Forgetting, Remembering, Belonging and Compassion

Forgetting, Remembering, Belonging and Compassion -
offered by Rabbi Diane Elliot - Yom Kippur 5785 ~ October 12, 2024
​Kehilla Community Synagogue, Oakland, California
 
L’shanah tovah. I’m so honored to be here on this most holy day, to pray with you, to sing with you, and now to speak with you. Some of you know me as the wife of Kehilla’s founder, Rabbi Burt Jacobson of blessed memory. Some of you know me as a rabbi, teacher, and spiritual director in Jewish Renewal. Some of you know me as both, and some not at all. 
 
For those who are receiving today’s service primarily through your ears, I stand here on the bima, a woman of medium height, pronouns she/her, wrapped in a great, flowing white silk prayer shawl, with pale skin and short brown hair, a former dancer now creakily bordering on old age, wearing reading glasses, which I may repeatedly take off or put back on, because I can’t tell if they make any difference.
 
I don’t have to tell you—because we’ve said it over and over during these holy days, and because your bones know it—that this has been a hard, sad, gut-wrenching, heart-stopping, awful year—in the world, and for me personally. Caring for Burt at home during his illness, a choice we made together, was a great honor, a profound learning, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done. He passed away on a brilliantly sunny Shabbat morning, exactly 16 weeks ago today. I feel his spirit here with us now, hovering over his regular front row seat (where I’ve been sitting during services), blessing us, and kvelling.
 
I’m going to speak about remembering and forgetting, belonging and compassion in a very personal way today. It ws hard for me to write this talk. Part of what made it so hard to write, to even think clearly, besides grief, is my trepidation about stepping on people’s hearts. I live more from feeling than from theory, and to be authentic to my own lived experience, I can’t pretend to be different than I am––a white Ashkenazi second-generation American-born Jew, a child of the 1940’s and ‘50’s, who has spent much of my life reclaiming my ethnicities and addressing stuck trauma responses––distressing symptoms in my body and mind––and feeling “other” (if not “othered”), even within my privilege. 
 
Yom Kippur is a day of viddui, of truth telling, and also a day of selichot, of offering and receiving forgiveness. Maybe some of my experience will resonate with yours, maybe not. I humbly ask your forgiveness if anything I share inadvertently excludes or hurts you or makes you feel othered.  
 
Last night Rabbi Dev asked us to attend closely for a few minutes to what it feels like in our bodies when we sit in the judgment seat, and how it feels to move to the seat of raḥamim, of compassion. Today I want to ask a different but related question: what does it feel like—how does it feel, in your body­­—to belong? How do you know when you belong somewhere? Is it a mind state or more of a felt bodily sense? A combination? Take a moment and maybe remember a time or a place when you felt real belonging. Maybe you feel that here, now. Does your belly relax, do you feel welcomed, comfortable, settled, seen? Like you can let your guard down? This is a question that I’ve long asked myself, because, though I’ve been part of many groups, many communities, even communities I’ve co-created, in some way I’ve never really felt that I truly belonged. Anywhere. My body-mind has never felt fully “home.” 
 
Maybe the fact of having lived at five different addresses by the time I turned four and having moved many times since then has something to do with that. Or the fact of being highly sensitive. I am the eldest of four children, born in 1949, at the end of a devastating decade, to a dad who had fought in Italy in World War II and dropped his last name, Goldstein, after experiencing virulent antisemitism in the army, and a mom who, when she was only six, lost her own mother to septicemia in the aftermath of an abortion. While I enjoyed many advantages growing up in white, privileged, upper-middle-class suburbia, unprocessed trauma permeated our household. (Think Ordinary People, only Jewish.) 
 
In 1956 a 24-year-old British auto-didact named Colin Wilson shot to instant fame with the publication of his landmark monograph, The Outsider, a study of the archetypal alienated white male in western literature and art. I and so many of my cohort consciously or unconsciously embraced that archetype, rejecting the “establishment,” our parents’ values, their economic and lifestyle choices. We became the “counterculture,” cool, hip, free, mobilized––or perhaps more accurately demobilized­­––by the phrase coined by psychedelics guru Timothy Leary, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Out. Far out.
 
Dressed in tie-dyed tank tops and homemade bell bottoms, cutting our teeth on marijuana and hashish and those little blue pills, professing free love, grooving to hard rock and folkie protest music, we tried in our own self-absorbed way to say, “Enough already!” Enough of war and bloodshed, enough of genocide and victimhood! Enough of racism and police brutality, of sexism and conformism and every ism! Who would want to belong in a world like that? 
 
