This is the text of the Drash that I wrote on Sarah and Hagar at Temple Israel of Hollywood today. Hope that you enjoy.
It’s Rosh Hashonah
The time of year when we take another look at our humanness.
They way we are.
The decisions we make and the ones that are made for us.
when our most human actions, especially the ones that seem to haunt us,
are placed before us to pulse and resonate and ask us to engage with them.
Memory and reaction joining hands.
Battering us back to our imprints and judgments…
But this year, I offer the prospect of staying present,
Quite simply, I ask, is it possible for us to avoid assumptions based on our imprints and perhaps, more expansively, experience the life around us based on our ability to be still?
“Let Life happen to you.
Life is right in any case”
Rainer Maria Rilke’s words grow for me. I first encountered them years ago before much life had tossed me around. The words were a call to experience but one I wasn’t ready to accept.
Just live, take the day and experience it? The good and the bad?
No blame either horizontal or vertical?
No judgment or triggers? Just clarity—?
Is that even possible for a stiff necked Jewish woman?
Gradually, however I have come to understand that tho we live in partnership with the universe, are actually an expression of God—or the Divine– on the planet, there are just some things that happen that we cannot fathom. There are some things that are part of “experience” and that we are not meant to understand and analyze. We are meant to just be still and see what happens.
Our rush to judgment and certainty is an interesting exercise perhaps but often gets in our way.
Sure, a moral compass is important to use in our analysis of what transpires and who we think caused it
but once we have our moral tools down
we spend and awful lot of time judging and blaming,
shaking our heads in wonder,
“ He should have.. if you just would listen to me… how could you possibly??.. deflecting our own experience of life
by standing outside of it in an intellectual HAZMAT suit.
Yes, there is good inclination and bad
Yes, we are asked to make decisions along our way
But isn’t it interesting how things work out?
Find their balance
Even in the time of imbalance .
Things are often horrific or at least inconvenient,
they have a life of their own.
We can alter our decisions perhaps,
choose right action but in the end what happens, happens.
People act responsibly and irresponsibly
Some say we create our own reality,
some say that’s hocus pocus thinking… but I tend to agree with Martin Buber .
“Rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way. Why rake muck when you can be stringing pearls for the delight of heaven?”
So, this Rosh Hashonah story. Sarah and Hagar.
Sarah threw the haughty slave girl with the smooth skin
and the quick child out.
Get outta here
Scram, hit the road jack and take that kid with you..
And Hagar, the slave woman, with her sloe eye and soft step threw her glance back at her lover, the man she shared with the old woman,
at the old woman’s behest and she began to shuffle off.
Oh, he protested, he cared about the woman, the child
But god told him to heed Sarah his wife…
And look what happened
Hagar and Ishmael hit the desert and at the last moment of despair
God spoke to Hagar (the first woman to receive that honor) and
Ishmael survived.
He founded a great nation
Which even to this day is working out its response to
Sarah throwing Ishmael out—
Islam was created
A great nation
A full culture
And even today we are still figuring out who we are to each other –us descendants of Abraham—of Isaac and Ishmael.
Whether we need to hate or get revenge
for Sarah’s rash, pragmatic action.
Maybe that’s why Arabs and Jews are at each others throats,
have lost our balance and seem desperate to even scores.
How about no answer?
How about just being with each other?
In the same world looking thru the same onion skin of this reality and getting inklings of the greater reality…..
All of us, engaged in really being in our total experience
the definable and indefinable. Hmmmm.. how would that be?
Why do we struggle to judge?
To even the score
Make sure tit gets tat and somebody wins and somebody loses
Perhaps this year we can see how it makes no difference
That from the worst expulsion
The most unequal business deal
The most grievous loss
From the greatest triumph there is really only experience…
If we look at our life
as a swirl of decisions, choices, energies
that exist for us within, say, a net of reality—we rattle and dance and the net keeps us present, we also have to notice that sometimes our rattle and dance is joined to something bigger. That bigger experience is All, Ultimate Spirit, God’s presence or whatever you’d like to call it. Seems to me the job is to consider the spaces between here and there-inside and outside– and realize it all may be the same– recognize that the difference between inside that net of reality and outside is not so far….
Isn’t that what prayer offers us, or meditation, or observation—if we step back and quiet ourselves and be the world as it spins and offers us a great ride, don’t we experience moments that transcend the everyday inside this reality net?
I’d say so..
Maybe someone you love dies… and all of a sudden you realize that they are not gone, just changed. And you are too. You have been expanded—painfully perhaps—but expanded. You are both here in your reality net and through love, are part of the soul that is off to Angel School with larger fish to fry. We are in our world of judgment, yes—but we are also in a larger simpler and more complex reality.
I remember my mother telling me the story that when a child is conceived and is floating out in the heavens, ready to come down thru the birth canal, God touches the babe’s upper lip—making the cupid bow of the lip- and with that touch God takes away all memory of the ALL the ULTIMATE and our job on earth is to start again to understand that we exist both in the heavens and at the same time inside our daily, “concrete” human life.
We move from being all knowing elements of the ALL or God into humans who must define and learn and grow and grow and grow back to the understanding that we are part of something bigger… and that something bigger is exactly where our souls reside.
This stuff here on the planet is important work.. we are here after all as the divine expression of the ALL, but our job is to remember that the ALL, the SPIriT is a place past judgment and we come thru our life imprints, our prejudices and human experiences to return to SPIRIT richer, fuller and more Godlike than when we were born. What a trip.
.
Yes, we need to protect ourselves as best we can from grievous harm, but if rotten acts are undertaken
maybe it’s just the Universe doing its thing;
it’s quite a power trip to think we are alone in creating our own reality in the end.
Right and wrong? Good and bad.. yes. We know about that
But when we cannot control those events, rather than stay in the struggle of judgment and blame, perhaps we can just “experience” the actions and the movement these actions cause and see what happens. We spend a lot of time worrying about the future… a time that if you think about it never comes… all we have is now… this moment.. and the way we experience it.
I am not saying complacency or outrage are out of style and unworthy—I am only saying that they have partners in observation and simple clear silent experience.
Life changes us and then we change our lives.
Sure Sarah threw Hagar out, but Islam arose because of that action.
Yes, we are still trying to figure out who we are to each other, Arabs and Jews . That sure takes up a lot of time. Maybe that activity would benefit from a release of the Blame Game. What if we didn’t name the devil but began to understand the dimensionality. We can still smite the foe. But perhaps we will realize the cost.
Maybe this year, we can step back from judgment.
From the nonsense of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, from the cult of celebrity and the mythical equation that money equals success. Maybe we can open our eyes and actually begin to get an inkling that life and experience are both inside the rules and outside in the larger float where experience just is and life is right in any case.
And so it is
Amen