What Happens When We Open Our Hearts

What Happens When We Open Our Hearts

Mark Rothman | Jewish Long Beach Interim CEO

The world does not belong to us.

Terrence Real, LICSW

Neither may you complete the work, nor may you desist from it.

The Talmud

The world does not belong to us. Boy, if there ever was a time for us to be reminded of that, this summer – if not the past 2 years – seems to be that time. If the world really belonged to us, would we have made ICBM attacks on Tel Aviv, October 7, the devastation in Gaza, or a nuclear-progressing Iran likely to target Israel with its first device? Would we have made ICE raids, the Holocaust, or cancer?

But Terrence Real, a therapist and expert in helping people build transformative relationships, also said:

“We belong to one another. Open your heart, stand for connection, and offer the gift of connection to the next generation. That’s our job.”

That’s our job. To open our hearts. To stand for connection. To see connection as a gift. And to value connection as our legacy, as the thing we want to pass on to our children.

No, the world does not belong to us. Yet we are not powerless. That’s Terry Real’s point. Our power is in what does belong to us, and what we need to do because of that.

That is the work we do at Jewish Long Beach. That is the work you do when you become a member, when you schedule personal training with our expert fitness trainers, or when you bring your children to the pool for an hour after school on a Wednesday. You are connecting. You are engaging in something larger than yourself: community.

Community is our antidote to all the craziness and all the crazies. In Boulder, Colorado, the Run for Their Lives walk would regularly draw a few dozen walkers. But the week after a hate-filled, radicalized man burned the walkers, several hundred showed up. Talk about standing for connection. An army stood and walked to show you can’t incinerate connection, but you can feel its warmth.

I understand if you say, “Yes, but the haters so outnumber the connecters.” It sure seems that way. Perhaps now it seems truer than ever before.

The ancient tradition of the Talmud wisely knew we would feel this way. People who lived millennia before us also faced a hostile and uncontrollable world. And not just Caesars and Nebuchadnezzars who oppressed, dispersed, and killed our Jewish ancestors. The Talmud is nothing if not a collection of anecdotes about droughts that stifled crops, oxes that gored, and demons that haunted us from ruined buildings.

The Rabbis of the Talmud knew the work of opening our hearts and standing for connection would exhaust us. They saw that at times the amount of what wounded and separated us exceeded our capacity to be open and to connect. So, they gave us a radically compassionate pass. They told us, ‘It is not yours to complete the work.” Yet they also reminded us nevertheless, “you may not desist from it.” As much as we might want to sit back and relax for the next 20 years, we simply can’t. We can’t quit. We can’t give up. It’s not what Jews do. We don’t close our hearts. Despite everything we’ve endured, we continue to open them up.

Not just because the day we quit is the day we let the crazies and the craziness win. But because we actually can make a difference. As puny as our efforts seem to be, they actually might change things.

This summer’s Chronicle (if not every issue!) is literally the chronicle of what happens when we open our hearts and respond to the noise out there by building our community here. But don’t just read the Chronicle. Live it. Spend your Tuesday evenings at the pool with our Summer of Fun events. Play pickleball. Participate in an ongoing program. Sit and have a cup of coffee in the Linden-Baldwin Café.

Sometimes, I like to take my lunch, sit in the Lentzner Promenade, and just watch our community. Because I am watching all of you open your hearts, stand for connection, and do the job of giving the gift of our connections – our community – to the next generation. And that changes everything.