A Jewish Toolkit for Resilience in Times of Fear
Rosh Hashanah 5785 – 2024
Hayom harat olam. This is the day the world was born. We remember Adam in the garden, the first human created, dancing around the Garden of Eden, taking in all of the beauty of creation: the huge variety of animals, the lush vegetation, the soft grass underneath his feet, the eyes of his beloved Eve, created with him on that final day of creation, the day we mark today. The sun warm on their skin, everything they needed provided for them. Everything was perfect.
…And then, the sun begins to set. The light gets dimmer, the sun sinks lower in the sky. The warmth of the day fades as night sets in, and Adam is beset by absolute fear. He and Eve have never experienced night before, and they are terrified. “Oy li! Because I sinned, the world is becoming dark around me, and the world will return to tohu va’vohu, to chaos and disorder.”[1] Adam took a look at the world around him and he was SCARED, and created a narrative in his head that he was to blame. This darkness was his fault. “As the sky blackens, his alarm turns into desperation. Could it be…that the world is ending?”[2] Eve, his beloved, hears his cries, sees his terror, and comes to sit across from him, weeping along with him. Eventually, inevitably, the sun rises. After a long night of crying in each other’s arms, Adam and Eve realize that a new day has begun, and this is the way of the world.
This Talmudic midrash, retold by Rabbi Sharon Brous in The Amen Effect, gives us insight into that most elemental of human emotions – fear, present from the very first hours of humanity.
Maybe you know this deep existential fear. The kind of fear that convinces you that the world is ending – that the world as you know it, the routines, structures, and relationships that you rely on, are crumbling around you. This fear shows up on an individual level – when a family is upended by tragedy, when a new diagnosis, physical or mental, rocks our worlds, with job loss, abuse, addiction, or divorce. We know this fear on a communal and societal level – on October 7, we woke up to a terrifyingly changed world, a world in which our sense of security as a Jewish people, protected by the existence of the State of Israel and the Israel Defence Forces, was forever shaken.
Maybe you know the kind of fear that keeps you up all night crying. Perhaps from last Rosh Hashanah to this one, you have felt like Adam – sitting awake in those predawn hours, crying with dread.
The question is – what do we do with that fear?
Storyteller Rabbi Marc Gellman imagines a different ending to the midrash of Adam and Eve and their first night on earth, surrounded by all the animals of the Garden, shivering and scared. After the relief of that first dawn, their terror returns when they realize that the sun is sinking in the sky, again. This time though, they are sure that they have a solution. “Let’s build something to stop the sun from sinking!” The animals scurried around piling stuff at just the spot where the sun sank. They hoped that the sun would hit their heap of junk and stop at the edge of the Garden of Eden just before it dipped below the horizon and everything got cold again. The monkey brought bananas and the elephant hauled tree trunks and the squirrel collected nuts and the pile of stuff rose high over the wall that surrounded the Garden of Eden. It was a HUGE pile…but of course, it was powerless to prevent the sun from setting anyway. The inevitable occurred, and God explained to Adam and Eve and all the animals that the sun would rise and set over and over again, forming days, weeks, months, and years.[3]
Sometimes, when that deep existential fear begins to sink into our souls, when we can’t imagine having to survive another dark night, we search for something – anything – to do. We can’t abide feeling powerless, so we rally our friends, our loved ones, and our community to fight the scary stuff, to try to make it go away. As humans, we desire action. We need to feel powerful – if you break apart the etymology of the word “power,” it originates from the Latin poder, which literally means “the ability to act.” To feel powerful in the face of fear is to feel that there is some action we can take, even if that action is useless.
