Yom Kippur, 5767, Hannah Dresner
October 2, 2006 / Yom Kippur 5767
Hannah Dresner
Rachamim/Compassion
At the end of the book of Jonah, after Jonah has delivered his prophesy of doom to the city of Ninveh, he leaves the city and sets up a booth in which to rest and watch what might unfold. For his comfort, God provides a shading qiqayon to grow overhead (possibly a castor oil plant, which grows wild in Judah and is characterized by its large palmate leaves and extremely rapid growth). Jonah loves the plant, but on the morrow, God introduces a worm that destroys the qiqayon, and Jonah faints from the sun beating down on his head. He is so distraught that he raises his voice to the Lord, crying out:
“I would rather die than live!” God says to Jonah: “Are you so deeply angry about the plant?” “Yes,” he says, “so deeply that I want to die.” And God answers: "Why do you feel so entitled? The plant grew wild, without your nurturance, and you only enjoyed it for a day! What has you so attached to this incidental luxury that loosing it makes you want to die? Why do you raise your voice to the Lord over such a minor loss?"
After all, just having come from Nineveh, a city of “more than twelve myriad people,” threatened with being “overturned” in the way that God had “overturned” Sodom and Gomorrah – Jonah must have some sense of what real loss might look like.
At first blush, Jonah’s attachment to the plant and God’s mocking reproach reminds me of a Jewish joke my father used to love to tell:
A young woman and her very young daughter were walking along the seashore. Suddenly, a wave came in and retreated so violently that it pulled the little girl out in its tide. The young mother fell on her knees and prayed to God, imploring God to return her child to her, beseeching and bargaining that she would dedicate her life to God’s service, go to the mikveh, send her daughter to Day School, if only the Lord would bring her daughter back unharmed. And, low and behold, with the next wave that rolled in, there was the child, returned to her mother, laughing in delight at her adventure! The mother scooped the child up with one arm, and with the other, she shook a fist in the air, yelling at the Almighty: “She was wearing a hat!”
How true this joke is to our sense of entitlement, and the imbalance of our trivial attachments! But what if we look beyond Jonah’s seeming sense of entitlement, and concentrate on this breakthrough of emotion in an unfeeling man? What if we perceive Jonah’s despair as an anomaly of connection in the life of a highly detached individual?
Jonah has disconnected himself from caring about the fate of the people of Nineveh, has ignored the fate of his fellow seafaring travelers, has been disgruntled by God’s grace to other human beings, and has fled across the sea and into the depths of deeper and deeper isolation.
What if we concentrate on this detached, unfeeling human being’s surprising experience of joy, derived from the simple pleasure of green in a desert, of rapid growth in a barren landscape, of shade in the heat of day, of the beauty, freshness, and fragrance of a plant growing up over his booth, unexpectedly. Maybe Jonah was inspired by the qiqayon to love life, to love his life, even for one shady green day. Imagine how contrary such an experience might be to the fear he has suffered as a fugitive from prophecy. Imagine the relief our dissociated renegade might feel enjoying the company of this plant. It is his joy in the plant leads him to the anger of loss that moves him to cry out: “I would rather die than live.”
It has occurred to me that Jonah felt, somehow, akin to the qiqayon, connected – if only because they were both withering in the sun. Jonah and the qiqayon share the same fate in the desert, and this seems to kindle, in Jonah, a glimmer of understanding of the web of life, the interconnection between all living things. I have been wondering whether the joyfulness of this suddenly appearing shade plant and its equally sudden death might have moved Jonah to extend the circle of his compassion beyond himself, to include it – a plant!
Albert Schweitzer is famous for having said that, “It is a man’s sympathy with all creatures that truly makes him a man. Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man, himself, will not find peace.” As Jews, we understand the circle of our connection to include all aspects of our world; we value a compassionate stance toward nature, blessing God for this very attribute:
“Baruch merachem al haaretz
Baruch merachem al habriot”
“Blessed be the One who has compassion upon the earth.
Blessed be the one who has compassion upon Her creatures.”
