Shira spent her summer
ordering pizzas. It was not what she planned for the summer, but this summer
did not turn out how anyone expected. So she made the best of it. Shira’s
children were supposed to go to summer camp, but camp was canceled. It was not
safe to go outside, so they spent the summer with their mother, ordering
pizzas. Shira, and her family live in southern Israel, not far from the Gaza
Strip, and the threat of rocket fire kept them confined to their home for much
of the summer. So they did a lot of ordering pizzas. But not for themselves.
Or, at least, not only for themselves. Shira’s daughter volunteered for a
project organized by their community where they would call women whose husbands
and sons were on milluim – reserve service, and offer to have a pizza sent to
their house for dinner. Judaism teaches us that when someone is having a hard
time, friends and neighbors should bring them a meal, but if we can’t leave our
house, then we order them a pizza. Shira and her daughters called women from
all over the country, women who were losing, at the very least, sleep as the
violence continued and their husband’s and son’s service stretched on. They
sent dozens and dozens of pizzas. In an e-mail a few weeks ago, Shira told me
that the remarkable thing was how the women responded. She wrote, “They were
all so grateful, but they were also sure that there were other people more
needy or deserving than they.” She was also awestruck at their determination
and grit, and selflessness. Shira and her children didn’t take no for an
answer. They sent pizzas.
Wassam lives in Canada,
with her husband, and her three children. Wassam is a pharmacist and her husband
is a pediatrician at a hospital in Ontario. This past spring, Wassam’s husband
planned a trip to Gaza, where he grew up, to renew his medical license. He
thought he would bring his youngest, his daughter, 8-year-old Salma, to meet
her grandmother. They arrived in early June. When the hostilities broke out,
the doctor volunteered in a hospital emergency room, helping children wounded
in the airstrikes. Soon, he was working 24 hour shifts. Salma stayed with her
grandmother.
Wassam sat at home in Ontario,
watching the news and fearing the worst. Once the war started, travel out of
the Gaza strip was next to impossible, even for foreign nationals. What’s more,
Wassam’s husband felt like he could not miss even one shift at the hospital to
transport Salma to the border. He was one of very few qualified pediatric
emergency physicians in Gaza. There were children there who needed him. So Salma
remained inside with her Grandmother, while Wassam, on the other side of the
world, watched and prayed, and mobilized a network of supporters and government
officials to help her get her daughter home.
When Israel and Hamas
agreed to a short-term ceasefire for international aid workers to enter Gaza, Wassam’s
network seized the opportunity. Canadian officials worked with the consulates
in Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Amman to extract her. Wassam’s husband drove her to
a bus, where she joined other Canadians leaving Gaza. Then he returned to the
hospital to continue to help the children there. Salma and the others were driven
to Jordan, where they were safely put on a plane. On Friday, August 8, Salma
was reunited with her mother, after more than a month away.
Two mothers. Shira and
Wassam. A world apart. United by conflict, united by hope, united by care for
others and fear for their children. Today, I think of them. But not just these
two mothers. The mothers who Shira called, who prayed for their husbands and
sons to be safe. The mothers of the children who lay injured in that Gaza
hospital, while Wassam’s husband tried to heal them. Mothers praying, and
mothers wailing, and mothers having, and losing, and finding hope again.
Mothers calling out for their children.
The imagery of the Torah
and Haftarah readings on Rosh Hashanah is all about mothers. Sarah and Hagar,
Rachel, and Hannah. And not just about mothers in general, but about their pain
and struggles, their prayers, hopes, and tears. So many mothers call out to us
on this day.
Today we read from Genesis
21, the story of Sarah, and the birth of Isaac. When Sarah finally gave birth, she
became jealous of her maidservant Hagar and the son that Hagar had borne to
Abraham. She wanted her own son to have the birthright, the inheritance of
God’s promise, so she asked Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael from their
home.
Hagar and Ishmael were
sent out into the wilderness. When their water and food ran out, and Hagar
could not go on, she placed her son under some bushes and walked a bit further.
She thought to herself “let me not look on as the child dies.” And the Torah says
וַתִּשָּׂא אֶת־קֹלָהּ וַתֵּבְכְּ “And she raised her voice and wept”
(Gen 21:16 WTT). Out in the wilderness, Hagar cries out for her son.
In our Haftarah, we read
from the book of Samuel the story of Hannah. Hannah was married to a man named
Elkanah. Elkanah had two wives, Hannah and Peninnah. Peninnah had several
children, and Hannah had none. This distressed Hannah greatly, especially
because Peninnah would tease her mercilessly. Yearly, Elkanan, his wives and children
went to the alter at Shilo to make sacrifices and on this family outing,
surrounded by Peninnah and her children, Hannah would become acutely aware of
her situation. At the annual festive meal, the Haftarah saysוַתִּבְכֶּה
וְלֹא תֹאכַל , she wept and did not eat (1Sa 1:7 WTT). Up in the shrine,
Hannah cries out for a son.
