Rejoicing and Trembling All at Once

SHABBAT REFLECTION: Rejoicing and Trembling All At Once

On Wednesday night I asked my 10-year old if he wanted to go to downtown Chicago Thursday morning to see the Thanksgiving Day parade. “I’m not so into parades,” he replied. “At the last parade, people got shot.”

He was referring, of course, to the July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, about 10 miles from our home in Skokie. His answer didn’t surprise me, but saddened me nonetheless. And it came amidst another week of gun violence in America, and another week when armed violence took the lives of young people in Israel.

And, simultaneously, Thursday was a day that was meant to be, and was, filled with gratitude: For the abundance we are blessed to enjoy; the ability to gather with family and friends (an ability we have learned, even more so, not to take for granted); the blessings of being alive. While Toby didn’t want to go to the parade, he woke up Thursday morning excited to help me bake an apple crisp. That’s just as wonderful a gift.

So I held the heaviness of Toby’s comment about the parade alongside the lightness of our delicious joint cooking enterprise on Thanksgiving morning. And the truth is, that’s not unusual. Frankly, it’s kind of ordinary, isn’t it? Life invites—let’s be honest, demands—of us all the time that we carry contradictory emotions: Sadness and joy, anger and compassion. It’s hard to navigate our days, even our hours or minutes, without the capacity to hold conflicting impulses.

Yet, as we know, that requires work. It’s why we practice.

At the outset of Parashat Toldot, the Torah paints an extraordinary picture, an image of Jacob and Esau tussling inside their mother, Rebecca: “The children struggled in her womb” (Gen. 25:22). In his commentary Gur Aryeh, the sixteenth-century mystic, Rabbi Judah Loewe of Prague (known as the Maharal), posits that “Jacob and Esau were not partners together in the world… they could not comfortably exist together in their mother’s belly… they were like fire and water—even though [at this stage] they had no awareness or will, their essences were in conflict.”

The ancient Rabbis had a generally historical-homiletical reading of Jacob and Esau, and the Maharal’s comments here are part of that lineage. But I think they also offer us another kind of insight about this challenge of holding deeply conflicting emotions within our own hearts and bodies. Rebecca’s pain is deep, as we know from the conclusion of verse 22: “The children struggled in her womb, and she said, ‘If this be the case, why do I exist?’ And she went to make a demand of the Ineffable.” These two beings she carries within her are so profoundly close—and yet so profoundly different. Holding them, and the identities and impulses and emotions that are their cargo, feels like an unbearable task. But she does ultimately manage, perhaps thanks what the Holy One tells her: “Two nations are in your womb, two separate peoples shall issue from your body.” That is: Yes, you carry these deep, powerful, and conflicting sensations within you—and perhaps becoming aware of that and acknowledging it is the first, most essential step to enduring.

Two decades ago I attended the wedding of one of my very close friends in New Jersey. He had been studying at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem for several years, and the wedding came just days after a bombing at the Hebrew University cafeteria took the lives of two Pardes students—in fact, the wedding took place between the funerals of the two students, who were both buried in the U.S. (Last summer, Rabbi Danny Landes wrote a powerful remembrance of this time.) What I remember most was the dancing: How hard we danced, how much we laughed, how much we cried, and how we didn’t know whether the tears we were shedding were tears of joy or tears of sorrow. Of course, they were both, the essence of the Psalmist’s phrase, “Rejoice with trembling” (Ps. 2:11).

My mind and body were taken back to that period this week when I heard about the bus bombings in Jerusalem. And I felt its reverberations when Toby told me he didn’t want to go to the parade because he didn’t want to get shot. The world is still, sadly, a violent place, made worse by the all-too-easy availability of firearms in America today. And in the very same breath, there is so much gratitude to express, so much joy to experience, so much love to bask in and share. Holding all of that can be hard—and Rebecca reminds us that it’s the work of life. May we support one another in the holding and the bearing and the living.

Shabbat Shalom.