I think true love is not only true personal love but the totality of love, universal love - to be in love with everything manifest and everything unmanifest.
David Lynch
This Valentine's let us move our celebration from Personal Love for Universal Love. Work that love muscle that honors, appreciates and celebrates a love for humanity, creation, diversity and connection to other humans, places and animals.
In a world where it is so easy to point to what is wrong and how badly we are messing up as a species, let Valentine‘s Day come to remind us: there is a love so powerful for humanity that it will continue to propel us forward. A love to vast that it can include the multitudes of multitudes of humanity. Every minute of every day a new life comes into this world. They did not ask to be here. They are counting on our love. This Friday night we will celebrate Universal Love and that which moves us to continue to heal and repair our world. Please join Kol Ami as we explore Universal Love through liturgy, song, poetry and community. Bring chocolate to share! Let us celebrate together the highest love.
A poem for those who cannot join us. A taste of what we will be uplifting through our prayers on Friday night at 7:30pm. (Come a bit early if you would like to be assigned a poem to read during services.)
Never forget: your love is what makes our world beautiful. Not for anyone or anything but for everyone and all things.
Good Bones
BY MAGGIE SMITH
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Many blessings and Happy Valentine’s Day,
Rabbi Kinberg