Rabbi Daniel Greyber, Beth El Synagogue - "The Exile of Sadness"
Rabbi Daniel Greyber serves at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, NC. This contribution is a sermon that he recently shared with his faith community.
A sickness afflicts modernity; we exile sadness. Time after time, people sit in my office or stand with me at the cemetery and, when they start to cry, they apologize, as if tears are a turpitude and sadness a sin. These apologies are a symptom of an emotional illness that plagues our society. Emotional health is the ability to rejoice in happy times, like a wedding or or when a baby is born and it is to feel sadness when someone dies or is sick or when our marriage is ending or we are estranged from those we love. But we apologize for our tears.
Jewish tradition tells a story. When the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, God cried. An angel, Metatron, plead with God, “Let me cry instead.” God responds, “If you do not leave me to cry, I will enter somewhere you cannot enter and I will cry.” Metatron is ashamed of God crying, but God is not. God’s tears do not diminish the divine image. They uplift it.
Simon Biles and Naomi Osaka are top athletes who have helped create more understanding that mental illness is real. It took courage for them to use the word ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety,’ to prioritize their well-being over Olympic medals and tennis tournaments. I told my own congregation about how, a few years ago, I was diagnosed with depression. Mine was fairly mild and, with the help of medicines and therapy and family and friends, I am doing okay right now. Other people’s struggles are much more difficult.
One of my colleagues compared depression to the plague of darkness, “a thick darkness [that] descended upon Egypt…[so thick that] for three days no one could get up from where [they were]" (Exodus 10:21-23). Some people suffer this way; for weeks or months at a time, they struggle just to move or to be concerned with anything outside in the world.
Though we are no longer slaves in Egypt, this darkness still plagues millions of Americans each year. The pandemic has only made things worse. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 4 in 10 adults in the U.S. have reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, a share that has been largely consistent, up from one in ten adults who reported these symptoms from January to June 2019. Depression and anxiety rates rise during a pandemic because, according to the “bio-psycho-social model,” depression and anxiety have three types of cause: biological, psychological and social, and our society and community have experienced a huge and traumatic social “cause” - a year of severe isolation and disconnection from human-to-human contact!
How might our communities better welcome those who suffer from depression and anxiety and other kinds of mental illness? One Jewish text describes how in God’s temple in Jerusalem, most people brought offerings by entering and going around to the right, but not everyone.
“These are they who must go round to the left: a mourner, an excommunicated person, one who has a sick person in his house, and one who lost an object. [When asked,] ‘Why do you go round to the left?’ [that one answers,] ‘Because I am a mourner’. They reply, ‘May the One Who dwells in this House comfort you’. [If she says,] ‘Because I am under a ban’, [they reply,] “May the One Who dwells in this house put it into your heart to hearken to the words of your colleagues so that they may draw you near.” To one who has a sick person at home they say, ‘May the One Who dwells in this House have mercy upon your loved one’; and if the person [at home] is severely ill, [they say,] ‘May God have mercy immediately’. It is related of a certain woman whose daughter was ill that she ascended the Temple Mount and went round it, and did not move from there until they came and told her, ‘She is cured’. To one who lost some object they say, ‘May the One Who dwells in this House put it into the heart of the finder to return it to you at once’. It is related of Eleazar b. Ḥananiah b. Hezekiah b. Gorion that he lost a scroll of the Torah which he had bought for one hundred minas. He ascended [the Temple Mount], went round it and did not move from there until they came and told him, ‘The scroll of the Torah has been found’.
What can we learn from this text? First, notice that those in need have an obligation to identify themselves, to make themselves vulnerable and let people know and see: I am mourning, someone in my home is sick, I have lost something or, I am struggling with depression. Mental illness is an illness, and some levels of care must be left to medical professionals with the capacity to provide appropriate support, but there is also a lot we can do. Too often, if someone breaks a leg or has a cancer diagnosis, we cook and offer rides and reach out, but when it comes to mental illness, we don’t. Yes, those struggling must walk around to the left; they must identify themselves and what needs they have that can be appropriately filled by the community. When they do, the community must meet each person with the appropriate blessing.