But if Jonah had compassion for the castor oil plant, he doesn’t seem to have had compassion for the people of Nineveh. The death of the qiqayon is not the first instance in which Jonah begs to die. Indeed, he has set up his booth already in a state of anger and depression. The text says that when God mirrors the Ninevites’ teshuva by “repent[ing] of the evil God had [intended] to do them and did not do it,” “this was a great evil to Jonah.” He was angry [and] prayed for death, saying: Please, Oh Lord! This is just what I expected, exactly why I did not want to prophesy, “for I knew that you are an el rachum, slow to anger, … repenting of evil. Now, Lord, please take my life, for I would rather die than live” [with this humiliation]. Blinders of pride had inured Jonah to the desires, dreams and pain of the citizens of Nineveh.
Perhaps it is easier to care about a plant. Maybe what’s difficult is widening the circle of our compassion beyond innately innocent life forms, beyond the earth, beyond endangered species, for example, to include a sense of connection to other people, people who are not Us or of us.
Jonah’s sensitivity, as expressed toward the plant, is God’s foothold in trying to encourage Jonah to feel diminished by the deaths of other human beings. But the narrative ends with God’s question to Jonah, God’s challenge: If you feel connected to a plant, God says to Jonah, one you didn’t even grow, how much the more so would I feel connected to this myriad of my own innocent children. And with the experience of your own compassion for the qiqayon, don’t you, Jonah, understand my compassion, my rachamim, for my children? Couldn’t you join me in that compassion?
I like to think that the boundary between self and other was dissolved, for Jonah, in a blaze of scorching sun. But he does not answer God, and we are left wondering whether Jonah’s connection to the qiqayon is enough to break through is alienation. God’s challenge to feel rachamim is left open.
* * *
The word “rachamim” is derived from the root rechem, womb, and the concept of rachamim retains the tender feelings associated with the instincts of a mother for the child of her womb. Thus, God’s rachamim for us is an aspect of God’s parenthood; El Rachum, the compassionate aspect of God we call upon today, on Yom Kippur, forgives because we are, as God explains to Jonah, God’s children, of God’s own womb.
We translate rachamim as “compassion,” which literally means “suffering together with,” just as Jonah suffered desert heat together with the qiqayon. Compassion: cum patior – to undergo with, to share solidarity with. Suffering with is quite different from pity. “Pity” shares its root with “piety,” connoting condescension, and condescension implies separateness from someone else’s weakness or misfortune. But compassion derives from awareness of our shared vulnerability. Thus, compassion is what we feel for those with whom we identify, perceive as connected to us, as kin. It’s brotherly love, what we feel for someone (as if) from the same womb.
Compassion means understanding that we share one fate with our earth, air, water, fellow creatures and fellow human beings. We are interconnected, affecting one another’s well-being. We are caretakers of the earth and we are very much our brother’s keeper. If we understand that compassion means interconnection, then it isn’t so much a moral commandment as it is simply an acknowledgement of the way the world works: it’s the flow between all that is.
And as it is Below, so it is on High. In explaining Abraham Heschel’s philosophy of the illusion of human self sufficiency, Dr. Fritz Rothschild explains that human beings “are continuous both with the rest of organic nature and with the infinite outpouring of the spirit of God.” Just as all life on earth is interconnected, so all aspects of God are interconnected and share one fate. We are aspects of God. The God in me is connected to the God in you and compassion is the flow of a unified divine energy through us all.
Our Torah teaches: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” But to understand how this would really be possible – loving an “Other” as ourselves, we must take into account the phrase of Torah that follows: “ I am Adonai;” “Love thy neighbor as thyself; I am Adonai.”
Love thy neighbor as thyself because yourself and his (or her) self are bound up in me! You are not really distinct and competing beings! “Love thy neighbor as thyself; I am Adonai?” That is God telling us: your neighbor is yourself, because I am Adonai who fashioned both you and your neighbor as reflections of Me.
When I think about the difficulty of this challenge, I really do understand Jonah’s preference of a lovely green plant as the life form he chooses to connect to! To live by a rachmanut that sees the “other” as my kin, I must engage in serious tzimtzum - suck in my ego and accept my connection to those who do me harm. I must embrace the suffering of people whose lives I can hardly imagine, who live halfway around the globe and I must accept the humanity of their tormentors. Intellectually, I believe that we are all sheep of one Shepherd, creatures of one Creator. I know; but I don’t always really feel bound by the bond that joins us…
Can I enlarge the circle of my compassion beyond the sphere of my intimates to be touched by foreign, unimaginable sorrows or by the God-spark in people I consider to be evil? How much can I care about animals, plants, people I disapprove of? Can I accept others as they are, still wrong, still bad, still uninteresting, and hold in the same moment, in every moment, that they are connected to me, that I am responsible for them?
