Erev Rosh Hashanah 5773, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life
עולם מוזר [...] יש בדידות ,יש כאב [...] ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע Olam muzar […] yeish b’didut, yeis k’ev [...] u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“This world is strange […] There is loneliness, and there is pain […] And no one knows what tomorrow will bring.” [1]
Tonight and tomorrow, on Rosh HaShanah, we mark the birthday of the world in a time of change and uncertainty. Some of the changes we have seen are strange and wonderful; others, strange and frightening. And, indeed, no one knows what tomorrow will bring, situated as we are in a time of economic and institutional and political transition.
ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“and as for what will be tomorrow, there is not one person who knows.”[2]
In some strange way, the words of this Israeli pop song make me think of that new text-messaging acronym: “YOLO: You only live once.” I’m sure this slogan is supposed to be upbeat and encouraging, but I can’t help hearing it fatalistically: “YOLO! Seize today, because tomorrow it’s probably just gonna get worse.”
Live the one life you’re given to live, and if you take too many risks, if you make too many mistakes, אין זה משנה ein zeh meshaneh—it doesn’t matter all that much.
אין זה משנה ein zeh meshaneh—literally, it doesn’t change. Within that phrase lies a key word for today: שנה. A year. The cycle of days that brings us back to the beginning. What does it mean for us, in this time and in this place, in this changed and changing world, to wish one another a shanah tovah?
For the students and teachers among us, שנה represents a familiar activity: learning. In Hebrew, shin-nun-heh, the letters and sounds that mean “earth’s trip around the sun,” can also mean to learn, to repeat, to go over again. Learning, for the Rabbis of our ancient tradition, meant reviewing and repeating. Young men memorized the debates and questions and disagreements of their rabbis, repeating not only legal outcomes but all the preliminary dialogue and debate. They preserved majority opinions and minority ones, too. They recalled and re-told tales of rabbinic wisdom and folly. They remembered and they repeated. An old model of learning, perhaps: the parroting students faithfully regurgitating information placed in their heads. Yet not entirely outdated or unhelpful: recalling and cherishing the lessons of the past and preserving lively debate so that we need not make similar errors in the future, so that we preserve our heritage, so that we benefit from the collected wisdom of the generations who came before us. In the Torah, we read that the ideal political ruler for Israel would carry with him at all times משנה התורה הזאת mishneih ha’Torah ha’zot—a copy of this Torah, this teaching.[3] Why? So that he might be accountable to the truths contained in it, so that he might understand his responsibility to the Jewish people, past present and future. He carries a copy, a second Torah, so that he might remain faithful to the “original.”
In these days and times, how can we tell a copy from the original? Do we even think it is possible to simply reproduce a copy? Would such a static, faithful copy be desirable? Lady Gaga “copies” Madonna who “copies” voguing houses in New York City… yet each “version” remains distinct. And, after all, didn’t the star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “copy” Ovid’s rendering of the ancient Roman lovers Pyramus and Thisbe? Copies and originals blend; African beats become soul classics become hip-hop remixes become Afro-hip-hop fusion. Every repetition is a repetition with a difference.[4]
משנה, learning, can never be a simple parroting—and not only because direct copying is nothing more than plagiarism. Learning might be a repetition, a going-over, a turning back to the collected wisdom of Sages who precede us, but we also add our questions and our interpretations. We become part of future repetitions, like the bordering commentaries on a page of Talmud. Whether we consider our “Torah” to be the five books of Moses or our native country’s constitution or the canon of Western literature or Sondheim’s songbooks or the collection of the MET, we and our learning contribute to a conversation that long precedes us and, we fervently hope, will continue long after we are gone. A new year invites us to make משנה תורה mishneih Torah, a “second Torah,” of our own. Our “second Torah” must be recognizably linked to its “original” ancestor, else we run the risk of separating ourselves from generations upon generations on whose shoulders we stand. And yet our “second Torah” adds nothing to the vibrancy of contemporary life if it does not respond to the changes in our world.
I wish for all of us, then, משנה טובה Mishneh tovah—good learning.
And so we “repeat” the annual cycle. Another shanah turns. We sit through the same services. The shofar blasts the same patterns. We hear that melody again and again and again, forever it seems, l’olam va’ed!
And yet the world surprises us: patterns break; mutations emerge without precedent; variation abounds. Indeed, Judaism calls God משנה הבריות meshaneh ha’briyot—one who makes various creations. There’s even a blessing for it: When you see a monkey, the Talmud urges, or an elephant—a strange and wondrous creature you might not see every day—you take a moment to recognize the miraculous variety of God’s creation. “Blessed are You, Eternal, […] for making various creatures.”[5] It’s a blessing that inspires us to consider how we treat the natural world, how we take responsibility for the billions of organisms we cannot even see—those hundreds and thousands of species deep in rainforests or floating in the dark deep. And it is a blessing, too, about change.
Remember your high school yearbook, and those endless entries at the back, usually from people you barely spoke to: “Don’t eva change!” And those captions beneath the photos: “Most likely to…” “Least likely to…” We recall our days in patterns and predictions.
Well, if God—כביכול, if it were possible to say such a thing—if God had a yearbook entry, it might read: “Least and most likely to change—and to change others.” משנה meshaneh: God as the One who changes.
I’d like to think of the blessing meshane habriyot as a blessing over the undeniable fact that our Creator did not make us static. A statement of profound gratitude for the reality that our God changes each of God’s creatures. Yes: Blessed are you, Eternal our God, […] who makes different creations—who makes myriad creatures, strange and familiar. Yes, and: Blessed are you, Eternal, […] who changes creations—who surprises us each, during our lifetimes, with our own capacity for growth, with our amazing ability to remain recognizably ourselves and yet sometimes be utterly foreign to the life we thought or assumed or were told we would lead.
This is the same God who “turned the flinty rock to a pool of water” (Psalms 114).[6] Miraculous and terrifying! The reliable landscape floods and turns firm ground into waters in which we might drown. Blessed and miraculous! The unforgiving stone becomes a life-giving source of water. A new year opens us to the potential for a sudden change.
I wish for all of us an openness to משנה לטובה meshaneh l’tovah—the One who changes us for the better.
