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Mourning Temple Earth:

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

A Universal Tisha B’Av

Tisha B'Av (the midsummer day of Jewish mourning for the ancient Temples in Jerusalem, and the day of hope for a transformed future) will be observed this year from sundown on July 30 to sundown August 1. We urge that this year it be focused on the endangered Earth as the Temple of all humanity and all life-forms that live upon our planet.

This notion that Tisha B'Av encodes a universal truth is not an invention of the Modern Age. Long ago, the Rabbis of the Talmud assigned as the Prophetic reading of the Fast of Av the book that begins "Eicha!" -- the howling outcry of the Book of Lamentations, "HOW lonely sits the city." 


And then the Rabbis ask the question: Where and when was this wailing "Eicha" first heard? And they answer that it was when God first called out "Ayekka" (the same consonants with only different vowels), "Where are you??!!" to the human race after their mis-doing in Eden, the Garden of Delight. 


This is not an answer out of narrowly Jewish pain for the sake of a narrowly Jewish history. It is an answer that brings our own Jewish life-experience of the Temple's burning into every individual human heart, and all the human race. 


The first and deepest exile is spiritual. To say it is "spiritual" is not to cut it off from earthiness. Indeed, this first misdoing in the Garden of Delight was precisely that we tried to gobble up all Earth’s abundance, refusing to restrain ourselves as the Holy Breath of Life had taught us.

 The result was that the abundance vanished. We were cut off from our Mother Earth and found ourselves at war with her. The spiritual exile involves an ethical/ political / ecological alienation, and every political and ecological exile is rooted in a spiritual failure.

In the same vein, the Rabbis and Kabbalists teach that the Mishkan (the Sanctuary in the Wilderness, for which the Holy Temples became a replication and renewal) was/ is a microcosm of the world. Its building was a human emulation of the Creation, and its destruction a warning to us all.

The ancient rabbis also taught that on this very day of desolation, the Messiah was born, and hidden away till the world was ready for the Great Turning.  From the seed of despair can grow the tree of life, determination to make healing happen.

This warning that human failing may bring about the  destruction of Temple Earth and this beckoning to heal her wounds and our own has at last become not a philosophical theory but a practical fact. So we suggest that observance of Tisha B’Av  this year look more broadly at this danger.

And we invite not only Jews but the members of other religious, spiritual, and ethical communities to undertake their own observance of a universal Tisha B’Av, using whatever date may best express their love of Mother Earth, their grief at her wounding, and their commitment to heal her.

Such observances, by Jews and others,  might follow this pattern:


LAMENT FOR THE EARTH

1. JOY AND GRATITUDE FOR EARTH: Recite Together (Song of Songs 2:11-13, trans by Marcia Falk)

Come with me, my love, come away,
For the long chill months are past,
The rains have fed the earth
and left it bright with blossoms.
Birds wing in the low sky,
dove and songbird singing in the open air above.
Earth nourishing tree and vine,

Prayer Service because the Earth Really Matters

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

And We Hear the Trees Pray

Dear friends,  As we reported to you earlier this week, our Survey of your views showed that you wanted  us to send regular suggestions of actions for you to take, toward healing American society and our wounded Earth. 

Meanwhile,  the collapse of Trump-UnCare has shown that vigorous, persistent public action can thwart the cruel and destructive plans of even would-be despotic officials.

On health care and immigration, religious communities have indeed been vigorous and persistent in resisting cruel governmental action. On the climate crisis, there has been some religious action – but not as much, even though the need is dire and the possibilities wonderful.

This letter offers one such action  -- an Earth-centered prayer service. Others will follow.

 During the week from July 9 to 16, the nationwide Jewish network called  Ruach HaAretz (“Spirit of the Earth”)   held a retreat at the Stony Point Retreat Center in upstate New York.  I took part both in planning that retreat and in teaching /”weaving”a course through the week, entitled “Prayer as if  the Earth Really Matters.” As I did, I kept in mind The Shalom Center’s recent multireligious consultation to develop liturgy that can inspire religious action to heal the Earth.

The class planned and then collectively led a prayer service in which all the retreatants took part. The guidebook/ prayerbook  for that course follows below. I suggest that Earth-aware religious and spiritual communities might use it as a template for planning services – perhaps monthly --  that will help inspire congregants to take spiritually rooted action to heal the climate and the Earth. Each prayer group could of course modify this blueprint to meet its own needs and desires.

We believe that the spiritual depth of prayer is crucial, but not sufficient, to make change happen.

So the class also began developing plans for a “public action liturgy” that would call for renewal, restoration, and healing of the Earth and its climate. We will pursue those plans by long-distance Zoom meetings.

The class also urged that we develop practices – like a congregational or neighborhood solar co-op – that would become  “religious imperatives.” 

The service was held in a grove of trees in the retreat center. It was focused on prayer for a Jewish gathering, but with a few changes could probably be used by many other religious and spiritual communities and interfaith groups.

We recommend that if at all possible, this service be celebrated  outdoors and among trees.  The service was planned for and actually took exactly one hour.  We are glad to provide it to gatherings of any religious or spiritual communities.  We invite those who draw on it to help us continue to disseminate it and develop other Earth-centered religious practices by sending  a supportive contribution to The Shalom Center. Click on the maroon "Contribute" banner on the left-hand margin of this page.or send a check to 6711 Lincoln Dr, Philadelphia PA 19119.

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Prayer Service As If -- and Because! –-

 The Earth Really Matters

Sunday Morning Service, Ruach HaAretz,

July 16, 2017

Held during the week-long retreat at

Stony Point Center

 

Arriving chant: Modah / Modeh  Ani l’fanecha, Ruach chai v’kayyam. ["Thankful am I, facing You  -- Everlasting Breath of Life ”]

Interpretive Modah /Modeh Ani

"Modah/Modeh Ani" in rhythm with other creatures and living beings. All of our bodies move differently, so please do the kind of motion that works for your body. Stretch up your arms toward the sky like a tree. Twist like a willow. Move your arms like a bird. Invite group to name moves; then the group follows.

Morning Blessings

Baruch ata Yahhh, Eloheinu Ruach ha’olam…

[Blessed are You,  Yahhh our God, Breath of Life -- ]

Who opens our eyes to the beauty in the world,

Who opens our eyes to what is truly happening today,

Who opens our eyes to envision the future.

Who reminds us that each step we take connects us with the Earth

Whose Divine image is seen in all life.

Excerpts from Psalm 148 [to the melody of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore”:

Praise God, sun and moon, Hallelu-Yah.

Praise Yah, you stars of light, Hallelu-Yah.

Praise God, you high heavens, Hallelu-Yah.


All that flows in all the world, Hallelu-Yah.

America: Celebration and Heartbreak in One Breath

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

 Last week, Phyllis Berman and I taught at the Chautauqua Institution, one of the great multireligious American educational centers, founded in the 1880s.    --  During the summer, it becomes an amazing small town of 10,000 people that is entirely a retreat center.

On July 4, I was invited to read the Declaration of Independence from the steps of the Chautauqua Library; on July 5, to deliver my own Declaration for today. That evening, Phyllis and I met with a group of Abrahamic young people, and the next morning we led a Jewishly-rooted morning service of chant and prayer and Torah-study that was accessible to people of all communities.

On July 6, The Daily Chautauquan ran an article by Kelly Powell on my new Declaration. Here it is, with a few emendations to more fully unfold what I said.

Shalom, salaam, peace, Earth!  --  Arthur

Arthur Waskow calls for simultaneous “celebration and heartbreak” in America, for America

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, founder and director of The Shalom Center, speaks on The Declaration of Independence on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 in the Hall of Philosophy.

On July 6, The Daily Chautauquan ran an article by Kelly Powell on my new Declaration. Here it is, with a few emendations to more fully unfold what I said.

Shalom, salaam, peace, Earth!  --  Arthur

Arthur Waskow calls for simultaneous “celebration and heartbreak” in America, for America

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, founder and director of The Shalom Center, speaks on The Declaration of Independence on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 in the Hall of Philosophy. 

Rabbi Arthur Waskow opened his talk with a song.

He sang the final verse of “America the Beautiful” to begin his lecture, “The Declaration of Independence: What Would Jefferson Write Today?” as part of Week Two’s Interfaith theme, “The Genius and Soul of a Nation,” Wednesday in the Hall of Philosophy.

This verse includes these lyrics: “O Beautiful for patriot dream/ That sees beyond the years/ Thine alabaster cities gleam/ Undimmed by human tears!/ America! America! God mend thine every flaw/ Confirm thy soul with self-control / Thy liberty in law.”

“I think that song, that verse of the song, which was written by Katharine Lee Bates in 1893, carries within it two attitudes toward life that we mostly treat as if they’re separate,” said Waskow, founder and director of The Shalom Center. “One is celebration, and the other is heartbreak.”

During that particular year in American history, he said, “a real populist party” of farmers and workers who were struggling against “corporations that controlled practically all of America’s economic and political life.” And a new great mass immigration  had begun, into cities whose streets were rarely paved with gold and often drenched in human tears. Bates saw this, Waskow said, and these injustices broke her heart.

“At the same time, she celebrated the America that was beautiful for a dream,” Waskow said. “It was easy to say it was beautiful for prairies, for oceans; it was harder to say it was beautiful for a dream, not then and not yet achieved.”

This year, this week of July Fourth, Waskow said, many members of the Chautauqua community have approached one visiting minister with heartbreak, asking how to “cope with their grief about our country.” Waskow suggested people could respond to this grief through “celebration and heartbreak in the same breath, in the same heart.”

Waskow took note of the 13-star Revolutionary American flag on the speaker stand [see photo above], not the flag “of a great imperial country stretching across the continent with two of those 50 states in the stars, one of them in the middle of the Pacific, the other one way beyond on the continent, but a flag made by a dressmaker, a seamstress in a tiny little house in Philadelphia. It was a flag that envisioned and embodied something new. That newness needs renewing now.”

While we need to celebrate the July 4 of old, we also -- heartbroken by its faiings -- must envision something new. Waskow discussed imagining what the “best possible (Thomas) Jefferson,”  could write as a Declaration of Independence today -- independence from corporate subjugation as well as governmental despotism. 

“I am not willing to stop celebrating Jefferson as one of the great, forward-looking persons of not only American but world history,” Waskow said. “And yet, it breaks my heart that he held slaves.”

One method of “encoding celebration and heartbreak,” Waskow said, is the Jewish practice of  midrash -- the reinterpretation of a sacred text.  “We transform the text we celebrate as life expands,  as we learn both from that text and from life beyond that text.”

Waskow read the Declaration of Independence — the first paragraph as it was in 1776 and the following paragraphs with his own midrash applied, as he views the document as a sacred text.

His new Preamble read, “     When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to reconnect with all other peoples and with all the life-forms of this planet, our common home,  and to transform their own political, economic, and cultural arrangements to better celebrate and serve the laws of nature and of nature's God, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind and to the life-needs of our planet requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the transformation.

There followed a number of new “unalienable rights” -- the right to a life-giving planet where our climate is renewed as it was for our forebears, the right to jobs and leisure and health care and truly democratic elections -- and this assertion:

“We now face a political and economic system contrary to these values -- destructive of democracy and dangerous to the lives, the liberty, the prosperity, the happiness of a free people and to the web of life necessary to all these.” [For the remainder of his version of a Declaration for 2017, see 

<https://theshalomcenter.org/july-4-what-might-jefferson-write-today>]

Following the reading, Waskow asked the audience to participate in five minutes of sharing with one other person their “grief and grievances” about the current American political climate. His goal was for this to model the civil dialogue Americans could experience by “bringing our grief out to each other, to the public (and) to the community.”

He discussed three major moments when grief and grievances inspired change in American history —the time of the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights; the cluster of Constitutional  amendments after the Civil War; and the cluster of amendments during the Progressive Era. With those ideas in mind, Waskow described several amendments he would implement today.

He urged making the rights to a livable planet, decent jobs at livable incomes and hours, and universal health care equal to those in the Bill of Rights.

He called for a Constitutional amendment requiring a review of businesses “to ensure and enforce that they are meeting the needs and balancing the interest, not only of their stockholders, but also of their workers, their customers, the earth and society as a whole.”

Waskow also proposed amendments guaranteeing the right to vote for all Americans 18 or older in all elections, providing  public  funding of all election campaigns and prohibiiting all other contributions except limited amounts by actual human beings, and requiring that presidential elections be determined by the popular vote.

