Once upon a time there was a king who desired to build an intricate palace, but instead of building his palace with high turrets he built it with seven circular paths, each path surrounding and encompassing another inner path, until one came to the innermost chamber. At the front of the palace there was a gate, and in each path there was a door to the next inner path, and each doorway was narrower and smaller than the one before so that the door to the innermost chamber was so narrow and small that a person could just barely squeeze through and enter. At the front of the palace the king placed a huge boulder. He called his son to meet him outside the palace, showed him the boulder and said that it would give him great pleasure if his son could bring the boulder into the innermost room of the palace. The son wanted to please his father so naturally he agreed. He went over to the boulder but it was too large and heavy to pick up so he began to roll the boulder through the gate and into the palace. As the doorways to each path became smaller and smaller, the son had more and more difficulty maneuvering the boulder into the next room, until finally it became impossible to get it through the door. The son went to his father in tears and confessed that the he had failed, the boulder was too big. So his father gave him a sledge hammer and said, try this. With the sledge hammer, the son broke the boulder into pieces, and carried each piece into the innermost chamber as his father had asked.
That boulder is our heart, and, as the Ba’al Shem Tov taught, Rachmana Liba Ba’ei -- it is our hearts that God desires of us. Not our puffed up, boasting, ego filled hearts. Not the heart filled with our acquisitions or great accomplishments. Not the self-satisfied heart. Not even the self-effacing, “poor me” heart. But the heart battered, in pieces. It is the broken heart that God desires.
We are broken in so many ways in this life: our aging bodies that abandon us; dread disease that threatens us; the loss of a job and economic disaster; watching our loved ones suffer and too often die; the death of a relationship; an endless loneliness; our children who struggle, or lose their way while we watch helplessly, or who cannot be who we want them to be; disappointment upon disappointment upon disappointment.
And as if the events of life do not batter us enough there is the extra, additional suffering we create for ourselves: the inescapable feeling that we will never measure up, that we are not good enough, that we are not worthy of love; the fears that imprison us; the angers that burn us like a hot coal clenched in our fists; the petty jealousies, the old habits of the heart and the baggage we have carried with us since childhood that we can never seem to let go of; the stories we tell ourselves again and again and again, repeating the same hurtful behavior over and over. Not to mention the poverty, the hunger, the pestilence, the hatred, and the violence that pervade our community and our world and that assault us daily in the news. We don’t need a sledge hammer to break our hearts; we’re already broken in so many ways. No one is immune from the pain that comes from being a human being.
Rachmana liba ba’ei – The Compassionate One wants the heart, and the heart is not so easily broken. Life, filled with so much pleasure and delight, also brings more pain than we think we can bear. Is that the purpose of suffering? To break our hearts?
The Talmud (Brachot 5a) records an exploration into the spiritual meaning of suffering: "Raba and some say R. Hisda, taught: If a man sees that painful suffering afflicts him, let him examine his conduct... If he examines his conduct and finds nothing [objectionable], let him attribute the suffering to the neglect of the study of Torah... If he still did not find [neglect of Torah study to be the cause], it is evidently chastenings of love, as it is said: "For whom the Adonai loves, God rebukes (Proverbs 3;12)"
This wisdom teaching urges that, in the face of suffering, we must examine our conduct. This process of cheshbon hanefesh – soul searching and taking a moral inventory of our behaviors -- is the essence of the forty days leading up to this day of Yom Kippur. If we came to synagogue only once a year on Yom Kippur, if we had no larger context for the meaning of the prayers we recite, we might easily assume that Jews are obsessed with guilt and that suffering is punishment for our sins and wrong-doings. But if we look deeper into the experience of wrong-doing, of sin, we might begin to see that wrong action always carries with it its own inevitable consequences in both the physical and psychic realms. We become burdened with our wrong-doing and often face an endless stream of anxiety, depression, fear, stress, inner conflict and guilt. And these powerful feelings can have an impact upon our physical health, our ability to work, our family, our relationships. A true and deep examination of our behavior reveals that, while there are often consequences to our behavior imposed from the outside, the gravest consequences we face come from the wrong action itself.
Some time ago I did work with a teenager who lied incessantly. He lied to his teachers and parents about not doing homework. He lied to his friends about his gaming skills and about experiences he claimed to have had. It was in the process of working with him that he also began to see that he lied to himself. He could not accept his own sense of smallness so he created a fictional life and persona. And as we talked together he began to acknowledge that the lying itself was painful, more painful than punishment, because he lived in constant fear of being found out and his stomach was tied up in the knots of internal conflict and confusion.
Aveira gorrerret aveira, our Sages say, which I understand to mean that the punishment for a sin is the sin itself. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the 20th century kabbalist and first chief rabbi of Israel says it this way: “Every sin oppresses the heart… the basis of the anguish experienced is not merely the result of sin itself. It is rather due to the basic nature of sin and the nature of the life process that has become disoriented from the order of existence.” A sin is in essence an act of terrible alienation from oneself and from the harmony of all existence, and that is the suffering we feel at our own wrong doing.
The Talmud’s second suggestion that a lack of Torah study can cause suffering points us to a wise insight into the nature of how we make choices. I call it a “tofu teaching.” My teacher Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi likes to say that the mind is like tofu. Tofu by itself has no taste. It takes on the taste of whatever you marinate it in. Let tofu sit in sweet marinade and it tastes sweet. Marinate it in bitter, and it tastes bitter. The mind is just like that. If we consciously and deliberately fill the mind with thoughts of gratitude or acceptance we are more likely to experience gratitude or acceptance during the day. If we fill our minds with bitterness, we will experience life with bitterness and cynicism. The Talmud is suggesting that we consciously and deliberately fill and surround our minds with Torah so that our perceptions and behaviors will be flavored with the compassion and justice of Torah.
