Some call the Torah ‘the longest standing book club.’ For the most part, Jewish folks, and others aligned with this flow, have been reading the same sequence of torah portions [sometimes split up into smaller chunks] each week, alongside each other, throughout the world.
In torah portion last week, Yitro, or Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law Yitro asked Moses what it could be that he does for the people that he sits alone, while the entire people ‘stations itself around you.’ Moses replies that the people come ot him to inquire about God. Yitro says, ‘lo tov!’ ‘Not Good’, as you do it. ‘Baveel teebeel gam atah gam ma’am haze Asher omeich ki chaveid meem’cha hadavar toocheil asohoo l’vadecha You will become work out, yes, worn out, so you, so [too] this people that are with you, for this matter is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.’ Audrfe Lorde says something similar: “without community there is no liberation”
Thus begets leadership transition from Moses only to Moses and a handful of other Truth-rooted leaders.
In this moment, we are watching on our phones and in our streets as governments across the globe are taking action for greed and power hoarding rather than for the Good of the interconnected collective. In this moment, we are invited into a re-membering, a remembering of our innately human ways of being shomrei adamah, tenders of the Earth. it is upon us to step into our role, to march, to run, towards our Right Place of Divine Knowing in Action.
The veil is lifted, and what we are seeing is not new. We have heard, and are hearing it, in the cries of our indigenous ancestors, of our slave-dwelling ancestors, of our immigrant ancestors. The political, social, and cultural structures that have held this society together have never been in alignment with shomrei adamah, with guarding and tending the earth.
This weekend, Apache Stronghold was leading the Run from the San Carlos Reservation, their own concentration camps of past and present, to Chichil Biłdagoteel, Oak Flat, their place of Divine Connection, each step of the runners mending the disconnection that capitalism, imperialism, individualism of this time has tended.
In the torah portion, through these runs, through the scrappy and loving resistance in Minneapolis, the meal trains and community tending and grief holding and land reconnecting that happens in communities across the globe, we are on the way well to a Whole re-connection in and with the Earth.
How do these actions go from ‘just helping each other’ to actively building the world we trust and pray and wish to be in? Through awareness. Through an active re-membering and reckoning with the reality that the structures and systems built around us are on the backs of those ancestors who were displaced, the ancestors who came to Turtle Island as slaves, the ancestors who came fleeing violence and persecution. A reckoning that we must re-orient our trust in each other, in the vulnerability of closeness with our neighbors, rather than the safe distance of governmenta; services and corporations.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian from the Far’a refugee camp outside of Jenin, now living in the US, said “stength and power comes not from weapons and money but from deep love and connection, the more we are connected the more powerful we are.”
If you’re reading this and you’re like YES I’m Ready!! Go. Go outside, talk to your neighbors, find the community organizations that align with your particular skills and desire of offering, and plug in. The door is open and waiting for you to walk through it.
Too, if you’re like ‘but what do I do? How do I actually shift my system to trust that which terrifies me, and let go of that which gives me an ever-more uncomfortable security?” I invite you to take a breath, bremember the road is long, and we are alongside each other, re-membering with every breath.
Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi says we don’t know what we will serve god until we arrive. as we walk this path, returning when we inevitable stray, trusting that our intention of unraveling the constraints that have lifted up those with more power and more wealth, trusting in a world that creates power and wealth outside of capital, but within each other, we are walking the path, only possible as Yitro said, alongside each other, towards our fullest, truest, wholest interconnected web of self. a more sustainable, ready, just partnership of Becoming and Making the World renewed, remembered.
[As Sarah Augustine reminds us in prayer]
And we say:
This land, my body.
