Mottos for the Future
Only a few days after I described new green shoots of hope arising in me and around me, hovering toward a fuller Rising of the Spirit, the American people voted for a fascist government.
It will make such a Rising more difficult and dangerous, but not impossible. The chess-board of history has now become far more threatening. There seems to be no United States willing to save Germany from itself or Israel from itself or Palestine from Israel, Ukraine from Russia, or other small peoples or states or crucial aspects of Earth from greater powers. (Not that the histories of Vietnam, Haiti, Congo, Chile, Nicaragua, Iraq, the Polar ice sheets, and other places on Earth or Humankind suggest the US was always or mostly on the side of Love, not Subjugation.)
I also entered on a new role provided by The Shalom Center — “Prophetic Envoy.”
I will be speaking to the best of how I can hear the Spirit, as close as I can get my ears and heart and soul to hear its music.
”Envoy” means I will be reaching out in and beyond the Jewish community. I thought to begin by sharing what has come to me from meditating and imagining from the Festivals and weekly Torah portions that reach from Yom Kippur till Simchat Torah.
Why these passages? I am trying to sense Moses’ struggles of how to live his last days, to fill my own Eldering with life.
The Spirit has called me to adopt two new mottos for myself:
One comes from Moses: The Spirit did not vanish from him as he learned he would die before he could continue leading the Godwrestling Folk on their next great task: settling in and on and with the promised soil.
As he recalled that supernal Sinai — not when he stood there himself so many years before — he found himself saying that not only the whole people, even suckling babies, must have been present at that moment. The Spirit told him that even those not physically present had made themselves present in some unforgettable way.
This meant Sinai would affect the world far into the future.
We stand in our generation in the same time-space: a crisis so deep that how we act can transform the future for a new world of sharing, love. and joy — or into a country and a planet of Greed, Selfishness, chaos and death.
The Spirit has turned itself into a question mark.
I had hoped the election would mean the Great Turning toward a world of love and justice, ecological throughout — for humans as well as more-than-human life. Instead, it means we face a world where much of human life, and more, is ruled by Subjugation and Killing. Hard to face, but necessary to face.
All the more, my and our motto must be: ”Those who are not yet physically present are in fact present — they are the future.”
We must work toward their becoming able to win elections on a series of immediate issues. And they must come together on something deeper than issues — Spirit. A Spirit of Love rather than Subjugation, Killing, Death.
My and our second motto comes from another old man, Rabbi Tarfon, being quoted by the Talmud: “I can’t complete the Work that needs doing, but that doesn’t mean I can quit.”
What does not quitting mean? Next week.
Shalom,
Arthur