This past weekend I attended my synagogue's biannual Women's Retreat. I was on the planning committee, I led all the music for services and I delivered the "drash" or sermon at Saturday morning's Shabbat service. It was a heartfelt weekend. The community we build at these retreats sends ripples out in my life. I will write more about the experience in a future blog post, but for now, here's my drash. The theme for the weekend was "liminal moments" and the Torah portion for the week was Noah (Genesis 6:9-11:32).
* * * * * * *
“And
to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
~ T.S.
Eliot
Last
weekend I celebrated my 50th birthday. If you’ve already hit 50 then
you know how it feels to get there. If you haven’t, then you may think it
sounds terribly old…I will say that, at least for me, there is something about
it, something different. I felt that difference as my past year unfolded. It
was as if the whole year preceding that 50th birthday was a kind of
preparation. The many moments of introspection, of new perspectives, of fog
clearing away (and believe me, as a women in menopause, the fog clearing away
is no mean feat)…all of these seem to have led me to that day and then ushered
me into this place I am now: the beginning of the next half century of my life!
The
Torah marks the 50th year as a Jubilee year. “…and you shall hallow the fiftieth year,” it says in Leviticus. “That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for
you: you shall not sow, neither shall you reap the aftergrowth or harvest the
untrimmed vines, for it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you:
you may only eat the growth direct from the field.”
The
50th anniversary is a golden anniversary and coming into last
weekend’s celebrations for me, felt like a golden time, a golden moment. A
liminal moment.
The
concept of a liminal moment is popular in anthropology. Liminal moments can
take many forms, but in general they are thresholds, thresholds for
individuals, groups, entire civilizations. These moments can take place in a
breath, an hour, a day or an epoch. Twilight is a liminal moment of time that
comes every day, being born is a liminal moment that comes only once in each
person’s life. A war is liminal for a country, or many, an “aha” moment is
liminal for an individual who has just seen the light.
Rites
of passage are liminal moments, as they mark the end of one period and the
beginning of the next. We, in Judaism, have many and I’ve long felt that we are
quite fortunate to be a people who still values the power of a ritual or a rite
of passage to mark the various milestones in life, most importantly the bar/bat
mitzvah, which marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood,
something that is lost to our general assimilated modern society but which is
so wise and can be so profound. Havdalah is also a liminal rite, and quite
meaningful in a world that has blurred the lines between the sacred and the
secular.
I
had never heard the term “liminal moment” before Rabbi Kramer brought it up at
a Women’s Retreat Committee meeting last spring. I had never heard of it, but I
had studied it for years. I am fascinated by liminal moments. I am quite interested
in that period of “in between” that exists during transitions, a time that
might stretch for months or years, with no apparent end in sight. Perhaps I am
intrigued by these because I’ve encountered them so often in life and found the
living through them to be so excruciating. Being in the moment when the moment
is agonizingly painful, confusing, frightening, hopeful, electrifying, full of
possibility, or even boring is an immense challenge. Changes seem to occur at
these crossroads creating whole new paradigms in our lives. Imagining all the
possibilities as we await the threshold-crossing-moment is oh-so-difficult. The
unknown is a hard companion to sit with.
How
was it then, for our hero Noah, the focus of our Torah portion this week? How
did he manage to be within that
twilight space…after the edict to build the ark, to collect the animals, to
call together his sons and their wives…
after the 40 days and nights of rain…after
all that but before the next phase had begun? How did he manage to sit with the
unknown?
“The
ark drifted upon the waters” the Torah tells us. The entire earth was covered
with water. As far as the eye could see. And “[o]nly Noah was left, and those with
him in the ark.”
Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
How
quiet was it?
How
terrifying?
All
the turmoil that had come before, wiped out, obliterated by an extremely
powerful and fed up God, fed up with the sins of mankind, but who chose to save
one righteous individual, Noah, and his family. All that chaos that came
before: GONE.
And
then the water and the quiet. And the waiting.
I’m
not talking about what the Lord said to Noah. I’m not talking about the
floody-floody. Or the muddy muddy. I’m talking about the period in between when it was months and months
of waiting for the storm to calm and the waters to recede.
Noah
must have experienced that liminal moment as a man, a husband and a father, but
also he experienced it for all humankind,
did he not? He was our representative on Earth, living in that twilight moment,
waiting to find out what comes after God’s mighty meltdown.
1)
an ending,
followed by
2)
a period of
confusion and distress, leading to
3)
a new beginning
If,
in the first phase, you don’t acknowledge the ending, says Bridges, you can’t
move forward toward a new beginning. A transition, then, is a very special
thing. It begins with an ending.
