This summer, I spent a chunk of my time compiling a Prayer book for Neilah, the closing service of Yom Kippur for the nursing home in which I worked. Writing creative translations and liturgical poems, as well as typing out pretty much every prayer in the service, got me thinking a lot about judgement, the idea of begging for our sins to be pardoned. In the same internship,I watched the magic of chaplaincy: how much a kind conversation or sitting by someone’s side can really make a difference. This, got me thinking about healing.
The High Holiday season, which we have been approaching since Rosh Chodesh Elul in August, is intended to be one of renewal and healing through self reflection and judgement. We are instructed to better ourselves and heal ourselves for the coming year, but at the same time, we fast, we exact penance on ourselves for the sins that we have committed in the past year. But how do we heal ourselves in this time of judgement? We have lots of instruction and liturgy on how to repent, how to judge ourselves. But if we judge ourselves too harshly, there will be nothing left of us to live into the coming year so we need to heal as well.
There are two stories from our tradition that I think can help us address this relationship,. The first is about meeting ourselves where we are and allowing the same kindness to those around us. Let me explain. In Genesis 21, the Torah portion which many communities will read tomorrow morning, we read of Hagar, the slave woman who had a child with Abraham at Sarah’s bequest, and her son Ishmael being exiled by Sarah after the birth of Isaac. While Abraham and Sarah leave them out to dry, God does not exact the same judgement. We are told that God hears Ishmael’s cries, b’asher hu sham, “where he is.” Ishmael is not forced to seek God’s grace or kindness, instead God comes to him and provides him and his mother with a well. Bereshit Rabbah says that God defends His choice to provide a well to Ishmael by saying, “I judge people as they are when they are being judged.” This can teach us a powerful lesson: God meets us where we are, and so should we. As we reflect, we need to see ourselves and judge ourselves as we are in this moment, not in the moments of last week or last year. And when it comes to healing, we need to meet each other where we are with openness and honesty and love.
Second, There is a common idea that while we are judged every year around this time, ultimate judgement will come when we face death. A number of the rabbis, particularly in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Ketubot are fascinated by this moment, and their supposed conversations with the Angel of Death are chronicled. Many of these conversations are interesting but there is one that I feel is especially pertinent to this juxtaposition of healing and judgement that we’ve been discussing, and that is the idea of “attaching oneself” to the sick. We are told in Bavli Ketubot 77b that R. Yehoshua B. Levi “attached himself” to the raatan, the person with a certain kind of illness, leper, and then later on the page, the Angel of Death asks R. Hanina b. Papa if he has done so and he is told that not attaching himself to the leper is what is keeping him out of heaven.
From this, we can assume that, at the time of judgement, one of the qualifications of getting into heaven is whether we “attached ourselves” to the sick, the “other.” Illness and suffering can be unbelievably isolating, an experience I know firsthand as someone who has been both the healer and the one in need of healing. But it is important that even though the sick, the broken, may scare us, we must stand by them in any way that we can. And I would argue that In a world where anyone who is seen as an “other”, or different is ostracized and isolated, “attaching ourselves” in any way possible to them is even more important.
Interestingly enough, in Ketubot, there is no qualification that we heal the raatan, the sick, just that we must stand by them. Surely, it would be ideal to heal but I find the absence of a direct instruction to heal profound. While we must stand and bear witness to the pain, the Talmud, at least indirectly, recognizes that there is pain that cannot be “solved.” The unfortunate reality of the world is that there is illnesses that cannot be cured and problems that cannot be fixed and transgressions that can’t be forgiven. There are some moments that are filled with such suffering that it is hard for us to even speak--I invoke the words of Les Mis, “There’s a grief that can’t be spoken, there’s a pain goes on and on… “ In those moments, binding ourselves to the people that are suffering and being empathetic and supportive and kind is all that we can do. Even though we are doing our best to make ourselves better for the coming year, the process doesn’t have to involve complete, forced healing. Because we will only be judged on our effort and our openness to healing.
These stories can teach us a little about what’s important at the end of the day, or in this case, at the end of the year. We must meet our souls where they are and bear witness to the pain and suffering in our messy world as God and the rabbis prompt us to do. We must keep the ideas of healing and judgement in balance with one another. At the end of the day, perhaps the questions of how can I heal and how will I be judged may be close to the same: we will be judged, perhaps, on many things, but one of the most important is our ability to be resilient, to keep pushing through and holding hope in our hearts when life is difficult. With that, I wish you a Shana Tova, and hope that your high holiday season is one of meaningful reflection and deep connection.
