Congregation Netivot Shalom

Yom Kippur morning

September 25, 2004 / 10 Tishrei 5765
Linda Blachman

Seeing Through Clouds

I began the process of writing this sermon long before I knew it would become one. Almost a year ago I became fascinated with the clouds floating through the Torah.  One image in particular captured me:  in Numbers, about a year after the Exodus.  The tabernacle is reared up, and we are told of the pillar of cloud, a sign of God, that covers it by day: Whenever the cloud rose from over the Tent, then the children of Israel journeyed; and in the place where the cloud abode, there the children of Israel encamped . . . whether two days, a month, or a year.

Imagine this: a people barely out of slavery, lost in the wilderness, but moving and resting as one, in response to what often seems the capricious, unpredictable movements of a cloud. Two things struck me: the innocence and faith of the people who at least in that moment held a kind of basic trust towards God and each other.  And second, the idea of God as a cloud, leading the Israelites in circles towards something promised but always elusive, a journey much like our own.

I continued to chase clouds through Torah and teachings.  Onto Moses' second ascent up Mt. Sinai into the heavy cloud, God's dwelling place, at the beginning of Elul, and his descent on Yom Kippur with the gifts we lean towards all day: forgiveness, a chance for renewed life, and a second set of tablets as a guide for living.  Here the cloud seems to offer an invitation to revelation and spiritual development. Or is it only for Moses?

For like Aaron in Leviticus 16, we are repeatedly warned not to try to penetrate the mystery on pain of death for God appears in the cloud over the cover.

We've gone from God as shepherd and guide, to God as keeper of mysteries and gifts, to God as paradox, revealed and concealed by a cloud.  Throughout Torah, we are teased by the invitation, put off by the warning.  And this persistent idea of surrender to the mystery, and faith no matter what happens.

I wanted a verse that felt closer to our contemporary experience of a post-Holocaust wilderness. Our extended community is seriously fractured, threatened from within and without. Most of us are even further removed from Moses' ascent towards revelation than were our ancestors at the foot of Mt. Sinai. How, once separated, do we come home safely to ourselves, our community, and God when all the signs are obscured in fog?

I found Numbers 12, the rebellion of Miriam and Aaron against Moses, and the punishment of Miriam by God who comes down in a cloud.

Most of us know Miriam as the older sister of Moses and Aaron and the prophetess who leads the women in song and dance out of the Red Sea.  Through fragments in Torah, folk tales and rabbinical sources, we learn of Miriam's other gifts as well:  a prominent family, a leadership role, moral authority, midwifery, a maternal instinct, and a mouth.  Miriam has the courage to stand up to powerful men, even Pharoah, and to use her voice for the good of family and community. And Miriam is associated with the miraculous portable well of living waters that accompanies the Israelites throughout the wilderness.

Initially a picture of wholeness and integrity, after Exodus 15: 19-21 Miriam disappears until Numbers 12.  She opens her mouth again, but now the tone and outcome are different.

The parsha:  Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married.  They then say, "Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has He not spoken through us as well?"  God hears, and calls Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, "Come out, you three, to the Tent of Meeting." God comes down in a pillar of cloud and calls, "Aaron and Miriam!" They step forward, and God thunders, "If there be a prophet among you, I make Myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream. Not so with My servant Moses; he is trusted throughout My household. With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles; he beholds the likeness of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against My servant Moses!" 

The cloud withdraws from the tent, and there is Miriam, leprous, white as snow. Aaron pleads with Moses, "Please don’t punish us for the sin of our folly. Let her not be as one dead, who emerges from his mother's womb with half his flesh eaten away."  Moses cries out, "O God, pray heal her!" God reduces the life sentence to seven day of leprosy and banishment from the camp, citing that Miriam must bear her shame like a daughter whose father spat on her.  

Miriam says nothing. We don't know what happens during her exile, what happens on her return.  All we are told is that the people wait for her.

This story raised the kind of questions we ask whenever a terrible thing happens. Like: Why me? Why Miriam? Feminist questions too: why not Aaron, or at least both?  What did Miriam do that was so terrible? Why was God's fury so extreme?

There are many possible explanations for Miriam’s punishment, but I want to point out just a few things.  Most agree that the Cushite woman is a red herring, because God only responds in anger after Miriam and Aaron's second complaint:  "Why doesn’t God speak through us, why only Moses?”  And whatever Miriam’s sin -- envy, pride, ego, evil speech or encroaching upon the Source Itself -- the cloud has gone from protector, guide, and inspiration to harsh judge.  Having grown up in an ultra-Orthodox home where God's punitive face reigned supreme, God's reaction rankled me. As did the idea of illness as punishment. So, I was disturbed by this story, and far from grasping the deeper meaning of Miriam's misdeed. But her situation seemed accessible and human, and, for a number of reasons, richly suggestive about teshuvah.

