An anonymous essay of mine, titled “The Medicine Cabinet,” appears on page five in the June 2009 issue of Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility.
If you’re coming here from there, welcome! I have not had time to write new, content-heavy posts for this blog for far too long, but I hope to get back to it at some point later this summer.
Neat little widget for online Sh’ma reader below:
|
First of all, an apology for not having written since April. I have not given up on this project. The truth is, my financial situation changed somewhat back in March, so I’ve been spending the time that I used to spend on this applying for jobs and to programs for next year. I have more substantial posts lurking in the recesses of my brain, though, and hope to find time to write them up before too much time passes. Thank you for staying with me.
In the meantime, another note about an upcoming event related to this blog. See below!
There is what looks like a fascinating evening on “Jewish psychology” at the Begin Center, cosponsored by Beit Morasha of Jerusalem and The Rotenberg Center for Jewish Psychology. I am especially interested in the film portion of the evening, and in the panelists speaking about loss and bereavement from an educational perspective and from a midrashic perspective.
I am not 100% sure about this whole “Jewish psychology” thing. I know that it is a field created by Professor Mordechai Rotenberg. A little bit is written about it here. I recently bought two books about Jewish psychology, both published in Israel and written in Hebrew, and have been working my way through one of them (very slowly). “Jewish psychology,” as a field, might be ridiculous or, even worse, dangerous. I am deeply curious, though. I know that it is based on ideas from midrash, kabbalah, and hassidut, and I am generally of the belief that classic Jewish texts have psychological and emotional truths to teach us (and we, them). I am wary, though, of attempts to reject Western psychological ideas, since I think that those ideas have done me, and many others, a lot of good. (I am less wary of attempts to correct, or modify, those ideas.) So, in sum: curious and suspicious.
In any case, this evening event takes place next Wednesday, June 24, from 7-10 pm. The general topic of the evening is “Bereavement and Loss: Between Separation and Continuity.” It costs 30 shekels and will be entirely in Hebrew.
Please pass this information along to anyone else you know who might be interested. Thanks!
The translation of the e-mail announcement (above) is:
Okay, I’ll admit it, although it is difficult, at first, to admit to such a perverse idea: Sometimes I miss Egypt.
There, I said it. At times I find myself wistfully wishing for slavery. I am apparently not the first to feel this way (Numbers 11:4-6):
For years, I did not understand the complaining of the Israelites in the desert after Moses and God miraculously took them out of the iron furnace of Egypt. (This was not a solitary occurrence: see Exodus 16:1-3 and Numbers 14:1-4 in addition to the verses cited above.) These verses (Deuteronomy 4:32-34) pretty well sum up the uniquely miraculous feat of the Exodus from Egypt (you may think you recognize verse 34 from the haggadah but you are probably thinking of Deuteronomy 26:8):
It was a miraculous, amazing, earth-shatteringly impossible feat! Why weren’t they grateful? How could anyone want to be a slave? It’s almost criminal to wish for such a thing, when all the enslaved peoples of the world must hungrily yearn for freedom. What is going on here? Why do I miss Egypt and what do I mean by “Egypt”?
We are each supposed to remember and feel the suffering we experienced in Egypt. As this one line states very succinctly (from the Haggadah and Mishna Pesachim 10:5):
בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם
In each generation, a person must look upon himself as if he had personally left Egypt.
Egypt means many things to many people. Some think of the actual experience of being an ancient Israelite in the land of Egypt. Others think of more modern versions of slavery or suffering, or of the Holocaust. For me, the first time I connected to the seder on a visceral level was after I had experienced both depression and redemption from depression.
One year, sitting at the seder, the salt water suddenly tasted just like the tears that I remembered shedding continuously for months, while in the deepest pit of despair. The dense, sticky charoset reminded me of the laborious process of emerging from bed every dusky morning and getting through the day. The tasteless cardboard-like matzah, caught in my throat, reminded me of countless meals eaten without tasting a thing, of numerous lectures plodded through uncomprehendingly. And then, finally, the sweet taste of freedom, redemption, and rebirth, first in the egg in salt water, which tastes scrumptious after the rounds of matzah and marror, and then–the chicken soup! Nothing says freedom quite like a rich bowl of my mother’s chicken soup. (The matzah kugel tastes a little bit less like freedom.) The freedom that I experienced that year, the first year that I connected the ancient Israelites’ Egypt with my Egpyt, was remarkable. I emerged transformed and with a new understanding of both slavery and freedom.
So why my newfound sympathy for the Israelites who complained in the desert, who took their freedom for granted and wished to revert to slavery?
Freedom is trickier than we usually admit at Passover time, when everyone is busy extoling its virtues. Freedom is not without its complications. That first spoonful of chicken soup is incomparably wonderful, but freedom wears thin after awhile. Freedom is scary. Depression is horrible, but it’s safe. I am only now beginning to understand that. Depression, like slavery, limits one’s horizons. All you need to do is get through the day. Expectations of onself, and from others, are minimized. If you want to kill yourself, and you don’t, that’s enough to make the day a smashing success. If you don’t want to get out of bed in the morning, and you do, that’s enough to make that day worthwhile, almost regardless of what you do once you get out of bed. A slave has to meet his quota of bricks, and while he may suffer tremendously under his taskmasters, he knows what they expect of him and it is in their best interest to keep him fed and sheltered from the harsh noonday sun. There is safety and security in that. Depression is not fun. It’s miserable to want to die, or to have your singular goal for the day to get out of bed (shower and tooth-brushing optional). It was incredibly frightening to put myself into a hospital when I was afraid that I would hurt myself, but also incredibly wonderful to have my basic needs met by someone else while I was there (”the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic”!). To be looked after, to feel cared for, even in misery, had something over this freedom that wearies my soul.
Freedom demands choices. Choices every day. All the time. One after another. Big choices and small, significant and entirely insignificant.
Freedom means expectations. Freedom means that getting up and making bricks every day isn’t enough–not nearly enough. And that is very scary.
I thought that once I left Egypt, which pretty much happened several years ago, things would be easy. The Promised Land glimmered hopefully in the not-too-distant distance. The Promised Land of being able to go to sleep at night, get up in the morning, and do something useful, fulfilling, and interesting with my day in between. The Promised Land of a husband, children, and a full professional and communal life. But it turns out that there is a vast desert between slavery and the Promised Land. I am traversing that desert right now.
Sometimes, I get a burst of energy and run a mile, quickly, towards the Promised Land. I see things–wonderful, exciting, gratifying things–that I could not have imagined while enslaved in Egypt. I picture a book-lined room and myself, sitting in a comfortable chair, writing eloquently and movingly about things that matter. I picture conversations with close friends and utter strangers about this crazy world we live in, and how we can make it more bearable for all of us. But then I get closer, and I see a lifetime of choices, including many difficult ones, before me. I see all of the responsibility of freedom, and I get scared. I run–literally run!–back towards Egypt. I crawl into bed for a few days. I yearn for confinement, for a world small enough to take in with a single sweeping glance. I yearn for reduced expectations, for a kindly nurse to take my temperature and bring me three square meals and give me something in the form of a small pill to help me sleep at night. I’ll make bricks, I think. I’ll curl up and sleep at odd hours of the day and night. I’ll contemplate death and feel worthless and small and insignificant. Just don’t make go out there and live my life as a free woman! Please! Anything but that!
These thoughts make me sad, and they don’t last forever. At first, I misunderstood the situation, and thought that those thoughts meant that I was back in Egypt. But I am not. I am out. I have been liberated. I walked out of Egypt years ago under the power of my own two feet and with the help of God’s mighty, outstretched hand and his perceptive psychotherapists, and I have not gone back since. That doesn’t mean that I don’t occasionally look back, from my vantage point atop a hill in the desert, halfway between Egypt and the Promised Land, and wish to be back there.
One of the many things that I love about Judaism is that it allows me to say, “I don’t want to be free!” and even to throw a small temper-tantrum against the very freedom that I know saved me and makes my life worth living. Rather than being mortified at this thought, as I was when I began writing this post, I can open up the Tanakh and see that the Israelites had these ostensibly terrible thoughts as well. They weren’t saved by skilled psychotherapists and 20 mg/day of pharmaceuticals. They were saved by the almighty hand of God, by signs, wonders, and miracles galore. And if they could complain to cover up their fear, then I can be scared, too.
