Blessing in a Period of Financial Crisis - D'var Torah: CBI Board Meeting - December 16, 2008

As you no doubt recall, one reason for distributing the book God’s To-Do List to every member of CBI during Rosh Hashanah was to create the possibility of a multi-month, collective CBI learning experience around themes in the book. The idea to use themes from a book in a given year (or more or less) for CBI wide reflection grew out of the notion of systemic, non-compartmentalized thinking which our staff has been trying to imbibe through our grant with the Legacy Heritage Foundation and from experience gained from our Shabbat Connections initiative, which is now proceeding in expanded fashion into its second year.

Perhaps you have noticed a banner set up in the courtyard on Sunday with the name of the “theme of the month,” or the interactive poster in the lobby on which teachers, committee heads or any CBI member can post their own contributions to the collective conversation, or the CBI GTDL blog on which folks can share as well. You may have noticed a bulletin article by Shelby Apple who receives a tiny grant funded stipend to coordinate the GTDL project. We have just begun this experiment in community wide learning. I am sure we will learn as we go better ways to extend and deepen the discussion and include more folks in it. Your ideas are welcome.

The second chapter of GTDL is “Bless.” The Mishnah Tractate which deals with the topic of blessings and prayer is called Brachot, meaning blessings. One of the many intriguing passages in Mishnah Brachot struck me as both challenging and particularly pertinent to the current global climate of financial woe. The mishnah says not only are there specific words of blessing to recite for the many blessings we experience in our lives – holidays, happy moments, celebrations, food and drink, the experience of nature’s beauty (the ocean, a rainbow, a tree), encounters with wise people or friends, and the like, the good news, as it were – but, says the mishnah, one is required to say words of blessing upon hearing bad news as well.

We are required both to bless the good news and bless the bad news. It occurs to me, in the face of so much apparently bad news these days, and therefore so many opportunities to fulfill this odd injunction, it might be worthwhile to reflect on what it might mean to do so. Here are some of the ways I would pose the question as I invite you to jot down on the reflection sheets any thoughts you have at the moment on the matter and let me know what arises for you as you ponder it in the days ahead. I expect that circumstances will allow us all a good amount of time for further pondering.

Obviously, many people are suffering or will suffer due to the forces of this prolonged economic downturn. However, in what ways does this financial crisis contain blessings? On personal, communal, national, and global levels, where are there sources of blessing or potential blessing?

On all these levels I see an opportunity to recover our sense of higher values and greater virtue. If and when we collectively move from not only blaming those who acted corruptly, deceptively, and immorally to an admission of collective responsibility for the degree to which we too were willing to profit from a system built on greed, we may then be able to seek those higher values, our “greater angels.”

When the rabbis in the Gemara discuss the mishnah’s odd injunction that we must bless both the good and the bad, they suggest that the reason may be that long term good often arise from bad circumstances. That is, when we bless the bad we really are blessing the potential for a benign, even if difficult to envision, future.
Along this line of thinking, the educator Parker Palmer, in a recent interview with Krista Tippet, on the Public radio show Speaking of Faith, opined that we may have entered one of those curious times in history when ideals and self interest correspond, where we will be forced to shift our emphasis away from the value of acquiring more stuff to the value of a life of service where humility replaces avarice, where we seek to establish and cultivate a culture of trust, and the like. If so, maybe the seeds of good do inhabit tough financial times and warrant our words of blessing.