Rosh Hashanah morning 5775/2014 Gazing Beyond the Abyss

There is Hagar: we see her sitting in the wilderness, weeping. Her mistress Sarah has banished her, fearing that Ishmael would usurp Sarah’s son Isaac’s inheritance. Abraham – Hagar’s master – Ishmael’s father – sent them away, with only a skin of water and some bread. And now the water is gone, and Hagar can’t bear to watch her child die of thirst. She lifts up her voice and weeps. And God opens her eyes. She looks up and sees a well of water. It was there all along.

There is Abraham: we see him up on the mountain. His arm is raised, the knife in his hand. Isaac, his son, is bound on the altar beneath him. He is about to sacrifice his own son. But an angel calls out to him, stopping him at the last possible moment. Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in the thicket. It was there all along.

Vayera – “and it was seen.” This is the name of the Torah portion assigned to this day of Rosh Hashana.

“And it was seen.”

What did we see this year – in our own hearts, and out there in the world?
How might we have we averted our gaze, and from whom?
How might we have looked directly at reality, eyes unobstructed?
In what ways have we been blind to what was there all along, waiting to be seen?

The Torah portion assigned for this day is itself very hard to look at. We have Abraham and Sarah banishing one of Abraham’s sons, Ishmael. And then we have Abraham brought to the verge of killing his other son, Isaac. These are not fun stories – they are violent and sad, and in the case of Abraham’s almost sacrifice of his son, very hard to understand. Every year I try to find a way to not have to talk about this Torah portion – it is so difficult and so dark – and every year, it reappears in front of my eyes. I can’t seem to make it go away.

But perhaps this is precisely the kind of story we should be wrestling with today, this day when we are supposed to take a magnifying glass to our own lives and the world and see what is really there. Because we know that this is really hard. Hard not to look away, especially when what’s there is sad or painful or broken.

As many of you know, over the past several years I have been studying and practicing mindfulness meditation in a Jewish context. Part of mindfulness meditation is to regularly sit still and quiet and watch the mind, noting what is there –whether pleasant or unpleasant. One of the most challenging aspects of this practice is to stay with the unpleasant when it arises. Whether it is doubt or anxiety, anger or sadness, the mind will typically try to flee the unpleasant. Instead of staying with that unpleasant feeling, the mind will do things like make plans to fix the unpleasantness, or start blaming myself or blame someone else, or find something more pleasant to think about, or find some reason to stop sitting – maybe go get something to eat or get something accomplished! I have found though, that when I can notice the unpleasant and then just allow myself to sit and feel that feeling, it eventually fades away – it is only a temporary visitor.

Over the summer as the cycle of violence escalated in Israel and Gaza, I had many opportunities to watch how my mind handles unpleasant thoughts and feelings. For the first couple weeks of the hostilities, I found myself obsessively scrolling through Facebook, reading article after article, analysis after analysis, hour after hour. After too many late nights of this, I found myself emotionally and physically fatigued. This was not a wholesome way of dealing with the unpleasant!

It’s interesting, because I was not avoiding knowing about what was happening. But by watching Facebook, I was actually avoiding watching my OWN experience of what was happening – the fact that I was feeling scared, angry, sad and anxious.

And I was not alone. During the period when the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers’ bodies had not yet been found, a congregant admitted that she had been checking Facebook and newsfeeds every time she had a spare moment during her work day, and then into the night. What helped her to stop this cycle was a memorial service that we held at the synagogue. She shared that having a delineated time and space set aside to pray, reflect and feel helped her make a choice. Even though she couldn’t actively do anything to solve the situation or make it go away, she also didn’t have to obsess about it anymore.

I too found that after being still and looking right at my thoughts and feelings about the situation, whether in preparing and delivering sermons, leading that memorial service, or facilitating a dialogue about the situation, I felt free of my Facebook obsession. After sitting with and looking at the heaviness and the confusion, after talking about it, singing and praying about it, allowing my heart to break and tears to flow, I was no longer overwhelmed, and the impulse to distract myself melted away.
Many of us try, whether intentionally or unconsciously, to avoid sitting with our own brokenness. We cover over the pain or confusion with consumption and busyness. Or we look away from the brokenness to our Facebook feeds and other forms of distraction.

Our sacred calendar is therefore so very wise. It gives us this Season of Awe to practice quieting down, reflecting, and sitting with whatever arises when we look back at this year. We are invited to do teshuvah – to turn, with compassion, towards the un-whole. And for a delineated time, we get to know the unpleasant pieces of our lives – whether it is regret, jealousy, fear or pain, loneliness or grief.

Perhaps the stories from Torah and the music and the prayer can even allow our hearts to break open. Over the years, folks have shared with me, usually sheepishly, that they often find themselves crying in synagogue services, and they don’t know why. There are so few times and spaces in our lives when we feel safe letting our hearts break. This can be one of those places.

In our Torah portion, when Hagar runs out of water in the desert, she can’t bear to look at her child as he suffers – so she casts him a distance away, under a bush. But then she lifts up her voice and begins to weep – she allows herself to be with her pain. This is the moment when transformation occurs – God immediately enters the scene and opens her eyes. Now that she is seeing clearly, she realizes she has a choice – she can retrieve her child, drink from the well, and find a way forward.

“Vayera” – and it was seen.

When the broken pieces of our minds and hearts lie out in the open we are no longer overwhelmed. We can see clearly and are free to examine the pieces. Having done so, we know our thoughts and feelings for what they are – temporary visitors. Change – choice – teshuva, turning– is now possible.

Another scene, earlier in our Parasha, that always breaks my heart, is when Abraham sends Hagar and their young son Ishmael off into the wilderness. Sarah orders her husband Abraham to banish these outsiders, to protect Isaac’s inheritance. And God backs her up. Separation is necessary for the future of both Isaac and Ishmael’s peoples. Abraham knows this, and God assures him that Ishmael, like Isaac, will be the father of a great nation.
The Torah tells us that, “the matter distressed Abraham greatly.”[1]

Nevertheless, Abraham gets up early the next morning, takes some bread and a skin of water, and gives them to Hagar. The Torah tells us, “He placed them over her shoulder, together with the child, and sent her away.”[2]

Abraham knows what he has to do. At the same time, he knows that he is causing great suffering, and this distresses him. It is so hard to watch.

“Vayera,” “and it is seen.”

It is striking that the Torah would tell the story in this way. The text clearly intends to evoke empathy within us as we watch Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away. Remarkable – that we read this story, about the suffering of non-Jews precisely on one of the most important days of the Jewish year. Hagar is in fact from Egypt, the land of our people’s mythic enemy. Precisely now, as we look within ourselves and reflect on our actions and experiences in the past year, our tradition asks us to gaze closely at the suffering of the enemy.

The past summer I felt this tension that Abraham is feeling – the pull between knowing what you have to do to protect yourself and knowing that it will cause others to suffer.

As we learned of the murder of the 3 kidnapped Israeli young men and then watched Hamas shoot rockets as far as Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, it was clear to me that Israel had to defend itself and that this could not continue. The towns in southern Israel such as Sderot and Ashkelon had been living under fire for years already, and now a huge segment of the population was running for cover and spending way too much time in bomb shelters. This time it really hit home: two of my cousins were wounded in the first week of the ground invasion and ended up in a hospital in Beersheva. The ophthalmologists are fighting to save Ishay’s eye, and
Yoav is undergoing physiotherapy for a leg injury and was told that it will take a year to get back to good health. Israel clearly had to do something, and I did not feel the need to apologize for Israel’s response.

At the same time, I felt like I was staring into the abyss.

And Abraham reached out for the knife to slay his son.

The death and destruction that the Israeli airstrikes caused in Gaza was horrifying to watch. It was painful to look directly at the fact that they were killing hundreds of innocent civilians, so many of them children. We cannot avert our gaze from the reality of that suffering.

When I look back at the Gaza war this summer, I understand that this is what it means for the Jewish people and the state of Israel to have political and military power. We can finally defend ourselves. But when we spill innocent blood in our own self-defense, our hearts cry out. And the world, and perhaps we too, hold ourselves to an impossible standard. Like Isaac, we are bound so tightly. We are in an impossible position – trying to protect ourselves and act morally when the enemy uses children as human shields.

And yet, at the last possible moment, God stays Abraham’s hand. Abraham lifts up his eyes, and there is a ram caught in the thicket. At that last possible moment, Hagar lifts up her eyes, and there is a well of water. Perhaps Hagar and Abraham are teaching us something here – that there is another way. Both of them are caught up in what they think is the only way – they are only seeing one way forward – lifting the knife, casting the child away.

My mindfulness teacher, Rabbi Sheila Peltz-Weinberg, was in Israel this summer during the rockets and the sirens and the airstrikes. When she returned, she reflected with me, that the most confused state is the state of war. War is the ultimate state of not seeing clearly.

Perhaps Hagar and Abraham are teaching us that if we would lift our eyes and see clearly, we would see that we do not have to give over our children or other people’s children to a cycle of violence and retribution. There is a way back. There is a choice. We have done it before. We can see our enemy, talk to our enemy, and yes – someday – perhaps at the last possible moment – make peace with our enemy.

Our rabbis teach us that the well and the ram were both created at the beginning of time, on the eve of the seventh day of creation – at the last possible moment of creation. That moment also happens to be the eve of the very first Rosh Hashanah.

Sometimes, we have to bring ourselves to the very edge of the abyss, into the depths of confusion, of striking out and striking back and casting away before we can see clearly. But the answer has been there all along. All we have to do is lift our eyes out of the abyss, and it can be seen. And then we can grab the ram by the horns, take a long drink of water from the well, stop sacrificing our children, and bring what we all need – some wholeness, some peace.
[1] Genesis 21:11
[2] Ibid. 21:14