Reading
this on the tail of the first stories of Creation, we might think of Noah’s
story as the “end of the beginning.”
The
end of the beginning.
Bridges
also says, “We have to let go of the old thing before we pick up the new—not
just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections with the people and
places that act as definitions of who we are.”
Did
Noah, looking back at the chaos from whence he came, did he think of it in that
way? Did he take store of humankind’s sins and consider how he and his
offspring would move forward to create a better world? Or, did he suffer in the
silence, anxious about whether or not God would truly spare him after all this,
the ark, the cubits, and the animals two by two? All the definitions Noah had
were gone.
“The
ark drifted on the waters” of what we might think of as a Neutral Zone, a place
with no place and no time and no definitions.
As
Noah and his crew floated out there, somewhere (who knows where?), they embodied
that Neutral Zone for all humanity. It’s Phase 2 of Bridges’ transition triumvirate,
“…a strange no-man’s land between one world and the next…,” “…a low pressure
area…a vacuum left by the loss…” During this period of waiting, this confusing
and disorienting time, what did Noah think about? How did he feel? Was he
afraid? Was he lonely?
In
her book The Beginning of Desire:Reflections on Genesis, Scottish contemporary Torah scholar Avivah Gottleib
Zornberg says that [in Noah] “…for the first time we are given a sense of human
loneliness, as time is endured, as Noah waits for something new to begin…” and
that Noah “prays to be saved from the prison of the his ark.”
“Noah,”
she says, “like every faithful man,” prays to be saved from the “rushing mighty
waters” [shetef mayim rabbim]; the
undifferentiated dumb violence of the world just outside the prison of the ark.
The prison is both the closed space of the ark and the too-great openness of the wild raging silence beyond.”
Just
about seven years ago my family embarked on an odyssey when our middle son, Ben,
then just 8 years old, was diagnosed with Chiari malformation type I. At his
eight year well doctor’s visit he bent over for the scoliosis check and the
sight of a huge lump (actually a hump) on his back caused me to literally leap
up out of my chair. What came next were x-rays and MRI’s, urgent doctors
appointments, calls and emails to everyone we knew for information about hospitals
and neurosurgeons. Less than two months later we were sitting in the cafeteria
at Children’s Hospital, Oakland
while he underwent brain surgery for 10 hours.
What
I didn’t know then was that that was the end of the beginning. We were entering
a very long period of transition, one we still inhabit.
Those
first months as we moved to the head of the class finding out more than you
would ever want to know about brain surgery and cerebellar tonsils, those first
months were only the tip of the iceberg of our period “floating on the
waters.” What was supposed to be a
veritable “walk in the park” by neurosurgery standards became two months at his
ICU bedside watching the doctors scratch their chins in puzzlement as he would
not heal and would not heal...and would.not.heal. He endured four surgeries in
those two months, though he was only supposed to have the one. He endured many
more painful and frightening procedures during that time: needle pokes and
blood draws, huge sticky bandages pulled off (quickly or slowly, it did not
matter), stitches made without anesthesia. And I stood by, blowing cool air on
his face, holding his soft little hand in mine, guiding his mind with images of
Hawaiian beaches to calm him or superheroes to give him strength, organizing
poker games for him with his loving uncles and dad, urging him to smile with
ridiculously inappropriate TV and movies. It was a period of twilight for me,
and I would agree with William Bridges’ assertion that time slows down in that
zone.
What
I didn’t know then was that because of the Chiari and the fluid pocket that had
formed in his spinal cord, his spinal nerves had been compromised and the
scoliosis he was left with would be severe. And require more surgeries.
Today,
we still drift in those waters. They have not cleared as yet. In about three
weeks Ben will head to Philadelphia with my
husband, Mark, to have his 11th surgery, at Shriners Hospital
for Children. He has been getting treatment there for the past three years,
treatments that have held off spinal fusion and allowed his spine to continue
to grow, but that have required him to spend more time in the hospital, more
painful procedures, more time away from home. Within his back he has a 17 inch
titanium rod and 5 staples. We have no idea when all this will end, or what it
will end with.
Last
summer, as we were approaching his 9th surgery I felt somehow that I
just couldn’t take it anymore. I was so drained, physically, emotionally,
mentally, spiritually from the never-endingness of it all. Ben was drained too,
and that of course was HUGE for me. Ben was suffering from bouts of depression
and anger and his constant back aches caused my own back to ache and my heart
to ache, as well.
