Rabbi Laura Geller gives a short and simple explanation of who this book is for in her blurb about it. She writes that ”this is a book for all those among us who have been touched by trauma, by violence, by natural disaster, by illness, by marginalization or by family disfunction.” In other words, this is a book for everyone, for who is there among us who has not been shaken or who someday may be shaken by one of these experiences?
The essays in this book are testimonies by people who have dealt with the sorrow of stillbirth or the difficulties of a contested divorce or the experience of a near fatal accident or of being near the finish line of the Boston Marathon when the bomb exploded, or the torture of having to care for a loved one who has Alzheimer’s disease or the loss of a loved one. If there is one thing that they have in common, it is the honesty with which they recount what this experience has done to their faith and to their lives.
As each one of the writers in this book comes to understand, no one ever recovers from trauma, but some people are able to go forward from it, and to incorporate it in their future lives, and it is these people who can be our guides and our teachers.
The people who write in this book are all wounded souls. Gone forever is the glib and certain faith that they may once have had, and in its place are the scars and the aches that will never go away, and, in some cases, a hope and a hard-earned wisdom that will enable them to survive and to help others survive as well.
The essay by Lawrence Hoffman, who is the retired professor of Liturgy at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is an example of this kind of honesty. It will disturb many, but it will force its readers to think about the meaning of what they are saying when they pray.
He begins by saying that he cannot pray the traditional prayers any longer after the dreadful experiences that he has gone through because they seem to say that suffering is the result of sin, and that it can only be overcome by repentance, and he does not find that helpful. And then he goes on to say that he cannot pray the modern Reform Jewish prayers when he is in distress either, because they stress the importance of being happy and of being in community, and he says that when he is in grief and in pain its cheerful words grate on him.
And so, he ends up wishing that there could be services for those who are sick at heart, places where they could be together with each other without having to also be with those who only want to sing and dance and be happy.
He says that to praise God as the One who feeds all mankind as it says at the beginning of the Birkat Hamazon feels dishonest to those of us who know how much starvation there is in this world, and that to say that we have never seen a righteous person go hungry, as it says at the end of the Birkat Hamazon is offensive to those who know that this statement is simply not true.
And yet he admits that at least twice in his life, once when he sat at the bedside of his 15-year-old daughter as she prepared for another futile operation and once when he sat at the bedside of his dying wife, he said the words of the traditional prayers even though he berated himself for doing so afterwards. I read Dr. Hoffman’s lament with sympathy and yet I feel that his criticism is unfair. When Miriam, the sister of Moses, whom he loved and who had saved him more than once, was ill, Moses prayed only five simple words, words of one syllable each, and yet they helped. I think that they helped Miriam if she heard them and that they helped Moses too.
And so, I feel that his criticism of traditional prayer is unjust. Any words or no words can be helpful in time of crisis if they come from the heart. This is why, when Hannah stands at the entrance to the sanctuary at a time at a time when she feels abandoned and unhappy, she calls her prayer “the outpouring of her heart,” and if she used words, they were said so quietly that Eli, the High Priest, who was passing by, could not understand them.
The traditional prayers can be the simplest and the most human way to pray when one faces a crisis in one’s life, and so I am not comfortable with his generalization that the classic Jewish liturgy is just a confession of guilt and a plea for forgiveness. It is that — but it is more. It is, or at least it can be, the way in which the heart reaches out to God.
And it is not really fair to label the contemporary Reform liturgy as just a time to feel community and to celebrate joy. The very fact that the Reform movement has published this book on how to live with suffering is proof that celebrating with joy is not its only purpose, and that singing and dancing are not its only way to worship.
But by raising these points, Dr. Hoffman will make everyone who reads this essay think seriously about what mature faith is and what it is not.
And this is what the rest of the chapters in this book do, each in its own way. I never noticed before that there is so little in our liturgy about how to mourn for a stillborn, and I agree that the reason for this may be that the traditional liturgy was written by men, and not by women. I had never thought before about what the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease do the caretaker, and not just to the victim until I read this report by a woman whose life has been changed by the new responsibilities that her husband’s illness has put upon her And I never thought before of what the effect of a nearly fatal accident has on a person until I read the chapter in this book about how the anniversary of the date when he had one has become a day for self-examination for him.
And so, I recommend this book as one that all of us should keep handy just in case we ever need it. It is a book that has much to teach us about how to survive the traumas that come upon each of us at some time in our lives, because it tells us how others have gone through these experiences and how they have emerged stronger and wiser as a result.
Rabbi Jack Riemer is the author of “The World of the High Holy Days,” and of “Finding God in Unexpected Places,” and the co-author with Rabbi Elie Spitz of “Duets On the Psalms.”
