Rosh Hashanah 5786 Sermon

The Power of Imagination: A Revelation for Our Time
Rabbi Hannah Spiro, Rosh Hashanah Morning 5786

Reb Nachman of Bratzlav was in the active stages of dying on his final
Rosh Hashanah in 1810. He ended up holding on until the second day of
Sukkot, but by the time Rosh Hashanah came around he was in bad shape,
coughing up blood and having difficulty leaving his room. His people figured
that he would be too sick to give a sermon, but he insisted. He gathered
everyone around, held a bowl in his lap for the blood he was coughing, and
went for it.
He started with a really important topic: how to give and receive
tochecha; that is, caring rebuke. Then he pivoted. And I’m guessing that these
last words he publicly shared meant a great deal to him. These are the words
he chose to culminate his life’s work. He started talking about the power of
imagination – koach ham’dameh.
I want to go there today, too. But before we imagine, let’s just take a
look around at our world today. It’s been a year. Federal employees and so
many others losing their jobs – not just their salaries and their benefits, but
their sense of professional purpose and respect. ICE terrorizing migrants and
American citizens alike, separating families. Free speech in question.
Transgender members of the military fired for being themselves. Anti-semitic
murders and attempted murders and a wide, abundant variety of other
shootings. Israeli elders and parents with little ones struggling to make it to
bomb shelters in time. Palestinian civilians starving and dying without bomb
shelters available at all. Emaciated hostages filmed digging their own graves.
So many natural disasters. So many personal struggles. It’s been so much.

I’ll be real with you: I have felt pretty powerless, and I’m guessing that
many of you feel the same way. We’re watching all these horrors going on
around us – and what can we honestly do to stop them? Sometimes it feels
like anything we might try would be either too small to be meaningful or too
daunting to be feasible. I’ve felt guilty for feeling powerless. It doesn’t feel
particularly brave or useful to be this cynical. But it’s a real feeling,
particularly during years like these.
So let’s get into Reb Nachman’s final words of torah for Rosh Hashanah:
that of imagination. He took his people through some steps. He said first, you
need to be able to imagine. And you need to be willing to imagine. Without
that imagination, you can’t trust, or have faith, in much of anything. There is,
after all, only so much that we can know with certainty in this world, and we
need to be able to trust in far more than that. Imagination gives us the
capacity to have faith in more than we can know. But why do we care about
trusting? Why is that a value we have? Well, he said, you need trust in order
to engage in acts of love. And I guess that makes sense, because you have to
trust that these acts of love are meaningful, or why else engage in them? And,
he said, you need to engage in acts of love in order to renew the world. So, he
said, the renewal of the world is dependent on imagination. We will get
nowhere without it.
Let’s fast forward a century to the works of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman
Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. His sermons have been put
together into a book called the Eish Kodesh – the Holy Fire. Talk about
someone who leaned on a strong sense of imagination. For the Eish Kodesh,
imagination was not an escape from suffering. It was the opposite – it was the
one inner freedom that no oppressor could take away. It’s not just about

imagining a better world. It’s about reimagining the meaning of our own lives,
our own personal purposes and abilities.
He and his congregants, his community members, were nearly all about
to die in the Holocaust. His words in the Eish Kodesh were written when
things were very, very bad, and getting much worse. He imagines a mashal – a
parable that we’re meant to take seriously, but not literally. It’s about a
wayward prince who had been disconnected from his father, the king, and
from any sense of duty. He got caught up with a group of scoundrels who took
him hostage and tortured him constantly. Then, in the midst of all this this
torture and separation, the prince felt a strong sense of his father’s presence,
as if his father was somehow nearby. He cried out, not just his normal level of
crying because of his suffering – but extra loud, intense crying, because now
he had this sense that someone he cared about was close by, listening.
This is a form of imagination: transforming unbearable pain into an
experience of closeness. It isn’t fantasy. It is the capacity to feel connection
despite the fact that the world has seemed to be beating you over the head
with separation.
In most mashals, the king represents God. And the princes represent us.
We’re miserable and trapped. And we cry out, and we get this feeling of
closeness to the Divine, which makes us want to cry out even louder.
According to the Eish Kodesh: That crying is a sign of revelation. The
revelation isn’t some brilliant, revolutionary knowledge-drop from God. The
revelation isn’t some euphoria or solving of all of our problems. The
revelation is – wow, even in the midst of intense suffering, we’re not alone;
we’re accompanied; we’re connected. That’s the revelation. And crying out is
a sign of this revelation.

