On Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about how the Jewish wisdom I’d gleaned from Hilary’s Yom Kippur readings over the years helped me manage my challenging relationship with my father, enabling me to forgive him – and unburden myself — before he passed away on August 17. I also mentioned the ensuing trauma caused by his wife. That trauma intensified last week making it among the most agonizing of my life.
Exhausted from sleepless nights and stressful days, I told Hilary that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to summon the clarity, humility and insightfulness to write a sermon.
How do I encourage self-examination and repentance while so angry, anxious and distracted? How can I personally seek the spiritual release of forgiveness when I find unforgivable the pain I’m forced to endure.
Ever the instigator of self-examination, Hilary said, “I’m sure at some point you’ll find a gift in the lesson of this difficult moment,” channeling Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who said, “the deepest crises of your life can turn out to be the moments when you encounter the deepest truths and acquire your greatest strengths.”
God knows I’m not the only struggler. There are others here who are undergoing painful transitions. There are people who’ve suffered through recent hurricanes. There are Jewish students who don’t feel safe on college campuses – supposedly the most enlightened places on the planet. And there are Israelis unsure how to repent when they’re still raging at God and man for the October 7th atrocities.
Then there are hostages – both dead and alive – and their families who’s suffering is incomprehensible.
We all feel trapped, as if in a terror tunnel, (though thankfully we’re not):
…and we don’t know whether the light at the end is a train that’s heading for us.
As Haviv Rettig Gur put it in a tweet last night. “How do you enter the “headspace” of Yom Kippur when it seems so detached from the anxiety that surrounds us?”
Thankfully this weekend grants a reprieve and the grace and headspace to think. So, I’ve spent the last couple of days tapping into Jewish wisdom, and here are six insights I’ve come up with:
First insight: when you’re struggling, it is important to have perspective. As I pointed out in my RH sermon, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Rabbi David Wolpe demonstrated this when he reflected on his year as a visiting scholar at Harvard where he had served and later resigned from its Antisemitism Advisory Group:
“What gives me hope is, I imagine myself in a conversation with my great, great, great grandfather. I say to him, it’s terrible what I’m seeing at Harvard, and he says, you’re at Harvard?
And I say, yes, but there’s a lot of anti-Israel sentiment there. He says, there’s an Israel?
And I say, yes, but you should hear how the administration is talking about shaving some of the billions in aid to Israel. And he says, America is giving billions of dollars of aid to Israel?
And I say, you’re right, we have problems, but to our great, great, great grandparents. We are blessed.”
Second insight: remember, life is bitter and sweet. No one ever promised you a rose garden, to paraphrase the famous song. “Along with the sunshine,” the lyrics go, “there’s gotta be a little rain sometime.
Yes, life can be hard, as it was for me this last week. But it can still be sweet, as it is right now….and will definitely be when Zac opens up the break-the-fast buffet!
The truth is, the world is full of beauty and pain, and it is our job to promote the good and do our best to eradicate the evil. Understanding this is why in Judaism there’s no such thing as a pure celebration – even at weddings the destruction of Jerusalem is mentioned.
This was noted in a video I found on Rabbi Danny Gordis’ Substack in which a diverse array of Israelis reflected on the year since October 7th. The first one says, “our glass is not empty, and it never will be because there are too many heroes who in their death have ordered our life.
“Though we’re looking for a glass half-full,” he continues, “after the last year, we’ll settle for a quarter-full glass.”
“The pain is what shaped us,” another Israeli says, “and it’s fucked up how death is so good at bringing us closer.”
Just look at the millions of donations, thousands of volunteers, families who opened doors to those who’d lost their homes, the supportive WhatsApp groups, the food centers, and the people who went south to make BBQs for the soldiers.
By believing that we’re God’s partners in making the world a better place, Rabbi Sacks argues that Jews are the people who not only survive, but thrive in adversity, renewing ourselves after every disaster, including the Holocaust. “From the worst tragedy of all in human terms,” he wrote, “came the rebirth of the state of Israel, the greatest collective Jewish affirmation of life in more than two thousand years.”
That Israelis are demonstrating this now is not only inspirational, it grants us perspective.
Third insight: adjust your expectations. I spoke about my mindset trick on Rosh Hashanah – know when to have long memories, like an elephant, and when to forget quickly, like a goldfish.
I was able to forget a lot of the bad by thinking of my dad as if he were an uncle, from whom one naturally expects less. And I became an elephant by recalling the adoring father of my childhood, helping me make peace with the challenging father of my adulthood.
Israelis have also had a mindset change since October 7th, adjusting to the fact that pain is an inseparable part of existence; an attitude that helps account for the fact that Jews are the ultimate survivors as the longest living people in the history of the planet.
Fourth insight, to make a better world, we must have courage which, as Winston Churchill noted, “is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it all others depend.”
The Jewish response to crisis and tragedy, notes Rabbi Sacks, is to say: “God, I do not know why this is happening, but I do know what you want me to do … We must wrestle with it, refusing to let it go until it blesses you, until you emerge stronger, better or wiser than you were before. To be a Jew is not to accept defeat. That is the meaning of faith.”
Doesn’t this photo of Israeli women soldiers capture this idea?
In the quarter-glass full video, one of the Israelis applauds the courage of the Jewish people: “We are all one body,” she says, “and no son of a bitch has yet risen to change that. We’re still here. And we’ll say it until every Israeli can live in peace, until every hostage returns home.”
May it be so!
Fifth insight: return to our values, after all, returning is what it means to do teshuva.
When Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he delivered the customary “last lecture” knowing his talk was going to be his legacy to his children. As Yom Kippur prescribes, facing death helps focus our mind on how to live righteously.
Though titled “How to Realize Your Dreams,” Pausch closed by telling the crowd that his talk wasn’t really about how to achieve dreams, but how to live your life. And “if you lead your life the right way,” he urged, “the karma will take care of itself, and the dreams will come to you.”
Pausch wasn’t Jewish, but I think he frames well the meaning and purpose of the High Holidays and the notion that in the long sweep of Jewish history, karma has tended to work out – just consider all those conquering empires that have come and gone, not to mention all the dead terrorists – and we’re still here!
I think it is partly because we’ve been observing the High Holidays for a couple thousand years, asking ourselves to think about the year past and evaluate it against our Jewish values so that we can plan to do better in the year to come. And we do this not as individuals, but as a community so we can strengthen each other in this difficult task, a task made easier knowing that each of us needs to do this.
And finally the sixth insight: no matter how dark the moment, do not lose hope.
Judaism is a religion of hope, and its great rituals of repentance and atonement are part of that hope. We are not condemned to live endlessly with the mistakes and errors of our past.
Rabbi Sacks spoke to this moment. “Optimism is the passive belief that things will get better, he explained. “Hope is the active belief that together we can make things better.”
So in these final moments of self-denial, as we prove our commitment to actively making things better, I hopeyou’ll find some relief in knowing that we can overcome hardship by:
- having perspective,
- remembering that life is both bitter and sweet,
- adjusting our expectations,
- having courage to fight,
- returning to values so karma will take care of itself, and
- having hope!
Just as it took God six days to create us and our wonderous world – calling it good – may these six insights help us restore wonder and goodness to our world, relieving our pain and suffering and sealing us in the book of life for another year of blessings.
Amen!
These remarks were made by Melanie Sturm on October 12, 2024 at Temple HilMel services commemorating Yom Kippur.