Second, notice that the response to each of these people is not to do something; it is to offer a blessing. We should not diminish the power of offering a blessing, nor should we react by trying to fix things ourselves. This video - “It’s Not About the Nail.” pokes fun but contains a really important message: too often we try to fix what can’t be fixed and, in doing so, we leave the person in front of us feeling unacknowledged because we are uncomfortable sitting with the sadness of someone we care about without trying to fix the problem. We react to an admission of depression with phrases like- “can’t you just think about something else…” or “don’t you realize how good you have it…?” or “at least this other horrible thing isn’t happening too…” We try to remind people who are depressed of what they have; we try to help them forget their pain. And yet, by invalidating, we add shame to pain and people feel worse for feeling bad. People most need to feel heard; they need us to be with them, to witness their pain. A blessing may be a powerful tool precisely because it is not practical, but rather it says, “I see you, and I pray that the Source of all healing provides healing now and when I am not right here in front of you.”
Finally, I am very taken with the stories within this text, the ones about the woman whose daughter is ill and the man who lost a Torah who say, “I’m not moving from here.” I can imagine someone in the Temple who thought he was doing his job well by coming along and telling the woman with the sick child or the man who lost a Torah, “You can’t stay here. We’re closing. It’s time to go now.” These people refuse and, in doing so, they remind us that’s what holy places are for!
Religious communities are the places we go when we are hurting most, places not governed by “opening and closing hours,” places where we have access to healing and to finding ourselves, and what we’ve lost. Many stories, of course, don’t have happy endings – not every child gets better, not every Torah is returned – but those people who refuse to leave are reminding us, “Here, here is where we can come to spend the night crying for healing and hoping to find, and to be found, and, if tomorrow we are mourners, we will walk again around to the left and be met with a blessing.”
My family and I arrived to Durham from Israel on July 4, 2011. One day in mid-August, I was rushing from the synagogue to my car in the parking lot when Bekah Resnick stopped me, “Rabbi Greyber, do you have a moment?” I was really in a hurry, though I don’t remember now where I was rushing off to. I was feeling the stress of getting our boys settled into a new home, feeling insecure about how to be a synagogue rabbi, feeling tired from going to meeting after meeting trying to get to know a community who all knew my name but I didn’t know very many of theirs. I thank God to this very day that something moved me in that moment to stop, and put down my bag, to look her in the eyes and say, “Sure, what’s going on?”
I don’t remember now what exactly we talked about, but I do remember when Becca died by suicide a few weeks later after years of struggling with mental illness, how Bekah’s mom told me how grateful Bekah was for that short interaction, that she had felt seen and acknowledged and heard in that moment.
Bekah’s family shared with me how many people in our congregation - through small kindnesses and presence and acknowledgment - did not “fix” what could not be fixed, but helped keep Bekah stay in the world for so long; they were, for her, a source of blessing and light. In turn, Bekah was instrumental in keeping others in the world. Bekah understood the depths of depression and, through her self-understanding, she was able to validate the experience and meaning of others afflicted with this disease.
Through sadness, Bekah and others reveal to us a Torah – a teaching from God – about kindness. The Palestinian poet, Naomi Shihab Nye (b 1952), once wrote
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Before you know what kindness really is
You must lose things
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
…..
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing
You must wake up with sorrow
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore
In the wilderness, Moses pitches his tent outside the camp. In a study of Moses, Israeli author David Sneh points out that outside the camp is where people with illness live. Sneh wonders if Moses chooses to live there because he feels a kinship with them. Moses feels alone and that they too feel alone. By living with those who are ill, Moses expands the boundaries of the camp, the ill are included, and through this inclusion, the community becomes whole once again. So it was then; so may it be for us. It is time to broaden our tent once again, to make space for sadness and tears in our midst. It is time for those who struggle with depression and anxiety and mental illness to know: we want to see you, we want to bless you, we are not whole unless you are with us.
Daniel Greyber is rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, NC and author of Faith Unravels: A Rabbi's Struggle With Grief and God.
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