Perfectly Broken
Ger The Stranger By Ghiora Aharoni as presented on Mount Olives in Jerusalem
Dear friends,
On the night of the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av some decades ago, my parents made their way through the streets of west Jerusalem, entered through the walls of the old city and walked down to the Western Wall. My mother was carrying her ripe, pregnant belly around as they joined the multitudes of Jews who came to sing Kinnot, sad songs of abandonment and despair, and hear the words of the most broken of biblical books, Lamentations. Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple thousands of years ago, as well as multiple more recent horrors that came upon our people, draws many to the only piece of that temple that still stands. Shortly after my parents got back to their apartment in Rechavia, as the legend goes, contractions began, and a few hours later I was in mother’s arms.
I have always been comfortable with the simultaneous presence of joy and sadness. There are times when I can’t make them apart. Things like breaking the glass at the wedding, or Mourners Kaddish at every prayer service make perfect sense to me. I sometimes think my parents’ nighttime trip to the Kotel on the night of my birth has to do with that. Certainly, having a (Hebrew) birthday on a fast day can drive that point home.
The Israeli reality I grew up in was similarly drenched in both joy and sadness, beauty and ugliness, wonder and fear, idealism and cynicism. West Jerusalem in the eighties was a safe and warm place, where kids played soccer in the street, climbed fruit trees to eat their apricots, figs or mulberries, and rode their bikes on the streets on Yom Kippur. But there were knife attacks by terrorists, my father fighting in wars, soldiers just older than my brother dying regularly. Those deaths held within them the most tremendous pain and a perfect beauty. I remember the gorgeous, sad songs sung at Memorial Day ceremonies every year that would bring me to tears as the alumni of the school stood in uniform looking like beauty itself. That little boy felt the dead and their family’s sacrifice as ultimate love: perfect, unbreakable and entirely demolishing. And he knew that soon his brother would wear that uniform, and shortly after so would he.
As soon as I completed my military service, I left all that behind. I moved to New York and joined a pacifist theatre company. The idealism from my childhood, that of the quest for peace, the belief in the goodness of the state, or any state for that matter, was gone. Ultimate sacrifice no longer seemed beautiful. What took its place were the people I knew who were looking at the world soberly, seeing its horrors and brokenness, and diving in to take a stand against them. The greatest example of this for me was always the activists working in the West Bank to try and help poor Palestinians from being kicked off their lands by settlers and the army. While most of the country had gotten tired of caring and stopped looking east, or worse, these few knew exactly what was going on, and despite their miniscule chances of success they doggedly persisted in going out there and doing the right thing. My experiences in places like the South Hebron Hills have been some of the most horrifying and the most gratifying of my life.
Most days I have a strange double feeling. I feel the goodness of humanity slipping between our fingers like melted ice, and I feel love and friendship constantly exhibiting themselves.
Tonight the 9th of Av will begin, and it will be that rare occasion when my Hebrew birthday is not marred by wailing and fasting. Shabbat trumps any sad day, and we’re taught to enjoy ourselves and rest. But when the postponed fast will begin tomorrow evening I will take the day to mourn the destruction, the stupidity, the nastiness; I will allow myself to wallow in sadness. I will remember that many of those Palestinian villages I tried to help keep in place have been removed, that Ukraine is burning and millions of refugees walk the earth, that much of what our great feminist teachers have taught us has been unlearned, that this country is broken at the bone. Despair, my father taught me, is its own kind of freedom.
Jerusalem means “we will see wholeness.” May we find the strength to look straight at the brokenness and see it for what it is. And may that remind us of all that is whole in us and in the world, and give us the courage to make that wholeness appear in front of our eyes.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha