How Whole is Your Heart? Va’era

For me these days, I go back and forth between a full heart and a hard heart.

Full of what?

Full of love. Pain. Tears.

Hard like what? Maybe like crusty layers on the outside and mushy on the inside.

I know. That sounds disgusting.

A whole heart—now that sounds peaceful.

So far, I’m not there.

So far, the pandemic is still dominating our lives. The new variant and a huge rise in Covid cases are real.

But the obsession with the vaccine and getting ourselves “back to normal” doesn’t feel like the answer to our national or global problems.

In Torah this week, Pharaoh’s heart is hard, time and again, as God brings the plagues down upon Egypt.

Each time, Pharaoh pleads with Moses and promises; tell your god to take away this plague and I will let your people go to worship your god.

Blood fills the rivers; frogs fill every bed and vessel; lice torture the animals; locusts eat the crops.

But each time a plague is lifted, the pain is gone, Pharaoh forgets, and he goes on as before—”back to normal”—until the next plague. Pharaoh’s heart is so hard, he has little concern even for his own people and their suffering, let alone the Jews.

Before the pandemic began, New York City had finally passed a law outlawing the use of plastic bags in grocery stores. It was a first, very tiny step in light of a huge, global problem.

It was quickly forgotten. Because of the emergency.

The need to survive led many individuals to think only of their own welfare and that of their loved ones.

And Covid has been a great profit opportunity for those in a position to do so.

Ordinary citizens took permission to participate in the waste and litter that large companies were profiting from, and continue to profit from, including the vaccines.

But it’s an emergency, right?

For two years now, in the midst of a climate emergency, we have collectively been buying disposable gloves and masks and hand sanitizer and wipes and more, thrown into the garbage, and all too often on the ground.

We are a disposable society, so this felt like “normal” times: our way of life as Americans. So easy to do.

Because it’s an emergency.

It’s been pretty much in the 50 degrees in New York City over the past weeks, and that’s not changing soon. For us, dreaming of a white Christmas was…just a dream. Yet the implications are not pointed out or even mentioned in the news.

Just a couple of weeks ago there was a tornado in Kentucky like none experienced before.

Yet, we have forgotten about it all too soon. The pandemic has taken priority again. Because “it’s an emergency.”

At one point almost at the end of this parsha, Pharaoh says to Moses, Okay, I was wrong. I believe you. God is great. God is real.

But Moses retorts, no, you are not in awe of God yet. You do not fear God yet.

I think that’s where we are; we are not yet in awe of God. We do not yet fear God. Or our hearts are so full of fear that we cover them over with crusty stuff, just trying to get through our days and survive.

What this means is that we do not yet understand the pandemic in the context of the world. We are still only looking at the trees and don’t yet see the forest.

Our hearts are not yet whole. Everything is fragmented and so are our hearts.

So how do we live, not with a full heart, or an empty heart, or hard heart, but with a whole heart that encompasses all that we feel: the pain, the fear, the sorrow, the tears, the despair—and the love?

How do we find our hearts and make them whole? How do we see ourselves as belonging, not just to our own families and communities, but to the whole of the human family?

That, to me, is to live in awe of God. That to me, is God.

I end with a quote from Rachel Held Evans’ book, A life of Holy Curiosity, written in friendship with Jeff Chu (you can find his interview with Krista Tippett here) on the question of wholehearted faith:

“Some days I believe in God. Other days I want to believe in God…

“For better or for worse, there are seasons when we hold our faith, and better yet, there are seasons when our faith holds us. In those latter instances, I am more thankful than ever for all the saints past and present who said yes and whose faith sustains mine. They believe for me when I’m not sure I believe. They hold on to hope for me when I run out of hope….

“They are [the people who recite the prayers] on my behalf on those days when I can not bring myself to recite those ancient words wholeheartedly.

“‘Is this what I really believe?’

“They pray for me when the only words I have to say to God are words that I refuse to allow to be printed on this page because they would make even my most foul-mouthed friend blush.

“I’ve come to believe that wholehearted faith isn’t just about coming to terms with the heart that beats inside me. It’s also about understanding how God has knit together my heart with the hearts of [other people around me].

“Wholeheartedness is about seeing and comprehending my place in a bigger family of faith; it is about risking hurt and confusion for the sake of the thing that so many of us seek: belonging.”

Thank you, Rachel Held Evans, for these words.

Because I say, let’s stop covering over our hearts with layers of distraction from what’s really real.

We will not get “back to normal” as long as our planet is out of balance, because “normal” is a world of inequities which we no longer want.

For a “whole” world, one of peace, equality and justice, our hearts must be balanced and full and open— and most of all whole.

And let us say Amen.