Yom Kippur: Morning Service
Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2020/5781
In the words of poet Langston Hughes:
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
This poem entitled “Mother to Son” has been on my mind a lot lately. I could not tell you exactly when I learned it, but I believe it was in elementary school…so a long time ago. It is a poem that rises to the front of my consciousness every so often, usually when the future seems uncertain. There is no question in my mind why this poem has been floating around in my head over the last few months. This poem portrays a letter written by a black mother to her black son.
You see, the morning after George Floyd’s murder, my son Fred and I went out for our usual morning walk. It was early. The summer sun had just risen and the dew was still on the grass. There was a stillness, a quiet that was simultaneously both eerie and comforting. Fred did not seem to notice anything different about this particular morning as he ran down the sidewalks of downtown Minneapolis noticing all of the trucks and buses and construction vehicles. As we walked we passed a father and his son also enjoying the early morning air. The father and I looked at each other and smiled and then he said: “We have to get them outside before things get crazy again.” I nodded as we both continued our walks. But, as we walked away, the full realization of the difference between the trajectory of Fred’s life and that of this little black boy hit me like a ton of bricks, the tears rolling down my face. Our children, all of them, deserve a better world than the one that we have created for them. We cannot go back to the way it was, and I know I will never truly understand how bad it has been for my neighbors, my friends.
There is no doubt that COVID-19 has been a tragedy. In the last 7 months we have struggled to educate our children while working, we have missed time with friends and family that we desperately need.We have replaced gathering at Temple with zoom services for Shabbat, holidays, B’nai Mitzvah and Baby namings.In this time we have said goodbye to loved ones over FaceTime and buried them over Zoom. We have lost our jobs and we’ve navigated economic hardships we could not have possibly anticipated. Our loneliness has become suffocating.
At the end of May, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered with a knee on his neck, and protestors took to the streets. Since the beginning of this pandemic, we lost some of our greatest advocates for truth and justice in Representative John Lewis and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Each day we wake up bracing for the next news headline telling us what else in the world has broken. From skies thick with smoke out west, to east coast hospitals overflowing with patients, every time we think that things cannot get any worse...they do.
Yet, with all of the tragedy, we have been given the potential gift of insight.The lush carpet has been pulled back and the striped boards lay bare. In a poem written by Australian teacher and author Tania Sheko that has gone viral we see all that the virus has revealed about this world.
It begins in a world where there is poverty and plenty.
Back before we understood why hindsight’s 2020
When we were able to get anything that we dreamed of with a click of a finger.This is when the work life balance broke and families stopped talking to each other. Before 2020 when our children, where continuously connected to the entire world through their cell phones and devices, yet they always felt alone.We drove our cars and flew our planes to find the stars we could no longer see through the smog filled sky.We filled our sea with plastic and strangled our sea life and starved our birds.
And while, the poem continues, we drank and smoked and gambled, our leaders taught us why
It’s best to not upset the lobbies, more convenient to die
Sheko portrays a compelling view of how off course our world has gone. Like the poem, Mother to Son, at first glance both can be seen as only about hardship and adversity. But, let us look closer at the poem. When read a few more times, we can see that it is actually about resilience and determination.
Don’t you sit down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
After a lifetime of hardship, this mother is still climbing. What is the source of her strength? What is the secret to her determination? How, in a world that is stacked against her, is she still going forward? There may be many answers, but I believe the answer is hope. Hope is what has sustained so many of us through the hardest and scariest moments in our lives. NOT unfettered optimism, NOT idealistic fantasy, but hope. As Eli Wiesel writes, Just as a person cannot live without a dream, one cannot live without hope. Hope has sustained the Jewish people. Hope allows us to acknowledge the challenges of today without losing faith in the end of the story. It is hope, along with resilience and determination that has allowed us to move forward.
We are all here today because, in many ways, our hope is born of our Jewish faith.It is not in our DNA to despair.On the contrary, in the mystical tradition, hope is a soul trait. Hope is a characteristic that we mindfully cultivate in order to become fully realized human beings. The mystical tradition, otherwise known as Kabbalah, teaches that we are all born with qualities of God imbedded within us. At any time, if we are not feeling this to be true, it is because we are unable to access them. Yet, through training and self-reflection we can bring these forward. Within us, right now, we all have the capacity for hope. We will still be confronted with despair, but we have the ability to convert it into hope.
In fact, we know we cannot “command” ourselves not to despair; it is inescapable at times. In such moments, we may instinctively lash out against even those we love, sometimes even against ourselves. This is when we learn to hold ourselves with compassion and use the energy generated by our despair to invite hope in: we utter a word of prayer for God to be with us; we call a trusted friend with whom we can share our anguished thoughts and feelings; we go out into nature; we read inspirational literature; we take an action, even a small one, against injustice. If our despair can lead us to action then it can also restore our hope.
With Judaism as our guide, we have the ability to continue to climb, even when the staircase looks impossibly steep. It is our Jewish values and teachings that will allow each one of us to lift our heads out of the self-isolation and the fear of change and begin to pay attention to the change that is already occurring.
Pay attention to the hospital workers living out the value of pikuach nefesh, saving a life, in their daily work with Covid-19 patients and all patients – especially those navigating terminal illness during this time of separation and isolation – speaking with and saying goodbye to loved ones over FaceTime.
Pay attention to those patients living every day with courage and conviction, living out the value of choosing life even when they know they will die soon.
Pay attention to the aerospace workers in Massachusetts who put tikkun olam, making the world a better place, ahead of profits and demanded that their factory be converted to ventilator production.
Pay attention to the Floridians holding the government accountable by standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office. Their actions reminded all of us of the Jewish value of lo ta’ashok sachir - to treat all workers fairly.
Pay attention to the residents of Milwaukee, who braved endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in a special election making sure that, as the talmud teaches, a ruler was not chosen without consulting the community. They did not allow the virus Al tifros min hatzibur – to separate them from their community.
And, closer to home, pay attention to the thousands upon thousands of people who marched for the value that EVERY person is created in the image of God.
The time is now for us to act on all that we have realized! For, while the temptation is to wonder when things will get back to normal? The challenge is to ask, how will we reinvent, transform, and adapt for the future?
The last 7 months have brought disruption to all of our lives. We have postponed, cancelled, changed, and reimagined so many milestone events. We know that there is no real “redo” for any of these things, and, if Judaism teaches us anything, it is that going back is not the goal. Our Torah portion this morning reads: Atem Nitzavim kolhem hayom - I say to you THIS DAY, I have set before you life and blessing, death and curse, choose life so that you and your descendants shall live.
This is our time to choose life by reimagining, reinventing, rethinking. This day Black lives do matter, this day women’s rights are human rights, this day we have to listen to our earth crying out from beneath its burden, this day our health care is not the same for all who are sick, this day our children are suffering from failing school systems. The video The Great Realization continues with a prophetic vision of what our world could look like.
Sometimes we must get sick, in order to get better. This day let us commit ourselves to the healing, the realization of the dreams, of the vision, of a better future to which this pandemic is pointing. Let us not give up on the hope that Langston Hughes described so eloquently.
Let us not turn back,
Let us not sit down on the steps,
‘cause we find its kind of hard,
Let us keep going,
Keep climbing up,
This day when we choose life.