עולם מוזר Olam muzar—It’s a strange world in which we live. Constantly changing. At times inspiring. At times overwhelming. עולם מוזר כולו שלך Olam muzar, kulo shelcha—“This world is strange, and all of it is yours.”[7] The responsibility for the coming shanah lies with each of us.
With an eye to ten days from now, to Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement, we begin our new year by reflecting on the past one, returning to our deeds and misdeeds. We make atonement through a process called תשובה teshuva—from a verb that means “return,” go back. שובו אלי ואשובה Shuvu elai ve’ashuva—“Turn to me and I will turn back, too,” says God.[8] Change direction. In Rabbinic parlance, תשובה means “reply” or “answer”: a dialectic process. The world asks us many questions, and it is up to us to respond. A new shanah is a call for us leshanot—to change, to become agents of change in a world that needs changing.
Sometimes the change we are called to bring about is external: alleviation of poverty, education of the next generation, enrichment of the arts. And sometimes it is internal: a change in our own habits, our own outlook. In this new shanah, as we return to our learning, to our mishnah, we return the same and yet different. The process of teshuva cannot be one of returning to the starting block exactly as we were, running in circles. Such a feat would be impossible, at any rate: each event, each moment in our lives changes us in some subtle way. And such a “return” would be empty and meaningless. Repentance is not about going back to the moment before we erred, but rather, changing our direction, changing our pattern, changing our behavior.
No matter how overwhelming it seems, no matter how powerless we may feel—if we see a need for change in ourselves or in the world, we simply do not have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for change to come. Rabbi Tarfon used to say, “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, yet neither are you free to desist from it.”
I wish us each a שנה טובה, a good year, and I wish that we each can seize an opportunity to be ראש שינוי, a leader of change.
עולם מוזר כולו שלך כשהתקווה איתך נשארת Olam muzar, kulo shelcha k’she’hatikva itcha nisheret—“This world is strange, and it’s all yours, so long as the hope remains within you.” אל תאבד אותה ,תשמור עליה Al t’abed otah, tishmor aleiha—“Do not lose [that hope]; protect it.” ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“No one knows what tomorrow will bring.”
No one knows what tomorrow will bring, for this strange world is yours to learn and to know, to shape and to change, in this new year.
שנה ושינויים טובים shana v’shinui’im tovim, A good year, and good changes, to each of you.
[1] שיר תקווה (“Song of Hope), Miri Mesika, words by Michael Vaknin, translation by Rabbi Karyn Kedar.
[2] Ibid., translation by Nikki DeBlosi.
[3] Deuteronomy 16:18.
[4] With acknowledgements to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
[5] Gemara to Mishnah Brachot 6.
[6] Acknowledgements to Professor Joy Ladin, whose workshop on the Psalms as transformative text continues to influence my thinking (from Transforming Beitecha 2010, CBST’s conference on LGBTQ inclusion).
[7] “Song of Hope,” transl. DeBlosi.
[8] Malachai 3:7.
Showing posts with label transformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transformation. Show all posts
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Friday, November 18, 2011
Evening-Fall
There is evening, and there is morning. One day turns into another.
And yet, sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I’m still standing before an open rectangle cut into the ground. I see the clods of earth, there, where I shoveled them over my father’s coffin. I hear that sound. The thud of earth falling … And part of me falls with it.
What does it feel like to lose someone?
To lose someone… feels like falling.
At least, for me it does. And I wonder, will I be able to rise at the end of this year—the traditional Jewish year of mourning for a parent? I wonder, will I again be able to get mixed-up in the lives of those around me? Will I always feel removed, as I do so often now—suspended, wandering aimlessly?
What does it feel like to lose someone?
For me, it’s like being Isaac. Isaac who walks, alone, at twilight.
When Sarah dies, Abraham turns his grief outward. He comes לספד לשרה ולבכתה, lispod l’Sarah v’livkotah, “to eulogize Sarah and bewail her” (Genesis 23:2). And then he is able to move on: ויקם אברהם מעל פני מתו וידבר..., va’yakom Avraham mei’al p’nei meito vay’daber, “And Abraham rose from beside his dead, and he spoke…” (3). Abraham gets up and gets going: he negotiates for the Cave of Machpelah as a burial-place; he fills his time with concrete tasks; he even looks toward the future, planning a marriage for Isaac.
In stark contrast, his son, who disappears from the Torah’s narrative after Mount Moriah. Isaac is conspicuously absent at his mother’s burial. Three years after his mother’s death, Isaac still mourns.1 Not active, not vocal, not like his father, Isaac is passive and pensive. ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out לשוח lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
Alone, in a field, as the darkness descends, what does Isaac do? How should we translate that rare verb, לשוח lasuach?
Traditional commentators offer several interpretations: a שיח siach is a bush or a shrub, so Isaac went out to walk in nature, or to work in the fields. 2 A שיח siach is a conversation, so Isaac went out into the field to meet up with friends. 3
Perhaps the most pervasive traditional interpretation is that Isaac went into the field to pray. The Midrash identifies Psalms as a source for our tradition of prayer three times a day: ערב בבקר בצהרים אשיחה, Erev va’voker va’tzohorayim asichah, “Evening, morning, and noon, I plead” (Psalms 55:18). According to this midrash, we pray in the afternoon to imitate Isaac, who walked out into the field at twilight—that strange mix of day and night—lasuach, to pray mincha, the afternoon service. 4
I guess he began with Ashrei, the opening prayer? “Happy are they who dwell in your house, O God”? …. But, no. He couldn’t have.
As a mourner, I can only imagine Isaac’s שיחה, sichah, out there in the field as night began to fall.
It’s three years since she died... Why can’t he shake off this darkness? Why can’t he eulogize and cry, and then “rise up,” like his father Abraham? Isaac lingers in his grief. He can’t return to routines. He pours out words, but they’re not like Abraham’s neat and purposeful sentences. Not rational. Not a linear presentation of thoughts and wishes. Rather, a lament—as Rachel Adler describes: “contradictory rather than emotionally consistent.” 5
Whatever Isaac voices out there, in the field, at twilight, it is not a siach—not a conversation where Isaac says “X” and God replies “Y,” but rather lament’s “tumultuous and disordered language.” 6 At least, that’s how I imagine it. Unruly.