For tomorrow’s Torah
portion, we will read Genesis 22, the Akedah –the story of the binding of
Isaac. God commands Abraham to take Isaac and offer him as a sacrifice on mount
Moriah. The Torah tells us nothing about Sarah in this story, we have no idea
how she felt. Did she know it was going to happen? Did she learn about it afterwards?
Did she try and stop it?
Responding to Sarah’s
silence, the rabbis wrote a number of midrashim, stories to fill in the gaps in
the text. Many pick up on the fact is the next thing that we hear about Sarah,
in the section that follows the Akedah, is that she has died. The Rabbis wonder
if the news of what Abraham did, or almost did, caused her so much grief and
agony that she actually let go of life. Alone in her tent, Sarah cries out for
her son.
In tomorrow’s Haftarah,
we will read from the book of Jeremiah, written at the beginning of the Babylonian
Exile. In it, the prophet writes, “A cry is heard from Ramah – Wailing and
bitter weeping” -- רָחֵל מְבַכָּה עַל־בָּנֶיהָ (Jer 31:15 WTT) “Rachel weeping for her children”. Our
tradition imagines Rachel, buried near the road from Jerusalem generations
before, could “see” as the Israelites went into exile, and she wept for them,
praying to God to remember them. Even from beyond the grave, Rachel cries out
for her children.
Two days, four readings,
and four wailing mothers. Hagar, Sarah, Hannah, and Rachel. Three of the readings
explicitly use the world לִבכּוֹת
– to weep. The only outlier is the Akedah, where so much pain is implied that
the rabbis created a whole library of midrashim. So many tears are shed in our
text, on this great and awesome day. Too many mothers cry out for their sons.
It’s been a summer of too
many tears. Too many mothers crying out for their sons. Like many Jews around
the world, I spent my summer in a haze. When I turned on the news, I was inundated
with images of war and destruction, pain and death. My Facebook feed was a
constant barrage of posts about conflicts. But I did not see a lot of weeping
mothers on the news. Not as many as you would think. I saw a lot of talking
heads and pointing fingers. I saw a lot of analysis and punditry. Stories about
people like Wassam and Shira were drowned about by the din of body counts and
rocket tallies, by the noise of sirens and politicians.
And it was not just
abroad. Here at home we had our own share of conflict. Watching the news from
places like Ferguson, Missouri was painful, too, and there were so many moments
that called on our conscience. I was struck by how quickly the conversation
turned from one about a community grieving to a conversation about race in
America, about police funding, about wealth and poverty and class. And somehow,
in our quickness to put the events in Missouri into their broader context, I
worry we lost sight of the pain and the needs of the people involved. Just like
in our Torah cycle for today, there were wailing mothers in Missouri, mothers
calling out for their children. Rosh Hashanah calls us to respond to them, and
not just to the politics of the moment.
I'm not saying we don't
need analysis. On the contrary. Clearly a conversation about context is crucial
to creating the conditions for change. And perhaps it is also true that
the wails of mothers can be overwhelming and hard to hear, and it is all too
easy to block out the realities of their pain with the persistence of our
rhetoric. Our instinct when we hear reports of suffering individuals on TV is
to respond to their pain with analysis. How could this have happened? Who is
right? Reports of the fighting in Gaza quickly turn into debates about Israel’s
right to defend itself and about the morality of war. Conversations about
Ferguson quickly evolved into conversations about race, and class, and
privilege. But even as each of the mothers in our holiday readings was situated
in a larger context, each one’s pain was real. Ironically, it’s easier to talk
about the big picture than to listen to the stories of people in pain. Perhaps
it is easier to see the context than to hold in our hearts the sometimes
contradictory emotions that come with empathy. Empathy compels us to say, “Even
if I don’t agree with you, I feel for you.” The annual reading of the stories
of Sarah, Hagar, Hannah, and Rachel call us to check if our inclination to
analyze makes us deaf to the wails of mothers.
In today’s Torah portion,
God says to Hagar, even though I have chosen to side with Sarah and Isaac, this
does not mean I will ignore you in this moment of need. God has chosen Isaac. By
the God’s reckoning, Sarah is right to kick out Hagar and Ishmael so that Isaac
can be guaranteed the birthright. And yet our tradition also focuses on Hagar’s
pain. Even if Sarah is right, or justified, this does not mean that Hagar has
to be wrong. In the story, God never speaks to Sarah, but God does speak to
Hagar, saying, “Fear not, for I have heard the cry of the boy where he is.
Come, lift him up… for I will make a great nation of him.” Hagar cries out for
her son, and God answers her.
It always surprises me
that the Torah and Haftarah we read on Rosh Hashanah are not about the big
picture, about the rhetoric of the day. Today is the birthday of the world, we
could read Genesis 1, the story of creation. Many Reform congregations do. But
instead we spend these days reading deeply powerful stories of personal
petition and divine intercession. We don’t read about the creation of the
cosmos or the need for repentance, we read about the wailing of mothers.
