Blogs

Among the many interviews the marvelous Terry Gross has conducted on her show “Fresh Air,” I heard one this week with Jeffrey Seller, a Broadway producer responsible for one of the greatest musical successes of our time.  That would be Hamilton, which Seller reminded us is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year!  What a show that was… and still is.  The source material was unlikely.  The protagonists were deeply flawed.  The struggle for justice it portrays did not extend to everyone.  That said, Lin Manuel Miranda’s lyrics and music were electrifying.  The characters’ imperfections reflected our own.  Their achievements and tragedies were relatable, and the eloquence, innovation, multi-racial casting and poetry spoke to us across gender, ethnic and generational spectrums. I’m not saying any of this because Adon Olam fits the melody of “You’ll Be Back,” though it does.  Perfectly so!

As concurrence of Shabbat Chukat and July 4 come closer, it’s the struggles along with the progress inherent in what it means to be human that are most on my mind.  In the Torah portion Chukat, Moses – overwhelmed with grief over his sister Miriam’s death and frustrated within an inch of his life by the ever-complaining Israelites -- strikes a rock to get water from it.  (“Use words,” we instruct our children, grandchildren and other little ones in our lives.  That had been Moses’s instruction too: to speak to the rock for water).  The water flows, but Moses suffers.

“If you want a happy ending, that depends of course, on where you stop your story,” remarked Orson Welles.  The pain and uncertainty of the Israelites’ journey was about exactly that.  It hasn’t yet ended.  Neither had our nation’s founders’ journey by the end of Hamilton.  And neither has ours.

We have come to a painful nadir to be sure.  The bill that just narrowly passed through the House and the Senate is one of abject, breathless cruelty.  Those who need the most care in our society – those who are poor or ill or otherwise vulnerable -- will face a whole new layer of threats to their already fragile safety net.  Immigrants with no criminal record and years of US residence in many cases are literally afraid to leave their homes lest ICE takes them away.  Who among us can’t hear our rabbis, our teachers, our founders crying out: “this cannot be.  This should not be.  This is not what we gave our lives to so that you could know a better world.”

“America, you great unfinished symphony!” Miranda’s Alexandar Hamilton cries out in his final moments.  It is our good fortune (and so important to find that where we can) that we need not – indeed we cannot -- wait until our own final moments to do the hard work of rebuilding, protecting, pursuing justice together.  It’s going to be a hard swim upstream. May the living waters of our tradition give us much needed sustenance to write one more movement.  One measure.  One note.

Shabbat Shalom,

[1] Catie Curtis