I’d like to share with you a poem sent to me this High Holiday season by my friend Rabbi Roy Furman, confronting his own sin of blindness and deafness to the pain of the “other.” He writes:
I who can quote you
Chapter and verse
The poems of my people
Of loving ha-aretz
Her fruit and her fragrance
And of Isaac’s blood
Shed to water
Abraham ’s promise,
Can tell you no poem
Neither chapter nor verse
Of Ishmael ’s pain
Of losing his hearth,
His trees and their fruit
And blood shed to water
His still fragrant land.
As has been quoted several times during these Yamim Noraim, Elie Wiesel says:
“A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering… The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.”
Abraham Heschel said:
“A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers in himself harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion…”
The piece of reason that often escapes me as I think about sharing a single divine breath with the “Other,” is the fact of our shared fate. I forget that wherever and whatever the pain is, no matter how foreign, it will affect all of us, influence the nature of people in general, shape the character of our world, determine our collective fate, and even influence what kind of God we experience. Surely there are examples at hand to remind me that pain we are not attending to is causing worldwide human relationships to become more and more strained, hateful, twisted. And the longer that foreign pain festers, the more we are all affected, the more the quality of our world changes, and the more likely we are to encounter what we might experience as a wrathful God when (surprise, surprise) we are “punished” by violence.
What I forget is that it’s a natural aspect of the world’s design that life forms are interdependent. If compassion means empathic awareness of that natural interconnection, then compassion is a law of nature we cannot deny. If we want to live in harmony with the logic of our world, we can’t ignore the parts of us that are custodians of the earth and our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We’re responsible for one another’s wellbeing whether we choose to act in accordance with that responsibility or not, because our wellbeing is inescapably collective.
Elie Wiesel and Abraham Heschel join activist Christian theologians like Thomas Merton and Matthew Fox in asserting, as Mathew Fox puts it, that: “Compassion is not sentiment but is making justice and doing works of mercy.” In other words, if we become truly able to feel the pain of others, we won’t be able to tolerate it! Feeling the pain of others as our own pain will, necessarily, lead us to activism.
God called upon Jonah to be an activist, and Jonah tried to flee from his role in Tikkun Olam, thinking he could hide from God and his fellows. The question is did he succeed in isolating himself? (And of course, the question is can we succeed in anesthetizing ourselves, swaddling ourselves in our personal concerns?)
Aviva Zornberg points out that the Jonah’s story begins with God’s command: “Kum, k'ra," "Arise and cry out!” Jonah cries out a number of times: He cries for his life in the belly of the whale, and for his ego when he felt the fire and brimstone of his prophesy undermined by God’s forgiveness. But by his story’s end, Jonah opens himself to a cry of loss, loss based on his moment of joy in connection. Perhaps this is the cry God sought from Jonah, and having elicited it, having cracked Jonah’s shell is enough. Perhaps this cry for the qiqayon, for an entity outside himself, is the glimmer of understanding God was waiting for, Jonah’s moment of understanding, his turning. And so, the story ends there, in the moment of his teshuvah.
* * *
I have tried to identify moments in which I, myself, have experienced epiphanies of identification with strangers: certainly the ease with which I identified with other pregnant and birthing and nursing women when I was a pregnant, birthing and nursing mother, and, conversely, the kinship I have felt with parents of sick and suffering children convalescing on the same hospital ward as my own sick and suffering child.
I think, too, of the experience of going to Berkeley Bowl on a September day when free-stone prune plums were in season to pick some up to make my German mother and grandmother and great grandmother’s plum pie recipe, the crown shaped dessert generations of women in my family have made for Rosh Hashanah, the recipe I think of as most authentically tied to my Jewish roots – and finding myself reaching into the bin over and over again, to select 36 plums both ripe and firm, alongside an equally discerning blond German accented woman twice my height whom I discover, in a moment of confusing camaraderie, is also about to make her grandmother’s tvetchenkuchen. We compare recipes, and a bit of our German family histories, complete with the predictably disparate details. Still, we’re connected by cake and all the loving memories associated with those who made it before, and all the times we’ve eaten it en famile.
