The medieval poet Yehudah Halevi famously wrote these words:
לִבִּי בְמִזְרָח וְאָנֹכִי בְּסוֹף מַעֲרָב
אֵיךְ אֶטְעֲמָה אֵת אֲשֶׁר אֹכַל וְאֵיךְ יֶעֱרָ
“My heart is in the East and I am at the far end of the West / How shall I be able to savor my food; how shall I find enjoyment?”
For Halevi, these words were about his longing for the Holy Land while he was living his life in Spain. But these words have been on my mind and in my heart this week, as my heart flies eastward to Turkey and Syria from our perch here on the far edge of the Continental Plate.
I knew about the earthquake nearly instantly. It was Sunday afternoon, less than an hour before our Tu Bishvat ritual on Zoom. My brother-in-law in Haifa pinged me. It was 3:20 am there and he had just been jolted awake by the powerful and lengthy quake. We exchanged messages until the news started breaking that it was a 7.8 epicentered in Turkey, and my brother-in-law began remembering the 7.6 in Turkey in 1999 that claimed 18,000 lives. I felt his fear begin to grow about just how big a catastrophe might have just happened minutes earlier. About how many people might have died minutes earlier. His fears were, as we now know, well founded. The death toll having now exceeded that of 1999, and still growing. The magnitude of it, the pain of it, is too much to bear.
The shaking of the ground under our feet is something we humans have lived with since the beginning of time. Those of us who have experienced a large quake carry an ingrained fear of the next one in our bones. With each small tremor we freeze, at high alert, waiting to see if this will be the Big One. And just as the memory of earthquakes is wired into our bodies, so the memory of earthquakes is wired into our mythologies.
Last week we read in Torah about the Children of Israel’s escape from Egypt to the Red Sea and through it. That story gets retold as a short poem in Psalm 114 that we sing at Seder every year. The poem goes:
בְּצֵ֣את יִ֭שְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרָ֑יִם בֵּ֥ית יַ֭עֲקֹ֗ב מֵעַ֥ם לֹעֵז
הָיְתָ֣ה יְהוּדָ֣ה לְקָדְשׁ֑וֹ יִ֭שְׂרָאֵ֗ל מַמְשְׁלוֹתָיו
הַיָּ֣ם רָ֭אָה וַיָּנֹ֑ס הַ֭יַּרְדֵּ֗ן יִסֹּ֥ב לְאָחוֹר
הֶ֭הָרִים רָקְד֣וּ כְאֵילִ֑ים גְּ֭בָע֗וֹת כִּבְנֵי־צֹאן
מַה־לְּךָ֣ הַ֭יָּם כִּ֣י תָנ֑וּס הַ֭יַּרְדֵּ֗ן תִסֹּ֥ב לְאָחוֹר
הֶ֭הָרִים תִרְקְד֣וּ כְאֵילִ֑ים גְּ֭בָע֗וֹת כִּבְנֵי־צֹאן
מִלִּפְנֵ֣י אָ֭דוֹן ח֣וּלִי אָ֑רֶץ מִ֭לִּפְנֵ֗י אֱל֣וֹהַּ יַעֲקֹב
הַהֹפְכִ֣י הַצּ֣וּר אֲגַם־מָ֑יִם חַ֭לָּמִ֗ישׁ לְמַעְיְנוֹ־מָיִם
“When Israel went forth from Egypt . . . the Sea saw it, and fled . . . The mountains skipped like rams, and the hills like lambs. What ails you, O Sea, that you flee . . .? O mountains, that you skip like rams? And you, O hills, like lambs? Tremble, Earth, at the presence of Adonai . . .”
The Psalm turns the Sea into a living being that witnessed God’s miraculous actions and hightailed it out of there. And it turns the mountains and hills into leaping rams and skipping lambs, playfully describing the violent shaking of the earth.
Our Exodus story from last week does not actually mention an earthquake accompanying the parting of the Sea. But the Psalm seems to think you cannot be in the Divine Presence and not tremble, and that goes not only for us but for the Earth too.
That gets made explicit in this week’s Torah portion, where the Children of Israel are now gathered around the Mountain ready to receive the Revelation that we would later call Torah. The people stood at a distance as the Mountain began to smoke:
וְהַ֤ר סִינַי֙ עָשַׁ֣ן כֻּלּ֔וֹ מִ֠פְּנֵ֠י אֲשֶׁ֨ר יָרַ֥ד עָלָ֛יו יְהוָֹ֖ה בָּאֵ֑שׁ וַיַּ֤עַל עֲשָׁנוֹ֙ כְּעֶ֣שֶׁן הַכִּבְשָׁ֔ן וַיֶּחֱרַ֥ד כָּל־הָהָ֖ר מְאֹד
“Mt. Sinai was all asmoke as Adonai’s fiery presence descended upon it; its smoke rose like smoke from a kiln, and the Mountain shook greatly.” [Exodus 19:18]
Vayecherad – “the Mountain shook,” described here with exactly the same verb as was used two sentences earlier to describe the trembling of the People in that very same moment.
This is how our ancestors understood earthquakes. It was the very Earth trembling in God’s presence, as we ourselves certainly would.
In Torah, everything we might see as a natural disaster understandably has to do with God. The Great Flood. The annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah in a firestorm. Even the sinkhole in the Wilderness that swallowed up the household of Korach.
Floods, earthquakes, sinkholes, volcanic eruptions. In the theology of Torah and of many centuries after, these cataclysms are understood as punishments from God. Because what else could they be? A just God would not allow these destructions unless they were deserved.
And so the family of Korach, and the citizens of Sodom and of Gomorrah, and the generation of the flood not only experience the agony of their catastrophes, they come to be maligned by future generations, slandered by our stories that place the blame on their shoulders.
But that is no longer our theology. While our ancestors could not bear the thought of a God whose harsh actions were random, we cannot bear the thought of a God whose harsh actions are purposeful. In our generation we know that earthquakes are geology, disease is biology, even though in our lifetimes science could not keep fundamentalists from preaching that AIDS was divine punishment.
Earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, storms are not punishments, although we might’ve had a hand in making them worse by how we’ve warmed the planet, or how we’ve built cities cheaply and unsafely, or how we’ve politicized the aftermath.
Earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, storms are not punishments. They are part of life on Planet Earth. We live on an orb flying through space, made of heat wrapped in cold; a dense core surrounded by molten rock, sheathed by the thinnest of crusts, which is in turn made up of interlocking plates, all of which are in motion, slow motion, which we think of as unmoving, terra firma – solid ground. But it’s not solid. And when the plates collide the trembling Earth sets off a trembling in our untethered hearts. And if we have built our concrete buildings on the path of the Earth’s trembling, oy lanu, woe to us.
Torah is wrong about disaster being retribution but it is right about disaster having to do with God’s nearness. If there is some kind of Divine, then it is in-dwelling in the physics of all of it. God is the physics of all of it. And we live in the consequence of the physics, in the perils and path of planetary life.
God is the physics and more than the physics. God is also in our pained experience of the catastrophe. There is no other place for God to be if not in the experience of every person, every creature. God is the physics of the disaster, and witness to the disaster. The Zohar teaches us that Shekhinah cries with us in our suffering. And teaches us that we too are the Shekhinah. Her tears are ours, ours are hers, as She cries today with the people of Turkey and the people of Syria.
It has been a week of tears and of of trembling. So let us do the usual things and the unusual things to help hold the suffering and remember the dead. Help however we can, support the rescue and relief organizations, dedicate o ur service tonight to the memory of those lost and the healing of those who survived. Even prepare to receive the displaced, even if it takes years for them to arrive. From our perch here in the far reaches of the west, we will let our hearts fly on Shekhinah’s wings and settle gently and lovingly in the east.