Chesed to the End
The following was delivered by Rabbi Ariana Katz on 12 October 2024 | 10 Tishrei 5785.
This room is filled with people who have betrayed each other.
Been awkward with each other.
This room is filled with people who were too hard to one another online, but don’t acknowledge it in person. This room is filled with people who have never repaired from that one time a few years back. This room is filled with people who picked different sides of the story. This room is full of people who shut down dissent. This room is filled with people in the same family who haven’t been able to have a civil conversation all year. This room is full of people who owe each other money. This room is filled with people who have attacked each other, lied about each other, run their mouths about one another. This room is full of people who scoff when the other asks for help.
And. This room is filled with people who called and kept calling because they wanted you to know you weren’t alone. And people who helped us get sober. This room is filled with people who always make sure there’s a vegan and gluten free option because they want you to be able to make motzi. Who will show you what page we’re on in the prayerbook and gently explain Jewish stuff, while waiting to learn your insights. This room is filled with people who will give you your chemo injection because you’re terrified of needles. And people who not only bring food to shiva but put a plate in your fridge for when its 9pm and you haven’t eaten all day from grief. This room is full of people who have watched you grow over 7 years and love you in every stage of your becoming. This room is full of people who have asked you to make teshuvah with them, or been ready when you ask. This room is filled with people who hold you while you sob, or lovingly ignore you and just stand next to you while you cry it out. This room is full of people who drop off mastectomy pillows, share tips for starting HRT, celebrate your name changes and remind one another of your pronouns. This room is full of people who make your business our business.
Isn’t that a kick in the pants–that one room could be full of so much harm and so much beauty?
Y’all, I think this is why we’re still in shul. Because we need to fall apart, and put ourselves back together–together. How we tie ourselves to one another matters, as the winds pull on all that tethers us.
Adrienne Rich taught:
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors…
I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
The world is roiling. Boiling. Spilling over. How do we hold all this grief, all this cruelty, all this doom? We are watching roofs peeled off of the houses of people we love, floors coated in feet of mud from hurricane. We are watching families bear unbearable horror while still trying to survive in Gaza. We are feeling our earth changing, plants needing to go in later, seeds starting earlier, water coming in faster. We are trying to survive our own heart break, sickness, instability. How do we hold all this doom? We can’t. Let the ball drop.You cannot control any of it.
But you can love one another through this time.
What Chesed Can, and Cannot Do
We cannot control what the year ahead will bring, the Unetaneh Tokef reminds us, as it lists all the ways we might thrive or die. But teshuvah–return, tefilah prayer in action, and tzedakah, just sharing of resources, can change the severity of the decree, promises the prayer. All we have control over is the work of our hands. Instead of seeking to fight back the forces we cannot overcome, let us care for one another as we ride it. Releasing control feels foreign, wrong. But we are called in this season, I believe, to admit it.
We have witnessed the horrors of climate change wreak a path of destruction through the American South the last weeks, destroying homes of even members of our community and their families. And despite the disregard for human life from our governmental agencies, the huge amount of resources being poured into the war machine instead of aid for those reckoning with climate change...despite all this we have also witnessed incredible human kindness and beauty.
The building of Firestorm Co-op, an anarchist bookstore in Asheville where I visited on book tour this summer, has become a bulletin board covered with flyers, how to’s, and resource sharing. Our wider community in Baltimore through Red Emma’s filled a U-Haul van to the brim with supplies to drive down.
And we see it, again and again. When neighbors ran out of hormones and posted on the BMore Queer Exchange for someone to tide them over. When the formula shortage sent parents into panic for a specific brand for a premie baby.
This all might sound inane, like a feel good Sunday morning highlight reel-but it isn’t. What we can control, what is not hypothetical, is mutual aid and care, and the skills to look after one another as the world ends.
I share this not because how we care for one another can take control over our collapsing fates. I think I might have believed that a few years ago, back before a global pandemic. But now, after all we have witnessed together, all the loss in our own lives, in our city and world, I know that I was wrong.
There is profound potential in the work of our hands–I still believe this to be true. Your organizing is blessed and needed and sacred to the world. And I still believe, with perfect faith, that small acts transform the world, and that our organizing might have the chance to turn the tides of fate. Tefilah, teshuvah, tzedakah.
But I’m not counting on it. And our acts of care should not be done simply because they will move us further down the road to justice–they are the road to justice. And just as our care for one another cannot save the world, our care for one another cannot SAVE each other. But we can accompany one another. If the world ends this year, I don’t want us to be alone. If the world ends this year, I want to witness it alongside you. If the world ends this year, I want to take care of one another to the end.
This does not mean boundless chesed, lovingkindness–that is the realm of God and God only. We must understand our limits, our ability to care, clarity on what we can offer (and what we can receive.) Boundaryless care is not more authentic care, it is more dangerous care. And it does not mean allowing another person to transgress your boundaries over and over again. When our communities transgress our boundaries (expectations, offering damaging theologies, not living into our values) we do not need to stay because of “community covenant,” that covenant has been broken. It can be repaired, but must be done so intentionally. A skill each of us needs to learn is discernment around discomfort–stretching as we’re able to be compassionate, allowing for immediate repair and course correction, instead of immediately cutting people off and fully disinvesting from the relationship.