Because the world just doesn’t make sense anymore. Language fails… “How are you holding up?” Am I holding up!? What do I have to hold up? What’s holding me up?
It’s dark. And I’m falling.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ער, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
Isaac went out to pray in the field at twilight… Perhaps. We might read לשוח lasuach as לשתחוות lishtachavot, which means “to bow”—in prostration and deference. Va’anachnu korim u’mishtachavim u’modim, we bend and bow and give thanks before God. 7
(But) How difficult it is to bow to God when I am already bent in grief.
What if Isaac bends not in prayer, in thanks, in acknowledgement of God? What if it is Isaac’s emotion that bends him? He sinks down to the earth in unremitting sorrow. So, don’t read לשוח lasuach but rather: ויצא יצחק לשוחה בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak la’shuchah basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to a pit8 in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62). In the depths of despair, Isaac wanders to a shuchah, a gaping hole in the earth, a reminder of his mother’s burial in the deep dark ground, a landscape that reflects his own low feelings. How could he carry on with life when his mother has been lowered into the dust?
Isaac walks into the field at evening-fall to bow… not in prayer, but in despair. Shachoach: to lower, to incline downward, to be bent, to be oppressed. 9 To lower his body toward the ground—because his soul is already lowered. From Psalms: כְּרֵעַ כְּאָח-לִי הִתְהַלָּכְתִּי כַּאֲבֶל-אֵם קֹדֵר שַׁחוֹתִי, K’reah, k’ach li hithalachti, ka’avel eim koder shachoti, “I behaved as though he had been my friend, my brother; like one who mourns for his mother, I darkened with grief and bowed low” (Psalms 35:14).
Isaac can’t get up and get going like his father Abraham. Instead, he walks into a field, alone, at evening’s-fall, and he drops to the ground in despair and in grief.
What does it feel like to lose someone? What does it feel like to mourn?
Philosopher Judith Butler describes mourning in her recent book, a post-9/11 reflection called Precarious Life. She writes, “[O]ne is hit by waves. […One] starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen” (Butler 21).
You fall. Darkness descends.
What is the significance of Isaac’s wandering precisely as evening falls? He is crossing into a time that is neither here nor there.
ערב, erev, evening, is a time for עירוב, eiruv, for mixing.
Isaac walks in the field לעת עירוב, l’eit eiruv, at the time when boundaries blur. Neither day nor night, but something in-between. Neither day nor night, but a mixing of the two.
When we think of the Shabbat עירוב, eiruv,10 we might think of a boundary. A line that marks the farthest one can travel. A marker of the limits of the public realm, the outside. But an עירוב eiruv is also a way to extend the inside. What is an עירוב eiruv if not a plea that I might carry a little farther, that I might blur the boundary between the safety of my home and the risk of the wide, wide world? 11 Perhaps, for Isaac, the ערב erev represents an עירוב eiruv for his grief: he wants to linger there, to carry on a little further. To wander out into the field and fall sobbing to the ground as darkness falls around him.
Love and loss topple us from our careful plans and our automatic routines. Some of us recover quickly, like Abraham. We weep and we mourn and we rise up. And some of us run from the messy work of mourning—we run because we don’t want to fall. If we keep moving, maybe we won’t notice how off-balance we are. And some of us are like Isaac, and we can do little but go out lasuach.
We can ask, as Judith Butler asks, “Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability […]? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for […] one another?” (Butler 30).
Because, when we wander into evening, we are turning not only to the despair of ending. We are wandering into the time for mixing. It’s a tricky time, an in-between time, a liminal time.
And so with Isaac. Walking out into the field, bent low in his grief, Isaac enters the realm of the liminal.
Anthropologist Victor Turner notes that, in the liminal, one is “betwixt and between” 12—not this and not that. Isaac, too, is betwixt and between: A boy who has lost his mother. A man not-yet a husband. A person walking alone in a tribal society. Like an initiate in a rite of passage, Isaac walks in the wilderness, בשדה, basadeh, in darkness, לפנות ערב, lifnot arev.13
And in the darkness, boundaries blur. When we walk into the liminal, we risk the breaking of some ties, and the building of others. As critic Richard Schechner writes, the point of liminal space is “to reduce those undergoing the ritual to a state of vulnerability so that they are open to change.” 14
Liminality represents potential. In a liminal state, we might become anything. Truly anything. That kind of transformation is frightening and risky. No particular result is guaranteed. And yet, we walk out into the field, lowered. We walk at twilight, vulnerable.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
But not just evening… ערב erev. Jewish-time. Evening not as ending, but as beginning. First, there is evening. And then, there is morning.
There’s a line in Freud’s famous essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he makes a peculiar observation about mourning—a phenomenon he can’t explain through psychoanalysis. It’s what he calls “the regular amelioration” of grief that happens “toward evening” (Freud 589). How remarkable. Mourning eases at twilight. As if our bodies know that dawn will come.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to despair in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
But the story continues: וישא עיניו וירא והנה גמלים באים, va’yisa einav va’yar, v’hinei! G’malim baim! “And he lifted up his eyes, and behold! Camels are approaching!” (Ibid.). Isaac wanders, hunched over in the field, and only then can he lift up his eyes – נשא nasa – an action that leads to נשואין nisuin, a marriage, a love, a turn from the past and from death to the future and to relationship.
Because it is Rebecca approaching there, in that caravan. It is Rebecca, and, like Isaac, her transformation begins as darkness falls.
When does Eliezer the servant first meet Rebecca? לעת ערב לעת צאת השאבות, l’eit erev, l’eit tzeit hasho’avot, “At evening-time, the time when women come out to draw water” (Genesis 24:11).
And now, in the caravan, approaching the field, ותשא רבקה את עיניה ותרא את יצחק, va’tisa Rivka et einehah va’teireh et Yitzchak, “Rebecca lifted up her eyes and she saw Isaac” (Genesis 24:64). Saw him there, sunken in grief. Saw him there, betwixt and between. Saw him there, as he lifted up his eyes to new possibilities. ותפל מעל הגמל, va’tipol mei’al hagamal, “And she fell from her camel” (Genesis 24:64).
Like the sudden miracle of love, she falls into Isaac’s life.
