From “The Replacements” to the Zohar—A Jewish response to fear

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5770

One of my favorite sports films of all time is called “The Replacements.” It stars Gene Hackman as the coach of a professional football team in a season when the player’s association has gone on strike. The film fictionalizes a real strike that took place in the National Football League, when owners, rather than lose a whole season, decide to play the games, but to hire replacement players—mostly second-tier players who may have been good in college but who never made the cut on an NFL team.

The film is great fun, and Coach McGinty’s replacement team features an amazing ragtag crew of washed up athletes, including a tough guy who gets paroled from prison to play for the team, a sumo wrestler, a chain smoking Welsh soccer player who has never played American football before, a brilliant athlete who just happens to be deaf, and more. Mayhem ensues. The team stinks, and in the early stage of the film, can’t win against other teams of similar replacement players.

The quarterback of the team, Shane Falcow, played by Keanu Reeves, was a college football star who got a reputation for losing the big game. There’s a great scene in which Gene Hackman’s character is trying to motivate his team after a tough loss. He writes this word on the board and, well, you know what? Let’s take a look:

DP--LIGHTS OFF

TURN PROJECTOR ON, SHOW CLIP

PAUSE FILM. “WE CAN OVERCOME IT TOGETHER.”

TURN OFF SCREEN

At first, this piece from Hollywood might not seem like a Jewish text. But as I began to reflect on the fear I have seen in so many faces this year, heard in so many voices, I began to think that there might be great wisdom to be plumbed.

We have been faced with many crises—job losses, bankruptcies, foreclosures, struggling or failing businesses, a terrible recession, a great rise in epidemics, two wars that are draining our economy further and have resulted in the deaths of 5,000 Americans, and more. These aren’t reasonable times we’re living in; it often seems as if one thing has gone wrong, and then another, and then another. And it feels as if we might be in over our heads.

How will we face these challenges? How face down the fear that seems so pervasive in our society? How deal with one crisis after another—crises that induce fear like quicksand?

As Jews, we have a lot of mileage as individuals and as a people in dealing with fear and crisis. We have bookshelves of volumes, written from real-life experience, of Jews who dealt with the fears of their time, and I wondered what we might learn from them for our own time. So on this Rosh Hashanah, I propose to you 7 lessons we might learn from Jewish history and Jewish tradition, that might allow us to stand erect to face the crises before us with a little less fear and trembling.

As Jews, when we look to our history for guidance on how to deal with fearful times, for ages, the archetypal story was, of course, the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. The destruction happened in stages, of course. It is said that on the 10th of the Hebrew month of Tevet, the Romans laid siege to the city. The walls of the city of Jerusalem were cracked open by the Roman Legion six months later on the 16th of Tammuz, and the Temple itself was destroyed less than one month later on the 9th of Av.

When I look at the reverence with which people approach the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the last retaining wall of that Great Second Temple, it is clear that this great tragedy still strikes at the Jewish heart 2000 years later. We still traditionally fast on these dates on the Jewish calendar. And the details of the destruction still are resonant with Jewish playwrights and artists. One of the greatest native-born Israeli poets—Dalia Rabikovitch—wrote a poem to describe deeply personal pain by referencing the destruction of the Temple. She wrote:

I told you nine words.

You said “so and so.”

You said, “you have a child. You have time. You have poetry.”

The window bars were engraved into my skin. You wouldn’t believe I got through it. I really didn’t have to stand it, humanely speaking.

On the 10th of Tevet, siege was laid. On the 17th of Tammuz, a breach was made in the walls of the city. On the 9th of Av the Temple was destroyed.

In all these, I was alone.

B’chol eleh, hayiti levadi, Rabikovitch writes. In all these, I was alone. In many ways, she captures it all. That’s the way we are. All those big moments of fear in our lives, in the final analysis, the question is—how will we get through them? How will we endure the crises that engender the fear? What is clear from our 2000 years of mourning for the Temple is also the first Jewish lesson in confronting our fears--that we need to keep telling the story. As we tell and retell of our fears, we keep open the possibility that we might someday begin to move on, to imagine a new reality. When we tell and retell our stories of crisis and fear, we also give ourselves permission to reinterpret the crisis in new ways, to see ourselves in the story even if we weren’t literally there.

