Mickey and I just returned from three weeks of travels among the world's natural wonders -- the first week reveling in the natural wonder of Mickey's (and increasingly, joyfully, my own) daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, the latter two weeks hiking and camping in the sublime red rocks of southern Utah. In the canyon country you are usually way down in the bottom of something or up high on its rim. There is very little middle ground. And so at times I felt swallowed in the earth, other times frolicking high above the ground, seeming to walk on air.
I'll especially remember walking the rim trail of the "Island in the Sky" at Canyonlands National Park, looking down twelve hundred feet and out a hundred miles at raw, naked unearthed earth, feeling like I was flying, floating above it on nothing at all. At one point I sat down on a rock, my feet practically hanging over the edge of the world. Mickey had scrambled ahead some distance, and, as my breathing slowed down, I found myself wrapped in a silence so thick that all I could hear was the fluid moving about m brain. I could hardly bear the intensity of the noise of standing up again!
In the canyon country one gets a very long sense of time. You see geological upheavals that occurred millions of years ago, and slides and crumblings that may have happened that very morning. Everything is in motion, always has been and always will be. Water has flowed in and out again, the earth has erupted and cooled, silt has settled and hardened, rock in turn has crumbled into sand and silt. I find something calming about that sense of continual motion, an elevated, removed sense that it is all beautiful, all fine. Floods, ice ages, extinctions, meteors all seem tolerable somehow from that high vantage point.
But as our traveling time drew to an end I started to feel a very familiar anxiety. As long as I can remember, since I was a small child, I have felt this same twinge of fear as some trip comes to an end. Coming home from grammar school I would worry that I would find out some terrible news when I crossed the doorstep. And driving back through Nevada across Highway 50, the "loneliest highway in America," I started to feel the same way. Who will have died in my absence? What will have burned down? What catastrophe will I hear about when I get home?
Coming home I did get some bad news. No deaths, no fires, but several other sorrowful and fearful tidings. It's hard to imagine any three weeks that wouldn't contain some things one dreads. These bits of news rattle inside my chest, make me clench my jaw. And they make me think, as I often do these days, about whether it is possible to live meaningfully amidst upheaval and crumbling, rather than simply trying to dodge it or pretend that it isn't happening.
In the past few days since I've been home I've done two things in response to this lurking question. I re-read a bit of Sylvia Boorstein's lovely little book, It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness. And I've put on my tallit and davvened each day.
Syliva Boorstein, one of the wise teachers these days who is exploring the synthesis of Buddhism and Judaism, writes about waking up one day in her happy and successful life terrified that something would happen to one of her children. "Suddenly, I woke up to the fact that being alive is very dangerous and every moment of life is very precious. Perhaps if I had woken up to that fact in a balanced way, or at least in a more mature way, I would have experienced one of those transformative moments one reads about, after which one is totally changed forever and the rest of life is lived in abiding clarity. That didn't happen to me. I was plunged into gloom and despair." Boorstein felt great relief when she learned the "First Noble Truth, that life is difficult and painful, just by its very nature, not because we're doing it wrong." She writes, "Because things change, our relationship to anything we care about or its relationship to us will change, and we will feel the pain of loss and separation. Those of us who have chosen relational life have made the choice that the pain is worth it." She teaches a path of mindfulness, of resolutely returning to what is, resisting the temptation to cling to fantasies and longings. She teaches much more than this, and her book is itself a modest summary of some aspects of millennia of Buddhist teaching. But I found this simple introduction to be once again bracing and inspiring.
I put down It's Easier Then You Think and put on my tallit, the old, fragile white rayon one that I patched and restored last spring during Luna's tallit-making workshop. My tallit is itself continually crumbling, and with each new tear and bare patch I ruminate about how to sew it up. My tallit has been disintegrating at the same time that our community has been struggling with its relationship with Israel. Right before the High Holy Days my old/new tallit almost split clean in half. I thought about wearing it that way for the Yamim, living with the tear, letting it keep ripping further up my back while we prayed together. But even I am not that gloomy. I patched the tear with new white silk, but I pulled out some of the long frayed threads of the old tallit, braided them and attached a little bead of an elephant, a symbol of memory.
This morning I was standing in the sun on the stepoutside my office door, still newly-enough home from our trip that the trees of our back yard looked stunningly beautiful to me, more beautiful than I had remembered. As did the words from the siddur. Lines kept leaping off the page, such as this one from Avot de Rabbi Natan, intended to be read daily, that I too-often skip:
Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai once was walking with his disciple Rabbi Joshua near Jerusalem after the destruction of the temple. Rabbi Joshua looked at the Temple ruins and said, "Alas for us! The place which atones for the sins of Israel through the ritual of animal sacrifice lies in ruins!" Then Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai spoke to him these words of comfort: "Be not grieved, my son. There is another way of gaining atonement, even though the Temple is destroyed. We must now gain atonement through deeds of lovingkindness." For it is written, "Lovingkindness I desire, not sacrifice." (Hosea 6:6).
I am struck once again, anew, by the endless Jewish effort to elevate and sanctify everything that is, everything that happens, even the difficult, even the painful and intolerable. And I am struck once again by the continual return to lovingkindness, to hesed, as the instrument of that hallowing. Even the intolerably painful loss or wound can be lifted up -- not erased, not forgotten, but sanctified -- by one's own lovingkindness in response.
We can control very little of what happens to us, to our loved ones, to our community or world. It is all in constant movement, endless upheaval. From certain elevated vantage points it can all look beautiful and elegant. But if the rocks are tumbling down on your own head, it can feel quite the opposite. Still, we always have the possibility of responding from a place of hesed, of seeking that vantage point, cultivating that perspective. Today I imagine hesed as a kind of lens through which I can look at a situation: what kindness is possible here? Where is the place where generosity could be introjected? Likewise that lens can be turned on myself: where will that generosity come from? How will I handle my fear and indignation, so that kindness is even a possibility? How might I exercise those muscles of lovingkindness when the world isn't caving in, so that they are accustomed to motion when I really need them?
Every day here at home, among all of you, I see these questions asked and answered. I just took a break from writing this paragraph to make a little mental list of acts of lovingkindness I've witnessed in the two days since we've been back. It's already too long to include here. Every day among you I see the lens of lovingkindness pointed every possible direction. I see and learn from your heroic efforts at elevating life through hesed. I'm so glad to be home!
© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 11/04/2002 (rge)