Be Comforted, My People

I sit here writing on what is considered the saddest day of the Jewish calendar.

Yes, it’s been awhile, I know. Two months, actually, since I last published anything. These past months, the news has felt like a daily assualt, and like I ran out of words. I had nothing left to say, no sentiments of consolation, as Isaiah tells us this week, or of inspiration. Not for me, not for anyone. How could I write?

Today, when Jews commemorate the destruction of the Temple, a fast day we are supposed to sink into, I can’t find any rational reason to do so. Have I not sunk into the deepest grief for months, or maybe more correctly, even years?

But I’m slowly finding my strength, my inspiraton, again.

This week, one of the rabbis at my synagogue talksd about the fabric of the Jewish people falling apart; while we have become even more polarized due to political disagreement, our way of communicating is tearing us apart further than the disagreement itself. It’s a way of attacking each other that has become the norm over the past years, given license by the general state of disrespectful discourse in our country and our world.

The rabbi asked the question: are we as a people falling apart?

She pointed to the fact that Jewish culture and tradition rest strongly on the ability to argue and disagree.

I wondered about this. Has our unity been an illusion? Like that of our country whose history is being whitewashed? Just when we were beginning to reckon with our past as a nation? Were the ancient rabbis necessarily respectful towards each other in their disagreement?

Perhaps not. But they at least talked to each other.

Or is that an illusion as well, recorded in texts in a way that gives us that impression? Texts recorded over time, of conversations happening between rabbis that actually lived centuries apart.

I don’t know the answers. Neither does this (other) rabbi.

But I do know that we can each try our best, in each conversation we choose to have about challenging questions and views about the world, by introducing ideas in ways that others can hear—if only we do so slowly and gently, planting seeds along the way.

There may not be enough time to do things slowly, everything feels so urgent. And maybe there isn’t.

In the meantime, I draw strength from those who quietly resist with their bodies in various ways, like those who get in the faces of masked ICE agents as they kidnap people, and yet others who risk everything by speaking out, whether they are political figure, government employees, or Jews using words that are taboo in the Jewish world.

So for those on a spiritual path who, because their own pain is so deep, can’t bring themselves to talk to someone whose views are the polar opposite of their own, who can’t allow themselves to feel anything of the pain of others, I beseech you to try.

Because what is being asked of us in this moment is a very big spiritual lesson: to read, to listen, to open our eyes to the suffering of others, whoever they might be.

I don’t have any answers as to how to fix our current situation, and I often feel helpless to do so, yet I can guarantee that by screaming at and above each other, by calling each other stupid or blind, or by closing our eyes and avoiding the whole thing, we will get nowhere. Even if others are doing it, we don’t have to respond in kind.

Maybe there is no escaping the sadness. I’ve been living in the sadness for a long time, and yet I keep going. Maybe I do actually have the strength I didn’t know I had. Maybe we all do. Maybe this is the wisdom of the Jewish calendar: that we get a day to allow ourselves to be in the sadness.

And then we have to get up and keep going—keep trying.

May it be so for all of us.