It is also no small comfort to know that it took the Israelites forty years to traverse the desert between Egypt and the Promised Land. One popular interpretation of this lengthy punishment for the sin of the spies (see Numbers 13 and 14) is that the Israelites needed the time to transition from slavery to freedom. They could not have entered the Promised Land immediately after redemption from Egypt. I feel that I, too, would be ill-suited to transition immediately from slavery to freedom. It’s just too hard. So I am trying to let myself take this time–not that I have much of a choice, apparently–and let myself look forward with anticipation and then balance that with a wistful look back at the misery that I leave behind me, without being too harsh with myself for this journey.
Leaving Egypt was merely the first step. Becoming free is a process and a journey, not a week-long holiday.
Passover and the exodus from Egypt is the story of the Jewish people for a very important reason: Because this is how we learn to live our lives. I’m not going to go so far as to suggest that this one story is the answer to all that ails humanity, but I think that it at least starts us off in a very good direction.
I. Suffering and Obligation
Deuteronomy 10:19:
| יט ואהבתם, את-הגר: כי-גרים הייתם, בארץ מצרים. | 19 You shall love therefore the stranger; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. |
Who among us has not been a “stranger in the land of Egypt”? Who among us has not felt enslaved, trapped, abused, despondent, neglected, stuck, addicted, bereft, or depressed?
Our intimate, personal knowledge of suffering from Egypt requires us to care not only for the stranger, but also for the fatherless and the widow (Deuteronomy 24:18-19):
II. Obligation Depends on Ability; Ability Depends on Knowledge
We are not obligated by God to do the impossible; we are only required to do the possible. We are not programmed for failure. What makes caring for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan possible?
Egypt makes it possible. Egypt means that you can and therefore must love the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.
An essential aspect of Pesach is that each of us must feel as if we were slaves in Egypt and then experience, through the seder, the moment of liberation. After liberation, in the Sinai desert, the Jewish people received the command to “love the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” If we had not been “strangers in the land of Egypt,” we could not truly know the plight of the strangers who move among us and we could not be obligated to love them.
We who have suffered ourselves, and who have, whether through the strength given to us by God or by the power inherent in our beings, been freed from slavery or suffering, truly know how the ubiquitous “other” suffers and only we can truly help them.
I really do not want to say that we suffer in order to help others. Who would volunteer for that thankless task? I would be justifiably outraged if someone said that to me. However, once we see and know that suffering is for some unfathomable reason necessary in this world, we have no choice but to use our own personal suffering, and our own redemption, to help others.
III. My Religion
Religion, if it does anything at all, should make our lives better in some way. It makes our lives better not because it requires us to “love the stranger.” (That’s just a nice platitude–along the lines of “Have a nice day” or some other meaningless thing the grocery store clerk might mutter in your direction after you sign your receipt.)
No, Judaism makes our lives better because it insists that we–the ever-suffering, enslaved for 350 years, powerless Israelites, who were so deep in the mucky pit of despair that the Midrash tells us that they no longer wished for redemption–are particularly and specifically commanded to love the stranger, that utterly unknowable wayfarer, and the widow and orphan, who may not be strangers to a community but belong to no one and are therefore as alone as people can be.
There are other places in the Torah (writ large) where we are commanded to love our brothers, our friends, and our family. I do not think that such injunctions are unique to religion or to Judaism. Those are just common sense.
I am going to go out on a limb here and declare that reason given for the commandment to love the stranger is, alone, a good enough reason for me to engage deeply and honestly with Jewish texts. It was those, those who would otherwise be strangers, who came out in support of me during my times of deepest darkest alienation and unknowability, who made my life livable. When I felt most like an unloved and perhaps unlovable stranger, these people, my saviors, came out of nowhere to love me and make my life livable. If my life had not gradually become more and more livable since the Fall of 1998, I would, in a very real and tangible way, not be here today. I would still be enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt, or, much worse, I would be dead.
עֲבָדִים הָיִינוּ לְפַרְעֹה בְּמִצְרָיִם, וַיּוֹצִיאֵנוּ יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ מִשָּׁם בְּיָד חֲזָקָה וּבִזְרוֹעַ נְטוּיָה. וְאִלּוּ לֹא הוֹצִיא הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אֶת אֲבוֹתֵינוּ מִמִּצְרָיִם, הֲרֵי אָנוּ וּבָנֵינוּ וּבְנֵי בָנֵינוּ מְשֻׁעְבָּדִים הָיִינוּ לְפַרְעֹה בְּמִצְרָיִם. וַאֲפִילוּ כֻּלָנוּ חֲכָמִים, כֻּלָנוּ נְבוֹנִים, כֻּלָנוּ זְקֵנִים, כֻּלָנוּ יוֹדְעִים אֶת הַתּוֹרָה, מִצְוָה עָלֵינוּ לְסַפֵּר בִּיצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם. וְכָל הַמַרְבֶּה לְסַפֵּר בִּיצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם הֲרֵי זֶה מְשֻׁבָּח
We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the L-rd, our G-d, took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm. If the Holy One, blessed be He, had not taken our ancestors out of Egypt, then we, our children, and our children’s children would have remained enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt. Even if all of us were wise, all of us understanding, all of us knowing the Torah, we would still be obligated to discuss the exodus from Egypt; and everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.
Given my understanding of the reason why the story of the Exodus plays such a central role in Judaism and in my life, it makes perfect sense that being wise, understanding, or knowing the Torah would not exempt us from telling this story. If anything, one who is considered wise, understanding, or knowing in Torah–one who sits in the ivory tower, as it were, far from the stranger, widow, and orphan–may need to tell it more. The goal of Pesach (and of Judaism) is to tell the story, to taste the salty tears of interminable bondage, and then, with a newfound knowledge of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to set out to ease their suffering. All who tell this story, all who consider themselves as part of this people, all who declare “עבדים היינו”–”We were slaves” every Pesach, are the inheritors of the Exodus and therefore of the injunction to love the stranger. All who taste the bitter marror join the fleeing Israelites as they cross the Sea of Reeds.
This–the centrality of Passover– is reason alone, for me, to belong to a chain of history and peoplehood stretching back to Egypt and stretching forward to redemption.
I hope that we can all journey, together, from the unmitigated suffering of Egypt to the bright, clear light of the Promised Land. I, and you, too, came out of Egypt.
Note: This piece is based on something that I wrote in 2006 and rewrote in 2008.
Just a short note about a conference that’s coming up that looks wonderful. It’s called “This Is My Prayer—Va’ani Tefillati: Jewish Women In Prayer” and is co-sponsored by The Jewish Theological Seminary, Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, Women of Reform Judaism, Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, Kolot of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Lilith magazine.
Sunday, March 1, 2009, 9:45 am
Abraham Joshua Heschel High School - 200 West End Ave. - New York City
The schedule is here.
Important note:
Advance registration is required; space is limited and registration will be on a first-come/first-served basis. We regret that we can accommodate NO WALK-IN registration for the conference.
Registrations must be received by February 24, 2009.
If you go, let me know how it is!
I want to take a moment to thank the Jewish and general blogosphere, and all of my commenters, for the warm welcome that this blog has received.
Thank you especially to:
When I first conceived of this idea (circa 2005), I was emerging from a depression and found that writing about my emotional life through tefilla [prayer] was powerfully healing. I posted them on a secret, private, password-protected blog that I didn’t tell anyone about. Clearly, I wasn’t ready to share my thoughts with the world! Over the years since then, as I have felt better and better, I have also felt an increasing need to share my writing, personal and painful though it is, with the greater world. I spent months dithering over the decision to start this blog. Should I go public? Anonymous? Password-protected? My goal was to enable myself to write as honestly as possible, while reaching as many people as possible. In the end, I decided anonymity without password protection was the way to go. Based on the number of readers I have and the ways in which this blog, through its honesty, has been able to touch people, I think that I made the right decision.
Special thanks to all of those who took the time to leave comments. I read and think about them all, even the ones that I can’t really answer. Comments that “just” say, “Thank you for doing this,” “I find this helpful” or “I find this meaningful” are incredibly encouraging for me. They are literally what keeps this blog going. When I was dithering over starting this blog, aside from the whole privacy vs. publicity question, I wondered if this was a good idea in terms of my own mood. I was feeling, this past summer and for several years before that, better than ever. Would writing about deep, dark, scary things make me depressed once more? Was it a risk I could take? Would I even be able to write from the point of view of a depressed person if I was no longer depressed? Life, as it so often does, played a little joke on me and I unexpectedly became depressed before I even began work on the blog. As a result, the blog’s launch was delayed by several months, and it’s progress has been impeded further since then by the depression. In short, I don’t think I could keep doing this without all of your positive feedback and comments. Working on this has truly been a healing, transformative experience, much as writing the first few pieces were in 2005…also, really difficult and draining. I am so grateful for the generosity of heart, mind, and spirit in which this blog has been received.
