When Life Makes Us Dizzy

My son texted me recently:  “Did you the guys dangling near the top of the world trade center?”

I hadn’t seen the news yet so I googled it and saw a whole video of what transpired.

For those who may not have seen it, two window-washers at 1 WTC were left dangling in their window-washer contraption over 60 stories above the ground at a very awkward angle because one of the cables holding it up suddenly got slack and so the contraption went practically vertical.

As I’ve said on occasion, I have a particular fear of heights, so I had a sickening feeling just from my son’s text, which worsened the more information I got.  But I suspect that most people sitting here find the thought of dangling 60 + stories above the ground less than comforting.

I would go so far as to say that if I worked in the WTC, I would totally understand if nobody ever cleaned the windows.  My contribution to the psychological well-being of humanity would be to work in an office with filthy windows so no one would ever have to go through what these two men went through.

I want to talk this morning about psychological vertigo.  Now medical vertigo, to be accurate, is not generally connected with heights.  Although we have the association between vertigo and fear of heights through Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film by that name, medical vertigo is associated with loss of balance, sometimes accompanied by a spinning sensation.  It is occasionally associated with heights, though often not.

But I want to talk about "psychological vertigo", the sense that the literary scholar and biblical interpreter, Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, refers to in her commentary on the passage of the Torah that recounts the death of the matriarch Sarah.  In her book, Genesis:  The Beginning of Desire, Gottlieb Zornberg refers to the feeling we may get when we have a profound sense of how vulnerable we are.  

I want to explore different ways that we respond when we sense how fragile we are, when we experience the “near miss” of how differently something could have turned out in our own lives, when we allow ourselves to acknowledge the dangers and mishaps that we see around us.  When the world in some way feels like it’s spinning around us.

Our Torah portion this morning began with the death of Sarah, the first wife of Abraham, the mother of Isaac. 

She died at the age of 127.  Now the NY Times, if they were writing her obituary, would probably not print a cause of death.  She was, after all, 127 years old.

But the ancient rabbis wondered what caused her demise, and several midrashim in which they are quoted connect Sarah’s death with the binding of her son Isaac, which completed last week’s portion.

According to one version, after Isaac was bound on the altar, Satan came in disguise to visit Sarah and told her that Isaac in fact had been sacrificed by his father.  In horror, she collapsed and died.

In another version, he tells her that Isaac was almost sacrificed in Hebrew כמעט ולא נשחט kim’at v’lo nishchat - and would have been, had the angel not spoken up and told Abraham not to go ahead.

According to Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, the second version is terrifying in a particular way.  Sarah was forced in that moment to confront reality in a way that makes you dizzy.  This happened, but it could quite easily have been that.  The dizziness comes from the psychological equivalent of dangling high above the ground in an unstable contraption.

Through this understanding Sarah experienced dizziness, vertigo.  She was unable to continue to live in a world where such a thin line separates salvation from destruction, life from death. 

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb to suggest that many of us are likely to have experienced some version of that in our lives.  The things that almost happen to us or our loved ones, the things that happen to others that we see, can force us to consider the tenuousness of our own lives.  How do you live in a world where sickness and violence are often random and more frequent than we like to admit?

If we’ve felt this, the dizzy vertigo of kimat v’lo nishhat, what if that happened instead of this – then what do we do about it?

Sometimes we get overwhelmed by all the terrifying things that could happen, and do happen. 

Sarah, according to the understanding I shared, was overwhelmed.  She couldn’t continue to live in a world where profound misfortunate is such a real possibility.

I imagine that there is a part of us that shuts down in some way when we allow ourselves to face the frightening aspects of life. 

There are many ways to shut down that are less dramatic than total collapse.  We shut down by closing ourselves off from experiences that could be quite positive.  We shut down by refusing to take appropriate risks.

Sometimes we go to the other extreme.  We say, if life is dangerous anyway, then I might as well avail myself of whatever I can. 

If you haven’t read Ari Shavit’s book, The Promised Land, I recommend it.  It’s an honest, critical look at Israel from the end of the 19^th century to the present.  He criticizes the left, the right, the Israelis, the Arabs.  No particular approach has all the answers, he demonstrates again and again.

In one chapter, he describes the party scene in Tel Aviv.  Now what, you may wonder, is a chapter on the all-night clubs in Tel Aviv doing in a nice respectable book about Israel?

Ari Shavit, a longtime columnist for the newspaper, Ha’aretz, examined the club scene in Tel Aviv as a window into a certain part of Israeli society, to see what he could learn about a portion of the younger generation.  And one thing he discovered is that many young Israelis, by virtue of having served in the Army and lived under the threat of terrorism, really want to be able to relax and have a good time.  They want to be “normal.” 

Except that the clubs he’s describing are quite a few notches more intense than sitting around with friends and having a good time.  Without getting into the details, there’s a lot of risky behavior going on there.   

Many of the young Israelis who frequent these clubs are saying, life is short, you don’t know what will happen, and so, as Shavit discovered, they are “diving right in” and taking risks.

In some ways, hedonism and isolation, diving in and shutting down, are opposite sides of the same coin.  They both avoid commitment and responsibility. 

Is it possible to turn vertigo into something more lasting and productive?

Abraham, following the death of his wife and the near-death of his son, thinks long-term.  He thinks about land and he thinks about descendants.  He purchases Machpelah for two reasons – as a burial ground, but also as a lasting foothold in the land.  He sends his servant to find a wife for his son in order to ensure continuity in the next generation.

I don’t want to make an unfair comparison – Sarah was quite capable of planning for the future, and Abraham had his myopic moments to be sure.

But it’s striking to me that the two-pronged emphasis of much of the book of Genesis is land and progeny, always looking toward and planning for the future.

It requires a kind of compartmentalization.  You can’t spend too much time dangling 60 stories above the ground. 

In the final chapter of his book, Ari Shavit describes being with his children and grandchildren in a park in Tel Aviv.  He describes the willingness of young Israelis who surely understand life’s vulnerability to embrace commitment and responsibility. 

I want to invite each of us to do a little exercise.  Ask ourselves, have we ever felt the kind of vertigo that was ascribed to Sarah?  Have we ever felt the “Oh my God!” of “I can’t believe this happened, or almost happened?”  Have we ever confronted the terrifying reality that all kinds of unfortunate realities can happen, do happen, almost happen?

And then, let’s ask ourselves, what do we do about this feeling during those moments?  Do we try to ignore it?  Do we explore it?

And finally, let’s ask ourselves, what do we do with this feeling in the long-term?  Do we escape in one way or another?  Do we shut down in one way or another? 

Do we try to achieve stability in one way or another? 

Maybe we do a little bit of this and a little bit of that which, I would say, is very human.  We can compartmentalize, or we can allow ourselves to feel opposing things simultaneously. 

To be human, Abraham and Sarah may be teaching us, is sometimes to feel terror at life’s uncertainties and sometimes to feel empowered to take our own decisive action.

To be human is sometimes to be paralyzed by vertigo and sometimes to be energized by virtue, our own and others’.

To be human is to know that things can come crashing down at any moment and yet to want so badly to build and to create.

To be human is to dangle hundreds of feet in the air, on a flimsy contraption, and to do our best to try to clean the windows.

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on November 15, 2014, Parashat Hayei Sarah