Perspective

Change is difficult.

It is hard to break patterns of behavior.

If you are used to complaining about how life has short-changed you, turning that mind-set around to an appreciation of what you have seems impossible. We all know people like that; folks who continually complain about how life has beaten them down.  Nothing about them seems joyful.  It is hard to be around people like that. They seem to suck the happiness out of the room until it is hard to breathe.  

Question to ponder: Do we feel better or worse when we share life’s disappointments with others?

It is axiomatic in our culture that sharing life’s woes is part of the healing process. We are encouraged to sit with therapists and articulate our inner pain, speak about our psychic injuries – real or imagined to feel better.  Does this improve our sense of well-being, or does it merely feed into our feelings of inadequacy?  Of course, we all know that being able to share our inner pain is a part of the pathway to healing but it is not the panacea to relieve our souls of the burden they carry.  It is only a first step.

A man with a negative disposition was operated on for gallstones.  One day the doctor met the spouse on the street.  She seemed worried.

“What troubles you?” the doctor asked.  “The operation was successful.”

“For me hardly,” came the reply.  “The stones are gone but the gall remains.”

Excising negativity is a complex matter.

Yes, it starts with accessing it, acknowledging the source of the pain, but then must move to the next step of resolution.

The wisdom of our faith has each day start with foundational statements of affirmation.  We start with Modeh ani “Thank You for restoring my soul…” progressing to gratitude for the gift of ridding the body of toxins, before acknowledging sentience, eyesight, movement…. What is the purpose of these daily blessings?  To be sure we are relating to our Maker.  Further, we are accessing what is most positive about our life.

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement…to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted.  Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually.”

Is this too difficult to imagine?  

Find what troubles you then seek the anodyne for that pain.  If you feel isolated, craft the affirmation that makes you less alone.  If you sense that you are less privileged than others, affirm what is right and present in your life.  Once you know what you need, what remains is to find the inner healing that only you know can make you whole.

The Talmud teaches, Mishaneh makom meshaneh mazel, "When you move, you change your future."  

Real change comes when we adjust our vision of our life.  It does not take a herculean effort, just readjusting the way we see ourselves.  A small move can bring about significant change and offers unimagined opportunities.  Be unafraid. 

Actually, I overstated the problem above.  Change is not difficult unless we stand in our own way.

Idea: Begin the day with your needful affirmations and if you do not know where to begin there is no better place than the opening passages of the siddur said upon awakening.

On Being Judgmental

 Rabbi Abba bar Yudan said: Everything that God disqualified in animals, He endorsed in people. For animals, He disqualified the blind or broken or maimed, but in man He endorsed the broken, downtrodden heart.  (Vayikra Rabba 7)  As it says in the Torah, “A broken and contrite heart God will not turn away.”

It is good to be judgmental.

For if we do not distinguish between that which is good and bad how would we ever achieve a just society?  We will allow veil to run rampant.  What parent would tell their child to absorb the body blows and verbal assaults of bullies?  In our adult lives too, it is important to keep away from people who are doing bad things.  Even more, when we see a wrong being committed, we should not “stand idly by your brother’s blood.” Lev 19:16 We have a sacred obligation to. Do everything you can to stop evil.  And how can you do that without being judgmental?

It is bad to be judgmental.  

Has it ever happened that you see someone and instantly have a disliking to them?  Perhaps they remind you of someone hurtful. Perhaps they have the kind of face Hollywood would use as a “bad guy.”  In those instances, we may have acted derisively towards someone who did not deserve to be treated that way.   There are probably other times when we misinterpreted someone’s actions as harmful and wrong.  

How do we discriminate between the times when we are called to be judgmental and when we become the evil that we perceive?

A person should be judged based on action alone, nothing else.  Any other kind of judgmentalism is a prejudice, whether it is based on nationality, religion, dress, political party, or any belief system to which we do not ascribe.  Richard Bach opined that we hate that which we do not understand.  Simply because it differs does not make it bad.  To the contrary, the difference should make it interesting, worthy of exploring not destroying.

I began this article with a midrashic quote about a broken person.  We are all in various stages of brokenness.  No person gets through life unscathed.  It is vital to remember that just as God values the broken soul so we must imitate the Divine by embracing that which looks different from us.  We are loved by God with all our inadequacies and foibles.  So is the person next to us in the theater or who just blew past us on the highway with the music so loud it made our car shudder.

In the same sourced midrash above, Rabbi Alexandri stated, “A regular person, if someone serves him with broken vessels, he is insulted. But with God- the vessels that serve him are broken as it says, “God is close to the broken hearted.”

Memories of Poland

 On my trip to Poland brought up many emotions.  The visual impact it left on me was one of desolation.  One of the remembrances most painful were the shoes.  In one barrack they lined the floor reaching 3 to 4 feet high.  In another they were stacked up to the ceiling held in my metal cages.  In yet another was a mountain of all kinds of shoes thrown together haphazardly- red, shiny, the shoes of a laborer, white nurse’s shoes, wing tips…

The one I picked up must have belonged to a child of three or four.  The heels were slightly worn.  Overall, it was a lovely pair of shoes, the sort that little ones would wear before going on an exciting excursion.

A vision: My little ones.  I think of the boundless lone I hold for them.  When they are frightened, I quietly reassure them that the night will pass, and I will be there to protect them.  They my quiver and whine in my arms so I hold them a bit tighter to let them know they are safe. I gently kiss their heads.

To the sacred memory of the one and one half million children who were denied a childhood there are no words.  For the unfathomable anguish of the parents who could not hold their little ones when they looked to their mommy and daddy for comfort and protection there are only silent tears.  All the moishelehs and Rachels, the aspiring artist and the dreamer, the joyful and joyless all met the same end.

 

A Tale.

Gisella Perl was a Hungarian physician sent to Auschwitz.  Josef Mengele dictated to D. Perl that any pregnant woman was to be reported to him at once.  He told her, “They will be sent to a better camp where they will receive nutritional supplements.”  Dr. Perl discovered these women were being used for Mengele’s sadistic medical experiments.  She took action. Night after night Gisella Perl performed abortions on the filthy floor with her bare hands.

 

Decades later, Dr. Perl shared her story.  “Hundreds of times I did this.  No one can ever know what it means to destroy these babies.  But I must do it or both mother and child will be cruelly treated by Mengele.”

 

 

As I sat on the cold boards I thought of the unborn and the victims as I turned over the shoes in my hands. The leather was still supple, the shoelaces intact.  It was hard to breathe.  Who could possibly conjure the hopes and dreams of these children. Who can begin to describe the loss of so many children?

 

Another fragment

Adam Czerniakow was the head of the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto.  I visited his grave in the Warsaw cemetery.  In an entry from his diary on June 14, 1942, he wrote, “I command that the children be brought…. These eight-year-old citizens conversed with me like adults.  I’m ashamed to admit that it’s been so ling since I cried so…. Cursed are those among us who can eat and drink and forget these children.”  Finally, Czerniakow took his own life rather than oversee the murder of the children.

 

Connection with the One

 You make my feet firm by Your Word:

Do not let sin overcome me.  -Psalm 119

 

You are not alone.  You never were and never will be.  At times it may have as if the choices you made and the events that affected you left you feeling bereft with no one to share the burden of sorrow.  Without doubt, the road is long and feels so much longer when in pain.  No one can tell you where it goes or how it will end.  Still, you are not alone, ever.

In the journey of life, you will become lost and disoriented.  That is not failure and it certainly is not the end of the tale.  This is when learning happens.  Challenges allow us to invest our ingenuity.  To stop along this road and ask for directions is not a sign of weakness it is the mark of maturity.  When we inquire, we learn.

Others have tread this path before us.  They too were not alone.  His Presence buffeted and steered them through their time on anguish and sorrow.  This same strength will uphold you.  Allow God to be your navigational guide.  Trust Him and His power.  

And do not forget to say thank you.

 

A story

Rabbi Yohanan said, “A man was walking along the road late at night.  Suddenly his lamp was blown out by a gust of wind.  He lit it but the wind blew out again.  Finally, he said to himself, “Why should I continue to bother myself lighting the lamp when it will just be snuffed out?  I will sit here by the roadside and wait for sunlight.  Then I will travel once more.”

So tic is with the Lord God.  When it was His will that we be released from the grip of Pharaoh he sent our teacher, Moses.  And when we were exiled to the distant reaches of Babylon, He sent His servant Zerubbabel.  Mordecai saved us from the clutches of Haman (May his name be erased for all time. Amen).  So it was with the Maccabees and every evil that has cast its pall over the Jewish people.  

