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December 10, 2014

People of my generation grew up with Buffalo Springfield’s song, “Something’s Happening Here,” which starts:
     “There’s something happening here
      What it is ain’t exactly clear
      There’s a man with a gun over there
      Telling me I got to beware”

It was a song for its time, and it’s a song for our time as well, with protests in cities across the nation objecting to the killing of unarmed black men and boys by police and the lack of indictments against them.

It can be disheartening, all this unrest, all this injustice, and it’s with this mood that I walked into a new experiment at our synagogue called Beit Café. It was dreamed up by our clergy and “>Rick Lupert, surrounding the rich, creamy filling of various congregants who sang, read poetry, and even did a ventriloquist act.

In a sense it was a variety show, but it was much more than that. To paraphrase, as the night progressed it was clear that “Something’s happening here.” It was a holy night in which we came together in a time of darkness to create something light, comforting, and meaningful. There is something about people taking the risk to create something new that just can’t be described in words.

Several times during the night, Rick read poems in which he said he doesn’t know whether he believes in God. It is powerful when people can speak their truth, especially when it’s done in a synagogue and the truth is welcomed, as it was on this night.

And despite this expression of doubt, Rick’s poems are suffused with a deep affection for Judaism, from his love poem about latkes to his Havdallah poem called, “Separation” in which he calls this time of the week the “hardest Jewish moment” when “we are as far away from the next Shabbat as we can possibly be.”

The night was filled with laughter and song and, for me, an underpinning of our yearning to make the world a better place, to heal, to come together in community during times of stress not to forget, but to transform.

And although some of us may, at times, be unsure of whether we believe in God, I came away from the evening quite certain that God believes in us.

—————-
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