the hidden blessing of brokenness
It should not come as a big surprise to those who know me that I have this dream of becoming a rabbi someday – you know, "when I grow up" – if I can ever find a way to attend rabbinical school. Every brick-and-mortar rabbinical school I know of is located far from Houston, most of them in the northeast (NYC, Philly, Boston, and Cincinnati), and while there is one distance-learning rabbinical ordination program that is the equivalent of a full five-year rabbinical education, it is run by a group ("ALEPH - Alliance for Jewish Renewal") about which I know very little and with which I have had no interaction – their nearest affiliated congregation appears to be in Albuquerque.
But I digress. One of the things I enjoyed about the pre-pastoral life back in my Presbyterian Seminary days was the practice of sermon-writing: the effort to write one short (okay, not if you're Presbyterian), witty, and wise treatment of a religious subject each week felt like a good way to channel my creative side.
So, I've decided to try, for a couple of weeks anyway, to write one sermon each week as if I were going to deliver it at Erev Shabbat services.
I understand that such sermons are usually supposed to have something to do with the week's Torah portion, but I have also witnessed numerous rabbis at times diverge from that tradition. Whether the idea is "kosher" or not, since I have my mind on "Blessings of Judaism" for a book I am hoping to write this summer (another story for another time), I thought I would write my first few sermons on various "treasures of Judaism" – ideas from and/or about Judaism that have caught my attention in some way in recent weeks.
So, without any more ado, here is my first attempt: "the hidden blessing of brokenness"
- - -
An acquaintance of mine recently asked me something about how Judaism deals with our shortcomings, our failures to be perfect people all the time, that sort of thing.
This is a big deal to her: her central relationship with the Divine centers around the idea of God's Grace, which means (to her) that God has the graciousness to meet her where she is in life, despite being a highly imperfect person, and to forgive her for her imperfect faith and imperfect actions. She sees herself, perhaps because of messages she got from a rather judgmental mother when she was growing up, as constantly falling short of the person she ought to be. As a result, she is in constant need of God's Grace to put herself in right relationship with a God who she seems to see as rather intolerant of human failures and foibles, at least until that Grace thing kicks in.
I should take a moment to mention a few things here about this lovely person. She is a devout United Methodist, though I have known her to question a few core beliefs like the Virgin Birth from time to time. She sometimes gives of her free time to help with literacy and poverty-alleviation programs in her community. She is a special education teacher who pours far more than the required 40 hours a week into giving her students the educational assistance they desperately need. She is, in my mind, more a candidate for sainthood than a person in desperate need of forgiveness.
But that is not what her Christianity teaches her. Well, I shouldn't speak for her, but Christianity always taught me to be hyper-aware of my sins and shortcomings, my flaws and imperfections, so that I would always have a clear idea of what it was I needed Jesus to save me from, to forgive me for, in order to make me once again acceptable to a God who dearly loved me but at the same time couldn’t stand to be around this much human fallibility without Christ somehow intervening to make me acceptable once again. Christianity taught me to be hyper-aware of my broken-ness, but also to be ashamed and perhaps a little afraid of it.
I point this out not to criticize Christianity – a religion that clearly works pretty well for a good many people, even if it never really did for me – but as a contrast to some of the ideas about "brokenness" that I have encountered in Judaism: ideas that imply that God created us this way for a reason and maybe even values us for that very brokenness that my former religion taught me to fear.
For starters, Judaism clearly does have a concept of sin, a concept that lines up pretty well with the English phrases "falling short" or "missing the mark." But Judaism does not share the Calvinist ideas that our sin utterly separates us from God, or that the "total depravity" of human nature makes us entirely sinful.
Instead, Judaism teaches us that we all contain both a yetzer ha-ra, an inclination to bad behavior, and a yetzer ha-tov, an inclination to do good. And it teaches us that we cannot live without either, as in this oft-repeated story from the Talmud (Yoma 69b):
But I digress. One of the things I enjoyed about the pre-pastoral life back in my Presbyterian Seminary days was the practice of sermon-writing: the effort to write one short (okay, not if you're Presbyterian), witty, and wise treatment of a religious subject each week felt like a good way to channel my creative side.
So, I've decided to try, for a couple of weeks anyway, to write one sermon each week as if I were going to deliver it at Erev Shabbat services.
I understand that such sermons are usually supposed to have something to do with the week's Torah portion, but I have also witnessed numerous rabbis at times diverge from that tradition. Whether the idea is "kosher" or not, since I have my mind on "Blessings of Judaism" for a book I am hoping to write this summer (another story for another time), I thought I would write my first few sermons on various "treasures of Judaism" – ideas from and/or about Judaism that have caught my attention in some way in recent weeks.
