Find Me Through One Other: a Brother's Blessing

Jews deal with God in kind of a unique way.  I'd like to reflect on that by exploring a blessing that one brother recently offered another.

Ordination of Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie

But first I want to take you back several decades.  When I was a rabbinical student I worked at Lenox Hill Hospital participating in a pastoral education program.  In my small group of six students were clergy students of other faiths.  Our group included someone preparing to be a Dominican friar, a Roman Catholic lay leader, a Presbyterian minister and a Franciscan monk.

The pastoral work was fascinating.  In addition, it was enormously beneficial to have extended contact with people of other faiths at a similar point in their professional journeys as I was.  We talked often about tradition and community and theology.   We noted our similarities and our differences.

Here’s one area of difference that I noticed and I want to use it as a basis for my comments this morning.

My Christian colleagues took many classes at their respective seminaries in a subject called systematic theology. 

Systematic theology classes, as you might imagine, teach various Christian views on God in a systematic way.  These classes were a major part of the curricula at the various Christian seminaries that my colleagues attended.

We, however, took classes in Bible, Talmud, Jewish history – an occasional class in Jewish philosophy – but proportionately we didn’t spend a lot of time learning the systematic theologies of various thinkers.

Again, proportionately, Jews don’t do a lot of systematic theology.  When we arrive at God, it’s generally not through systematic contemplation.  If I had to generalize I would say that when we arrive at God at all, it’s through our laws, our stories and, not incidentally, it’s through each other.  

Through other human beings – family, community, people, humanity - we sometimes come to some understanding of God.

To reflect on how we might arrive at God through one another, I'd like to share a brief vignette about two brothers.

What To Do With Our Bitterness

Bitterness can be hard to let go.  Case in point:

Chapter 1 of the book of Exodus:  וימררו את חייהם בעבודה קשה Vayemar’ru et chayehem ba'avoda kasha.  

The Egyptians embittered the Israelites’ lives with hard labor.  (Exodus 1:14)

Ch. 15 of the book of Exodus:  After leaving Egypt, after crossing the sea and singing the song of thanksgiving and victory, the Israelites came to Marah ולא יכלו לשתות מים ממרה כי מרים הם v’lo yachlu lishot mayim mimarah ki marim hem. 

They couldn’t drink the waters of Marah because they were bitter.  Hence the name Marah, bitterness. (Exodus 15:23)

How interesting, how sad, how understandable, how human – that the bitterness that the Egyptians imposed somehow remained with the Israelites even after they left Egypt and began to experience freedom.

 Moses looking out toward the Promised Land

This morning, on the last day of Passover, with the resonance of the Passover story still with us and the resonance of loved ones present and no longer present powerful for each of us, I want to talk about bitterness.  The understandable, yet ultimately corrosive feelings of bitterness that most of us have felt at some point or another and possibly are feeling for whatever reason even now.

Did someone hurt us physically or emotionally?  Does life feel unfair? 

Did we not get what we felt we deserved?  Were we discriminated against for one reason or another?

I would define bitterness as the feeling of hurt and resentment that perpetuates a sense of victimhood and misery.

Someone else can embitter our lives, as the Egyptians did for our ancestors, but the extent to which we continue to feel bitter, even after the initial impetus may be gone, often depends more on our volition than we realize – a version of Eleanor Roosevelt’s often quoted statement, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

By and large, no one can impose lifelong bitterness on us without our consent. This can be hard to accept, but what we do with our bitter feelings is largely up to us.