Soul-Shattering

A Sermon for Rosh haShanah 5768

Rabbi Ellen Lippmann

Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives

I used to think Rosh HaShanah was mainly a holiday of reunion. When I was a kid we ate apples and honey and honey cake, dressed up in new clothes, wished each other a sweet year and prepared to get serious at Yom Kippur.

Rosh HaShanah for me is still reunion time, a time—as at a Pesakh seder—to look around and see who is here and who is not. Rosh HaShanah is also the time when we return to God: Hashiveinu Adonai elekha v'nashuva—We ask God to return us and we pledge to return. We stand at the gate hoping to find a way in. In the parlance of the 19th century Hassidim, God has now left the field of the month of Elul when we all had easy access to the divine presence, and has re-entered the palace and ascended the throne. How do we connect to God now? How do we open the gate, walk up to the throne? What is the point of Rosh HaShanah in a time and place far from kings and queens and the prayers of farmers and shepherds?

An answer came to me a few weeks ago, as I met with Rosie Silber-Marker as she began to prepare a d'var Torah for her upcoming bat mitzvah. In the humash Eitz Hayim Rosie and I found a comment that has stayed with me: Commenting on the fact that Jacob is shaken or afraid after awakening from his dream of the ladder and God standing by him, it says “We tend to speak casually of coming into God's presence. Jacob's response here reminds us that to truly encounter God in our lives is a soul-shattering experience. We are shaken to the core of our souls, and we are never the same person afterward.”

On Rosh HaShanah our encounter with God is not casual. We dare to hope that it will be soul-shattering. Avinu Malkeinu, we sing yearningly, have mercy on us, answer us. We want to feel Your presence to the core of our souls. That yearning, that encounter is the reason for Rosh HaShanah's continuing power, after the apples and honey are gone and the new clothes get a little limp in the heat as they always did.

The dictionary (Webster's Unabridged) tells me that to shatter is to break something into pieces, as by a blow; to damage; to destroy or impair; to weaken or refute; or to be broken into fragments. I am reminded by writer Ellen Frankel that “the Baal Shem Tov taught that there are many keys to unlock the gates of repentance, but that the ax—that is, the sincere prayer of the broken heart—is the mightiest key of all, capable of shattering even the strongest gate. Similarly, Nahman of Bratslav taught that nothing is as whole as a broken heart.”

In some way, we all know that soul-shattering: I look around this room tonight and see the faces that reveal so many stories. Soul-shattering is your aging mother losing her mind and memory. Soul-shattering is a diagnosis of cancer or Parkinson's, forever changing your future. Soul-shattering is hitting bottom with drink or drugs or gambling. Soul-shattering is the loss of a baby or a young daughter or a dear friend or a nearly-grown son.

We also know the joyful way our souls can shatter and open. I remember a moment a few years ago when I felt so lucky to be in my life—when many things came together at once—so lucky that I wept and wished my meager words of prayer could come close to the life-changing joy I felt. Looking around the room again, I know that soul-shattering may be a baby coming into the world, or falling into the love of your life, or living when you had thought you might die. We are shaken to the core of our souls, and we are never the same person afterward.

When I was a senior in college, my mother tried very seriously to commit suicide. My family was in Virginia, I was in Boston, and I have never prayed as hard as I did in the hours between hearing she was missing and learning that, somewhat miraculously, she had been found and revived. I was shaken to the core of my soul; in some ways I am still recovering. Only now am I able to wonder about her shattered soul, beyond what I have known for years about the ravages of clinical depression. When I think of her despair—the hopelessness that must have so consumed her—I am deeply saddened and wish I had a way to reach out to her now. I do know that she was always glad she did not succeed in killing herself.

I was 20 when my mother tried to kill herself. She lived another 27 years, full of pain and joy. At Rosh HaShanah, I don't visit her grave. I don't look at photographs of her. It holds no meaning. Instead, I visit her life. I sing the songs she loved to sing, enter the holiday saying the prayers I learned from her, gather friends and family as she so often did. And this year, for what combination of reasons I am not sure, I can recognize that her near suicide was soul-shattering for me. It was terrifying, and I carry the memory of that terror with me.

I think the reason we read about Abraham on Rosh HaShanah is because his story shows us two kinds of shattering—the stunning, transforming joy of having a child when he had given up on the idea altogether, and the unfathomable agony of being asked to give up—to kill!—the child he loves and has waited so long for.

He and Sarah both laugh when they learn they are to have a child; Abraham falls on his face! The Torah reports no response from him to God's stunning request to sacrifice that child. The midrash shows him holding it off, step by step.

