February, 2022 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
There is a story I love and hate, about Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol, one of the eighteenth-century Hasidic masters. He’s the guy who said, “When I get to the World to Come, they won’t ask me, ‘Why weren’t you Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why weren’t you Zusya?’” But it’s not the story that has been driving me nuts for decades. My Zusya story—which you’ve probably already heard me tell because I think and talk about it all the time—is the one in which two students of another rebbe were stumped about a famous rabbinic dictum that one should “bless God for the bad as well as the good” (that’s in Berakhot 9b). How can you possibly bless God for the bad? Their teacher sent them to inquire of Reb Zusya in his little cabin where he had spent years in poverty and episodic illness. When the two young students asked their question of the frail old man, he said, “I don’t know why your teacher thought to send you to me. I’ve never had a bad thing happen in my life.”
I’ve been on sabbatical now for almost four months. This is the first of all my sabbaticals for which I made no plans at all. I just wanted to rest, to think, to renew and then to see what unfolded from there. The first month or so I was happily self-absorbed, reading books about the inner life, mulling, drawing a bit. I started making a life-sized doll out of old clothes and every pillow we’d never thrown out over the decades. Her head was blue and she had lovely green hair made out of stuffed points of fabric. I took a couple of short family trips, enjoyed lots of walks, plenty of quiet time. I took a big break from news and an even bigger break from Zoom. After some weeks I began to feel quiet and calm and restored.
Then I broke my arm playing pickleball. Then our beloved dog died. Then a couple of much larger and more difficult things, mostly in the medical realm, began and continue in my family. (I’m sorry to be vague, but I’m not free to share details right now.) The sabbatical that I had not planned began to look a lot different from what I had [not] planned on.
So I return to that question whether anything that happens in life is actually bad. I note first that Reb Zusya was speaking only of his own life; he didn’t have the agency to judge other people’s lives, and neither do I. Which makes me think about various kinds of badness. There is unarguably a lot of badness in the public realm: immoral activities, hurtful behavior, acts of violence, harm to others and to the earth. There are also terrible stories of unfortunate and difficult things happening to other people. Reb Zusya, like us, lived in politically fraught and violent times, and I imagine he had opinions about them. I’m trying to understand the difference between this public kind of “badness,” which is easy to see and easy to name, and whatever it was that Reb Zusya had never experienced in his life.
Was it bad when Ibroke my arm? It didn’t make me very happy. Of the things I most wanted to do during my sabbatical, like working on my doll and making soups, most involved having use of my dominant hand. So I said to myself, “I get to be even slower, even more inward.” I checked that out for a while…like seven weeks. Was it bad when my beloved studio, unused all those rainy weeks, got damp and full of rat refuse? That didn’t make me very happy either, but I cleaned it up one-armed and made habitable again.
The doll didn’t survive the rain and pests very well, as she had serious structural issues, and is now in the landfill. But other projects are starting to percolate. In the meantime I read some books, like one about dreams, that meant a lot to me. Was it bad when Pulga died? She had a hard end and many tears were shed. But death, you know…. Everyone dies, even adored dogs. Sad, difficult, but not bad.
Is it bad when people I love get sick? Can there be a bad diagnosis, a bad prognosis? Is death bad? Is suffering bad?
I think that it might be this sense of “and” that Reb Zusya knew so well that he could never simply call anything that happened “bad.” Within each experience, many things are happening at once; and often the more intense the experience, the more different colors, sparks, tones, and sensations are in it at once. Such big experiences might even be described as being fractal—like the shoreline, which looks straight or curved from an airplane, but up close has ripples upon ripples, and then inside each ripple the complex shapes of every grain of sand, and then the molecules below that.
Reb Zusya was poor. He was sick. He lived in fractious times, and so do we. I can only imagine that he was gifted with some kind of vision that enabled him to stand inside the experiences of his own life and see “and.” He could see the blessing along with the misfortune along with the love along with the loss along with the growth along with the diminishment. And then maybe even the fractal facets within these. When we stand within an experience, “we can hardly ever experience something all by itself.”
That brings me back to the matter of “blessing God” for these bad-from-ten-thousand-feet but also fractally complex life experiences. That doesn’t seem so hard to wrap my head around. Whoever and whatever God or God-ness is, I think that may be where It can be seen, from inside life, looking at the immense complexity and dare I say beauty of its moments, whether I like those moments or not.
Maybe that’s another one of those things one can only say for oneself and not for anyone else’s experience. Maybe I can’t even say it for myself, at least not with certainty, at least not all the time. It remains to be seen.
