Erev Yom Kippur 5785 --- On Monday of the week before Yom Kippur we remembered the anniversary of October 7th in ceremonies across the globe, live and online, personal and communal, sharing images of yizkor, sharing thoughts of pain and sadness on social media, lighting memorial candles online and in person for the men, women and children who were brutally murdered in the worst pogrom to face our people in a century. Our acts of commemoration are a formalized response to a trauma our people experienced on that day. And formalized, ritualized responses often help us to cope with trauma.
But if you are anything like me, your personal, inner response to this horrifying pogrom remains unresolved. I know my inner response still doesn’t know what to do or what to think or what to say. Our Jewish world collapsed into chaos on that day, and while we try to get on with our lives, the chaos and confusion remain, further agitated by the ongoing conflict that ensued, with death and destruction everywhere, and a giant hike in antisemitic hate across the globe. It has become a cliché to say there are no words, but the reality is that we use words to help us grasp and even explain the traumas we experience. And there have in fact been many words spoken and written since that day, but none are able to satisfy.
So what do we do in face of such setbacks on our journey? Rabbi Sharon Brous of Ikar in Los Angeles shares the wisdom of a pastor friend in her contribution to the Jewels of Elul. We have three options: we can be the victim, we can be the hero, or we can be the learner. And we have a choice.
She offers an example to illustrate the point. It might seem trivial, given the severity of the ‘setbacks’ now confronting us, but it makes the point, nevertheless. Imagine, she says, that we get the opportunity to travel somewhere beautiful for a few days, but when we get off the plane, we discover our luggage didn’t travel with us.
The victim asks: Why does this always happen to me?
The hero reports: I stayed calm, gave my info to the baggage representative, and made my way to the hotel. I’m not going to let this spoil my vacation!
What does the learner do? They make a decision: in the future they will restrict themselves to carry-on luggage.
Amidst all the rage and sorrow of our time, Rabbi Brous observes, we gravitate naturally toward the victim or the hero and there is comfort in both. But the better response is to be a learner, to ask ourselves: How can I grow from this experience?
What would it take to be a learner, Rabbi Brous asks? To learn, we must be curious. When challenged by people or situations, instead of fighting or fleeing, we can choose to open our hearts and listen. Recently I was in an Uber on my way to the airport from Leuven. I spoke English to the driver who seemed to detect that my accent was not local, and he asked where I was from. All very innocent. I told him Scotland and asked where he was from. He answered Gaza. I asked if he had family in the conflict and he said almost all of his family were in the conflict and that he was one of the few to be spared.
He had left Gaza ten years earlier and had trained as a medical assistant in Leuven as well as an Uber driver. But what followed was a crescendo of hatred towards Israel. I was on my way to a conference in Budapest on antisemitism and the promotion of Jewish life in Europe organised by the European Commission, but it suddenly made sense not to talk about that, to identify myself, to expose myself. I fell silent, mumbled something defensive, something about the need for the war to end, and for peace in the region. Awkward silence until we reached the airport.
I left the Uber with a sense of shame, to be honest. Why was I silent? I shared his horror, and while I didn’t share his exclusive perspective, I could at least have engaged in a dialogue with him. I cast myself in the role of victim and reported the incident to friends and family. What a dreadful thing to have to go through! You must have felt terrible! Then I remember a visitor to IJC from the US, a cantor from a synagogue in California, who experience something similar, but in fact a lot worse, in an Uber on the way to the Brussels South Station from the synagogue. The driver picked her up from Beth Hillel and announced immediately he was from Palestine and insisted she condemn Israel for the war. In a hysterical diatribe he lost control of himself, stopped the car halfway the journey and told her to get out.
When she told me about her encounter, our visitor wasn’t looking for sympathy, and although she seemed to have a right, she didn’t adopt the victim role. She struggled with the decision to do what was right and in the end was persuaded to report the incident. But all the while she tried to learn from what had happened, in practical terms about what she would do differently in the future, but also how she should learn from the rage of the Uber driver. She chose to make the shift from defensive to intrigued, to look at the other with wonder.
If choosing to be a learner can work with something trivial like lost luggage, Rabbi Brous observes, just think how much more meaningful it can be with broken hearts, and strained relationships, and even with seemingly intractable polarization resulting from war.
A commitment to learning, she insists, allows us to see one another not as caricatures of evil – and the temptation here is great, and many of us will have to admit that we have indulged in this – but as images of the Divine: broken and even beautiful. It calls us back to the sacred recognition of each other’s humanity – even or especially when we’ve been hurt, and perhaps deeply.
Vulnerable, openhearted engagement, which is the path of the learner, might be counter-intuitive these days, when everyone seems so certain about everything and ready to offer their opinion. But what if it provided some hope, a way to heal, not only our personal wounds, but also the wounds in our relationships, our community, our people, our conflicted world.
Which of the three describes you best? The victim, the hero, or the learner?
Rabbi Brian
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