New & Old Mourning
Dear Friends,
Earlier in the week I received one of those terrible calls that rabbis receive. “Steve died. He was killed in a motorcycle accident.” I went over to sit with the two boys, who I know from Bar Mitzvah lessons that took place mostly on a basketball court, their mom, and Steve’s mom, and the community that had begun to gather around the mourners. Since the call I had already been making prayers, with my breath an exhale of communion, accompanying the soul on its way away from this world. With my oud, which had gone untouched for months, I sang to open the circle, and then we told stories, memories silly and profound.
The funeral will be on Sunday, which is also Tisha B’av, the day of national Jewish mourning, which holds the brokenness of the Jewish story, histories of destruction, persecution, trauma. From a young age I understood that mourning, like all domains of spirituality, could be politicized, the tremendous experience of grief, manipulated to chart the course of the future toward particular aims. I hated the victimization of Judaism, and avoided the holiday. Further into my years, I see the paradox of grief and healing. We are broken by our losses, our way of being altered, how could we not be changed by our woundedness? Healing is not a process of restoration, but a movement into loss that opens us to new worlds, rather than one that closes us in on ourselves.
Judith Butler has written profoundly on mourning. “I am not sure I know when mourning is successful, or when one has fully mourned another human being … Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned.” (Butler, Precarious Life)
There is a comment in the Talmud amidst a discussion about how long periods of mourning should last, Rav Ashi teaches – new mourning is different from old mourning. New mourning, when someone loses a father, partner, or son. Old mourning, commemorations of the destruction of the Temple thousands of years ago, the pogroms and the exiles, the Holocaust. The violence of the Holocaust is incomprehensible, as is its mourning. What separates new from old mourning – we are only three generations from the Holocaust. Is it a matter of time? Does new personal mourning illuminate the experience of old communal mourning. I’m reading Winona Leduke recounting the histories of Native American genocides, and recalling Lewis Hyde’s work on remembering and forgetting the traumas of American slavery, as part of the process of healing. We’ve just now arrived at the historical moment where we understand that our communities (Jewish, Black, Native, American, Israeli) cannot move forward, until the past has been well mourned.
I am nursing the healing of a wound, it is a slow mercurial process, attuning to the subtleties of bones and ligaments, how to distinguish aging, change, wholeness, healing. One of my favorite aphorisms is relevant. “Before creating a wound, God has already created its healing.” Cause for faith woven into time, the instinct and tendency that leans toward repair. But healing time, mourning time, is not chronological, our eyes lie. Our histories, personal and communal, are in knots, futures tied up to present and past. The messiah sitting at the gate awaiting our presence, with a pile of thread, the work a sympathy of hands. Before the new garment, the work of repair.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman