If You See a Ram in a Thicket, . . .

"Le sacrifice d'Isaac'* by Marc Chagall

So already, in just a few days in synagogues all over the world, Jews will be reading the story of the Binding of Isaac as part of their observance of Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish new year. The blowing of the shofar, which happens many times during the High Holy Day season, reminds us of this story (among other things) because the shofar is a ram's horn, and Isaac is not killed by his father Abraham because, in the nick of time, Abraham spies a ram caught in the thicket and sacrifices it instead of his son.

It's a hard story that's long been pondered, interpreted, and discussed: the idea of religious obedience's requiring the sacrifice one's child is just so repellent to most of us. But it's also a story about seeing what's there. One interpretation of the story says the ram was always present in the thicket and therefore available for sacrifice, but that Abraham couldn't or didn't see it until he was just about to kill Isaac. Does such significant perception depend on the threat of terrible, imminent loss or choice?

Last night, I heard a poem by Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfield about listening to the shofar in this season of Jewish repentance. In it, she talks about the importance of learning to see, which may mean learning how to see differently:

The ram’s horn is silent at first
as is the ram.
Caught in the thicket,
Waiting for Abraham to lift his head and see,
It appears at the last minute,
Out of nowhere,
When it’s almost too late.

Of course, it was there all along.
Since twilight
On the eve of the first Shabbat, we are told.
It was there before darkness fell.
(We barely knew what darkness was then.)

It was there all along.
Waiting for us to open our eyes.
Waiting for us to see another way.**

As I listened to the poem, I found myself thinking about another poem informed by the story of the binding of Isaac: Wilfred Owen's "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young," one of many Owen poems about the life-wasting, tragic futility of World War I****:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.***

Despite being called to "Behold" the ram in the thicket, Abram, the old man--Owen uses Abraham's pre-covenant name, the one he had before God promised him that he would be the father of multitudes--chooses not to behold, not to see or observe. And the result is mass senseless death and despair.

As I contemplated the several types of persons both of these poems suggest--the person who won't look, the person who can't see, the person who hasn't seen yet and will, and the person who does see and chooses to ignore what she's seeing--I began thinking of Greta Thunberg's comments at the recent United Nations Climate Summit:

For Thunberg, science is the ram in the thicket that the representatives of the world's nations are willfully refusing to see because of their greater commitments to their "fairy tales of eternal economic growth.***** Rightfully indignant, Thunberg chided the diplomats: "How dare you!" Her implication: Your fairy tales are going to cost my generation our lives.

Rabbi Cohen's poem includes the following lines about the importance of serious threat, and not just as an intellectual concept but as a lived feeling that makes clear what's urgent:

The sacrifice has to be offered.
The child will have to die.
This is the power of the ram’s horn.
It beckons us back to this moment in the story.

For many Jewish worshipers, it's just as Rabbi Cohen says: the sound of the shofar prompts a visceral response, a shared sense of the importance and immediacy of both the present moment and that early biblical moment. The real tragedy of our present-day moment may be that the children of the world and the national leaders of the world disagree that this is the moment of serious threat in which a change in collective behavior must occur or else the child, or the children, will die. Today's climate-activist children are right, according to the scientists. But the Ram of Pride is winning against the Ram of Life nonetheless. A teenage girl's voice isn't like the blast of a shofar, unfortunately.

So shofar or not, we move on/ And as we do, Rabbi Anisfeld urges us to

. . . think about the path we are all on together
The altars at the end of the road
The children we love but seem prepared to sacrifice.

Look up.
Listen.

This holiday season, may we all wake up and smell the altars. May we raise our heads and look around, and see what rams there are that we can sacrifice instead of the world's children. Meanwhile, it's never a bad thing to see and seize life-affirming opportunity in the thickets of our own lives. May we all be inscribed for long, long life, especially the children!
 

