When I left Poland the second time – it was in the middle of the night – old friends accompanied me to the train station in Warsaw, along with some Polish dignitaries. At departure time, as I stood alongside the carriage in the station, a woman approached me with a request: she had a sister in Jerusalem, whose husband worked in Tenuva on Yechezkel Street. Her elderly father was traveling to her on this same train, and she asked that I invite him into my cabin so that he could travel with another Jew. Of course, I agreed. I went into the carriage with her and we moved her father, together with his possessions – a meager collection – into my compartment.
When I later entered the compartment and looked at this Jew, I saw before me a face as yellow as wax, a white beard, melancholy eyes, and all of him a bundle of nerves. When I questioned him – who and what and so forth – he was silent and gave no answer.
I, too, fell silent. After some time he asked me to help him to open his suitcase. Inside I saw a shofar, candlesticks, a havdala set, tallit and tefillin, some books and some garments, and a few other things. He took out the book Noam Elimelekh, and started reading. I did not try again to engage him in conversation, for I felt that he did not wish to talk.
Before lying down on the bunk to sleep (right after the war, Poland did not yet have upholstered bunks, nor sleeping coaches), I had something to drink and asked if he, too, would like to drink. He nodded his head. I poured for him. After he had drunk, he began talking with me, and told me, in short, that he was a Belz chassid from Galicia. He was old, and had suffered much hardship. He told me about everything that happened to him under Hitler's rule, how he lost his wife and some of his children, how he was saved, and how he was now emigrating to the "Land of the Living." Suddenly he stopped and was silent. He would not continue. He remained sitting, his eyes sad. After this oppressive silence for a few moments, I left the compartment. When I returned, I found him stretched out on his bunk. I, too, lay down on the other bunk, but I could not close my eyes. All my thoughts were focused on the man opposite me and all that I had heard from him.
At daybreak, I arose to pray before non-Jewish travelers would embark. The man opposite me neither rose nor stirred, although he was not sleeping. After praying I took something to eat and drink from my bag. I asked if he wanted something to drink. He gave no answer. A few hours later I asked again, and he nodded his head to indicate that he was ready to drink. And thus he drank a few times during the day, never uttering a word. He looked at his book for a while, and sat. His silence was terrible, and cast an awful depression over me. I was tormented.
After midday he began to speak. He said, "After everything I went through, and after everything that my eyes saw, with God having no compassion and no mercy – I shall not pray to Him. I shall anger Him, too."
I was silent and gave no answer. A sigh burst forth from my heart, but I said nothing. He, too, resumed his silence. Towards evening, when it was almost dark, I began to arrange my things for disembarkation in Prague (he was to continue to Paris). Suddenly, he asked me to help him to take down his suitcase, and he took out his tallit and tefillin. He wrapped himself in his tallit, donned his tefillin, and stood up to pray. I was astounded at the sudden change. However, I remained silent and said nothing. After he finished praying, he said:
"Strictly speaking, I don't have to pray. Still, is the Almighty not in need and worthy of pity? What does He have in the world? What is left to Him? And if He was compassionate towards me and left me alive, He deserves for me to show compassion towards Him, too. That's why I got up to pray."
He finished speaking; tears rolled from his eyes and he began to weep. "Woe… the Master of the universe also needs pity." I wept together with him. I parted from him in tears and with the hope that we would see each other in Jerusalem and merit the coming of the Messiah. That shocking scene will never be erased from my mind. To this day, his words resound in my ears: "The Master of the universe also needs pity."
That is the power of faith.
S.Z. Shragai was the first mayor of West Jerusalem after the state gained independence in 1948. He tells this story after serving as an emissary to refugees immediately following the war.
As I read this story this week, it jolted me. There are moments in the course of the world that feel like they tear at the very fabric of our universe. When children are killed, it’s certainly one of them. These moments beg for compassion for all. If there is a God that created this world, that God needs pity. These moments beg for an explanation or a justification that just simply doesn’t exist. Questions arise in our minds.
How can we muster the belief to pray in a moment like this?
Can we even have faith in a moment like this?
Maybe those are the wrong questions.
