When life is midrash, we webinar
by Rabbi Nate DeGroot
The Book of Now Rosh Hodesh Adar
Parashat Now Chapter 20
Aliyah 1
25: Now, a new king arose over the land. The man was called Trump, for he believed he trumped all - even the God of All Creation. 26: His skin glowed orange like a toxic sunrise and his hair was a flimsy gold, like the idol he worshiped most. 27: When he feared losing control over the people, because they had grown restless, the king hurried to make a deal with the one whose shekels numbered more than any human. 28: “Yea,” said the God of Time and Space, “Fear not. This one’s shekel count compares neither to the stars in Heaven, nor the microbes within. 29: They act like there are no limits; God knows no End.
Aliyah 2
30: The man’s name was Musk, named for the potent reddish-brown substance secreted by the male musk deer for scent-marking. “It stings the nostrils,” it is said of the scent. 31: With tweets and X’s, the financier compulsively marked his spot, territorial and extraterrestrial alike, arm erect and outstretched to his followers, aiming to goebbel up space, as if to foolishly claim that Mars exists outside of The Space. 32: Musk must have forgotten - or maybe he never knew that YHVH, the effusively elusive God, is both “Re-” and “Un-” markable.
Aliyah 3
33: In short time, the financier assembled a small group of helpers to maximize efficiency throughout the land. 34: Yea - recall previous sordid efforts at increasing efficiencies of extermination. 35: Pay heed. Consider your relationship to these systems. Dismantle their gears. Miss their grift. 36: Remember there is another way. 37: So The People, in big cities and small towns, from all four corners of the world, were subject to the financier's vicious whims, conflicts of interest, and heart-wrenching disinterest. 35: A pummeling of decrees carried out by his trusted henchpeople and confidants, like “Big Balls,” a Senior Advisor to the financier, whose name was inspired by a common malady of the day, which occurs when excessive feelings are bottled up and repressed. Know: what is bottled must erupt. 36: Too soon, Musk and his sentries offered pink slips to too many dedicated servants. 37: When that didn’t work, they forced pink slips. And forced some more. And jammed and pried and cried pink slips until something cracked and pink slips spilled over and every member of the royal court slid and slipped on slips of pink, as if the pink slips were confetti falling free.
Aliyah 4
41: Red hats, red flags, red faces. We wear the hats and the hats wear us. We wave the flags and the flags wave us. Red faces like masks. Red ants marching up a red ant mill hill to a 42: White House with white people, white history, white again, white future, Great White Lie. 43: To which YHVH chuckles: “Have they never seen a rainbow?” 44: And to which we lift our voices and sing: “Our covenant is a rainbow. Our coat, like our world - technicolor. 45: Our God, multivocal. Our path, mysterious. 46: Our vision, a time when Red and White are just two colors on the infinite color wheel of life, spinning forever, refracting in all directions at once, every color that ever Is, Was, or Will Be. 47: Each rotation, a series of infinite, almost imperceptible revolutions, colors spinning wild, the wheel itself whirring perceptibly, “I will be that which I will be.”
Life as Midrash
These days, I see midrash everywhere.
The names. The symbols. The buffoonery. The cartoonish performance of fascism. The wounded performance of machismo. Life itself, a low-budget reality tv production, re-running the same old scripts from the dustbins of yesteryear, dusted off for this cycle of grift. The tech bros. The robots. Relief for the fires denied because of wokeness; water, released merely for show. Ordering name changes for gulfs and mountains while criminalizing name changes for people. Personal power masquerading as legislator, judge, and executor. This extended moment, a caricature of itself. Biblical in proportion.
Of course, real, tremendous harm is being caused in the midst of the simulation. And in this time it is vital that we show up for ourselves, our beloveds, and each other. To offer as much care and protection as possible. But if we try only to meet this midrash head on, square in its eyes, it will dash and dart, defying grasp, as is its way. If in our back and forth, our pledges of allegiance to our side, our standing firm, our solid ground, our speaking of truth and our pointing of finger, we rely only on cloistered and stilted algorithms of the serious, do we not risk expelling and exiling the trickster? Do we really wish to tame the promiscuous? In our rush to solve the problem, might we in fact be helping to prop up the architecture of the problem itself?
