Today I saw a hysterectomy scar. Not mine, I thank God, and not the scar of someone I love. It wasn’t even the scar of someone I know. It was the scar of a stranger I encountered during my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) training. The woman bearing the scar needed to adjust an itching bandage; exposing the scar seemed matter-of-fact. She didn’t comment on it; neither did I.
Working as a chaplain intern at a major hospital, I am learning to offer a humanizing touch in a deeply alienating and dehumanizing setting. And when I say “learning,” I am pretty sure I mean “floundering,” “failing,” and “doubting.” The hours are long, and vulnerability and rejection abound. Some doctors and nurses don’t seem to welcome pastoral care, nor value it. Others smile at me like I am a child and imply I am nothing but a glorified Candy Striper. I walk into rooms feeling unwanted by patients, and the medical and social work staff fly past me, concentrating on their own well-defined and clearly essential tasks.
I struggle with how to introduce myself and how to offer care. I struggle to break some patients’ association between the title “chaplain” and imminent death (as in “I thought I was in here for minor surgery and they called the chaplain!?”). There are times when I immediately see the relevance and the healing power of eye contact and a listening ear, prayer and blessing, questions that invite a patient to become a person again, to offer me their narrative and their perspective on the world, to allow them to make meaning in the midst of suffering.
My first week has not been overflowing with such times, and today I left the hospital feeling pretty defeated, thinking about the long weeks stretching ahead, a summer not bright with sunshine but dark with uncertainty and mistakes (you know how we over-achievers shrink from those!).
And then a young woman boarded the subway car and took a seat next to me. She wore dark jeans, a hoodie sweatshirt, and a tight black hijab (Muslim headscarf). Her eyes were lined in dark black eyeliner and she wore pale pink nail polish. She carried a purple leather bag that I admired. She fidgeted nervously and kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye. She seemed like she wanted to talk, so I smiled and said, “Cute bag.” “I know,” she said, her shoulders relaxing, angling herself toward me on the bench. “I keep forgetting to latch it, though. I hate bags without zippers, but it was so cute I had to buy it.” We both laughed. I didn’t have much else to say, but she looked expectant, her dark brown eyes still turned toward me. She asked me if the M train were running today, but she didn’t seem much interested in my answer. Instead, she told me she had moved to New York just a year ago.
She spoke quickly. Her voice was bright, but she seemed nervous, like she just needed to make some kind of connection. Perhaps I am projecting, because I definitely needed to make a connection, to feel less isolated. So here I was, my feet sore from standing pretty much all day, eyes itchy and dry from crying, hands smelling of the antibacterial sanitizer I have to apply constantly to ensure patient safety, wearing a Star of David pendant and chatting with a Muslim woman, a complete stranger. The conversation started with accessories and subway schedules, but it turned quickly to marriage, commitment, and relationships.
“I’ve only been in New York for a year,” she said. She carried a large textbook stamped with the name of a local university, so I asked if she moved here for school. “I got married,” she said. She described a whirlwind courtship: at her cousin’s wedding, a man, a friend of the groom’s family, noticed her across the room and asked about her. They were soon engaged, living on opposite sides of the country. After a two-year engagement, the two were married and the bride moved to a fast-paced city and a new life. I asked if the couple had any children and she raised her eyebrows, shaking her head emphatically. “I’m still young!”
If I type out the rest of the conversation, I am afraid it will sound silly and trite. But I assure you, it wasn’t. We talked about how, even in a happy relationship filled with love, it can be a challenge to move from making choices independently to being ever-mindful of your partner’s needs. We talked about how we worry for our spouses’ health—sometimes more than they worry for their own. We talked about establishing a rhythm with your partner before adding children to the family. We talked about carving out time for emotional intimacy amidst career tasks and schoolwork. She was surprised to hear that I am ten years older than she (“I thought we were the same!”). When she learned my partner was a woman, she apologized for assuming otherwise and the conversation continued smoothly. She asked for advice in shaping her marriage and ensuring fulfillment for herself and for her husband. We weren’t “the same,” but the ways in which we were different mattered little. In some ways, it was the differences that made the conversation enriching.
When I got off the train, I started to cry. It had been such a long, tiring day, and most of it was spent wandering hospital hallways feeling lonely and useless. On the subway, I became a person with something to offer: my life experience reassured a young bride. On the subway, I became a person worthy of care and attention.
