L' shana Tova

I don’t think this election is going to answer questions, like whether we’re going to live in a fascist state and if 45 is an historic inevitability, because, unless we get our house in order right quick…yes and yes. 

People, lots of people who vote, say, “We’re doing poorly, because God isn’t smiling on us anymore, because we took him out of the public square.”

I can’t wrap my logical brain around a Santa Claus-like god in the sky, keeping lists, withholding toys, pressing his nose against the fence in the public square. I sense something bigger. 

A  phrase keeps going through my head, “God made us in his own image.” I think the opposite is true: We make God in our image.  A spiritual woman I am working with says that spirit (capital S) is like the feeling you get at a football game. Team spirit. School spirit. The collective we. That makes both intuitive and logical sense to me. Can’t you feel the pull of the angry vortex creating our American god? And it’s gaining in velocity because we keep feeding it. It’s like we’re swimming against an angry current.  You can try to put on the brakes by posting pictures of your pet or your garden or naïve pleas to “let’s all just get along”—I do that too, no judgment—but we have to dig deeper than sentimentality and a jingoistic appeal to the totems of our culture. It’s time for us to lay our culture on the table and do an honest assessment of who we are—not me or you personally, we’ve used our personal innocence to excuse genocide, thievery, cruelty, and slavery for too long. It’s our culture that’s on the examination table.  Our God. And if our God, our Spirit, is to be the just, benevolent God we want them to be, that we believe them to be, we have to create that God. But quick.

Some cultural appropriation: It’s the beginning of the Jewish holidays. A time to beg forgiveness for any trespassing we have done in the past year, gratitude for what we have attained, and hope for a sweet new year. A perfect time to reimagine and create the world we want. Let’s get busy.