Rosh Hashanah 2024

Margaret Holub - 10/02/24

As a tiny tyke I remember Miss Barbara at the end of Romper Room holding up her magic mirror and saying, “I see Jenny and I see Linda and I see Tommy and I see Susie…” I thought it was the most amazing thing — how did she know who was out there? Could she see me? It wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally figured out the sad truth — her mirror wasn’t magic, and she couldn’t see anyone. She was just making up those names. That was a cold realization.

But my magic mirror is different. At 9 AM every morning for the past thirty days — well, except for Shabbat (and the week I took off) — I’ve logged on to the MCJC zoom page. When I get on there I see boxes open up like popcorn kernels, one and then another and then a bunch… And inside every little box is someone I love. Even people I hardly know, like Harriet’s lovely friend from LA or Rachel’s cousin… I see them. They’re there! I see Bonnie and I see Fran and I see Kenny and I see Susan and I see Grumpy Cat…

We spend about seven minutes together. I read a version of Psalm 27 (more on that later) and I blow the shofar. Then there is this very sweet and slightly awkward moment, when we don’t really want to leave. And people just smile and gaze at each other. After a few moments we kind of reluctantly log off one by one.

Lately I’ve been very touched by a couple of conversations I’ve had with people about loneliness. And also the Surgeon General called loneliness a national epidemic deeply detrimental to people’s health and longevity — not to even mention their pleasure in life. I’ve found myself thinking about that as I look at the bright faces in my magic mirror in the morning. I’m not particularly prone to loneliness myself, though I have my moments. But since these conversations I’ve looked at my dear ones gathered together on my little screen and I have wondered about the loneliness that might hover behind these beautiful faces.

I decided to be modern and crowd-source the question. A few weeks ago I sent out an e-mail to our MCJC list asking people to tell me about loneliness. I thought I might hear from a couple of people who were willing to tell me a bit about how it is for them. Well, blow me over with a feather — within two days I had gotten over seventy-five responses. And they keep coming. They are all so beautiful and many terribly sad. I have learned so much from all of you. These days I look at those faces on my morning screen — and the people in line at the bank and driving in cars next to mine. And I keep thinking: it’s not as easy as it looks to be alive.

So… loneliness. As I promised I won’t quote anyone or tell any stories. And I’m not going to do any social science either. But a couple of things strike me as worth mentioning. Very broadly I think most of you told me about one or another of two kinds of loneliness: there is the stark feeling when people you love are gone, when you are alone handling a difficult situation, when you are in an unsatisfying intimate relationship or in a crowd of people you don’t really relate to, when you are isolated by frailty or illness. Call that social loneliness, Loneliness One. And then there is a kind of loneliness which seems to strike wantonly, like stomach flu, to just come on out of nowhere in the most painful and debilitating way and last however long it wants to last. Sometimes your whole life. Call that core loneliness, heart loneliness, Loneliness Two. One kind of loneliness seems to come with circumstances; the other seems to be somehow bred in the bone.

A number of people wrote about how they used to have rich and connected lives. And then, through the death of close people, retirement, moving away, physical frailty or pain — all this compounded by the isolation of COVID —they find that now they don’t have people who hold them close, physically or emotionally. A couple people said some version of, “I am lonely for the person I used to be.” Loneliness One.

And then there are others who wrote about how they have always been lonely, how they felt like they just didn’t have a gift for connection, that people thought they were strange, that there was something wrong with them. Loneliness Two.

Some people talked about how loneliness hurts them in particular places: their stomachs, their necks, their skin. One beloved friend wrote — and I think I can mention this, since it wasn’t personal — about how when small children are cared for lovingly and attentively, and especially when they are held next to the skin of their caregiver, a kind of core security is imprinted.

And when a young child is left in a crib, let to cry, not responded to, a pattern of loneliness gets stamped in that follows that child through life. A few people wrote about how antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications helped them to feel less lonely — which reminds us that loneliness can be profoundly located in the body.

And then some people wrote something along the lines of, “I’m hardly ever lonely. I like my own company. I am a solitary person, and aloneness suits me.”

While I have been absorbing all this I have been reading Psalm 27 every day. And hearing it through the lens of this conversation it strikes me as almost unbearably poignant:

To You my heart says:
“Seek My face!”
O God, I seek Your face.

Do not hide Your face from me;
do not thrust aside Your servant in anger;
You have always been my help.
Do not forsake me, do not abandon me,
O God, my deliverer.

The psalmist is so tender, so vulnerable, so hungry to be seen, to be known… Then, in the very next breath, he proclaims:

Though my father and mother abandon me,
HASHEM will take me in.

Certainty or bravado? Poor psalmist.

____________

While I was mulling all this a friend pointed me to a surprising passage in the latter part of the prophet Isaiah. This is God speaking:

I responded to those who did not ask,
I was at hand to those who did not seek Me;
I said, “Here I am, here I am,”
To a nation that did not call My name.

I constantly spread out My hands
To a disloyal people,
Who walk the way that is not good,
Following after their own thoughts;

ISAIAH 65:1-2

Is it possible that God is lonely too? I know that the sense of God’s loneliness is at the heart of some basic kabbalistic ideas: that God in God’s infinite Godness longed for there to be a world, as though to instigate the possibility of relationship, and so began the project of creation.

