After the Fire

I want to take a moment to thank those who have helped us out in our time of loss and need. We're just starting to figure out how to move forward, and the support of our community is sustaining, energizing and inspiring. Your embrace sustains us.

I've decided to share my sermon from last Kol Nidre in this forum; the resonances with what has just happened to us are both bizarre and meaningful.

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 There is a traditional blessing for children offered each Yom Kippur. Offered ideally with personalization to each individual child but even on its own, it cannot fail to bring tears to the eyes of a parent. The centuries-old blessing is as follows:

May your eyes look straight ahead,

Your mouth speak wisdom,

Your heart meditate with awe and wonder,

Your hands busy themselves with mitzvoth,

Your legs run to do the will of your father in heaven,

And may you be inscribed and sealed for a good, long life

Among all the people of Israel.

This blessing of the body and soul is usually accompanied by the priestly blessing – following the midrash, I propose the following rendering:

May God bless you with all that you need and protect you from anyone or anything that might take it away from you.

May God bring you enlightenment and favor in the eyes of everyone you meet.

May God transform your face into the face of the Divine, that you may bring peace to yourself, your family, your community and your world.

The sentiments of these ancient blessings, still evocative and moving, offer a language for our greatest hopes for the next generation. When life conforms to those aspirations, we receive it as a blessing, say a heartfelt thank you and give tzedaka as an expression of gratitude. But the very need for a blessing belies the fact that life, all too often, falls short of those dreams. Even for the best of us, there is sometimes no way around misfortune.

A story is told of a man, who, one year, in the hour just before Kol Nidre, was found crouched over, weeping on the floor of the synagogue. The beloved rabbi of that synagogue, none other than Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, greeted the man, who, through the tears, told him his story: “Until a few weeks ago, I had all good things, and now I am in a terrible state. Rabbi, I lived in a village, and no hungry person ever went from my door unfed. My wife used to bring home poor travelers and feed them. And then God comes along and takes my wife and my house! There I was with six small children, without a wife, without a house! Now you tell me, Rabbi, can I forgive God?”

As the weeping man continued to lament his mounting losses – his beloved, generous wife, the mother of his children, his home, his possessions, his security, his future, the man snarled the following words: “And I had a thick prayer book, and all the hymns were in it in just the right order. And that burned up along with everything else. Now you tell me, Rabbi, can I forgive God?”

Levi Yitzhak remained silent, then after a few moments, directed his students to look for a prayer book for the man, and when they found one, they brought it to the man for inspection. The weeping man looked carefully at the book, checking each page to make sure that it was exactly how it should be, as the rabbi looked on. Finally, the rabbi asked, in a soft, gentle voice, “Do you forgive Him now?”

“Yes,” said the man.

At that moment, Levi Yitzhak ascended the bima and began the prayers of Yom Kippur.

Even after soul-shattering loss, the weeping man found healing in being listened to and in the words and feel of the prayers of his ancestors in his hands. One small hint that there was still order in the world ended this round of the emotional spiral of grief and began again the discovery of faith and hope. The most important question of the weeping man turned out not to be exactly, “Can I forgive God?” to which the unspoken answer was, “It’s not up to God – it’s up to you.” Instead the Rebbe heard the question of the weeping man as, “Having lost so much, how can I move forward?” The rebbe and the community provided the answer, not as much through words as through presence and support.

          Even when our suffering is not quite as extreme as that of the man huddling in the corner of Levi Yitzhak’s synagogue, some of us find ourselves offering songs of alienation, frustration, betrayal, anger and despair. I hear these notes sounded in many a hospital room, in homes where shiva is being observed, when someone comes to my office suddenly in dire straits. Some of us enjoy lives without these emotions for years on end and are surprised when finally besieged; others have lived in light of them for decades. We have a lot to lose. Loss of a loved one, good health, a job, a home, a future, a marriage, youth, or a dream… Any loss can elicit another verse of the song of grief. Usually the community, given the opportunity, responds in chorus by listening and offering an embrace. Still, grief comes in waves, and healing takes patience, hope and time.

         

Many of the prayers of Yom Kippur speak about the experience of living through the suffering of self and others. In just a few minutes, for example, we will be singing one of the most heart-wrenching poems of the High Holy Day season, one that tackles the question of the origin of the trials we face.

כי הנה כחמר ביד היוצר

We are like clay in designer’s hand,
As he wills—to contract, as he wills—to expand,
So are we in your hand to lovingly define

The poem, with its many stanzas and metaphors, yields multiple interpretations. Some focus on the way the poem presents human beings as dependent on a divine Designer and hoping for only gentle shaping. Still others note the division of responsibility between Designer and clay – God and individual. Like a loving parent, the designer skillfully shapes and molds, expands and contracts, lengthens and cuts short. At the same time, the composition and consistency of the clay make a big difference in the quality of the pot that will emerge.

          Yet there is a third force involved in pot-making besides clay and potter. M.C. Richards points to it as she writes, “The potter does everything that he can do.  But he cannot burst into flame and reach a temperature of 2300 degrees Fahrenheit for a period varying from eight hours to a week and harden plastic clay into rigid stone, and transform particles of silica and spar into flowing glaze… He can only surrender his ware to the fire, listen to it, talk to it, so that he and the fire respond to each other’s power, and the fired pot is the child.”

