Shabbat Chazon 2010

Shabbat Chazon 2010

Good Shabbes!


Where are we? We are in Ivri time. We are in Hebrew time. We are in Yisra-El time. I invite you to leave behind American time. In Ivrit there is no verb for “to be”. Like many other language cultures around the world where there is no verb for “to be,” our ritual lives are cyclical - and our religious texts renew us and we renew our texts in a never ending wave of possibility. When the linearity of time goes away, our words focus on the potentials of our actions, on the deep levels of intents of our being, and on the potentials uncovered once actions have happened.
Some say our word for “to be” is nothing less than the name of god – Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey. The sages teach that Hashem - the holy name of g-d - can be read as as Yud Hey and Hey (after all, vav means “and”), which is Yah with and extra Hey for potential, for the strong force that binds the world together, for gravity. That is what, where, and when we are as a people - we are an embodied state of potential. We are the extra Hey. We acknowledge with every living breath that we have the power to heal the world, or enact its opposite.
In Ivri time, we are at the banks of a multiplicity of rivers across a multiplicity of events. In our torah portion, we are with Moshe at the banks of the Yardein, the Jordan river, waiting to cross over into the Land that was promised us, and we remember the forty year journey that brought us there. In our haftarah, we are with Isaiah at the swift waters of a great and powerful foretelling, a great chazon, a foretelling of sorrow and destruction and …even…some hope. And as we approach Tisha b’Av, we are at the banks of the Euphrates weeping for the land that we lost, the temple that burned, Isaiah’s foretelling fulfilled. We are at the banks, at the edge of the water, afraid to dip our feet in and acknowledge that we are entering an unknown, scary place. Over the ages, our ancestors, our Avot, added many other great sorrows, when we were also at the banks, and they wrapped up those sorrows into this conjunction of our life cycle, - at the banks, in the month of Av, the month which means Father.
Midsummer in the desert of Arabia is dangerous! It is as dangerous as midwinter in the frozen arctic of Lapland. It is hard for us, in this valley, a comparative Gan Eden in its own right to connect to this. But the people who inhabited that land – Avraham Avinu before he set out, and our forefathers who wound up back there in exile, and the people who brought them back there - they experienced life that we can scarecly imagine, unless we have been there. In the month of Av, sweltering heat, desert winds, cracked earth and whithering crops lead you to cry out to your divine essence as your elders pass away from dehydration and your wells begin to dry. Consider that today’s weather forcast for Nahiriya is 120 degrees Fahrenheit. On the ninth of the Father month in Babylon, the Talmud teaches that our fathers joined their conquerors in lament.
This month of Av is the month of our Father places. We all have them, men and women, boys and girls. That place in your heart that is where you keep the essence of dad-ness and grandpa-ness that you experience from your forebears, and if you are a parent yourself, that place that binds your parenting to the parenting of your avot. And even if you don’t have a father, never knew your father, you might have spent energy filling up those father spaces with your imagination. Even if your father spaces are filled up with negativity, with evilness, with abuse or hard times, you still have them. You know you do. We – all of us - do. This is the month to approach god as our Father, and to fill our father places with light. We have our Mother places too, of course, and perhaps the month of sh’vat half way around our cycle was in ancient times a month of Mother places. But that is for another d’var, another day.
Our Father places are not pure. They never are. This is the season when our ancestral fathers brought destruction on themselves time and time again. The point of Tisha b’Av is to acknowledge and lament. But there is hope. Our Haftarah, the foretelling of the destruction and exile, is traditionally chanted alternately in the trop mode of Lamentations in the sad parts, and in the regular trop in the hopeful parts. We sing our lament and we sing our hope and we sing Ani Maamin that the moshiach will come.
Then, once we are past the point of crisis, we call the month “Menachem Av” – “Father comforts.”
So…let us be solemn and lament. Let us examine our father spaces, fill them with light where they need light, fill them with comfort where they need comfort. Fill ourselves with the knowledge that we, men and women both, have deep connections to our fathers and our fathers fathers, to the beginning of time. Let us mourn our temple, and let us acknowledge in our hearts the imperfections of our fathers that we bring into ourselves, so that we may break the cycle of destruction that we lament this week. And … let us celebrate that aspect of Hashem … that comforts us. Let us take that light, and use it to fill the father spaces in our souls.

Avinu, I want to kneel with you.
Avinu, I want to stand with you.
Avinu, I want to parent with you.
Avinu, I want to child with you.
You stand with me,
You serve with me,
You are father,
You are source.

7/16/2010