and 3-1, respectively. They were the horses racing neck-and-neck to win. The race was playing out precisely the way the math told us it would. Until it didn’t. The lesson for climate? While it’s still a major league longshot, we might, just might, be able to get it together for greener forms of energy to come out of the back of the pack and win the climate derby. (Likewise, Donald Trump was projected as having a 7 percent chance of being elected president in 2016. Black swans don’t take sides; they just describe longshots.)

On the Jewish calendar, we are deep into a Sabbatical year, a year of shemitah. The Torah’s expectations for this year, and for the larger Jubilee cycle in which it occurs, might strike us as fanciful, preposterous even. We are commanded not to farm the land, but only to live off whatever naturally grows. We are expected to forgive debts and release indentured servants. Every 49 years, we are expected to return the land to its ancestral owners. In short, we are, it seems, expected to overthrow the economic table and start anew. It is nothing short of a radical resetting, a recalibration of society.

If this might have seemed difficult to imagine two or three thousand years ago, it feels even more so now. Yet the Torah is not alone in deploying sacred ritual to reconfigure the social order. As David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate in their book The Dawn of Everything, societies the world over have done similar things throughout human history. From Native American communities to Neolithic Europe and Mesopotamia and beyond, human beings have shown a remarkable propensity to order our societies in many different ways—and to consciously reorder them when necessary and desirable.

Contra Rousseau, there is no “state of nature,” according to Graeber and Wengrow. Rather, there are innumerable different ways humans have configured social and political life. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.”

That, perhaps, is the greatest challenge we face: that we accept that this is the way things are and will be—whatever that way is. We are so invested in the current scheme of things that we discount the possibility that anything could be otherwise. We lose imagination, we lose freedom, we become fatalists.

The Torah, like other wisdom traditions, invites us to practice a different way of being, the touchstone of which is yetziat mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt. What was is not what must be. What seems inevitable is not destiny. Just because life seems good right now doesn’t mean it’s going to remain that way; just because life looks horrible right now doesn’t mean it will always be so. When we cut ourselves off from the unfolding nature of the world, when we become so invested in a particular way of encountering it, we practice a kind of idolatry, we drive the Divine presence from the world.

Our calling and mission is to do the opposite: to live with mindful presence, aware of the contingency and ongoing becoming of a world which is constantly recreated anew, aware of our interconnection with all other beings, with the earth, with life itself. That is the practice of Shemitah, the practice of Shabbat. It is the practice that enables us to resist our confirmation bias, our fatalism about climate, and to remain open to the possibility—however long a shot it is—that the unexpected might just come about.

This piece was published in the Times of Israel on May 12, 2022.

It often feels these days that we’re living through a Great Unraveling. Institutions, those deposits of trust that enable things to be—or at least seem to be—settled, are coming apart. News media, public health, elections, representative government, the weather, the forests, the shoreline, truth, language itself: In so many places, things I took to be more or less stable are revealing themselves to be far shakier than I could have imagined.

I find my mind racing with questions I could scarcely have contemplated asking even a couple of years ago: Is the person standing next to me in the grocery store vaccinated? Is the man at the post office carrying a concealed weapon? Writing in the shadow of the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, those questions include ones like, Will a mob storm the Capitol? Will a state legislature overturn an election?

Like all shadows, this Great Unraveling has its brighter side too. Much of it is driven by the democratization of media. Where Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat and TikTok seem to lead us to collectively ever-shorter attention spans, they also give opportunities for far more people to have a voice, for more of us to expand our awareness of people and issues than would have been in our view otherwise.

Whether we view it as an invitation or an externally-imposed compulsion, it seems to me that this moment calls each of us to deeper personal responsibility and agency: the responsibility to be vaccinated, to engage in democracy non-violently, to practice speech that is mindful, wise, and courageous. And when I reflect on that, I realize that, though it may feel more intense today, that is really our calling all the time: to be vessels for the Divine presence; to reflect and enhance the image of God in the world; to free and help every image of God to be present.

In his bestselling classic The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz describes how one of IJS’s founders, Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man, summed up his personal spiritual path, which he referred to as keter malchut, or the crown of sovereignty, to the Dalai Lama: “To be a sovereign human being, to be a king, to be not reactive, but active, to know one’s place in the world, to be conscious. And it is extremely hard work. The ego always gets in the way, all the needs get in the way; it is a long, long path. But the path is very specific” (196).

In a democracy, as opposed to a monarchy, each and every citizen is a part of the sovereign; each of us wears a part of the crown. Thus Jonathan’s description of this spiritual work—to become a sovereign human being, a sovereign image of God—is, to my mind, the core of the “habits of the heart” about which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote nearly 200 years ago as being essential to the democratic project. At root, this heart work is about the most basic questions: How do we become aware of yet not beholden to the thoughts and emotions that arise in us—the results of our conditioning—when we encounter beings other than ourselves? How do we hold space for difference? How do we live together? How do we trust each other?

Nurturing and sustaining trust is the name of the game. It is essential to the infant who must trust adults to feed, clothe, shelter, and bathe them; it is essential to coworkers who must trust one another to work together; it is essential to neighbors and fellow citizens and residents who must trust that the people they encounter do not seek their harm; it is essential to voters who must trust that elected officials will act with honor and not for personal power or enrichment. Trust, Emunah, is essential for a life lived in relationship with the Divine. And, “In God We Trust”—our trusting both reflects and generates the possibility for the Divine presence to be visible. It is, on the most fundamental level, essential for democratic life.

That mutually supportive web of trust begins and is sustained by our continual work on our hearts—avodah shebalev, what the Talmud refers to as prayer and what we might expand to include the spiritual practices of democracy. I don’t know whether those practices by themselves are enough to calm the baser forces of fear, anger, and resentment that seem to be fueling this Great Unraveling. But I know they are essential for me—perhaps for you, too—to live through it. And I have a strong sense that they offer us a way through. May we support one another in cultivating them.