But even on the outside, I felt outside. Not able to tolerate drugs—when I smoked a joint, I didn’t get a high, just a cold––not feeling so free about loving or sex, not wanting to get beat up by burly Ann Arbor cops or shot at by the National Guard, I nevertheless engaged in my own hot critique of the materialistic suburbia I’d grown up in. I wrote bitter poetry, made jagged dances, and moved from one roach-infested New York City tenement to another, living the dancer’s bohemian life––but not truly leaving the “home” I grew up in, still benefiting from my middle-class whiteness, even as I rejected it.
 
Maybe it wasn’t just coming of age in the 1960’s, in the long shadow of war and holocaust, that shattered my sense of belonging. Maybe it was a much older strain of outsider-itis, rooted deep in the soil of my Jewish and Israelite lineages, exemplified in those archetypal figures who populate our sacred scriptures: Abraham, who’s told to leave behind kith and kin, jettison his cultural attachments, to follow an all-powerful Deity; or his son, Isaac, who is nearly sacrificed to that God; cunning Jacob, who risks everything to steal his brother’s blessing and then must flee for his life; and his son, Joseph, so hated by his brothers that they vow to kill him, but instead end up selling him into slavery in Egypt, where he rises to power but remains ever the outsider. 
 
And what about Moses, perhaps the ultimate exemplar of identity confusion—a Hebrew baby, adopted by an Egyptian princess, who grows up in a palace, separated from his enslaved blood family, until he suddenly realizes he is not of that place, kills an abusive slave-master, and must run for his life to the wilderness? Outsiders, all! Did any of them—or their sisters, wives, daughters--ever feel that they belonged? How did they experience community? Learn to care for their fellow beings? 
 
Love the stranger, our scriptures remind us over and over, because you were strangers! You know the heart of the stranger! And perhaps in the set of our nervous systems, in our epigenetic legacy, strangers we remain. Perhaps this is the “land” we’ve inherited, exiles even in the spaces of belonging we strive so hard to create.  
 
A story: while living in Minneapolis in the 1990’s, I joined a Jewish Renewal havurah. After a year, a conflict broke out over who should lead the group, and our little community imploded. People stopped speaking to one another; the group scattered, leaving people bereft. A small contingent of us met for nine months, trying to knit things back together. When that effort failed, I invited whoever wanted to, to join me in addressing the question, why do Jewish communities so often blow up in conflict? Why do we so often turn on our leaders and on each other? 
 
Seventeen people signed up. Looking for a place to gather, I realized I didn’t feel comfortable meeting in any Jewish space in town, the synagogues or the JCC. So I met with the director of the Powderhorn Phillips Cultural Wellness Center, a space established by visionary women of color, dedicated to promoting well-being of body, mind, and spirit for folks in one of Minneapolis’s poorest neighborhoods. “We’re Jews. We’re not poor and we’re white,” I told her (there were no people of color in our havurah). “But we’re wounded and unwell. Our communities don’t cohere. We don’t know how to love ourselves or each other.” She cried with me and invited us in. When we arrived for our first meeting, we found that someone had put a mezuzah up on the wall near the door, alongside the African, Hmong, and Indigenous American cultural symbols. We felt welcomed.
 
Each month for over a year, we sat in a circle, read, talked, told our family stories, invoked our ancestors. I brought my background as a dancer, contact improviser, somatic therapist, and mindfulness practitioner to facilitating the group. I’ll never forget one session when I suggested that we try a simple movement exercise: to hold a partner’s hands and support them to squat. I explained that there’s a reflex, the tendon guard reflex, in which all the muscles of the back side of the body contract in readiness to fight or flee. When a person is carrying unprocessed trauma, this fight/flight response can get stuck in the body, making it hard to squat, much less stand on the ground, receiving earth’s full support.  
 
As people partnered up, holding one another’s hands, sinking toward the floor (we were younger then!), I began to hear sobbing. Words spontaneously poured out, a jumble of stories of parents and grandparents forced from their homes, running for their lives in the night, no ground to stand on, no place to belong. This went on for a long time. We tried to witness—to withness––one another. Some of us couldn’t even stand to be touched or held in our grief.
 
Every year, shortly before High Holy Days on the Shabbat of Parashat Ki Tetzei in the Book of Deuteronomy, and again on Shabbat Zakhor, one of the special Shabbats leading up to Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, these words are
traditionally read in synagogues all over the world: 
בַּדֶּרֶךְ בְּצֵאתְכֶם מִמִּצְרָיִם: עֲמָלֵק לְךָ זָכוֹר אֵת אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂה
Remember what the Amalekite people did to you on your way out of Egypt, how they attacked you from the rear, your weary ones, your elderly, your women and children. So, when you are settled in a safe place, the Land that YHVH is giving you as an inheritance — תִּמְחֶה אֶת־זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמָיִם––wipe the memory of Amalek from off the face of the Earth, לֹא תִּשְׁכָּח: –– don’t forget!
 
