Essential Empathy, for A New Year.
[For Rosh Hashanah, New Shul, 2015 / 5776] At our darkest, do we wish for sleep? Where the troubled are calm, the halls echo? The tired are resting and only the walls can know what we’re all hiding from? And is death the buried treasure? Or is this light, this life the truest measure of our capacity? And if it’s accurate that more precision yields fluidity, and fluency, and currency, then I offer this precise prayer as both question and answer, and as a kneeling-down-surrender, as a quiet declaration of how we might begin right here. Could it be that we confuse our feelings about our darkness, our fear, with its essence – which is respect, which is listening, maybe holiness, maybe reverence? Could it be that my reverence gave birth to an entire universe of light and sound? And could it be that clearing out our darkness isn’t our way around our fear – but compassionate evolution might be? Can we circumambulate our anguish and see everything that’s there; can we surround it with more love and be crystal clear that we care for ourselves? However large, however small, you draw the map of it, and tell the tall and layered story about how it …
