Transition as Transformation (Shabbat Shemini)

The other week, I spoke with a resident who confided, after a year of pandemic isolation, she hardly knew who she was anymore. The people who had been important to her — the activities that mattered most to her, felt like distant memories.

On some level, we are all this woman: we’ve all been through uncertainty, and suffering, each in our own particular way.

We recently celebrated Passover, a holiday that marks the end of our people’s bondage in Egypt, a period, our ancestors, too, could not eat or celebrate or mourn with the people they cared about, or in the ways that were meaningful to them.

When they were finally liberated, after 400 years of enslavement, was their freedom a relief, a joy to them? No. Instead, Torah tells us the burden of responsibility that came with this freedom overwhelmed them.

To give them the time they needed to adjust to their new reality, God thus did not take the people directly to Mount Sinai, but instead led them roundabout in the wilderness.

The lives we yearn to return to, the freedom of pre-pandemic times — Shabbat services in the chapel, communal dining, lectures in the Ballroom — is not something we get back in an instant. Like our ancestors preparing to gather at Mt. Sinai, we don’t know exactly when we will be together like we were.

We journey toward the lives we had incrementally, as we navigate, outside our community, a world that still mostly hasn’t had access to the vaccine. While it would be so easy to put our hopes and expectations on hold until everything was exactly the way we wanted it to be, our tradition challenges us to instead use this time intentionally.

Torah could have simply instructed us to observe Shavuot — the day we commemorate our gathering at Sinai, right after Passover, our moment of liberation — but it instead instructs us to build in 7 weeks, between these two central moments in our people’s story.

As profoundly painful as many of its lessons were — the loss of family and friends, of moments to celebrate and mourn — we’ve each learned something over this pandemic time about what we value, and who we want to be. We must not lose our hard won wisdom.

These 7 weeks are known as the “Omer”. The period of time we’re in invites us  to apply what we’ve learned over this past year to our lives. I hope you’ll join special guest, Rabbi Navah Levine, Wednesday at 2pm, for our new series, “Journey to Sinai”,  to help us engage the wisdom of this time, through the ancient tradition of personal growth and transformation called Musar!

As we enter a life that feels a bit more normal, may we each find a way to reflect on what we’ve learned, so we can move into this new chapter of life together with purpose, passion, and meaning, aligned with what matters to us as individuals and a community.

May it be so.