It’s funny how good things and terrible things can all be happening at the same time, and we can feel so far removed from one or the other. 

I guess it's the tension of living, and the paradox of being human. 

The question is, can we feel it all, the good and the terrible?

I was in a little world of a big wedding I did over the weekend. Last week I was in the comfort and meaning I brought to two mourning families with the funerals I did.

I found myself turning off my feelings about the world and just focusing on my immediate tasks. I barely listened to the news. I just couldn’t.

Meanwhile, the grief and my role in the funerals felt manageable.

With the wedding, I focused on enjoying a weekend in Upstate New York in between the work, which itself was joyful.

If you remember, the wedding was Hindu and Jewish. I was overtaken by the warmth, openness, and curiosity I received from the Indian family (not to mention intricacy and beauty of the Indian dress—and the bride!!! I’ve never seen anything—or any bride—more beautiful).

I loved learning about and witnessing the faith this Indian family and community carry with them, and the similarities across cultures, as they kept noticing and repeating to me. To experience the possibility of people from vastly different experiences, histories, and lived lives so easily coming together.

After leading the Jewish Friday night prayers, so many people came up to me, excited to see and learn more about Jewish rituals at the wedding ceremony the next day.

Person after person that approached me kept saying, “We’re all one. God is one.”

And the Jewish family was just as open and welcoming. Everyone was so happy that this couple had found each other. They knew they were meant to be together.

All it takes is the ability to be open.

A willingness to open one’s heart.

There was also the sad reminder of our climate emergency as we sweated profusely in the hot sun on a mountaintop in mid-September in the northeast (even there, I managed to find joy, laughing and joking with a few people—yes, about global warming).

And as I returned to everyday life, I heard news of cell phones and pagers blowing up in the midst of civilians in Lebanon. And saw continued images of starving children and families physically trapped in Gaza.

I got angry when I again heard the phrase, “the suffering of children”—as if the parents aren’t suffering, too, as they see their children whither away? In a situation that seems to have no end, and doesn’t have to be.

And I heard more of the horrors in other parts of the world, not to mention in my own country, perpetuated by my very own government and politicians.

I wonder how we can look away.

And I just want to cry.

And yet, I, too, look away, because there are times I can’t keep looking.

This week’s Torah reading is horrendous.

It portends so many of the horrors we are seeing now. It’s terrifying: scorching heat and drought, rain made of dust, skies of copper and earth of iron, starving people eating their children (no, we’re not there yet).

All this will come to be if we do not “walk in God’s ways.”

If we do not treat other humans as human, as it implies with its lessons of how to treat others.

I wonder how we can get to the point where we don’t feel like we have to choose sides: my people over your people, or your people over my people.

Why can’t we mourn the death of any people, yours and mine. Because each and every life is precious. No matter whose.

This week is our sixth prophetic reading in a row “of consolation.”

Sometimes that’s all we can do: offer consolation, as with a funeral.

And sometimes the feelings are too much.

In poet and writer Mark Nepo’s words:

“The tension of living often comes down to this paradox we all carry between our fear of feeling anything and our need to feel everything (The One Life We’re Given).”

Sometimes we need to challenge ourselves to feel all the feelings if we dare to allow ourselves.

Because healing starts with feeling.

And what I experienced with this particular Indian family and this particular Jewish family—I want to keep it front and center in my memory as a possibility for the whole world.

May we find peace.

May we open our hearts to all, and make peace.

Shabbat Shalom.