So, without any more ado, here is my first attempt: "the hidden blessing of brokenness"
- - -
An acquaintance of mine recently asked me something about how Judaism deals with our shortcomings, our failures to be perfect people all the time, that sort of thing.
This is a big deal to her: her central relationship with the Divine centers around the idea of God's Grace, which means (to her) that God has the graciousness to meet her where she is in life, despite being a highly imperfect person, and to forgive her for her imperfect faith and imperfect actions. She sees herself, perhaps because of messages she got from a rather judgmental mother when she was growing up, as constantly falling short of the person she ought to be. As a result, she is in constant need of God's Grace to put herself in right relationship with a God who she seems to see as rather intolerant of human failures and foibles, at least until that Grace thing kicks in.
I should take a moment to mention a few things here about this lovely person. She is a devout United Methodist, though I have known her to question a few core beliefs like the Virgin Birth from time to time. She sometimes gives of her free time to help with literacy and poverty-alleviation programs in her community. She is a special education teacher who pours far more than the required 40 hours a week into giving her students the educational assistance they desperately need. She is, in my mind, more a candidate for sainthood than a person in desperate need of forgiveness.
But that is not what her Christianity teaches her. Well, I shouldn't speak for her, but Christianity always taught me to be hyper-aware of my sins and shortcomings, my flaws and imperfections, so that I would always have a clear idea of what it was I needed Jesus to save me from, to forgive me for, in order to make me once again acceptable to a God who dearly loved me but at the same time couldn’t stand to be around this much human fallibility without Christ somehow intervening to make me acceptable once again. Christianity taught me to be hyper-aware of my broken-ness, but also to be ashamed and perhaps a little afraid of it.
I point this out not to criticize Christianity – a religion that clearly works pretty well for a good many people, even if it never really did for me – but as a contrast to some of the ideas about "brokenness" that I have encountered in Judaism: ideas that imply that God created us this way for a reason and maybe even values us for that very brokenness that my former religion taught me to fear.
For starters, Judaism clearly does have a concept of sin, a concept that lines up pretty well with the English phrases "falling short" or "missing the mark." But Judaism does not share the Calvinist ideas that our sin utterly separates us from God, or that the "total depravity" of human nature makes us entirely sinful.
Instead, Judaism teaches us that we all contain both a yetzer ha-ra, an inclination to bad behavior, and a yetzer ha-tov, an inclination to do good. And it teaches us that we cannot live without either, as in this oft-repeated story from the Talmud (Yoma 69b):
“The sages ordered a fast of three days and three nights, after which the yetzer ha-ra was surrendered to them. It came out from the Holy of Holies like a young fiery lion. One of the rabbis said to the others: realize that if you kill him, the world goes down. They imprisoned him for three days, then looked over the whole land of Israel for a fresh egg but could not find one.”
Why could they not find a fresh egg? Because without the yetzer ha-ra, there is no sex drive and therefore nothing is conceived.
The Midrash for Genesis further tells us that “without the yetzer ha-ra, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children” and other retellings of this story have added that, without the profit motive, nobody would open up their businesses to make and sell the things on which our society depends.
And so, the story goes, the sages reluctantly let the yetzer ha-ra go free again, knowing that each of us will just have to wrestle with it on our own terms.
We can take home a lot of messages from this story, but the one I want to home in on is that Judaism tells us that even our so-called "bad side", our selfish urges, are essential to life on earth. God can use our sinful side to bring about life!
But my point here is not just that our willful, stubborn, selfish side can be used to bring about good results. What about those times when we are desperately trying to be good but just can't seem to do it right?
I recently ran across another Jewish teaching story that answers this question:
There once was a water-carrier in a small village, who would spend his days walking from the village to the nearby stream to collect water and then carrying it back to the village in a pair of buckets.
As it happened, one of his buckets had a small leak. Not much of a leak, just a drop of water here and there, but enough that you could easily tell the difference between the leaky bucket and the other one by the time the water carrier got back to town.
Now, in these stories even the water buckets have feelings, and the leaky bucket began to feel quite ashamed of itself as time went on, and quite sorry for all of the extra work it caused the water carrier.
One day it couldn't hold these feelings in any longer and it said to its owner: "I'm so sorry that I am a leaky bucket. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't have to make quite so many trips to the stream each day. Maybe you should replace me with a bucket that doesn't leak."
The water carrier smiled. "You are fine just the way you are," he said. The leaky bucket did not understand, so the water carrier asked his other bucket a question. "Bucket," he said, "tell me what you see."
