Life may be scary, but...

I've been doing some quick reflecting on the hurricane this evening. I absolutely hate the coverage the news media is giving this thing, and can barely stand to listen to NBC, CNN and their ilk for more than five minutes without feeling queasy. Nothing says ratings like a natural disaster, especially when there's floating dead bodies, floating dead animals, and/or floating gross sewage. Well, sure, that's stuff been around for years in places like Haiti, Niger, Colombia...but now's not the time to complain about how no one seems to notice those catastrophes. Now is the time to just give...money, prayers, positive energy, whatever. Give today, challenge tomorrow. I heard someone today bought all the shoes at a local K-Mart and is going to send them down to New Orleans, so that homeless people don't step on glass.

So in hopes of trying to make something out of all this chaos, I've been trying to pay close attention to what some progressive religious leaders have been saying. I found one of the best statements to come from Rabbi Michael Lerner, who is the editor of Tikkun, a Jewish magazine (a movement, really, rather than just a magazine) from Berkeley. I'll post a link to the full article that Rabbi Lerner wrote, but I'll include a brief excerpt here that resonated with me. Be well, everyone. And grateful.

There is one beautiful thing that sometimes happens during these kind of emergencies: the cynical realism that teaches us that people just care about themselves, a teaching that makes most of us feel scared to be “too generous” or “too idealistic” temporarily falls away, and people are allowed to be their most generous and loving selves. When the restraints are momentarily down, there is a huge outpouring of love, generosity and kindness on the part of many Americans. People do things like this that I saw yesterday: advertising on the internet’s Craig’s List that they are willing to take in to their own home for many months a family that has been displaced by the floods. This kind of selflessness is something that people actually yearn to let out, but under ordinary circumstances they’d fear to do so. So watch the goodness show itself.

Not to deny that ugliness will also appear. The looting of stores in New Orleans momentarily revealed the “bottom line” of government responsibilities when the New Orleans police announced that they were going to switch policing priorities from saving lives (of the poor) to saving the property of the wealthy and the corporations from the looters. It’s this kind of misplaced priorities over the course of many decades that makes some poor people (and not only poor people, but others who feel that they have a deep sense of social grievance) think (mistakenly and unjustifiably) that it makes sense to take advantage of this moment to rectify a long history of social injustice by taking from the “haves” to provide for themselves as the “have-nots.” It’s hard to witness this perversity on the part of both looters and police without a deep sadness of heart about the depths of depravity that reveal themselves in these moments, alongside the heights of goodness mentioned in the previous paragraph.

For me, this is a prayerful moment, entering the period just before the Jewish High Holidays (starting Oct. 3), realizing that the Jewish tradition of taking ten days of reflection, repentance and atonement is so badly needed not just by Jews but by everyone on the planet. I hope we can find a way to build this practice among secular as well as religious people, because America, indeed the whole world, so badly needs to STOP and reflect,repent and atone, and find a new way, a new path, and return to the deepest truths of love, kindness, generosity, non-violence and peace.

(To view the entire article by Rabbi Michael Lerner, click here.