We are on the precipice of Adar, the trickster’s time. The season of cabin fever, when masks and what’s behind them are revealed. A season of fugitive hiddenness. An upside-down that does not despair in its upside-downness, or yearn to be made upright, but revels in the view from below, our feet warm against the sun. Feasts and festivals and joy making sanctuary in the cracks of certainty that form when we grip the wheel too tight. In this time, we remember to remember that life is midrash and not-knowing is knowing.
Life these days is midrash, as you might have read above. Perhaps it always has been. And so we must ask: What might it look like to live as such?
Below, please find two incredible programs that we hope will meet us in the upside-down and ordain us in our disorientation. The first is a conversation with Peter Beinart and authors from The Shalom Center’s Chapter 9 Project - Graie Hagans, Rabbi Tamara Cohen, and Devon Spier - on 3/6, about Peter’s new book and the need to tell a new Jewish story. The second is a conversation about Christian Nationalism and the Jews on 3/12, with Roan Boucher, Dove Kent, and Alexiana Fry, diving together into the dizzying world of rapture and end times, traveling through the theological dreamscape that is colliding with our political-spiritual reality.
We sincerely hope you’ll join us for these programs, with your imaginative groggers in hand, so we might drown out our sense of surety and legibility and shake loose new rhythms and roots restlessly waiting to sprout forth and bubble up.
With blessings,
Rabbi Nate
A New Jewish Story
(and why it’s so desperately needed)
Featuring: Peter Beinart, Devon Spier, Rabbi Tamara Cohen, Graie Hagans, and Rabbi Nate DeGroot
March 6, 2025, 7pm ET
“They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.” Though we may say it tongue-in-cheek, these words constitute perhaps the core Jewish story of our time. And while it’s cute and sometimes applicable to our holiday narratives, what does it simultaneously obscure?
In this timely, Pre-Purim webinar, panelists will unpack the Jewish stories we’ve inherited, reckon with the harm they have caused and cause, and dream about new Jewish stories we might tell going forward, for a world that desperately calls us to understand that we are all in this together.
Christian Nationalism & The Jews
Featuring Alexiana Fry, Roan Boucher, Dove Kent, and Rabbi Nate DeGroot
March 12, 2025, 7pm ET
We are living in someone else’s cataclysmic imagination. What happens next?
For half a century, there has been a strategic, resilient, and extremely well-funded movement trying to take over every element of American society, whose aim is to amass extreme wealth and exert control over anyone who isn’t “a believer.” This strange movement trades in demons and devils, prophets and tongue-speakers, Seven Mountain summiting, messianic resurrections, professional exorcisms, and the long awaited rapture. Now, after decades of organizing, this movement has elbowed their way into the very architecture of American government, placing their thumbs on the scales of justice and supporting a president who will execute their will.
In this timely, pre-Purim webinar, panelists will discuss what Christian Nationalism is, its history, what it feels like to grow up in this movement, how it’s currently guiding our governmental and extra-governmental systems, including specifically how Jews fit in, why the movement is so successful, what we have to learn from it, and how we can forge and strengthen our own movements, to provide an alternative, irresistible vision of sacred justice, that culminates with and necessitates the thriving of all creation.
With Our Shekels Combined
As we enter Shabbat Shekelim this week, dozens of Jewish justice organizations across the country have come together, with the help of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, for a new initiative called Jewish Justice Day of Giving. How do we build sacred spaces and sacred community? Torah this week tells us that everyone contributes a hetzi-shekel. Half a shekel. That everyone contributes something to help build and fund the world we know is possible. So yes, Financier Musk may have more shekels than anyone else in all the land. But if we all contribute what we can, that will go a long way in helping us continue to weave sacred midrash to overturn and upend the world as it is, and keep stewarding a sacred justice big enough to hold all our dreams. Today, help us make the funds in our coffer closer in number to the stars of YHVH’s Heaven, as we give and work for the thriving of All Creation.