The Book of Lamentations is attributed to the prophet Jeremiah who is said to have stood on the hills outside of Jerusalem watching the Temple burn and telling the story as he was exiled to Rome. If you can imagine, the prophet Jeremiah is so pained that he weeps and asks God to take away his prophetic state of consciousness because he can’t take the fear of what he has to say or what he has to see. But God calls him to prophesy nonetheless-- teaching him the second Jewish lesson we can learn from our history—to face the pain of the loss head on. By confronting his fear, Jeremiah also helps us through the ages. The prophet recounts for us the story to read and process these 2 millennia later.

So far, these two Jewish lessons feel similar to the stages of grief and loss that Elizabeth Kubler Ross identified for us only in the 20th century. In moments of great fear, we first need to tell our stories over and over to whoever will listen. And secondly, we need to fully experience the fear and confront it honestly. But having done all of this, what then?

A great modern Jewish teacher named Melila Hellner-Eshed teaches us our third lesson about responding to fear, when she instructs us concerning the origins of the Hebrew word mashber—Hebrew’s word for crisis—mashber. She notices that the word is used in the Book of Kings, when King Hizkiya is speaking. He says, “This day is a day of distress and rebuke and disgrace, as when children come to the point of birth—the Hebrew says mashber-- and there is no strength to deliver them.” Rashi and all the commentators on this verse say, “Ad mashber—until the breaking point—this is to be likened to a woman who is sitting on the delivery chair—also called in Hebrew mashber¬—and the woman does not have the energy to give birth. That’s one meaning of the word—it’s the stool that a woman sits on at the last stages of labor. And mashber also means “a breaking point”—but not just any breaking point—it is the point at which a break must happen so that the next phase can begin. It is a place of crisis, but also a place of birth—a place where something new can happen.

And so, too, with us. As Jews, our third lesson in dealing with fear is rooted in our heritage of re-envisioning those fearful moments and experiences in our lives as pregnant with possibility—if we can just have the endurance and fortitude to push through the crisis.

Furthermore, one of the most powerful Jewish responses to fear was envisioned by the Kabalistic mystics of our tradition, who teach us that crisis is a part of the process of being alive. The great Jewish mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria taught, as many of you have heard before, that at the moment of the creation of the world, there was a shattering of vessels, a crashing, a splitting which contained one reality in order to make space for a new reality that was less ornate and grand on the one hand, but which was more sustainable on the other. What is clear from the commentators on Lurianic Kabbalah is that they acknowledge that this moment of the breaking of the vessels was a crisis, yes, but at the same time, it was a part of a process. It was a built-in part of the work of making cosmos out of chaos, and the same is true, in many ways, of the human psyche, and the human body, in the world, in Torah, even in God.

We learn also that the awesome nature of crisis depends on the perspective from which we look. And at some moments, we’re able to gain a sense of perspective on our own lives and our own world.

When we look from afar at the fears of our fellow human beings, from time to time they don’t seem so fearful to us. Perhaps you’ve been in a place like that with a friend or loved one who was afraid, and either you couldn’t understand why they were so troubled by this seemingly small thing, or you could see that, out of this great challenge in their life that had them paralyzed, great things could come—opportunities would emerge from the mashber. But when you actually sit with them, or when you yourself are in the middle of that fearful moment, that’s not what we need to hear. We need a to be non-judgmental, and to have sense of perspective to help our loved ones, to help our friends, to find renewed strength at the end of the crises we face. Haven’t we all gone through shattering moments—what the desert fathers call “the dark night of the soul?” The fourth Jewish lesson in enduring fear is the call to maintain perspective—both the perspective that challenges are an inherent part of being human, and the perspective that each of us experiences fear differently.

We turn to the Psalmist for our fifth lesson: The night is always darkest just before the dawn. And the midrash on this teaching reminds us that night is not the same thing as darkness. Night often has starlight and moonlight. But there is an hour of deep darkness much later in the evening, when the constellations pale away and the moon has gone. And then what? Asks the midrash. What’s to keep you company? And it’s just at that moment that God raises up the dawn. Judaism calls us to remember that the movement from crisis to renewal, from fear to redemption, from darkness to light, is a very gradual one. And isn’t that true for us? Anyone who has been in a fearful place knows that you can’t rush through it— there is simply no shortcut—very often no way to break through into the light, no matter how you try. There’s sometimes nothing you can do but put one foot in front of the other.

As I reflected on the seven Jewish lessons for overcoming fear, I was honestly flattened by the story of Kalman Kalonymous Shapiro, the Rabbi of Pizentzna, and the way that he brings all of these lessons together. From a town near Warsaw, Shapiro was imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto with his community during the Shoah, the holocaust. He committed himself to continuing to teach Torah in that awful place. He wrote contemporary midrash on the weekly Torah portion—extrapolating the ways in which Jews might find hope and sustenance from the Torah even in fearful moments.

The Rabbi wrote down all of his teachings, and in 1943, when he was taken in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto first to Treblinka and then to Trevniki where he was killed, he put his manuscripts in a steel can and buried them underground. After the war, the can was found by a Polish construction worker, and the texts were later published in Israel under the title Eish Kodesh—Sacred Fire. There is no mistaking this text—it is Torah out of the heart of darkness—a person looking at the dynamics of fear and what might enable a person to endure and overcome that fear.

I came across his commentary on Parashat Vayeshev, from the book of Genesis, dated December 2, 1939. The portion itself begins, “Jacob sat down in the area where his father had lived in the land of Canaan.” The next verse starts the story of Joseph and his horrific relationship with his brothers—a story of jealousy, parental favoritism, and attempted murder. Rabbi Shapiro points out what the medieval commentator Rashi says about this passage; where he teaches, “Jacob wanted to live in serenity, but the anguish of Joseph leapt upon him. Righteous people want to live in serenity in this world, says Rashi, but the Holy One Blessed be God says to them, ‘it is not enough that you will enjoy serenity in the world to come, but that you should want it in this world as well?’” This midrash challenges us—it says—you think that you’re in this world to just mellow out? Forget it. That’s not our job here. Our job is to work and make the world a better place. Jacob wanted to sit down—Vayeshev—but that was not his role in the world.

Rabbi Shapiro then goes on what seems to be a tangent, where he compares silence and muteness and the differences between them.

“What, then,” Rabbi Shapiro continues, “is the difference between the Hebrew word cherish, silence, and the word ilmut, muteness? When the Torah uses the word cherish, silence, there is generally plenty to be said, but the subject has the option to speak, or to refrain from speaking. For example, when Mordechai tells Esther ‘if you remain silent at this time—im tacharesh tacharishi, then deliverance will come from another place.’ Or as Moses says to the Jews on the banks of the Red Sea ‘God will fight for you, but you—be silent—hacharesh tacharishu.’” In these examples, Rabbi Shapiro says, there is plenty that might have been said, but the people choose to be silent. The Rabbi is teaching us that the word cherish—silence-- doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s nothing to say; sometimes it means that we decide to keep it inside. This kind of silence is a choice.

“Very different,” he teaches, “is the person who, God forbid, is so broken and crushed that he has nothing to say—who does not understand or appreciate what is happening to him—who does not possess the faculties to assess or assimilate his experience—who no longer has the mind or the heart with which to incorporate the experience. For this person, silence is not a choice. His is the muteness of one incapable of speech.

In this text, Shapiro is right with the people he is speaking to—in the ghetto in December 1939. There are fearful situations, he argues, when we keep silent by choice. But as we move deeper into crisis, the Rabbi teaches, deeper into fear—that quicksand again—we move from cherish—silence, to ilmut--muteness.

“There are times,” Rabbi Shapiro continues, “when survival means, God forbid, being reduced to petty, small-minded and spiritually diminished behavior. Then a [person] cheers himself—adapts to the times and the difficulties until wrath passes. He says to himself, ‘it is true—now I am mute, but even a mute can communicate—with grunts and gestures. I, too, will speak a little in this way—communicating even in my muteness.’”

Sometimes these days, in 2009, we feel that this is our situation. Our sense of fear and crisis can feel so overwhelming that we feel mute—we feel that all we can do is lay low until something changes—the stock market rebounds, the flu passes, the war ends—we go underground, hoping to just wait until this great wave passes. Don’t make noise. Keep quiet. There’s nothing we can do; we’re helpless, so we might as well hide under our covers, keep our heads low.

Rabbi Shapiro is giving his own totally personal testimony. He says, “sometimes I feel like that, too. I sometimes feel I should just keep quiet, like everybody else.” And then suddenly, Rabbi Shapiro brings us back to the Torah portion.