And large parts of Torah convey that this longing for relationship didn’t always work out so well for God. God tried to destroy the world and start again with Noah. Later on God made a special friend in Abraham. Abraham held it together, but his offspring disappointed over and over. God courted Moses and entrusted him with bringing b’nai yisrael — the children of Yisrael — into a special covenanted relationship, essentially a marriage, with HASHEM. But they weren’t faithful either.

This motif of God courting the Israelites and their coming close and then pulling away, God’s rage and heartbreak — this suffuses the prophetic books. There is a feminist reading of this dynamic in the prophets that sees God as a jealous husband on an abusive rampage. But this year it strikes me that God is like the child in her crib, raising up her arms to be picked up and held, and instead left to cry. Either way it’s painful reading.

Poor God.

And then I learned from my friend Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer about the luz bone. According to midrash there is a bone in the human body, many say at the top of the spine, “exactly,” says Nancy, “where the mind connects with the body.” It gets its name from the place where Jacob dreamed of the ladder reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending. He named this place of connection Beth El — but the same passage in Genesis notes that it is also called Luz. The luz bone, unlike any other part of the human body, is eternal. It doesn’t biodegrade. The Zohar says that when the dead are resurrected our bodies will be rebuilt out of the luz bone. Nancy writes, “The luz, then is God’s home inside us, the inner manifestation of that ladder of divine-human connection.” (“The Face Under the Huppah” in Chapters of the Heart p. 30)

So by this light God has a home inside us, built into our very structure. We might think we are separate from God — God might, as it were, think that God is separate from us — and it’s simply not true. The separation is the illusion, not the connection.

Now I listen again to Psalm 27:

To You my heart says:
“Seek my face!”
O HASHEM, I seek Your face.

I hear the longing in there — both directions. I seek Your face and You seek mine. And I wonder about the singular prepositions. My heart, your face… I know that many of us have experiences in which the boundaries of our individual selves feel more permeable than usual, where we feel part of something larger. Maybe it’s at a rock concert in a stadium. Maybe it’s a little split-second thought in the middle of a city traffic jam: we are all really one big caterpillar inching along. Maybe it’s at the dinner table, looking around and saying, “These are my friends. This is my family.” Maybe it’s under the Milky Way. Maybe it’s on the zoom shofar.

I think of walking on the Spring Ranch trail, this time of year especially, when the grasses are tall and dry and gold. They wave in the breeze, countless rippling heads of grass. I can sometimes feel myself in that motion, part of what is rippling in the currents of air, just another stalk in the wind, another head full of seeds waving on this beautiful earth.

Maybe this sense of being part of a field is as true and realistic as the perception of ourselves as separate, individual beings. Maybe we really are part of a landscape, part of a community, part of wherever we are, part of the universe. Maybe we really are stardust.

Likewise, maybe, we are part of each other — whether we think we are or not. Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer quotes the Israeli novelist David Grossman who says that one’s luz bone can actually turn up in someone else’s body! We are part of the rock concert, part of the dinner table, part of the traffic jam, part of the night sky. What if loneliness is a kind of painful illusion, a kind of misunderstanding of who we are in this universe?

If it is a misunderstanding, it is so prevalent that it is even imputed to God. If it is an illusion, it is one that causes untold misery — is a national epidemic, shortens our lives even while it makes them seem unbearably long.

This is the place where Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and so many other wise souls urge us to strengthen our communities, create more opportunities to meet and connect, help each other more and so on. And I believe and support all that with all my heart. Building up and deepening this community has been my life’s work — and that of many of you as well. I hope we have done fairly well so far. And there is always more to do to make connection and friendship and mutual care more accessible to us all. More social connection — this is the medicine for Loneliness One.

But, being as today is the birthday of the world — and specifically the birthday of the creation of human beings — I find myself thinking about the possibility that loneliness is as much a spiritual as a social issue. Perhaps it stems from misunderstanding of what human beings — and in fact all created beings — are. We are all constituted of the same substance. We are all filled with the breath of God. We are all universe. We are all life. We have faces and bodies and personalities and stories. But we are not separate. We are intermingled with each other and with the infinite divine.

How can we possibly come to know this, to feel it as deeply as we feel separate — as deeply as we feel like that baby crying in their crib, alone and unheard? What would it take to embed this awareness in our consciousness?

I don’t know the answer to this, and I don’t want to be facile about it. It’s not simple, like an injection or a week of boot camp. I think it is one way to understand Jewish spiritual practice — hours, days, weeks and years of being part of a minyan, of being needed and counted, of singing together, of setting out the kiddush and washing the cups. Maybe it’s about touching the challah or touching someone touching it. Maybe it is feeling the company of the ancestors. Maybe it has something to do with showing up and assuaging God’s loneliness with our loving presence.

So maybe, when we pop up like popcorn on the zoom screen and see each other’s beautiful faces maybe there will be a moment when we can feel like each person seeps past the boundaries of the little boxes, that in fact we are all mixed up with each other. And when we are home alone in our houses maybe we can feel that we are part of the earth below us and the sky above and all the plants and animals and microbes and particles that inhabit the world with us.

And then we will live in the house of HASHEM, and HASHEM will live in our house and be our house all the days of our lives.