February
21, 2016
Shabbat
yesterday was the fiftieth day of my retirement, a personal Pentecost, or as we
have it in Judaism, simply Shavuot, Weeks,
the seven understood. After leaving the
working world, I think I have begun to thaw out enough to experience the
exhaustion of the working world of our times, all of the striving after wind in
a world that makes a pretense of freedom when, in fact, the fix is in.
I
have sat in my small house in Portland, Maine, for the first time (really)
reading novels l’shaym shamai’im, for the sake of heaven, going down to
Bernie’s headquarters a couple of time a week to make calls on behalf of his
candidacy, against my better judgment asking strangers (registered Democrats)
to support Bernie over Hillary, really none of my business, yet easier than the
“ask” for money which came with my job of the last thirty years. I am beginning to seek out political
activists and religious leaders, looking for how I can continue to be a good
neighbor, and becoming ever more conscious of the silos in which so many of us
seem to live.
I
am particularly conscious of the silos of our religious congregations. Without sacrificing the truth and beauty of
our particular spiritual traditions, it seems to me that we who want to rid the
world of human violence, or at least begin effectively to lower the level of
the unnecessary infliction of pain and effectively respond to the erosion of
freedom in countries which lay claim to being democracies—we need to come
together, in the name of all that we hold sacred, to resist the tyranny of our
times.
This
kind of unity is what I was looking for with the idea of everyone coming
together in Washington DC that I wrote about earlier. I never really expected it to happen—no organizing
for it ever occurred—just trying to develop consciousness of the freedom
movement demanded by our times.
