We joined together at the end of a week of so much grieving, loss, and shock for a two part service.
Morning Service: Praise the rain, it brings more rain
Our morning service was built around the theme of being in a time of building for the future as represented by the traditional liturgical switch from praying for dew to praying for rain at Shemini Atzeret. Knowing that rain must fall in one season for the earth to produce food in the following season, we read and sang liturgy about rain, possibility, and the beginning of fall. Read our liturgy here.
Included in our liturgy is Rabbi Rachel Barenblat’s piece “Geshem” and Joy Harjo’s “Praise the Rain.”
Mincha: Pour Out Your Hearts Like Water
Our mincha service was a container for our communal grief, fear, and anger. We opened by acknowledging the complexity of our emotional responses to the attacks in Israel and the war on Gaza. As non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, our ability to speak our truth is caught between two worlds: the mainstream Jewish community which challenges our Judaism when we support Palestinian lives, and the U.S. Left, which refuses to understand how deeply we care about Jews and the future of Judaism. In our space, for 16 years now, we’ve provided a space that can hold and honor our full selves. Today we needed that space to allow us to grieve and connect.
Find our ritual here liturgy here. Time was built in to share responses, fears, and paths forward, to pray for healing, and to say Kaddish for all those lives lost so far, and for our related losses such as trust, hope, and a sense that shared future could be built.
One song we used is Linda Hirshhorn/Vocolot’s “Shifchi Kamayim.” Find a recording on Youtube here. We also used Simkha Y. Weintraub’s “God, Oh God: A Prayer on the Outbreak of War, Simchat Torah 5784.”
Anna Meyer shared this piece that she wrote about her child, her own history in Israel, and how our lives are so intimately intertwined.
I watch my younger baby fall to sleep. He is 10, but still my sweet boy who wants to curl into my arms each night. He is 1/4 Palestinian, 1/2 Arab, 1/2 born to this woman who was not born a Jew, but identified as one from as early an age as she can remember. As I feel his arms and watch his face relax, tears come to me, to have his warm, vital body so close and so alive and to know that no one will come for him or me, no bomb will fall upon us, here in our San Francisco home. As I have watched the horror unfold this week, it feels so close, and I am embarrassed to say, closer than Ukraine or Syria or Afghanistan because when I see the stucco of the walls of the kibbutz houses and the children’s toys strewn around the yard outside, I remember, deep in the pit of my own experience, when I lived in stucco walls just like that on a kibbutz in Israel. When I cared for the babies in the baby house. When I thought that I might one day become a doctor and return to Israel and raise my children in that oasis of communal living, where in 1993, I felt the most peaceful I had felt in my whole life, despite living in a country constantly at war. And as I watch him, I think of his paternal grandmother and that she might have just as likely been displaced in 1948 from Haifa to Gaza instead of to Lebanon and then Cairo, and that a part of who became my Micah Antoun and my Elias Jonah (both with Jewish and Arabic names), could have been born there, starved there, and died there too. I ask you to not suppose that there is a side to this and if you do and you align with one, go and come to know what you call “the other side.” Because there is no side to the human suffering that is happening in that sacred land and no way to really understand until you have listened, opened your heart, and held the pain of what you have thought was “the other” in your own arms.