So Isaac meets Rebecca at twilight, the liminal time. And, out of this ערב erev, out of this עירוב eiruv, emerges love and comfort and hopefulness:ויבאה יצחק האהלה שרה אמו ויקח את רבקה ותהי לו לאשה ויאהבה וינחם יצחק אחרי אמו, va’y’vi’e’hah Yitzchak ha’ohalah Sarah imo va’yikach et Rivka va’t’hi lo l’ishah, va’ye’eh’ha’ve’hah, va’yinachem acharei imo, “And Isaac brought her toward the tent [of] Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after his mother” (Genesis 24:67).
How do we know we’ve found our comfort? Though I have turned, eagerly, to traditional Jewish mourning customs, I don’t expect my comfort to come all at once at the close of eleven months. In his classic work on Jewish mourning, Rabbi Maurice Lamm writes, “Twlight is neither day nor night, or perhaps it is both day and night. The law, however, must be clear.” 15 The laws of mourning are neat and clear and measured. They can give shape to the overwhelming messiness of grief. But what if we can’t help but linger, like Isaac? The practices of shiva and sheloshim and yarzheit offer a way for the mourner to move, as Rabbi Lamm puts it, from darkness to light. 16
But some of us find ourselves in the twilight. What can we do? We can take the risk to truly experience that in-between. If we can be willing lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, perhaps we too can look up from our dark place and be transformed.
Because, like Isaac, we are never the same. Love and loss change us. Love and loss hurl us down into the pit. We walk out into the evening, fallen.
You see, the bad news is that our relationships leave us vulnerable.
But the good news is that we might, through falling, manage to lift up our eyes and see the caravan approaching. היני! Hinei! Behold! We know something is about to happen to us—but we don’t know what. We lift up our eyes and we see an Other walking toward us in the field. וניפול מעל הגמל Va’nipol me’al hagamal, and we fall from the camel. We know our lives are different—but we don’t know how we will be forever changed.
What does mourning feel like? It feels like falling. But, then again, so does love.
1 Radak on Genesis 24:62.
2 Ibn Ezra on Genesis 24:63; Rashbam on Genesis 24:62.
3 Ramban on Genesis 24:62.
4 Bereshit Rabbah 68:9, cf. Rashi on Genesis 24:62.
5 Rachel Adler, “For These I Weep: A Theology of Lament,” Dr. Samuel Atlas Memorial Lecture, The Chronicle, Issue 68 (2008): 10-15, p 11.
6 Ibid.
7 Evan-Shoshan’s Biblical Concordance.
8 Evan-Shoshan. See Jeremiah 2:6; 18:20, 22; Proverbs 22:14; 23:27.
9 Evan-Shoshan.
10 Under traditional Jewish law, carrying an object from the private sphere into the public sphere is prohibited on Shabbat. An eiruv, usually a string suspended on poles, even telephone poles or street signs in modern neighborhoods, links neighboring houses in a community into one big “private realm.” This symbolically enlarges the private realm, allowing people to carry objects during Shabbat in their own neighborhood.
11 Wendy Zierler, “Feminist Voices,” My People’s Passover Haggadah, Volume 1: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing): 2008, pp 104-105; and Zierler’s conversations with this writer in preparation for writing and delivering the sermon.
12 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Aldine Transaction): 1969, p 95.
13 Ibid.
14 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge): 2003, pp 57-8.
15 Lamm, Maurice. The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning. (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, Inc): 2000, p 82.
16 Jewish mourning customs are extensive, and offer stages for the mourner to move from the shock and isolation of hearing the news of the death of a loved one to the embrace of the community and a return to normal routines. During shiva, the first seven days, mourners remain at home, sitting on the floor or on low stools; it is the most intense period of grieving. The first thirty days, sheloshim, represent a mix between sadness and return to routine. A yarzheit is the anniversary of a death; Jews end the strict mourning practices for a parent (like not attending public celebrations or not cutting one’s hair) one year after a person’s death (sometimes measured as eleven months). We also mark the anniversary of a death each year.
And yet, sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I’m still standing before an open rectangle cut into the ground. I see the clods of earth, there, where I shoveled them over my father’s coffin. I hear that sound. The thud of earth falling … And part of me falls with it.
What does it feel like to lose someone?
To lose someone… feels like falling.
At least, for me it does. And I wonder, will I be able to rise at the end of this year—the traditional Jewish year of mourning for a parent? I wonder, will I again be able to get mixed-up in the lives of those around me? Will I always feel removed, as I do so often now—suspended, wandering aimlessly?
What does it feel like to lose someone?
For me, it’s like being Isaac. Isaac who walks, alone, at twilight.
When Sarah dies, Abraham turns his grief outward. He comes לספד לשרה ולבכתה, lispod l’Sarah v’livkotah, “to eulogize Sarah and bewail her” (Genesis 23:2). And then he is able to move on: ויקם אברהם מעל פני מתו וידבר..., va’yakom Avraham mei’al p’nei meito vay’daber, “And Abraham rose from beside his dead, and he spoke…” (3). Abraham gets up and gets going: he negotiates for the Cave of Machpelah as a burial-place; he fills his time with concrete tasks; he even looks toward the future, planning a marriage for Isaac.
In stark contrast, his son, who disappears from the Torah’s narrative after Mount Moriah. Isaac is conspicuously absent at his mother’s burial. Three years after his mother’s death, Isaac still mourns.1 Not active, not vocal, not like his father, Isaac is passive and pensive. ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out לשוח lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
Alone, in a field, as the darkness descends, what does Isaac do? How should we translate that rare verb, לשוח lasuach?
Traditional commentators offer several interpretations: a שיח siach is a bush or a shrub, so Isaac went out to walk in nature, or to work in the fields. 2 A שיח siach is a conversation, so Isaac went out into the field to meet up with friends. 3
Perhaps the most pervasive traditional interpretation is that Isaac went into the field to pray. The Midrash identifies Psalms as a source for our tradition of prayer three times a day: ערב בבקר בצהרים אשיחה, Erev va’voker va’tzohorayim asichah, “Evening, morning, and noon, I plead” (Psalms 55:18). According to this midrash, we pray in the afternoon to imitate Isaac, who walked out into the field at twilight—that strange mix of day and night—lasuach, to pray mincha, the afternoon service. 4
I guess he began with Ashrei, the opening prayer? “Happy are they who dwell in your house, O God”? …. But, no. He couldn’t have.
