Rabbi Janet Marder

March 5, 2010

Searching for Solid Ground

It is a country shaped like a ribbon – a long, narrow coastal strip wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains . The north contains the driest desert on earth, with rain falling only about every 25 years. The south is covered with dense rainforest. Scientists regard it as “perhaps the most highly seismic region in the world, with the possible exception of Japan ” [“Major Earthquakes of Chile : A Historical Survey: 1535-1960,” Cinna Lomnits, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico].

Last Saturday’s monstrous earthquake in Chile was the latest in a chain of seismic destruction stretching back at least to the 16^th century, when the earliest reliable records begin. The devastating earthquake of 1647 which reduced Santiago to ruins was the basis for Heinrich Kleist’s famous story, “An Earthquake in Chile ”; and the quake that struck the southern coast in May, 1960, magnitude 9.5, is the strongest thus far recorded on the planet.

In the winter of 1835, Charles Darwin, aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, found himself becalmed in the seas off the coast of Chile . On February 22 he wrote in his diary: “This day has been remarkable in the annals of Valdivia for the most severe earthquake which the oldest inhabitants remember…. I was on shore & lying down in the wood to rest myself. It came on suddenly & lasted two minutes (but appeared much longer). The rocking was most sensible; the undulation appeared both to me & my servant to travel due East. There was no difficulty in standing upright; but the motion made me giddy.  I can compare it to skating on very thin ice or to the motion of a ship in a little cross ripple.

 “An earthquake like this at once destroys the oldest associations; the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, moves beneath our feet like a crust over fluid; one second of time conveys to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never create.”

Later he provided more detail in a letter to his sister: “It is no use attempting to describe the ruins--it is the most awful spectacle I ever beheld….The force of the shock must have been immense, the ground is traversed by rents, the solid rocks are shivered, solid buttresses 6-10 feet thick are broken into fragments like so much biscuit.”

Modern quake survivors, too, focus on the sensation Darwin recorded: that sickening feeling of insecurity when all that once seemed solid cracks apart in an instant, and the stable ground on which you imagined yourself dissolves beneath you.

A resident of Santiago , more than 200 miles from the epicenter of the quake, emailed this description to his local newspaper:

“It was around 3 AM when it hit us.
….Everything was moving, side to side. My drawers were opening and closing, clothing and books falling on the floor. The feeling of insignificance is impossible to describe. There was nothing we could do for the next 90 seconds but pray. As I crawled towards the door frame, I could hear furniture falling, bottles breaking, and windows shattering… I shut my eyes, and waited for it all to end.”

The death toll in Chile is well below the tragic destruction in Haiti , where more than 200,000 died following the January quake. But even in Chile , a developed country built with strict seismic codes, there was panic. Newspapers reported that some people ran screaming from their apartments as car alarms and sirens wailed into the night.

“…[W]e, who are only spectators at other people’s misfortune, “ writes Rabbi Harold Kushner, “how shall we respond? We can send money, food, blankets. We can send our prayers. But there is something more that we need to do. We need to go beyond seeing the people struck by natural disasters….solely as victims, as objects of our pity and recipients of our charity.

“We need to see them as being much like ourselves, human beings vulnerable to the caprice of Nature. When our only response is pity, when we see these people only as victims, the danger is that we will distance ourselves from them psychologically, dividing the world into ‘they’ who suffer and ‘we’ who magnanimously reach out to help. The truth is that when it comes to vulnerability to the destructive forces of Nature and other misfortunes, there is no ‘them’ and ‘us.’ There is only ‘us,’ the vast human family linked by our shared vulnerability…”

Rabbi Kushner asks us to see earthquakes and other natural disasters as reminders that none of us stand on truly solid ground. All of us are susceptible to radical disruptions and upheavals when we least expect them, though we do our best to go through life pretending this is not so.

There is a reason we do this. There is a reason we spend so much psychic energy convincing ourselves that the world is stable and rational and basically ok, and bad things will not happen – at least not to us. It is because the alternative way of seeing reality seems just too frightening. How can you possibly get through your days with the consciousness that everything could suddenly go haywire and the moorings of your world could suddenly rip apart?

“Security is mostly a superstition,” wrote Helen Keller. “It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it…”

Every now and then we get a dreadful reminder of how vulnerable we all are to abrupt intrusions of disaster. A small plane headed for Southern California crashes in East Palo Alto and kills the three engineers onboard. A 21 year old athlete reaches the pinnacle of his career so far and comes to compete in the Vancouver Olympics; within moments he has been thrown to his death and killed. And just last week, a San Diego teenager, bright, beautiful and loving, goes for a run in the park after school and is savagely murdered.

Right here, close to home, there are earthquakes happening all the time -- the kind that shatter lives rather than buildings. Seismic events transform existences that felt ordinary, safe, predictable. Suddenly, when we least expect it, we feel the ground shift and we’re knocked off balance. All at once our world is out of kilter; everything looks different. Our job is gone; our income is slashed; our savings evaporate. There’s an accident and someone gets hurt. Unexpectedly our life plan goes awry. Someone we cared for leaves us; someone we trusted turns out to be a liar. Someone we love and need gets a bad diagnosis, or maybe it’s us.

This year at Beth Am we’ve been offering a four-session series focusing on the dialogue between Buddhism and Judaism and what we might learn from one another. Our Buddhist teachers have shared the philosophy embedded in the Four Noble Truths, the first of which is that life entails suffering. Suffering arises from desire – “craving and clinging” to that which cannot endure. When we attach ourselves to transient things, loss is inevitable and we experience sorrow.

