This was my Dvar Torah last Shabbat, November 9, the first Shabbat after Election Day 2024.
First I want to say that the operation of a democracy is awe-inspiring. To experience a day when 300-million-plus people bring something of moral significance to a crescendo all at once. To contemplate what goes into that, philosophically and logistically. Which is why we are honoring today the people who have been closest to that process, as candidates and at the polls and in campaigns – and thank you to everyone who voted or brought a young person with you as you voted.
It has been an exhausting week. It has been an exhausting campaign, an exhausting thirteen months.
Also an exhausting pandemic and an exhausting decade. But right now, just an exhausting week. Regardless of how you assess the results, all or some of them. Which is why I am not going to tell you today how the Torah solves everything on our minds – like how you are feeling or how you think about other people who voted differently or what to do next. There’s no Torah insight that only suddenly became apparent this week, that we couldn’t have learned until now. Next Shabbat, I will speak toward those bigger pictures, but today I hope I can offer you something both more modest and more fundamental. Maybe soothing, maybe even useful, regardless of where you’re at right now.
There is a classic psychology study from 2008 by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh, in which participants were given a description of another person, and asked to make judgments based on that information about whether that person was generous or warm, or the opposite. Or in which they were given a short task and then had the opportunity to take a small reward for themselves or give something to another person. But the experiment actually began when the participant arrived and was met by a research assistant juggling a clipboard and papers and a drink, who then asked the participant to hold their drink for a moment. Sometimes, the drink was a warm coffee, and sometimes an iced coffee. Then the assistant took the drink back and escorted the subject to the research room.
And in this particular study, the subjects who held the warm drink were more likely to rate the person they read a packet about as a warm person, a generous person. Or to choose to give something away rather than take a small reward for themselves. Other things controlled, the very same person was judged more generously or more harshly based on this external physical factor, the warm or cold drink. Other things equal, a participant in this study was likely to be more generous or more selfish, if they had been primed by warmth or cold.
My point is that our recent time has been like this. Not warm, but so cold, and so hot. Even beyond our awareness, our minds and our hearts are affected in ways we don’t even realize, by the touch of something that is at the same time physical and emotional and spiritual. As much as we are trying to live warmly and judge warmly, we are all being handed scalding after scalding after scalding cup of coffee.
We have to notice that. And it’s what any of us can and ought to do something about starting from now – whether you are more pleased or more disturbed by the results of the election, whether you are right now hopeful or despairing, whether you are thinking about what to do next or nowhere near ready for that. To put it negatively, what we need to address are the brutal and hateful words and calls. Everywhere around us. That brutality is the hot cup of coffee probably each of us has held to the point that it penetrates into our minds and our hearts.
Or to put it more positively: An antidote, even just for today, is love. It’s ahavah and chesed. It is simply, simply love. It is the practice of love.
Love is the warm cup we have to hand each other, over and over and over.
At a few of our interfaith gatherings this week, Rev. Allison Palm, president of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council and minister for the Unitarian Universalist Church, shared this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, called “Because”:
So I can’t save the world—
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.
Rev. Palm said to a few of us the other day that this love isn’t just that we should be kinder. Which certainly isn’t a bad thing. But more than that: To take love seriously./To give love wildly.
We know that kind of love right here, where love is saying Amen to everyone’s prayer, as if it were the most important prayer you yourself could say, even though you don’t know exactly what it is.
Love could be toward the people we are fearful for right now – the promise we make, even if it’s just right now to ourselves, that we will really follow through and love them, be there for them and speak up for them.
Love could be to stretch toward someone in our community or our society who baffles us, even if it’s just to appreciate their face or the beautiful sound of their voice when they speak about what matters to them.
Love must be toward yourself, so you can rest, have Shabbat, recharge for important things, or let yourself experience joy for no ulterior purpose at all.
Love is feeling that you are loved — loved by the Divine; loved by someone else, perhaps in a church or a mosque somewhere, someone who is imagining you, appreciating your face or the beautiful sound of your voice when you speak about what matters most to you.
…practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
…To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.
And whenever we are angry and frustrated and outraged, we can be serious about love, by reminding ourselves that we only feel those things because we love. And it’s only the love behind the anger and frustration that will ever make a difference.
So whether you are trying to take a stand or whether you are simply sad, today just love. Give love wildly.
Detoxing our environment of the ugliness and the brutality of tone will not by itself eliminate our divisions; nothing can. Nor will it miraculously reveal new public policies we have not found yet that everyone will rally behind, and the brutality will recede into small corners. But it is the thing that is always possible, even right now.
And at least in here, every Shabbat, we can be together in love. As we juggle our prayerbooks and our handouts, our plates at Kiddush, we hand each other the warm cup of coffee. The warm cider, the cocoa, that helps us see the world as our hearts want to see it – full of warmth, full of generosity. Give it to each other, again and again and again. If we do that here, we will be better able to do that outside as well.
So:
…today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open.
To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.
Shabbat Shalom.