We hope you had a meaningful Days of Awe with Or Shalom. We’ve made available the full text of Rabbi Hannah’s Rosh Hashanah D’var Torah as well as a Prayer for Peace offered by Alexis Kellum-Creer on day 2.
Here’s an excerpt from Rabbi Hannah’s dvar:
We Don’t Accept Fate; We Co-Create Our World
Hagar sinks into a dark night of the soul. Dispirited, degraded, defeated, she turns away rather than watch her child die of thirst. But Judaism isn’t about acceptance of fate. If it were, why bother with teshuvah? If it were, we’d still be slaves in Egypt.
Egypt pulled us low. Israel was, like Hagar, kotzer ruach, short of breath, voiceless, so demoralized by suffering that we didn’t have the capacity to cry out, let alone affect change.
And perhaps we have experienced dark times of our own, recently. Dark times so overwhelming that we’ve felt compelled to give up, give in to pain or depression…. Continue reading
And here’s an excerpt from Alexis’s prayer for peace:
Towards Peace: Never Be Silent
Praying for Peace implies a yearning for a sense of serenity and undisturbed calm, and an absence of conflict. Peace is something we, as social beings, yearn for as a mark of our gradual evolution towards perfection. And, particularly amid times of discord and uncertainty, it is important to see the beckoning possibility that Peace may yet prevail within our global community and upon our precious Earth.
But a yearning for peace in our own lives, as an end in itself, can prevent us, both as individuals and collectively, from extending our compassionate action in new directions.
In the face of conflict and upheaval in the world around us, it can be difficult to want to learn more about it…. Continue reading
