The Thing Is
To love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
Ellen Bass
Now we begin again. This is, after all, the reality of our lives, as we are lucky enough to be alive: every morning is a new beginning. Jewish tradition gifts us with ways to contemplate what would otherwise go unmarked: whenever you choose to take part in it, you are able to live a moment more deeply. This is a moment of beginning. But what is a new beginning, when one has begun so many times before?
There are constants, of course, for as long as we live: we breathe, we need, we yearn. Similarly, the Torah is always there, always the same words. But such is the extent of what is the same. Experience changes us, and perforce changes what we behold as well. We are taught that there are seventy faces to Torah; seventy ways to understand each story, each verse, each word.
In this week’s parashah, we encounter a world of beginnings. Let this invitation refresh our vision and open us to new learnings. The Torah is the same, but you and I are renewed, and through our relationship with Torah and with each other, we will find new insights to strengthen and support us through the days to come.
At Rosh HaShanah, the day we dedicate to encouraging each other and ourselves to believe in renewal, we considered what it means to be gathered together. What is the difference between a roomful of people and a kehillah kedoshah, a “holy community”, which is the traditional designation of a Jewish congregation?
This week, our Torah offers us the only bedrock certainty we will ever have. From our creation story, we know that it is a fundamental teaching that we are created in the Image of G*d. That is to say, all life is a reflection of Life and proceeds from its Source. The mystics derive from this an insight parallel to the modern scientific theory of the Big Bang: all of us are part of an explosion of life out of the same overflowing source. We each come from it, equally, and we each are made of it. Thus we reflect it.
Riffing on this idea as only a mystic would, the sage Isaiah Horowitz quoted the book of Job: מבסרי אחזה אלוה – “from my body I will see G*d” (Iyov 19.26) While Job may have meant this to say “while I am alive,” the Jewish understanding that there is more than one way to understand any text allows him to suggest the idea that this is about introspection: from contemplating the physical body, one moves toward an understanding of how one reflects holiness.
From our flesh we see HaShem. Not from denying our body, or rising above it, but from it, including it as we learn and grow toward the kind of personal integrity that is the prerequisite for relationships with others and a sense of one’s meaning in the world.
Each of us, then, reflects something equally precious and true about Life and its Source. As our kehillah continues to grow, meaning precisely that new reflections of Life are joining us, the palette of our shared experience expands in color and in depth. As the mystics suggest, it’s like sunlight coming through a window: it’s all brightness and light. Put a few bottles of different colored glass in the window, and suddenly you have different colored light. Put in a complicated stained glass window, and now your sunlight is a myriad of shades and hues.
We consider a stained glass window beautiful. Why not behold the variety of our community in exactly the same way?
Some of us are old, some young. Some are middle class, some are living paycheck to paycheck, and some are wealthy. Some of us are parents, some grandparents, and some do not have children. Some of us are healthy and some of us are chronically ill, or struggling with an acute ailment. Some of us converted to Judaism and others grew up with a Jewish parent who may or may not have transmitted a sense of Jewish belonging. Some of us are disabled physically or mentally. Some of us are heterosexual and some are queer; some of us are trans and some are cisgender. Some of us are female, some male, some are elsewhere on a spectrum that is every bit as varied as the window in the Gaudi cathedrale in Barcelona pictured above.
But these are all just the colors of the glass, that “glass” that we are taught to see as having seventy different colors. Beyond it all, we are each of us made of the same Light. Why ask if you belong? Why entertain for a single moment, rather, the idea that you do not?
It’s not necessarily easy to find one’s place in a varied multiscape, but monolithism is boring and, in the end, inimical to Life, which is about growth through adapting to change and variation.
Here we are, beginning again. May we begin again to try again to see HaShem reflected, not only in our own flesh, but in each other’s. Not because we look the same, but precisely because we do not.
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 