Everyone Gets to Breathe

Aimee Van Ausdale, January 31, 2017
This morning I have been pondering a nearly forgotten lesson I learned in high school music. Sometimes in band or choir, music requires players or singers to hold a note longer than they actually can hold a note. A 4-bar low G, a long aria. In those cases, we were taught to mindfully stagger when we took a breath so the sound appeared uninterrupted. Everyone got to breathe, and the music stayed strong and vibrant. Yesterday, I read an article that suggested the administration's litany of bad executive orders is a way of giving us "protest fatigue" – we will literally lose our will to continue the fight in the face of the onslaught of negative action. Let's remember music. Take a breath. The rest of the chorus will sing. The rest of the band will play. Rejoin so others can breathe. Together, we can sustain A very long, beautiful song for a very, very long time. You don't have to do it all, but you must add your voice to the song...

Lynn Ungar, Breathe
Breathe
Breathe, said the wind
How can I breathe at a time like this,
when the air is full of the smoke
of burning tires, burning lives?
Just breathe, the wind insisted.
Easy for you to say, if the weight of
injustice is not wrapped around your throat,
cutting off all air.
I need you to breathe.
I need you to breathe.
Don’t tell me to be calm
when there are so many reasons
to be angry, so much cause for despair!
I didn’t say to be calm, said the wind,
I said to breathe.
We’re going to need a lot of air
to make this hurricane together.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg The Jewish Way

The question is: From where can people draw the strength to renew their dreams again and again? The answer of Jewish tradition is: Give people just a foretaste of fulfillment, and they will never give it up. The Shabbat is that taste.
... [But] living with a dream is treacherous business. The dream gives and the dream takes away. Dreams can brighten an oppressive reality, or they can make the everyday appear drab and repellent. Dreams can give life purpose or rob it of value and meaning. Dealing with this double edge has been a major challenge for the Jewish people on their great trek through history toward redemption... Without the dream it hardly seems worth living... With it, everyday unredeemed life hardly seems worth living at all.
Paradoxically, Judaism affirms both the dream and the reality, both the perfect, redeemed world to be brought into being by human effort and the imperfect, unredeemed world of today...
The way to cope with this tension is to live dialectically -- to accept the world, affirm its sanctity, participate in it fully, and enjoy it. At the same time, the divine ideal prods the people to fundamental criticism of society’s status quo. By living in the world while at the same time offering a testimony of hope to redeem it, the Jews have become the prophets of permanent dissent, demanding a messianic perfection and insisting that it is not yet here. In the Rabbinic, halakhic style, this permanent revolution moves in ceaseless steps toward justice, acting in the best way possible until the final goal is achieved.
The classic Jewish answer to our dilemma is to set up a rhythm of perfection. The first movement is to plunge into the worlds as a participant. Then, just when there may be a danger of complete absorption into this world, there is an alternate reality to enter into: the Shabbat. Stepping outside the here and now, the community creates a world of perfection. Through total immersion in the Shabbat experience, Jews live the dream now.
By an act of [sheer] will, the community creates sacred time and space.