More killing, more sadness and insanity. I am outraged and want to get out into the world and change it. Change it now because it is nearly too late, I feel. I feel angry in my gut—that’s where this anger rests or rather pulls. Anger–it leads me to want to serve more, to be more present to this crazy world we live in, to shout and protest, pray and to love deeply. On the day the Dallas police officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith, Brent Thompson and Patrick Zamarripa were murdered, the day after Philando Castile was killed, two days day after the killing of Alton Sterling,

I sent a text to my friend Reverand  Julian DeShazier, of the University Church in Hyde Park, Chicago. “Julian!” I wrote, “Where’s the protest? What can I do? Are you preaching on Sunday?” I took my 14 year old daughter to church last Sunday. We listened to Julian with intensity as he preached; “How do we move forward because the  people that call themselves allies and advocates and care providers all have one thing in common, they can leave when ever they want.  That is what privilege is… privilege is the ability to leave…!” He reminds us that we have outrage after outrage at the injustices and ultimately, we can leave. With clarity and conviction he teaches that most of us can leave the very thing it is that causes the outrage. We can leave and go home, shut the door and look at social media, go about our business and after a while, our outrage turns into concern which turns into glancing at the news every so often which shortly thereafter disintegrates into to going about our busy lives at least until the next outrage happens and the cycle of our outrage begins anew.

Rev. Julian is asking us to stay and we can’t stay unless we know why we have to and we can only know why if we feel the pain that racism, injustice and madness creates. Staying requires us to feel our pain and to allow our anger to be felt. I mean really felt, asking ourselves, where in my body is my anger exactly? Yes. I want to feel it and then I want to be quite. Quite. I will be silently outraged until a calmness permeates within enableing me feel. I settle in and settle down so that the feelings may rise to consciousness and I can greet them. I inwardly nod to anguish and sorrow,  piercing feelings, stored somewhere in my unconsciousness that float to the surface of my mind and rest in my soul.  I have a flash of awareness and recall the systematic murder of 6 million brothers and sisters, there is unbearable pain.   Pain and grief. Loss and death. To feel it all is to be temporarily released from the burden of not knowing how to act, what to do, how to handle the madness in this world. Feeling  and then acknowledging my own pain is an answer to the injustice and insanity around us. If we do not feel, we will not remember, we will see our neighbors as “the other” and we will not stay.

I am down on my knees (I know, not such a Jewish thing to do) remembering, feeling and greeting what is within. My heart is aching and the constriction in my stomach has transformed from anger to gut-wrenching sadness. Deep, deep penetrating sadness.

Tears flowing, finally not thinking but feeling and there is an opening. I am witness to the blessing of an opening, a crack in my heart, the tears cease and I recall the Kotzker Rebbe’s teaching “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”  This heart-crack of mine—that is where the light shines through.

I slowly get up and am somehow weaker and stronger at the same time.  These moments of settling down and paying heed to the pain will serve me to help the living, to care more deeply and to be present.   I remember Julian’s words, “[p]rivilege is the ability to leave” and I renew my comment to stick around, one day at a time.