The Irritating Pearls of Humanity & Shavuos

Over the past two weeks I’ve officiated at four funerals (one wedding coming up!!). What I love about funerals is getting to know about a person’s life and their family in a very intimate way.

I come away feeling like I knew the person I never met. It often feels like I become one of the family.

As I get to know them, I learn about them as unique individuals, with their beauty and their quirkiness, the things people loved about them and the things they found annoying, difficult, and challenging: the complexity of the human being.

All four of these women I helped memorialize from these past twelve days fought fiercely for their own independence, for the rights of others, and they loved fiercely. They had all survived great tragedy in early lives, with parents and siblings dying at a young age, families splitting up.

I like to begin with a Mark Nepo poem that recognizes that it is from irritations that a pearl is born. (It’s called, Yes, We Can Talk.)

I have often had the opportunity to officiate at the funerals of those you might describe as pearls: people who lived their lives in a very intentional way, trying to make their little corner of the world just a little bit better. Pearls, not saints. (Jews don’t aspire to saintlihood. It’s not our culture).

Like the social worker turned lawyer, in order to have a greater impact. She would use her voice for the voiceless: for those suffering elder-abuse, or living in group homes, the mentally ill, the money-less.

When I dug into her family history to see where she got this passion, I learned that her father had been an example to her as a famous music producer, the Robbins Sheet Music business. He would sign on people like Ella Fitzgerald and others Black artists who might not have had a voice and become famous if it hadn’t been for him. Most of all, he did it with respect, not trying to control what they did, but allowing them to be their own people in their own unique way, letting their own particular talent shine through.

But she was difficult to work with. Her standards were high, and she had no patience for those who did not come well-prepared for court. “Don’t waste my time,” was her motto. “People’s lives are on the line.” She was tough, judgmental, challenging.

Still, everyone loved her so much, and she loved them. She had a great sense of humor. They laughed together and cried together.

Another one made a point of cursing a lot when interviewing people to hire, thereby eliminating those who were too uptight for the job. She was the chief editor of Planned Parenthood for some 30 years. She had a raunchy sense of humor, loved laughing, but very serious about her commitment to women’s reproductive health and freedom; she knew how dangerous it was for women when abortion was illegal.

Yet another was a woman who did stupid things like protesting alone with her husband in front of a Nazi bookstore in Arlington, Va, back in the 1960’s. They told the police they were going to do this, who shrugged, and they were on their own, with no protection. The Nazis showed up in black cars with German Shepherds, and the young couple, shaking, peeing in their pants, but they stood their ground. Two weeks later, the bookstore was closed. The Jewish tailor down the street thanked them.

This same woman would walk into a public bathroom marked “Colored” because she had to pee and that was the closest bathroom, but also to make a statement. She volunteered at food banks and made sure they weren’t profiting from others’ hunger. Her sons’ friends came from all different walks of life, of different ethnicities and religious backgrounds, and all were welcome in their home. She worked with Black children from poor neighborhoods, and she would drive them home, sometimes getting stopped by the police who wanted to make sure she was okay—because, you know, she had young Black men in her car, and that probably meant she was in danger.

She, too, was a pearl, but no saint. She also had a foul mouth, and would direct it at the principal of her sons’ school who could never quite figure out when the Jewish holidays fell, to her frustration. (This was in Springfield, Illinois, back in the 1970’s). She was tough, and she turned her son off to playing the violin at his bar mitzvah, despite her good intentions (he actually gave it up entirely) by doing something that had the opposite effect of what she’d hoped; she went out of her way to get him to meet famous violinist, Isaac Stern. Her grown sons have friends that are still afraid of their mother—even though she’s dead—despite knowing that she always had their best interests at heart.

Then there was the talented clothing designer, which could sound like an elite thing, traveling to and from Italy constantly, but she made clothing for friends and family, dressing them up beautifully, giving them scarves, and teaching them how to wear them. So many of those people wore the clothing she had made for them to the funeral. They cried when they talked about how they felt seen by her when no one else saw them, how she was there for them always.