Why Are We Bound Together
A brit, covenant, according to community member and mohel Dr. Steven Adashek, is a promise that lasts over time. A brit is a promise between two beings, made sacred by the intention behind it. The covenant between God and Noah to never destroy the earth again by flood, that is a covenant, sealed with a rainbow. The covenant between Ruth and Naomi to go where she goes, for her God to be her God, that is a covenant, sealed through care. Relationships are covenanted through explicit discussion–partnership, chosen family, congregational life.
Our commitments in our congregation are not the same as those we make to our kin. This covenant is not a friendship–explicitly because we extend care to people we are not friends with–or might not even like that much. And this piece is our most sacred work–I am bound to you in love not because we get along, but because we need each other to survive. I help you, not because you are popular, but because you are a beloved human being, created in the Divine image. This community covenant is one of ongoing showing up, making one another’s well being our well being. A resistance to the nuclear family, the individualism of our society, the only caring for people we know deeply. Love is what binds our movements together, and getting comfortable with not always liking each other (and having boundaries about it) is a part of the skill.
In Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “Paul Robeson,” she writes:
…we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
Covenanted relationship allows us to be transformed by *~*obligation*~*. Obligation, chiyyuv, is a loaded concept Jewishly. For Jews who make decisions based on halacha, Jewish law, who and what is obligated to whom and when governs our actions, relationships, and time. The holidays come in when they come in, no negotiation. The time to pray, or be able to eat meat after milk, is set, fixed. For non-halachic Jews, or Jews who use halacha as one Jewish mode of knowing but not the only one, determining religious obligation requires a longer process to establish practices, norms, and pathways of decision making. A covenant obligates our actions–if you follow the stipulations. For example:
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, Hashem appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am El Shaddai. Walk in My ways and be blameless. I will establish My covenant between Me and you, and I will make you exceedingly numerous 1.
God goes on to share exactly what that means–stick with me, and I’ll make your descendants as numerous as the stars “etc etc etc”, and Abram consents. It is an ongoing covenant–one that Abraham renews with God throughout his life, and is re-established with each generation that follows.
What are community covenants? To respect one another, to care for the survival of the community itself, to notice when one another is missing, to offer company and material resources whenever possible, to ask for company and help when it is needed.
This also looks like:
Chesed meals. In the last 8 months, 20 families have requested community care. In August alone, there were 8 requests–40 meals out of the total requested were filled.
Going to a stranger’s house because they are sitting shiva, and you want to make sure they have a minyan.
Supporting someone who has a critique or concern of Hinenu, so they do not feel alone or ostracized–making their problem your problem.
Texting someone randomly and inviting them to a meal
Asking someone to invite you to a meal! Its Jewish!
Keeping a prayer list, and follow up with people
GOING TO THERAPY and learn how to sort out what is yours and what is someone else’s
Giving tzedakah weekly before Shabbat–help pay for healthcare needs, feed neighbors, get uniforms for peewee football teams
Shrugging something off
There’s a midrash that asks, “how do we know the significance of acts of Chesed?” And it begins with a verse from Hoshea, "For I desire chesed, and not sacrifice." And continues on:
The world began only with chesed, as it says in Psalms: "All existence is built upon chesed; loving commitment is found even in the heavens."
One time it happened that Rabban Yohannan ben Zakkai was leaving Jerusalem, and Rabbi Joshua was walking after him. He saw the ruins of Solomon's Temple. Rabbi Joshua said: "Oy! What a devastation for us that the place where Israel atoned for our sins has been destroyed."
Rabbi Yohannan replied: "My son, do not fear. We have another form of atonement that is just as effective."
What is it, the text asks? Acts of chesed, it answers.
This is what the verse from Hosea means when it says:
"For I desire chesed, and not sacrifice 2.”
In the absence of being able to bring sacrifices to the temple, what do we have? Through our acts of community care, loving kindness, we can have closeness to Gd, access to the technology of atonement even after the sacrificial system is gone. It does not promise any outcome, but it does bring us closer to each other, and to God. Biblical commentator and midrashist Aviva Zornberg describes chesed as “not just loving-kindness as it’s usually translated, but is also courage and imagination.” Supplying chesed where there was nothing–no relationship, or good will, or possibility of a way out of a stuck place, is an act of great courage and imagination, and it is the work of covenanted relationship. We have the profound opportunity to enter into “ongoing consensual obligation to each other, to bring courage and imagination to this web of relationships that is neither kin nor pure friendship 3.” The covenant is made holy over time, but it is made real through our actions. The rainbow, or the split sea, or the acts of care we give one another.
This year, let us make one another’s business our business. You don’t have to like everyone, or be everyone’s friend. But you do have to love them. And love is not something you can do from far away, or by yourself. So we must continue to do acts of chesed, amidst the ruins, trying to survive the world as we go.
Footnotes
1 Genesis 17:1-2
2 Avot D'Rabbi Natan 4:7
3 Jon Argaman, sermon writing coach extraordinaire