At home, I opened Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, the prayerbook of the LGBT synagogue in San Francisco, and read the “Prayer for Unexpected Intimacy”:
“In the dark, in a strange place, our father Jacob encountered a stranger with whom he grappled all night. He never knew the stranger’s name, yet their encounter was a blessing, which turned Jacob into Israel and made him realize, “I have seen God face-to-face” (Genesis 32:31). May this intimate time with another person be an encounter with angels that allows us to both touch and see the Divine, in the Name of the God of Israel, who created passion and wove it throughout creation, turning strange places into holy ground and strangers into a source of blessing.”
I needed an easy conversation, a surprising connection, a simple, human encounter, and that is what this young woman blessed me with today. Before I left the subway car, I asked the woman her name. “Huda,” she said. I looked it up on the internet and found the meaning “right guidance.” Thank you for guiding me back to a complicated and surprising world and for reminding me that unexpected intimacy can connect us to the best in our humanity. We cannot reach transformation without uncertainty, without scars.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Friday, September 18, 2009
Tekiah!
The sound of the shofar isn’t exactly comforting. The call of the ram’s horn always makes me stand with my back a bit straighter, my eyes a bit wider. Sometimes the final, long call (the tekiah gedolah) simultaneously brings tears to my eyes and makes me feel like I should run out the door of the synagogue to start doing good deeds. There’s something about the tone of a shofar that feels big, expansive. And there’s something about the pattern of the different calls—the announcing call , the three harkening upward-inflected blasts, the staccato bursts, and the high-pitched sustained note—all arranged in several combinations, that just sounds ancient, primal.
The shofar’s blast can sound like a battle cry, a warning, or an announcement. As we prepare to hear its call, we recite prayers around three themes: sovereignty, remembrance, and revelation. These are themes of power and majesty, reminding us of our smallness and helplessness. These prayers highlight the nature of Rosh HaShana as Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment. This is a day when God reviews the record of all our deeds and decides, the Days of Awe prayerbook bluntly states, whether we will live or die. A primal call to awaken us to this bald fact: we are mortal, and there is much in our lives we cannot control.
I suspect that this year, many of us don’t exactly need a reminder of this helplessness, this smallness, this lack of control.
On Saturday, when I hear the blast of the shofar, I don’t want to close my ears to the magnitude of the day. But I’m afraid I might feel annoyed or resentful: why do I need to listen to this reminder of something I already know? Can You cut me some slack?
The prayers in the section of the service for blowing the shofar talk about God’s majesty, the creation of the world, the all-knowingness of God and our utter inability to hide our flaws. They talk about judgment and justice and glory. But they also talk about remembrance and mercy and compassion.
The “remembrance” prayers engage in a bit of name-dropping: God, we know you’re all-powerful and our fates are in your hand. Do you, by the way, know my ancestor Abraham? … We mention and we acknowledge the covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a way to hold God accountable; we want God to continue keeping the promise. We acknowledge God as one who remembers the work of creation and is mindful of all that was fashioned in the beginning.
The sound of the shofar reaches into our gut to shake us awake, to motivate us to change what we need to change. But it is an echo that reaches to the farthest reaches of our existence, that calls out to God, too. It is a reminder to God to keep an ancient covenant, and it is a call to us to remember: “God remembered His covenant with them and comforted them in His great love.”
When we hear on the Day of Judgment that God “remembers all that has been forgotten” for all eternity, we understandably might shake in our boots and feel, as I sometimes do, the urge to run out and immediately set things right. But the point is not that God remembers all the terrible things we have done and hidden and forgotten—or at least, that’s not the whole point. The point is that God remembers that we’re in a relationship. God remembers the covenant.
I suppose the blast of the shofar isn’t comforting to people who are uncomfortable with the idea of God or with the notion of covenant. Whether you do or not, though, the sound of the shofar can be a powerful call to remember the complexity of our lives, to balance out the fear of mortality with an awareness of the preciousness of our finite lives, to measure the misdeeds against the compassion we have been shown. It can serve as a call to remember our responsibilities to the people around us—our responsibility to show them compassion and to approach them with the humility we are urged to feel on a Day of Judgment, the awareness of the history of our relationships appropriate for a Day of Remembrance, and the kindness and joy of the beginning of a New Year.
The shofar’s blast can sound like a battle cry, a warning, or an announcement. As we prepare to hear its call, we recite prayers around three themes: sovereignty, remembrance, and revelation. These are themes of power and majesty, reminding us of our smallness and helplessness. These prayers highlight the nature of Rosh HaShana as Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment. This is a day when God reviews the record of all our deeds and decides, the Days of Awe prayerbook bluntly states, whether we will live or die. A primal call to awaken us to this bald fact: we are mortal, and there is much in our lives we cannot control.
I suspect that this year, many of us don’t exactly need a reminder of this helplessness, this smallness, this lack of control.
