Rabbi Janet Marder

November 28, 2008

Fragments of Light

            I’ve always loved the night before Thanksgiving. When I was a kid it was about seeing my mom in the kitchen, surrounded by mountains of canned goods she’d bought that week at the supermarket. I’d watch her in awe as she whipped up one fabulous dish after another -- from cranberry relish to stuffing to green beans casserole with cream of mushroom soup and French-fried onions on the top, to sweet potatoes covered with marshmallows -- then she’d stow them all in the refrigerator to be cooked the following day.

            While mom was creating her culinary masterpieces, my sisters and brother and I would sit at the kitchen table creating our own masterpieces – of aft. We used to collect fallen leaves on the day before Thanksgiving – then that night we’d trace them on pieces of  cardboard, cut them out and color them in, labeling each one with the name of someone in our family – our Aunt Barbara (a bit of an eccentric),  our uncle Alan, Grandma and Grandpa, all of our cousins. Next day these would be the place cards at our Thanksgiving table.

            In our early years together, Shelly and I had our own tradition on the night before Thanksgiving. We’d take the subway into New York City from our apartment in Queens and go to the movies. We’d stay up late afterwards, happy that we could sleep in the next morning, and walk through the chilly winter night on quiet streets dusted white by an early snowfall.

            Later, when we had kids and had moved to L.A; we’d stay in on the night before Thanksgiving. I’d make some kind of comfort food for dinner and we’d spend the evening watching family-friendly movies on tv and cuddling on the couch. Nobody had anywhere to go or any work to do. That night was for only for being together.

            This week, on the night before Thanksgiving, our family was together again. After years when our daughters were away from home, they are now back in the Bay Area, something we give thanks for every day. On Wednesday night I made split pea and barley soup for dinner and assembled the ingredients for my mother’s famous carrot ring, which is now my contribution to the family Thanksgiving feast.

            But when we turned on the television it was not to watch a heartwarming family film and spend a cozy evening on the couch. CNN was broadcasting footage of the chaos in Mumbai – crowds of terrified people running through the streets; black-uniformed police in bulletproof vests; smoke and flames and pools of blood on the ground. Information was leaking out slowly, but we knew that terrorists had attacked two luxury hotels, the railroad station, a movie theater and a hospital – choosing their targets deliberately to disrupt the institutions of modern civilized society in India ’s financial center. We did not yet know that Jews would also be among their targets.

            It was a night of the incongruous and the grotesque. There we sat in our family room, like millions of other Americans, getting ready for our national feast of Thanksgiving while watching scenes of carnage on the evening news.

            In 2003 Susan Sontag published a slim volume entitled “Regarding the Pain of Others” – a clever bit of wordplay that reflects her subject: the experience of watching others suffer in a faraway place. “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country,” she writes, “is a quintessential modern experience” [p.18]. She points out that it was an experience not available to our ancestors, who had only their own immediate suffering to contend with. There were no photographs or television or streaming video broadcast on the Internet to assault their eyes and ears with images of bloodshed and fear around the world.

            Sontag talks about the complicated emotions aroused when one sits in peace and comfort while beholding these upsetting images – pictures of starving children, victims of warfare and terror attacks. “[T]here is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror,” she says. “Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it….or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look” [p.42].

            The fundamental question raised in her book is this: “What to do with such knowledge….of faraway suffering?” Sontag writes: “A citizen of Sarajevo….whom I met soon after arriving in the city for the first time in April 1993, told me: ‘In October 1991 I was here in my nice apartment in peaceful Sarajevo when the Serbs invaded Croatia, and I remember when the evening news showed footage of the destruction of Vukovar, just a couple of hundred miles away, I thought to myself, “Oh, how horrible,” and switched the channel. So how can I be indignant if someone in France or Italy or Germany sees the killing taking place here day after day on their evening news and says, “Oh, how horrible,” and looks for another program. It’s normal. It’s human.’

            “Whenever people feel safe,” writes Sontag, “….they will be indifferent.” But she also finds another reason for our desire to change the channel and turn away, after a while, from regarding the pain of others. It is our sense of powerlessness, of utter impotence in the face of overwhelming suffering, that causes us to withdraw our attention. She writes:

             “People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but also because they are afraid…..It is because, say, the war in Bosnia didn’t stop, because leaders claimed it was an intractable situation, that people abroad may have switched off the terrible images. It is because a war, any war, doesn’t seem as if it can be stopped that people become less responsive to the horrors. Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers” [pp.99-101].

            What to do with the knowledge of faraway suffering? What to do with the terror we feel at beholding the terror of others -- terror we struggle to hold at bay, while reassuring ourselves that of course we are safe. Looking into the frightened face of a victim in some distant place, we feel an immediate upsurge of distress, an instinctive desire to help. But what is there to do? Compassion, as Sontag says, soon dissipates if we feel that there is nothing we can do. It “needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

            I tried to watch the unfolding drama in Mumbai as a Jew – meaning not only that I had a special sense of anguish when I heard the terrorists had captured the Chabad House – but that I asked myself where in our tradition is an answer to Susan Sontag’s question. How do we prevent ourselves from becoming passive spectators, impassive voyeurs of the evening news?

            For me the answer is in a powerful metaphor that came into Judaism in the 16^th century, though its roots are much older. The maker of the metaphor was Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria, known as the Ari, the “sacred lion.” Luria grew up in Egypt , where he became a scholar of Jewish law and also of mysticism. He spent some years in seclusion on an island in the Nile pondering the teachings of the Zohar and other kabbalistic works. In 1570 he came to the land of Israel to study in Safed with the great rabbi Moses Cordovero. Soon he began teaching his own original kabbalistic system and a circle gathered around him. Though he died just two years later, at the age of 38, Luria exerted a profound and lasting influence on his followers.

            Created in the wake of a traumatic cataclysm that shattered the Jewish world – the 1492 expulsion from Spain – the Lurianic system attempts to explain the existence of evil in the world and provide a means to address it. Luria offered his followers a “catastrophic theory of creation” in which a devastating explosion brought the world into being.

            Here is one version of his teaching: “God, in making the world, could not leave it devoid of his presence. He therefore sent forth rays of his light (strangely, this is not unlike the ‘background radiation’ discovered by scientists in 1965 which eventually proved the Big Bang theory of the birth of the universe). The light was, however, too intense for its containers, which thereby broke, scattering fragments of light throughout the world. It is our task to gather up these fragments, wherever they are, and restore them to their proper place.”

            Luria gave new meaning to a concept found in Talmudic law – the idea of “tikkun ha-olam,” repair of the world. For the Sages, this was a modest category of jurisprudence – laws passed “for the better ordering of society.” The idea of tikkun appears in different form in the Alenu prayer, where it expresses a grand messianic hope for a time when evil will disappear and all humanity will be united under one God. But in that prayer it is not human beings but God who “perfects the world.”

            Luria created a remarkable synthesis of these two ideas: human action for the betterment of society, and the messianic dream of a good and ordered world under God. In his kabbalistic theory, people are charged with the work of collecting the disparate shards, mending all that is broken and shattered. Every religious deed we do serves to heal the cosmos and bring redemption nearer. It should be noted that Luria was not talking about our modern notion of social action. When he spoke of religious acts that repair the world he meant prayer and mitzvot, not cooking meals for the homeless, lobbying congress or picking up trash on a beach.

            But Luria’s theory of tikkun olam remains compelling, because it provides an answer to the problem of compassion with nowhere to go, no outlet for action in the face of overwhelming evil. Tikkun olam holds fast to the utopian ideal, but it is firmly grounded in the modest and pragmatic deed. As Jonathan Sacks writes: “The significance of Lurianic kabbalah is that it is a redemption of small steps, act by act, day by day. Each act mends a fracture in the world. The way from here to there, like the journey of the Israelites through the wilderness, takes time. There are setbacks on the way – sins, rebellions, false turns. A journey of a few days takes 40 years. But there are no short cuts, no miraculous leaps” [Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: the Ethics of Responsibility, pp.74-77].

            Isaac Luria gave his  traumatized people an image of the slow, patient process of making things better. It is a recipe for resilience, buoyed by faith and powered by confidence in the human enterprise. When you believe in tikkun ha-olam you are fully aware of the enormity of evil and you expect no stupendous tidal wave to sweep it away. You are nevertheless convinced that it can be overcome, and that everything you do makes a difference.

            When you believe in Tikkun ha-olam you watch the evening news and interpret the misery you see there not as a catalyst for despair but as a summons to do good. You have faith in the supreme power of small, incremental acts. 

            “Lurianic kabbalah,” writes Jonathan Sacks, “is not afraid to look at catastrophe without concluding that the world is irreparable, evil endemic, that history is a meaningless sequence of events and the human situation irredeemable. Out of broken fragments, it shapes a mosaic of hope” [p.78].

            Every Thanksgiving I yearn for comfort food and the comfort of gathering my family around me in safety, warmth and peace. All the good things spread out on our tables cannot insulate us from a world of terror and pain. Still and all, there is reason to give thanks: for sweet potatoes with marshmallows; for eccentric aunts and adorable children; for this country that we love, and for the Jewish faith that calls us, in the midst of a chilly winter night, to lift up fragments of light.