Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Parsha Beresheit from 5784 to 5785 Still Praying for Peace

Here is a prayer that I wrote on Simchat Torah last year (5784), within hours of the coordinated Hamas attacks inside of Israel:

Divine Source, God of our ancestors, we pray that your compassionate and tender love for us will suffuse us with compassion and love, and bring peace to the world.

We all can remember back to those moments. How to be? How to move forward? How to celebrate Simchat Torah 5784? Was it okay to do so?

Violence and more violence. Unspeakable trauma, uncertainty, fear, and destruction on all sides.

This is the treasured moment in the cycle of the Jewish year when we complete, and begin again. Ha'azinu to Beresheit.

A friend who was visiting with me helped me roll the precious Torah scroll that graces my home, rewinding from the end to the start. Traversing a year of territory, the path of a year. Getting back to Beresheit.

As I watched the news, and prayed, and grieved, one word in Genesis 1:2 powerfully caught my attention:

מְרַחֶ֖פֶת

(referring to "the spirit of the Divine moving / hovering / trembling (?) over the face of the water":

מְרַחֶ֖פֶת

√רחף

Only two other instances of this shoresh in Tanakh:

Deut 32:11 יְרַחֵ֑ף

Jer 23:9 רָֽחֲפוּ֙

From close to the end of Devarim - where we are reminded of God's tender love for us - to the SECOND VERSE in Beresheit.... an encompassing, tender love.

The verse from Jeremiah brings in the disturbing interior stirring and energetic experience we can have when we tune into events and forces - such as we all are today, the second day of the current tragic violence in Israel [I wrote this on October 8 2023].

Let's look more closely at this shoresh: Gesenius on the verbal root √רחף

We see in this entry from Gesenius that √רהף is cognate with

√רחם

This is extraordinary; absolutely beautiful! to learn that the fluttering above has attributes of tenderness and cherishing, is cognate with the verb that brings us רֶחֶם (womb), רַחֲמִים (compassion/mercy).

It is also extraordinary to contemplate that the tremulous fluttering of the Shekinah's ruach has resonances with

With this in mind - the resonance among the tremulous fluttering of God's ruach above the face of the waters - with the experience of being in the nest with the compassionate Divine presence hovering over us - with the bone-trembling disoriented and unsettled state we can arrive in (as in the verse from Jeremiah) when our connection with God is disrupted.

Thought experiment: simultaneously consider:

the spirit of God fluttering over the face of the primordial waters

and

the tremulous fluttering of the eagle over its nest

and

the unsettled, softened, trembling state we are in when we are out of connection with the Divine

I suggest that this triad of images of fluttering, trembling, softening, probing... contains a seed of a promise of repair: I see suggestions of a cycle - perhaps like the cycle of water and rain: the spirit of God descends towards and flutters over the face of the waters, and something is formed. The eagle rouses its nestlings, and they start to learn to go forth on their own. However, they falter on their path, they err and do wrong; and then (Jeremiah) when we realize we are alienated from God, we tremble and dissolve.

Perhaps the dissolved state is where we need to start, to receive once again the spirit of God fluttering above the primordial depths of our confusion and despair.

I offer this prayer today on the 23 Tishrei Simchat Torah 5785 (as I did on Simchat Torah 5784):

Let us all pray that God's tender and compassionate care for us will radiate and suffuse all of us, and guide all people towards compassion for one another, and towards lasting peace in Israel and throughout the world.

Let us experience the tremulous fluttering of the wings of the Divine presence, above us, within us, shattering us and comforting us, so that we can form ourselves into agents of righteousness and light.

As an epilogue to this sheet, I will share a poem that I wrote during Sukkot 5785:

a failing grade (Sukkot 5785)

in the season

of our joy,

i fear

we are failing the test

each day

a chance

each moment

an opportunity

show me your heart:

show me your kindness:

the breadth of your wingspan;

the depth of your compassion.

holy holy holy

kadosh kadosh kadosh

i want to hear the angels singing

this structure

reminds me

“i’m just passing through”

and so are you

are we truly

homeless?

please pick up your pencils;

the test starts

now

just kidding

the test,

it started

on the seventh of october,

or the twelfth;

it started on

the fourteenth of may

(north america or levant);

on august sixth, or ninth,

or twenty-fifth…

or… any day

you name it

time’s nearly up

it’s almost time

to put our pencils down

that’s a shame

i wanted so

to pass this test

didn’t you?

did i really fail

to welcome the stranger?

did we really fail to see

the universe in that child,

that man,

that hospital

that woman?

the little girl carries

her injured sister

whose foot was shattered

in a bombing

so now the littler sister

cannot walk.

big sister knows what to do.

she tells the journalist:

“I must carry her.

I am so tired.

I must keep going

on this road.”

and she walks on.

a tiny girl

bearing the burden

of a life

smaller and smaller

receding

as the journalist’s camera

documents

her courageous

and inevitable path

show me your heart:

show me your kindness:

the breadth of your wingspan;

the depth of your compassion.

holy holy holy

kadosh kadosh kadosh

i think i hear the angels singing

can we have

just one more chance

to take this test?