* Chagall, M. (1966, January 01). The sacrifice of Isaac, 1966 - Marc Chagall. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://www.wikiart.org/en/marc-chagall/the-sacrifice-of-isaac-1966

** Anisfeld, S. C. (2016, October 06). Listening to the Call of the Shofar. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://www.jewishboston.com/listening-to-the-call-of-the-shofar/

*** Owen, W. (n.d.). The Parable of the Old Man and the Young--Poems | Academy of American Poets. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://poets.org/poem/parable-old-man-and-young

**** Yestervid. (2015, October 19). WWI - 20 Iconic Photos in HD (Trenches and Front Lines). Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiHvu2T4Vls

***** Npr. (2019, September 23). Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://www.wunc.org/post/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-un-climate-action-summit

In the Garden of Broken Hearts

Cut and Crinkled Heart**

So already, during a recent discussion about the approaching Jewish High Holy Days, I mentioned how much Rabbi Alan Lew's This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared* was guiding my spiritual preparations. Immediately, another participant in the discussion said that he'd hated the book: Alan Lew, the book's author, he explained, was a terrible narcissist.*** 

The man was offended by Lew's having shared his post-divorce pain as an example of broken-heartedness, or deep human suffering. The man explained that divorce, and by extension the suffering connected to divorce, reflected personal choice. "The death of a child, that's tragic," he explained. 

I know that the Jewish High Holy Day season is much concerned with judgment, but is the legitimacy of a person's claim to having a broken heart something to be judged? The Alan Lew critic seemed to be suggesting that only the suffering connected with tragic--terrible and unchosen--events merited our heartfelt compassion, that anything short of that was less worthy of our sincerest sympathies. 

I knew immediately that I disagreed with him. 

All of this especially matters during this Jewish penitential season because the Jewish sages speak explicitly about broken hearts. “'There is nothing as whole as a broken heart,' said the Kotsker Rebbe (rabbi, 1787-1859)."**** And when Rabbi Simon Jacobson reiteraties this teaching--he actually uses the word "complete" to describe a broken heart--and then enumerates some potential sources of broken-heartedness, he does not rank them in any way:

by Scott Ketcham******

"We all make mistakes and break things in our life, but life also breaks us. We've all been broken in one way or another. We have all experienced broken promises or broken relationships; we have all experienced the loss of a job or the loss of a loved one."***** (52)

Jacobson's hope is that the communal and individual meditations, prayers, and practices central to the Jewish High Holy Days will both console and effect the healing of people's broken hearts: "The reality is the world is a broken place--it's a broken place full of broken people whose job it is to mend what is broken."***** (52)

I hope so, too, because looking back over this past year, I recognize that I've been wandering through a garden of breaking and broken hearts. So many whom I know have lost loved ones this year. Others are continuing to walk beside those who are expected to die soon. Yet others are still grieving those who died in recent years. And then there are those whose hearts have been broken not by death, but by life: lost love, job challenges and disappointments, health challenges, the understanding that certain problems can't be solved and will only get worse. Others have been mourning a loss of identity, direction, and purpose.

In addition, for many, the experience of inhabiting a world in which so many--sometimes, even we ourselves--suffer routinely as a result of the willful exclusion, harassment, and neglect perpetrated by powerful others is another source of sadness. I hesitate to call it brokenness since so many who fight against injustice also fight against being characterized as broken. But when thwarted efforts to fight injustice and make positive change combine with other sources of anger and discouragement, the weight they collectively place on hearts can be straining if not breaking.

I've had my own sadnesses this year, and the sum of them on occasion has made my world far darker than usual. No, I haven't felt the broken-heartedness of someone who daily looks at an empty chair at the dinner table or into an empty bedroom at the end of the hallway. But there have been times when combinations of feelings--grief over the loss of a dear friend last winter (reignited the other day when I received a Facebook friendship request from him--OMG, Facebook hackers!!!!!); uncertainty about my ability to be both a responsible and a loving daughter to my nonagenarian parents; worries about other important people in my life who've been struggling not to become completely physically  and emotionally depleted by the health, career, relationship, and familial demands of their lives; fears that I'm really "not doing anything"--or at least not doing enough--with my "skills and talents"--without any accompanying insights into what I should be doing with them--have made my heart feel heavy to the point of breaking.

I think the man I spoke about at the beginning of this blog post would probably chide me for speaking of my sadness this way. But Simon Jacobson and Alan Lew would no doubt go easier on me. Neither man would advocate denying pain: Lew, whose Judaism often reflects his Buddhist spiritual roots, explains, "Getting into the habit of embracing our pain can be the first step toward getting past it by moving from the melodrama of suffering and affliction to a more pleasurable and primary world of impulse, energy, and sensation" (Be Still, 83).******* Jacobson says, "When your heart is broken, you are in a place that is real."*****

On three separate occasions this year, I've had the experience of the comfort of the real that Jacobson describes--and it took me three times to understand it as something more than a fluke. 

