Rosh Hashanah Morning, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life
Anyone who watched the sci-fi television drama Buffy, The Vampire Slayer knows that Buffy’s biggest challenge—the most pernicious demon she ever fought—was not a vampire or a monster or a giant snake or the incarnation of some primordial evil. No, the blonde former-cheerleader-turned-superhero fought an even mightier battle: A battle with her own inflated sense of responsibility.
You see, legend told Buffy that she alone stood between the ordinary and innocent people of her little California town and utter destruction. She had a noble mission to fight evil—and she had to fight it alone. Burdened with the weight of the world, she time and again averted literal apocalypse. Just one girl. Against all the evil in the world.
But, somewhere along the line, Buffy learned that she couldn’t go it alone. More and more, she came to rely on her friends and their individual talents to complement her strengths. They helped her investigate mysterious enemies, put her work into historical perspective, added humor and emotion, performed magical feats she could not accomplish, and plainly widened her individual perspective. If Buffy provided pure brawn and battle tactics, they provided other necessary components, and combined, they were Hand and Heart and Brain and Spirit—whole, and able to confront just about any enemy. In one episode, the group confidently sang out, “What can’t we face, if we’re together?”[1]
Cheesy as it may seem, this refrain—“What can’t we face if we’re together?”—relates to an important Jewish lesson, one I feel especially keenly during these Days of Awe, and one we might consider prioritizing this year, here at New York University, diversely talented as we are. We each bring different strengths to this community, but how often do we think of our strengths as linked? It is easy to get cordoned off into our own silos—pre-med, Steinhart, Gallatin; humanities majors, education experts; secular and all shades of religious. As students, as young professionals, as faculty and administrators, and as experts in our respective fields, we can get caught up in our own day-to-day responsibilities. Sometimes it can feel like the weight of the world rests on our individual shoulders. Such an overdetermined sense of our own role can be daunting and paralyzing; taken to the other extreme, it can turn us into callous megalomaniacs.
But what couldn’t we face, if we acted together?
We’re together during these Days of Awe: unlike the two most-celebrated Jewish holidays among a majority of American Jews—can anyone guess what those might be? [Hanukah and Passover]—we do not spend the Days of Awe secluded with our own families. On Hanukah and Passover, we gather in the privacy of our homes to mark the miracles our ancestors experienced. But on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur—the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement, respectively—we come together, in a public place, in a shared praying and learning community. Though we are tasked with taking an account of our own personal misdeeds and sins over the past year, these “High Holidays” bring us into community. We can neither retreat into ourselves nor inflate our sense of individual importance. We are in this process of taking account together. Even the confession we will utter on Yom Kippur will be a communal one, expressed in the first person plural: we have sinned, we have transgressed, we have missed the mark. Whether we have each committed every single sin on the laundry list we will together recite, we make communal confession.
How can this be, the Rabbis of the Talmud asked? Doesn’t the Torah teach that each person is responsible for his own sins alone? On the contrary, our Sages assert; each of our sins brings negative consequences upon the whole world! This comes to teach us, say the Rabbis, that כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.”[2]
What does it mean to be “responsible”—to be עריבים areivim? What happens when we act as though we truly believe and understand that we are each עריבים זה לזה areivim zeh la’zeh—“responsible, one for the other”?
What does it mean to be עריבים? The word itself is tricky. עריבים comes from the word ערב erev—“evening.” Neither day nor night, but the border-time, the time in-between. And, in Modern Hebrew,מעורב m’urav means “combined,” “mixed.” To be עריבים means to be attentive to those places where we meet: where our needs and desires bump up against the needs and desires of our neighbors. To be עריבים means to be “mixed-up” in one another’s fate.
kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.” And it is this mutual responsibility that transforms us from a collective into a community.
The medieval Jewish community—the kahal—served not only religious and moral but also educational, political, and administrative needs. The kahal ran the Jewish courts that adjudicated certain matters of civil, criminal, and religious law. The kahal managed business relations and negotiated with the non-Jewish ruling authorities. Even in the time of the Rabbis, in the first centuries of the Common Era, a Jewish community concerned itself with collective responsibility. A person eager to live a life according to the moral and ethical precepts of the Torah ought to seek out the right kind of community. We read in the Talmud, “[A] student of the Sages may not live in a city that does not have the following [essential things]: a court […], a charity fund collected by two officials and distributed by three, a synagogue, a [public] bathhouse, a [public] privy, a physician, […] a scribe, a [Kosher] butcher, and a teacher of young children.”[3] These are things a community must have in order to nurture and sustain those who would live according to Jewish values. A community needs a fair court to adjudicate the law and to resolve disputes. A community requires each of its residents to contribute to a social safety-net to provide for the needs of the poor and the orphan and the widow, and it distributes those funds fairly and impartially. A community cares for the spiritual and religious lives of its inhabitants. A community tends to the physical and medical needs of its residents. A community provides opportunities to record its deeds and its learning. A community ensures that people have access to appropriate food. A community educates future generations. The great Sage Rabbi Akiva even added that an ideal community must have “several kinds of fruit trees, because their fruit gives light to the eyes.”[4] Aesthetics and beauty, fresh air and natural resources—these, too, make a Jewish community whole and enriching.
