This sermon began in my mind watching a clip of a senator in the Texas State senate. He was frustrated that Covid still wasn’t done.
“You told
us,” he said brandishing his finger towards someone or something, “that it
would be the masks that would keep us safe from Covid. Then you told us,” he
continued to wag his finger, “that the vaccine would keep us safe from Covid,
and now we’ve got masks and vaccines and we’ve still got Covid – so which is
it?”
I can
understand the frustration. I’ve found Covid frustrating and just so confusing.
I know couples who live together where one got Covid and the other didn’t. And younger
people who have suffered horribly from this weird disease and older people who
have waltzed through it. And fully vaccinated people getting ill and
vax-resistors doing fine. And how does that happen? How come?
It's not
that Covid is the first time I’ve been frustrated and confused – that happened
lots before, but there is something about this journey that has brought me to
rethink the question of why things happen, and my inability to understand.
The
frustrated Texan Senator reminds me of two other moments of frustration in our
text-tradition, both more connected to Yom Kippur than today, but go with me. They
are going to model my problem.
In ten days
time, we read a Haftarah from Isaiah. The people surrounding Isaiah are
frustrated. They want, like of all of us, a good life, and they claim they are
doing the stuff they should be doing to get a good life, and it isn’t happening.
Isaiah reports, “[The people] keep asking me for the justice. They say, ‘why is
it that we have fasted and you don’t see our suffering?’ ‘We humble ourselves,
and you don’t notice.’”
Of course we
know the answer to the people’s frustrations and confusion, the reason that all
the fasting and bowing of the Israelites of Isaiah’s time fails to work is
clear to us, even if opaque to them. The Isaiah’s contemporaries might be fasting,
but they are also oppressing their workers and persisting in strife and
contention. They protest the system isn’t working, but the system is working
just fine. They just don’t understand the system.
Much like
our Texan State Senator.
He's missed
the point that neither the vaccine nor the masks are offered as perfect guarantees,
that’s never been claimed. It’s about %s and probabilities and epidemiological
forecasting. But we all make the error of the State Senator, or Isaiah’s
contemporaries, all the time. We articulate a frustration at the world not
working how we want it to work, but often we’ve performed a wish-fulfillment
imposition of a way for the world to work … which is just not how the world
works.
It’s the
wish fulfillment piece that is, I think, the most interesting piece of all of
this. I mean, I wanted Covid to go away so badly, I was prepared to believe it
would disappear by Pesach last year, or Shavuot, or last year’s Rosh Hashanah
and I’m still prepared to believe it’s going to disappear tomorrow, and I’m
still getting frustrated that it didn’t disappear yesterday, even despite all
the properly qualified epidemiologists and virologists calmly stating that that’s
simply not going to happen.
We’ve all
appointed ourselves experts in fields we know next to nothing about, we do it
all the time, and then we express surprise that our bent to the world to our
will.
So, here’s one
way to deal with the frustrations of a world not working out the way we want it
to work out. Remember the Talmud’s instruction to “Teach your tongue to say I
do not know.”[1]
If there’s
something I’m frustrated about – I need to check that the problem wasn’t that I
wished a truth into being that … simply isn’t a truth at all. That’s what I’ve
learnt from Isaiah, about Covid.
And here’s a
second moment from our faith tradition – a Midrash about Moses’ experience with
God when he comes down the mountain the second time, in the aftermath of the
Golden Calf debacle. A day, the Rabbis calculate to be Yom Kippur, some 3300
years ago.
In Masechet Brachot[2]
the Rabbis imagine God celebrating with Moses the giving of the second tablets
and offering to answer two of Moses’ questions but not offering the answer to
the third question. God answers that; Yes, God will dwell with the children of
Israel and always go with the Children of Israel, but then Moses attempts this question
- “Rasha v’Tov Lo, Tzadik v’Ra Lo” – why do good things happen to bad people
and why do bad things happen to good people and God refuses to give a clear
answer.
God’s grace
is just that, it comes at the will of God, and it goes at the will of God. And even
if you follow all the rules, and do everything just as you should – there is still
no answer in our tradition to the question – Rasha v’Tov Lo, Tzadik v’Ra Lo.
Sometimes there is just no reason. All the doctrines of cause and effect don’t
grant a perfect understanding of the world. That’s not just a religious truth, that’s
a physicists have come to accept – at the very deepest places of sub-atomic behaviour.
For sure we can predict generalities – if enough people wear masks, infection
rates will go down, if enough people get vaccinated, severe illness will
decrease. But trying to plot precisely who will and won’t get ill is as
impossible as trying to predict the behaviour of an electron.
We’re back
to this issue of humility. Who will live and who will die, who by fire, who by
water – isn’t a primer on how to make sense of the world, but a warning against
thinking we can control human destiny. Those words continue with a line about penitence,
prayer and justice but doesn’t offer these options as a way to guarantee
anything.
I think we
have the world backwards. Somewhere we seem to have picked up a notion that the
world is ours to understand and control. But, with every twist and turn in this
pandemic, with every storm and flood and with every experience of the fragile nature
of our hold on the world, we are having to acknowledge that we don’t control
the world.
So what now?
Two thoughts.
While we
aren’t given the ability to understanding everything in our strange world, that’s
not the same as saying we live in a void. We live in a space that is neither
anarchy or perfect order. There are general truths about the things that will
make the world generally better, for ourselves and the planet. Some of them are
obvious, some of them less so. We need to press back against our thinking that wish-fulfillment
will make the things we want to happen, happen. But if we open our heart to
listen to wisdom, we will learn and even if we can’t control every aspect of
our lives, we can improve our lot and that of those around us. Our inability to
control everything shouldn’t lead us to feel nothing matters at all. We’re back
to questions around vaccination and infection and mask wearing.
And also
this, what if we were to invert our relationship with control and understanding.
What if instead of feeling frustrated when the world doesn’t match our
expectation of it, we found ways to take delight in moments of beauty even in
their brokenness, even in their lack of complete order and security.
Let me take
the example of the rainbow. There have been so many rainbows, placed in windows
and chalked onto pavements. And I understand that the rainbow makes a wonderful
icon for the end of a period of loss and destruction – that is, of course, a
very Jewish idea. But I wonder if we have focused on the wrong part of rainbows’
symbolic power.
Rainbows are
ethereal. Sometimes visible, other times not. There’s nothing to touch, nothing
to rely upon. No way to reach a rainbow, and certainly – sorry to disappoint –
no pot of gold on offer for those who do. Rainbows exist in a moment of infinitely
fragile beauty as sun and rain combine. Rainbows are the perfect symbol of what
it could mean to find delight in the precarious. And we do, of course. We find
rainbows utterly transfixing; transfixing because of their fragility, not
despite it.
We’re ready –
or almost ready – to find beauty in the gentle moments of grace we can find. We
just struggle to admit we can’t find things beautiful in their fragility while
still protesting that the world isn’t the dependable solid kind of place we
would wish it to be.
So here’s
the challenge for any of us who find the world frustrating and challenging in
its refusal to function as we would wish.
We need to
check that the version of the world we expect is a true version of the world –
and not just an attempt to use wish fulfillment.
And we need
to acknowledge that the goal of our quest for understanding can’t be perfect
knowledge. We need to acknowledge that the Universe will always keep its deepest
secrets … secret, and instead of frustration we need to find beauty in the fragile
and ephemeral.
That’s a
path to delight and ease, even in a world that confuses.
That’s a
path, I think, to a year of sweetness.
May it come
to us all,
Shannah
Tovah.
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