The following sermon was delivered by Rabbi Ariana Katz on Rosh Hashanah 5781
September 19, 2020 • 1 Tishrei 5781
My friends, earlier this summer I posted a question on Facebook, asking “what do you want to hear a sermon about this year?” Powerful, holy answers that cracked my heart open. There were a few key themes that emerged, including the following:
“Is it my responsibility to fully perceive reality, or to tend my mental health?
How to hold the hope in this time. How to hold what is hard and still see what opportunities are here.
How to find the light in every person.”
Great. You want a sermon about hope, huh? I have to say, I sat at my desk over a period of weeks with this challenge weighing heavy. “A sermon about hope? In this economy?” Throughout the summer, I felt myself cycle through the waves that I imagine are by now familiar--perhaps you knew them intimately before pandemic landed, perhaps they are a recent addition to your life. The waves of surge energy. Creativity, passion, curiosity, optimism. The crash of despair, sluggishness, desperation, doom-scrolling, greater isolation.
“A sermon about hope”?!'
It seems that to speak of hope, we first have to speak of despair.
We are facing untold challenges, in the personal and global, the private and the political. This year we watched the Movement for Black Lives again get the attention it deserves at the murder of innocent Black life and the powerful movement that continues to labor and rise for justice. We watched continued imprisonment of would-be immigrants and refugees locked in concentration camps at the border, and in our very own state.
We saw the blossoming of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus that has shut down the entire world, and the reality that the life we’re experiencing in the US, with over 198k human lives lost, could have been otherwise responded to, so much life saved. We watched how the coronavirus more clearly stratified our society, those who could comfortably work from home, those who reported to essential front line jobs. Those who had access to healthcare, and those whose lives would quite literally have been saved by universal healthcare.
We learned of synagogues defaced, Asian Americans and Asian immigrants subjected to profound violence during the coronavirus emergence, Islamophobic violence in the US and genocide in China, overflowing hospitals and the suffering our our medical providers, students far from classrooms and socializing, elders isolated from community and family. Growing threats from the most powerful office in the land that make us fear for the months ahead. And so much more
In a season when we feel we are on the eve of destruction, how do we keep moving? Surviving? Greeting each new day, let alone a new year? You ask, “How do we keep a people together, when there is so much disagreement? How do we push our boundaries when we want more than ever to feel safe? Do we convince those who are gravely mistaken, or do we defend against the violence? How do we prepare for social collapse and the threat of mass violence?”
This is not to frighten us, but to prepare us. I believe that there is great medicine and armor in the High Holy Days for the wave of anxiety, danger, any violence ahead. To get lithe at decision making, resource assessing, movement making.
This year, as in most years, I find myself wondering, what did the people who came before us know about this moment? What do they need us to know? What did they leave us to survive this time?
So this morning, in the first shimmy and shakes of the new year, I want to look at hope, this ephemeral, bawdy thing, as a strategy.
I want to share with you two stories of Honi HaMe’agel, Honi the Circlemaker, a magic making, rain bringing, time traveling bad boy of the rabbinic world, 1st century, around the year 383something. These stories happen to live on the same page of Gemara, Ta’anit 23a, and are incredible examples of hope as a discipline.
First, the origins of Honi’s name:
Once, most of the month of Adar had passed but rain had still not fallen. They sent this message to Ḥoni HaMe’aggel and begged him to pray to bring rain. He prayed, nothing came. So he drew a circle in the dust and stood inside it, and SHOUTED:
“RIBONO SHEL OLAM! Master of the Universe! These humans think I can change this drought! I am taking an OATH by your name that I will not move from here until you have mercy upon Your children and answer their prayers for rain.”
First the rain began to trickle down, but only in small droplets. His students said, “um, nu? I know you can do better than that!” Honi shouts to the Holy Blessed One, “WRONG ORDER! I did not ask for this, but for rain to fill the cisterns, ditches, and caves!”
And it began to pour. Each and every drop was as big as the mouth of a barrel. Cats, dogs, Leviathans, rain so heavy his students came back to him, still standing in that damn circle, and said “Rabbi, we have seen that you can call on God to perform miracles and we will not die, but now it appears to us that rain is falling only to destroy the world.” So Honi goes back to God. “YOHOO, oh GOD! I did not ask for this either. I asked for rain of benevolence, blessing. And so the rains quieted to normal rain.
The rabbis wanted to put him in cherem, kick him out. He could not be trusted to bring rain, it is not safe! And what does it say, about how he makes demands of the Holy One of Blessing? This is not how things are supposed to go! But, he is excused because it is clear he is like a family member of the Divine.
To this I say, this is how you organize! Move heavens and earth to bring sweet rain to the people. But it is an impossible, fantastical story, the idea that he could demand rain from God. And that it would then fall! And he could customize a bespoke delivery of just the right rain. What gives him the nerve? What gave him the hope? In this drought, with this thirst, with no promise it could change anything?
I think about the despair he must have felt, when his students were dying of thirst, already in Adar in the spring, long through the rainy season. The crops bare, the animals and children suffering most immediately. Imagine how poor the quality of learning must have been with his students, if they were in such distress. Imagine what it must have been like, in Honi’s spirit, when his students begged him to help bring the rain. When we have felt like Honi, it has been hard to get out of bed, let alone imagine rain.
