Compartmentalization

I went to a funeral this afternoon, for a baby. I was never any good at compartmentalizing my emotions about this sort of thing and moving on - witness this old post - and I haven't gotten any better at it since leaving the shul rabbinate.

I know many people who have the same problem. Some of this is simply the strength of the emotion, but I think one reason people don't lock away their funeral emotions afterward is that it would feel wrong. It would feel like forgetting the death, it would feel disrespectful... and maybe it would feel like the experience didn't hurt me as much as it should have, as though I'm not connected enough to the people who are still grieving, who can't turn away. If you were really upset, you wouldn't be able to listen to that song, to laugh at that joke, to dance at that simchah. If it really touched you, you wouldn't commit the "turning away" Floyd sang about.

We need permission to move past grief, and this includes a permission only we can grant. So I went to a meeting tonight and couldn't let myself forget where I had been a few hours earlier. And now I'm supposed to be working on a shiur and I'm still at the cemetery.

It's good, even beautiful, that human beings can be so connected to each other; I cannot imagine how life without those connections could have meaning. But wow, does it hurt.

Walked past the sign my children made for my birthday, which is tonight, Zayin Adar is finally here. I don't feel the birthday... but I do feel the 40.

On the death of a child

[I feel like I’ve had too many death posts of late; I apologize, but it's the order of the day.]

I don’t use profanity; the gemara is very clear about how repellent it is when a person cannot control his tongue, and uses his gift of speech for base purpose. Presumably, the same applies to the keyboard. So I won’t say what’s on my mind.

And there’s nothing meaingful to say, anyway. What would you say?

What do you to someone who carries a baby to term, only to discover upon birth that it is not viable? What do you say when you stand there in the NICU and look at a baby, born yesterday, that will not see tomorrow’s sunrise? What do you say afterward, as the body lies, still, on a table designed for serving up life and joy and celebration?

Forget what you say to the family, to the mother. There is nothing to say; you’re just there.

But what do you say to yourself in order to shut out the image, so that when you look at your own happy children you don’t see those closed eyes, the miniature fist that should be clenched, not lax?

What do you say to calm your mind, so that when you look in the mirror you are not awash with guilt for having been spared this calamity?

What do you say to relax your nerves so that every pregnant woman doesn’t suddenly seem to be a disaster in the making, so that when you finally drift off tonight – eyes closed like the baby, don’t you know - you won’t see visions of what you saw today?

And what do you say to others, to people you meet who waste their breath and time and happy moments on turf wars and pride and who-did-what-to-whom? Or to people who have done nothing wrong, beyond being concerned with a passing, comparatively trivial matter at time when you are enveloped in this?

I know pediatricians, hospitalists, NICU personnel; they see this more than I do. I want to ask them, but I don’t want to know the answer. I know many, too many people who have endured this personally and managed to live life, sometimes birthing more children, sometimes adopting, sometimes not, but finding a way to survive.

I don’t want to know that you can’t learn to live with it. But I certainly don’t want to know that you can learn to live with it.

Death hurts, but it's not unfair

It’s been another deathfest these past couple of weeks, after a good two months in which, thank Gd, people stayed mostly healthy. I’ve lost some great friends and role models.

And, as inevitably happens at these times, I’ve heard people say, “It’s unfair.”

I have to disagree (although I would never say so aloud; to insult a mourner in his time of grief would be the cruelest stupidity).

I, too, am stabbed by pain. I hate eulogizing people, I am tired of the grieving process. Why do we have to lose anyone, let alone such good people? They were in the prime of life, or they were just about to enjoy retirement, or they were anticipating the birth of a grandchild, or they were doing good things, or they didn’t have a chance to say Goodbye…

But I do disagree with the “unfair” label.

Of course, from a Jewish perspective I disagree because we are taught to say ברוך דיין האמת, Blessed be the Judge of Truth, upon hearing of a death. We express this religious sentiment, which we hope we will come to feel in the course of the grieving process. We long to heal the ruptured relationship with Gd, to see through the immediate grief and agony and appreciate the good we were given.

But, beyond that longing for reunion with Gd, I think saying “it’s unfair” is illogical.

I see four logical arguments regarding Gd’s role in life and death:
1. Gd creates life as well as death.
2. Gd creates life, and not death.
3. Gd creates death, but not life.
4. Gd neither creates life nor death.

There may be gray areas in between, such as the idea that Gd is responsibility for “big picture” but not for details, but I don’t see that those shaded ideas contribute anything new here, so I omit them.

View #2 (possibly supported by Rava in Moed Katan 28a) says that death is the agent of unknowing fortune, and so it can hardly be termed “unfair” – “unfair” suggests a decision was made.

Similarly, View #4 assumes that no decision was made, and so death cannot be “unfair.”

View #3 strikes me as entirely against any idea of Gd I might conceive. I could sooner understand total atheism. So I discount this as well.

That leaves me with only View #1, which is the traditional Jewish view. If View #1 is true, then everything we received until this point is a gift… and how can I call rescension of a gift “unfair”?

I am in pain, but I concede that I have received far too much to ever say that the end of this gift is unfair.

ברוך דיין האמת.

[This week’s Haveil Havalim is here.]

