How Can we Sing? Yom Kippur 5783
By the waters of a strange country
One we did not recognize
We sat down
And wept
And remembered what we once had
And then, they - our captors– tormented us, taunting us to sing the song of the world they had just stolen us from:
But we could not
Eich Nashir - how can we sing? How could we?
Our tongues were tied
We knew not how to speak nor sing in this new world
We could not see our way out
We could barely look back
certainly we could not look forward
We were lost and we were grieving
Eich Nashir -how can we sing?
we asked again and again?
And then one day
We did
We picked up our harps once more -
For, even not knowing what was next, we had brought them along
And decided to sing
----
I want to know how they did it -
How did our ancestors start singing?
How long did they sit
How did they turn their cries into song?
Perhaps it is enough to know just that they did
But what strikes me is that at some point
After the shadow of grief - emerged a future picture worth singing towards
What they knew- Perhaps, even before how to start singing
Was how to begin imagining, how to begin again
And this, might just be of the greatest ideas that Judaism has given us
The gift of imagination
The world begins with an image - a tzelem - imagined by our Creator into each one of us -
The Tzelem Elohim- the image - and the imagination - of our Creator.
The first humans and animals are curious: “what might happen when…”
They imagine:
“What world might be beyond this garden?”
Imagination begins with an apple and continues inside a sealed ark - with an unknown world outside it
But a family - imagining what’s next - still, decides to step outside
And imagination is there -
In a young man -
Who went forth into a land that he did not yet know
Who saw beyond idols of the present
Who saw a God that could not be seen or held
A God that Did not live in one place
But instead was place itself
God had to be imagined --- not to be made real
But to be understood and experienced
And the young man inspired many more to imagine, too -
And he gave that gift of imagination to his descendants
Who dreamt of angels on ladders
And men who wrestled the best out of You
And they - our people - instilled that imagination as slaves in Egypt
Slaves who could say - I know there is a better world
I know that there is a place beyond this narrowness
And I know that in that place -
People are kind - though I’ve never known kindness
People are generous - though I’ve never had enough
And children are safe - though today they live in fear
And they imagined that a Pharaoh could be defeated
one day he was,
on that day they sang -
Mi Chamocha Baelim Adonai? Who could ever possibly be like you, creator of all imagination?
Those slaves imagined themselves free and they were
And those free people Imagined themselves not as wanders but as a people who could be home
And they imagined what it would be like there -
They imagined that the desert and rock could be milk and honey
And one day - they arrived into the world that they had imagined
----
But they could not stop imagining
Because this was their gift as humans
And it is the gift they gave us
Because we kept imagining
Year after year, imagining that we ourselves personally went out of Egypt
Even when we sat by that river in a far away land and even when we returned
Our prophets urged us to keep our eyes on the next world we should build
Asking -
How can we continue to imagine the image of God into each other?
To create a society built on the foundations of justice, compassion, and empathy?
Some day - bayom hayu - on that day, we imagine a world that could be one, Will be One
----
When we lost our city and its Temple and all that was holy to us-
when we were scattered
We imagined -
What if the service of our hearts is enough? What if we just keep telling our stories and keep speaking our language and singing our prayers and turning our hearts towards that imagined homeland?
What if we built Judaism from that?
And let me tell you -
We asked questions and we played
We played with stories and put words in the mouths of Angels and Roman generals and
We invented an island in time, made up legal loopholes and imaginary elephants to hold up the walls of a Sukkah - our ancestors letting themselves dream themselves into a new world
A new reality
And they gave that tradition to us -
Not a tradition that is stuck, crystalized and entrenched in dogma -but one that is living, breathing, dreaming, alive
And this is our gift - not only our gift - but our mandate
To continue to imagine
Imagination is not for children
Not just for children, I should say
It is not just for play or escaping
It is, in the words of author Ursula Le Guin, “the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination”
Our imagination is uniquely ours - uniquely human
More than most of our other capacities - to be human is to imagine
But to be human is also to prioritize comfort over compassion
To let our current reality forcast our future
We get lazy
We forget
To forget how to dream
And as a result, we forget what is built into our DNA
That image - that imagination of our Creator
We forget it in ourselves and we forget it in the Other
“[An absence] of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed,” Wendell Berry writes. He goes on:“By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination.”
