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Rabbi's Message

03/18/2022 06:22:14 PM

Mar18

Dear Chevre, 

I hope that you had a joyous Purim! If you did not get a chance to join KHN in person or online, you can watch the recording and enjoy Rabbi Jonah’s fantastically creative offerings as well as the Megillah readings and musical talents of many in our community: https://www.kehilathanahar.org/purim2022

Like many of you, while I am enjoying Spring’s arrival and am finding joy increasing in Adar, my heart is heavy with the continually despairing news from Ukraine. If you are able to give financial support, another outstanding organization which is providing emergency support for Ukrainian refugees is IsraAid, an Israeli organization which provides critical, strategic, non-sectarian work with humanitarian crises: 

https://secure.givelively.org/donate/israaid-us-global-humanitarian-assistance-inc/emergency-support-for-ukrainian-refugees?utm_source=moldovaupdate6

There are other ways to help support people. Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky who grew up in Odesa and has friends and family there asked his contacts in Ukraine how he could help.

“Finally, an older friend, a lifelong journalist, writes back: ‘Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.’ 

In the middle of war, he is asking for poems.”

 [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/ily-kaminsky-the-war-never-left.html?utm_campaign=di&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1&fbclid=IwAR0q7mmDRTJdHnERxEVpFuV-bXCbvAvW5KWgtRvTKHUQZsFLID2c4xHrj5w]

At difficult times as well as joyous times we often turn to poetry, for as Audre Lorde wrote, 

“…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” [1977, Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture]

As we move into Shabbat, which rabbinic literature describes as a foretaste of life in the perfected “world to come”, I am sharing a poem:

V’Ahavta by Aurora Levins Morales

Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning
and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,
embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,
teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,
recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible.
 
Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:
All together they have more death than we,
but all together, we have more life than they. 
There is more bloody death in their hands
than we could ever wield, unless
we lay down our souls to become them,
and then we will lose everything.  So instead,
 
imagine winning.  This is your sacred task.
This is your power. Imagine
every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets
in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never
unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,
the sparkling taste of food when we know
that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed,
that the old man under the bridge and the woman
wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car,
and the children who suck on stones,
nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their shelter.
Lean with all your being towards that day
when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune
out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.
 
Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.
It is your child.
Defend it as if it were your lover.
It is your lover.
 
When you inhale and when you exhale
breathe the possibility of another world
into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body
until it shines with hope.
Then imagine more.  
 
Imagine rape is unimaginable. Imagine war is a scarcely credible rumor
That the crimes of our age, the grotesque inhumanities of greed,
the sheer and astounding shamelessness of it, the vast fortunes
made by stealing lives, the horrible normalcy it came to have,
is unimaginable to our heirs, the generations of the free.
 
Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth
Into the throat with which you sing.  Escalate your dreams.
Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down
any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.
Make them burn clear as a starry drinking gourd
Over the grim fog of exhaustion, and keep walking.
 
Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.
So that we, and the children of our children’s children
may live

http://www.auroralevinsmorales.com/blog/vahavta

Lesley will be leading services this evening both at 7:00 pm at KHN and on Zoom at:

Kabbalat Shabbat

I hope to see you on Sunday afternoon at the Bagel U event "Right to be Safe". [Registration is in the E-bulletin]

May we envision and live into a safer and more peaceful world. 

Shabbat shalom, 

Rabbi Diana

Thu, March 28 2024 18 Adar II 5784