A Heart of Salt

38 going on 17

I was seventeen the first time my heart decided to remind me what happens when it’s not feeling right.

Prinzmetal’s angina, a rare spasm of the coronary arteries, the kind that shows up without warning and leaves you flat on your back in a hospital bed wondering what exactly your body thinks it’s doing. My rabbi at the time, Mark Fasman, came to visit me in the ICU. I don’t remember everything he said, but I remember the one thing that mattered; he gave me permission to be angry, at anything or anyone that I wanted. He didn’t offer a diluted theology or pithy aphorisms meant to allay the pain. He just simply said:

you are allowed to feel this, all of this, and it does not make you less.

I have carried that moment for twenty-one years. It is, honestly, part of why I became a Rabbi, this belief that the most sacred thing you can sometimes do for a person is stand next to them in their pain and refuse to explain it away.

To be honest, I did not expect to need that permission again this past week.

This past Sunday-into-Monday, I found myself back in the hospital with what seems to be the same condition in a very different stage of life. At seventeen I had no mortgage, no three-year-old who has very strong opinions about which pink or purple spoon he needs for his yogurt parfait, no team of people counting on me, no sense that the ground was already slightly unstable beneath my feet before any of this happened. The last several months have been full of real living: a new home, the beautiful and relentless chaos of a toddler who is currently in peak three-year-old form, transitions I chose and transitions that chose me. I had been feeling, before Sunday, a persistent low hum of needing to control things that were not especially controllable: parenting, logistics, sleep patterns and outcomes, and dare I say, the future.

And then my body said: actually, no.

There is a particular quality to vulnerability you have felt before. It does not arrive clean. It arrives with its history attached: every fear you thought you had metabolized, every version of yourself you thought you had grown past, suddenly like Emeril used to say,

bam!

It’s present in the room with you. I was thirty-eight and I was seventeen at the same time. And somewhere in that strange doubled feeling, I found myself wanting badly, to feel close to God, to something larger than my own constriction, both existential and physiological.

This week we begin Sefer Vayikra, the book of Leviticus, and I want to sit with one small, strange detail.

The Torah commands in chapter 2:13:

וְכׇל־קׇרְבַּ֣ן מִנְחָתְךָ֮ בַּמֶּ֣לַח תִּמְלָח֒ וְלֹ֣א תַשְׁבִּ֗ית מֶ֚לַח בְּרִ֣ית אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ מֵעַ֖ל מִנְחָתֶ֑ךָ עַ֥ל כׇּל־קׇרְבָּנְךָ֖ תַּקְרִ֥יב מֶֽלַח׃ {ס}

You shall season your every offering of meal with salt; you shall not omit from your meal offering the salt of your covenant with God; with all your offerings you must offer salt.

That’s a lot of salt which spoke to me this week across multiple levels, including but not limited to my high-ish cholesterol numbers and spanning into the theological plane. The Mei HaShiloach, R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbitza, stops at this and asks: why salt?

Salt is, in one sense, the opposite of growth. Salted earth does not produce. It does not allow goodness to spread and expand. So what is it doing at the altar?

His answer is precise and penetrating:

Salt does not grow things, but it mixes with what is good and adds flavor to it by clarifying and intensifying. One name for the captain of a ship is called malach in Hebrew because he stirs up the waters. And melach is a word rooted in the idea of mixing, of stirring things together that were separate.

So when the Torah says to salt every offering, it is saying something about what we bring to the altar when we are already in motion toward God. The offering itself is the good. The salt, the difficulty, the pain, and the disorientation, the thing that by itself does not grow anything is what gets mixed in. The result is not something of diminished quality. The result is a better taste and deeper knowing, or as the Mei HaShiloach puts it, betach u’ve’da’at-trust and clarity.

He is saying that the hard thing is not the obstacle to the offering. The hard thing part and parcel of the offering. When it gets mixed with the good, the genuine reaching toward something divine, something larger that one’s self, the desire for closeness even from inside the fear, the whole thing becomes more clarified than it would have been without it.

I have been thinking about what it means to relinquish control, well, for the past three and a half years of parenting, not as a spiritual platitude, not as something you say, but as a lived physical reality that a hospital bed has a way of forcing on you. You cannot will your coronary arteries to stop spasming. You cannot schedule your own recovery. You cannot protect your family from worry by managing the situation more carefully. You are just there, and the people who love you are just worried, and your three-year-old is somewhere at home being relentlessly three, and the world continues.

And in that space, which is not comfortable and is not a gift I would have chosen, something opens. Rabbi Fasman knew this when I was seventeen. He didn’t try to close it with comfort. He widened it with permission: be angry; feel this because you are allowed.

I think what I understand now, that I couldn’t have understood then, is that the anger and the fear and the loss of control are the melach-salt. They do not produce on their own. But they have the capacity to be mixed with something, with reaching, with prayer, with the stubborn desire to feel close to something divine, even from inside the mess of it. When that mixing happens, you come out of it tasting something you could not have tasted otherwise.

I don’t know what that is yet. I am still, as of this writing, pretty recently out of the hospital. But I am curiously noticing that I want to find out. And I think that wanting is the offering itself.

Shabbat shalom and Happy Weekend. May this week bring all of us, in whatever state we arrive, the capacity to bring what we have, salt and and all, and find it received.