On Saturday, when I hear the blast of the shofar, I don’t want to close my ears to the magnitude of the day. But I’m afraid I might feel annoyed or resentful: why do I need to listen to this reminder of something I already know? Can You cut me some slack?
The prayers in the section of the service for blowing the shofar talk about God’s majesty, the creation of the world, the all-knowingness of God and our utter inability to hide our flaws. They talk about judgment and justice and glory. But they also talk about remembrance and mercy and compassion.
The “remembrance” prayers engage in a bit of name-dropping: God, we know you’re all-powerful and our fates are in your hand. Do you, by the way, know my ancestor Abraham? … We mention and we acknowledge the covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a way to hold God accountable; we want God to continue keeping the promise. We acknowledge God as one who remembers the work of creation and is mindful of all that was fashioned in the beginning.
The sound of the shofar reaches into our gut to shake us awake, to motivate us to change what we need to change. But it is an echo that reaches to the farthest reaches of our existence, that calls out to God, too. It is a reminder to God to keep an ancient covenant, and it is a call to us to remember: “God remembered His covenant with them and comforted them in His great love.”
When we hear on the Day of Judgment that God “remembers all that has been forgotten” for all eternity, we understandably might shake in our boots and feel, as I sometimes do, the urge to run out and immediately set things right. But the point is not that God remembers all the terrible things we have done and hidden and forgotten—or at least, that’s not the whole point. The point is that God remembers that we’re in a relationship. God remembers the covenant.
I suppose the blast of the shofar isn’t comforting to people who are uncomfortable with the idea of God or with the notion of covenant. Whether you do or not, though, the sound of the shofar can be a powerful call to remember the complexity of our lives, to balance out the fear of mortality with an awareness of the preciousness of our finite lives, to measure the misdeeds against the compassion we have been shown. It can serve as a call to remember our responsibilities to the people around us—our responsibility to show them compassion and to approach them with the humility we are urged to feel on a Day of Judgment, the awareness of the history of our relationships appropriate for a Day of Remembrance, and the kindness and joy of the beginning of a New Year.
Friday, September 11, 2009
One Thing
Saturday night begins the final week of preparation for the Days of Awe: Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement. We pray for forgiveness and strength and courage of spirit using the words of Psalm 27, which begins “The Eternal is my light and my help; whom should I fear?”
A few lines down, the psalmist declares, “One thing I ask of the Eternal; this one thing I seek: that I might live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal and to visit his Temple.”
Just this one thing, the psalmist says, and then lists what appear to be three requests, all of them magnificent in scale: to dwell with God, to see God’s beauty, to visit God’s abode.
Just this one thing.
I seem to have innumerable requests of God this coming year: health for loved ones, a smooth acclimation to rabbinical school for me and my classmates, the humility and confidence to enter this profession, and other, sometimes petty, sometimes weighty concerns that often come with a new year. Help me keep up the weight loss. Help me balance school, work, and home. Don’t let me make a complete fool of myself in front of my fifth-graders. Help us continue to strengthen our marriage. Don’t let me lose touch with my sisters, my in-laws, my cousins, and my friends as the year gets busy.
Resolutions and reflections are common even at the secular new year, but the Jewish Rosh HaShana takes place in the context of the Days of Awe—days of terrible and awesome power and import, days in which, it is said, God decides the fate of all living things for the coming year. Even the angels tremble, according to the central prayer of Rosh HaShana, before the judgment of God. We are called to make a heshbon nefesh, a spiritual accounting, a detailed balance sheet of our lives and deeds over the past year. It is a daunting and certainly a humbling task.
And in the course of all this self-searching, as we make amends face-to-face with the people we have wronged over the past year, knowing that the forgiveness God can grant on Yom Kippur will not erase our duties toward other human beings, we pray Selichot, pleading prayers for forgiveness and for the ability to repent, to turn to God, to start the new year with sincerity.
And we make requests.
“One thing I ask of the Eternal; this one thing I seek: that I might live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal and to visit his Temple.”
What would your one thing be? What deep desire lies at the heart of your turning to God and to good this year?
I’ve already joked that I can’t cut it down to just one thing, but I wonder if the psalmist was on to something, declaring his “one” request and then listing what seem to be three. Perhaps living in God’s house, gazing upon God’s beauty, and visiting God’s Temple are, indeed, all one thing. Perhaps it’s about how we look at the world, how we perceive the limited reality that surrounds us, and in some cases (I know in my own and, during this economic crisis, in many others’ lives it does) burdens us.