If a lack of imagination begets cruelty - Imagination begets empathy -
It is a “major moral imperative,” “a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred,” in the words of Amos Oz. “An antidote to simplified cruelty.”
And what are fanaticism and hatred, if not an unimaginative way of seeing others? Of reducing people to a one-dimensional image that we force on them. Of ignoring the tzelem.
How is that we “came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?"
This is the question that David Graber and David Wengrow pose in their book, the Dawn of Everything.
How did it come to be that it is so hard to imagine ourselves out of our current reality?
Why is it so difficult to imagine a different way to treat each other?
Where did these new shackles come from?
We are skeptical by nature - yes,
Hard to envision something different from what we know
And yet- I wrote this sermon on a device that did not exist in any form 100 years ago
And I saved it to the cloud - something too complicated for me to see or even understand
And I live in a world entirely different from the one my grandparents were born into
For them, Israel was still a dream
War was an ongoing reality
My grandmothers could not have their own bank accounts
And were instructed that they could be whatever they wanted so long as it was a nurse or a teacher
They could not imagine the world I am lucky enough to inhabit
And this was not for lack of imagination
As imagination is not predictive-
Berry says this in an attempt to define the imagination, “By imagination I do not mean the ability to make things up or to make a realistic copy. I mean the ability to make real to oneself the life of one’s place or the life of an enemy—and therein, I believe, is implied, imagination in the highest sense…[it is not] passively holding up a mirror to nature; it is a changing force.
It does not produce illusions, or copies of reality, or “plagiarism after nature.” And yet it does not produce artificiality. It does not lead away from reality but toward it. It can be used to show relationships. By it “the old facts of history” are “reunited in present passion.”
Imagination, therefore, is the ability to take what is in our tradition -- connect it with our present passion, In order to start to dream our way forward - to live in our imaginations, not someone else’s
And -It is not, wishful thinking -
Le Guin teaches, “Wishful thinking is thinking cut loose from reality, a self-indulgence that is often merely childish, but may be dangerous. Imagination, even in its wildest flights, is not detached from reality: imagination acknowledges reality, starts from it, and returns to it to enrich it. …A failure to see this difference is in itself dangerous. If we assume that imagination has no connection with reality but is mere escapism, and therefore distrust it and suppress it, it will be crippled, perverted, it will fall silent or speak untruth.
She continues, “Wishful thinking is Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich. Imagination is the Constitution of the United States.”
It is wondering what is outside of Eden
It is the voice of Lech L’cha - leaving for a new world
Imagination is the Hebrew slave crossing waters that had not yet receded
It is the rabbis creating a new world from the fallen stones of their past
It is the American Jew clinging to that flawed constitution to make it live beyond this moment
It is the constant, incessant emphasis on the redemptive future, bimhera v’yameinu - may it come speedily and in our days
We must live in the world of the imagination
Not in in the world of wishful thinking - maybe someday it will all be ok
But to imagine - which is, the task of “becoming and remaining human” in Le Guin’s words
And it must be practiced - “like any basic human capacity, [imagination] needs exercise, discipline, training, in childhood and lifelong.”
And this is our charge -
To exercise, train, and bolster our imaginations
To play with our tradition as our rabbis once did
To dream of new worlds
To so fervently believe in unity amidst deep-seeded divisions
To make art - good art and messy art
To listen and be moved
To read great poems and literature
To imagine ourselves in our chain of ancestors and descendants
To be in conversation with them
To wonder what our Sages and Psalmists wanted to tell us
To sing -
Even in strange new worlds
Even when we are mourning
Even when we are far from what we know
How can we sing? How can we not?