For one thing, losing the right path can start in a flash. Something happens that shows us how fragile life is, how quickly everything can change.  Miriam's plight exemplifies these reversals of fortune and ironies:  Miriam the midwife, deliverer of new life, is delivered herself to death's door, dry and white like an old woman or aborted fetus. Miriam the mother figure is spat upon like a shamed child. Miriam the singer and courageous spokeswoman is stunned silent. And Miriam the healer is no longer whole, or home.

We can lose the path in other ways too, by small acts of commission or omission.  Through an insidious process of neglect, unconsciousness, or apathy, we can become unrecognizable to ourselves, perhaps not with the white scales of leprosy, but with some form of psychological, moral, or spiritual illness -- ailments of the soul. I wondered if that too might have been true for Miriam.  

Perhaps she lost her way long before God banished her. Perhaps gossip, envy, and ambition were symptoms of a deeper problem, unhappiness with her portion, a well that had already gone dry. Miriam's implicit demand to talk face-to-face with God bespeaks a preexisting separation, a loss of faith not unlike that of other Israelites or many of us.  Out of harmony with herself, Miriam becomes out of alignment with Moses, and finds, quickly, that she is out of order with God. Wishing to be like Moses, with immediate access to the Source, Miriam, in another ironic twist, is removed from both. She wants a direct message from God and gets it, although not what she had hoped for. Many of us can relate to that too.

The point is this:  whatever the reasons behind our exile, Miriam has taken us there.  Her life hangs in the balance, not knowing how she will survive, change, or return, just as on Yom Kippur, our own lives hang in the balance. As Moses prayed for Miriam’s healing, we pray for mercy, to soften the harsh decree. And just as the Israelites waited for Miriam because they needed her, the outcome for our own community depends on the depth and sincerity of every individual’s teshuvah process, not only today but throughout the year. 

So with great curiosity, I followed Miriam deeper into exile.  What happens in those dark, lost places where we suffer alone or witness the suffering of others?  The bigger questions open up:  How did this happen?  What is my role, God's?  What am I here to learn?  How do we face the reality of death and continue to live?   How do we rejoice in the gift of our portion when the punitive face of God overshadows the merciful, or when the sky seems completely empty?  And once illusions are shattered, how do we forgive and renew our faith?

We no longer have a cloud to follow.  We can't climb up the mountain like Moses because we're not Moses and we're not invited. So I wondered something else:  Can these dark cloud experiences or illnesses that initiate the soul's descent be gateways to revelation and spiritual development?  What is the process of teshuvah and of healing really like?  

This seemed like fruitful sermon material for Yom Kippur, but that was before my summer vacation. After coming home from a week in Germany and a week in Italy, I tried to write but it wouldn't come together.  I knew it was because of Germany. Something happened there that I couldn’t push away.  So I asked myself, if this were my last day on earth, would I speak to my community through metaphors of clouds and through Miriam, or heart to heart, soul to soul?  This question is not just academic because in my work I help young mothers living with cancer record life stories and legacies for their children. The mothers live the big questions every day, and as listener and witness, I can’t escape them either. I decided to speak from the Torah of my heart, as difficult as that is. 

With the permission of my partner, Jurgen, let me tell you about my summer vacation.  In July we went to Germany to celebrate Jurgen’s mother's 80th birthday.  Nothing really happened there, only a terrible sickness in my soul. In retrospect, I realize I’d gone rather naively.  I knew it would be hard -- after all I'm Jewish and my parents of blessed memory, while not Holocaust survivors, were Orthodox Jews who fled pogroms for this country. But I didn't know how hard, how I would feel overwhelmed and appalled by my own reactions. Although surrounded by loving people, the moment I hit German soil, I went into exile. I entered a land where I could not understand a language whose guttural sounds made me cringe. Every time I heard sirens, I thought, "Are they coming to get me?" Everywhere I looked, I saw a potential enemy in what I kept telling myself was "a god-forsaken land." I felt afraid, lost, and suspicious bordering on paranoid.  

I was desperate for something familiar, but the synagogue was closed. By appointment only. So, as people sometimes visit cemeteries for solace and connection, I went to Dachau, where at least I could be with my people even if they were only ancestral ghosts. The day was unseasonably cold, as cold as the wilderness of Zin. And then thunderstorms came, a cold rain.  I escaped into the museum where I carefully studied the photographs. I was drawn to one in particular, a life-size photo of children, and to one little girl, her shoulders hunched, walking innocently towards her fate. I was completely undone in this public place. As I stood there trying to control myself, I noticed a group of German youth leaning on some of the photos, doing their homework, chatting and sometimes laughing a little. In a flash, my grief turned to rage. I hated them, every last one.  I hated them for being German, hated them for being young, for still having their innocence, for still having their lives. My heart hardened and I felt ill because I knew these were children, behaving with the awkwardness and anxiety of that age and this situation, just as my own daughter might have done a few years earlier.

I wanted to run as far as I could. The only way I got through the trip was by telling myself, You never have to come back here. You don't have to marry this man and be part of his family. You don't have to make this challenge part of your portion.  

And then it all went underground.  Jurgen and I left Germany, and after some difficult but important talks, had a wonderful week in Italy and came home with renewed hope. But within days my anger started to well up against him, unfairly, inappropriately, and unprovoked. My writing got more confused and weak. All I could do was enter that dark place where there are no answers, no visible guides. All I could do was sit with it. 

I resisted this level of self-examination, as most of us do. We usually don't pay attention until we are stopped by a thundercloud, or by fog that erases all the markers. Indeed, some have said that illness is the American form of meditation, one of the few things that force us to sit still and think about our lives.  As Rabbi Dovid Zeller points out, the word, to sit, la’shev, has the same root as teshuvah.  Real teshuvah has to involve sitting until our hearts -- some would say our husks or defenses -- break open. 

This is what we do on Yom Kippur. One day out of the year, we face ourselves head on without a scapegoat to ease our pain. We assess our portion, bad and good, dark and light, and our responsibility for any wrongdoing. We let all the tattered remnants of our life come home and speak their truth, uncensored. We do that as individuals and we do that as community. This is our offering, to bare our souls -- shed our old skin as Miriam had to -- and bear whatever we find there.  Only through this unflinching self-examination, can our vows, acts of repentance, and redemptive gestures lead to true healing.  

This is what I have tried to do since returning from Germany -- sit with everything that arose for me related to the Jewish children and the German children, Miriam's sin and suffering, and my own  -- to let my heart break open.  

I feel that in speaking about Germany and the Holocaust I'm on dangerous ground.  Perhaps some of you think my reactions were natural, predictable. I'm a Jew, what's so surprising?  Others might think that by being with a German, I deserve what I get. I do believe that as individuals or as a community, there are going to be some things that we cannot forgive, some we should not forgive, that are not mine, nor ours, to forgive. I also believe that the echoes of the sins we carry and the paths back to ourselves and to God are different for each of us.

But on Yom Kippur, as we stand together vulnerable and dry mouthed, trembling and humbled before each other and the Source, I also know that anger inflames anger, hatred begets hatred. I know that there are places in each of us that can breed projections, where we no longer see the other as human but as archetype, stereotype, “It” rather than “Thou.”

As Jews we believe that our souls are pure, but that we also carry the evil inclination:  the potential for hatred and cruelty toward others, writ large or small.  Remembering our own slavery and suffering is supposed to lead to compassion and kindness, but can just as easily plant resentment, bitterness, and apathy. And these seeds can grow into the very attitudes and actions we would deplore when perpetrated against our community or ourselves. Perhaps that is why some version of Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, is repeated 36 times in the Torah.

This dangerous potential became my key to understanding Miriam's situation and my own. For my struggle was rooted in a very specific resistance to identifying with Miriam. Not Miriam of song, dance, leadership, and life, but Miriam whose name in Hebrew, Mir Yam, means bitter water, sorrow.  The sorrow that leads to bitterness and a hardened heart, that causes us to speak and act against others, even our own brothers, and in so doing, poisons the well.

We will never know the source of Miriam's sorrow, what injustices she witnessed or directly experienced. Perhaps disappointments and losses in the wilderness led to dissatisfaction with her portion. Or she suspected that her generation would never enter the Promised Land.  Thirty-eight years after her exile (Numbers 20), Miriam dies in the wilderness of Zin, the well disappears, ("There was no water for the congregation"), and her generation does not enter the Promised Land.  Just as we too only get glimpses; we too may not appreciate our gifts or importance to the greater community while we're alive. 

What about God's response to Miriam?  By shocking her, stripping her flesh off, bringing her to her knees, perhaps God hoped that she would return to herself and her community with new skin, grateful for her life and God's enduring faithfulness, even in the shadows. After all, the cloud could have led the camp onward, but didn’t. Perhaps on Yom Kippur that's God's hope for us too.

You don't need to know the source of my sorrows, or the injustices I have witnessed or experienced.  Suffice it to say that I don't think of myself as a deeply resentful or bitter person. But I couldn't unlock the mystery of Miriam because I didn't want to hold up a mirror to a part of myself that, like her, felt wounded and ill, unforgiving and unforgiven. Unknown to me, the blood of these old wounds had frozen but had never fully healed. 

From that perspective, and while not denying or minimizing real issues related to real historical events, for me Germany was a red herring.  Associations aroused there, especially to the children, cut through my hardened defenses and exposed nerves to the air. And because I couldn't accept what they had to say to and about me, I demonized the German children. It is easier to blame the other than to examine ourselves. I've always understood this intellectually, but in Germany I really knew how the seeds of hatred are planted in fear and sown in denial, how easy it is for victim to become oppressor. 

I never said or did anything offensive to the Germans I met, certainly not to the children in the museum. But the blame and judgment poured out of me, through my skin, eyes, posture. Fear and anger created a casing around my heart, and I raged against the Germans, every last one of them, not only the guilty, but the innocent of today and for all the generations to come.  My German friends, my beloved Jurgen, were no longer human but had become archetypes, potential Nazis or complicit bystanders. 

In Deuteronomy 24:16, we read, the children shall not be punished for the sins of their parents. Long before modern psychology, the Torah understood that even unspoken blame or judgment can do terrible damage to a young person. Children who are criticized and rebuked simply for being grow up feeling guilty and self-hating which is intolerable, and can therefore get turned against equally innocent others. And so it goes on.  So it goes on.

When I was in the Dachau museum, looking at the little Jewish girl in the photo, I could only think about the victims of our enemies.  I cried, "What did she do? What did the Jewish children do?"  But as I went deeper into myself, deeper into teshuvah, I thought of a 17-year old German girl who had a nervous breakdown after she visited Dachau and realized the implications of her own heritage. What did she do?

And I asked myself, are the German children who feel the hatred and suspicion of the world for the sins of their parents and grandparents different from any child who is made to feel guilty for something she didn't do? Is this what I want for my own daughter and the next generation?  If a German, or an Arab or Polish youth tries to befriend her, do I want her to turn away in disgust or be frozen in fear? Where will it end, God, where will it end? When will the healing begin?

Too late, I wish I could find the German children at the museum, or the 17-year old in the mental hospital, all innocent, suffering children and say, “I forgive you; you’re forgiven; you didn’t do anything wrong.”  I’d like to clean their slate for them, just as one German woman I read about in the Dachau bookstore, the one ray of light in that desolate place, goes through Berlin washing swastikas off buildings and buses.

As I was struggling with this sermon, my dearest friend, Judith, whose child died many years ago at the age of four, told me that her daily prayer for years was, “Please, God, save me from a bitter heart.”  That has become my prayer too.  Save me, save my people, save all of us, from a bitter, hardened, cynical heart.

Many years ago, I had a dream in which four young women I knew at the time stood in a square facing each other, each representing a different aspect of myself. One of them was clearly myself as a child, but she was physically disabled, facially distorted, quite ugly.  She looked and acted retarded and I wanted nothing to do with her. I tried to push her away, but she wouldn't leave me alone, kept imploring me for something. Finally, she looked at me with pity and stopped my aggression with her words, We are all one under the umbrella. A sentence that allowed me to begin some healing within myself.  She seemed to understand that Shalom, inner peace, depends on Shalem, being whole: accepting all of ourselves with mercy.

As we say the Viddui, confessing our sins as a community, there is a wonderful recognition that we are all one under the umbrella, God's cloud.  I remember how my mother and the other women used to beat their breasts in a way that seemed like self-flagellation. But now I think of it more as gently knocking at our hearts:  open, open, keep the gates open; soften, soften. Let it in, let all of it in.  Hold it all with compassion and tenderness.

Then let it move, let it flow through this day and our lives, don't let our individual or communal pain and grief divide us, embitter us, keep us frozen in our positions or attitudes. Give our children, and the next generation, a chance to sing a new song.

As Moses cried for Miriam's healing, may we too pray for the healing of all our afflicted souls, and the soul of our rent community and broken world.

As we enter the Yizkor prayers, may we not get stuck in our own grief and suffering, or become blind to the suffering of others. May we not get stuck in any one part of this day, but stay fully present with each moment, moving, moving, like the living waters, towards neilah, the Sh'ma, and the infinite possibilities for beginning again.  

G'mar chatimah tovah.