This same woman was defined as very “spiritual,” very New-Age-y. Sometimes it was too much for her friends and family, and she irritated them with her constant talk of angels and heaven, always encouraging them to visualize good things happening when they were worried or facing a challenge.

But she radiated deep love for every single person, they all said, and they felt it.

Her grown nephew told of how they would walk down the street, and when they saw a homeless person, particularly one who looked like they hadn’t bathed in six months, she would stop, look into their eyes, and make him do the same while shaking their hand. (“Mortifying” is how he described it.)

All four of these women understood each human being to be worthy in their own right, no matter who they were, where they came from, or what they had done. They carried this strongest of Jewish values in their very beings, committing their lives to it, even though they came from secular families and weren’t necessarily conscious where these values came from.

There’s a mishna from our ancient rabbis that teachers: “Adam was created singly…to proclaim the greatness of the Blessed Holy One, for a human being stamps many coins with one die and they are all alike one with the other, but the King of Kings of kings, the Blessed Holy One, has stamped all humanity with the die of the first man, and yet not one of them is like his fellow” (Sanhedrin 4:5).

As Rabbi Shai Held points out in his volume, The Heart of Torah (Vol. 2, p. 94-95), “this is a staggering teaching—that never before in the history of the cosmos has there ever been another human being just like you, and never again in the history of the cosmos will there ever be another human being just like you.”

But the mishna continues: “Therefore, each and every person is obligated to say, ‘For my sake was the world created.’”

Rabbi Held, like many of us perhaps, might find this troubling; isn’t there a touch of nacissism and self-congratulation in this statement, he asks?

But then Rabbi Held explains that he came to realize that such an interpretation of this mishnah had more to do with our modern culture, and how we are taught to think about our uniqueness as implying entitlement.

On the contrary, says, what it says about human uniqueness actually carries implications for God’s glory, not ours; it’s not about what we are entitled to, but what we are responsible for. Because “we are, all of us, called upon to serve.”

He goes on: “As human beings faced with a world so utterly broken in so many ways, we are called upon to ask not just, what can I give, but also, and crucially, what can I give?…How can I, with my own unique gifts, talents, and passions—and my unique combination of weaknesses and limitations—best serve God? God’s love is a call to service, and we answer not as human beings in general but as human beings in all our particularity.”

“There is another critical dimension to all this,” Shai Held writes: “Our uniqueness implies our irreplaceability. When the Mishnah tells us that there has never been and will never be another person just like us, it also implicitly points to the tragedy of our inevitable death: When we die, something infinitely precious and utterly irreplaceable simply disappears.”

There’s a parable from a midrash that says, “A man had a stock of fine pearls which he used to count before taking out, and count again before putting away.” So, similarly, the midrash imagines God saying to the Israelites, “You are my children…and therefore I count you often” (Numbers Rabbah 4:2).

It is this preciousness that I witness each time I officiate at a funeral. Each person is utterly irreplaceable, with a name that we hold up and vow to never forget as long as we live.

On this holiday of Shavuos, the Israelites stand in awe and terror, trembling at the sights and sounds that accompany the presence of God, ready to receive God’s teaching on Mt. Sinai.

It is said that every Jew alive today stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai. We stood there collectively, as a family.

But we stood there as individuals as well.

As we enter Shavuos, we simultaneously begin reading the Book of Numbers, in Hebrew, Bamidbar, or In the Wilderness, where counting is so central.

As human beings, we need to learn to see ourselves as pearls bringing our uniqueness into the world every single day.

Faced with a world so utterly broken in so many ways, we, too, tremble at the future and the implications for our responisibility.

And yes, we can let ourselves fall apart sometimes, so we can gather ourselves together again, pick up the broken pieces, and bring our unique gifts, passions and talents, along with our unique combination of weaknesses and limitations, and figure out each next step we must take in this wilderness we are living through.

Will you join me in standing ready to love one another in all our beauty, uniqueness, and brokenness, to answer the call of service, bringing your own uniqueness, beauty and brokenness into that service?

Please say Amen in answer to that call.