Let’s look more closely
at the story of Hannah for a minute. Hannah is wracked by pain. The pain of
feeling incomplete, the pain of being teased by Peninnah. And so one night, she
goes into the sanctuary at Shilo. The Torah says that with the bitterness of
her soul she offered a prayer to God. She prays fervently, but silently. She
rocks back and forth and weeps. She is alone in the building, though the Priest
Eli sits just outside the door. Eli looks over at her and thinks that she is
drunk. He approaches her and says, "How long will you make a drunken
spectacle of yourself? Sober up!"
Eli cannot see Hannah. He
sees her only in the context of the temple, for which he is responsible. It’s sacrilege
to be drunk in this sacred space! He does not see her pain, he only sees how
she appears in this context, as he perceives her to be defiling the house of
God. He sits at the doorway of the shrine, literally he is outside, looking at
the whole. He only sees Hannah as a small piece inside this larger puzzle. His
concern for the integrity of this institution blinds him to the woman who sits
before him in tears.
Hannah turns back to him
and says "Oh no, my lord! I have drunk no wine… I have only been speaking
all this time out of my great anguish and distress." Suddenly Eli sees
her. She is not only a woman in his shine, she is a woman in pain. When he acknowledges
her pain, she is no longer just an “other,” now he sees her as a mother,
calling out for a son.
It’s not that Eli should
not be concerned with his shrine. It is his job to sit at the gate. But until
his concern for the bigger picture is balanced against empathy for the
individual, he lacks the ability to hear Hannah’s story. We must all be like
Eli, who balances a concern for the shrine with compassion for the people who
sit within it.
Why
do we read about so many wailing mothers on Rosh Hashanah? To remind us that
these next ten days are not just about ideas like the birthday of the world,
the nature of the universe, the power of repentance and forgiveness. Rather these
stories of wailing mothers remind us that these ten days are about people.
Sarah and Hagar, Hannah and Rebecca are crying out, begging us to remember
them. And not just them, but the real people in our lives. Who are the people
we have hurt this year? Who are the people who are crying out to us, who we do
not hear? And when we see the people around us hurting, we must resist the urge
to be right, and instead, we must be sensitive. Our job is not to justify our
actions or react defensively, but instead to help them feel heard. Just like
Sarah and Hagar and Hannah were heard. This is our call for the next ten days.
To reach out to the people we might have hurt this year and begin to make
peace. So when we stand here together at Yom Kippur, we can focus again on the big
picture of our lives and our souls, having first heard the call to compassion for
those around us.
The
stories we read today are not just the stories of mothers who call out for
their children, they are also the stories of mothers being answered by God.
Sarah prays for a son and is answered. Hagar prays that she and her son be
saved, and God hears them. Hannah calls out to God in pain, and God blesses her
with a child. We are challenged to be like God, to hear the mournful call of
the people around us and ask ourselves how we might answer them. Like Eli, we
must first recognize that they are in pain. When we see a person’s agony on TV,
we must resist the urge to change the channel or dial up the rhetoric. We must respond
to them in their pain.
The Talmud says that the
100 blasts of the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah are related to the wails of the
mother of Sisera, the Canaanite General, enemy of the Jews. According to the
book of Judges, Sisera’s mother stood on her balcony and wailed at the news of
the death of her son. The midrash says she cried out 101 times. Tradition says
we blow the shofar to counteract any affect that her crying might have on the
heavenly hosts, so that our T’shuvah might not be discredited on her account. Yet
we don’t blow the shofar 101 times to cancel out every single tear. Instead we
honor that fact that even the mother of our biggest enemy mourns for her son.
When we hear the shofar today, let it be a call to hear the cries of pain that
come from near and far. The sound of the shofar reminds us of the cries of
mothers in pain, and calls us to hear their stories.
About a week after
Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson, his mother Lesley and their family
received a letter from a person who recognized her pain all too well, Sabrina
Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin. In this letter, Sabrina models for us
balancing the need to have larger conversations with our obligation to acknowledge
the individual. She speaks to Lesley as the leader of The Travon Martin Foundation,
an organization whose mission is both to end violence that claims too many children
in America, and also to provide support to the families effected by that
violence. But she writes to Lesley primarily as a mother. A mother who
recognizes her pain. She says:
Michael is much more than a
police/gun violence case; Michael is your son. A son that barely had a chance
to live. Our children are our future so whenever any of our children – black,
white, brown, yellow, or red – are taken from us unnecessarily, it causes a
never-ending pain that is unlike anything I could have imagined experiencing.
This Rosh Hashnah, let us
be like these mothers. Let us balance the cosmic and the global against the human
and the personal. Let us hear the blasts of shofar, not just as a call to
action, but a call to listening. Let us be responsive to those around us and
those on TV who cry out to us in pain, so that we can be better neighbors,
better friends, and better citizens. Let us make this year a year of empathy
and listening. A year when we take to heart the message of the Shema: Listen,
Israel.