If the one thing I seek is to live with God all the days of my life—and I am most certainly not talking about afterlife—where might I gaze upon God’s beauty and visit his Temple? I’m not generally a literal reader of the Tanakh, and so I can imagine many situations in which we do gaze upon God’s beauty and visit God’s Temple: live with God in the days of our own lives. I think about the amazing experiences of the past year: sharing Shabbat during the joyful holiday of Sukkot with family in Tzfat, standing under the huppah and singing the Sheva Brachot (the seven wedding blessings) for my friends, hugging and kissing Rachel in the airport upon my return from Jerusalem, hearing an amazing sermon about our duties to ourselves and each another from Dean Idelson of HUC, sharing a Shabbat meal with old friends and new around our table in Brooklyn. In small ways, we can get a taste of what it’s like to live in the house of the Eternal, but we have to be open to feeling those moments.
Sometimes the one thing we ask for is a huge thing. We can’t put it into words or separate out its components. It seems un-grantable. It seems too big and too far for us to grasp. But it might be around us, in little pieces. We have to look at them, to turn them in the light. But they are there. They are little pieces of that one thing we seek.
“Hear, Eternal, when I cry out; have mercy on me, answer me […] Do not hide Your face.”
A few lines down, the psalmist declares, “One thing I ask of the Eternal; this one thing I seek: that I might live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal and to visit his Temple.”
Just this one thing, the psalmist says, and then lists what appear to be three requests, all of them magnificent in scale: to dwell with God, to see God’s beauty, to visit God’s abode.
Just this one thing.
I seem to have innumerable requests of God this coming year: health for loved ones, a smooth acclimation to rabbinical school for me and my classmates, the humility and confidence to enter this profession, and other, sometimes petty, sometimes weighty concerns that often come with a new year. Help me keep up the weight loss. Help me balance school, work, and home. Don’t let me make a complete fool of myself in front of my fifth-graders. Help us continue to strengthen our marriage. Don’t let me lose touch with my sisters, my in-laws, my cousins, and my friends as the year gets busy.
Resolutions and reflections are common even at the secular new year, but the Jewish Rosh HaShana takes place in the context of the Days of Awe—days of terrible and awesome power and import, days in which, it is said, God decides the fate of all living things for the coming year. Even the angels tremble, according to the central prayer of Rosh HaShana, before the judgment of God. We are called to make a heshbon nefesh, a spiritual accounting, a detailed balance sheet of our lives and deeds over the past year. It is a daunting and certainly a humbling task.
And in the course of all this self-searching, as we make amends face-to-face with the people we have wronged over the past year, knowing that the forgiveness God can grant on Yom Kippur will not erase our duties toward other human beings, we pray Selichot, pleading prayers for forgiveness and for the ability to repent, to turn to God, to start the new year with sincerity.
And we make requests.
“One thing I ask of the Eternal; this one thing I seek: that I might live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal and to visit his Temple.”
What would your one thing be? What deep desire lies at the heart of your turning to God and to good this year?
I’ve already joked that I can’t cut it down to just one thing, but I wonder if the psalmist was on to something, declaring his “one” request and then listing what seem to be three. Perhaps living in God’s house, gazing upon God’s beauty, and visiting God’s Temple are, indeed, all one thing. Perhaps it’s about how we look at the world, how we perceive the limited reality that surrounds us, and in some cases (I know in my own and, during this economic crisis, in many others’ lives it does) burdens us.
If the one thing I seek is to live with God all the days of my life—and I am most certainly not talking about afterlife—where might I gaze upon God’s beauty and visit his Temple? I’m not generally a literal reader of the Tanakh, and so I can imagine many situations in which we do gaze upon God’s beauty and visit God’s Temple: live with God in the days of our own lives. I think about the amazing experiences of the past year: sharing Shabbat during the joyful holiday of Sukkot with family in Tzfat, standing under the huppah and singing the Sheva Brachot (the seven wedding blessings) for my friends, hugging and kissing Rachel in the airport upon my return from Jerusalem, hearing an amazing sermon about our duties to ourselves and each another from Dean Idelson of HUC, sharing a Shabbat meal with old friends and new around our table in Brooklyn. In small ways, we can get a taste of what it’s like to live in the house of the Eternal, but we have to be open to feeling those moments.
Sometimes the one thing we ask for is a huge thing. We can’t put it into words or separate out its components. It seems un-grantable. It seems too big and too far for us to grasp. But it might be around us, in little pieces. We have to look at them, to turn them in the light. But they are there. They are little pieces of that one thing we seek.
“Hear, Eternal, when I cry out; have mercy on me, answer me […] Do not hide Your face.”
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