5778 Rosh Hashanah Serermon, Congregation Emanu El, Houston, Texas. September 21, 2017
Yaron makes Roses. He doesn’t grow roses -- he forges them.
Yaron lives in a tiny community in Israel called Yated (יָתֵד). The town is only about four-and-a-half miles from the border with Gaza. People who live in that part of Israel are under the constant threat of rockets fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Thankfully, rocket attacks in the last two years have dropped off precipitously, but at their height, there was a near constant barrage. A few times a day, residents in these border villages would hear the sirens telling them they had just 15 seconds to find shelter.
Yaron has had two close calls. Twice he’s found himself without shelter. Twice he has felt the ground shake and the dust cover him.
The second time that it happened, the rocket fell fifty feet from him. When the dust cleared, he could see the mangled metal body of the rocket sticking out of the ground.
Yaron is a blacksmith and a metal artist, and looking at that smoldering shell, he was overcome with an urge to make something beautiful. So he began taking the fallen rocket shells, melting them down, and hammering them into beautiful roses. He sells these roses and donates a portion of the proceeds to help build bomb shelters to protect his neighbors. To him these metal roses are sign that something both strong and beautiful can grow out of adversity, that violence cannot quench hope. Isaiah says we should beat swords into plowshares; Yaron hammers rockets into roses. It’s not always easy, but he is trying to turn terror into something more triumphant.
How do we hammer the hard parts of our lives into something beautiful? Or if not beautiful, maybe functional. Or if not functional, maybe we can at least soften the sharp edges. It is an art to move forward after tragedy or trauma. The field of positive psychology calls it “Resilience.” This past month, we’ve all been getting a crash course in the kinds of tragedies that require the art of resilience -- and it is an art we can learn through these High Holy Days.
Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and her friend, psychologist Adam Grant, write about resilience in their provocative new book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. Sandberg learned about resilience firsthand when her husband, David Goldberg, died suddenly of a cardiac arrhythmia at the age of 47. In the book, she writes about her own descent into grief and despair, and how Adam’s research about resilience helped her and her children find their way out. For all of us struggling to make sense of tragedy, or supporting people who are, this book can be a powerful read.
Sandberg and Grant define resilience as “the strength and speed of our response to adversity.”[i] They see it, not as an innate ability, but as a skillset. And they conclude that after a trauma, or even before, it is possible to develop this skillset. We can learn to be more resilient.
Before we go any further, it is important to acknowledge[ii] that pain is a part of loss, and resilience does not diminish it. Resilience does not erase all suffering. All of us who have experienced loss, whether in recent days or years past, know this. Building resilience is not about denying pain. It’s about what we do with that pain, how we hold space for it, and how we eventually learn to live with it.
We must also recognize that growth does not give meaning to our pain. Sandberg experienced what psychologists call “post-traumatic growth” by developing more self-awareness and strength. But she says she would happily trade her new self-knowledge for a little more time with Dave. It’s a sentiment all of us who have suffered a loss know well. Finding strength in the face of hardship does not mean we should stop trying to diminish hardship in the world.[iii]
And finally, resilience in the face of tragedy is not simple. There are people in this room who are at this very moment experiencing great upheaval. Some of you have been displaced by the storm. Others of you are facing an illness in your life or the life of a loved one. Some of you have lost jobs, ended relationships, experienced violence, or seen abilities decline. For me to stand here and tell you to look for the silver lining would be cruel. All I, or anyone else can do is reach out our hand, and say “I’m here for a hug, or to help you pull yourself out. Whichever you most need.” This morning, as I speak about the possibility of resilience, I do so knowing that this may seem distant for some of you. But I hope today we might plant a seed that will sprout when it’s ready.
So, if resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity, how do we teach ourselves to be stronger and faster? Psychologists like Martin Seligman say we do this by learning to understand our natural responses to hardship. Seligman teaches that when tragedy strikes, we are susceptible to three myths. They try to take up residence in our brains like uninvited houseguests. Our resilience is found in our ability to recognize these uninvited visitors and help them find the door. The houseguests are:” Permanence, Pervasiveness, and Personalization.[iv]
Permanence is the belief that I will always feel the way I do right now. It is not just saying “life will never be the same” – for that is surely true. It is saying, “I’ll never be happy again.” Yes, our world will be irrevocably changed, but psychologically speaking we are actually pretty bad at predicting how we will feel in the future. Psychologists have studied this. They call it affective forecasting. When people are asked to predict how sad they will feel before an event occurs, they tend to overestimate relative to how they actually report feeling months after the event. Essentially, when things are going wrong, we are predisposed to think we will continue to suffer[v]. When we are stuck in the myth of Permanence it is harder to notice our progress.
