April, 2023 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
This morning I find myself remembering a really dumb book that passed through Mickey’s and my hands many years ago. It was called something like Men: An Owner’s Manual. Bad gender binary, bad hierarchical politics, bad all of it. But it was kind of funny at the time, and we read bits and pieces to each other with the appropriate eye-rolls. The one thing I remember is a chapter called something like “Men and Counting Behavior.” It claimed that if a man and a woman see a waterfall, the woman will say, “How beautiful!” The man will say, “Well, if it’s 50 feet high and there are a thousand gallons of water, the velocity must be.so many cubic feet per second.”
I guess I’m thinking a bit about counting behavior these days, with the new moon of Nisan making her appearance two days after the Spring equinox, the counting of the omer coming up in a couple weeks, and Mickey’s first yahrzeit five days from today as I write. This past year I’ve done the appropriate traditional Jewish counting: seven days of shiva after Mickey’s burial; 30 days to his shloshim; 11 months of kaddish (this not quite traditional following the death of a spouse, but I chose to observe the custom of 11 months as one would when mourning a parent); and now the yahrzeit a year after his death—following a little interior counting debate about whether to observe the Hebrew or Gregorian date.
Over the years I’ve taught this counting cadence countless times, facilitated it for many mourners, and now lived it myself this past year. It has left me with some thoughts about counting.
One of the priceless gifts of this past year for me has been talking to many other people whose spouses have died and receiving their hard-earned wisdom. How could I have lived all these years without realizing that so many friends, neighbors, people in our community are widowed? Every one of them reminded me that mourning is a deeply personal and idiosyncratic process. No two people mourn the same way. There is no right way and there is no right amount of time to grieve.
I made a decision to mourn deeply, not to shine myself on or shake myself into “recovery” before I was really recovered, whatever in the world that might mean. Somehow I intuited that, for all its excruciating painfulness, as a mourner I was entering into a profound period of my life. I would have given anything to skip it and just have Mickey back, but since that wasn’t going to happen, I didn’t want to shield myself from the experience of grief.
I found shiva very difficult. I was exhausted and overwhelmed. So many people! So much attention. I could barely sit up. People I love very much, some from far away, were here and wanted to connect, but there was very little me to connect with. I was mostly in the grave with Mickey. I do remember with gratitude some surprising and perceptive words that were said about Mickey. That helped me a lot. On the last day I remember Sandra leading the whole houseful of us out the front door, down the road a bit. That felt beautiful. I can’t imagine NOT having sat shiva, even though little of it penetrated and a lot of it was taxing. Everything in the world felt formless and shapeless and overwhelming, but my dear community and beloved tradition offered some shape to things when I couldn’t possibly have done it myself.
At the shloshim, some rabbi friends of mine organized a zoom minyan. Because I planned to continue saying kaddish, the shloshim wasn’t a huge marker for me. But it was somewhere around that 30-day marker that I began to say of myself that I felt like I had just awakened in a hospital ICU with both my legs amputated. Some progress, I guess, from being in the grave myself.
I was saying kaddish every night with the sweet Nechama Minyon [sic], a zoom minyan organized by a rabbi after her mother died, which has continued for a couple years now. That little minyan was an important anchor for me and still is, though I don’t go nearly as often these days. It is an hour a day to be a mourner. The first month or so I cried through every minute of the service. After awhile I just mostly cried at the kaddish.At some point, even though I wasn’t crying as much, I started hurting more, not less. I was still in the ICU with my legs amputated, and the anesthesia was wearing off.
The end of the shloshim corresponded with my going back to work. Oh my goodness, it was so hard to concentrate. I had to start listening to other people and caring about them. Other people had become widows! People’s lives had gone on. I’m not the only one. Every day I would say to myself, “Just show up.” All of you met me with the most exquisite kindness and care. That was amazing and a little embarrassing. And so necessary. I was carried gently by so many of you back into being your rabbi.
One day many months later, I noticed that I laughed at something! Another day I realized that I was thinking about something that didn’t have to do with grief or Mickey or my inner state. One day I actually had an idea about something. These little markers came slowly. There was a lot of time in between each. When the 11-month marker came up, I was sometimes doing more than just showing up. Sometimes I had a little energy. Sometimes I was preoccupied by something besides my own sadness. Sometimes I even had fun.
Now I’m coming up on Mickey’s yahrzeit and I am thinking about counting behavior. In this past year I didn’t heal on a schedule. If anything, I appreciated having these markers like a vague chart somewhere far above my head, a map to glance at as I moved through the much wilder, less predictable territory of my own grief. I’m still grieving. Maybe I always will be. Maybe it’s not something I do; it’s something I am.
I’ve found myself recoiling from the idea of “again,” as in “now I can do what I used to do again.” There is no “again.” I will never “again” be who or how I was before Mickey’s illness and death. There is no return to before. Life only moves forward. But life is not linear either. At least grief isn’t. In my experience, it circles and loops back on itself and takes abrupt plunges and hurtles up and out and sideways. It has layers. Thick times and thin. Height, depth, texture, color.
So too with collective experience, with history. So too with Pesach, with counting the omer. The map over our heads says that we are moving from one place to another—from slavery to freedom to revelation, from Mitzrayim to Sinai to the Promised Land. And we do, in so many ways, but hardly ever in a straight line, counting from one station in a direct path to the next. The map of the holidays, like the map of grief, doesn’t describe our lived experience of enslavement and release, but it tells us that these places exist, and that there can be movement between them.
The omer, which we begin counting on the second night of Pesach and continue for 49 days, maps the territory between our post-slavery arrival in the formless wilderness and the gift of Torah. It probably didn’t happen in 49 days, not in history, and not in present society or in our own lives as we negotiate whatever wilderness we find ourselves in. It probably wasn’t, and isn’t, a straight line for any of us. But the map suggests the possibility of movement, of ongoing life, of change and growth. That’s probably reason enough for any of us to want to count.
PAIGE NOTES
Chodesh tov! This past new moon brings us into the Hebrew month of Nisan, as we liberate ourselves from winter and from slavery! In the days leading up to Pesach, we may choose to engage in the spiritual cleansing rituals of Bedikat Chametz and Biur Chametz. Bedikat Chametz is the practice of searching our home for any leavened food that we will not eat during Passover. Traditionally, we do this the night before Pesach by candlelight so that our full focus is only on the few inches that our flame illuminates. We use a feather to sweep up the crumbs, traditionally the same feather we have used all year to glaze our Shabbos challah with an egg wash. We scoop it all into a wooden spoon so that we can offer it to a sacred fire for the Biur Chametz ritual.
In Jerusalem the morning before Pesach, the streets are filled with tiny bonfires of everyone burning their chametz together—quite a sight!
An abundance of meaningful symbolism can be found in these rituals that lead us to eating matzah rather than chametz. Bread rises like an ego so the Pesach matzah diet can be an annual egocheck. Bread also takes up more space, so matzah can represent practicing minimalism, releasing what in our lives and homes takes up too much room, both literally and metaphorically. Lastly, bread is soft to chew so choosing the harder crunch of matzah reminds us to not always hide from our shadows, but to be with and work through the harder parts of life.
As you engage with the Bedikat Chametz ritual, take a moment to discern what else you might release at this time. Mitzrayim doesn’t mean only Egypt, but also literally the “narrow place,” so may these rituals enable and empower us to expand from our own personal narrow places into liberating freedom!
from my ancestors to yours,
paige