“But the letter of the law is never enough,” Waskow said. “It’s necessary, but it’s not enough. We face a crisis at this moment in our society because there are very large clumps of people who feel excluded or marginalized in American culture and American society.”

He listed a few of these “clumps”: the black community, Latinos, “independent-minded women,” Muslims, immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

[And he named one other large group  who now feel marginalized, and are bitter  about that status: those "old Americans" ----  white, often rural, often working-class or lower middle class in small businesses, often educated in ways other than college, who now feel themselves or their children economically  and culturally -- even spiritually -- marginalized.

[“We might call them the newly marginalized, as distinct from the "old marginalized" who have begun to insist on full participation in America -- the Black, Latino, Muslims, and LGBTQ, communities and independent -minded women, “ he explained.

[“For some but by no means all of the newly marginalized, racism or disgust with minority religions or with immigrants has become a way of affirming their own dignity by looking down on others who they think of as "beneath" them.

[“That response pits those who hold it directly against what might be called the "old marginalized" who are now insisting on being marginalized no longer.

 [“The hardest question for us all is how to act so that none of these groups is marginal, and so none of them  needs to look down on the others for the sake of their own dignity.”]

 “Spiritually, it’s just not legitimate to marginalize any human being, and politically, in the United States of America, it’s a political disaster to marginalize any group of human beings,” Waskow said.

He said the solution is “not to turn away, but to broaden” involvement with these marginalized groups – all of them.

“We are facing a horrifying attempt to impose despotism by corporations allied with the present government --  not only on America but on the whole Earth, burning our common home for the sake of hyper-profits. They benefit from this collision between the two great "clumps" of the old and the new marginalized.

“Often in the past, when the powerful have turned to despotism, there has been a Great Transformation to create new forms pf community. In response to cruel Pharaoh,  the Red Sea and Sinai – a new kind of community. In response to cruel Caesar, both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. In response to oppression in Mecca, Islam. In response to King George III, the Declaration of Independence.

“Now if ever, with American democracy and Earth itself in danger, we need a Great Transformation.

“April 4, 2018, is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death--  really, his murder.

“Dr. King was killed as he was working to create a Poor People’s Campaign to bring together people across boundaries of race, religion, and place. Perhaps that was why he was killed – so challenging would that alliance be to those who ruled America then – and still do.” 

“Could we make that day a national Day of Atonement?” he asked. “Not only atonement for our sins of exclusion, marginalization, subjugation, violence.  Also a day of — the pun is important — a day of ‘at-one-ment’ in American society, and ‘at-one-ment’ with the One beyond all organized religions Who is invoked as “’Nature’s God” in the Declaration of ‘76”?

Waskow closed his lecture by playing through the microphone “Democracy is Coming to the USA” by Leonard Cohen.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y> .

“That song is not an easy, sweet celebration of a democracy that already exists,” he said. “It talks about how hard it was to get this far, and says that democracy is still coming, not yet here. It brings celebration and hearbreak into one breath.”

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Please help The Shalom Center continue to heal the deep wounds of our society, by making a contribution through the maroon "Contribute" button on the left margin of this page.



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YOUR Sacred Songs & Stories to Heal, Not Just Band-Aid, Our Climate

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

This past Thursday and Friday (June 22-23.2017) , The Shalom Center convened a gathering of 17 religious activists from across the country --  organizers, liturgists, and preachers --  to explore a new approach to the science, policy decisions, and religious practice of addressing the global scorching that has brought us into a climate crisis.

The gathering (held at Pendle Hill, a Quaker-sponsroed retreat center just outside Philadelphia) successfully laid out a plan of religiously rooted action. Just as important, we shaped the gathering so as to help those present see themselves as part of their own committed, covenanted community. I am writing to share it with you, and invite you to join in what will be a profoundly inspiring work to heal the Earth.

Moments of powerful imagination that we want to share and multiply: Matzah labeled “CO2-free.” A Palm Sunday march/procession from a church to a nearby “pyramid of  power.” A weekly congregational blessing for healing for the Earth and the human beings wounded by famine, or typhoon, or drought, or formerly “tropical” diseases. Counting a tree in the Jewish minyan, the quorum for prayer. On Good Friday, mourning the crucifixion of the Earth.