As a mourner, I can only imagine Isaac’s שיחה, sichah, out there in the field as night began to fall.
It’s three years since she died... Why can’t he shake off this darkness? Why can’t he eulogize and cry, and then “rise up,” like his father Abraham? Isaac lingers in his grief. He can’t return to routines. He pours out words, but they’re not like Abraham’s neat and purposeful sentences. Not rational. Not a linear presentation of thoughts and wishes. Rather, a lament—as Rachel Adler describes: “contradictory rather than emotionally consistent.” 5
Whatever Isaac voices out there, in the field, at twilight, it is not a siach—not a conversation where Isaac says “X” and God replies “Y,” but rather lament’s “tumultuous and disordered language.” 6 At least, that’s how I imagine it. Unruly.
Because the world just doesn’t make sense anymore. Language fails… “How are you holding up?” Am I holding up!? What do I have to hold up? What’s holding me up?
It’s dark. And I’m falling.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ער, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
Isaac went out to pray in the field at twilight… Perhaps. We might read לשוח lasuach as לשתחוות lishtachavot, which means “to bow”—in prostration and deference. Va’anachnu korim u’mishtachavim u’modim, we bend and bow and give thanks before God. 7
(But) How difficult it is to bow to God when I am already bent in grief.
What if Isaac bends not in prayer, in thanks, in acknowledgement of God? What if it is Isaac’s emotion that bends him? He sinks down to the earth in unremitting sorrow. So, don’t read לשוח lasuach but rather: ויצא יצחק לשוחה בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak la’shuchah basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to a pit8 in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62). In the depths of despair, Isaac wanders to a shuchah, a gaping hole in the earth, a reminder of his mother’s burial in the deep dark ground, a landscape that reflects his own low feelings. How could he carry on with life when his mother has been lowered into the dust?
Isaac walks into the field at evening-fall to bow… not in prayer, but in despair. Shachoach: to lower, to incline downward, to be bent, to be oppressed. 9 To lower his body toward the ground—because his soul is already lowered. From Psalms: כְּרֵעַ כְּאָח-לִי הִתְהַלָּכְתִּי כַּאֲבֶל-אֵם קֹדֵר שַׁחוֹתִי, K’reah, k’ach li hithalachti, ka’avel eim koder shachoti, “I behaved as though he had been my friend, my brother; like one who mourns for his mother, I darkened with grief and bowed low” (Psalms 35:14).
Isaac can’t get up and get going like his father Abraham. Instead, he walks into a field, alone, at evening’s-fall, and he drops to the ground in despair and in grief.
What does it feel like to lose someone? What does it feel like to mourn?
Philosopher Judith Butler describes mourning in her recent book, a post-9/11 reflection called Precarious Life. She writes, “[O]ne is hit by waves. […One] starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen” (Butler 21).
You fall. Darkness descends.
What is the significance of Isaac’s wandering precisely as evening falls? He is crossing into a time that is neither here nor there.
ערב, erev, evening, is a time for עירוב, eiruv, for mixing.
Isaac walks in the field לעת עירוב, l’eit eiruv, at the time when boundaries blur. Neither day nor night, but something in-between. Neither day nor night, but a mixing of the two.
When we think of the Shabbat עירוב, eiruv,10 we might think of a boundary. A line that marks the farthest one can travel. A marker of the limits of the public realm, the outside. But an עירוב eiruv is also a way to extend the inside. What is an עירוב eiruv if not a plea that I might carry a little farther, that I might blur the boundary between the safety of my home and the risk of the wide, wide world? 11 Perhaps, for Isaac, the ערב erev represents an עירוב eiruv for his grief: he wants to linger there, to carry on a little further. To wander out into the field and fall sobbing to the ground as darkness falls around him.
Love and loss topple us from our careful plans and our automatic routines. Some of us recover quickly, like Abraham. We weep and we mourn and we rise up. And some of us run from the messy work of mourning—we run because we don’t want to fall. If we keep moving, maybe we won’t notice how off-balance we are. And some of us are like Isaac, and we can do little but go out lasuach.
We can ask, as Judith Butler asks, “Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability […]? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for […] one another?” (Butler 30).
Because, when we wander into evening, we are turning not only to the despair of ending. We are wandering into the time for mixing. It’s a tricky time, an in-between time, a liminal time.
And so with Isaac. Walking out into the field, bent low in his grief, Isaac enters the realm of the liminal.
Anthropologist Victor Turner notes that, in the liminal, one is “betwixt and between” 12—not this and not that. Isaac, too, is betwixt and between: A boy who has lost his mother. A man not-yet a husband. A person walking alone in a tribal society. Like an initiate in a rite of passage, Isaac walks in the wilderness, בשדה, basadeh, in darkness, לפנות ערב, lifnot arev.13
And in the darkness, boundaries blur. When we walk into the liminal, we risk the breaking of some ties, and the building of others. As critic Richard Schechner writes, the point of liminal space is “to reduce those undergoing the ritual to a state of vulnerability so that they are open to change.” 14
Liminality represents potential. In a liminal state, we might become anything. Truly anything. That kind of transformation is frightening and risky. No particular result is guaranteed. And yet, we walk out into the field, lowered. We walk at twilight, vulnerable.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
But not just evening… ערב erev. Jewish-time. Evening not as ending, but as beginning. First, there is evening. And then, there is morning.
There’s a line in Freud’s famous essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he makes a peculiar observation about mourning—a phenomenon he can’t explain through psychoanalysis. It’s what he calls “the regular amelioration” of grief that happens “toward evening” (Freud 589). How remarkable. Mourning eases at twilight. As if our bodies know that dawn will come.
ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to despair in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).
But the story continues: וישא עיניו וירא והנה גמלים באים, va’yisa einav va’yar, v’hinei! G’malim baim! “And he lifted up his eyes, and behold! Camels are approaching!” (Ibid.). Isaac wanders, hunched over in the field, and only then can he lift up his eyes – נשא nasa – an action that leads to נשואין nisuin, a marriage, a love, a turn from the past and from death to the future and to relationship.
