This Too Shall Pass – Vayera 2013
Sammy Cohen-Eckstein was due to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah on November 16th. But last week, when he ran out into the street to retrieve a soccer ball in front of his apartment building on Prospect Park West, he was suddenly hit by a van and died. My dear colleague and friend Rabbi Ellen Lippman, is Sammy’s rabbi, at Kolot Chayeinu in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the synagogue that Jim and I belonged to when we lived there. I never knew Sammy, but the news of this sudden tragic death touched me deeply. It’s been hard to stop thinking about it.
As rabbis and as Jews who decide to cling to a particular community, we open ourselves up to the possibility of these kinds of losses. This could happen to me. It could happen to any of us. We rabbis fall in love with our congregations – we develop love for our congregants as individuals, and for our communities as a collective.
These past few weeks here at CBSRZ have been hard. Over many weeks I stood at the bedside of a dying man – Howard Kaplan – and then buried him surrounded by a loving circle of family and friends. And while this was happening, we have had and continue to have many other congregants in the hospital and in treatment for serious conditions. Thankfully, many seem to be on the mend, but we have the longest Mi Shebeirach list we’ve ever had during my time here.
On top of this we recently had to say goodbye to some people I’ve grown very fond of. Bea and Lew Case, long time members of CBSRZ who moved up to Newton, MA to live in an assisted living facility close to one of their sons. And we recently celebrated the Bat Mitzvah of their Acadia Barrengos, whose family recently relocated to Vermont. All of these experiences have reminded me on a daily basis of how much I love this congregation and how attached I am to the individual members of this community, and this is such a gift. At the same time, it is a terribly scary thing – to catch these daily, sometimes even hourly glimpses of the possibility of loss.
The word “love” appears for the first time in the Torah in this week’s Parasha, when God instructs Abraham to take his son, his only one, the one whom he loves…and offer him up as a burnt offering on the top of a mountain that God will show him.
We know this terrible story. Our own Michael Roth offered multiple commentaries on it on the 2nd Day of Rosh Hashana this year. But none provided comfort or peace. Except, at the end of Michael’s confrontational, stark presentation, he offered this. That perhaps this story is really meant to illustrate how fragile life is. It is really meant to illustrate what it means to allow yourself to have a child, or to become attached to another human being. God tells Abraham, and God tells us – to dare to live and to love means to make yourself vulnerable to having it all snatched away.
And so, what do we do? We learn from Abraham that we can live in the present and give thanks. When we’re faced with our own fears, our own vulnerability or uncertainty, we can’t live in the past, trying to bring back or relive what was. God uproots Abraham from his past by calling him in last week’s parasha – to leave his father’s house and his homeland and to go to the land that God will show him.
And this week, Abraham reminds us how fragile the future is as well. God allows Abraham to get to the brink of sacrificing his own son – his future – and the future of our entire people. We can plan for the future – we must. And we should have hope for the future. But Abraham teaches that we shouldn’t become too attached to a particular image of how the future will be.
Abraham’s knife is stopped from killing his son at the last minute by an angel. Abraham then immediately lifts his eyes, refocuses, notices a ram caught in the bushes, and offers the ram as a sacrifice in place of his son. When we catch glimpses of the abyss of loss, we too can refocus, offer up a ram to God and burn it, thanking God for the gifts of life and love that we have right now. We can live in the present and give thanks.
I have another colleague, Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, in Chicago, whose son Sammy just came through a bone marrow transplant to heal him from childhood leukemia. Phyllis posts on a blog almost every day and she is inspiring in how willing she is to share her vulnerability with all of us. She shares her frightened, angry rants when things aren’t going well, she shares her prayers of gratitude when the light of hope is visible.
Above all, she shares her excruciating effort to stay in the present – to not allow herself to get too attached to a possible future outcome of a particular drug or treatment –– to not allow herself to get anxious or give up when they hit a roadblock – to help her son find peace with the rollercoaster of one day finally getting to go home after 90 days in the hospital, to the very next day spiking a fever and having to go back to the hospital – to allow herself to shed tears of hope, as Sammy writes out his birthday wish list and she catches a glimpse of more birthdays to celebrate after this one. To love someone is to ride the rollercoaster with them, day after day.
I want to close with a well-known folktale that seems to have migrated from the realm of Persian Sufis to Jewish lore about King Solomon.
The story goes that King Solomon had a trusted minister named Benaiah ben Yehoyada. But the King thought Benaiah was getting too big for his britches and needed to be humbled. So, one day, Solomon said to him, “Benaiah, there is a certain ring that I want you to bring to me. I wish to wear it for the Sukkot festival, which gives you six months to find it.”
“If it exists anywhere on earth, your majesty,” replied Benaiah, “I will find it and bring it to you, but what makes the ring so special?”
“It has special powers,” answered the king. “If a happy man looks at it, he becomes sad, and if a sad man looks at it, he becomes happy.” Solomon knew that no such ring existed in the world, but he wished to give his minister some added humility.
Spring passed and then summer, and still Benaiah had no idea where he could find the ring. On the day before Sukkot, he decided to take a walk in one of the poorest quarters of Jerusalem. He passed by a merchant who had begun to set out the day’s wares on a shabby carpet. “Have you by any chance heard of a special ring that makes the happy wearer forget his joy and the broken-hearted wearer forget his sorrows?” asked Benaiah.
He watched the elderly man take a plain gold ring from his carpet and engrave something on it. When Benaiah read the words on the ring, his face broke out in a wide smile.
That night the entire city welcomed in the holiday of Sukkot with great festivity. “Well, my friend,” said King Solomon, “have you found what I sent you after?” All the ministers laughed and Solomon himself smiled.
To everyone’s surprise, Benaiah held up a small gold ring and declared, “Here it is, your majesty!” As soon as Solomon read the inscription, the smile vanished from his face. The jeweler had written three Hebrew words on the gold band: “Gam zeh ya’avor – This too shall pass.”
How very true. In a moment of great difficulty, we can remember “This too shall pass,” and feel comforted. Yet, in our greatest moments of joy, we also know in a deep place, that “this too shall pass.”
All is fleeting, and we are humbled. But this should only propel us to seek more connection, to give more thanks, to give and receive more love.
