Last Night at Thursday Night is Health Care Change Night on Daily Kos, diarist Kitsap River posted The Lost Decades, a moving account of the three decades of life she can expect statistically to lose as a result of our current health care “system.” Kitsap wants to know why someone should be able to profit from decisions that ultimately cost her the functioning of her kidneys, and why they should continue to profit by denying her the transplant she needs in order to grow old with her lifelong lover.

Meanwhile, at streetprophets, ramara has posted the weekly D’Var Torah, Nitzavim – Va-yeilekh, the last reading in the book of Deuteronomy.

Moses has reached the end of his days. He has finished writing the scrolls of Torah, one for each of the appointed elders, and has offered the people a choice:

You can choose Torah, which is life, or you can choose the ways of other peoples, which brings with it a spiritual death. Choose life, he tells them, though he fears they will choose death. You can do it, it is not in heaven, it is not across the sea, it is very near to you. (ramara’s words)

Ramara reminisced about her own experience confronting cancer, when she was forced to choose between giving up, or finding a new intensity and meaning in life. She chose life through her newly conceived weekly D’Var Torah series at streetprophets. President Obama ended his speech on health care with a similar exhortation. While remembering Senator Kennedy, he offered us a moral choice: would we as a nation choose justice, and hence life?

Several years ago, someone I trusted let me down very badly, betraying not only me, but the people of my community in my name. For awhile, I mistrusted everyone around me, even friends I had known and worked with for years. I doubted the existence of G-d. G-d was not required to exist. There was, I realized, at least a 50% chance that S/he did not, and that my insistence in following an ancient text instead of looking out for myself was simply laughable.

I was surrounded on all sides by darkness…the “dark night of the soul.” Then I knew suddenly that I could be the person I wanted to be. I could choose to worship a just G-d even in G-d’s apparent absence, because doing so would help me to create the world I wanted to experience.

Nobody can take our lives from us. They can only intimidate us. Confronted with 9-11, our previous administration chose to abandon compassion. We can choose another path.

It is we who fail to live the lives we are given. G-d is resting within us. When we choose the compassionate path, we become co-creators of the world.

It was then that I came to understand a puzzling quote from the Zohar: “With Beginning, — created G-d.”

@laurenreichelt on twitter