July-August, 2022 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
There is a tradition that mashiach, the messiah, will be born on Tisha B’Av, the day when the Temple was destroyed. Tisha B’av marks the hurban, the catastrophe, actually the double catastrophe, of the decimation of both the first and second temples and the exile of our ancestors.
According to this legend, somewhere in the midst of all that ruination a baby will be born who will grow up to redeem history.
Some months ago, before Mickey got sick, I had an early-morning dream that captivated me. I spent some time with the dream, and what came to me was a sense that embedded in the universe, in everything, is a kind of joy. This was a new idea for me.
I like life and like the world very much, but I have always assumed, as Camus wrote in The Stranger, “the benign indifference of the universe.” I figured that the universe neither wants nor abhors; life and death move on as they do, and we may care but the world does not. Like the ocean that is happy to be surfed upon and equally happy to drown you, the world is neutral.
I am not even sure what I mean by words like “the world” and “the universe.” These mean to me something like the stage upon which everything happens, what theologian Paul Tillich called the “Ground of Being.” It is a new thought to me that the universe is not entirely neutral, but that it has in its everything-ness a quality of joy, of tenderness, of delight. The idea came from a dream, but in the saddest time of my life, I am trying it on.
Writing this column is my first effort at putting this into words, so here goes. I don’t mean that there are always beautiful flowers to look at, even when [fill in the blank with your disaster of choice]. It’s more like if you zero in close to even something very, very difficult, and you look at it carefully, it actually has many mingled energies. Maybe there is love in there, or desire, or fruitfulness along with all else.
I think of the tenants in an apartment complex in Minsk, Belarus, who repainted a piece of graffiti of two defiant DJ’s on a wall and spawned a resistance movement (“The Battle for the Mural—and the Future of Belarus” by Sarah A. Topol, New York Times Magazine, March 30, 2022). An autocrat in power. 24/7 surveillance. Threat of jail and worse. All of that, bitter and true, but, at the same time, a sweet belligerence, people coming alive in new ways. Not victory, not at all, but mixed in with the rottenness and cruelty is that beautiful liveliness.
His is a set of experiences I’m just reading about in a magazine. That sense of a joyful and generous universe may be more evident in experiences much closer to home. Over the years I’ve asked many people a typical rabbi-ish question: When in your life have you felt closest to the Divine? Some people say that they have felt close to God, or the Mystery, or most alive, or whatever their own language might be, when watching a beautiful sunset or holding a new baby. But a surprising number of people say that they have felt especially close to the Mystery when in the presence of death. Something opens up there, a kind of love, a kind of awe.
We’ve all been sequestered for the past two-plus years because of COVID. Now, in various ways, to varying degrees, many of us are creeping out of our houses and beginning, with some trepidation, to re-enter the world. It seems to me that this re-entry is about more than just going back to the shul or the Film Festival or the Music Festival. We are encountering the world anew. We are talking to people we haven’t seen lately.
Here’s the conversation I have any number of times a day as I bump into friends I haven’t seen: “So how are you doing?” Dour face, shrug, “Well, you know, the world….”
The world, indeed. There is much to be dispirited and angry about in our present circumstances. And much to fear about the future. But something feels, dare I say, disrespectful about categorizing our world, our universe, our Ground of Being in such sweeping terms. Even the hardest places and situations in our world have a fractal complexity. As when we stand around the bed of a beloved who is dying, and we feel there some kind of awe along with the sorrow, so too in places that feel cruel or unjust or ruined, places of hurban, I wonder if there might be more there than just the evident bitterness? I don’t know; I can only imagine and wonder.
As some of you know, I’ve long been interested in the places where the beautiful and the ugly meet, or the difficult and the easy-to-appreciate. I just re-read a story told by the organizer and public thinker Laura Chasin: “Two years ago…my husband had a terrible accident. He was swimming in a lake and a motorboat ran over him. The propeller cut a gaping gash in his leg. We rushed him to the hospital, but the doctor said that the wound was too large to be sewn up. The only thing we could do was keep the area clean and dry. ‘The two sides of the wound will reach out to each other,’ the doctor said. ‘The wound wants to be whole’” (from Solving Tough Problems by Adam Kahane). When we think about our terribly wounded world, it is easy to see the gashes, but there is also an invitation to see that the wounds want to be whole.
As I have been mourning Mickey, I have been embroidering. It’s a way for me to think and feel, slowly, stitch by stitch. I recently made an image of a wound, a big red gash across a piece of white linen. I sewed beads onto the red fabric of the wound, to make the gash look goopy and raw, like the wound in my heart feels right now. Then I turned the whole thing into a challah cover. I would like to be able to bless a wound, to feel its holiness, to sense the energy in it towards wholeness.
I would like to be able to bless the joy that I think might be hidden in my own grief. I haven’t quite been able to put my new challah cover on top of a challah on my Shabbat table, but I’d like to.
There will be difficult times ahead—for ourselves, for our community, for our country, and for many in our world. As I write this, the Supreme Court has just overturned Roe v. Wade, and promises to go after other hard-won rights and freedoms. These seem like the worst of times, but as we meet them, I wonder if there might be beauty, joy, holiness, generosity, right in the mix with all that we abhor and fear? It was a dream that got me riding on this train of thought, but I am starting to think that, for me, this question—not the answer but the question—might be what is meant by “faith.” Faith might be the curiosity, the wondering whether the wound wants to be whole, whether there might be joy in the hurting places in the world and in our own hearts, whether there can be love and awe around the death bed along with sorrow and defeat? It might be something about wondering if there might be a baby a-borning in the midst of all the shards and ruination.
I hope that, as we move toward a new year, we might be able to look closely at the wounds of our world and draw strength from what we perceive. Hope is, after all, an act of faith, and we can practice hope even when faith is difficult.
