When my soul folds over me
Dear friends,
Many things are true today that seemed like dreams a week ago. We are in a state of vulnerability and potentiality. We have been confronted with beautiful and terrifying realities. What do we do? Who do we trust? This evening’s kabbalat Shabbat will give us an opportunity to come together, take a breath, smile, and then talk about the meaning and content of faith, in general, and in this moment in particular.
This week’s Torah portion takes us beyond the primordial faith world of the Book of Genesis. No more Abrahams with their uncrackable belief in and adherence to God. From here on we will be in a world filled with doubt. Moses knows God is real. He sees him in the flames of the bush. But he doesn’t want to do what God tells him. He knows people won’t believe him, neither Hebrews nor Egyptians. He begins the great task of his life reluctantly, with not only a heavy mouth and a heavy tongue, as he describes himself to God, but also a with a heavy heart. Yet he goes.
The Haftarah describes a similar first encounter between the prophet Jeremaiah and God:
God: Before you were formed in the womb I knew you, and before you came out of the womb I dedicated you to be a prophet for all nations.
Jeremaiah: Ummmm…. I’m a just a kid and I can’t even speak properly.
God: Why don’t you start with a prophecy of doom and destruction?
Jeremaiah also reluctantly begins his life task. But the first prophecy begins not with anger, but with love:
זָכַ֤רְתִּי לָךְ֙ חֶ֣סֶד נְעוּרַ֔יִךְ אַהֲבַ֖ת כְּלוּלֹתָ֑יִךְ לֶכְתֵּ֤ךְ אַחֲרַי֙ בַּמִּדְבָּ֔ר בְּאֶ֖רֶץ לֹ֥א זְרוּעָֽה׃
“I remember the kindness of your youth, the love you exuded like a young bride, the way you followed me into the desert, to unplanted lands.”
Faith drives us. It moves us to act. And yet we often experience it as fleeting. There and then gone, present and hiding, working behind the scenes of consciousness, and then at times not even there, we feel. Jeremaiah seems to me to describe it here as a memory we live with. Jonah seems to see it more as an act of sudden remembrance, when he cries out from the whale:
When my soul folds over me
I remember Adonai
And my prayer goes to You.
Faith is something Jonah remembers in moments like the ones we are in, times when we feel ourselves to be in the belly of a whale, our souls folding over us.
Jonah’s faith has a name: Adonai. It is what moves him to run away, and then to fulfill his task. This evening, amidst the songs, the light and the wine, I hope we will try and think together on what or who we might say our faith is directed at, how it drives us, whether we carry it inside us like a memory Jeremaiah style, if it’s like a switch that turns on in unusual moments like it is for Jonah, or if we experience its mysterious force as something entirely different. Hope to see you at 6pm.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha