It pains me how little stretch of the imagination it takes to place us in Parasha Noach this week. We stand face-to-face with a catastrophe tinged with inhumane violence and suffering, finding it difficult to breathe, to sleep through the night, to do anything but refresh phone screens with news updates or text loved ones we fear may be even closer to the pain. Among the flood of feelings I’ve named with friends, colleagues, and community (grief, fear, heartbreak, exhaustion, overwhelm), the experience that strikes me as perhaps most akin to our ancestor Noah’s plight is what Rabbi Sharon Brous[1] identifies as an existential loneliness, borne of feeling siloed, unseen, or unsafe in a global discourse that is unfolding faster than our social media feeds can keep up with.
Noah, though described as “righteous in his generation,” has always struck me as the loneliest of our ancestors, separated and detached from community throughout the long saga of world-destroying, flooding and repair he witnessed. He’s unable to find others who share his worldview, even after it was safe to leave the ark.
I fear that we, too, risk succumbing to overwhelming loneliness, isolated and alienated in truths each of us hold deep in our bones, no matter where in the bombastic civil dialogue on events in Israel and Gaza we find ourselves. Already, friendships, affiliations, professional spaces and even sacred spaces like our temple community have felt the strain and pain of seemingly irreconcilable differences that back us into increasingly narrow corners, trying to hold onto the anchors of justice and love that we need to keep afloat.
Prescribed, monolithic understandings and dictated single-mindedness have never been Jewish ideals. We are champions of complexity, of holding opposing truths and inconceivable contradictions as holy. Yet the extreme grief of the last weeks has pushed many of us past the nuances we can bear to hold.
In humility, and in a space of truly not yet knowing what path will move our people (and all people) towards a resilient, lasting peace, all I can return to is a simple question immortalized by the civil rights legend Ruby Sales, a question we all deserve to be asked in this moment: “Where does it hurt?” Sales poses this question as the one she learned would best access the core of what we love and live for, in addition to what we hate–necessary revelations if we want to see a change in a crisis.[2]
Amidst all the trauma we’re still reeling from, and fear of all the violence and vulnerability that is yet to come for so many people, I am grateful to be part of a Jewish community that steps closer to one another – as so many did for last Tuesday’s vigil, and as so many of us continue to do in reaching out beyond our usual circles to say “I see you” with tenderness, to ask after each other’s grief, and to make space in our hearts for the anguish of others, whose suffering is bound up in our own.
May we not wait to rebuild our world from the lonely place that Noah experienced, but instead compel ourselves daily to recall the best of our humanity, and the highest ideals of justice that are our legacy. May we dare to keep asking, “Where does it hurt?” and hold our hearts open to different experiences than our own, trusting that the path forward is one we do not walk alone, but one we share.
[1] https://ikar.org/sermons/lets-not-lose-our-minds-rabbi-sharon-brous/
[2] https://onbeing.org/programs/ruby-sales-where-does-it-hurt/