Make Like Dust
Dear friends,
When I ask God
He says Yes
You may vanish.
And just like that
I become
One with the astonishing
Blue envelope of music.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks died last week. His voice, one of compassion, purpose and intellect has accompanied me and many others in recent years. When teachers in my school are struggling with a student’s B Mitzvah parasha I will often send them to Rabbi Sacks’ website to read his words on it, because he had an impressive ability to speak to many minds at the same time, from the religiously oriented to the secular. The rabbis taught us that one mustn’t speak a word that cannot be heard or understood by the recipient. Whatever language you speak, Rabbi Sacks could speak it. In this moment of terrible division, his voice is important. I recommend checking out his Ted Talk about listening to those who see things differently than us.
About this week’s parasha, in which both Sarah And Abraham die, he wrote:
"To understand a death, we have to understand a life."
Dying well, as both Abraham and Sarah are described doing, and living well go together. Both involve an acceptance of external circumstances along with an unbreakable connection to your inner sense of self, or what Sacks called being needed by God.
This week in our Vayetze chevrutah we began studying the biblical telling of Jacob’s departure into the world, and his dream of the ladder. We paused on one phrase in God’s promise to Jacob in the dream:
“Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth…”
It seems to imply that we all want to be like the dust of the earth. Is that so? Do you?
I mean, we know we will one day go back to dust, but why do we need a divine promise of our inevitable end?
Toward the end of the Amidah there is a curious phrase about dust:
“Venafshi ka’afar lakol tihyeh.”
“May my soul be like dust for all.”
Several times a day we ask to be like dust. I’ve been very close to this prayer for years now and finally yesterday I managed to come up with a way of explaining it through a short imagination exercise:
Imagine the wind blowing over a hill. It raises the dust from the ground. Now the dust is moving around the air in the sunlight. It moves to and fro with no control. It has no desire of its own to reach any particular place, no need or motivation: it has no resistance but simply rides the wind. Now imagine yourself as a speck of dust moving in the breeze over that hill.
Pleasant, no?
Living and dying, Rabbi Sacks suggests, combine a dust-like mentality with a sense of self, of right and wrong, of responsibility.
“What makes a life satisfying is not external but internal, a sense of purpose, mission, being called, summoned, of starting something that would be continued by those who come after,” he wrote.
It is about doing our work and surrendering their results, about knowing, like Jacob, that each one of us is chosen to be here, and at the same time allowing ourselves to ride, to be a part of the winds of the time in which we live, the world as it appears, the sweetness and the brutality and the grace.
Next Shabbat we will be joined by Nilab Nusrat, an Afghan woman living in the US, whose trying and inspiring life journey will, I’m sure, resonate with these thoughts inspired by Rabbi Sacks Z”l.
Oh, and the poem at the top is by a local poet by the name of Cynthia Cruz.
A shabbat of peace to you all,
Rabbi Misha