Maybe there are events that are so tectonically painful that they require all of us, no matter our theological identities to offer pity to whatever power we believe manifests in the universe. No deity, no spirit, no energy, and no force could possibly exist right now and not be in need of pity.
All week long, I imagine you have had their cherubic faces and fiery red hair flash across your screen. All week long, perhaps all these months long, you have held out a scintilla of hope that the rumors weren’t true. That maybe Hamas, in all their cruelty, was playing one last trick and letting us think they were gone only to reveal that they miraculously survived. Alas, in a cloud of inevitable lamentation, we got confirmation that those babies were killed.
After news like that, not much can be said. What words could possibly capture what this moment feels like? In moments of intense grief like these, I often turn to the Piacezna Rebbe, Reb Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the defacto Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto who ultimately was killed during the shoah but whose writings were found after the fact.
In August of 1941, he wrote the following:
There are calamities for which it is possible to accept consolation. A person may have had an illness from which he recovered. Although he had been in great danger and in tremendous pain, when with God's help he was healed, he was immediately consoled for all the pain he endured. Similarly, if money was lost, then when God restores the lost fortune, consolation follows quickly.
But when lives are lost, it is impossible to accept solace. It is true that when the pain is due to the loss of family and loved ones, or to the loss of other Jewish people because they were precious and are sorely missed, it is possible to take comfort in other surviving relatives and different friends. But any decent person mourns the loss of others not simply because he misses them; it is not only his yearning for them that causes pain and distress. The real cause of his grief is the death of the other – the loss of life
There are certain pains in life that can be assuaged. We get sick and then we heal. We lose something material only to gain it back eventually. But death is unique in its pain. Our sadness is not simply because we long for them but because those that die have lost out on life. How much more so is this felt when we’re talking about babies?
Often in Jewish circles you’ll hear that prayer and learning can serve as a salve for painful moments and the Piacezna Rebbe brings that up. But he wisely anticipates the challenge of prayer in moments like this. When faced with profound suffering, it’s hard to even enter into prayer. In a different essay around Rosh Hashanah in the Warsaw Ghetto, he noted that in their especially precarious times, the community was having a hard time mustering up the energy to pray. He explained as follows:
…this is simply because our bodies are so weakened and Jews have no more strength…What has caused this to happen? Firstly, as King David said (Tehillim 138:3), "On this day when I called, You answered me, and strengthened me with strength in my soul." When a Jewish person prays, and his prayers are answered, his subsequent prayers are even stronger and stimulated to greater passion. But when he prays and then sees that not only are his prayers not answered but his troubles actually increase, may the Merciful One protect us, a person's heart falls and he can not arouse himself to passionate prayer.
We know this feeling. We understand that not all prayer is answered. That gap is an inherent part of faith. But when happens when the troubles increase, when the pain feels too much to bear? Left with this teaching, we might think that there’s no option to pray but the Piacezna Rebbe doesn’t leave us there:
The Jew is falling now, lying prone and crushed, there is no one to be aroused in prayer.
However, King David said (Tehillim 130:1), "Out of my straits I called upon God." That is, I called not just from one straitened circumstance, but from straits-plural. Though I called upon You when I fell into my first crises, and not only was not answered and rescued but plunged even deeper into crisis - straits within straits - nevertheless, I take strength and call upon You again.1
When the book of Psalms talks about calling out to God, it uses plural language. For the Rabbi Shapira, that implies an understanding that there are going to be these moments in life, true moments of despair, when we really have to dig deep to find the cry. That feels apt for a moment like this. But maybe it’s still too raw and fresh. To be honest, I don’t want to pray right now. So I dug deeper.
Then the Piacezna Rebbe goes on by quoting a teaching that true connection to the Divine only comes from a place of joy. So if I am in such distress, should I give up on feeling any semblance of that connection? Not so, he argues:
This is the very reason why God appeared to Moses for the first time from within the burning thorn bush. Rashi (Shemot 3:2) explains the choice of the thorn bush by quoting the verse (Tehillim 91:15) "I am with him in his pain."
…when God is, as it were, together with the Jews in their pain and trouble, then prophecy may also come to the prophet who is likewise in pain over the plight of the Jews.
….Thus, we learn that while in the outer chambers of heaven there is always "strength and rejoicing" before God, within the inner chambers, God weeps in distress, as it were, over the pain of the Jews.