The wisdom teaching from the Talmud also recognizes a third form of pain and suffering in life: the pain for which there is no reason; the pain which is not a punishment or a consequence of our behavior. It is, simply put, the pain of living. The Talmud calls this “yesurin shel ahava” - redemptive suffering, or suffering that arouses love. When we come to know our suffering with love, it is then that it offers us the greatest possible redemption.
Many years ago I regularly visited a woman named Joanne, who suffered from a chronic and debilitating disease. Often when I visited her at home she would tell me about the latest, painful deterioration of her physical condition, which she called “the new normal.” She taught me the difference between “hope” and “faith.” There was no hope, she said, that her condition could get better; it would only get worse. Instead of hope, she had faith, and when she awoke to her new, agonizing condition, she would say, “Thank you, God, for this opportunity to know you better.” Joanne had no Jewish education and was not what you would call a religious person. She simply recognized in every experience the opportunity to know God.
This is what our Tradition must mean when it teaches us to say a blessing when we encounter pain or suffering. We are to be mevarekh al hara’ah—to bless the experience of suffering. Thank You, God, for this opportunity to know you better.
If you think about it, you’d probably notice that when you feel an intense pain in your body, your body naturally contracts and tightens. I used to have a dislocating shoulder and each time it popped out of the socket, sending excruciating pain throughout my body, I tightened as hard as I could to control the pain. Then, just after my first child was born, when my shoulder dislocated, I decided to do Lamaze breathing while I was driven to the emergency room. As I sat and focused on my breath, my body relaxed, all my musculature relaxed, and my shoulder slipped effortlessly back into place. That was the last time my shoulder dislocated.
When suffering strikes our instinct is to squeeze tight, as if it were the only way to hold ourselves together. We are squeezed, we feel constricted, tight, and in addition to the physical pain or the emotional pain there is a gnawing fear, this will never will go away, I can’t survive this, I am alone in this… and with each fear it just gets tighter and tighter, until it feel like we crack. But what if in that tightness there was a small opening, a tiny space, and in that space was a cry, and in that cry there was a Presence. There was God.
“Ba-tzar hirchavta li” – From my most constricted place You opened a wide expanse for me, so prays the Psalmist (chapter 4). I always assumed this meant that God answers our prayer of distress with the promise of an expansive place. No, teaches, Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav. This means that God opens a wide expanse for us even from inside the narrowest place of our distress. If we could simply contemplate the infinite divine love for us we would know relief, redemption, and the expansive place from within our very suffering. In the midst of our hardship, God widens the straights we are in (Likutei Moharan, Part I, 195.) If we allow ourselves to take a breath and see clearly, we would understand that the suffering we feel, which is so real, will ultimately bring us closer to our true selves and to God. This suffering is the instrument of our awakening. That is the essence of teshuvah, of repentance, to return to our true selves, to our true hearts, to our deepest connection with divinity. True repentance arises only when we are able to know God in the depth of our suffering and to have faith that blessing comes from these painfully narrow passages of life. Thank you, God, for the opportunity to know you in this narrow place. Just as the waves batter the shore, leaving behind pebbles and smoothly polished sea glass, each dropped uniquely in place by chance or by design, so every moment of my life, those joyous and those taut with suffering, has led me to this one unique moment in which to feel You, God, in which to know You, God and to know the truth of my heart, and to feel whole, to feel healed.
Just a few weeks ago two women came to Friday evening services. Both had lost their mothers three weeks earlier. Both had sat with their mothers as death insistently approached. Both of the women felt a profound sense of loss and grief. As one of the woman spoke of the guilt she felt at disconnecting her mother from life support, the other put her arms around her and let her weep, offering her comfort, and telling her that someday soon she would be able to see that what she did for her mom was an act of great love. They talked together for a long time, as I wondered at the mystery that brought these two strangers to the same place at the same time so that they might find healing in each other’s brokenness.
Rachmana liba ba’ei – The Compassionate One desires the heart, and the heart is not easily broken. The heart is covered with layers of armor and defenses, with scabs and crusty hard skin. Yet life, with its inevitable pain and suffering manages to break the heart open. The heart is broken to let the light in, to let God in, to know healing. And we, like the beloved child in the Hasidic parable, pick up the pieces of the heart and carry them into the presence of the divine, into the room of healing, where we put the pieces back together and make for ourselves a stronger heart, a truer heart.
And yet, and yet, there is another story. There is the story of Moses who is told not to hit the rock and break it, but to speak to the rock so that life giving waters would flow out freely. So what if we could but turn and speak to our hearts and say “I want to know you, my heart. I want to know your truth. I accept you, my heart. I accept your beauty, I accept your joy, I accept your pain, I accept your suffering, I accept your goodness, I accept your purity and I accept your faults and your failures. I embrace you, my heart, and I will embrace myself as simply, beautifully human.” If we could but speak to our hearts, so gently, would not the hard crust of scab fall off, and would not our hearts become all fleshy and vulnerable? And then, having forgiven ourselves the sin of being human, having spoken our truth, our hearts would melt at our words. At last we would be vulnerable and humble, and holding our hearts in our hands we would offer ourselves once again, just as we are, to the God who waits for us so lovingly, so patiently, to embrace us and to heal us from the inside out.
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