Speaking of comments, does anyone have an answer for commenter Tamar about Elohai Nishama and kabbalah? Something about “four worlds in which the soul travels as it is being formed”? I know very little about kabbalah and don’t think I can get a handle on it quickly enough to answer Tamar. Thanks!
God’s protection and control, as stated in the “אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה” prayer, rankles at times. It seems entirely untrue. On some mornings, the declaration of “וְאַתָּה מְשַׁמְּרָהּ בְּקִרְבִּי” “and You preserve it within me,” rather than being comforting and reassuring, chafes against my lived reality. If God protects my soul within me, why do I feel like my soul is battered, bruised, and blackened? If this is God’s idea of preserving the purity of my soul, that’s not a very promising indication of God’s abilities! And what kind of “אֲדוֹן כָּל הַנְּשָׁמוֹת,” “master of all souls,” is this? This is part of a much broader question of God’s omnipotence and intervention in our lives, but on some mornings, praising God for protecting and sustaining me simply feels empty and false. What do I do? I say the words anyway, even though they leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I try to focus more carefully on what feels true to me at the moment.
Psalm 51 is helpful for presenting a different option for thinking about the purity or impurity of our hearts and our souls, and what sort of protection we can expect or not expect from God.
The Psalmist, speaking in the voice of King David, who has just been reprimanded by the prophet Nathan for killing Uriah in order to marry Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, does not feel that his heart is pure. Many of his feelings about himself seem more familiar to me than the declaration of the אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה prayer.
Verse 12 reads:
| יב לֵב טָהוֹר, בְּרָא-לִי אֱלֹהִים; וְרוּחַ נָכוֹן, חַדֵּשׁ בְּקִרְבִּי. | 12 Create a pure heart for me, O God; renew in me a steadfast spirit. |
This verse was a popular song when I was teenager. I remember noticing that people around me, and thus I, usually sang “לֵב טָהוֹר, בָּרָא-לִי אֱלֹהִים” instead of “לֵב טָהוֹר, בְּרָא-לִי אֱלֹהִים.” It’s not a big difference–just one vowel–but the meaning in difference is significant. What people were singing was “God created a pure heart for me,” in the mode of the “אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה” prayer, rather than what the verse says, which is “Create a pure heart for me.” The actual verse is a request of God. Our hearts may or may not have been created pure once-upon-a-time. (It seems that our spirits were once steadfast, since we are asking God to renew them, not to create them that way for the first time.) Our hearts are certainly not pure now, and we want them to be. God did not succeed at protecting them or us. That is the naked truth of this psalm. Our hearts become impure; battered; blackened. We ask God to help us purify them, or, in even stronger terms, to create new hearts and souls for us.
As I sometimes do, David feels that he arrived defective from the factory (Psalms 51:7), although perhaps in stronger terms than I would use.
| ז הֵן-בְּעָווֹן חוֹלָלְתִּי; וּבְחֵטְא, יֶחֱמַתְנִי אִמִּי. | 7 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. |
Note that I do not mean to imply through this analysis of Psalm 51 that I think that sin and depression are equivalent. It only seems useful to adopt the language that David uses to describe how awful he feels after having sinned, to describe how awful I feel when I am depressed. It is somehow reassuring to find my emotions reflected in ancient Psalms, even if the events that serve as catalysts for those emotions are very different.
In the next verse, he prays for wisdom, which I have certainly done:
| ח …וּבְסָתֻם, חָכְמָה תוֹדִיעֵנִי. | 8 …make me to know wisdom in mine inmost heart. |
Other things he says in this chapter of Psalms also resonate. David feels blackened, and in need of purification. He wishes to be full of joy and gladness. He feels crushed and beaten down and hopes he won’t feel this way forever. Unlike the “אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה” prayer, David does not seem to feel that God protects his soul, that God is “אֲדוֹן כָּל הַנְּשָׁמוֹת,” master of all souls. He recognizes that bad things happen in the course of our lives; things that require fixing, purification, and constant renewal. What we are created with is not always enough. We need periodic infusions, washes, purges, and help from God throughout our lives. Our souls do not remain pure or static.
The word that David uses to say “You have crushed” is “דִּכִּיתָ.” Interestingly, the root of this word is the same as the Hebrew word for clinical depression, which is “דִּכָּאוֹן.” (This word also appears later in this chapter, in verse 19, in reference to David’s crushed and contrite heart, sickened by recognition of his sin.)
I love the following verses. How much do I wish I felt like I was in God’s presence! How often do I feel cast away from God! How badly do I yearn for a willing spirit to uphold me and a restoration of joy!
If we skip a few verses about bloodguilt, which are, thankfully, irrelevant to my current state of mind, we arrive at a verse that is directly connected to prayer. It is recited right before we begin the Amidah, and asks for God’s to help us pray.
| יז אֲדֹנָי, שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח; וּפִי, יַגִּיד תְּהִלָּתֶךָ. | 17 O Lord, open Thou my lips; and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. |
This verse is a humble recognition that we cannot go it alone. We need God to open our lips, and perhaps our hearts, before we can declare His praise. We may yearn for a God who is in the driver’s seat, who protects our souls and keeps them pure, but in the end, Psalm 51 often presents a more realistic view for me of the imperfect state of my heart and soul, coupled with a yearning for a God who will help me fix it all.
I usually think of “grace” as a very Christian theological concept. My knowledge of Christian theology is somewhat shaky, acquired mainly through Jewish history classes in day school, one Bible class in college, and browsing Wikipedia when something particularly interested me. I tend to associate grace with Christian notions of original sin and the merits of thoughts over action. As I understand it, grace is something that Christians believe that God bestows to an undeserving, sinful people.
This doesn’t jive with my theology on many levels, and, yet, I think that there is a Jewish equivalent as expressed in the “Elohai Nishama” prayer. For me (and maybe for Christians), grace are the blessings that God bestowed upon me by creating me and by sustaining me for no other reason than that I am a human being and that is what God does for people. Grace is something to be grateful for even when the world seems bleak and empty. Grace is when things turn out okay, even though there is no reason for them to. Grace is the sort of unconditional love that God has for humanity, the pinacle among his creations. Jews don’t talk about God and love, but maybe it’s time to start.
And now, onto “Elohai Nishama.”
This is a powerful prayer. According to the Talmud (Tractate Brachot 60b), this–not Modeh Ani–is the first thing that you are supposed to say upon awaking.
“אֱלֹהַי! נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא” / “My God! The soul which you bestowed in me is pure.”
What does it mean to declare that one was created with a “נְשָׁמָה טְהוֹרָה,” a pure soul?
I often worry, beset with depression as I am, that my soul is somehow defective. Perhaps, I sometimes think, it arrived this way from the factory, and I am just doomed to walk around with this blackened soul forever. I find this prayer reassuring: No, God created me with a perfect soul, just as He created every other human being with a perfect soul. It is not defective and I am not defective. It came to me pure and it retains this essential purity despite whatever life may throw my way. I am, deep down, at my core, okay in some essential way, just because I was created with this pure soul.
“וְאַתָּה מְשַׁמְּרָהּ בְּקִרְבִּי” / “And you preserve it within me.”
This prayer also tells me that God not only created my soul in a pure state, but that God also protects and maintains its purity. God has control. God is in the driver’s seat
Making that statement is both comforting and freeing. This is part of my idea of grace. It is a blessing to be able to let go of this idea that I can control things in my life. For every thing that I can control, it seems that there are ten things that are beyond my control. Whether those things are fairly benign (the weather), more potentially hazardous (the actions of people around me), or the most terrifyingly sometimes-out-of-my-control (my own conscious and subconscious and unconscious emotional reactions to events around me), there are many of them.
” וְאַתָּה עָתִיד לִטְּלָהּ מִמֶּנִּי” / “You will eventually take it from me.”
You, God, not I, will decide when it’s time to give up. You will take my soul from me. Like everyone else, I will someday lose my soul, but it will be on your watch, not on mine. I can control my body to some extent, but only God controls my soul.
“כָּל זְמַן שֶׁהַנְּשָׁמָה בְּקִרְבִּי מוֹדֶה אֲנִי לְפָנֶיךָ ה’ אֱלֹהַי וֵאלֹהֵי אֲבוֹתַי. רִבּוֹן כָּל הַמַּעֲשִׂים אֲדוֹן כָּל הַנְּשָׁמוֹת” / “So long as my soul is within me, I give thanks to you, Adonai, my God, and God of my ancestors, Lord of all creatures, master of all souls.”
