About ten years ago, I discovered an album of the poet David Whyte called “Solace: The Art of the Beautiful Question.” At the time I was leading Ask Big Questions, an initiative of Hillel International I had helped to found, and so the title intrigued me. Yet even as I’ve transitioned to new work and new stages of life, listening to this album has become an annual ritual, part of my practice of preparing for the High Holidays. (I wrote about it last Rosh Hashanah too. Like any good work, it repays regular visits.)
Whyte explores a lot of terrain over the course of two hours. He reflects on loss and renewal and becoming. He offers beautiful ruminations on pilgrimage. He talks about exile and homecoming. And because Rosh Hashanah encompasses all of these themes (seriously, Rosh Hashanah is a rabbi’s favorite holiday, because you can write a meaningful sermon on just about anything–its lens is so vastly wide), I find listening to this album prompts fresh and deeper reflection year after year.
The second part of the recording begins with a series of reflections on grief and solace. Understandably (I hope), it was this section that really spoke to me as I listened this year. Because we have all done a lot of grieving this year–of lives lost, of realities shattered, of ideas we thought were solid that, perhaps, turned out to be less durable than we assumed. And, perhaps even more challenging, so many of us have not been able to grieve properly, as our worlds and realities are fundamentally unmoored, the possibility of feeling at home strained to the breaking point, as if we’re climbing a staircase without any landings–no rest and no respite.
“Solace,” Whyte writes elsewhere, “is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.” And the most basic gesture of that solace comes not through our minds, but through our bodies. Here is how he describes it at the end of a poem he wrote after losing a close family friend:
For this loss I could not speak,
the tongue lay idle in a great darkness,
the heart was strangely open,
the moon had gone,
and it was then
when I said, “He is no longer here”
that the night put its arms around me
and all the white stars turned bitter with grief.
the tongue lay idle in a great darkness,
the heart was strangely open,
the moon had gone,
and it was then
when I said, “He is no longer here”
that the night put its arms around me
and all the white stars turned bitter with grief.
To me, the image of the night embracing us in our pain, the stars crying along with us, is beautiful and powerful–and evocative of the sound of the shofar. Or, perhaps more accurately, what I think the shofar can and is meant to help us do.
The Rabbis of the Talmud understood that the middle sounds of the shofar blast–the shevarim or teruah–
Frequently at this time of year I get questions about the theology of Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer that asks, “Who will live and who will die?” and, inevitably, the Holocaust: Where was God? Why didn’t God save the Jews? This year I’m hearing from friends and relatives similar questions about October 7 and the year since.
Here’s my answer, in two parts: a) I don’t know; and/but b) I also have found that looking for that kind of intervening-in-history version of God isn’t all that helpful for me, as I find it leads me to a theological and experiential cul-de-sac. At this point in my life, I have found other conceptions of divinity that are more helpful. Here is one of them.
The Rabbis of the Talmud taught that the Divine presence travels with us into exile and will be with us in redemption (Megillah 29a). The sixteenth-century mystical master, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, elaborates: “Shechinah is the one who is expelled with us, ascending with us and descending with us. She is redeemed with us and exiled with us. She is the one connected to us always, never separated from us under any circumstance. She dwells with us. Our deeds cause her union or separation or mercy. It all comes from us, for she depends on souls” (Ein Yaakov 1:3).
Speaking for myself, I experience a strong desire to hear the tekiah of the shofar as a stirring blast to pride and courage–the kind of sound I often associate with national glory and military honor. But/and: that kind of orientation can also lead me towards understandings of the Divine as acting–or not acting–in history, and away from the much more personal, intimate, often painful and challenging kind of heart work that the broken middle notes call us to do.
Each of us relates to that heart work in our own way, at our own pace, in a language that is, at its deepest level, only decipherable to ourselves as the Infinite One. This, too, is an invitation of the shofar: to be in a way that is both before and after the language we can share with others; to live, if only for a long moment, in the expansive silence of a wordless cry.
As the new year enters, I want to bless you, as I hope you will bless me, that through our shared experiences of grief and loss, through our silent witness to one another, we might come to also sense the love and support of the Creator and creation, the divine presence that is always available, the night that puts its arms around us, the whole notes that embrace the broken in the cry of the shofar.