Richards reminds us that the significant relationship that yields a pot has not two parties but three: clay, potter and fire, each essential to the finished product. We are the clay. The potter, the Creator, shapes us in God’s image with love but cannot complete the task. It is, instead, life in the blazing fire of this world hardens us and takes the final role in the transformation of clay into pot. We have control over neither Creator nor fire. And so, the practice of Yom Kippur, while encouraging us to reflect on our origins and our journey, focuses our attention on how we respond to our God-given nature, as well as the things that happen to us. It challenges us to develop our character so that we can better survive the fire and emerge transformed in the image of our Creator.

There are many ways in which our tradition conceptualizes this journey. Our prophets, our sages and in many cases our closest friends and wisest family members phrase it differently. As we studied on Rosh Hashana, our literature is replete with questions that spur discussion of how the clay can become the best possible pot or vase: “What does Adonai your God ask of you?” “Who may ascend the Mountain of Adonai?” “What will we be asked on the Day of Judgment?” Humbly we note that none of the short lists that result speak about daring one-time achievements; rather all are inventories of how we should live with some combination of character traits that include but are not limited to a strong and keen sense of justice, personal integrity, careful speech, fairness in relationships, humility, openness to insight and hope.

          Among the most pointed guidance about how to live comes by way of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the 18^th century teacher who advocated character development as key to Jewish living. Like the poet of the mahzor, Luzzatto teaches life’s central challenge by way of a mechanical metaphor. He holds that we naturally connect with the transcendent like iron to a magnet but that sometimes encounter barriers that interfere with the attraction. Sometimes those barriers come from outside– things that others do to us or that happen to us – and sometimes they are barriers we leave up or even erect ourselves. Luzzatto’s advice is clear yet nuanced: “An individual should prevent his soul from being held captive by things which hinder the realization of nearness to God.”

Luzzatto reminds us that sometimes we get stuck in the wrong places, places that keep us from recognizing just how close we are to connection, hope and faith. Luzzatto isn’t telling us not to feel those emotions – such advice would be counter-productive, never mind insensitive. Instead, he is encouraging us not be held captive by them. Pain, anxiety, suffering, anger, sadness and despair separate us from each other and interfere with our sense of connectedness. They are ever-present, a product of human nature and the lives we lead. They are barriers that rise and fall, thicken and thin over the course of our lives. But they are not necessarily the limit of our destiny. How we prepare for, interpret and ultimately respond to these barriers, however, is entirely up to us.

The Book of Elijah (23), a tenth century collection of midrash, reiterates this message to keep our head in the game, to actively set our course and not just roll with where life takes us. It reminds us to always see ourselves as heirs to our biblical ancestors, who, in the face of adversity or perhaps because of it, continued to do good deeds and engage with God. No matter what challenges arise, no matter how much primordial chaos enters our lives through our exposure to fire of this world, every one of us is ultimately called to internalize and reiterate a central message of Torah: For my sake was the world created. Although we are entitled to time to heal and figure out how to recover from setbacks, we are not to acquiesce and surrender to the current of our lives.

This midrash, like the prayers of this sacred day, motivates us to think about the extent to which we allow our kishkes to lead us through life, even when there are better choices. Do we stay remain behind barriers like sadness, righteous anger, betrayal and alienation, or can we transcend them? When we enter the fire, as we must, are we oblivious to or even complicit in our own destruction? Or will we, over time, be transformed into vessels more resilient, more empathetic, and ultimately more inspiring?

To accept barriers as our destiny and then deny responsibility for that choice, says the midrash, is to walk the path of the fool. Yet, as author Dani Shapiro reminds us, there is great potential in keeping our wits about us, in choosing our path even as we live in the fire. She tells the following story:

My Aunt Shirley lives in a stately home on a tree-lined street in Brookline, Massachusetts, where the phone never stops ringing. She is a mother of four, grandmother of sixteen, great-grandmother of forty-five and counting. Recently widowed, she had just put her home on the market when, during a visit to a daughter in Chicago, a pipe burst, flooding several floors full of antiques and artwork. A significant part of that elegant home had been —turned, in her words, into “a barn.” So she had just begun the process, arduous for anyone much less an octogenarian, of filing insurance claims and rebuilding her home.

“Come in, darling!” She swept me into what had once been her living room. “It’s a mess, isn’t it? But look how lucky we were. None of Uncle Moe’s books were damaged.”

I looked at her. “Lucky?” I thought, “This wouldn’t have been my definition of lucky.”

“I was just writing a letter to the insurance company,” she went on to say. “I wanted to let the president of the company know how wonderful his people have been to me.”

I watched my aunt, beautiful, beaming, lit from within.

          Life happens; be it flood or fire, bereavement or betrayal, trial is an inevitable part of being a human being - a pot in the hands of the potter, hardened in the kiln of this world. What happens to the formed lump of clay, how it will respond to the flames, relies some on the practiced technique of a loving potter and some on the nature of the flame. But so much depends on the character of the clay, though sometimes it feels like nothing more than dust mixed with water.

          Let’s get our part right this year.