Before I describe in more detail what the gathering undertook, let me note one approach that The Shalom Center intends to pursue: Gathering similar groups of clergy and engaged laity (perhaps including relevant scientists) in local or regional venues, rather than a national one.

Such local gatherings of about 18 people could be done in a single city or metropolitan area and so would cost little for travel and room and board. They could create and disseminate liturgical and sermonic materials – like the ones above -- with great effectiveness.

Please let me know if you would like to bring about such a gathering in your community. We can offer our people, our knowledge of the issues,  our experience with the mixture of prayer, song, focused contemplation, and planful conversation  that brought the group together.

All this began six weeks ago, when scientists/engineers  sought out The Shalom Center, asking us to convene a new effort to infuse diverse religious communities with  activist liturgical and sermonic aids in support of an unconventional vision:

Taking action not merely to barely survive the onslaught of global scorching, but to renew, heal, and restore the planet and its climate to be as life-giving for our children and grandchildren as it was for our parents and grandparents  -- and to infuse that renewed healthy world with far more justice than was current in the world that many of our parents and grandparents  knew.

What can YOU do to defend and heal the Earth?

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Could we give our religous communities new life by sacred action to heal the life of Earth?

Although  many American religious communities have responded to some of the Trump Regime’s despotic actions, especially its attack on immigrants, religious responses to the Trump war against the Earth have been considerably weaker.

It is true that some religious communities and congregations have passed resolutions supporting action on the climate crisis, have sent some members to lobby Congress, or have encouraged their members to take part in the great People's Climate Marches of 2014 and 2017. Some have even decided to move their money out of investments in fossil fuel companies.

But only sporadically and locally have the religious communities actually refocused their most religious aspects on healing Mother Earth.

By “most religious aspects” I mean prayer forms and hymns, songs and sermons, ceremonies of festivals and life-cycle markers, learning together in sacred texts, and carrying out sacred daily life-practices.  All these could authentically echo the Biblical and Quranic affirmations of the sacred relationships between the Earth and human earthlings.

If these religious acts are well planned to move hearts, minds, and souls, taking part in them can get inside people, into their hearts and guts.  Just as when the churches of Montgomery and Birmingham Alabama took  prayer into the streets, political transformation can grow lips in prayer and song, from knees kneeling.

When we celebrate the next generation's entry into our religious lives, we need baptisms and bar/bat mitzvah ceremonies to deeply engage parents and children in protection and healing for the Earth that our children and grandchildren will live in.

We need Passover Seders and Good Friday sermons and Ramadan teachings  that will say again and again and again to every congregant that we must "turn the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to the parents lest the Earth be utterly destroyed"  (The Prophet Malachi, 3: 23-24). 



 We need to translate the fast of Lent into deep reductions in the carbon burning that crucifies all life-forms.

We need to focus the fast of Ramadan on the serious spiritual action implied by  the verse of the Quran (30:41) that teaches,: “”Corruption has appeared on the land and in the sea because of what the hands of humans have wrought. This is in order that We give them a taste of the consequences of their misdeeds that perhaps they will turn to the path of right guidance."


We need to transmute the fast of Tisha B’Av from mourning the destruction of Holy Temples in Jerusalem millennia past, to mourning the destruction of our universal Temple Earth that is happening before our eyes today.  – We need to awaken to the last lines of the Book of Lamentation, “ O Wind of Change and Solace,  turn us as the winds turned sailing ships of old; turn us toward You, and we will let our sails turn us toward days as new and full of life as our days were long ago. “

We need reinterpretations of the code of kosher and halal food to say that today, energy from the Earth is a large part of our “food,” and must be consumed in an “eco-kosher,”  “eco-halal” way.

We need ministers, priests, rabbis, imams to  say it is a religious obligation for the whole congregational membership  to become a neighborhood co-op to install solar or wind energy in every household.

Transgressive Women => Transformative Leaders:The "Broad" of Jericho

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

The Broad Who Lived on the Edge in Jericho By Rabbi Arthur Waskow * The Hebrew Scriptures do two things in their storytelling that we conventionally, today, would not think religiously "proper": They often use puns and word-plays to make a deep religious and spiritual point; and they sometimes treat sexuality not with prudish reserve but with relish, again to teach a spiritual point. The traditional Torah-reading and prophetic portion for this Shabbat (June 8-9) do both.

