September, 2022 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
I loved our women’s retreat this year! That is not a sentiment that you always hear from me after the retreat, but this year there was an ease, a simplicity, a depth. It was a pleasure. This year’s gathering was, if I’m counting right, our thirty-second retreat. Some women come for the first time every year, but many of us have kind of grown up together with this annual confab. We’ve seen each other from early work lives, menstrual cramps, new relationships, young motherhoods, back-to-the-land ambitions, political awakenings, and earthshaking spiritual discoveries on through all the events of mid-life and now to cane use, grandmother-hood, artificial knees and hips.
As we were swimming around naked in the glorious water of the Navarro River, several people commented on the bobbing heads of grey hair. Beautiful! There were, as every year, some younger women, but even they have grown older. Our theme for this latest retreat was the search for and celebration of wisdom. As I like to tell young women becoming bat mitzvah, we are living in the greatest time in Jewish history to be a woman. We are living in the generation of the emergence of the voices of women! Women’s Torah commentary, women’s midrash, women rabbis, women’s ritual, and so much more. As this efflorescence continues, we are hearing queer voices as well—a new and redemptive development in Jewish text and culture.
There has been a new attention (new as in the last 50 years, let’s say) to the milestones in women’s life cycles: from this arose the simchat chochmah, the celebration of the attainment of wisdom. Our own Fran Schwartz celebrated her simchat chochmah on her 70th birthday, a joyous and inspiring occasion for all present. Others, including my beautiful friend and teacher Savina Teubal, of blessed memory, celebrated their attainment of wisdom at age 60.
How can one say that one has attained wisdom at a specific age? Especially at the tender age of 60?
This idea of the attainment of wisdom as part of the life cycle, for people of all genders, has long intrigued me. Does age make people wise? I look around at those grey heads around me (in the mirror at my own) and I’m not sure.
I don’t think that every old person is wise. And even the ones I think are wise have plenty of bumps in their calm and thoughtful exteriors. Can young people be wise? What do I even mean by wisdom? Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said of a very different matter, “I can’t define it, but I know it if I see it.” That works for me with wisdom. I know it if I see it.
As part of my prep for the women’s retreat, I dove into the book of Job, a fascinating and horrifying story: God, in a wager with Satan, allows Job to be afflicted with every terrible suffering to see if Job will curse God. Job’s home and fields are destroyed. His children die. He is afflicted with boils. Job does not curse, but he crumbles in despair. Three “friends” come allegedly to comfort him. They each challenge him, saying, essentially, “You must have done SOMETHING wrong to warrant all this affliction.” Job engages with each of them, proclaiming his innocence and his bafflement. Finally God Godself challenges Job. There is a climactic scene, a kind of awakening, a renewal.
In most conversations about the book, the friends are looked at as creeps who blame the victim in the guise of consoling him. But The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, by Carol A. Newsom, challenges this view. It sees the friends as “multi-vocal,” an essential part of the story. “…the truth about piety, human suffering, the nature of God and the moral order of the cosmos can be adequately addressed only by a plurality of unmerged consciousnesses engaging one another in open-ended dialogue.” That’s academic-ese for saying that you can only come to clarity about the big issues of life by bumping and grinding with others in a lifetime of conversation and confrontation.
These days I am reducing this thought to an even more basic one: there is no way out but through. We have to go through life, with its torments and conundrums—and its long, not-always-satisfying conversations—to attain wisdom. There are no shortcuts. I saw wisdom at the retreat when various women talked about their responses to personal loss and crisis. And I saw it in much smaller ways as well: the ways that people would help each other down to the river, the ways people moved smoothly from one space to another without worrying about which chair they sat in, the times when people didn’t insist on saying yet one more thing before the session ended. I heard in this absence of fuss and anxiety a kind of small-scale wisdom: there will be a way to the river, there will be a chair, there will be a time when I can be heard with attention.
It’s a hard read—it sat on my desk for months before I finished it. But I’m glad I did. I can’t stop thinking about the problem of crisis thinking in so many realms, close-to-home as well as distant. I’m thinking about how even well-meaning activists frame so much of what is happening around us in crisis language which may make us numb and hopeless. Endemic crisis thinking not only makes us chronically anxious, but might also keep us from thinking well and acting wisely.
There is no way out but through. I write this, very intentionally, at the beginning of the holy month of Elul, the month that asks us to engage in cheshbon ha-nefesh, accounting of our souls, our lives, and specifically of our past year. A mark, I dare say, of my own nascent wisdom is that I am not as hard on myself during Elul as I used to be.
I no longer use the month just to catalogue my failures, wrongs and deficiencies (though if I did, there would be plenty of material). Instead, I will look over the year I have just lived and to reflect on its important moments. I will think about how I have responded in those moments, how I have changed, what I have learned. This year, which has been full of challenge for all of us (and some very specific ones for me), has been full of voices telling us what we should think and what we should do. We have our actual friends, family and community, but also our “friends” in media and culture and the larger zeitgeist, all speaking in our direction. Life is multi-vocal.
One way we might approach the accounting aspect of Elul would be to think about all these crises and all these voices coming at us. And we might reflect on how we have tried to make sense of it all, to find clarity, to figure out how to take the next step. We might look at ourselves as being in the messy, chaotic process of attaining wisdom, a process probably never completed.
I’ve never before thought of Elul—with its cheshbon ha-nefesh, its inner account-taking—as a kind of simchat chochmah, a celebration of the attainment of wisdom. We know as Jews and friends of Jews that it is important to celebrate victories even if they are only partial. And so it may be with simchat chochmah. There may never be a moment of the attainment of wisdom. But I find it helpful to think of myself, all of our selves, as moving in the direction of wisdom—on the bumpy, frustrating, confusing path of real life with all its noise. I find it hopeful, and true, to think of myself and all of us getting wiser through the process of living another year.
As we enter Elul this year, I wish us all simchat chochmah: find joy in the awareness that we are growing wiser, gratitude for all those wise-ish friends who advise, console and confront us, clarity about when to listen and when to ignore their advisements, acceptance (and celebration) that we still have a ways to go. There is no way out but through, and we’re in it together. L’shana tovah, my dear community.
