Money is power. And the more money you have, the greater your power to do good and the greater your power to do evil. In the Purim story, the Queen Esther story, Haman uses arguments about Jewish disloyalty to convince the king to order the destruction of the Jews. But to clinch the deal, he offers to fund the operation himself. He offers 10,000 talents of silver for the king’s treasury if the king will issue the edict. Haman doesn’t just dream up the destruction of the Jews, Haman buys the destruction of the Jews. How are we ever to prevail against well-funded hate?

Just as the memory of earthquakes is wired into our bodies,  so the memory of earthquakes is wired into our mythologies. Our ancestors understood earthquakes to be the very Earth trembling in God’s presence, as we ourselves certainly would. God is the physics of the earthquake and more than the physics. God is also in our pained experience of the catastrophe. 

We name this not only Shabbat Shirah but Refugee Shabbat, to help us renew our compassion and empathy for the refugees who are right now lodging in tent cities and crossing great waters and wandering from place to place in search of home. We were refugees too. They are our story rewritten in the present tense.

What if at some point the Egyptians had refused to go along with it anymore? What if they had declared a general strike? If they had gathered at the palace in protest? If they had decreed a day of fasting and crying out to their gods or to ours? Would it have made a difference to Pharaoh? Even if it didn’t, mightn’t it have made a difference to us? Introducing Interfaith Public Fast of Sonoma County.

For me, looking back over this year, what stands out most is how many individual stories in our community reached their conclusions. Looking at them, suddenly, everything shifts. A story of individual trauma and triumph gives way to a larger story of life pouring through the details of circumstance. Every act, every turn of the story, is imbued with a greater knowingness. Seeds have borne fruit. Life has had its way.

There is an invitation for collective teshuvah in front of us at this moment of history, being proffered by too many modern-day prophets to count, and by too many to ignore, taking the form of the movement for reparations. This critical piece of teshuvah is an invitation for the collective to develop its moral conscience, to look at how old harms continue to live with us until they are addressed, to notice how we are implicated even in histories we didn’t actively participate in.

Rosh Hashanah reminds us to think beyond the human scale of our lives, and get on Cosmic terms. Is our Judaism big enough to go galactic? And what does a Cosmic consciousness require of us in the here and now?

Parashat Eikev offers another Jewish entry point to a consideration of reparations. “Beware,” Moshe says, “lest you come to think that your good fortune is of your own doing.”

Where evening becomes day, light alternates with leaf, and experience becomes story.

Featuring Min Hametzar – Psalm 118:5; Setting: Rabbi Shefa Gold.

Prophecy is not dead. But it does require the right conditions to emerge. What are the insights waiting to come from or through us? How can we make it easier to hear them?