Imperfect, Impermanent and Interdependent

Yom Kippur 5777/12 October 2016

There is a story of a Zen master who taught his students, “When you are eating breakfast, eat breakfast. And when you are reading the newspaper, read the newspaper.” One morning, the students go to the master’s house for a class. They are horrified to find their teacher eating breakfast and reading the newspaper – at the same time. “But, Master,” they say, “You told us that when we are eating breakfast, we should eat breakfast. And when we are reading the newspaper, we should read the newspaper.” Without hesitation, the teacher responds to them, “When you are eating breakfast and reading the newspaper, eat breakfast and read the newspaper!”^[1]

It can be hard to be present with what we are doing or experiencing, to be fully in the moment in our day-to-day lives. Twelve years ago, I wanted to learn how to be more present in my life, and so, as an Orthodox rabbinical student I participated in a meditation retreat for the first time. For seven chilly December days I sat with my fellow retreatants at the Elat Chayyim Jewish Retreat Center immersed in silence.

When I first arrived I was full of anticipation, and not a little dread. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I had an idea that something big was going to happen; This would be a week of important breakthroughs and personal transformation, I was sure of it. It didn’t quite turn out that way. Day by day, I noticed how refraining from speaking, unplugging from technology and hours on the meditation cushion made me more sensitive to the thoughts, emotions and sensations in my mind and my body. But, the more I tried to settle into to the experience, the more restless I became. I grew increasingly frustrated that my big transformation was not coming, and on the fourth day of the retreat I went to speak with one of the teachers to ask his advice. He just looked at me and laughed, a pure, joyful laugh. It was contagious, and soon I was laughing with him. He drew my attention to how my lofty expectations were coloring my experience. His advice to me was to remember the mantra, “ah yes, this too”- to  be fully present in the moment, noticing whatever came up without judging and letting it pass through my mind- the stiffness from sitting in meditation or frustration and self-judgment from not having the retreat experience I expected. It was a small but profound shift in focus that allowed me to let go and settle into the experience. There was no big transformation for me that week, but I left with four words to accompany me, “Ah yes, this, too.” And in retrospect, that week changed the course of my spiritual journey in profound ways.

When Yom Kippur arrives each year, I have often thought that this holiest of days is a lot like going on a silent meditation retreat.  We’ve arrived, and there’s nowhere else to be, nothing else to do but be here in this immersive experience for the rest of the day. Most of us will likely not experience profound shifts between now andNeilah, but we might take some subtle and fundamental steps today that can shape our paths for the year to come.

As on a meditation retreat, on Yom Kippur the restrictions of the day allow us to sensitize ourselves to the subtleties of our bodies and their needs- because of the marathon of sitting, standing and swaying, the rigors of fasting, or because we are not fasting due to health considerations. Today, we sit together in community and encounter our own vulnerability and mortality. Today, we are challenged to accept our imperfection and our impermanence as a fact of our humanity, and to learn from them.

At the outset of this Yom Kippur we lead with the fact of our imperfection. The opening act of the day, Kol Nidrei, is a public acknowledgement that we have fallen short of our expectations for ourselves, that we are imperfect and as imperfect beings we will inevitably fall short again. Kol Nidrei is written as a declaration before a beit din, a court of judges. It is preceded by a brief formula chanted by the prayer leader, in the role of the court’s representative: This court gives us permission to pray with the עֲבַרְיָנִין (avaryanim). That word, avaryanim, is typically translated as transgressors. The simple meaning of the line is that the prayer leader is declaring, before God and the congregation, that all are welcome to join this congregation in prayer, regardless of past sins, and giving us permission to pray alongside them. But there is no “us” and “them;” we have all transgressed.  As Rabbi Alan Lew points out, this rabbinical court is “…giving us permission to pray with ourselves. We are the Avaryronim. We are all imperfect. We are all sinners.”

Rabbi Lew offers another reading of that statement of permission that gets at the heart of the work of Yom Kippur. The word avaryanim comes from the word avar orla’avor, which mean to pass. This is a declaration of our impermanence. “Not only are we all imperfect.” Rabbi Lew writes, “we are all impermanent. … We are the ones who are just passing through, every one of us.”^[2] 

It’s liberating to step into the Day of Atonement with a public acknowledgement that we are inherently imperfect and that none of us in this room is without misdeeds. The acknowledgement of our impermanence can also be deeply liberating, and equally terrifying. Quite reasonably, we often avoid conversation about our impermanence out of fear.