Because it is Rebecca approaching there, in that caravan. It is Rebecca, and, like Isaac, her transformation begins as darkness falls.
When does Eliezer the servant first meet Rebecca? לעת ערב לעת צאת השאבות, l’eit erev, l’eit tzeit hasho’avot, “At evening-time, the time when women come out to draw water” (Genesis 24:11).
And now, in the caravan, approaching the field, ותשא רבקה את עיניה ותרא את יצחק, va’tisa Rivka et einehah va’teireh et Yitzchak, “Rebecca lifted up her eyes and she saw Isaac” (Genesis 24:64). Saw him there, sunken in grief. Saw him there, betwixt and between. Saw him there, as he lifted up his eyes to new possibilities. ותפל מעל הגמל, va’tipol mei’al hagamal, “And she fell from her camel” (Genesis 24:64).
Like the sudden miracle of love, she falls into Isaac’s life.
So Isaac meets Rebecca at twilight, the liminal time. And, out of this ערב erev, out of this עירוב eiruv, emerges love and comfort and hopefulness:ויבאה יצחק האהלה שרה אמו ויקח את רבקה ותהי לו לאשה ויאהבה וינחם יצחק אחרי אמו, va’y’vi’e’hah Yitzchak ha’ohalah Sarah imo va’yikach et Rivka va’t’hi lo l’ishah, va’ye’eh’ha’ve’hah, va’yinachem acharei imo, “And Isaac brought her toward the tent [of] Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after his mother” (Genesis 24:67).
How do we know we’ve found our comfort? Though I have turned, eagerly, to traditional Jewish mourning customs, I don’t expect my comfort to come all at once at the close of eleven months. In his classic work on Jewish mourning, Rabbi Maurice Lamm writes, “Twlight is neither day nor night, or perhaps it is both day and night. The law, however, must be clear.” 15 The laws of mourning are neat and clear and measured. They can give shape to the overwhelming messiness of grief. But what if we can’t help but linger, like Isaac? The practices of shiva and sheloshim and yarzheit offer a way for the mourner to move, as Rabbi Lamm puts it, from darkness to light. 16
But some of us find ourselves in the twilight. What can we do? We can take the risk to truly experience that in-between. If we can be willing lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, perhaps we too can look up from our dark place and be transformed.
Because, like Isaac, we are never the same. Love and loss change us. Love and loss hurl us down into the pit. We walk out into the evening, fallen.
You see, the bad news is that our relationships leave us vulnerable.
But the good news is that we might, through falling, manage to lift up our eyes and see the caravan approaching. היני! Hinei! Behold! We know something is about to happen to us—but we don’t know what. We lift up our eyes and we see an Other walking toward us in the field. וניפול מעל הגמל Va’nipol me’al hagamal, and we fall from the camel. We know our lives are different—but we don’t know how we will be forever changed.
What does mourning feel like? It feels like falling. But, then again, so does love.
1 Radak on Genesis 24:62.
2 Ibn Ezra on Genesis 24:63; Rashbam on Genesis 24:62.
3 Ramban on Genesis 24:62.
4 Bereshit Rabbah 68:9, cf. Rashi on Genesis 24:62.
5 Rachel Adler, “For These I Weep: A Theology of Lament,” Dr. Samuel Atlas Memorial Lecture, The Chronicle, Issue 68 (2008): 10-15, p 11.
6 Ibid.
7 Evan-Shoshan’s Biblical Concordance.
8 Evan-Shoshan. See Jeremiah 2:6; 18:20, 22; Proverbs 22:14; 23:27.
9 Evan-Shoshan.
10 Under traditional Jewish law, carrying an object from the private sphere into the public sphere is prohibited on Shabbat. An eiruv, usually a string suspended on poles, even telephone poles or street signs in modern neighborhoods, links neighboring houses in a community into one big “private realm.” This symbolically enlarges the private realm, allowing people to carry objects during Shabbat in their own neighborhood.
11 Wendy Zierler, “Feminist Voices,” My People’s Passover Haggadah, Volume 1: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing): 2008, pp 104-105; and Zierler’s conversations with this writer in preparation for writing and delivering the sermon.
12 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Aldine Transaction): 1969, p 95.
13 Ibid.
14 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge): 2003, pp 57-8.
15 Lamm, Maurice. The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning. (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, Inc): 2000, p 82.
16 Jewish mourning customs are extensive, and offer stages for the mourner to move from the shock and isolation of hearing the news of the death of a loved one to the embrace of the community and a return to normal routines. During shiva, the first seven days, mourners remain at home, sitting on the floor or on low stools; it is the most intense period of grieving. The first thirty days, sheloshim, represent a mix between sadness and return to routine. A yarzheit is the anniversary of a death; Jews end the strict mourning practices for a parent (like not attending public celebrations or not cutting one’s hair) one year after a person’s death (sometimes measured as eleven months). We also mark the anniversary of a death each year.
Monday, October 3, 2011
We Will Be What We Never Always Were
If you’re a nerd like me, then you remember the sheer childhood joy of back-to-school shopping… and I don’t mean the new shoes. I mean the trip to the stationery store: all those pencil sets with matching erasers and sharpeners, all those empty folders waiting for labels and stickers, and, best of all, the blank notebooks full of promise. Each page clean.
Clean and empty, free of the grades and the mistakes of last year—like our souls at Rosh HaShana.
Except Rosh HaShana offers us no blank slate, no escape from last year’s missteps and sins. The Jewish new year precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first ten days, the first ten pages of our Jewish notebook already are filled to the margins with the inescapable truths of this past year of faults and failings and misgivings and regrets. We read this morning in the U’netaneh Tokef prayer: “v’choteiv v’choteim v’sofeir u’moneh, v’tizkor kol hanishkachot”—and you write and you seal and you record and you count, and you remember all that had been forgotten—“v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u’mei’eilav yi’kareih v’chotam yad kol adam bo”—and you open the book of remembrances, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.
Rosh HaShana might be the new year, the birthday of the world, but it is also Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom HaTeruah, the Day of the Blast of the Shofar that wakes us from complacency and proclaims our deeds.