The first time, I was up in the middle of the night worrying, worrying, worrying, convinced that what lay ahead of me was a great deal of busyness that would ultimately benefit neither my parents, nor my husband, nor my colleagues, nor me. Overwhelmed by this sense, I stopped fighting it, and said to myself, "You are so sad." Suddenly my whole body relaxed, and I began breathing deeply. I hadn't decided to breathe deeply; I just started breathing deeply. I realized I hadn't felt relaxed for the longest time because in that moment, I was actually feeling at peace. Nothing about my world had changed, but somehow I felt held, like I had a chance. 

Breathing Woman Atop "Bouffants and Broken Hearts" *(9)

The next two times were almost identical to the first: at a moment when I was feeling overwhelmingly sad and failed, I again simply stopped trying to figure things out, stopped trying to develop solutions, stopped chiding myself for feeling bad about myself, and told myself how completely sad I was. That same thing happened: that spontaneous deep breathing and relaxation. That same sense of being cared for by something bigger than myself.

Teshuvah, whether defined as repentance, an accounting of the spirit, a turning, or a return to God and/or one's divine essence, requires effort and compassion both. As Lew says, "Our suffering, the unresolved elements of our lives is also from God. It is the instrument by which we are carried back to God, not something to be defended against, but rather to embraced" (This is Real, 63).

Philosophically, I agree with this, but I imagine this offers little or no comfort to those who can hardly breathe at all because they've been crying so much and so hard. They don't need to be reminded to embrace their suffering because they viscerally as well as emotionally can't escape it even for a minute. 

So at this moment at this time of year, I have two wishes. 

The first is that all those suffering deeply, all those who can't seem to find even a single moment when they're not mired in darkness and pain, find some peace, whatever its source might be. And the second is that all of us who suffer less acutely--but who suffer nonetheless--most of the rest of us--respond to our own and others' suffering with compassion and acceptance, and even love. And yes, I say this, knowing, as you probably do, a few people who seem to like nothing better than to elicit our and others' sympathies, which requires them to present themselves regularly as suffering; and yes, it's annoying. But even so.

Broken Heart on a Brick Wall *(10)

This season, may we all remember that this season is at least as much about compassion--divine and human--as it is about judgment. Time, we're often told, heals wounds and broken hearts, but compassionate people can help ease and advance the healing process. Whether your heart is broken, shattered, shredded, bruised, chipped, or just a little scratched, I hope that the months ahead deliver you from your pain. And may the new year bring you and your heart a new sense of wholeness, peace, and hope.

* Lew, A. (2018). This is real and you are completely unprepared: The Days of Awe as a journey of transformation. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company.

** Cut and Crinkled Heart: https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2017/11/16/10/istock-533477557.jpg
*** While Lew doesn't characterize himself as a narcissist, he does say in one of his books that he has a certain kind of nervy authority, a kind of shadow self that he's not all that proud of, but that allows him to write books in the first place. 

**** Kukla, E. R. (n.d.). Wholeness of a Broken Heart [Web log post]. Retrieved September 17, 2019, from https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/wholeness-of-a-broken-heart/

***** Jacobson, S. (2008). 60 Days: A Spiritual guide to the high holidays. 2nd revised ed. New York: Kiyum. 

*(6) "The Man Who Swallowed a Bird" by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/post/132767564002/379-the-man-who-swallowed-a-bird-2015-28-x-19 

*(7) Lew, A. (2005). Be still and get going: A Jewish meditation practice for real life. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

*(8) Image found at https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&id=7FAF9C408758F68993F23060CDC772FC903D6959&thid=OIP.bVJAVfZHuNlg7ujK2xXdhwHaEK&mediaurl=http%3A%2F%2Fi39.tinypic.com%2F25z1ojo.jpg&exph=450&expw=800&q=dark+bedroom+at+night&selectedindex=77&ajaxhist=0&vt=0&eim=0

*(9) Clipart (Relaxation Techniques Clipart Woman atop "Bouffants and Broken Hearts" from the blog by the same name at https://www.bouffantsandbrokenhearts.com/; Garden Bits can be found at this address:https://www.bouffantsandbrokenhearts.com/post/76604966511/garden-bits
*(10) Screen shot of http://home.bt.com/images/is-a-broken-heart-as-bad-for-you-as-a-heart-attack-136422807691602601-171113143931.jpg