At some point over Yom Kippur we will each experience suffering- be it hunger and fatigue from fasting, headaches from caffeine withdrawal, pangs of regret and remorse, or physical discomfort from sitting in the pews for so long. We will suffer today. That is inevitable. But there is meaning to be found in the experience.

Yom Kippur challenges us to explore our relationship with suffering:

Do we try to protect ourselves by denying our own suffering? Do we get so caught up in the experience of that pain that our identity gets bound with it? Or can we be present with the fullness of our experience, including what is painful? How do we relate to the suffering of others? Does the way that we relate to our own suffering help or hinder our ability to hold the painful experiences of others with compassion?

Suffering –– be it from mental or physical illness, injury, loss, the death of a loved one or relationship difficulties —  can be painful and scary. It forces us to face ourlimitations and our mortality, which itself can be so deeply painful. Spiritual instructor Ram Das writes that:

Unlike the angels, we human beings move through the world in our bodies. We understand ourselves and the world through the experience of our bodies, and we rely for that understanding on an orderly functioning of our bodies. Illness in particular can disrupt how we experience our bodies. As medical anthropologist Gay Becker notes: “Disorder that pervades the body plunges people into chaos and may signify for them the approach of death. … Prior to a disruption, people move through their everyday routines without attention to their bodies as bodies.” When the body is disrupted, it connection to oneself and the world is ruptured.^[4]

Yom Kippur offers us a small taste of that disruption. On the one hand, we try to imitate the angels, ridding ourselves for a day of the focus on bodily needs. And at the same moment, this day inevitably calls our attention back to our bodies and offers an opportunity to examine how we cope with illness and bodily disruption in ourselves, our families and in community. In the words of psychologist Mark Epstein, “the traumas of everyday life… if they do not destroy us, become bearable, even illuminating, when we learn to relate to them differently.”^[5] 

In our own discomfort with illness, we have a tendency to unconsciously send people off to the “land of the sick”, as if by quarantining those who are ill we may avoid the disruption of our own safe and happy lives. As Susan Sontag wrote in her book Illness as Metaphor, “Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.”^[6] The more we try to keep illness at arm’s length, the scarier and more dangerous it seems. And in the end we too suffer isolation and loneliness. “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” Sontag writes. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”^[7] We are implicitly taught that to be surrounded by sickness is necessarily to be unhealthy. But that’s just not the case. To live in community is to be surrounded by sickness, and the community that lives with that awareness is alive, sensitive and strong. 

Over and over, today, we recite the confessional Vidui. Together, we each read a list of misdeeds, from A to Z. In the vidui, we are each taking responsibility for our own actions. The confession of sin is a deeply personal act, and yet we do so together and aloud, and in the plural form- “We are guilty, we have betrayed, etc.” As Rabbi Isaac Luria, the renowned 16th Century mystic, writes, this is because the recitation of the vidui is meant to remind us that all of Israel is one body, and every person in our Jewish community is a member of that body. We share a mutual responsibility, and we are each affected by the actions of the other.^[8] We are עָרֵבים (areivim). We are interdependent.

We are avaryanim and we are areivim. We are incomplete. We are imperfect. And we are interdependent. And we find wholeness only within community.

As Rabbi Alan Lew writes:

I am inspired by our BZBI community. We cry and rejoice together, and we show up for each other in times of need. As Rabbi Friedman and I spoke about on Rosh Hashanah, each of us comes to BZBI “because we know that here, together, we can find something we could not attain on our own.” We discussed the shift toward a more relational culture at BZBI, where “every person’s offerings affect the depth and quality of our relationships, providing us with support and inviting us to respond in times of struggle or celebration.” Today I’d like to explore how we in the BZBI community can better hold and respond to our own pain and that of others- around illness in particular, as well around aging, and caregiving for loved ones.  How can we hold the difficult experiences of our fellow and sister community members in ways that provide emotional and practical support and that foster wholeness and healing for the individuals and the congregation as a whole?

The first step is to know that you need not suffer alone. Let people in the community know when you are sick or in need. Call the clergy or the synagogue office, call a friend and have them get in touch with us. As we’ve been exploring, in our culture, it can be very difficult to acknowledge our vulnerability, to express a need and to ask for help. And yet, in many synagogues and communities of faith, it is the norm to let someone from the community know when there is an illness in the family, a scheduled surgery or unexpected hospitalization. There is an expectation that the clergy and congregation will show up to support them in times of need, and they cannot do so if they don’t know that there is a need.

There’s always a question of what to share and when, and of course this is for each of us to determine based on our own needs and stories. There are times, when we want to maintain our privacy and are ambivalent about talking even to clergy behind closed doors. And there are times when an illness is minor and fleeting and you have no needs to speak of. Like so many communities, though, we at BZBI tend to err on the side of not letting people know.

When you are ill, if you feel comfortable doing so, share what you’re going through with others, including the diagnosis if there is one. Whether it’s bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, postpartum depression, or a torn ACL, the more we are able to comfortably talk about what we are going through the more we break down taboos and stigma around it, and it invites others to talk with you. Naming the diagnosis allows others in the community to share ideas, strategies or emotional or material support from their own experience with similar struggles, personally or in people close to them.

Talking about our suffering with others can be a powerful source of healing. It can help us to accept that our suffering is not something to be ashamed of, not a sign of weakness, and not a reflection of inner failing. It is simply a fact of life. Healing comes when we begin to relate to our suffering differently.

This has been a lesson I have been working on learning for many years. When I was a teenager, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, a chronic illness that causes inflammation in the digestive tract. I have experienced long periods of remission and periods of flare-ups. I have often been afraid to tell people or talk about it publicly. And yet, when I have named it I have found support and I have been able to offer support to others. My experience of Crohn’s Disease has come with suffering, and it has helped me to empathize with others who are coping with chronic illness, to be sensitive to all that we carry that may not be visible to those around us. As my teacher, Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, says, “We are always comparing our insides to other people’s outsides.”

We find healing when we recognize that we are all imperfect, we are all impermanent, and we are interdependent. We are avaryanim and we are areivim.

We are not angels. Today we recognize our human mortality and the limits of bodies. And yet, when we do mitzvot we are loftier even than the angels. Bikkur Ḥolim — visiting those who are ill — is a great mitzvah, so great, the rabbis teach, that even God was careful to perform it, and when we do this great mitzvah we are imitating God.^[10] This year we are moving in a new direction in how we relate to members of our community who are sick. In addition to the ongoing pastoral work of our clergy, we are developing a self-sustaining, congregant-led initiative to involve trained volunteers in providing care for adults in the community who are isolated, dealing with chronic illness or long-term recovery, or have diminished mobility with age.

BZBI is honored to have been selected by the Center for Pastoral Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary for their Building Sustainable Bikkur Ḥolim Fellowship, and we are grateful for their training and support. You will hear more about this initiative in the coming months, and if you’d like to get involved, please speak with me or Cantor Grainer.

You do not need to be part of an official initiative to take on this mitzvah of being present with others in illness and suffering. All you need is to show authentic, personal interest and open a conversation.

One of my dear pastoral care teachers at JTS,  Rabbi Simkhah Weintraub,^[11] developed a list of conversation-started to use with people who are ill or suffering or otherwise suffering. These “Seven Ways of Asking” are open-ended questions meant to elicit full, expressive responses. I have found these and similar questions to be effective for me, in my work in hospital chaplaincy and pastoral care in our congregation, and in my personal relationships. I have also found these types of questions to be meaningful when others have asked them of me.

Here are Reb Simkha’s Seven Ways of Asking:

You, too have, and will find, your own sensitive ways of asking that open authentic conversation.

As we’ve said, suffering is inevitable; sooner or later as Sontag write, each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens [of the kingdom of the sick].” We do not get to choose whether or when we get sick, or grow older, or any of the other “traumas of everyday life,” but we can choose how we relate to our suffering, and how we relate to the suffering of those around us.

Yom Kippur gives us an opportunity to sit with our suffering, in the presence of community, and to say, “Ah, yes. This too.” To let it be a source of wisdom and growth for us. To connect us to our vitality. To remind us that how much we need each other to make it through this life.

Yom Kippur teaches us that we are the avaryanim. We are all imperfect and impermanent. We all make mistakes and we are all just passing through. And we are all areivim. We are interdependent. We are interconnected. We need each other.

May this year of 5777 be a year of self-acceptance, a year of vitality for our community, deepened relationships and mutual support, and year of health and wholeness and growth.

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Tags: Bikkur Holim, illness, impermanence, interdependence, suffering, Yom Kippur