Pretty scary. God remembers everything! All our sins, all our missteps, all our negative thoughts—everything we did openly and everything we tried to hide.
And yet, at the center of a holiday that proclaims God our King, our Judge, our Prosecutor, and our Witness in a trial where our lives are literally on the line, we also call God the One who remembers. God remembers not only all those sins and failings, but the good deeds we did, the times we tried our best. And God remembers that we are part of a long chain of tradition that includes some pretty amazing people—not only the faithful Abraham who left everything he knew to follow God into the unknown desert, but ordinary people, too—our family and friends who preceded us and who surround us, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.
Our High Holy Day prayer book tells us that God is constant in both reassuring and unsettling ways. God is eternally Malkeinu, our King. God rules over us in judgment, records all our actions, measures all our deeds, and remembers what we wish to forget. And God is eternally Avinu, our Father. God loves us unconditionally as a parent loves a child. God recalls our first words and keeps a photo of our first day of school on his desk, throughout the ages. God kvells over our accomplishments like a proud mother.
God’s constancy can offer comfort. In the Book of Numbers, we read, “God is not like a human being, to be capricious, or like a mortal being, to change his mind” (Numbers 23:19).
For some of us, though, all this constancy and steadiness can be unsettling. Is there room for change? What if our lives don’t fit into the mold? What if we want to reinvent ourselves?
Some of us are nothing like the children we were on our first day of kindergarten. Many of us change our names (or our nicknames) or our hair or our major. We move to a new place. We take up a new hobby. We work hard to change destructive habits and develop healthier ones. We stop going to shul. Or we go to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. We reshape and reinvent our identities. How does that change fit with the concept of an ever-present, ever-constant, ever-steady God who remembers all about us—good, bad, and in between?
Yeshiva University professor Joy Ladin is among those who find a God of constants and absolutes both challenging and dissatisfying. As a transsexual woman, Professor Ladin cannot fathom a God who requires us never to change. We don’t have to have radically changed our bodies and our gender identities to understand Professor Ladin’s message.
When we look at Rabbinic texts like the Talmud and codes of law, we see a God of absolutes. This is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy, changeless, presiding over the heavenly court with the infamous book in which all our deeds are recorded eternally. But, Ladin asserts, the God of Torah can be “impulsive, unpredictable, and constantly exceeding human categories of understanding.” Though the Torah assures us that God does not “change his mind” (va’yitnachem), we read in the story of Noah that God “regretted” (va’yinachem) ever having created human beings and so decides to flood the earth (Genesis 6:6). For hundreds of years, the Israelites suffered under Egyptian slavery, and then suddenly, va’yizkor, “God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). And God transformed the people, in one radical moment, from slave to free.
Especially in the Psalms, we read of a Deity who can radically alter the shape of our lives and our identities—even the world in which we live. In her own writing, Professor Ladin focuses on Psalms as a source for thinking about transformation Jewishly. She sees in the Psalms a “really wild, imaginative energy.” God enacts “radical social transformation”: “He raises the poor from the dust, lifts up the needy from the refuse heap” (Psalm 113:7). God changes the shape of the earth: “Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep” (Psalm 114: 3-4). God makes the unexpected possible, changes our fate in the blink of an eye: “We are like a bird escaped from the [hunter’s] trap; the trap broke and we escaped” (Psalm 124: 7).
Professor Ladin revels in the radical shifting described in the Psalms: “[W]hen I read the Psalms,” she says, “[…] I don’t see steady-state categories.” And this is immeasurably reassuring because, as Ladin says, “no steady state is me.”
The God of Psalms—a God who can radically change anything and everything at any moment—is yet the same God who writes and seals and records and counts. We might find an always Eternal (capital “E”), constant God, imposing and restricting and even, as Ladin does, “boring.” We might worry over the chance to never have a clean slate, to never know the joy of a blank page, to never have the opportunity to be radically different than we were yesterday. But Judaism does not trap us into just one kind of God. Jewish tradition offers us the God who is eternally Malkeinu and eternally Avinu and yet a God who, in Ladin’s words, “isn’t everything all the time,” a God who can instead be “like this or like that,” a God who can be with us now, in this particular moment.
Our lives are like the Psalms. They twist and turn. They are emotional and specific. They can be, as Ladin describes some of the Psalms, “one ridiculously long sentence” in which each line makes sense on its own, and yet changes meaning once the next line is read. Every action we take, every new iteration of our identity, makes sense as an event in isolation. And it makes sense as a part of our ongoing, unpredictable life narrative. And it makes no sense at all if we expect ourselves to be always “the same,” constant.
When God tries to tell Moses exactly Who it Is who is sending him to Egypt to free Israel, God gives something that doesn’t sound at all like a name. What is your name, Moses asks, and God answers: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, this goes something like: “I AM THAT I AM.” But Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb “to be.” And so what serves as God’s “name” here is perhaps better translated, “I will be what I will be.”
As we begin this new year, let’s take our inspiration from the God who remembers us and measures us and counts us and loves us and transform us. Let us let ourselves be what we will be. Let us remind ourselves, as Professor Ladin urges, that “God knows that I’m a spectrum of possibilities that’s going to keep being realized”—in unimaginable ways. Let us remind ourselves that this new year isn’t about clean slates or blank pages. It’s about a constellation of relationships and emotions and experiences that are both utterly the same and radically different than anything we could have expected of ourselves.
[This post was given as the Rosh Hashana sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there. Quotes of Joy Ladin are taken from the workshop presentation “Transformation as a Jewish Spiritual Path” at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s “Transforming Beitecha” conference, March 7, 2010 , which I attended. Psalms 113 and 114, part of the Hallel cycle, along with Psalm 27, traditionally recited during Elul (the month preceding the Days of Awe) were the Psalms Professor Ladin brought to her workshop for analysis and discussion.]
Clean and empty, free of the grades and the mistakes of last year—like our souls at Rosh HaShana.
Except Rosh HaShana offers us no blank slate, no escape from last year’s missteps and sins. The Jewish new year precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first ten days, the first ten pages of our Jewish notebook already are filled to the margins with the inescapable truths of this past year of faults and failings and misgivings and regrets. We read this morning in the U’netaneh Tokef prayer: “v’choteiv v’choteim v’sofeir u’moneh, v’tizkor kol hanishkachot”—and you write and you seal and you record and you count, and you remember all that had been forgotten—“v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u’mei’eilav yi’kareih v’chotam yad kol adam bo”—and you open the book of remembrances, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.