I can be thankful, at the very least, that I have these ideas and that I repeat them, sometimes with more conviction and other times with less, every morning: I was created with a pure soul. God protects the purity, the essential wholeness of my soul, and God alone decides when it is time to give up.
These three short verses, taken from the blessings that the kohanim, or priests, are supposed to give to the Israelites (see Numbers 6:24), contain many requests. They ask for blessings, protection, light, kindness, attention, and peace, and I say them every day after the Torah blessings in the morning prayers.
Significantly, I think, these verses of blessing make no mention of happiness. I am opposed to praying for happiness, since I don’t think it’s a realistic request and I don’t believe in praying for the impossible. I believe, of course, in individual moments of happiness, but to ask to be happy overall? Not realistic. Life contains too many tragedies to seek constant happiness. This may go against current trends in positive psychology as exemplified by popular books with titles like Stumbling on Happiness and Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, and maybe this outlook accounts for, or is due to, my sometimes depressed state, but it’s how I feel.
In any case, volumes could be written about each of these, and I yearn with all my being for all of them, but I want to focus on light and peace in this post. When I think of what I pray for the most, it is peace and a sense of fulfillment or purpose in life. Light is a necessary prerequisite for all of those things.
I spend a lot of time in darkness when I am depressed. It can be difficult to explain how pervasive and invasive this darkness seems, and how real it feels on even the sunniest of days. It’s not just that I feel dark and despondent when I am in a depressed period; the entire world around me seems dull, dim, and cloudy. It doesn’t feel like it’s dark here and now, but somewhere else or at some other time, there is light. The darkness that envelopes me with a chilly hug when I am depressed precludes the existence of any light, anywhere.
My all-time favorite verse about light is from Isaiah 58. It refers to light as a kind of justice breaking forth through the injustice and corruption of the world we live in. I can’t equate depression with injustice and corruption by any means, but the kind of light I seek breaks forth as the morning, and includes a strong dose of healing, much like the light of Isaiah 58:8.
The first half of the verse that follows, verse 9, is also stunningly beautiful and, in many ways, it sums up my deepest, unexpressed hopes for what prayer can be and do. When will God say, “Here I am”? In some ways, I wonder if my failure to call out in a regular manner, alone, accounts for God’s failure to respond. I have certainly cried enough… In general, I find many of the words of the prophets to either reflect my depressed state or to provide a sense of hope, uplifting, or healing from them.
| ט אָז תִּקְרָא וַיהוָה יַעֲנֶה, תְּשַׁוַּע וְיֹאמַר הִנֵּנִי:. | 9 Then shalt thou call, and the LORD will answer; thou shalt cry, and He will say: ‘Here I am.’ |
And what of peace?
When I think of seeking and hoping for peace in my life, I think of stability and normality. I think of waking up in the morning, expressing gratitude for my life, getting up, and going about my day. I think of the absence of the too-oft expressed “Please God, just give me one good reason to keep on living!” thoughts. I think of being able to fully take care of myself the way I deserve to taken care of. I think of being an integral part of a warm, loving, and accepting community. I think of being fully at peace with my family and, more than that, with all the many parts of myself–my reality, my limitations, and the many, great, unrealized possibilities of my life.
Chanukah is a usually a sad time of year for me. A friend of mine died eight years ago, on the first night of Chanukah. I spent time with my grandfather over Chanukah in 2003, when he was dying of cancer. After that, I used to light via phone with my grandmother so she wouldn’t have to light alone and now she, too, is gone.
Last year, I spent some time thinking about lighting candles at the darkest time of the year and how Chanukah could stop being solely about sadness and loss for me. I thought about the miracle of Chanukah being not that we won some short-lived military victory against the Seleucids, or that the oil lasted eight days instead of one, but that we bother to light candles during this dark, depressing time of year at all, rather than huddling under the covers and waiting for the sunlight to return.
I thought about this idea a lot in the years immediately following my friend’s death, when I tried to wrap my mind around the idea of celebrating anything on anyone’s yahrzeit. Lighting candles? Singing Hallel? Whatever for? It seems impossible, but, lo and behold!, through the intervention of time, fading memory, and increased focus on the gifts we received from a person during her lifetime, we somehow live to celebrate again.