The second houseguest is Pervasiveness, which says that all aspects of our life will be affected by the trauma. Pervasiveness is the thought that “I can’t find anything funny anymore.” It is the myth that says you’ve lost all havens in your life that could feel normal or even good. Pervasiveness includes the guilt we feel when we do start to feel happy. It is the way we convince ourselves that if we laugh, we are moving on too quickly and doing a disservice to the memory or the event. When we are stuck in the myth of pervasiveness, we expect our pain will permeate into all aspects of our lives.
The third houseguest is Personalization, the sense of guilt or responsibility we feel for tragedy that is not our fault. It is the “I could have’s.” The “if I’d only’s.” Learning from your mistakes is one thing, but blaming yourself for events outside of your control is another thing entirely.
After her husband's death, Sheryl Sandberg blamed herself for not finding him sooner. She later wondered if she should have pushed him to eat better when he was alive. But even when she could no longer think of any specific way to blame herself, she noticed that she was apologizing. She writes, “[I apologized] to my mom, who put her life on hold to stay with me for the first month. To my friends who dropped everything to travel to the funeral…. To my colleagues for losing focus when emotion overwhelmed me.”[vi] Apologizing had become a smokescreen for her feeling of personal responsibility for her husband’s death. When we are stuck in the myth of personalization, we make ourselves into the enemy.
When tragedy strikes, these three unwanted house guests invite themselves into our brains. Permanence says, “you’ll always feel this bad”; Pervasiveness says, “every part of your life will feel this bad”’ and Personalization says, “you are to blame.” We cannot stop these guests from coming to visit. They are pain’s natural companions. But we can learn to recognize them for what they are and to know when to ask them to leave.
The themes of the High Holy Days can help us learn to recognize these three houseguests. Take for example the difficult and heart-wrenching words of Untaneh Tokef. Cantor Simmons so beautifully showed us this morning how the separate components of the Untaneh Tokef fit together into a unified whole. And each piece of this prayer contributes in its own way to the larger message of resilience. As we listen to these themes in this prayer, it can teach us how to find resilience in our own lives.
The first paragraph of the prayer speaks to Permanence and Pervasiveness. “Untaneh Tokef k’dushat hayom — ki hu nora v’ayom.” “Let us proclaim the holiness of this day, it is full of fright and dread.” These days are set apart. We feel as if the passage of time has stopped -- that is Permanence. We feel as if everything hangs in the balance -- that’s pervasiveness. But these days will end. The book will close. The shofar will sound, the fast will get broken and life will go on. We will get back to normal. The Days of Awe are structured as if to say, “you cannot live in this kind of intensity of purpose every day, so live it fully for 10 days, and then move on.” When we pray these words, we say, “I know these feelings are intense, but I also know they have an expiration date.”
The next section of Untaneh Tokef teaches us to confront Personalization. We read the words, “B’Rosh HaShanah yikateivun; uvYom Tzom Kippur yeichateimun.” “On Rosh HaShanah it is written; on Yom Kippur it is sealed: who will live and who will die…” It reminds us that there are many things beyond our control. The disaster can strike at any time, for no reason at all. We storm-tossed Houstonians know this all too well. But, the prayer declares, “repentance, prayer and charity, these help us transcend the harshness of the decree.” Notice that they do not change the decree; rather, they help us to deal with it. When we pray these words, we say, “I know what I cannot control, so I will behave with intention in the places where I do have control – my actions towards myself, God, and others.”
We, who have seen the water rise, know from tragedy. We, who have had to tear out sheetrock, know from pain. Some among us have lost everything. Many among us have comforted friends who saw their lives washed away. There are those who know other traumas. We know the tragedy of a job lost, or a loved one’s illness. We know the pain of a marriage ending or an unexpected death. Tragedy is a tear in our lives, like the mourner who rends his clothes as a sign of his torn heart. There is an old story about a king who finds a scratch on his most prized ruby, and is distraught until someone comes and etches the ruby further, turning that scratch into the stem of a rose. Just as Yaron turns his rockets into Roses, this person knew that we cannot erase the crack. But over time we can learn to transform it.
Theologian and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation... we are challenged to change ourselves.”[vii] Untaneh Tokef has taught us taught us hard truths about the world. It can also teach us how to change ourselves in response. It has shown us how to recognize three houseguests. It can also teach us how to evict them.
Sheryl Sandberg describes one of her lowest moments, when the pain of her loss was unbearable. She turned once again to her friend Adam Grant for help. She thought he would say to think positive -- to look on the bright side. In fact, he told her the opposite. He asked her to imagine a way her situation could be even worse. “Are you kidding?” She asked him. “How could this be worse?” He answered: “Dave could have had that same cardiac arrhythmia driving your children.”[viii] Sandberg was instantly thrown into an unfamiliar feeling. She was sad for her loss, but she was suddenly so grateful for her two children and that sense of gratitude softened her pain.
