Poet Rabbi
Exodus 34:4-10
4/7/12
Ki tissa
Shabbat during Passover: what is possible
How do we heal our hurts of the past? Our wrongdoings? Our
overt and covert inconsideration of those we love? Our moments of rage and
disdain, or hurtful words and actions?
“God will visit the iniquity of parents upon children and
children’s children, upon the third and fourth generation.”
Ouch. That’s a big deal – what we do now reaches into a
future we will not see. We are affected by a past we do not know. So what do we
do?
Seriously. How my great-great grandparents were in the world
affects how I parent my children. I am touching the lives of my children’s
grandchildren – and here’s the thing: I am SO not perfect.
So I put perfect aside and I take comfort in two things. 1.
What I do, how I am, matters. 2. I can be an agent of change.
Agent of change, the past ripples, the present ripples, the
future is happening now (we just haven’t gotten there yet) and it ripples.
So how do we heal? How do we deal with our own iniquities
and those visited upon us?
Two ideas: 1. We pray. We acknowledge who we are, who we
have been, who we hope to become, and we ask for forgiveness in the fullness of
our knowing. Forgiveness of G-d, of our children, of our parents, of the
ancestors we don’t know and the future we will never see. But if we close our
eyes, let ourselves go a little, draw closer to G-d, we can feel them. Which
leads to #2…
2. It is never too late to love. To show it backwards and
forwards. This makes us agents of change, it makes us humble, it allows us to
be in the eternal company of all that is, was, and will be, the imperfect
past-present-future-God who is ever evolving as we change too; and we make a
commitment to awareness, to search the corners of our souls. Not with guilt and
heavy hearts alone, but with hope – that we will not go one step further
unaware, that we will not go one step further in the old way, the way of
hardened hearts, the way of slavery, the way of believing that we DO NOT
matter.
We matter. We heal with G-d and love and hard truth. We heal
by acknowledging our screw-ups, sometimes a lifetime of them, and working
inside to say NO MORE. I won’t keep doing that.
And then we ripple – past, present, future – into our freer
selves. Not perfect, not without relapse or complaint, but in knowing that LOVE
matters, that all is not lost, that if our iniquities ripple, so too must our
hope, our love and our awareness.
So go forth and know we all do it. But not one step further that way, it’s time for anything we can
do to serve that unseen past and future. This is how we heal. This is how we
see and know and serve God.
– Samantha Libby
