Transformation

The news is often depressing. Many of the stories involve human failure to listen, to think, to care, or to act. Some of them are also natural disasters, infinitely complicated by human failures. It’s so, so sad.

So it lifted my heart today to see something new in my garden: a brand-new monarch butterfly drying out his wings. This creature just emerged from his chrysalis and was taking advantage of the noontime sun, getting his wings ready for flight:

He is sitting on a grape leaf, the leaf under which his chrysalis hung for the last little while:

“Well, how nice, rabbi,” some of you may be thinking. “But what does a butterfly have to do with all the grief in the world today? How can people change enough to make any difference at all?”

Change is hard. Ask the butterfly – he had to struggle to get out of that jade box! For him, transformation was inevitable: nature had hard-wired it into his system. For human beings, change is harder. We are stubborn, and sure of our own ideas.

In Jewish tradition, this is where prayer comes into the picture. Human beings rarely change on their own in Torah: they change when they come into contact with the Divine, with that which is greater than themselves. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it so much better than I ever will, so I will finish with a quote from the introduction to his Siddur:

When, at the end of his vision, Jacob opened his eyes, he said with a sense of awe: “Surely God is in this place and I did not know it.” That is what prayer does. It opens our eyes to the wonder of the world. It opens our ears to the still, small voice of God. It opens our hearts to those who need our help. God exists where we pray. As Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk said: “God lives where we let Him in.” And in that dialogue between the human soul and the Soul of the universe a momentous yet gentle strength is born.

That’s why I pray, today and every day, for a world in which justice is available to every person, a world in which wisdom and goodness win out over foolishness and meanness. I pray for change, beginning with me.