As we begin the year, each year, we are asked to take in this story, to try to imagine Abraham's joy and his agony, his embrace of Isaac, his unwilling expulsion of Ishmael, his horror as he lifts his own hand grasping the consuming knife.

Jewish tradition says God tested Abraham ten times. The tenth test is the Akkeda, the binding—the agreement to sacrifice—Isaac, his hard-won son. After it is over, after Abraham has found another way, a ram in place of his son, God finally says, “Now I know that you are in awe of God, in fear of God.”

Soul-shattering is Abraham's encounter with God, God saying Understand at the first and the last that life lived fully includes the highest joys and the deepest pain, heartbreaking love and soul shattering agony. Our task on Rosh HaShanah is to confront that reality, over and over again, year after year. The king is on the throne and we stand at the gate, trying to decide whether to push to enter or not. As the poet Muriel Rukeyser has written,

“To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, Wishing to be invisible, you choose Death of the spirit, the stone insanity. Accepting, take full life. Full agonies…

The gift is torment. …the accepting wish, The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee For every human freedom, suffering to be free, Daring to live for the impossible.

Abraham dared to live for the impossible.

Let's be truthful: We sitting here live mostly pleasant lives. We have great joys, I hope. And I hope we have few agonies. We can watch on television or read in the newspaper or online any time of day or night the most horrifying stories and images we can think of, yet they rarely touch us in a way that reaches our souls. Otherwise, as Kathryn said to me last week, we would all be at the White House right now, or on a plane to Darfur or Iraq.

I cannot get out of my head Nina Berman's photo of the Marine wedding (you may have seen it too)—that young man whose head and face were reconstructed beyond recognition, yet here he is getting married to a young woman who sent him off to war with the promise of love in both their hearts, a promise that transcends the intervening horrors. It shakes me, and I cannot shake off the memory. Yet I see it from a distance; it is a photograph, after all.

Even the Shoah is becoming a series of photographs to our children, and soon that will be true of 9/11. What was once shattering fades in memory. But Rosh HaShanah is Yom HaZikaron—the day of memory, of remembrance. And it is the day we remember Abraham, and remember risk, and remember death, and life. Remembering, facing what may shatter our souls, we become whole again for another year.

Last summer at my last retreat with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, we were introduced to a practice called hitbodedut, being alone with yourself. In this mode, borrowed from Hassidic Judaism, we were to walk outside alone—to wherever we wanted at the center we were at—and talk out loud to God, continually, without stopping, for half an hour. We could say we were stuck, we could say we didn't know what to say, but we had to keep talking.

I started walking up a hill to an abandoned camp site and began talking. Within a minute or two I was weeping as my shyness at actually talking out loud to God without printed prayer gave way to actually talking out loud to God. I poured out my heart, including things I didn't even know I was thinking about, grief I thought had long dissipated, hopes I had not yet spoken. I cried and cried and talked and talked, walking and talking and crying until I was spent, my shell of poise or calm or capability shattered. I felt drained and open: able to move on in ways I did not even know I needed to.

It took Abraham and Isaac three days to go a very short distance, a long journey of the soul up to Har HaMoriah: The mountain of God's teaching, of God's appearance. My life's troubles, my little walk up that hill, seem puny by comparison. But I have known great joy and great sorrow, and strive on Rosh Hashanah to encounter God in a way that truly touches God and transforms me.

The opposite of the shattered soul is not the hard shell of denial, but indifference, sh'veh nefesh, the over-balanced soul. I would rather have the shattering, the imbalance we live with, the tears this life can provoke, the extraordinary joys that are still possible. Otherwise, we live as though looking at a photograph.

Rabbi Margaret Holub wrote once about being the person chosen to sit with a dead body overnight, guarding it in the traditional way. This was the body of someone she had known in life, and Margaret said looking at her body was like looking at a photograph of her: It looked like her, but was not her. The soul had left, the breath had left, the life had left.

That is what Abraham came to know and what we Jews confront this and every Rosh HaShanah. A new year has arrived with who knows what joys and horrors yet to come. Abraham's story reminds us that we can't escape. The new year brings new life, and life is soul-shattering. With shattered souls and broken hearts, we are open to life, to God. It can hurt like hell, or break us open in joy.

Each of you sitting here has to know what will enable you to live life most fully and avoid indifference. What I mean to say is that Rosh HaShanah is a time to begin. Our society likes to be happy, likes to avoid aging and sorrow and pain and death. Judaism likes to be happy too, and wants us to know sorrow and pain and even death as the parts of life that they are.

Life can shatter the soul. But it is all we have. The only other choice is death, or indifference.