Double Exposure, Multivalence, & Ki Tetzei
After three months at home with us, on Sunday, my husband and I dropped off our daughter at the airport. She was heading for Jerusalem for a year of study.
Which all means I haven’t slept a good night in at least a week, but more like three months (although, being 63 now, I can’t blame it all on her).
Monday morning, my birthday (thank you!!), she arrived safely. (An excellent birthday present all by itself.)
Having our daughter staying with us while preparing to go away was a multivalent experience.
First, her destination; “Who goes into a war zone??” (unless you’re a soldier, doctor, politician…). Not to mention the multilayered feelings about this particular place in this particular point in time.
And there she is, calling, sending photos of the places she fell in love with her last time there, having an Israeli breakfast with her best friend in a charming restaurant, so excited to be at the Western Wall, running into old friends in cute neighborhoods by accident. It feels so safe and wonderful and magical.
All the while knowing there are horrible things happening very close by.
Getting her ready to leave was also like this. It was lovely and wonderful to have her home again for a time. We had beautiful moments together, especially in the last week when we were very intentional about spending time together. Several mornings, we went out to sit in the park and enjoy the cool weather and the flowers. Her last Shabbos home, her sister and brother-in-law came over, and we played games and ate ice cream and laughed a lot.
It was also chaotic with all the collected stuff of three years living on her own. And of course we were all anxious. There were lots of emotional ups and downs. At one point, it looked like she might not make it, that her trip might not happen when war broke out with Iran; her flight was canceled, and we had to buy a new ticket. There were many sleepless nights.
The same multivalence was true of my birthday. On only four hours of sleep two nights in a row, I bounced out of bed, determined to have a happy day. I was not going to lie in bed depressed over this new loss and sudden change.
Early in the morning, we hopped on a train to Cold Spring, NY, to go hiking and have some good food. Nature and fun. That was the objective. We basically hadn’t left the city all summer (because I don’t think New Jersey counts). Exhausted and literally not seeing straight, we started up a very steep mountain, aiming for 360-degree views.
There were moments I didn’t know if I could make it to the summit. Unprepared for such a strenuous hike, I hadn’t eaten much for breakfast (saving room for the ice cream, you know?), we hadn’t brought any food, and not enough water. But encouragement came from my husband and others on the trail. (Four days later, I’m still exhausted, though recovering.)
In her commentary on this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tetzei, Rabbi Tali Adler talks about double exposure and multivalence. She reminds us that more than one thing can be true at a time; the same place and time can hold beauty and horror all at once. She describes one particular day as a young child in Europe, seeing, through her grandfather’s eyes, his life before the Holocaust.
She explains it as a double exposure: “For the first time, I began to understand what it is like when something so beautiful becomes, while retaining all its magic, something terrible as well.”
It is like the Egypt of the Bible for the Hebrews: a place of great abundance and richness—but how does it look from a slave’s point of view?
“Egypt is a place caught in a double exposure,” says Adler; “For the Jews, Egypt has long been a nightmare, a place of slavery and oppression, of beatings and cold-blooded murder. One imagines that for the Jews in Egypt, every place must have a secret meaning: beautiful houses as places of servitude, cool bathing spots in the river as the place where baby boys drown.”
The double exposure comes with the understanding that the Nile is both a source of life and also a place of terrible suffering: “The first two plagues (blood and frogs) are a way of exposing the hidden underbelly of Israelite suffering to the Egyptians, of making explicit and raw what denial and callousness may have disguised. They are a way of bringing the Egyptians out of their day-to-day understanding of their country and of making the other, blurry side of the double exposure unbearably clear.”
And yet, in spite of this, she points out, we are explicitly commanded in this week’s Torah portion not to hate the Egyptian.
The ancient rabbis explain why: the Egyptians once hosted us generously during the time of Joseph, who became Pharaoh’s right-hand-man, saving an entire generation of Jews from famine.
Since she writes of my sentiments in this moment so well, I end with Rabbi Adler’s words:
“In this moment, it is we who are forced to learn that the multivalence of places does not allow us to neatly cordon off the beautiful and ugly: we are touched by the meanings of other people and groups. It is impossible, in this reading, to fully separate the memory of nightmarish tragedy from miraculous safety.
“We are commanded to give room to both, to treat our stories with the integrity and nuance they deserve. We are commanded, in this mitzvah not to hate the Egyptian, to remember the past in all its complexity: not to forget the suffering that we endured, but at the same time, not to allow our memories to become exclusively dark. We are commanded to remember honestly. We are commanded to remember moments of beauty and kindness even as we remember suffering, persecution, and darkness. We are commanded to live in the only truly honest way: in the double exposure.”
And so I hold the beauty and the magic of where my daughter is, focusing on the objective of her year there, while also holding the suffering.
In this third week of the month of Elul, a time of honest self-assessment, I choose to live in the double exposure.
Will you join me in this endeavor? It’s not easy, perhaps more challenging than climbing a mountain, I know.