The Holy One, blessed be He, hears the moans from His people.  Enduring terrible pain, the people turn to the Rabbis who comb the ancient and holy texts.  They read this prayer:

O Lord, free us not through the intervention of any person.  We are weary of the endless cycle of enslavement, freedom and enslavement.  Be our redeemer, not a mortal.    Let no man lighten us but lighten us Yourself.  As is written in the sacred writings, “With You is the fountain of life.  In Your light we see light.”

 

 

Repression

  She made an appointment to discuss problems she was having with her children.  I proceeded to ask questions to get a grip on the nature of the problems.  I was particularly focused on asking about roles and the dynamics of power at play in the relationships.  We talked and as time went on, she became more and more agitated until the poor woman cried out hysterically. 

She sobbed.  Finally, she came out with the disturbing revelation that she had been abused as a child.  Some thirty years later nightmarish visons of the sexual abuse came flooding back.  Memories of shoch and revulsions washed over her until this woman was a helpless mass.

 

Freud called it repression.  “By carrying what is unconscious on into what is conscious, we lift the repressions.”  But what is simply too painful to feel with now we squirrel away deep into the recesses of our mind so that we can go on living.

 

 

The Shoah was a crime so enormous in the mind of our people that few spoke of it for ten years after the Nazi defeat.  Utterances about the unfathomable pain were few.  Collectively, the incomprehensible was repressed so that we could go on living.

 

Elie Wiesel’s personal testimony, Night, was essentially the first detailed experience of a survivor came a decade after the Holocaust.  Until then survivors had great difficulty in finding their voice to convey an experience so horrific.  And the world was not prepared to hear their testimony either.  It took a long time to convince ourselves that humanity might be worthy of that name.

 

At that time, we dismissed the broken souls that returned to Poland in 1945, crippled in body and spirit.  What else does a survivor do but try to return to his roots and pick up the threads of his life where they were abruptly cut short?  Some came to reclaim what had been stolen from them, others to attempt to regain a semblance of an ordinary life after Auschwitz.

 

On July 4, 1946, mobs of Poles raced through the streets of Kielce in search of survivors to rid themselves of the Jews that had the temerity to return to their homes and reclaim what the residents had stolen.  Carrying guns, ropes, knives they attacked the Jewish worn and beaten stragglers.  Sparing no one forty-three lay dead by the end of the day and many seriously wounded.

 

My pilgrimage to Poland.

For me, coming to this place was an act of confirmation of my deepest psychological fears.  There was a carefully thought-out and viciously executed plan to exterminate every Jew from every city, town and village in Europe.  Having lost members of my extended family, whose names and lives will never be known, as well as being a potential victim is no small weight to bear.

 

One of the most incredible aspects to seeing the plains of destruction is the striking fact that businesses were opened for the specific and sole purpose of killing.  The complex called Auschwitz was designed for murder.  The evil ones used poison gas, bullets, burning, starvation, beating to death, hanging, crucifying, vivisecting…

 

Truly horrifying was the single picture of a mother clutching her baby as she walked to the gas chamber.  One wonders, what this mother was singing to her child to calm her fears?  What prayer passed her lips when her little one was wrenched from the land of the living?  If there was a time when God should have given up on His creations in utter frustration at our evil machinations it was then.

 

‘Terrified,’ describes the look on the face of the young girl as she lies on the earth, naked.  Her mother comes to her side to give comfort and reassure her she us not alone.  But the expression.  No, it is not terrified.  It looks more like confusion, amazement.  Her mouth hangs open.  The expression pleading, “What is happening here?  It is not human.  It cannot be real.”

 

There was one barrack filled with hair.  Some were braided, others with a ponytail.  Long flowing locks of golden hair shorn from the body.  Thousands of lives were betrayed by that room.  Some hair was woven into fabric, and some cut off to simply further dehumanize the victims, the Jews.  All that remains of ten of thousands of lives is this mass of hair thrown haphazardly into massive piles while the bodies were erased.

 

One expects to hear the voices of the dead rise.  Passing through the Concentration Camp (really an awful misuse of language as they were murder factories not concentration camps) I expected to hear anguished screams of the dead penetrate the thick air.  But there were no sounds.  Only quiet.

 

There are no words in these places of utter horror.  There are no phrases that capture the sense of such gross violations of all that is sacred, only a pervasive awareness of silence and despair.

 

We said out prayers.  They were of no comfort.  We lit candles to the memory of the dead.  It was symbolic.  Then we wept.  A dozen rabbis, pious and learned cried at this place of darkness.