Uncomfortably numb

The gemara talks about the horrible smell associated with tanning leather, but experienced tanners don’t really notice it.

Career politicians probably become dull, at some point, to the accoutrements of power.

And I find that I am becoming numb to death these days.

We’ve had nine deaths in the past month – four members and five relatives of members. This number of deaths is high for our community, for such a short period of time. We’re not talking about a מכת דבר (supernatural plague) here, Gd-forbid - all of them were people who were senior, and some of them had been ill for an extended period of time - but it’s really an abnormally high tally. At times, thank Gd, we’ve gone a year or more with one passing, maybe two. But now we’re in a blizzard of bereavement.

I’ve grown suspicious of my cell phone; every time it rings I’m afraid to pick it up and hear more bad news.

And I can feel myself becoming desensitized. I can detect in myself more of a sense that death is normal, just the end of life.

I’ve come to some form of acceptance, thanks to the constant flow of eulogies and nichum and shiva houses. It’s a protective defense mechanism, because feeling horrified anew every other day is an intense harrowing of the soul.

I’ve seen this happen with hospital physicians, particularly those who deal in geriatrics or oncology; they become so familiar with death that they can discuss terminal diagnoses and end-of-life options, even with patients and their families, without any sign that the subject causes them pain.

But this is a dangerous phenomenon for a rabbi (and for a doctor as well!).

For the mourner who has suffered the loss, this isn’t the ninth grief in thirty days; it’s the first, the only. Even for those who have suffered the death of relatives and friends before, each one is unique. They endure all of the feelings, the rage and denial, the realization of bereavement, and they need the comfort of having someone listen to their pain uniquely and independently, without that experience being colored by other deaths and circumstances.

Every eulogy must be unique, every pain must be treated. With complete, genuine sincerity, the rabbi must ask all of the questions, and offer all of the counsel and commisseration, that the mourner needs to hear. He must state, “ברוך דיין האמת, Blessed be the Judge of Truth,” not as an objective ritual declaration, but with all of the pain of a mourner being forced to confront the conflict between the promise of his religion and the pain of his experience.

This is what any rabbi must do; the empath cannot afford to stand at a distance.

So you block out all of the previous experiences and see each one as new, the person in front of you not as one more in a line of mourners but as a suffering human being. You open up your heart to feel everything that they are feeling, you put yourself in their place and see what they see. It tears at you, as you know it will – but this is what you have to do, this is the person you need to be, for their sake.

And you hope that the next time the phone rings, it will be for a שמחה, a happy occasion.

Avoiding the appearance of showmanship is also showmanship

[This week's Haveil Havalim is here.]

Once I landed on the bimah I was surprised to learn that somewhere inside me lurks a tendency to tear up. I cry on happy occasions and sad occasions. I cry when speaking at Kol Nidrei. I cry during Tefilat Geshem, especially if I am chazan (תולדותם נשפך דמם עליך כמים). I cry at Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

Which brings me to the following incident: On the first Shabbos after it became clear that Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, ה' יקום דמם, had been killed, I stopped including their names in our shul’s prayer on behalf of hostages. That first week, I reached the spot where their names ought to have been inserted, and I just couldn’t go on. It took me a couple of minutes to be able to continue.

The following week, I received an email from someone assuring me that he believed wholeheartedly that what I had done was genuine, and not at all theatrical.

Of course, I now had to wonder: Did someone actually think that my crying was theatricality? Theatricality when crying over dead Israelis?!

Then, a couple of weeks later, I spoke in shul about a family who was moving out of our area. I have a longstanding emotional bond with this family. It was no surprise to me that I got choked up while speaking about them. But later I wondered: Did someone think that this, too, was rabbinic theatricality?

I don’t want to have people analyzing my tears and judging them authentic or phony, emotion or showmanship.

That discomfort shaped a decision I made this past week. In retrospect, think it was the wrong decision, but now it’s too late:

I cry every year as I read the Haftorah of Chazon. Some years it starts while I’m reciting the berachot, other years it waits for devastating lines like “מי בקש זאת מידכם רמוס חצרי, Who asked you for this, for you to come trample in My courtyard?” But it has happened pretty much every year, as best I can recall, since I started leining Chazon some fifteen years ago.

So this year, in the wake of that email and its implicit skepticism, I decided to ask someone else to read Chazon.

My replacement did a fine job on the Haftorah, and no one could see my emotion this year, but after having pondered my decision through Shabbat and Tisha b’Av, I think I was wrong to back out:

- Wrong for this specific case because, as I was told by a few people afterwards, my public emotion in reading Chazon helps them feel the impact of Tisha b’Av.

- Wrong in a more general sense because my crying is the “heter” allowing other people (yes, particularly men,) to express emotion in a public, religious context.

- And wrong a third time, because that email has, paradoxically, made me phony, or at least less authentic. That emailer convinced me I had to pretend not to cry; this Shabbat I was not the real me.

I’m still uncomfortable about crying, wondering what people think when they see the tears well up. But I don’t see that I have a choice. Gd-willing there will be no Shabbat Chazon next year… but if it should come up again, I’d like to think I would reverse this year’s reversal, and let the tears flow where they may.