Backpacking and Braver Angels
Friday May 13, 2022
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
I heard that Sunset Valley Road out beyond Figueroa Mountain was recently reopened, after a six-month closure for repair work, and decided that I should take a trip out to the San Rafael Wilderness before it got too hot and the water sources dried up until next winter. So I cleared my calendar and embarked last Sunday on a three day backpacking trip along Manzana Creek and then out through White Ledge Canyon, which features some of the most spectacular scenery in Santa Barbara County. I knew from previous visits that I was likely to see only a handful of other hikers in the entire three days, and very possibly nobody during the entire time out in White Ledge.
The wildflowers were abundant. Blue Larkspur. Indian Paintbrush. White Sage, Purple Sage, Chia Sage. Owl Clover. Wooly Blue Curls. Bush Monkey Flower. California Bush Poppy. Scarlet Bugler Penstemon. Mariposa Lilies. Manzana Creek was flowing in places but elsewhere drying up into stagnant pools, and for long stretches completely dry. The one other hiker I met asked if I had seen the rattlesnake curled up in a rock cranny by the trail, but the only animals I saw were dozens of lizards. Birds. Butterflies. A deer.
On the first day of hiking my head was full of work. I struggled to shut out the still lingering conversations and debates, complaints and criticisms, compliments and questions, but the more I tried to let go of it all, the louder those voices remained.
The wind howled all night long Sunday night around my tent and my sleep was agitated and interrupted until I finally managed to sleep soundly for a few hours. Waking at sunrise, I went out and found a place in the sun to pray by flowing water. I took it slowly, savoring the words of the prayers, and I experienced the quiet inside myself that I had walked so far to find.
Most of the next two days, I walked and sang and wandered in my mind, to England, to Israel, back to my childhood, and stopped to rest, and to read, and walked again, and did not meet another soul until almost the end of my hike. Nearing the end of the trail I met four guys in their twenties heading in the other direction, out into the wilderness, and one of them called out to me “are we there yet?” I wasn’t ready yet to have a conversation, so I just said “well I guess that depends.”
As always, I was happy to find my car still there when I got back to the trailhead, and even happier when it started up without a problem. It was a long drive back up, up, up along Sunset Valley Road, and over Cachuma Saddle, and then out Happy Canyon Road. Because the car is electric, it was perfectly quiet as I drove, until after about forty-five minutes I came into the town of Santa Ynez, and turned on the radio, and experienced the brutal shock of re-entry.
It was the late afternoon news hour and I was assaulted by everything I had left behind for three days. The leaked Supreme Court draft overturning Roe v. Wade and the failed senate vote to guarantee the right to abortion. The al Jazeera news reporter shot dead, apparently by an Israeli soldier. The congressional commission investigating the January 6th insurrection. Russia’s crimes against humanity in Ukraine. Supply chain woes. A national baby formula shortage. Parents of transgender children threatened with charges of child abuse. People arguing about pandemic and masks, and boosters, and surges and public gatherings. The California drought and approaching fire season.
And running through it all, the brittle and jagged feeling that so much boils down to us versus them. The feeling that there are two Americas, and vast numbers of people on both sides who have lost any desire to understand or to communicate or to share the world with the other. The word polarization seems supremely inadequate to describe the total breakdown of our sense of shared humanity.
I turned off the radio, returned home, showered, treated myself to a good dinner, and went to bed exhausted, grateful for both my time out in the wilderness, and for my warm bed and comfortable home, but deeply unsettled by the heartbreaking return to the world of news and politics. The temptation is so strong to withdraw, to listen only to music on the radio, and to have nothing to do with the brawling, the name calling, the derision and contempt and demonization that have become the norms in our political discourse.
I’m so tired of it.
And yet, here we are, trying to create something together. This congregation is our attempt to make a positive contribution, to be a force for good in our community, and to offer an example of how people with different ideas and different backgrounds can live together.
Especially at this time in our country’s history, I believe that this is our most important work: to learn how to speak up clearly for our own core values and principles, and at the same time to listen, to be curiousand to genuinely seek to understand others who see things differently. I know, it seems impossible. But listen, we have been invited by the national organization Braver Angels, to be one of a few houses of worship around the country piloting a program for civil discourse.
Braver Angels works on a single, simple, radical notion: that we will be better and wiser…and our nation will be healed… if we can learn to speak with each other not in order to persuade each other, but in order to understand each other. An ancient Greek philosopher put it nicely: “we have one mouth and two ears, so that we might listen twice as much as we speak.” That should not be hard to remember! And I still believe, after all these years, that this Congregation B’nai B’rith might yet become an example of the rare community that genuinely celebrates many voices.
Liberal and conservative.
Republicans, Democrats and Independents.
It takes courage to listen, with true openness and real curiosity.
Who knows what we will hear?
Who knows what beloved old truth we might need to reconsider?
Hence the name Braver Angels.
But listening is the deepest of all Jewish practices.
The central prayer of our religion summons us with the words Shma, Yisrael.
Listen, you who wrestle with God.
Listen, close your one mouth for a moment; open your two ears.
Listen, not in order to prepare your rejoinder; but listen in order to learn.
Listen not in order to persuade; but listen in order to understand.
Shma, Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu Adonai echad.
Shabbat shalom.