Sermon after Hurricane Harvey -- Congregation Emanu El, Houston Texas. September 8, 2017
We need to talk about the High Holy Days. Normally, what moves me about the Days of Awe is that they contain the breadth of the human experience. On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the beginning of everything – the birthday of the world. On Yom Kippur, we wear white and refrain from earthly joys, as if we are rehearsing our own deaths. Between these two days we move from birth to death. From great sorrow and pain to great joy and hope. From sin and shame to return and renewal. It is a journey that contains all our hopes and aspirations for the year to come. It’s a lot to take in.
I don’t think I’m ready for the High Holy Days this year. I don’t mean that I am behind on my sermon writing. Though, there is that. I mean, I don’t feel spiritually ready. Not after the month we’ve had.
I had a feeling last week that maybe we don’t need the High Holy Days this year. Maybe they would be redundant. The High Holy Days are a reenactment of the fullness of life, a sacred drama. Have we not had enough actual drama? We, who are drying out, who are ripping up carpet and tearing out sheetrock, what space can we make to clear out the depth of our souls? We who have seen on TV and in our neighborhoods such acts of generosity and of human connection, do we really need a day to remind us what the human experience is all about?
And how can I say the words of Un’taneh Tokef this year? How can I say “who by fire and who by water”? And don’t even get me started on Sukkot. What I don’t need is a holiday about temporary and fragile housing. I get it.
I empathize with the Psalmist, who, exiled from his home, writes, “How can I sing the Eternal’s song on foreign soil?” I want to be like a student who goes to the teacher and says that I should get to be exempt from the lesson because I’ve already mastered the material.
And there is so much work to do. There is so much to rebuild, so many families to take care of. And with Irma having wrecked the Caribbean and bearing down on Florida this week, there will be even more people who could use our help. How can we sit in services, working on renewing ourselves, when we could be out rebuilding houses?
Maybe we should just call the whole thing off. Everybody gets a “Get Out of Shul Free” card this year.
But no. We are not going to cancel. We need the High Holy Days this year, maybe more than ever. So, we will be here.
We will be here because life continues. We will come, as we have tonight, as a testament to the Jewish spirit, which thrives in the face of adversity. We will show up to these High Holy Days as a sign of our resilience and a celebration of our grit.
We will be here because we need each other. We have seen the power of community these past few weeks. We have seen neighbors show up with gloves on, or cookies in hand. We have seen congregants open their homes to strangers who have been displaced. We have seen the outpouring of support from Jews all over the country as gift cards for affected families continue to arrive in our mailbox daily. These High Holy Days we will celebrate the power of community and the ways we hold each other in times of tragedy as well as triumph.
And we will be here because the message of the High Holy Days are particularly important, perhaps now more than ever.
The image of the High Holy Days is literally life and death. God opens the Book of Life but waits to inscribe our names, hoping we will return. Then God decides who to write down for fire, and who for water. And we are told, over and over, that t’shuvah (repentance), tefillah (prayer), and tzedakah (charity) can temper this decree.
This is a metaphor. The people who lost their homes or their lives as Harvey unleashed his torrents did not pray any less hard than those who were spared. They were not any less charitable. But the metaphor is real. Life is short and it is unpredictable. The flood waters could come any day. The fires rage. And all we can control is how we behave in the face of this fact. All we can control is our own t’shuvah – acts of self-examination and return, tefillah – acts of faith and hope, and tzedakah – acts of justice and love.
These trying times may make us question these truths. It is not just Harvey and Irma. It’s the earthquake in Mexico. It’s the fires in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the 270,000 Rohingya (ro-hin-JA) Muslims fleeing religious persecution in Myanmar. It’s Charlottesville. We have always lived in a world of Un’taneh Tokef, but somehow the images of who by fire and who by water, who by famine and who by thirst, might feel even more present today. And it is hard, in the face of these overwhelming tragedies, to feel like our t’shuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah will make a difference.
This week, Rabbi David Seidenberg published an article on what it means to pray in these difficult times. He says that there is a risk in believing in theurgic prayer – prayer that can change God’s mind. We might pray and then think, “OK, I’ve done my part. God has heard my case. Now it’s in God’s hands.” This theology of prayer can actually discourage us from acting. It limits our sense of our own power.
But this is not the prayer of the High Holy Days. Like the image of Book of Life, it maybe what the literal words mean, but it is not what the metaphor is good for. Rabbi Seidenberg proposes three other ways we might think of prayer. First, prayer can be an expression of hope when issues seem too far away or too removed from us. I want the people in South Florida to be OK, but there is nothing I can do to stop the storm, so I express that hope in the form of a prayer. I do not believe my prayer will change the track of the storm – rather, my prayer serves as a vessel for my hopes. Rabbi Seidenberg believes this kind of prayer helps us to “stay engaged with whatever crisis is unfolding, instead of shutting it out or becoming resigned to what it happening.”
The second kind of prayer is an expression of justice. We pray for the world, not as it is, but how we want it to be. The hope is that, in articulating this, we will inspire ourselves and our neighbors to build this better world. We pray tonight that all people affected by these terrible storms will be taken care of and held in their pain and their misfortune. But we know that some communities are more pervasively affected by these tragedies than others. The poor and the vulnerable are less able to access the resources to get back on their feet. They are more likely to live in areas that were hit hardest by flood waters and near petrochemical plants that are now leaking dangerous compounds. Our prayer that God protect the people affected by these storms calls us to action. How will we ensure that God’s protection can be felt by everyone — not just the wealthy of Houston and Miami— but all those who saw their last hopes washed away, too?
This brings me to the third and most powerful form of prayer: prayer as exercise for our hearts. The heart, like every muscle, needs to stretch and strengthen. The world’s attention and love poured into Houston, even before the waters receded. Can such attention be sustained for St. Martin and Miami, for Puerto Rico and Palm Beach? And if we can muster that concern this year, what about next year? And the year after? As Seidenberg says:
We will face storm exhaustion, storm fatigue... And more and more often, we will face not just storm fatigue, but wildfire fatigue intensified by drought, famine fatigue intensified by crop loss, refugee fatigue intensified by floods and resource wars… all of which are consequences of climate disruption.
Prayer can help us fight fatigue and recharge our compassion. The High Holy Days, with their imagery of the birthday of the world, remind us that we are all co-travelers on this blue-green rock, hurtling through space. They remind us that all humanity shares the same fate. They ask us to reach out with acts of t’shuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah, because these are what temper the severity of that fate. The shelves at the grocery store may still be picked over, but that is not how our hearts work. Our compassion is a renewable resource. Prayer helps us fill the tank. And Prayer helps us stretch the tank’s capacity, so that in the face of global challenges, we can learn to be more human, more loving, more visionary. The power of prayer is that it stretches the heartstrings and tunes them, so that in the moments where the words on the page are reflected in the realities we see on the news or in our streets, the images will pluck those strings. Then, with this song of hope in our heart, we are ready to respond with courage and with compassion. To the Psalmist we say, how can you not sing God’s song, having seen?
So I’m glad you’re here. I know you have a lot you could be doing. But being here is important work to. And we will be here in two short weeks for Rosh Hashanah, as ready as we can be. We hope you’ll join us. Join us to show that life continues, even in the face of hardship. Join us to be a part of this amazing community. And join us to practice living a life of meaning and purpose – a life of hope, justice and compassion. The world needs those skills, now more than ever.
Shabbat Shalom