This is not the club of memory I want to belong to. Yet if I am somehow a de facto member of this club, this club of the long memory of betrayal and persecution, of attack and retaliation wired into my very nervous system––amygdala, hippocampus, cerebellum––how can I simply choose to resign and join another club, one that doesn’t require me to fear and exclude and wipe out the memories of other people, even the ones who have hurt me? 
 
Or is this verse possibly saying something else? That when we’re settled, when we have rest from surrounding enemies, when we have some space to breathe, a modicum of safety, we need to remember to forget our fears and enmities, to process them through and to release ourselves from the trauma matrix, so that we don’t unconsciously act out on others the hurts we sustained? So that we can remember to re-member that we humans are all members of the same club, all indigenous to this Earth? 
 
What I’ve learned is that in order to do that very difficult thing––to remember to forget in order to remember––which is teshuvah––I have to be willing to face my own shadow, face it squarely, and grapple with the fear that binds me beneath the level of consciousness, the way Jacob wrestled with the dark angel of his own fear and jealousy. We have to wrestle with the instinct to “other” that lives in our bodies, in the very set of our nervous systems, our hair-trigger reactivities. We have to be willing to hang out with uncomfortable bodily states, to support one another in bringing consciousness to those scabbed-over, unhealed wounds that subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—isolate us, leave us feeling alone, bereft, hungry for contact, distant from Spirit. Only by attending deeply to the ways our pain has bound us upon the altar of the wrong god and caused us, in turn, to pain others, can we hope to fully belong here on this earth, in this community, in this room, and to thrive together.
 
Part of what drew Burt and me together was that we recognized in one another a fellow outsider, someone dissatisfied with the way things are, who lives outside the box, who sees what could be and advocates and works for that. But while the “classic” Outsider in white western culture retreats into themself and focuses on self-realization through self-expression, Rabbi Burt, though in many ways a product of his times, broke that mold. After many years of grappling with his own inner demons––something I got to witness at close range––he chose to envision a space, a structure, that would support not only his own, but other people’s expression, a community of and for “outsiders,” a community sensitized to the basic human need to belong, yet not predicated on others’ non-belonging: a Synagogue Without Walls, a real space, and also a holy aspiration, a mandate to gently, with compassion, dismantle our inner walls and so grow our capacity, our tolerance for living in loving community. A synagogue where he himself and others might find a home and aspire and act together to bring about a better, more compassionate, more inclusive reality. He did so with the religious sensibility of a prophet, the esthetic sensitivity of an artist, and the social urgency of an activist. His vision, his invitation, has opened up space for others—for each of us—to bring our gifts, to practice being human together. 
 
When Rabbi Burt saw that Kehilla was well launched, now in its third and fourth and fifth generations of leadership––active, alive, multi-generational, becoming more and more fully diverse, gradually over the years building itself into a true “caring community,”––he felt at peace, he felt he had accomplished his life’s work—though he still had one final burst of ambition, and that was to complete his writing on the Baal Shem Tov. 
 
Because, as Rabbi Dev shared on Rosh Hashanah, for Burt, the Baal Shem Tov represented the fountainhead of compassion, of love, of non-judging acceptance, the portal to a Jewish spiritual path focused not on surviving as a nation nor on wiping Amalek from the face of the earth, but on rebuilding the sacred Temple of the human heart. And whether or not the Baal Shem was a deeply flawed human being—and Burt believed that he was, and that grappling with his own flaws in a religious context was the very source of the Besht’s spiritual power—we Renewal Jews have chosen the Besht’s lineage of love and compassion. This is where we situate ourselves, where we belong. This is the superpower that drives us toward honoring the brilliance of our differences and, at the same time, recognizing the intrinsic Source of our oneness.
 
The great 20th century prophet, James Baldwin, wrote, “Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can be felt….”  
 
We come together on these High Holy Days, and especially on Yom Kippur, naked and empty-handed, eyn banu ma’asim, to enter as clear-eyed as we can into the vortex of uncertainty––“Who shall live and who shall die….”––to join together in the great symphony of living/dying, to tune our instruments to the key of compassion, and to loosen our cherished identities, so that as agudat aḥat, a unified kehilla, we can feel our belonging to one another and help one another swim in the strong current of grief and love ever flowing through the great Ocean of existence. 
 
Let us remember and imprint the feeling of this Day of Atonement when, for a little while, we strip off the beautiful clothing of our individual selves, our identities, and float together in the vast Sea of Compassion, so that when we dress again, our clothes are just a little looser, there’s a little more space to breathe, a little more breath to share with one another.