History,
Revelation,
Our myth of Sinai returns now for celebration
Ritual and community.
Special food for the palate and flowers for the sanctuary.
The long line from revelation to exile to redemption
Rosenzweig’s trinity of history,
Yet in our century all has been rehearsed
All has been encapsuled
The failed secular messianic movements
The failed dictatorships
The secular theologies of flag county and honor
One big experiment in social engineering that only led to ethnic cleansing.
From the European of learning to Auschwitz to Yom Yerushalayim
Giddying changes for our community.
Before our eyes within decades,
The desert blooms,
The county thrives,
Start-up nation attracts billions from investors globally
Women’s revolution in Torah bringing
the new gift of insight into our sacred texts
Technology and torah allowing us the dizzying mastery
of 2000 years with one click
(except on Shabbat when we return to our “am Haaretz status”)
But recently the tiny RNA virus that toppled our lifestyles
Recalibrating work and play where economies toppled
and nations blamed each other.
And the horrors of another war
of man’s inhumanity to man,
To remind us of the darkness within,
That is destined to boil over volcanically every century
Making that post WWII 70 year calm another aberration in Hegelian history
A blip in the centuries fighting over a piece of real estate…
Now we return to that normal,
Europe’s soil hungers for blood and must be satisfied with more.
Yet here we are
We dig once more into texts of Decalogue and Ruth and the Degel
Of self-understanding as a covenantal community
As well as on the individual trajectories
The personal miracles
The personal revelations
The renewal of commitment to recovery and healing
The openness to transcendence
The time to reflect and meditate on another year
Of learning
Of growth
Of optimism in the face of darkness.
Yizkor seems to mar the festivities
But that is our genius
For loss and trauma are never far from joy
Like the glass we break under the chuppah
We must remember those we lost
Moving from grief to an etching of love and memory
In the heart.
We have created this monotheistic ideal
Yet Schechina is down here with us
A matrix of love and
Suffering alongside us quietly
She wears at times a black bodice
And longs for her beloved
Trapped with us in an eternal exile.
We take all of this
On the macro level- as a community among others
As a nation state among others
And as individuals within communities
And struggle with seeing our tradition as once more relevant
Its ideals and mission
Its promises and utopian messianism
The myth of Matan Torah