But,
last summer I was standing out by my pasture, breathing in the cool morning air
and I was perseverating on it all. When would it end? What would happen to Ben?
Where had my happy, healthy boy gone? What was it like to not be constantly
worrying about a sick child? I was finding it incredibly hard to just be with
my life, sit with the unknown. And then it hit me: This is your life. Be in it. Be in it right now.
That
“aha” moment, or as I like to think of it, My Moment of Zen, really helped. It
helped me accept the truth and to live in it with not only the courage to deal
with it, but the courage to see that the only thing that I could do was stay in
the present moment and accept it. The past needed to be let go. The future was
on the other side of the threshold.
I
believe it’s quite necessary to survive the liminal moments that feel like an
eternity. I believe it’s important to look to the future, to imagine what will
be. But I also believe that it requires great courage to stay with the pain and
the fear and the racing heart in the moment, the moment that may be dark or
foggy or so terribly unclear. It is within those moments that we have the
potential to uncover the truth about who we are, what we are made of, and
possibly even why we are there.
And
then, there are times when we don’t find out the whys until long after the
transition is past. Looking back on events in our lives is when we can count
the blessings or see what we learned from that very taxing teacher.
And
so, what about Phase 3? The new beginning?
What about after the floods receded and Noah threw open the doors of the
ark to let the sun shine in? What then?
I
can imagine that it was not easy to take the next step, down the gangplank, to
the damp soil of Mt.
Ararat. The Torah says
“God spoke to Noah, saying, "Come out of the ark, together
with your wife, your sons, and your sons' wives. Bring out with
you every living thing of all flesh that is with you: birds, animals, and
everything that creeps on earth; and let them swarm on the earth and be fertile
and increase on earth." It might have been an obvious direction. But,
perhaps, God noticed Noah’s hesitation. After all that waiting, after all that
time spent on the waters, walking through that doorway might not have been
anything short of Noah’s most
courageous move.
According
to Aviva Gottleib Zornberg, “What Noah experiences when he is released, is the subtle
gratitude of one who now realizes the implications of where he was and where he
is. The history of Noah is, then, the history of man’s first exercise in
self-construction. Between the worlds of kindness and ecstasy, between
closedness and openness," she says, "Noah reads and interprets the test of God’s words and
of his own heart.”
“We
come to beginnings only at the end,” William Bridges tells us, “…changed and
renewed by the destruction of the old life-phase and the journey through the
nowhere.”
Have
you ever walked from one room to another, on an errand to pick up something but
by the time you got there you had no idea what you had come for? Did you know
that psychology researchers have a name for that? It’s called “the doorway
effect” and what they have found is that walking through a doorway causes you
to have a lapse in short-term memory. According to the Scientific American,
“walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because
whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that
you have changed venues.”
How
interesting.
And
we have learned that liminal moments also seem to involve that same loss of
memory, or what could be seen as a death. One definition I found said: “a
liminal moment involves a metaphorical ‘death’, as the initiand is forced to
leave something behind by breaking with previous practices and routines.”
We
can view our lives as a linear series of chronological events and as circular, beginning leading to in-between leading to ending leading to in-between leading to beginning
again. The seasons of the year are this, the cycle of water from particles in
the atmosphere to rain to raging waters of a river to the vapors over the ocean
are this as well. The holiday of Simchat Torah is a ritual we Jews have to
acknowledge the cyclical journey we take through the lessons of the Torah every
year, unrolling and rolling, reading, singing and dancing our love for the book
we cherish.
Noah’s
time spent drifting upon the waters came to an end with a beginning, a new
beginning for humanity. After many, many months drifting there in that
no-time-no-place the waters finally drew back, the land finally dried out and
marching off the ark they all came, to begin again.
Today
at 50, I am all that I was before I arrived here at this new phase in my life.
I am the consummation of my experiences, the thresholds I have crossed, the
pain I have felt, the mistakes I have made and the joy I have shared. The
course of my life has meandered along like a river’s course and I can sit with
the events the way they have unfolded, knowing that they have brought me to
where I am today. No regrets, just gratitude.
In
his book The Way of Transition,
William Bridges says, “You can talk about transition in either context. In the
linear context, it’s the segue between one life-segment and the next, as well
as being the process that disengages us from the first phase, turns us around,
and plugs us into the second phase. In the circular-journey context, transition
is an analytical way of talking about the journey itself.”
I
suppose that’s the key for me: the journey. I have always been less interested
in the destination than I have been in the journey. My personal journey, Noah’s
journey, the journey of humankind.
