The Essense of Faith

Rabbi's Notes - June 2005

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

It's the most beautiful and fecund week of the spring! Everything is in flower. Rhododendrons are everywhere. (I read somewhere a long time ago, probably inaccurately, that rhododendrons are native only in Tibet and here -- I wander through the pink blooming pygmy forests of Albion and imagine snow leopards…) Rattlesnake grass has just burst upon us in the past week. Every leaf on the ceanothus is glossy. New growth is lime-green and rubbery at the tips of last year's fir branches. As I kick around on the trails around my house I keep thinking: these plants wait all year for this one week. After this they fruit; the seeds drop onto the ground and the plant wastes away. Once that seed is spit out, nothing else matters to the plant.

And so, too -- not to be in any way disparaging about this lovely moment in my own life -- I see how the skin begins to hang a little looser on mybones. I just got my first pair of bifocals "before the prescription gets more extreme, when it's easier to get used to them…" I'm complimented yet again on my marvelous grey hair. I see where this story is going.

And, too, news reaches me this morning of the death of someone who was dear to someone in my family: cancer, midlife, school-age children, work still to be done. And I've spent a bunch of time this past week at the hospital with someone else who is struggling with the physical and cognitive impingements of old age. And tomorrow I'm on my way south to help with a mikveh for the elder of a circle of women I was part of before I moved here -- now she has lung cancer and is calling her old friends and students back to her. And this past week I learned that a history professor of mine in college, who was notably reticent about his own past, has just, thirty years later, published a book about being a holocaust survivor. I had no idea, though I read books about the holocaust with him every week. Now, towards the end of his career, he's telling his story. In a few weeks, God willing, I will visit with my grandmother, a few days after her ninety-eighth birthday. She was living on her own until a few months ago, but fell. She is struggling mightily to regain her independence and misses baking as much as anything.

I'm seeing cycles everywhere: birth, blossom, fruit, seed and decay. They're not perfect circles by any means, but bumpy and fractal, idiosyncratic and personal. Still, the pattern is every place I look. And from some vantage point it is all so beautiful! The brevity, the fragility, the struggle, resistance and futility as much as the moments of luxury. The decay as much as the spring growth.

Last week in our Hasidism class, we read the (nineteenth century Polish Hasidic master) Sefat Emet's sermon on the Song of the Sea, the biblical poem of praise that the Israelites sang after the Red Sea split and they crossed through to freedom. The Sefat Emet teaches: "When it says, 'They had faith in the Lord and in his servant Moses,' it means that they looked back at the whole of their exile and accepted it with love. Their song was about the whole thing: they even sang to God for hardening Pharaoh's heart…"

A friendly but fierce argument broke forth around the table as we read: did they accept "the whole thing" because it worked out well in the end, or simply because it was life, their life, their moment in history? Personally I'm firmly in the second camp.

"We need to know the same thing in this present exile," says the Sefat Emet at the conclusion of his Passover sermon. What is it that we need to know in this present exile? That everything will work out well in the end? Or that this life, every part of it -- bud, flower, fruit, seed and decay, in whatever order and re-order the story plays out -- is gorgeous and in its own way perfect?

Another Red Sea reference keeps coming back to me: "If God had freed us from slavery but had not split the Red Sea for us, dayenu! It would have been enough!"

I think that for me this is probably the essence of faith: that the whole cycle is worthy of praise -- not just the miracles, not just the spring fecundity, not just the moment of release or redemption but "the whole thing."

But still, it's drizzling outside my window as I write. We've had more May rain than ever -- this green season might just go on and on. And if it does, I'll take it!

© 2005 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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