Two Types of Looking Back
Lot's Wife by Humberto Chugchilan
Dear friends,
Remember that tender moment in the Torah when Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt? I’ve been thinking about it this week.
On Tuesday evening I was lucky enough to see Hadestown on Broadway. Hadestown is a musical play on Greek mythology, which peaks in a tragic moment of looking back. Orpheus goes down to Hades to rescue his beloved, Eurydice. Hades lets them leave on the condition that she walk behind him through the perilous journey, and he never look back to check on her. They try. He fails, and she is doomed to a life in the underworld.
On the way to the theater, I looked back – at the news, and was doomed to 24 hours in the underworld of my mind. I stopped reading American news since last Tuesday night, but I have yet to cure myself of my addiction to Israeli news. That’s where I learned that the next American Ambassador to Israel, as well as the administration’s special envoy are no doubt going to work to fulfill Trump’s promise to Miriam Adelson to annex the West Bank, and likely build a few Jewish settlements in Gaza along the way. I also got another update on what has now become an undeniable campaign of ethnic cleansing and starvation in Northern Gaza. What followed were 24 hours in the underworld, where it was crystal clear to me that under current circumstances, these American appointments are nails in the coffin of the place I grew up in as I know it.
In this light, it became impossible to not see Hades, the dark seducer of souls to the safety of meaninglessness and despair, as one of his contemporary manifestations in the world. Tears flowed when Persephone said her time above ground was too short (she’s entitled to six months each year before she goes back down for the rest). More welled up when Eurydice signed her life over to Hades. And a little lake emerged when the one believer left, the god of music and spring, Orpheus let his love get the better of him and looked back to doom his beloved.
The truth is that I find myself entirely uninterested in the type of looking back and analyzing that that so many brilliant minds are currently engaged in around the elections. I am not interested right now in looking back to the past to learn how we ended up here. I am not interested in the punditry of this world. That, for me, right now is the meaningless, dangerous noise that turns me into a pillar of salt overlooking the Dead Sea.
But there is another type of looking back that I am interested in.
I do want to look back at the world to come, that world of truth that is captured in between the lines of the ancient books. I’m interested in looking back at the poetry of the prophets and their clues on how to be. I’m interested in looking back into the eyes of the homeless guy at the end of my block, and the line circling around the block of the food pantry at the church down the road. I’m interested jn looking back at the suffering faces of those thrown aside, trampled on and forgotten in every single country in the entire world. I’m interested in looking back at what is happening to people right now in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, to what is happening to women in Afghanistan and Iran and so many other countries, to pregnant women in Texas, to gay people in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia and other countries with a death penalty for homosexuality, to look back on humanity right now and open my heart to my brothers and sisters of all types with whom I share the earth.
The 16th century Italian rabbi Obadia Sforno explained the prohibition to look back at the burning of Sodom like this:
אל תביט אחריך. כי הרעה תתפשט עדיך כמהלכת אחריך ולא תזיקך אבל אם תתעכב להביט תדבק בך כמו שקרה לאשתו כאמרו ותהי נציב מלח:
Don’t look back, because the evil spreads toward you, as though she is marching behind you. However, she will not harm you unless you delay yourself by stopping and looking back. Then she will cling to you.
We have to be selective with what we look back on in order to protect ourselves from the sticky bad stuff lurking in our rear view mirror. We have to look back. The question is at what.
This Shabbat, let's look all the way back. Zecher lema'aseh bereshit, we say about Shabbat - a reminder of creation. Let's look far, far back to that time when light first came to be, and after it the sky, the mountains, the trees, the stars and the animals. And let's remember that sixth day too, when human beings first appeared, mirror images of the divine.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha