Images of Destruction
I was on google trends late last night trying to find the most viewed images of the last year. 2021 is yet incomplete, so I was looking through 2020, which was fitting. In some ways, without a Rosh Hashanah celebration last year, time has morphed and fused, beginning in March 2020 -- year’s end has still not arrived. There was a video catalogue of the year that moved me, and I took notes on the top searches of the year -- Chadwick Boseman, Aug 28th, Beirut, Aug 4th, George Floyd, May 25th, BIPOC & BLM, June 9th, Coronavirus symptoms, March 15th, toilet paper, March 22nd, Tiger King, April 4th.
But another date before the pandemic caught my eye , January 5th, fires in Australia. Since then the images of fire and water devastating our lives have become commonplace, California, Oregon, Turkey, Algeria, China, Germany. In the earliest days of the lockdown, when a quiet unheard before protruded the skies because airplanes did not inhabit it, eighteen wheelers were not parading Flatbush, memes of animals repopulating the world proliferated. Fake and real pictures of dolphins in the canals of Venice, elephants and penguins in the streets. True or false, the question is intriguing to me — all living things cycle through sickness and health, life and death -- is the coronavirus the mechanism by which Mother Earth is effecting her own healing? The capitalistic drives of humanity have become self destructive. But the great mother plays in forces and eons greater than we can ever imagine.
Faced with daily imagery of destruction were inhabiting our days with great anxiety. But there are practices which can mitigate that suffering. It’s our natural tendency to flee suffering and strive for pleasure. But that predilection is immature, and it does us great disservice. I believe the balm for this malady, counterintuitively, is learning how to inhabit images of destruction. Can we witness the fires and floods, feel unbounded sympathy with those reeling from their devastation, sit alongside our fears and be still beside them not as enemies but as unpleasant acquaintances.
The images of destruction have returned me to the divine name bestowed to Moses at the burning bush, I will be what I will be. There is no judgement in this god that is the All. The god of I will be will see years of famine and destruction, species thriving and lost, great beauties and unimaginable horrors all wrought within her. I will be is not a proper name though, it’s a daily practice. To witness, be still, feel the pain of a broken heart without fleeing the images before our eyes. The equanimity we might find inhabiting images of destruction will free us from perpetual anxiety, and tune us to a state of wholeness from which we are best equipped to work alongside Mother Earth toward her healing.
Wishing you a Shabbat of peace,
Rabbi Zach