Today is the fifth day of the counting of the omer. We are still focused on love and lovingkindness, chesed. But today adds the sense of humility, hod. Today is hod b’chesed. Hod is another word that is hard to translate. It comes with a meaning of majesty and spender, prayer and submission. I’ve been thinking a lot about Rabbi Everett Gendler and how he was a role model for me. Not only did he teach about the omer with his concrete exercise of planting winter wheat or rye but he was the one who taught me that a rabbi needs to trust his or her board and not go to every meeting. He was the one who very much was a collaborative leader, working with a congregation and not just using his power and authority as the trained professional. He was the one who would say that a rabbi is someone who can move the tables and chairs (and turn the heat on in New England). He didn’t ask his congregants to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself. Having that kind of a leader, who exhibited humility, we all grew. Having that kind of leader, we got to see his humility and his majesty. In May Rabbi Everett Gendler will be honored by T’ruah, the formerly Rabbis for Human Rights, North America with their Human Rights Hero award. I can’t think of someone more deserving. This is a man who marched with Martin Luther King, who has worked on Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation and who travels each year to work in India. He does all this in a quiet unassuming way. He does it because it is the right thing to do.
Hod, because it is about humility and submission is also about forgiveness. Think for a minute about who you might need to forgive. Being able to ask for forgiveness can be hard to do. It means being humble and admitting that we made a mistake and that we will try to not do it again. It takes courage. The rewards can be well worth it. Think about who you may need to reconcile with and how it might make your love stronger. For me it is usually about making peace at home. I should not take my husband and daughter for granted and too often do. So I will try to be humble today, and ask their forgiveness. Usually the hurts are slight and unintentional but they build up over time.
Today is also Easter Sunday. Yesterday we read the haftarah for Passover, Ezekiel 37 with its vision of the dry bones coming back to life. Last year, this weekend on the Hebrew calendar I got an excited call from a good friend and a teacher in our religious school. A Holocaust teacher. She had just heard these words for the first time and wondered why we read them Easter weekend. “Do Jews believe in resurrection?” Yes, I assured her. Take a look at the g’vurot prayer for example. Both the lines from Ezekiel and g’vurot are part of where resurrection comes from. There is a belief that when the Messiah comes, we will be resurrected during Passover. The question becomes whether this is for individual people or for a nation. On the exit gate of Yad V’shem, they use a verse from this very Haftarah, “I will put my breath into you and you will live again. I will set you upon your own soil. (Ezekiel 37:14).
I know that there are many non-Jewish readers of my blog, so for those of you celebrating Easter today, may it be a time of rebirth and renewal, a return to spring and a time when my people and your people can continue to work for the day of reconciliation, peace and harmony. Then we will have reached a time of hod b’chesed, humility in lovingkindess, when it won’t matter what separates us as much as what unites us.