Most powerfully, in this particular moment, I think about the urgent shock of identification that was the impetus for this dvar torah: Rabbi Kelman had just returned from the Kavod V’Nichum conference, the conference for chevrah kadishas and others interested in Jewish burial and mourning practices, and he told me how moved he had been by a session on janazah (think genizah). Janazah is Arabic for tahara. Muslim tahara? I had no idea… but as soon as I heard of it tears sprung to my eyes, I got goose bumps, trembled, even, and I’ve been disturbed ever since by the restlessness of my own imaginings around this concept, this fact about the “other” I could have assumed would be so, but had remained unaware of.
My friend Dr. Elizabeth Feldman, who had also attended the conference, called me the same weekend. “Unbelievable," she said. Two devout Muslim men from Raleigh-Durham, James Adams and Dr. Rufa Abdullah, came to the conference to hear about chevrah kadisha and spent 2 hours telling and showing how they perform janazah. All the Jews kept nodding, saying –“yes, we do that too,” and “yes, that’s the same.” The rituals and sensibilities are so close; everything they do is also for kavod ha-met. They pray, wash the body, dry it, do a ritual washing similar to Muslim ablutions before prayer; they start on the right side, and then go to the left, then they dress the body in white shrouds. Finally, the body is sprinkled with rose water.
Representatives of the Muslim burial society talked about how this work changes you, what a privilege it is to do it, how intense and holy the experience, and they acknowledged that as in their own community one meets incredibly special people doing this work, so it seemed to them that it is in the chevrah kadisha world!
Something happened to me in hearing all of this. My restlessness seems tied to a deep belief that there is a key here, that the experience of kinship this detail of Muslim religious practice affords me is some sort of gateway, a portal to a deep embrace of the sorrow of the other. Would it not change something in our world to know, understand, feel, Grok, get it, that families on both sides of the current Middle East conflict, and all those past, are preparing and have prepared their dead by way of the same purifying rituals, burying their loved ones in similar shrouds, reminiscent of the age-old rituals of one family? I am restless because, somehow, this particular detail makes visceral what I already, intellectually, know. It conjures, for me, the image of twin sons, siblings issued of the same womb being returned to the womb of the earth simultaneously; the irony of their otherness and their utter sameness causing me to cry out here, today.
We all have moments of identification and connection. And any one of these instances of compassion is a teshuvah akin to Jonah’s teshuvah, because each occasion of rachamim turns us back to our mutual source and cracks our insulating shells just a bit more, giving God a better foothold in encouraging us to greet the challenge of embracing compassion more deeply more often. Our presence here in shul today is testimony to our belief that our participation in shaping the fate of our world counts; we show up for this reckoning because we believe that our activism will, necessarily, advance Tikkun Olam.
* * *
Looking back into Jonah’s story, the captain of the ship Jonah boarded in his flight offers an important teaching for us on the theme of interconnection. When God brings a life-threatening storm upon the waters they sail, his sailors each turn to their gods asking forgiveness for any offences, looking for divine remedy, but Jonah’s avoidance of himself and his God is so strong that he actually succeeds in falling asleep in the midst of disaster! The Captain awakens him, demanding that he, too, search his soul and turn toward his God. What the captain and his sailors understand is that we straddle life-and-death in community, confined together as on a ship - all the time. Their deepest knowledge is that, just as on the open sea, there is no stable ground; we’re all riding the waves, all in the storm together, our fates intertwined, and all ever standing before God.
The lesson is that the fate of each is the fate of all.
We may well be tempted to join Jonah in deep, avoidant slumber rather than take our places, today, standing before God. But reading the Book of Jonah empowers us to embrace the effect we can have on Tikkun Olam, if we engage in what Arthur Waskow calls “passionate compassion,” crying out in appropriate action. The challenge is to experience the pain of others as our own pain, so that we cannot tolerate it and are moved to make it stop.
* * *
Finally, reading Jonah toward the end of Yom Kippur offers reassurance. As we face our God, we derive hope from this precedent of God’s compassion for the “turning,” repentant Ninevites. God speaks of them with the kindhearted, worried nurturance of a parent. And today, in particular, we seek to be perceived as of God’s womb. We are, after all, prodigal children returning, remembering our familial connections and wanting to be welcomed as children of God and siblings to our fellows.