And then he just straight up says – while you’re davening on Rosh
Hashanah, while you’re here in the pews at services – make noise. Get down
on the ground for Aleinu. Say Amein for the Mourners Kaddish, loudly.
Literally cry. Consider what’s wrong right now – in your world, in your
country, in your city, in your community, in your home, in your heart – and
believe that your feelings about it matter. Imagine someone listening –
literally, anyone – who cares. That imagination is revelation.
The Eish Kodesh was holding a community through the Holocaust, and
what he wanted them to imagine was a listener, an accompanier; a sense of
closeness. He wanted them to know that their suffering mattered. He wanted
them to feel connected to one another in their expression of it; in their being
there for one another through it. We are not living through the Holocaust. But
we certainly can empathize. There’s at least a limited way in which we can
spiritually relate. And as the Eish Kodesh insisted, we can feel a sense of
holiness in our own emotional expression, and also in that of others. As we
do, our connection to that which is most transcendent and most meaningful,
our connection to God, you might say, grows and grows.
I’ve been studying the Eish Kodesh with our friend, Rabbi Jenna Shaw,
and as we were talking about his words, they pulled up a blog post by the
author adrienne maree brown. brown describes our world as one of fractals –
“infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They
repeat a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.” And she
writes, “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The
patterns of the universe repeat at scale.” We have the capacity to set patterns
for the whole system. We do what we can do to create and nurture a beautiful
world for ourselves and our communities, and those communities are pieces

of the larger pattern and so they matter, very much. They’re the building
blocks for the whole thing. I feel like if I tell you that about bad things, like
cycles of violence, or the way that abuse at the highest levels of government
echoes through a whole society, you know just what I’m talking about, but if I
say it about good stuff, like showing up for each other, it’s like “that’s not real”.
But it is.
For me, brown’s words are a reminder that what each of us does, even
on a small scale, is meaningful. We set an example for others. We make an
impact on others. And this is especially true if we connect with one another, if
we allow ourselves to engage with community. In a community, small acts
have major consequences. Acts of love have major consequences. Acts of
accompaniment, of aid, of empathy have major consequences. In a world
where hatred and oppression are so real – in which even in social justice
movements, so many approach their work with a hatred of their opponents –
acts of love have the potential to make that much more of a difference. And I
believe what Reb Nachman taught – that my ability to love begins with my
ability to imagine that my acts of love matter.
And [big healthy pause] I know that in this moment it might be very
frustrating to hear that small actions matter. It feels like a truism, one that is
incomplete and insufficient. Because it is. There’s another layer that’s also
necessary: go back to Reb Nachman on imagination. It’s almost like a
flowchart:
Imagination is a prerequisite for trust
Trust is a prerequisite for love
Love is a prerequisite for changing the world in a positive direction

And on that flowchart, we are at the very beginning. What I think is true
is that for many of us it’s very early in a hard, hard process. For many of us our
ability to imagine what ‘better’ could look like, or our place in it, has been
severely damaged these last few years, maybe even shattered. And I don’t
think we can just skip straight to action from there, I don’t think it works on
its own.
So in addition to doing what we can do and showing up however we’re
able, we need to imagine that our own actions do matter. We need to
undertake a project of great re-imagining, focusing on ourselves and how we
can make a difference – with trust and with love. I think this is a time to be
learning Torah and thinking about some pretty radical stuff like what it means
to really take care of one another in a community. I think this is a time to be
reading sci fi and spending time in the visionary imaginations of Octavia
Butler and Marge Piercy and Ursula K. Leguin. I think this is a time to be
seeking out and listening to the perspectives of people outside our bubbles –
beyond our political comfort zones, our income brackets, and our generations.
I think this is a time to rethink our basic assumptions about how society has to
work. It’s time to be a lot more imaginative.
As the world is renewed for another year, and as we are renewed for
another year, we call ourselves to teshuvah – to return. May we return to our
ability to imagine. To envision a world in which our pain and suffering is seen
and heard, and our hopes and dreams are lifted up and valued. And then – as
we are seen, heard, lifted up, and valued, may we be able to see and hear and
lift up and value the pain, the suffering, the grief, the love, the passion, the
hopes and dreams that our fellow humans carry with them. Koach
ham’dameh – the power of imagination – is that it gives us the ability to trust

that our love for ourselves and one another and this world and this life is
meaningful, is purposeful, is actionable. Again – we don’t just have to imagine
a better world; we have to imagine a more meaningful role for ourselves
within it. That we are helping build patterns of freedom, loving kindness,
truth, and joy. That we’re adding beauty to the fractal that is our world
through living our lives authentically, meaningfully, freely, and connectedly.
We know just how powerless we are. That’s not a revelation. But we can
imagine, and we can trust, that our lives, our connections, our communities,
our individual and collective existence, mean so much more. Together, I
imagine, we will renew the world.