The Hand and the Window - A Sermon for Yizkor

Reaching Out of Windows The LORD hurled a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. And the mariners were afraid, and cried every person unto their god; and they cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it unto them. But Jonah was gone down into the innermost parts of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep. I feel like Jonah, fairly often, at the moment. With the storm breaking around me and threatening to break me, fairly often, I just want to pull the duvet over my head. Jonah, in this moment, isn’t an embodiment of the triumph of human possibility in the face of challenge. I’ll get back to that. Here’s a Talmudic tale, imagining the experience of Adam after expulsion from the Garden of Eden “Eat the fruit in the garden, God tells Adam, Mot Tamut. You will surely die.” But instead of death, Adam is exiled. And also this. Let’s suppose the world was indeed created on Rosh Hashanah, that would have exile starting just around about now, in the calendar-year, as the leaves begin to turn And it was as Adam saw the days getting shorter and shorter he said, woe, maybe the world is getting darker and darker because of my sin, and this is headed back to the chaos and disorder of the universe before creation. And this is the sentence that was decreed by heaven. But, of course, the world eventually stops getting darker and darker, and the days start to get longer and longer. And that’s when Adam holds an eight-day festival of lighting candles – a sort of precursor of not only Chanukah but the mid-winter celebrations of so many peoples around the world. Better than Jonah, facing up to the despair and eager to mark its passing, but unable to transform the ever encroaching darkness. One more story; Noah is on the ark, in the midst of a devastation that has wiped out kol hayakum – humans, cattle, insect and fowl of the heavens; really, Covid pales in comparison. And as Genesis Chapter 7 comes to an end, Noah is sealed in, the ark is lined with pitch inside and out with only one window for light and the waters rage for 150 days. This of course is pre-Zoom, or Netflix and the rest of it. And when Genesis Chapter 8 opens, it opens with the words ‘And God remembered Noah.’ Did God forget about his hero? Or is it just that Noah felt forgotten, lost, alone. And this is Noah’s response. Vayiftach Noach et HaChalon Vayishlach et HaArev Noah opens the widow and sends out the raven. He sticks his arm out of the ark and begins the process of re-establishing human possibility in this world. It’s possible, of course, to look at these tales, of Jonah of Adam and of Noah from a psychological perspective. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her book, On Death and Dying, set out five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. That’s a good place to start. And for our Covid-addled times you can add to the list this nagging ennui, maybe a bit of despair and well – there is one other thing. The one thing that perhaps above all might help us get through this time with our souls intact – for that surely has to be the task. What about the moment when Noah opens the window and reaches out his hand? My friend Rabbi Marc Wolf asks the question – what strength must it have taken; to reach out of the darkness and take – what should we call it – a leap of faith, a stretching out a hand from the darkness into the light, an act of spiritual heroism? I want to share the work of Professor Melissa Raphael. She writes, in The Female Face of God in Auschwitz of a desire to try and find something to say to her daughter about the bleakness of the Holocaust. She wants to “wring from her own unease, a respite which conviction and hope moves them to transmit to others.” Raphael collects, from the wreckage of the Holocaust, moments of love and care demonstrated and shared even in times far darker than we – in our rather middling pandemic – have any right to compare to our own existential concerns this year. During roll-call – often lasting a day and a night without interruption – Lucie Adelsberger remembers how the women stood still, in rags, in all weathers, beaten whipped and lashed with pistols if they fell, with empty stomachs, often with diarrhoea and unable to move. And yet here too; ‘furtively and inconspicuously they pressed up against one another to keep warm, and thus they began to support their comrades when they began to reel.’ Charlotte Delbo too remembers how, at roll-call, each woman would both support and be warmed by another by placing her hands in the armpits of the woman in front of her. And when the legs of women in her work detail became too swollen for them to walk the other would try to carry them, terminally weak as they themselves were. One girl,” Raphael continues, “Adele, fling into the trucks turns to help those behind her … She is not afraid. Her arm encircles a weaker girl whose knees are failing her.” Raphael’s point is theological. Not the sort of theology most of us think of when we think of theology – if we think of theology at all. She writes, “The father God, the Monarchal Man of War was of little or no consolation or relevance to these women.” Rather, she writes, these women are embodying a godliness which is made manifest in acts of comfort and care of others. Raphael cites the Talmudic passage where we are called upon to behave like God and the examples of what it means, to behave like God, are examples of simple, yet powerful, acts of Hesed – kindness; clothe the naked, visit the sick, offer comfort to the bereaved. The godliness Raphael is interested in is neither the theoretical postulates of Maimonides or the sectarian claims that demarcate on denomination from the other, but actions that simultaneously bind all humanity towards the existential possibilities of what is greater than all humanity. In our treatment of what is other than us, writes Raphael, we are sustained by a godliness that is more profound than the prototypically masculine models of classic theology that lie broken and wrecked by the Holocaust. Etty Hillesum was a young Dutch Jew, murdered in Auschwitz. Her last recorded words were scribbled on a postcard which she threw out the window of the train that took her to her death. I know what will happen to us next (…) [Hillesum wrote on this remarkable artefact from the midst of that awful terror] The latest news is that all the Jews will be deported from Holland to Poland, through camps in the province of Drenthe, and the English radio said that since last year 700,000 Jews have perished in Germany and the occupied territories. If we do survive than we will have that many wounds to carry for the rest of our lives. And still life makes sense to me, my God, I cannot help it. I have already died a thousand deaths in a thousand camps. I know it all and I do no longer get upset over new information. And still I find this life beautiful and full of meaning, every minute of it. I get Jonah, I know sometimes all I want to do is run away, and pull the duvet over my head. I get Adam, I know it can feel desperately dark and helpless. But more than that, I know I am called, by Noah, and by Hillesum, and those countless myriads of women, and men, who have reached their hands out of the prisons of arks and carriages and lock-downed homes in compassion and love. Reading Hillesum’s postcard both, heart-breaking and heart affirming, is so powerful. It’s about a resistance that survives even death, it’s about holiness, courage and the very nature of life. We’re all doing. This is our spiritual inheritance. This is what has been handed down to us today. This is the job – to keep reaching out the windows, in compassion and love, despite our ennui, and despite the gloom. For what it’s worth, it’s always been the job, the very role of humanity, the very expression of what it means to be human; to keep reaching out the windows. May we always be so emboldened. One last thing. I want to share. A bit of a vision. In my mind, in this strange tangled web of our contemporary Covid-ed existence, our awful history and our very humanity, the hand of Ettie Hillesum reaching out the window of that train meets the hand of Noah, reaching out the window of that ark. And those fingers, in some echo of Michelangelo, touch. Maybe that’s my deepest dream this holy evening. That as we reach out, in these glorious acts of humanity, we touch, and we find someone else reaching out towards us. Chatimah Tovah, May it come to us all in sweetness and in health.