Parshat Vaera 5785
This d'var Torah was given on Shabbat Parshat Vaera,
January 24 2025 at Hinenu Baltimore.
Here are a few things that I would like to say.
I love you.
I love you.
Look around. You don't have to say it if you don't have it in you.
But if you do, brave people, you can say it.
You can make eye contact with someone and say, I love you.
Or just close your eyes and feel it.
But I love you.
I love you.
You are beloved.
That's the first thing I wanted to say.
OK, here's a second one.
2. You are not alone.
We are here on a very auspicious night.
Homewood Friends has been the host for Hinenu since we first gathered for Kabbalat Shabbat in 2018 when Avi and I led upstairs in May 2018.
And this weekend, we get to pray together.
We get to be in space and find our breath together.
And to do it intentionally, because I know many of us have overlapped and spent time in prayer and in silence and in organizing with one another.
But tonight, we have this amazing opportunity to celebrate Shabbat with our friends and to join friends for meeting for worship on Sunday, all from the comfort of our same sanctuary.
How many of our prayers have been whispered in this room?
Core life cycles witnessed, friends comforted, world events parsed in this space.
This sacred building is over 100 years old now and has held the full spectrum of life and of yearning and of connection and of light.
What a blessing to get to be here together.
And in a week that was engineered to make us feel alone, instead, each of you are here.
We are here, present and accounted for and accounting for one another.
3. Please do not harden your heart.
In this week's Parsha, Parshat Vayera, Pharaoh's heart is hardened.
Sometimes it does it itself.
Sometimes God hardens his heart.
But what it results in is cruelty, continued enslavement of the Israelites, tricking them, distracting them, and lying to them.
Now, this whole heart-hardening thing is an ethical catastrophe for the rabbis.
Taking away free will is kind of the opposite of the whole image that we have of the divine.
Is this maybe instead divine intervention?
Or maybe it's doing something that Pharaoh was already drawn to?
Ramban, who is a rabbi in Catalonia in the 13th century, says that actually, Pharaoh hardened his own heart at first during the first five plagues.
And then God hardened his heart in the second five.
Don't worry about it.
See, you know, Ramban says, like, it wasn't God setting out to take away Pharaoh's free will. But after Pharaoh started hardening his own heart, it became inevitable. It became muscle memory. It became safer to do it that way.
This week, if you can help it, I want to invite you and all of us to not let our hearts be hardened, whether it's by your own fear or your desire to distance yourself from all that you love and all you fear to lose.
Do not stop fighting because it would be easier to just surrender.
Do not give away your free will, your ability to choose to stay open to miracles that could be coming, that you could cause to make.
Do not cut yourself off from hope.
Do not cut yourself off from terror.
Do not cut yourself off from community, though God knows it would be pretty easy to isolate.
What are we up to, four?
4. What we are doing here matters, and we have teachers to remind us.
They bring the Torah of steadiness.
Yolo Akili Robinson, who is a writer, a justice worker, a yogi, he said this week:
The more under-resourced we are emotionally, the easier it is to activate us and turn us against each other. The spectacle is a strategy, fam. We have to resist with rest, regulation practices, and rooting ourselves in our bodies as we fight back.
This week, we also receive the Torah of bravery.
adrienne marie brown, a writer and ritualist and activist, said:
The reality is bleak and chaotic, but not permanent. Remember, the future is unwritten. We are not in their story even if we are impacted by it. We have to keep writing and living our stories, the ones where justice and love and equality and material well-being and care and connection and freedom and safety and dignity and belonging on Earth are at the center.
In our stories, this is either a failure, because we don't learn anything but vengeance and smallness and violence, or a tragic setback that we turn into a multitude of opportunities for liberation and a living economy.
And we receive this week, again, the Torah of acceptance.
On Kol Nidre, the most sacred and fearsome night of the Jewish year, Hinenu welcomed Ricardo Levin's Morales, an artist and organizer, who taught us:
A tree that refuses to concede that summer is over, is ill prepared for what comes next. That's denial, and it rarely works out well. Denial, we could say, is our contract with a dead past that we cling to so we won't have to mourn its demise…
I've come to embrace the Buddhists concept of acceptance. It doesn't mean that I'm cool with how things are, just that I know that this is the world that is. It's the starting place for whatever comes next. That transition - the journey from denial to acceptance - is called grieving. It's the bridge that we must cross to be fully, humanly, present. It requires letting go. It hurts. Believe me, I know. I've spent my entire life fleeing from grief. But it's the hurt that accompanies healing. That opens pathways.
We are called to steady ourselves in the face of terror, to call in the Torah of steadiness, like we all had to when seeing images of a certain greeting from Elon Musk all over the news, or as we read, reports of ICE trying to invade schools in Chicago.
We will certainly be called to receive the Torah of bravery, like Bishop Buddy, who prayed for compassion and empathy for trans people and immigrants right to the president's face.
And we will be called to receive the Torah of acceptance, like January 6th protesters who refused presidential pardon, and organizers who said, “all right, let's cry. What's next?”
Bravery, accountability, and steadiness.
That's all I got:
I love you.
You are not alone.
Do not harden your heart.
What we are doing here matters.
May the Holy One, in her infinite wingspan, shelter all undocumented neighbors, all trans kin, all of us living on this aching planet. May we be blessed with steadiness. May we be blessed with bravery. May we be blessed with acceptance. May we not be distracted by those wishing to distract us. And may we stay focused on the work of protecting life. Amen.