Rosh HaShana might be the new year, the birthday of the world, but it is also Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom HaTeruah, the Day of the Blast of the Shofar that wakes us from complacency and proclaims our deeds.
Pretty scary. God remembers everything! All our sins, all our missteps, all our negative thoughts—everything we did openly and everything we tried to hide.
And yet, at the center of a holiday that proclaims God our King, our Judge, our Prosecutor, and our Witness in a trial where our lives are literally on the line, we also call God the One who remembers. God remembers not only all those sins and failings, but the good deeds we did, the times we tried our best. And God remembers that we are part of a long chain of tradition that includes some pretty amazing people—not only the faithful Abraham who left everything he knew to follow God into the unknown desert, but ordinary people, too—our family and friends who preceded us and who surround us, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.
Our High Holy Day prayer book tells us that God is constant in both reassuring and unsettling ways. God is eternally Malkeinu, our King. God rules over us in judgment, records all our actions, measures all our deeds, and remembers what we wish to forget. And God is eternally Avinu, our Father. God loves us unconditionally as a parent loves a child. God recalls our first words and keeps a photo of our first day of school on his desk, throughout the ages. God kvells over our accomplishments like a proud mother.
God’s constancy can offer comfort. In the Book of Numbers, we read, “God is not like a human being, to be capricious, or like a mortal being, to change his mind” (Numbers 23:19).
For some of us, though, all this constancy and steadiness can be unsettling. Is there room for change? What if our lives don’t fit into the mold? What if we want to reinvent ourselves?
Some of us are nothing like the children we were on our first day of kindergarten. Many of us change our names (or our nicknames) or our hair or our major. We move to a new place. We take up a new hobby. We work hard to change destructive habits and develop healthier ones. We stop going to shul. Or we go to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. We reshape and reinvent our identities. How does that change fit with the concept of an ever-present, ever-constant, ever-steady God who remembers all about us—good, bad, and in between?
Yeshiva University professor Joy Ladin is among those who find a God of constants and absolutes both challenging and dissatisfying. As a transsexual woman, Professor Ladin cannot fathom a God who requires us never to change. We don’t have to have radically changed our bodies and our gender identities to understand Professor Ladin’s message.
When we look at Rabbinic texts like the Talmud and codes of law, we see a God of absolutes. This is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy, changeless, presiding over the heavenly court with the infamous book in which all our deeds are recorded eternally. But, Ladin asserts, the God of Torah can be “impulsive, unpredictable, and constantly exceeding human categories of understanding.” Though the Torah assures us that God does not “change his mind” (va’yitnachem), we read in the story of Noah that God “regretted” (va’yinachem) ever having created human beings and so decides to flood the earth (Genesis 6:6). For hundreds of years, the Israelites suffered under Egyptian slavery, and then suddenly, va’yizkor, “God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). And God transformed the people, in one radical moment, from slave to free.
Especially in the Psalms, we read of a Deity who can radically alter the shape of our lives and our identities—even the world in which we live. In her own writing, Professor Ladin focuses on Psalms as a source for thinking about transformation Jewishly. She sees in the Psalms a “really wild, imaginative energy.” God enacts “radical social transformation”: “He raises the poor from the dust, lifts up the needy from the refuse heap” (Psalm 113:7). God changes the shape of the earth: “Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep” (Psalm 114: 3-4). God makes the unexpected possible, changes our fate in the blink of an eye: “We are like a bird escaped from the [hunter’s] trap; the trap broke and we escaped” (Psalm 124: 7).
Professor Ladin revels in the radical shifting described in the Psalms: “[W]hen I read the Psalms,” she says, “[…] I don’t see steady-state categories.” And this is immeasurably reassuring because, as Ladin says, “no steady state is me.”
The God of Psalms—a God who can radically change anything and everything at any moment—is yet the same God who writes and seals and records and counts. We might find an always Eternal (capital “E”), constant God, imposing and restricting and even, as Ladin does, “boring.” We might worry over the chance to never have a clean slate, to never know the joy of a blank page, to never have the opportunity to be radically different than we were yesterday. But Judaism does not trap us into just one kind of God. Jewish tradition offers us the God who is eternally Malkeinu and eternally Avinu and yet a God who, in Ladin’s words, “isn’t everything all the time,” a God who can instead be “like this or like that,” a God who can be with us now, in this particular moment.
Our lives are like the Psalms. They twist and turn. They are emotional and specific. They can be, as Ladin describes some of the Psalms, “one ridiculously long sentence” in which each line makes sense on its own, and yet changes meaning once the next line is read. Every action we take, every new iteration of our identity, makes sense as an event in isolation. And it makes sense as a part of our ongoing, unpredictable life narrative. And it makes no sense at all if we expect ourselves to be always “the same,” constant.
When God tries to tell Moses exactly Who it Is who is sending him to Egypt to free Israel, God gives something that doesn’t sound at all like a name. What is your name, Moses asks, and God answers: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, this goes something like: “I AM THAT I AM.” But Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb “to be.” And so what serves as God’s “name” here is perhaps better translated, “I will be what I will be.”
As we begin this new year, let’s take our inspiration from the God who remembers us and measures us and counts us and loves us and transform us. Let us let ourselves be what we will be. Let us remind ourselves, as Professor Ladin urges, that “God knows that I’m a spectrum of possibilities that’s going to keep being realized”—in unimaginable ways. Let us remind ourselves that this new year isn’t about clean slates or blank pages. It’s about a constellation of relationships and emotions and experiences that are both utterly the same and radically different than anything we could have expected of ourselves.
[This post was given as the Rosh Hashana sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there. Quotes of Joy Ladin are taken from the workshop presentation “Transformation as a Jewish Spiritual Path” at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s “Transforming Beitecha” conference, March 7, 2010 , which I attended. Psalms 113 and 114, part of the Hallel cycle, along with Psalm 27, traditionally recited during Elul (the month preceding the Days of Awe) were the Psalms Professor Ladin brought to her workshop for analysis and discussion.]
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