Remembering that all is impermanent and everything comes to an end, we can teach ourselves not to cling and not to grieve when health or wealth or loved ones pass out of our lives. That is one path to ease the suffering that is the fate of human beings – what Shakespeare called “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

It bears some resemblance to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism – another approach to easing human suffering. Rather than yearning for what we can’t have, the Stoics counseled acceptance of the world as it is – full of pain, replete with uncertainty and random suffering – best met with a mood of quiet, dignified resignation. "Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire,” wrote the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.

Seneca, in first-century Rome , taught that the solution is to stop beating your head against a wall and wanting what you can’t have.  “Winter brings on cold weather; and we must shiver,” he wrote. “Summer returns, with its heat, and we must sweat….In certain places we may meet with wild beasts, or with men who are more destructive than any beasts…And we cannot change this order of things…it is to this law [of Nature] that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey…That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure” [quoted in Alain Boton, The Consolations of Philosophy, p.111].

One response to a world in which earthquakes wreak havoc with human life is to expect the worst, to rid yourself of the delusion that life should be fair; to detach yourself, as much as possible, from perishable things so that you can endure their loss with equanimity.

Jewish tradition offers another response to the terrible vulnerability inherent in the human condition. Essentially ours is a teaching of desire. Jewish tradition trains the soul not to acquiesce in what is, but to yearn for what ought to be, and to work unceasingly to turn vision into reality. Born into an imperfect universe, our task is not to accept its imperfections, but to dedicate our energies to healing what is broken.

The world is a shaky place; the future is shrouded in mystery; and everything precious leaves us sooner or later. But for Jews, one thing stands firm and solid and definite. It is, as Leo Baeck taught, “the commandment, the task, which alone is always clear and always binding.”

This Jewish path, this path of total engagement and immersion in the mess and muck of human life, does indeed leave us open to suffering. It teaches us to attach ourselves deeply to others, to love with them all our heart and feel joy in all forms of intimacy, knowing that to lose our beloved will someday cause us wrenching pain. That is a price we accept for the privilege of knowing great love. We believe what Dylan Thomas wrote: “Though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion.”

What can our Jewish tradition offer to those who know the upheaval of earthquake, the shattering of what seemed so solid and steady, the sudden and terrible sense of life’s uncertainty?

Here our best answers come from the Psalms, which are not works of philosophy but cries from the human heart. Written not by God but by people like ourselves, they express the most passionate and personal human responses to the realities of life: sorrow, anger, confusion; but also celebration, joy and peace. Psalm 42, for instance, speaks in the voice of a person dazed by tragedy, who feels as if he is quite literally drowning in grief, overwhelmed by anguish. “All Your waves and billows have washed over me,” the psalmist says to God [vs.6].

Somehow, though, the poets whose voices we hear in the Psalms find their way through pain to a measure of tranquility. They do it not by denying their real anguish, nor by detaching themselves from the world; but by attaching themselves to something greater than themselves. In the language of the Psalms themselves, they find their anchor in God. “God is our haven and our strength,” says Psalm 46; “a very present help in times of trouble. So we will not fear even if the earth should shake or the mountains topple into the heart of the sea” [vs.2-3]. Notice: the psalmist does not say that by attaching himself to God he will avoid the earthquake – only that he will not feel so afraid and adrift.

The person who lives amidst ceaseless change, who experiences himself as fragile and vulnerable to great forces outside himself, turns again and again in the Psalms to the reality of something beyond his own small consciousness; something that does not change; something that stands firm in the midst of chaos; something that does not die.

Words crafted more than 2000 years ago still speak to us today, because they come from the depths of a human experience that is not foreign to us. Despite our mastery of technology, we are still such frail creatures, battered by forces we cannot control, try as we might; still subject to the depredations of time, the ravages of disease, the winding down of the body, the implacability of death; still battered by waves and shaken by the earth.

And so we continue to search for something solid and strong, something true and enduring, to which we can anchor ourselves during the time we are here, and which will give our lives meaning when we are gone. We do it by believing in the reality of great ideals and commanding moral imperatives. We do it by connecting ourselves powerfully to family and community, opening our hearts to love, responding to needs beyond our own. We do it by participating in the life of the Jewish people, linking ourselves to those who came before and those who will go on after we are gone. We dedicate ourselves to compelling work that transcends our own small concerns.

In all these ways, we strive for a life of significance and purpose. In all these ways we reach beyond the self – which is another way of saying that we ground ourselves in God, the Oneness that transcends our separate individual selves.

“Only by linking our own destiny to something transcendent,” writes Rabbi Bradley Artson, “[only] by joining our future to an eternal living force, by molding our deeds into a song of praise and gratitude, can human beings escape the despair of our own mortality and fallibility.”

Tonight, as always, the earth is shifting under our feet. Change is the very essence of human life, and we live under the governance of time. Yet we Jews hold fast, as we always have, to the truths that time cannot destroy. As this week passes away, amidst scenes of disaster and pain, once again we lift up the cup of sanctity and joy, and offer our ancient song of gratitude and praise. Still we affirm, despite everything, that life is a blessed gift of God, ours to fill with beauty and goodness in every way we can while it is ours. To that great task, we pledge our energy and strength.