"I don't see much," replied the un-leaky bucket. "I see a dirt road and a lot of dusty footprints. What do you expect me to see? I'm just a bucket."
Then the water carrier asked the leaky bucket "what do you see?"
"I see a whole mess of grass and wildflowers on my side of the road," replied the leaky bucket.
"And that," said the water carrier, "is why I will keep you just the way you are. Because of your drips of water every now and then, I get to enjoy beautiful wildflowers all the way to the water and back."
And so the lesson I take away from this story is that God does not only tolerate our broken-ness, God blesses it and uses it for higher purposes that we may never see or comprehend.
But perhaps the ultimate contemporary expression of this Jewish "praise of broken-ness" comes from the late Leonard Cohen, a singer-songwriter who lived his whole live as a devout Jew and never saw any point in divorcing his Jewish sensibilities from his songs.
Cohen's songs are full of the word broken, but that word is never used in a purely pejorative way. For example, the original album version of his song Hallelujah contains this verse (a verse that is not included in the more-familiar version that has been covered by everyone and their singing dog):
Now, we could unpack the Jewishness of this verse in lots of ways, but I want to zoom in here on the "blaze of light in every word" that includes the "broken halleluyah." To Cohen, even when we sing our prayers from a place of brokenness, we manage to catch God's light with our broken halleluyahs.
But Cohen proves my point about the value Judaism puts on blessing our brokenness best with the chorus from his less-well-known Anthem, with which I will close today:
Blessed be God for putting a crack in everything,
Amein
And so, the story goes, the sages reluctantly let the yetzer ha-ra go free again, knowing that each of us will just have to wrestle with it on our own terms.
We can take home a lot of messages from this story, but the one I want to home in on is that Judaism tells us that even our so-called "bad side", our selfish urges, are essential to life on earth. God can use our sinful side to bring about life!
But my point here is not just that our willful, stubborn, selfish side can be used to bring about good results. What about those times when we are desperately trying to be good but just can't seem to do it right?
I recently ran across another Jewish teaching story that answers this question:
There once was a water-carrier in a small village, who would spend his days walking from the village to the nearby stream to collect water and then carrying it back to the village in a pair of buckets.
As it happened, one of his buckets had a small leak. Not much of a leak, just a drop of water here and there, but enough that you could easily tell the difference between the leaky bucket and the other one by the time the water carrier got back to town.
Now, in these stories even the water buckets have feelings, and the leaky bucket began to feel quite ashamed of itself as time went on, and quite sorry for all of the extra work it caused the water carrier.
One day it couldn't hold these feelings in any longer and it said to its owner: "I'm so sorry that I am a leaky bucket. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't have to make quite so many trips to the stream each day. Maybe you should replace me with a bucket that doesn't leak."
The water carrier smiled. "You are fine just the way you are," he said. The leaky bucket did not understand, so the water carrier asked his other bucket a question. "Bucket," he said, "tell me what you see."
"I don't see much," replied the un-leaky bucket. "I see a dirt road and a lot of dusty footprints. What do you expect me to see? I'm just a bucket."
Then the water carrier asked the leaky bucket "what do you see?"
"I see a whole mess of grass and wildflowers on my side of the road," replied the leaky bucket.
"And that," said the water carrier, "is why I will keep you just the way you are. Because of your drips of water every now and then, I get to enjoy beautiful wildflowers all the way to the water and back."
And so the lesson I take away from this story is that God does not only tolerate our broken-ness, God blesses it and uses it for higher purposes that we may never see or comprehend.
But perhaps the ultimate contemporary expression of this Jewish "praise of broken-ness" comes from the late Leonard Cohen, a singer-songwriter who lived his whole live as a devout Jew and never saw any point in divorcing his Jewish sensibilities from his songs.
Cohen's songs are full of the word broken, but that word is never used in a purely pejorative way. For example, the original album version of his song Hallelujah contains this verse (a verse that is not included in the more-familiar version that has been covered by everyone and their singing dog):
You say I took the name in vain
Well, I don't even know the name
But if I did well, really, what's it to ya?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken halleluyah!
Now, we could unpack the Jewishness of this verse in lots of ways, but I want to zoom in here on the "blaze of light in every word" that includes the "broken halleluyah." To Cohen, even when we sing our prayers from a place of brokenness, we manage to catch God's light with our broken halleluyahs.
But Cohen proves my point about the value Judaism puts on blessing our brokenness best with the chorus from his less-well-known Anthem, with which I will close today:
So ring the bell that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in...
Blessed be God for putting a crack in everything,
Amein
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