In the ideal, perfected world, connection with a sense of divinity comes from a place of joy. But we don’t get to live there usually and certainly not this week. So what does the Piacezna Rebbe teach us? We are not alone in our weeping. Take a look around you this week. For all of our fractures and divisions, our tears have brought us together, even if only for a few moments.
Before we even think to pray, we cry because in the deepest parts of our existence, wherever and whomever it is you conceive of as a greater power, they too are crying and are in need of our pity for creating a world in which babies are butchered in their mother’s arms.
And yet, we still want *something* because we’re human after all. The Piacezna has one last answer for this. He looks around a world with intense suffering and sees others either attempting to deny it or to justify it on religious grounds. He throws both arguments out. The suffering that comes from death is a part of life and we have to note it and pay attention to it not attempt to rationalize it.
One logical answer for what comes next is hope. But there’s a challenge with hope which many of us now feel after maintaining the smallest amount of it that those babies would come back alive.
It is clear, amidst all this suffering, that if only everyone knew that they would be rescued tomorrow, then a great majority - even of those who have already despaired - would be able to find courage. This problem is that they cannot see any end to the darkness. Many find nothing with which to bolster their spirits, and so, God forbid, they despair and become dispirited. This is how Rashi explains the meaning of "Be wholehearted with God your Lord." Even if you are broken and oppressed, nevertheless be artless and whole. Take strength in the Divine because you know that God is with you in your suffering. Do not attempt to project into the future, saying, "I cannot see an end to the darkness," but simply accept whatever happens to you.... 2
Hope projects us out of the present. As painful as the present it is, it is where we’re living. We find ourselves in these acute moments of distress where we feel shattered and not wholehearted. He reads the text asking us to be wholehearted creatively though. Specifically in the moments when we are broken, don’t seek out hope but seek out presence in the present. Don’t escape; be wholehearted.
Despair though is also not the answer because that signals that that nothing is worth living for. Being wholehearted means accepting the present in which I find myself, not justifying, not awaiting whatever is on the other side of the horizon but just being right here, right now. Feel your heart in all of its fullness. Because if we all do this, if we promise to feel this moment together, we can be reminded that we’re all in it.
Before we pray, before we learn, before we act, before we try to allay the pain by imagining a better future, we have to just be in it with everyone else who is in distress. In doing so, we can remind ourselves that we’re all deserving of some pity right now. We cannot escape this on our own.
The terror that has been struck by Hamas in this moment is meant to afflict us emotionally because they can’t touch us physically. That intention is to get us so dejected that we give up. So in response, we stay in it. We note our pain. We remember how it feels. We remind ourselves that we’re not alone in it. And we cry. For our tears are also note alone as the Piacezna Rebbe argues:
We learn in the Talmud (Berakhot 32b): "R. Elazar said: 'Since the day the Temple was destroyed, a wall of iron has separated the Jewish people from God.'" Why is an iron wall necessary? Because prayers of the Jewish people can break down stone walls, and so an iron wall was erected. But against screams like these, how can even an iron wall remain standing? It is impossible to comprehend. For we are certainly not alone in our prayers.
Our fathers and our mothers, all the prophets and prophetesses, all the righteous men and women are not at rest, they are not silent while we suffer. They are surely turning the whole Garden of Eden and all the holy palaces upside down, on account of our suffering. 3
Today we are weeping together, not just us here but all of “us” who have come before, all of our ancestors. Our tears join with their tears to become a sacred fountain of lamentation, spreading pity to all that need it, ready to uproot the very foundations of our world. I wonder if that’s what activated that man on the train. He had been somewhere else but then in that moment, he was there, fully present. I’m not there yet so for now, I am here, in this moment, with you.
Let’s stay in it together today and leave tomorrow to tomorrow.
Shabbat Shalom
Sacred Fire, p. 230
Sacred Fire, p. 213
ibid., pp.328-329
So profound. Yes, life is so very complicated, filled with sadness and heartbreak, as well as love and laughter. Prayer is nice, but communal love and caring is a necessary to get one through our difficult times. And, of course, acceptance, that there is only so much we can do. Hugs and love. ❤️ Z
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