I want to give you a little “behind the scenes” insight for a moment. I begin preparing and writing for the High Holy Days months before they start, and spend much of the summer reading broadly on all sorts of topics, collecting ideas and insights that eventually become the High Holy Days sermons you’ll hear. So when one of my favourite writers, Anne Helen Petersen, interviewed Soraya Chemaly, author of The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, I immediately added Chemaly’s book to my pile. Her argument is that the definition of resilience as personal strength and individual grit isn’t enough to get us out of the dark times. We need “mutual dependence and interconnectedness…[to nurture] our relationships with people, spaces, stories, history, and time itself.”[4] She draws examples from around the world and multiple fields of study, one of my favourites being from neuroscience research that shows that “traditions and rituals such as swaying…and singing in unison are all practices of embodied harmony. All national, ethnic, and athletic cultures have well-developed rituals that bring people together in ways that stabilize bodies physically, emotionally, hormonally, neurologically while bonding participants. As with fans chanting at a soccer game, these physical connections signal affection and rapport and help build connections between people and communities…”[5] Beautiful, right? I immediately thought of all the times we’ve sung together in this room, or I’ve stood in a circle, swaying to the familiar melody of havdalah, the ritual we use at the end of Shabbat. Or every time we’ve risen to say Mourner’s Kaddish together, flanking the mourners in our midst, holding the mourners throughout the Jewish people in our hearts.
But here’s the thing that occurred to me as I read The Resilience Myth, marking pages as I went: she’s not saying anything new – for us. The idea that “resilience draws its power from mutually nurturing relationships in supportive environments, serendipitous experiences, sharing resources, and creating tolerant, compassionate communities”: this is the secret sauce of the Jewish people.[6] We have been building resilient communities for millennia, long before we stood in a circle with a guitar to sway to havdalah. It is in our bones. It is in our Torah, which is the very blueprint of how to be a resilient community – of how to build a society that takes care of each other, that looks out for those whose nights are long and full of fear – the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. This wisdom of resiliency is there for us to rediscover. To remember how to show up for each other. To relearn the ancient wisdom. That is how we get through these dark times.
We’ve done this before. Jewish historian Salo Baron cynically described “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” – the way of telling the Jewish story that emphasises only our dark times, our unending suffering, our brushes with extinction, and our struggle to survive. Jewish history is more than struggle, Baron argued. Jewish history is also a tale of resilience – a story of how our people has survived, time and time again. That is our story, our inheritance.
We’ve built this into our communal infrastructure. Jewish Free Loan Toronto, since 1924, has provided direct financial assistance to Jewish residents of Ontario, Saskatechwan, and Atlantic Canada in need using interest-free loans to help individuals and families navigate challenging times, invest in their futures, and achieve lasting stability.[7] This is communal resilience: setting up structures so that a medical emergency, getting an education, or even paying for fertility treatments or adoption is possible beyond one individual or family’s financial means. Our community has built structures of care, so that after a night sitting up crying, contemplating the worst, we are not on our own to respond. Instead, we can get up, blink new life into our tired, dried-out-from-crying eyes, and make space for resilience, to imagine a different way forward, held by our community. And while Jewish Free Loan Toronto provides loans within the Jewish community, its sibling organization, the Hebrew Free Loan Society in New York, loans to anyone regardless of religious identity – knowing that as a community, we are only as resilient as the society in which we live.
Communal resilience happens closer to home too, on a seemingly smaller scale. Earlier this year, WRJCC started a Chesed Committee, to help people right here who need some support, be it a meal delivery, a ride to a doctor’s appointment, a bag of groceries, or just someone to visit with them. Adam didn’t sit alone on that long dark first night – Eve sat with him. I bet we have some Eve-types here this morning – if you think the Chesed Committee sounds like work you’d like to get involved in this year, to help build our community’s resiliency by supporting individuals and families right here in Kitchener-Waterloo, please speak to Rahel or Jay who can help get you connected, along with any of the other members of the Chesed Committee who are here this morning.
After almost any disaster or horrible news event, a meme inevitably surfaces with a quote from Mr. Rogers, of the beloved American children’s TV show. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” In the dark days and weeks immediately following October 7, the image that continually gave me hope, a break in that endless parade of horrific images, was a photo of Jerusalem residents lined up to give blood. They waited in line for twelve hours. We are the helpers. In Israel, the grassroots network that had built a vibrant protest movement in 2023 harnessed the power of organized people, and many many WhatsApp groups, to collect and distribute donations for the uprooted and traumatized residents of the South and the North – diapers, children’s toys, clothing, food. We are the helpers. This is how we get through the dark times, by being each other’s helpers. This is why the Jewish people has survived for 3000 years. We have a toolkit for resiliency and survival, honed over the generations. The first step in opening that tool kit is showing up for each other, showing up in community.
