In the past month I’ve had two really troubling conversations with young adults. One was with someone I know in their 20s. We were talking about the presidential campaign. And this very intelligent, caring person said, “Honestly, I just can’t get excited about politics. The damage we have done to the planet is irreversible, and it feels like we only have a few years left no matter who’s in power. It just doesn’t matter.”
In another conversation, I was talking with an Israeli woman in her early 30s. Again, supremely intelligent, a committed Zionist and IDF veteran, a caring and compassionate person. She has two young children. And she told me that she’s been actively looking at places to live outside of Israel because she just can’t see how the country, and its Jewish population, will survive for many more years. She was totally serious.
Both of these conversations caused me to lose sleep. It isn’t as though they were telling me things I wasn’t aware of. In just the last couple of weeks we have experienced day after day of “the hottest global temperature on record.” We are living with the realities of climate change, and absent some messianic shift those realities are going to worsen in the coming years. Likewise, Israel lives with instability and very serious threats on every one of its borders–not to mention the profound challenges it faces within them.
Yet somehow, knowing those realities hasn’t led me to the place of fatalism I heard in the voices of these young adults. That could simply be my naivete. It could be a form of optimism functioning as spiritual bypass: I can acknowledge it but, because the possibility of it being true is just too shattering to contemplate, I kind of put the knowledge aside and function as though everything is normal. But hearing people younger than me articulate so honestly and powerfully how they felt–it was really jarring. As, frankly, it should be.
I recently started listening to a podcast called We Are the Great Turning. It features a series of interviews with the legendary activist and Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy, conducted by Jessica Serrante and produced by Anya Kamenetz. In addition to the interviews, the series also includes practices–meditative, conversational–to do. The overall point of the series is to help us not to look away at what’s happening, but instead respond with connection, care, and compassion.
Jess and Joanna don’t waste any time. There are tears in the first episode. At one point, Joanna describes her awakening to the global climate crisis half a century ago, and the long months of depression and silence it produced in her: “There’s the loneliness of the unheard witness of what’s befalling our planet. You’ve been holding it back because you don’t want others to know how bad it is. You don’t want others to know how great is the grief. I didn’t want my family to know how much pain I was in. I didn’t want them to know my own suffering because it was enough to drive you mad to think that we were heading over the brink as a species, to bring this sense of anguish and isolation to my beloveds.”
Eventually, however, Joanna came to understand that even, or perhaps precisely amidst, that pain and grief, relationship and connection were more important than ever. Finding ways to share the grief, and finding ways to help others respond to the crisis while not sugar-coating reality–that has more or less been her life’s work since then.
Towards the end of Parshat Matot-Masei, close to the conclusion of the Book of Numbers, we encounter this verse in the Torah: “You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I Myself abide, for I YHVH abide among the Israelite people” (35:34). It’s an evocation of the words God uses to describe the building of the Mishkan: “Make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:2). The Holy One reaffirms that It dwells in our midst.
But we already knew that. So what does this verse come to add? Rashi, quoting the Midrash, tells us: “even when the Israelites are ritually impure, my presence remains amongst them.” This is a larger theme, of course. As we approach the 9th of Av, we recall the teaching that even when we are in exile, the Holy One is with us. It’s as if the tradition is coming to remind us, again and again, that Divinity does not reside only in one holy, perfect place. Rather, the loving life force of the universe is constantly present, constantly available, constantly beckoning us to reconnect–even when we are lonely, even when we are in pain, even when we feel totally cut off.
Like so many things, that is easier said than done. And it is certainly easier to try to look past the genuine suffering in the world and just insist that everything will be all right. It might, and it very well might not. But as Joanna Macy teaches, as our own tradition and our ancestors teach us, even in the midst of that suffering there is still a great deal of love and goodness and even possibility to be nurtured. May we support one another in experiencing it.