Hear Our Voice

I was a brand-new rabbinic student, sitting at a Jerusalem café with my professor, Rabbi Ben Hollander, z.l., who had been charged with providing me a primer on teaching prayer to high school students. It would be my job, as madrich, counselor for NFTY’s high school in Israel program, to meet daily with the students and teach and lead some version of prayer. I was an uber-novice in this area, having been inspired by visions of serving as a rabbi, having applied and been accepted to rabbinical school, but I had not been a youth group president or big involved in Hillel… but there I was with this job. The director of the program sensed that I would need some assistance and so in came Rabbi Hollander, may his memory be for a blessing, to work with me and to help me put together a plan. 

A note about Rabbi Hollander… Imagine a really beautiful and soulful version of Woody Allen, whose discombobulated exterior, truly belied his pristine soul.  He would lean on the dais as he lectured to us from thread-borne, dog-eared notes that he had taken when he was a student at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, some 30 years earlier under the tutelage of Nechama Leibowitz (a great modern, Israeli, woman scholar at a time when few of these adjectives were generally strung together).  He was probably the last person I would’ve expected to teach me more about essential elements of Jewish prayer than anyone has done to this day.  His central premise for understanding the nature of Jewish prayer was that its purpose is to regularly and continually remind us of all that is going right in the world.  He would say over and over, we don’t need any help reminding ourselves of all that is broken. Jewish prayer on the other hand acts as a counter valance to human behavior, that evolutionarily may have made us physically safer, also made us soulfully challenged to easily find the good.

In the light of the memory of Rabbi Hollander, on this day after our national election about which we still do not have a final decision, I thought it would be a good idea to give ourselves the challenge of identifying the good that has nonetheless come from a rife, strident and existentially challenging political world.  I have three.

The first is thus far, by general consensus, that some of the great concerns about and threats of violence on election day did not come to fruition. Seeing very passionate and opposing groups peacefully protesting from two different sides of West Gray here in Houston, in front of the polling location at the West Gray Multi-Purpose center, protected and managed by the police with no subsequent drama other than verbal expressions for and against each other’s positions, gives me solace that democracy can be messy and imperfect but also peaceful.  The second is the sharp rise in ours and our fellow citizens’ knowledge of, attention to, and focus upon the really crucial, but too often ignored processes and safeguards of our democratic system.  High school civics has never felt as important to know and understand.  And the third is the gratitude that this moment does inspire from within me.  I am grateful that we have the spiritual tools to meaningfully respond to the moments in life when, not if, things don’t go entirely our way.  Whatever the outcome of this election, no one can un-see the divisions that exist in our society.  No one can pretend any longer that limiting one’s political speech to social media is enough.  No one can pretend that echo chambers are productive.  And everyone, whether or not they are spiritually or religiously driven, needs to regularly engage in efforts that open our eyes to all that is going right in the world.  It’s only when we do this that we can maintain an understanding of the world we are trying to build.

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