Mariame Kaba is an incredible organizer, educator, and curator, and on the afternoon of Yom Kippur next Monday, our community is invited to join Tzedek Chicago, a sibling congregation, to attend a lecture she is offering our communities called “We Keep Us Safe: Prison Industrial Complex Abolition and Transforming Justice.” I am incredibly excited to learn from her, and I hope you’ll join me.
On hope, Kaba asks that we distinguish the work of hope from the emotions of sadness or despair. She teaches, “hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion. Hope is not optimism.” Perhaps Honi did not expect the rain to come. Hope is a strategy. The circle was too.
If you looked around at the world and saw the destruction, violence, failure, lack of kavod (respect) for human life, it makes sense how you could not have hope. Kaba explains that HOPE is instead a DISCIPLINE. It is a practice that we must commit to each and every moment, to believe in the power of transformation even when the world around us does not reveal itself that way.
“Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various, different ways, so I get that, so I really get that...I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way and I choose to act in a different way. I choose to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy.”
Hope is a practice that does not only base itself on the current reality. Honi practices hope when he stands in the circle and shakes his fists at G!d. “COME OUT HERE AND TALK TO ME. WE DEMAND RAIN.” Despite thirst, despite impossibility, despite despair. He stays in the circle. It actually doesn’t matter to me if Honi ever got the rain to come, in the right amount or not. By drawing a circle in the dust, standing in it, he demonstrated all three steps.
Another story of Honi.
One day Honi was journeying on the road and he saw a man planting a carob tree.
He asked, "How long does it take [for this tree] to bear fruit?" The man replied: "Seventy years." Honi then further asked him: "Are you certain that you will live another seventy years?" The man replied: "I found [already grown] carob trees in the world; Just as my ancestors planted for me, I too am planting for my descendants.
Ḥoni sat and ate bread. Sleep overcame him and he slept. A cliff formed around him, and he disappeared from sight and slept for seventy years. When he awoke, he saw a certain man gathering carobs from that tree. Ḥoni said to him: Are you the one who planted this tree? The man said to him: I am his son’s son.
Honi woke up and asked Grace Lee Boggs’ question, “What time is it, on the clock of the world?” He found himself 2 generations later, seeing what power a small act of hope can result in for the next generation. What minuscule sliver of time is your universe operating in? What minuscule difference can you make, to link the second before to the second to come?
How do we cultivate hope? Again, Kaba, who explains that she does not take a short-term view of change. “I take a long view, understanding full well that I’m just a tiny, little part of a story that already has a huge antecedent and has something that is going to come after that, that I’m definitely not going to be even close to around for seeing the end of.” A mutual aid system that shapes the neighborhood’s culture of support, the results of a piece of legislation, a protected acre of trees, a more accessible building, youth empowered to rise up, a carob tree. Perhaps the understanding of our smallness can narrow the world to a small enough point we can find our way to action?
Honi is exemplifying this beautiful idea that Chris Johnstone and Joanna Macy published in 2012, Active Hope. They describe the dual meanings of hope: either the kind of hopefulness where it is for an expected, ideal, possible outcome. On this definition of hope, they teach, “If we require this kind of hope before we commit ourselves to an action, our response gets blocked in areas where we don’t rate our chances too high.”
But the second meaning is about desire. Sheer force of will, the kind that makes it possible to describe a future so desired, with so much clarity, it physically hurts.
They set out the path for cultivating Active Hope:
Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps. First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.
Like Kaba’s understanding of hope as a discipline, Active Hope is understood as a practice, an action, something that does not require optimism, but intention. Macy and Johnstone again:
The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be our guide.
If you have been living through hopelessness, depression, anxiety, immobility, or the over-productivity that is a cover for the above, you are in good company. And this is not a message to shame or blame that hopelessness and despair. Instead, can those feelings co-exist with the discipline, the obligation, the practice of Active Hope?
Kaba teaches us that hope is a discipline, a daily commitment to building for the future, planting the carob tree. Boggs teaches us that time is long, and we are second on the clock, connected to a chain of seconds. Macy teaches us that we must practice Active Hope, by moving each next step forward.
Last night, I shared this teaching from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:
The seventh day is a palace in time in which we build. It is made of soul, of joy and reticence. In its atmosphere, a discipline is a reminder adjacent to eternity.
Honoring Shabbat and calling it holy, sanctifying time, having rigor around how we carve out sacredness of moments, is a rigorous practice. It demands rules and instruction, thoughtful observance. No matter if you’re ready for the sun to set, if you managed to take out the recycling, if you got challah, or made all your plans, when the sun sets, Shabbat arrives. We are pulled out of time. Shabbes, in a way, does not care about your feelings.
And so too, hope.
Hope is the daily investment in the people and the world around us. The willingness to try. To make sacred use out of our precious moments in this lifetime. The rigor of Active Hope, of disciplined hope, carries us through times of depression and despair, moves us forward. Encircles us.
May this be a year when our practice of hope mobilizes us, challenges us to dream bigger, listen more deeply, scheme wilder, and bring the sweet rain of the world to come.
May it start soon to cease the fires in the West of this country, and may it wash over the whole world.
Kein yehi ratzon, so may it be.