CyberTorah

And God heard their cry and remembered the covenant...(Exodus 2:24).

 Exercise 1:  get in touch with a place of pain or restriction in your heart. Perhaps it is a story or experience that you have never fully worked through. Or maybe it is a current area of pain. Or it could be someone at work or home who is abusive to you. Perhaps it is pain or loss of function in your body. 

As you connect with that place of constriction, allow yourself to cry out with the pain of that experience. Perhaps like the Israelites thousands of years ago crying out will be healing. Imagine that your cry is heard for the first time. Something is different this time and the Divine or God hears and empathizes with that pain or constriction.

Now allow yourself to feel in that moment of being heard an invitation to speak. Imagine that this power will enable you to express yourself in a way that transcends the constraining place. Perhaps the physical reality will remain similar. The body for example may remain constricted and in pain. But perhaps this redemption will enable you to write a new story that empowers and moves past the experience of pain and constriction.

Perhaps it will give you the strength to respond and walk away from the relationships that are so hurtful and difficult. Perhaps it will be a first step of finding a new way of engaging that can be healing and freeing.

Praised are you God who redeems.

 Exercise #2: Redemption has a national component as well. Here is a place to cry out for the release of the hostages. Here too is a place to cry out for a release from an ongoing cycle of violence. To ask for something to happen beyond our human comprehension that can show us the way. Not towards a meaningless ceasefire but towards a meaningful peace.

Praised are you God who redeems Your people Israel.

 Background: Redemption is a word we don't use very often. For the Bible it means removing the bonds of constriction and slavery and uncovering a way of interacting that is heard and seen. We tell numerous stories of God's redemptive power. We tell them to remind ourselves that situations that appear constraining and constricting are so only from our limited human perspective. Even the war in Gaza that seems so terrible and insurmountable is a constriction of this moment. There is within the human heart and the power of God, a pathway that will emerge and show us through to something better. Prayer is a means by which we attach ourselves to that possibility. Prayer is an invitation to see past the darkness and constriction towards a new beginning of hope and possibility.

May God soon and speedily show us the way to be redeemed from our own private constrictions and to help the people of Israel and the whole world to find a path that brings true peace. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi David Booth

Please note there will be no CyberTorah next week.