Traditional Jewish law took community responsibility very seriously. Contribution to the communal charity fund, for example, is required of each individual, according to his wealth; of course, the specifics of this requirement are contested and argued and adjudicated in many cases throughout traditional Jewish literature—but the general sentiment is that community sustenance is up to the whole community. Community leaders carried great responsibility, too. In the Talmud, we learn that community officials must perform an annual inspection of public facilities and utilities like roads, plazas, and ritual baths; should they neglect their repair and upkeep, these officials incur guilt for any injuries or deaths that occur as a result of accidents.[5]
How will you tend to the upkeep of your communities this year? Will you participate in the political process as a way of ensuring attentive care over public institutions from which we can all benefit? Will you work to improve the education of children in your hometown, in New York City, across the world? Will you engage in spiritual exploration here with the Bronfman Center? Besides yourself, to whom are you responsible?
And how far can our responsibility extend before we feel, like Buffy, that there’s just too much evil to fight alone? Jewish law guides us to a notion of concentric and expanding circles of obligation: sustaining our own families must take precedence, for example, over our contribution to the community charity fund; those “closest to us,” says one Code of Jewish Law, must take precedence over every other person.[6] Even to care for “the poor of one’s own city” is my responsibility before I become obligated to sustain someone in a faraway land.[7] And a person cannot be expected to financially sustain another if he cannot financially sustain himself.[8]
Our own community involvements are not singular. We each exist in many communities—some of them overlapping concentric circles and some of them seemingly isolated cells. We live in tension. Princeton professor Kwame Appiah calls it the pull between “the idea that we have obligations to others, ties of kith and kind” the world over, and “the value not just of human life but of particular human lives”[9]—a pull between universal and particular, between global and local, between a broad sense of care for all our human “brothers and sisters” and our real ties of affection and responsibility for our families and friends. In his study of “community” ties in America, Robert Putnam finds that, when most people think of “community,” they cling to the most inner of inner circles; he writes, “For most of us, our deepest sense of belonging is to our most intimate social networks, especially family and friends.”[10] Community organizers seem to want to tap into this sense of affection and mutual obligation—this sense of identity and belonging—and build on it to connect to our ethical obligations to those in ever-widening concentric circles. In the past, the kahal confined its “community” obligations to “the permanent [Jewish] residents in a given locale”—even going so far as to “decide who might or might not settle there.”[11] But in a postmodern, “cosmopolitan” world—a world in which we might feel responsible to family and to friends and to neighbors and to fellow citizens and even to strangers—the borders of “community” can seem messy and confusing.
To whom are you responsible? I cannot answer that question for you, though I hope that, over the course of the coming year, some of us can begin to explore that question together—through Jewish learning, through social justice projects, through Shabbat celebration, and in our social interactions.
כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.”[12]
And who is “all Israel”?
If you argue that “all Israel” refers only to ethnic Jews and converts to Judaism, you could find evidence to back your assertion, sure. Rabbinic literature abounds with claims limiting how we might apply Torah precepts like “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[13] Our neighbors, the Rabbis sometimes argue, refers only to the Jewish people.
But the Torah also tells us that “the Jewish people” itself is a mish-mosh gathering, a diverse collection. When God frees us from Egyptian enslavement with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, we pour out of Egypt—men, women, children, and livestock. And with us, marching joyfully in the Exodus—with us an ערב רב erev rav—“a mixed multitude.”[14]
Today, the Jewish community is most certainly an ערב רב erev rav. Each of us has endured a different kind of Egypt. Each of us walks to freedom a little bit differently. But we’re all mixed-up in this together. And we’re mixed-up, too, in the widening concentric circles of community in which we find ourselves—the ערב רב erev rav of this University, this great City, our nations, the world.
As we build and strengthen a progressive Jewish community this year at the Bronfman Center, we would do well to recall, as the Talmud reminds us, that sometimes we must imitate God by gathering together diverse materials from which to shape our holy communities. God, Rabbi Meir was known to say, did as such when creating the very first human being: “The dust of the first man was gathered from all parts of the world.”[15] Isolated, specialized communities will not fulfill the ethic of this act of the creation of human beings in the Divine image—gathered, as we each were, from the humble dust, collected not from one, single source, but from all the places of the earth. Perhaps it is this very diversity in our origins that contributes to our holiness, as the Torah teaches, “for all the community are holy, all of them, and the Eternal is in their midst.”[16]
Be a part of that holiness, this year—that divinely-sparked essence within each human being that, gathered in community, can create amazing things. Be the Hand or the Heart, the Brain or the Spirit. Be the one strong enough to know you can’t go it alone.
כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.” And together, there’s nothing we can’t face.
[1] References are to Joss Whedon’s FOX Network show Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which aired from 1997 to 2003.
[2] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
[3] Bavli Sanhedrin 17b.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, Hilchot Teshuva.
[6] Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, Hilchot Tzedakah, 251:3.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, xv.
[10] Putnam. Because I purchased and accessed Putnam’s work on a Kindle device that does not support page numbers, I am unable to cite precise page numbers in referring to Bowling Alone.
[11] Katz 88.
[12] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
[13] Leviticus 19:18.
[14] Exodus 12:38.
[15] Bavli Sanhedrin 38a.
[16] Numbers 16:3.
[17] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
A Year/A Learning/A Change
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)