Havdalah for Being Honored and to Mark 50 Years of the Occupation

Submitted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on

Dear friends,
 
Yesterday, at the graduation ceremony for new rabbis at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, I was deeply moved by the introduction with which Rabbi Deborah Waxman, RRC’s President,  and David Roberts, the Chair of its Board, conferred on me the Doctorate of Humane Letters (hon. causa) and by the warm and prolonged response that came from dozens of the old and new rabbis present and from hundreds of their guests.  

 
And before that, on Saturday night,  there was a dinner that Rabbi Waxman gave for the Board. Phyllis & I were invited to the dinner — and then invited to lead Havdalah. I began with a kavannah. The weekend’s events were for me a true blessing — not just the words of blessing but the feeling of being fully blessed, down to my toes and within to my kishkes.  Below is some of the kavvanah I shared. (There were also more personal comments on how I felt to be in this way honored by the College where I had taught  in the "80s.)
 

Shalom, salaam, peace, Earth!—   Arthur 

        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

For Phyllis and me, Havdalah tonight is more than making the distinction between Shabbat and the work week. I want to share with you what else it is –-  to share with you a kavvanah for this Havdalah. 

This Havdalah  ends the week of the 50th anniversary of the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Fifty years ago, that moment seemed more a liberation than a subjugation. We could pray again at the Kotel, along with the Shekhinah still in exile. And surely we would wisely relinquish the newly occupied territories for the sake of peace!

 Fifty years later, not so much joy. What comes next? The very last word of the Havdalah itself raises that question. The word is chol--  Blessed is the One Who distinguishes between kadosh and chol. Between holiness and – what?

Our beloved teacher and friend Rabbi Max Ticktin, alav hashalom, taught that chol means not “profane” but “hollow” – chol like the chalil, the hollow flute that can make a melody precisely because it is hollow. It is up to us to fill the hollow space we are about to enter. We can choose to fill it with the melody of holiness. What comes after 50 years of Occupation? We must choose.

That there have been two different approaches to dealing with the Occupation was not in itself surprising . For the Occupation makes utterly clear the knife edge between winning one’s own freedom —  winning for one’s self  enough empowerment to assert and protect that freedom — and letting the hunger for empowerment became an addiction to power — power that becomes the subjugation that  destroys the freedom of another. It is all too easy for human beings to move from one side of that knife edge to the other. 

Indeed, one line in Havdalah teaches us how sharp the knife-edge is. We sing with joy, “Layehudim haita orah v’simcha v’sasson  v’ikar.  Keyn tihyeh lanu!. For the Jews there was light and gladness, joy and honor. So may it be for us!” But that verse stands right on the knife edge. It comes from  Megillat Esther, close to the end. In the story , within a few moments of celebrating their new freedom, the Jews are killing 75,000 Persians. The knife-edge: How much empowerment of ourselves for freedom, how much power over others that denies them freedom? 

 The danger afflicts not only Israelis but us all. Notice how many of those  Americans who voted for Trump to win their own freedom from economic disemployment and cultural marginalization crossed that edge  into trying to subjugate others — immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, independent-minded women among them. 

 Once we  realize how easy is the slop-over and how hard it is to balance on the edge of the knife,  perhaps we can more easily respond not with the complicity of silence but with the caring of compassionate rebuke, challenge, opposition. Tochecha that comes with ahava.

 So we greet with joy this Havdalah that welcomes us  into hollow time, open time.  I am much more open now than I was years ago to how sharp the knife-edge is, how hard it is to keep the balance. I try to bring much more compassion into my rebuke. I try to focus  my challenge not on Israelis as a whole, but on the government that is more and more leaping across the knife-edge to using its power not to free its citizens but to subjugate its neighbors. 

 So let us plan how to fill this open time beyond Havdalah by making holy melody with the holy flutes we bring to it. And let us take joy in the knowledge that as we pass the 50th anniversary of the Occupation, more and more American Jews are demanding that we renew our own freedom not by continuing the Occupation but by ending it with some new holy melody.  

 

So  -- Hinei, El yeshuati!   Here! --  O God of transformation!

 

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