by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, September 16, 2007
This past Thursday, our Jewish sisters and brothers marked the start of a new year with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah; this coming Saturday, the High Holy Days of the Jewish liturgical calendar culminate in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On Yom Kippur, practicing Jews look inward, acknowledge where they have fallen short of ideal, things done and things undone, and recognize the burdens they’ve been carrying of unhealthy and unresolved feelings and emotions. As a liberal congregation, we take this opportunity between the Days of Awe to make our own internal assessment, and to lay our burdens down, symbolized by those small stones.
In Hebrew, the act of letting go, casting away, our misdeeds and inactions and unhealthy emotions is called tashlich. Rachel Stark, a member of Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness (UUJA), writes:
I imagine the ritual of tashlich as a physical act into which we can put our disappointments and frustrations, a means to cast away all the ways in which we acted as we wish we had not, all the ways we failed to act as we wish we had. In striving to be kind and strong and moral and thoughtful and friendly and brave,
we all fall short. Tashlich gives us a chance to try again to be our very best selves.
No matter your theology or spirituality, tashlich is important, even vital. There is a line commonly heard in many UU memorial services: “Tears unshed are like stones upon the heart.” But it is not only unshed tears that can be like a burden of stones on the heart and the mind – all unresolved emotions are like that. Carrying around – lugging around – feelings we haven’t dealt with, emotions we haven’t expressed, tangled unresolved issues, all end up as an invisible backpack of boulders, weighing us down, preventing us from experiencing joy and being truly happy.
New Orleanians have a lot of burdens right now – dealing with losses of property and people and pets and even precious landmarks, we are burdened by our memories, our grief, our survivor’s guilt, and our resentment and rage at what happened to us and continues to happen to us 2 years after the storm. We are burdened with bills, with formaldehyde fumes in our FEMA trailers, with bureaucratic red tape, with recalcitrant insurance companies, with governmental indifference, corruption, and incompetence. The rest of the country and our federal government don’t always seem to understand us, and sometimes seem to blame us for our predicament. Most of the time, we feel too busy, too caught up in our lives, too burdened, to deal with our knotted-up emotions and feelings – taking time for ourselves in that way seems like a shameful indulgence. I am not naïve enough to think that one congregational ritual in a Sun-day service will magically take care of all the burdens being carried by the members and friends of this church.
Two, three, four rituals wouldn’t do it, although personally I think it might help. Working through all that happened and all that is still going on will take months and even years of conscious, intentional work. (Many mental health experts say that many of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress do not even surface until at least 2 years have passed because people are too occupied with coping.) As your minister, I want to help you with that working through – I am here for you, and I want you to know that you can call me, make an appointment to come talk to me, and ask me for referrals.
For this year. I am your minister, and I want to help to ease your burdens in every way I can. What happened to us, to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, was not our fault. Nothing we did caused what happened or drew it to us. We are not in any way responsible. But Yom Kippur teaches us an important lesson: we are not always at fault for events that occur in our lives, we are not always responsible for the things that happen to us – but we are totally and completely responsible for how we respond. (In fact, “responsible” literally means “able to respond.”) We can make positive changes in our lives and in our behavior, we can alter course, turn around, make a new start – which is the real, literal meaning of “atonement.” Maybe the hand we’ve been dealt is a lousy hand, maybe life has been unfair to us, but that’s the way the levee crumbles. As your mama probably said to you more than once– I know mine did – “Life is unfair.” All that matters is how we act now.
This is the deal: by destiny, we have been placed here in this city, at this time in history, with our particular skin color, family constellation, brain power, gender identity, and social situation. You could change what city you live in, but pretty much nothing else about that list can be changed. This is the hand we’ve been dealt, or that we have chosen. How we will live, how we will act, how we will cope, how we will move forward from here, whether we will deal in a healthy productive way with our emotions or not, all that is entirely up to us. Let us take this to heart, and make the right choice.
Let us choose life.
AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE –BLESSED BE!