“When, however,” he goes on, “the suffering… continues, and everyone is even more broken and crushed, then we reach the level we read about [in Vayeshev]. Joseph describes his infamous first dream to his brothers. ‘Behold,’ Joseph says, in my dream, ‘we were binding sheaves in the field, Hinei anu me’almim alumim basadeh. And then my sheaf stood up erect, and your sheaves surrounded it, and bowed down to mine.” This is the dream that infuriates the brothers, right? You have the image in your mind? Sheaves of wheat, symbolizing Joseph’s parents and brothers, lying prostrate on the ground, and this one sheaf, Joseph’s sheaf stands up, as if to Lord over them.

“The Hebrew phrase for the binding of sheaves,” Rabbi Shapiro notes, “is mealimim alumim, which is identical to the Hebrew for being made mute. It is as though Joseph has said, ‘we were struck dumb in the field.’ Hinei anu me’almim alumim basadeh. Lying as dumb-struck, cut off sheaves—sheaves that are trampled all over the field—that’s his image.

Joseph explains a very different prophetic meaning of his dream in Rabbi Shapiro’s reading. There we were, toiling away in the field. And when our exile reached the state of me’almim alumim—that dumbstruck muteness, we were bereft of our ability to communicate.

Then, behold, said Joseph, alumati—my muteness—suddenly stood up, erect. At first, I tried bending my shoulders to the yoke, thinking to adjust myself to the difficulties, and to live a life of muteness. But when I saw that even the muteness was dumbstruck, I could not bear it. I took the courage to cry out to God even louder, when alumotechichem—your sheaves, your muteness surrounded mine, and you took strength from me. This is the meaning of the original quote from Rashi, when he teaches, ‘Righteous people want to live in serenity in this world.’ They want to adjust, and adapt themselves to exile and trouble and fear. But the Holy Blessed one says, ‘It is not enough for the righteous to be satisfied that the future will be good, that they will survive. Even now, they must toil to arouse heavenly mercy so that [humanity] will be saved immediately.”

It’s hard to know what to say about this kind of Torah. A cynic might say, “what’s the use of reading this text? They all died, Rabbi Kalonymous and all of the people he was teaching. But the fact is, his teaching, his act of spiritual resistance, left us with something that is truly priceless when he teaches us the sixth Jewish tool for enduring crisis and fear. He wrote, “you will see that there are stages when fear hollows a person out. And in that stage, there needs to be a force—there needs to be a sheaf of wheat…”

And it happens. I know that many of us have been in fearful places. In these moments, we each need something—God, spirit, some other person around us that has the ability to suddenly move from lying trampled on the ground to stand up, and by the mere fact that that sheaf stands up from it’s state of muteness, tesubena alumoteichem—our sheaves can come and surround it and gain strength from the fact that since they stood up, we can as well.

What have we as Jews learned about how to overcome fear? First, like the haggadah, we retell our stories over and over. Second, we face our fears directly, painful though they might be. Third, we are called as Jews to see fearful moments, even though we would hardly ask for them, as opportunities for rebirth. Fourth, Judaism teaches us to put our fears in perspective, and to remember as non-judgmentally as we can that fear often depends on the perspective of each person. Fifth, after thousands of years of wrestling with God and human beings, we are inheritors of a tradition that call us to accept that darkness gives way to light only gradually. Sixth, we learn from Rabbi Shapiro that when we can move with Torah even as we find ourselves in darkness, it can allow us to find that sheaf of wheat that sheds light.

Torah can serve as incredible comfort for us in days of fear and trembling—days of awe.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches us our seventh and final strategy for dealing with fear, when he recalls the story of a learned man who had lost all of his sources of income and was looking for a way to earn a living. The members of his community, who admired him for his learning and piety, suggested to him to serve as their cantor on the Days of Awe. But, in his downtrodden state, he considered himself unworthy of serving as the messenger of the community, as the one who should bring the prayers of his fellow [congregants] to the Almighty. He went to his master, the Rabbi of Husiatin and told him of his sad plight, of the invitation to serve as a cantor on the Days of Awe, and of his being afraid to accept it and to pray for his congregation.

“Be afraid,” was the answer of the Rabbi. “Be afraid, and pray.”

On this New Year, we have been given something that we often dream of—a second chance. As a community, let us resolve to be there for each other, to learn from each other, to tell and listen to stories, to acknowledge and name our fears, to do what we can do to find perspective and rebirth, to lift our own sheaves and the sheaves of others even in moments of fear, and, yes, pray because of it all, pray in spite of it all.

Shana Tova.