This idea–that there is value in lighting candles for eight nights simply to celebrate light during the darkest time of the year–is not a modern invention of the ecumenical mind, striving to find a unifying theme behind Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanza. The Talmud itself (Tractate Avoda Zara, 8a) mentions the idea:
ת”ר: לפי שראה אדם הראשון יום שמתמעט והולך אמר, “אוי לי, שמא בשביל שסרחתי עולם חשוך בעדי וחוזר לתוהו ובוהו, וזו היא מיתה שנקנסה עלי מן השמים!” עמד וישב ח’ ימים בתענית [ובתפלה]. כיון שראה תקופת טבת וראה יום שמאריך והולך אמר “מנהגו של עולם הוא.” הלך ועשה שמונה ימים טובים“Our rabbis taught: When Adam saw the days becoming shorter, he said: ‘Woe is to me, because I have sinned and the world is returning to chaos!’ He prayed and fasted until the winter equinox when he noticed the days becoming longer. ‘This is the way of the world,’ he said, and he established an eight day festival.’”
I don’t know about you, but I have many days during the darkness of December (as well as October and November) when I think, “Woe is to me…the world is returning to chaos!” Whether I attribute this to my own sins or not is a separate matter entirely. But, my God! You don’t need to have to have full-fledged Seasonal Affective Disorder to fear the clutching darkness of winter!
Unlike Adam, we do not need to pray and fast to ensure the continuation of our world. Instead, we rely on our experiences from the past, of woe and chaos descending upon us and then, in time, being lifted, to know that, as Adam said, “This is the way of the world.”
The idea that chaos and darkness are an inherent part of the world is integral to my theology. My God who is the God who is “יוצר אור ובורא חשך,” “creator of light and creates darkness.” [See blessings before the morning Sh'ma.] I don’t believe in a God who is all lightness. I believe in a God who creates darkness, too. I don’t understand the darkness most of the time, but I believe that it comes from God. Hand-in-hand with this belief comes the faith that, as the morning follows the night, spiritual and emotional light inevitably follow the deepest darkness.
The world is a mean, nasty place sometimes. Some nights, some Decembers of the soul, seem interminable. Depression always feels like a forever state to me–like I always was, and will always be, depressed. Even though I may intellectually recognize that I was not always depressed, that it comes and goes, my emotional memory is of the past being one big black pit, which no sunlight could permeate. Somehow, my experience of depression lessening in the past does not carry through to the present. Being unable to recall past happinesses is only one of the many curses of depression. But these flickering Chanukah candles remind me, in a tangible way, that this is false. They are a device to remind us that it is not always dark. Light is a real possibility. Dawn will approach, and whether I try to hasten its approach by lighting candles or by sitting in front of a light box or not, it will come. It will come, and I don’t need to sit weeping and lamenting in the darkness until it does. I can do something about it. I can light candles.
Despite Noah’s and our worst fears, God will not return the world to chaos. That is the covenant that God made with Noah and all of humanity after the flood. This is the miracle of Chanukah for me–that we have faith in “יוצר אור ובורא חשך,” “creator of light and creates darkness”–that we actually go ahead and light candles in the darkness, that we combine our faith in God’s hand in our lives with our own efforts at hastening the arrival of the dawn.
During Chanukah, it is customary to recite the 30th Psalm, because of the connection between the Maccabean rededication of the Temple and the original dedication of the Temple. In a beautiful confluence, this verse speaks to the idea of a God who creates light and darkness, and a God who promises not to let us languish in the pit forever although he makes no promises against us falling into that dark space in the first place. Some of the most relevant verses to that theme are highlighted below:
I will write more about this psalm when I get to that part of Shacharit, but for now, I will say that this Psalm reflects my belief that God does hide his face. We do become frightened as Adam did when the days seemed about to shrink into oblivion. But God eventually turns our mourning into dancing. God promises us that nothing that is bad will be bad forever. Redemption will come. We will be girded with gladness one day, and live to praise God again.
It sometimes seems like extreme folly to praise the God who brings darkness, the God who causes the days to shorten, the God who takes away the dawn of friends, family, and life itself, and who causes us to gird ourselves with sackcloth in the first place. I choose to believe, instead, that such praise of God is part of the miracle of faith, of recovery, and of the dawn that follows the darkness.
* * * * *
Postscript: I wrote most of this for Chanukah last year. To be perfectly honest, it is much more hopeful than I feel at the moment. The weeping is tarrying for much longer than a night and for much longer than I would like, and the dawn of joy seems impossibly far away. However, I am still lighting Chanukah candles, so perhaps there is still hope. Sometimes you just do the actions and the feelings follow later.
