"A Fine and Beautiful, If Impossible, Question"

Rabbi's Notes - March 2008

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

I'm not always one for the quaint Hasidic stories, but here's one I think about probably every day: Two disciples of Rebbe Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch, once asked their master, "The rabbis say that a person should rejoice in his afflictions and bless God for the bad things just as he makes a blessing to thank Him for the good. How is that possible?" … The Maggid sent them to ask their question to another disciple of his, Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol.

They went to Rabbi Zusya's broken-down cottage and found him smoking his pipe. They told him that the Maggid had sent them to him to ask him their question --"How can one thank and bless God for the bad?"

Like some other holy people, Rabbi Zusya was on a very high spiritual level where he never used the word I but instead always referred to himself as "Zusya." He said to them, "Zusya can't understand why the Maggid sent you to him, since Zusya has never experienced anything bad in his whole life!"

Now everyone knew that in fact Rabbi Zusya had suffered greatly in his lifetime: He was poor and sickly. Yet they also knew and saw that he always glowed with inner peace and joy. (as re-told by the marvelous Yitzhak Buxbaum in Jewish Tales of Mystic Joy)

Okay, Reb Zusya, what gives? How do you do it? What's in your pipe? How do you go about being poor and sick in your broken-down cottage without sometimes thinking, "This is bad!"? How do you be a Jew in Galicia in the 1700's, beset with all that we know beset the Jews, without at the very least finding that you need to "thank and bless God for the bad?" How do you never experience anything bad in your whole life?

I am sitting in my crazy little yellow study here, looking out the window in the dusk, watching the trees blow above the canyon behind our house. I am daydreaming about all the sick people in my life right now, and those around them who are grieving and worrying. And, I must confess, I am thinking a bit about a sore wrist which has been dogging me lately, about extra pounds, about my crowded and cranky calendar, about phone calls I should make, bills I should pay -- the real noise of the front of my mind most of the time.

And through all that noise I can faintly hear Reb Zusya trying to answer my question. "What," he is asking me, "makes an experience 'bad?'" Is it 'bad' to be sick? Is death 'bad'?

This line of questioning isn't so difficult for me, actually. I know that illness can be miserable, but it is a natural thing. Death, all the more so -- death is almost always exquisitely sad, but it isn't evil. As I keep saying to myself these days, "Everyone dies." What can possibly be bad about the last experience of every living being? How can something as lovely as life end "badly?" (At least on this plane -- personally I'm pretty much agnostic about lives beyond this one. Maybe it all goes onward. That neither scares nor consoles me very much.)

Now that I am in a time of life when more and more people I care for are actually taking the plunge and dying -- my elders and, increasingly, my age-mates as well -- I find peace in what I can imagine Reb Zusya might say. Death is not a bad thing. Even illness, well, easy for me to say… Illness is difficult, but natural, part of life as a finite being. Not what I want, for myself or for anyone else. And illness seems to fall so heavily on some people, while brushing others only lightly. I've had a small share of illness myself over the years. I haven't liked it much. But I can't say it has been bad.

Okay, I admit, I'm kind of a cerebral girl. It matters to me what I think about things. Thinking sometimes even helps me feel better (and, I suppose, sometimes worse…) And so I work my way down my little list of preoccupations. And none of it is truly bad. It's life ("and life only…") Life with a body, with a mind, with friends and family and community and world -- finite, fragile, always at-risk, ultimately fatal, but not bad.

What, then, Reb Zusya, of Darfur? Gaza? Iraq? Afghanistan? AIDS? Global poverty? Climate change? Extinction of species?

Here my cognitive faculties leave me short, and my joy naturally fails. The damage we can do to each other is enormous, truly terrible. Even still, sometimes for a moment I can see us all as comets flashing through the sky, lighting up for a moment, hitting what we hit, then burning out, falling to the ground, crumbling. In those split seconds, from that great distance, it can all look sort of beautiful. Sometimes for just a flash I can see even violence and terror as holding within them some kind of hunger for life, our fragile and foolish species flailing in fear.

Many of you know my beloved midrash: A person is walking from place to place, and he sees a castle on fire. Perhaps, thinks that person, the castle has no master. A voice emerges from the flames and says, "I am the master of the castle." (Genesis Rabbah 39:1)

Sometimes, for just a second at a time, I can grasp that the burning castle has a master, even that the divine voice comes from the midst of the flames.

As I write this, I hear Rabbi Zusya again, tapping on the corner of my mind. "Zusya has never experienced anything bad in his whole life!" "What," I hear him asking me, "do you actually experience of the suffering of Darfur or of Gaza?"

What do I actually experience? News images, words of concern, feelings of complicity, feelings of outrage and frustration, admiration for those who step forward to help, admiration for those who survive and endure. Flashes of empathy, of bodily identification with people's wounds. I experience my distance from zones of war. I experience how tentative that distance really is. I occasionally experience the call of my conscience to try to contribute something. Befuddlement, discouragement, stretches of forgetting, indifference. Being reawakened to concern, usually by someone's words. Especially by the personal witness of people who have been there. More forgetting, more discouragement. Excitement when someone offers a way to make a gesture of support. Moments of hope. Long stretches of hopelessness.

I can't begin to speak for any other person, animal, plant or landscape. I can't even begin to imagine life of any kind in places of war or hunger or desperate illness. But I can, in my small, fleeting way, begin to hear Rabbi Zusya's tacit admonition. It is possible that, even while I have witnessed my small share of human cruelty, and have found it sad, shocking and infuriating, I have also never experienced anything bad in my life.

At the very least, I find myself challenged by the serenity of Reb Zusya in the face of whatever sorrows and outrages he knew. He wasn't stupid, and he wasn't shallow. He lived in a time of world upheaval surely no less shocking than our own. In the midst of it all he clearly brought peace of mind and heart to the students who came to his house, and no doubt to others as well. He did so despite his poverty and his frailty -- and no doubt the poverty and frailty of his disciples too.

"The rabbis say that a person should rejoice in his afflictions and bless God for the bad things just as he makes a blessing to thank Him for the good. How is that possible?" I think that it may matter how we think about our own experiences and about our world. A fine and beautiful, if impossible, question.

- Rabbi Margaret Holub

© 2008 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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