A deeper clean

It is a familiar ritual at this time of year, inspired by nature’s obvious cues: The need for Spring Cleaning. The budding flowers and greening trees of the outdoors evoke a desire to revitalize what is inside. We clean out garages and closets, defrost refrigerators, replant gardens and even delve into some cyber-hygiene of our hard and software. But with such wholesale rehabilitation of our physical spaces, our internal inventories of attitudes and behavior and the effort toward personal refinement they should inspire, often get short shrift.

It is far easier to sweep out a dusty carport than to air out stale assumptions. It takes much less to rearrange a kitchen pantry than to reevaluate our biases. And it requires far less to move furniture into novel layouts than to shift perspectives on calcified power structures. But we should strive to embrace a broader, deeper and more lasting cleansing of our souls with as much devotion as we exert to freshen our spaces.

This year’s annual rite of rehabbing is amplified by the difficulties and pain of the last 15 months of pandemic and quarantine, compelling a more urgent need for a transformation beyond a return to the “old normal.” Even a “new normal” seems insufficient to the current challenges.

And beyond individual efforts at more sustained growth, our collective need for change as a nation demands far more from us than platitudes and pablum, something greater than “thoughts and prayers.” The litany of sickness in our body politic – climate change, racism, gun violence, polarization and disinformation – have all been exacerbated by the fear, alienation and disconnect fostered by COVID-19.

And thus, the depth of our commitment to change and capacity to do the hard work of change must be equal to the outsized demands of the times.

The Book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Bible expresses the profound grief of those who witnessed the cataclysmic annihilation of culture and faith with the destruction of the first Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. And yet, despite outward signs that seemed to spell doom and gloom, a truer, more vital faith emerged in an inner, hopeful vision for the future that transcended the dusty rubble of the fallen shrine. The mourners saw, out of the ashes of despair, a glimmer of the possible:

Take us back, O God, to Yourself and let us come back; Renew our days as of old! (Lamentations 5: 21)

The exiled and the broken saw a chance for God’s re-embrace growing, not from mere promises of repentance, but from their willingness to plumb the soul and ply the tasks of a true rebirth. Their dreamed-of future was not merely a return to what was, but a re-imagining of what could be. May our shared spring cleaning, after an unprecedented year of struggle, rise to meet the needs of our moment – a renewal deeper and more lasting than a mere sweeping of our sins beneath the rugs of our rationalizations.

Weiner is rabbi at Temple De Hirsch Sinai, which has campuses in Seattle and Belleuve.