Maybe this is how we make sense of the terror of the words of Untaneh Tokef. Who by fire? So far, not me. Who by water -- Thank God, my family survived. There is so much to fear in these dire words if we use it to look forward. But looking back at the past year, the words seem more like Adam Grant’s question of “how could it be worse?”
Every night at dinner, Annie and I start our meal by saying a thing we are grateful for. Some days it is big things, like when our daughter Ella does something for the first time. Most days it is something small, like finishing a project at work or getting a text message from a distant friend. There are days when thinking of something to be grateful for is incredibly easy. There are days when it’s incredibly hard. The days when it’s hardest are the days we push ourselves to think of two things, or three of five. Because those are the days when it’s most important, where it would be easiest to forget that we are blessed. People who keep a daily gratitude journal report both improved attitudes towards difficult events and improved health outcomes and wellbeing.[ix],[x] The practice of gratitude does not remove our burdens, but it does refocus our energy on our blessings. If, as I speak, resilience feels out of reach to you, then don’t worry about being resilient. Be the kind of person who writes down five things they are grateful for before bed. On the days where it’s especially hard, read back through the last week. I promise it will help.
In the final verses of Untaneh Tokef we declare that we are “broken vessels.” It is a declaration of immense vulnerability. After all the lofty talk of books of life, we stand before God in all our brokenness, asking for God to accept us. In the last month we have been learning how a community holds each other in our brokenness. Together, we are learning how to say more than “how are you doing?” even as we are learning how to respond with more than “fine.” We are learning to push past platitudes like “everything happens for a reason” and “what doesn't kill us makes us stronger” and “when life gives you lemons...”. These phrases do not hold someone in their brokenness; they just minimize their pain. Instead of offering advice, we can emulate God, and offer consolation. The Catholic priest Henri Nouwen teaches, “To console does not mean to take away the pain but rather to be there and say, ‘You are not alone, I am with you. Together we can carry the burden.’”
We will strive for this congregation to be a community of gratitude and consolation. This is the message of Untaneh Tokef for us, this year. In the face of the difficult realities of “who by fire and who by water” we can only offer words of consolation to each other and gratitude for blessings, even when they are hard to find. The final words of Untaneh Tokef praise God’s Holy Name, as if to say when life feels fragile, let it be a reminder of God’s abiding presence. When life feels dreadful, let it be a reminder of God’s glorious mystery. When our lives are like shattered vessels, let words of blessing never be far from our lips...
O Source of life and blessing,
We come to you on these High Holy Days
these days of fear and dread
these days of return and renewal.
We stand before you with all our burdens
with hearts as heavy as rockets rammed into the earth.
We come to you with hearts as hopeful
as shiny metal roses --
the promise of a new blossoming
after the dust has settled.
In the face of all that is temporary
and all that is terrifying,
we come to you in gratitude
for the blessings in our lives,
both the blessings we see
and the blessings that are hiding in plain sight.
We come with gratitude
for the many incredible ways
the members of this community
have offered strength and comfort to each other
in recent weeks.
We pray that you will remind us
that we are not alone,
that we are not to blame,
that we will not always feel
the way we feel now.
That pain,
and joy,
like life itself
are like grass that will fade,
a leaf that will wither.
We pray that these High Holy Days will be a reminder
that even though our fate is sealed
we can choose who we will be in the face of our fate.
God, whose name is holy,
help us through these Days of Awe
to live more gratefully,
to live more resiliently.
Help us to be your eyes
taking notice of the many blessings in your world,
and the suffering and injustice, too.
Help us to be your ears,
hearing and acknowledging the pain of our neighbors.
Help us to be your arms
reaching out to offer consolation
to all those who struggle and stumble.
Help us to be your partner
in the sacred work
of rebuilding this city and this world
as a more perfect expression
of your holy name.
L’shanah tovah
[i] Sandberg and Grant, p. 10
[ii] Many of these caveats were developed from this helpful article: https://ptgi.uncc.edu/what-is-ptg/
[iii] Sandberg and Grant, p. 11
[iv] http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-martin-seligmans-3-ps-helped-me-cope-with-my-husbands-death-2016-5
[v] Sandberg and Grant, p. 21
[vi] Sandberg and Grant, p. 17
[vii] Frankl, Viktor E.. Man's Search for Meaning
[viii] Sandberg and Grant, p. 25
[ix] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755263/
[x] http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/practicing-gratitude-can-increase.php