Let There Be Light
In parts of the black activist community there is a word you may hear, and that word is “woke.” Today we’re gonna get woke.
What does it mean? It means that you are awake and aware of what is happening in the world. And more than that- woke means that you are taking responsibility for your role, that you are seizing your agency, your power in the world and you are using it to help restore justice.
Woke means that you see how the world has been, and you are aware of what the world can be and you are prepared to make a change. Getting woke is a call to action. Getting woke is a refusal to accept things the way they are, because when you wake up you see what needs to be changed.
And there is no better time to wake up, no better time to get woke, than today, the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.
One of the first things you do on Rosh Hashanah is to sound the shofar- the ram’s horn. You blow one loud ringing sound and then seven more short blasts that sound almost like someone in tears gasping for breath. And there is a reason for this. The great Jewish Scholar Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon has written in the (Laws of Repentance) 3:4 that the commandment to sound the Shofar, although based in holy writing, has a reason behind it: to awaken those who have not seen the problems with previous behavior.
The horn blast calls you to examine your life, to get woke. To see what is real, and to say with certainty “I can make it different.”
But waking up, waking up is a beautiful thing. Opening your eyes from a troubled sleep and seeing the light again. Knowing that you can go forward into it. Knowing that you can welcome others into that same sunlight of hope, of joy. It is a beautiful thing.
In the book of Micah in the Hebrew bible, the Israelites were worried- they wanted to know exactly what their God would demand of them? In modern terms did he want their cars? Their computers? Would they have to give up eating good food or going out dancing? Did they have to sacrifice their children’s education and give all their money away to make up for anything bad they might have done?
They said, “Micah tell us, do we have to mope around and give up everything we own? 6:7Does the LORD take delight in thousands of rams, In ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
And Micah said Come on now, that’s silly. He already told you what he wanted. Listen.
8He has told you, O humans, what is good; And all he wants of you is this: to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with Him.
And the beauty, the beauty of it all, is that it can begin today.
No matter who you are.
No matter how deep asleep you have been.
No matter how full of brambles and missteps and pits and alligators the path you have been on has been.
Today you can take a step towards the sun.
There is always light. Do good now. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly, and there will be light.
Lin Yutang said “Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.” Anne Lamott agrees, she said “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.”
Eight years ago I met a woman named Evelyn, who was very old. Evelyn was tiny; she had beautiful blue eyes, long white hair, and a strong German accent. Sometimes she forgot words in English and would struggle in German to tell us what she wanted to say. I had known her for about six months when one day she saw my Star of David necklace.
"I have one of those too", she told me. She had me get her little treasure box, and in the bottom, wrapped in tissue was a delicate, fragile, star of david made out of silver filigree.
I was already writing the story in my head- I knew she was wealthy. I knew she went to a local church. She didn’t have numbers on her arm. I was all ready to hear how her rich family had left Germany ahead of the war and converted to Christianity to avoid problems.
I was asleep.
I said something like “Oh that’s pretty. Was your family Jewish?”
She looked at me for a long minute, and then in a quiet little voice said “No, National Socialists”
I must have looked confused because she said “We were Nazis.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said the only thing I could think of- “Tell me the story, please.”
In 1939 Evelyn lived in Schoneberg, outside of Berlin. She was 16, and her older brother, Henry, 22. And one day he came home, and told his family he was going to be helping to enforce the Jewish curfew, and that he would have a gun. He wanted her father to be more active in the party, to help his chances of promotion, and for a bit he was. Her mother went to meetings.
Their Jewish friends and neighbors were all gone, removed to Jewish housing. And then there came a night when her brother told them he was going to work at one of the camps, and that he had a job there waiting for their father. After he left that night, her father told Evelyn and her mother that they were going to escape to America, and that they could not tell her brother.
This is where I got confused, and I thought she was too. “Evelyn” I said, “I’ve met your brother. He came to visit last week.”
She smiled. “Before we left,” she said, “my father found that a Jewish family we had known had been taken away, but their son had been out looking for food, and was left behind. He was 15, but big, big enough to pass for 22.”
She paused. “We did not tell my brother Henry we were leaving. We ran away. We gave that big 15 year old the papers, my brother Henry's papers, and poof, like that, he was my brother, Henry. We brought him too.”
"But you were Nazis, and that boy was a Jew", I said, and she smiled.
"We woke up," she said.
They got woke.
Rosh Hashanah is a reminder that it is never too late to find hope, to choose joy, to begin again. Your new year doesn’t have to be today, it can be any day, every day. Any moment you choose to say here is where I begin.
Mary Pickford said “If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
Don’t let the world keep you on the ground.
This country goes through cycles- awake and asleep, over and over again. We hear of some new atrocity and we stir ourselves. Social media and news outlets explode, and for a few brief days we wake up. Someone else is shot. Aleppo is bombed. A protest here, a riot there.
And then we go back to sleep, as if we can’t see the hope, the promise of success, right in front of us, if only we are brave enough to reach out. President Obama said “The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
We hold the keys to changing the world, one small piece at a time. One protest sign at a time, one life at a time, sometimes one cup of coffee or one Facebook post at a time.
We are the hope and we can never be hopeless because we can never be denied another chance to make it right. As long as we have breath, we are the change. We are the hope. We are the joy.
G.K. Chesterson said, “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
Get woke, because you are the light of the world and the shofar has sounded.
Amen.