We met to pray during the challenge, grief, and fear of these times. We acknowledged the new, strange land we have entered, in which our grief for violence done to Jews is being overwhelmed by our grief for violence being done by Jews. How do we grieve this? In Heschel’s words, we need someone to say kaddish for our souls, for everything we have lost.
We read a lot of Heschel today – not the Heschel of what has become simplified memory – but the actual Heschel, writing from unbearable grief after the Shoah and into the unbearable grief of the Vietnam War, a man whose world was shattered and who nonetheless called out for peace and justice rather than victory.
Find our liturgy here as slides.
Our music included:
Min Hametzar/ Hodu l’Adonai kirtan , a melody by Krishna Das called Hanuman Chalisa (Good Ole Chalisa) – which is a Hindu devotional hymn sometimes referred to as “the breath”. Liz Feldman and her daughter Hannah Shefsky set the Min Hametzar and Hodu psukim to it, along with her singing group at the time, Azamra (including Rabbis Lizzi Heydemann and Sam Feinsmith, and Yoni Saraon)
New to us, a setting of eich nashir/ how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land by Tany Yitzchok.
We also marked the 3rd anniversary of the last time we met as a monthly in-person havurah in March 0f 2020. Later that year we started a practice every month of listing the number of those dead from COVID in what I called “A Prayer for an Accounting.” We did that monthly until fall of 2022, then switched to yearly. Our liturgy for that is below, and with it comes tumbling all the fear and shock of those first months, which we carry with us and always will.
We also included, with permission, beautiful Purim art from Liora Ostroff, pictured below as well. Prints are for sale; clicking on the photo will take you to Liora’s Instagram feed for more images and information.
For our monthly reading on Consequences, we read this excerpt from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Moral Outrage of Vietnam:
This war, I am afraid, will not leave the nation where it found it. Its conclusion may be the beginning of a grave alienation. The speed and the spirit in which this war ends will fashion our own lives in the years that lie ahead. On January 22, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson in his address to the Senate uttered a point of view which we pray President Lyndon Johnson would adopt as his own: “It must be a peace without victory.” Let our goal be compromise, not victory.
The initiative for peace must come from the strong, out of a position of strength.
We will all have to strain our energies, crack our sinews, tax and exert our brains, cultivate understanding, open our hearts, and meet with all Vietnamese, North as well as South.
This is the demand of the hour: not to rest until — by excluding fallacies, stereotypes, prejudices, exaggerations which perpetual contention and the consequent hostilities breed — we succeed in reaching the people of Vietnam as brothers.
There is still time to unlearn old follies, there is still time to seek honest reconciliation. A few months from now it may be too late; a few months from now our folly may be beyond repair, sin beyond repentance.
It is not for man to decide who shall live and who shall die, who shall kill and who shall sigh. May no one win this war; may all sides win the right to live in peace.
“The Crisis of Responsibility” Abraham Joshua Heschel, from The Moral Outrage of Vietnam
