In this week of painful anniversaries and equally painful local and national happenings, I’ve had an old Paul Simon lyric echoing in my head and heart.
And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees…
A lifetime ago, Simon’s ‘American Tune’ captured a moment that he called ‘the age’s most uncertain hour.’
Today his words feel prescient and fresh.
Hirhurim – qualms or troubled thoughts
The ancient rabbis had a word for that kind of uncertainty and feeling of unease. Hirhurim – qualms or troubled thoughts – is the word employed by the Midrash to describe our ancestor Abraham at a number of critical moments in his life’s journey. In his troubled state, Abraham asks questions, hard and deep and fundamental questions, mainly of God.
ow do I remain faithful and hopeful through the present, exhausting turmoil?
- Where are we headed?
- What does it all mean?
- How do I remain faithful and hopeful through the present, exhausting turmoil?
We of battered souls and shattered dreams have many of the same kinds of questions in this age’s most uncertain hour.
Beautifully and poetically, Aviva Zornberg expands our understanding of hirhurim, “a term that expresses the imaginative, passionate level of consciousness” with which Abraham is credited. Hirhurim connotes “vagueness, the inchoate dream state that precedes gestation.” It is “a heated, fluid state in which many things are implicit” but not yet “crystallized.”
One Midrash (Tanhuma, Lekh L’kha 2) describes Abraham (and us I think) as one who “sewed the whole world together in the presence of God” AND as “a person who tears apart and sews together.” Sewing together, tearing apart, sewing together, over and over again. That’s the state of consciousness that the rabbis call hirhurim. That’s us in the autumn of 2020.
This week’s anniversaries – of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and the Tree of Life massacre in 2018 – summon up all of those hard questions and more.
- Have we overcome our internal divisions and sinat hinam (gratuitous hatred) or are we just as divided and hate filled in 2020 as we were a quarter of century ago?
- Have we done enough to protect ourselves, our places of worship, our communities in the two years since that terrible Shabbat morning in Pittsburgh?
- Have we made progress in rooting out violent anti-Semitism from American society and life?
- Where are we headed?
- How do we remain hopeful through the turmoil?
The current turmoil only magnifies the “anarchic range of consciousness” (Zornberg again) that is hirhurim. The continuing and worsening pandemic, the looming election, and the tragic police shooting and protests and looting that have followed in our city all serve to deepen and amplify our shared unease and troubled thoughts. ‘Most uncertain hour’ indeed.
Where is hope to be found? Zornberg’s unpacking of the image of sewing, tearing, sewing again yields a spectacular insight. “In the current generated between the two poles of ‘rending and rendering one’ there is intensified life!” On these painful anniversaries, and in the midst of our current turmoil we reside precisely, if uncomfortably, between those very poles.
Much like our ancestor Abraham, we “desire to reintegrate (our) own world with God.” May we, following his example, come to deeper “understand and resolution” which might open the way to the uncovering of “further mysteries” and more and more “invitations to love.”
As a popular saying has it:
“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass…It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
Shabbat Shalom.
