How Do We Create a New Future?
Look around. No matter what direction you gaze, where you tilt your ears, you’ll find what’s wrong in the world. The climate, refugees, terrorists, rain forests – everything is depicted as falling apart. We are awash in dystopic visions. Media has left nothing to the imagination as to what the end of the world can look like – aliens, nuclear annihilation, tsunamis, disease, environmental collapse. But turn this way and that, and one finds very little, if anything, on how to create a new future. The end, it seems, we have fully covered. Beginnings – zero. Think about it: Where can we possibly go, how can we possibly get there, if the only setting on our compass is decline?
This year I spent the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah at the Brodsky Synagogue in Kiev, Ukraine. It’s gorgeous. Even more gorgeous is the community. This huge synagogue was packed wall to wall – literally standing room only – filled with kids, families, commotion, love. During the service children raced to the board to get to turn the dial that signaled the page number. Other children, playing, weaved in and around the rabbis’ and chazzan’s legs, who simply tousled their hair and kept going, not missing a beat. At one point, a young boy, whom I assumed to be the age of studying for his bar mitzvah, interrupted his father, who was one of the chazzans leading at that moment, to ask a question. The father simply paused, answered, showed him where we were in the service, then continued. After service on Erev Rosh Hashanah the feast was unlike any I’ve ever seen – towers of beet salad, buckets of honey, salty fish, smoked fish, gelfite fish… it was endless. The stories, the lessons – even a special one prepared and said to me and my friend in English. It was the most joyful, welcoming experience I may have ever had.
The thing is, though, this synagogue isn’t supposed to be here. These people, not supposed to be here. That celebration, not supposed to have happened. Rosh Hashanah this year fell on the Gregorian calendar of September 29 and 30. These very same two days just 78 years ago, in 1941, Nazi soldiers killed the Jews of Kiev in one of the largest mass murders in WWII, over 30,000 people in these 2 days and around 100,000 more in subsequent weeks). The Nazis turned the synagogue into a puppet theater, as it remained all the way until 2000.
So you see, these people having babies, making festivals, standing shoulder to shoulder saying prayers, teaching children how the service works so they can one day lead it, eating abundant feasts, and welcoming strangers … they’re not supposed to be here. Their world supposedly ended. And yet it didn’t. Because they have the key to how to build a new future.
Abundance is all around us. Where? Look again. Ice caps may be melting, forests may be burning, but plant a seed in the ground and it will grow. It will grow IF we give it water and light. If we turn our attention to the seed of possibility and nurture it. WE may be running around talking about the end of the world but under our noses nature is quietly continuing to send out seeds, push down roots, stand up above the ground, blossom, and produce fruit season after season. WE may see only ends, but the seeds of our future are here, right now, scattered about our feet.
The Jewish community of Kiev created a new future by living it. Picking up seeds they continue to make families, continue to teach their children, continue to celebrate, and continue to bring in strangers to share what they have. Continuing to create, renew, grow step by step in each new generation.
In the last four months I have had several young clients tell me that they do not want to have children because they worry about the world they would bring them into – some going so far as to actively take that decision within their couples. Be very careful: The moment we stop creating, destruction sets in. That’s how the world works. The moment we stop imagining new futures we become stuck in a nightmare of dystopic visions.
Every single moment presents us with infinite possibilities. The second we choose we begin to create; ideas become things. That means both and either good or bad. In our media-saturated, world-conversation the topic is one of traumatic endings. The moment we buy into that, add our fearful fantasies to it, we fuel it, energizing it to grow and become tangible. THAT idea becomes a thing. If we choose instead to direct our looking to find the seeds of possibility, water them with our attention, give them the light of our bright imaginations, then we add to the always-present abundance that also surrounds us, and those are the seeds we will harvest. This is how we create a new future.
New futures are not created by endlessly discussing past nightmares, endlessly indulging in everything wrong in the present, endlessly indulging in the terrors of the what-ifs of tomorrow. They are not created by believing in the thousand reasons of why something can’t be, shouldn’t be, isn’t. New futures are created by audaciously finding the one thing that might be and growing it into existence.
Why would Jews move back to Kiev? Why would they have children? Why bother to teach the children? Why fight nearly 70 years take back a puppet theater and restore it to synagogue? When the Torah scroll made its way around the congregation I saw something I had never seen before. Usually, one touches the scroll with a pinkie, the edge of a siddur or tallit; here, the men took the scroll in their arms in a loving embrace, pressed their faces directly to it, and kissed it directly. Why would Jews move back to Kiev? Because they believe in their life. Life, inherently, is about always creating.
Creation stories, not dystopic ones, this is the firmament of a new future. And the choice is ours. Both – the good and the bad – are present at every moment. Which one we choose to bring from idea to thing is up to us.
Happy dreaming,
b
(image from Wikipedia site)