To return to Adam and Eve in the Garden. They had a number of possible responses to their fear at seeing night descend. In one story, they acted from a place of panic, actions that gave them a semblance of control and power, but in the end, were useless. In the other story, the Talmud is careful to tell us about Eve’s actions. She sits down with Adam, and cries with him. She comes close to him. She doesn’t avoid his fear, or pretend it doesn’t exist, or reassure him with platitudes of “don’t worry, it’ll be ok.” Eve is with Adam in his fear. Rabbi Sharon Brous, in her retelling of this midrash, calls this “the most important question we must answer in our lives: When the night comes, who will sit and weep by your side? Who shares your worry? Who sees you?”[8] I spoke last night about the “surge” in Jewish life post-October 7. The research conducted by Jewish Federations of North America shows that people within our Jewish community are turning to Judaism because the war affects them a great deal. 90% of the Jewish community is concerned about antisemitism (and that’s probably the closest a group of Jews has ever come to agreeing on anything). At this time of fear, worry, and uncertainty, through this long dark night since October 7, we show up for each other. We show up with each other.
When I spoke at the Waterloo Walk for Israel this summer, I quoted Yemenite-Israeli author, Ayelet Tsabari. She spoke of her decision to return to Israel earlier this year, after spending some time with her young family in Canada immediately after October 7. One friend, an Iranian here in Canada, urged her to return home, saying, “At least there, you can breathe together.” Tsabari’s friend echoed Soraya Chemaly’s writing on resilience. Chemaly describes interpersonal synchronization, when our bodies begin to sync up to each other, building resilience as we go. “Each of us is a body, but together we are interbodies. Your body is yours, but it is also part of everyone else’s environment, which has implications for how we respond to stress, hardships, and trauma.”[9] We’re here today to breathe together, and through that breathing, through the singing, through the praying, through every time we open our Jewish toolkit to get through another dark night, we build our own capacity, and our communal capacity, for resilience.
If you’re here today, in some part, because you’ve felt scared at some point in the last year – if you’ve felt deluged by reports of antisemitism in our region, and our country, and our world, if you have been worried for the safety of loved ones in Israel, and what the future will hold for Israel and her Palestinian neighbours and the rest of the region – I’ve felt that too. We’re here to breathe together. I hope you’ll join me on Sunday night, at 7pm at Kitchener City Hall for our communal memorial ceremony for the victims of October 7 – we’ll remember, we will mourn, and we will breathe together.
People turn to Jewish community for all sorts of reasons in times of trouble, and throughout these High Holy Days, we’ll explore a number of different reasons, but I have a hunch that for many people – maybe for some of you sitting in this room this morning – fear is part of it. And we’re all looking to not have to sit alone with our fear. We don’t have to – this community is here, resilient, and growing even stronger, using the wisdom of our tradition, all of our tools of resilience honed over the generations, to enable us to make it through even the darkest of nights.
We’re each looking for the Eve to our Adam, for the person who will breathe with us, sit across from us, cry with us, hold our hands through the dark night. We are Eve and Adam, sitting together, breathing together, crying together through the night, knowing that the sun will rise in the morning.
Shanah tovah.
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[1] Talmud b. Avodah Zarah 8a, as discussed in Sharon Brous’ The Amen Effect (36).
[2] Brous (36).
[3] Marc Gellman, “The First New Year,” in Does God Have a Big Toe?, p. 10-11.
[4] Soraya Chemaly, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, ix.
[5] Chemaly, 38.
[6] Chemaly, xi.
[7] Jewish Free Loan Toronto | Jewish Community Interest Free Loans
[8] Brous, 36.
[9] Chemaly, 39-40.
