Yair Robinson
Yom Kippur 5786
What We Carry, and Who It’s For
I have been lucky in my life to have had many teachers who have had a profound influence on me. To be sure, I drew deeply from their expertise in their subject matter, whether it was Bible or midrash or Halakhah or the poetry of Yeats, Japanese art and aesthetics, or mysticism. But more than that, I learned from who they were as a person, how they encountered the world, and responded to the needs of the other. The conversation might have been about Maimonides or the history of Reform Judaism, but the teachers I gravitated toward were also the ones who, often quietly, taught me how to be a person. For me, the instruction from Pirkei Avot, “aseh lecha rav” acquire yourself a teacher, has been as much about who the teacher is as the subject matter.
One of my teachers, from the time I was a teenager, was Rabbi Larry Kushner. Not the one who talks about when bad things happen to good people—that is a different Kushner, Harold, zichrono livracha, and I was also blessed to learn from him decades later. But as a teen growing up in New England I had many opportunities to be in conversation with him, learn from him at NFTY events, read his books, and learn Hasidic literature, mysticism, Bible, Midrash, and theology, but also have a sense of how he saw the world, and that was as much through his outlook as it was his classes. One of his stories has stayed with me for decades, and I have shared it with others. Rabbi Kushner has written about how he had a set of tefillin, sometimes called ‘phylacteries,’ that he carried for years. Truth be told, the mitzvah of wrapping oneself in these leather straps-and-boxes did not really speak to him, but he did not exactly want to get rid of them either. So, he held onto them, not sure what to do with them, until he was speaking with a congregant one day. This person had lost his tefillin, which had been his father’s, who had passed, and was feeling a profound sense of loss over this. At which point, Larry writes, he understood why he had been carrying the set of tefillin all these years; they were not his tefillin. They were never really his. He had just carried them until this moment. He pulled them from whatever drawer they had been in, and said to the man, “these are not my tefillin. It turns out, they were yours all along.”
It is a beautiful story, and I find myself getting teary-eyed sharing it with you, partly because it says something so meaningful about my teacher’s Neshama, about his personhood and menschlikeit. Of course, the tefillin were not literally the other man’s, nor were they his father’s. There was no recovering that set of phylacteries from wherever they had disappeared to. Rather, it was the gesture itself, the act of acknowledging the other’s pain, but also that the tefillin Rabbi Kushner had carried all these years were not physical objects taking up space in a drawer; they carried a cosmic significance that was only revealed when he could be truly present for the other.
In his short story, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien lists the various things a platoon of soldiers in Vietnam had with them: their guns and ammo, canteens and equipment, letters and mementos from home, and also this one’s guilt over the death of his buddy, that one’s longing to see his family again. Many of us find ourselves carrying things and we are not sure why. For some of us, they are literal objects in our cupboards and basements, knickknacks and gewgaws that we no longer have a use for, but also dare not get rid of: a partial set of china that belonged to a beloved grandparent, old photographs where we can’t quite identify everyone in them, our children’s art from ten, or twenty, or forty years ago, schoolbooks and tablecloths and furniture and Legos and all sorts of other things that we hope we might pass down to our children or grandchildren, or not. And there are others who carry, let us say, metaphysical things as well: song lyrics and memories of birthday parties, a line from an argument that bring us to a boil even a quarter-century later, a word said carelessly that still brings us to tears.
It would be tempting, as we look at our attics in our homes and within our hearts, to purge all of it, to clear it all out. And many of us, I know, debate with our inner Marie Kondo, deciding whether to get rid of half of it because it no longer ‘sparks joy,’ or hold onto it a little while longer because, well, we are not sure why. That is as true for the tablecloths, or the three parfait glasses, as it is for the memories. Why not put them down, lighten the load? And there is some wisdom in that, perhaps. Certainly, many of the things we carry may seem like a burden, souvenirs from times we would rather not remember. Either what we have squirrelled away is no longer needed or seeing them simply reminds us of pain rather than joy. I have seen and heard that speaking with older congregants and family members looking to downsize, wondering what will become of their treasures, or who felt obligated to keep things that they had no use for.
And I have seen it especially in the last two years, or even the last five, or the last ten, as the assumptions we all made about how the world works have been ruptured, perhaps irreparably. I know so many of us who have always carried the sense of responsibility for the world, interpersonally if not politically, who understood our responsibility as Jews and human beings was to stand up for what was right, protest when necessary, support charitable causes, engage civically as good citizens, and that if we did all those things we would make a difference in the world. That, as my teacher Michael Marmur wrote, many of us may not have full access to our texts and traditions, our liturgy and our practices, but the idea that it was our special responsibility l’taken olam b’malchut Shaddai, to repair the world and thereby make it what it ought to be, was one all of us could in some way embrace. In 2017 and 2020, as we have for generations, we stood up to make our voices heard, to speak out against the injustice we saw unfolding against the vulnerable in our midst, vulnerable either because of race, gender, or sexuality. And then October 7th happened, and too many of us found that our allies had decided that our vulnerability, our grief, was not worth carrying. And this last year, with wars in Israel and chaos here at home, we have perhaps found that the weight is too much. I know many activists in our community, people with a long history of speaking out and standing up, have just…put everything down. They have turned inward, stepping away from their Judaism (if they are Jewish), or their activism, or both. I have watched interfaith alliances falter nationally and locally as former partners have simply stopped engaging. I don’t know what is in their hearts, or yours, but it seems to me that so many of us find ourselves looking at our work, our traditions, our engagement, our activism, even our relationships, and are wondering if they’re worth keeping, or, being as chipped, torn, stained and broken as they are, whether anyone even wants them.
It is true that for so many of us, as we contemplate the new year on this Yom Kippur, we do not know why we hold onto all of this…stuff. But before we throw it away, I want us to turn back to our story about my teacher, about Rabbi Kushner and the Tefillin, and suggest that there might be another alternative. And that is that…it is okay that we do not know why we have it. It is okay that there is ambiguity in our preserving all this stuff. That we have been looking at it all wrong.
Because it is easy to see our accumulated possessions and memories and obligations as a weight, as an unwanted gifts from our past. But what if we see them with an eye of curiosity, that we are keeping them for just the right moment, just the right opportunity to share with others? What if, like the tefillin in Rabbi Kushner’s drawer, they are not really ours, but someone else’s?
What I mean by that is that all of the accumulated ephemera of our lives: the things, the memories, the experiences, the work we have each done to repair whatever cracks we have seen in the world around us, all matter and all help us reach the point of being able to better serve others. So much else that we have hidden away are, in fact, gifts. Well, perhaps not the parfait glasses, though who am I to judge? But I have seen the tablecloth that hasn’t been used in years come out as a stand-in chuppah, a wedding canopy, when the wedding had to be moved up before dad went into hospice, and the sheet music go to an aspiring musician, and the china and photographs be turned into art, and the grandparent read to their grandchildren the same books they read to their kids. That isn’t just being thrifty, nor is it simply an act of preservation. It is an act of transformation, of helping reveal the or haganuz, the hidden light that remains in this world, despite whatever the evening news and our social media feed declares to us.
And if that is true of our stuff, it is true of our memories as well. The fact that we remember them so vividly, including and especially the difficult ones, may be a simple trick of evolutionary genetics, a penchant for pattern finding passed down as an heirloom from our ancestors on the ancient savannahs. But those memories are there to teach us something, and throwing them away or leaving them buried does us no favors. We are meant to examine them, reflect on them and what they are trying to teach us; so we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, so that we may recognize that pain or grief in someone else and be there for them as someone may have been there for us, so that we can begin to repair the wounds within our own hearts. I truly believe that we carry the source of our own healing within ourselves, though it may take time to see how those same moments of pain might also serve as a balm of holiness.
And our activism, the urgency, as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, of now. Yes, the work is more difficult, our voices seemingly drowned out, and so much on fire, we do not even know where to begin. But we do know. We know because we carry it in our bones, we carry it in our tradition, we carry it in the lessons our parents and grandparents taught us. We have, as our Torah reminds us, a choice: life and death. And, we are urged, to choose life. The temptation is always there to choose a death of the spirit, to choose the ironic posture of the cynic, to decide the task too monumental, too Sisyphean. But when we say that, we forget Camus’s reminder, that one always finds one’s burdens again, that the struggle itself toward the heights we aspire to are enough to fill the heart. That we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Or if you prefer, Rabbi Kushner’s translation of the words of Pirkei Avot: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” No matter how enormous the world’s grief might be, we cannot imagine that our actions are in vain or that they are not missed. When her son was in the Peace Corps and called home overwhelmed by the desperate situation he saw, Sonia Sloan, may she be remembered for blessing, told him over the phone, “change one life.” Never mind what the press and the mob online and everyone else may be saying—change one life, as your life was once changed for the better. Be that person. That is what all of us, each of us, must carry, and give to the next person, so they can be that person for someone else.
A couple of years ago I was in an online Zoom class about trauma with people aspiring to be therapists, when one of the students, a nurse a few years older than me, said something, I can’t remember what, that tickled at the back of my brain. Remembering that she, like I, had gone to Oberlin College, I messaged her privately to say, “that sounds like something Norman Care would say.” Though not a favorite professor by any means, Norman lived up to his name, both in terms of how he engaged with the world, but also as a teacher of philosophy, specifically ethics. She shared that he had been her favorite professor, that so much of what he taught influenced her, and that she lamented having lost his book on ethics in some move or another years ago. I looked to my shelf and saw his book, unopened for over 25 years, exactly where I expected it to be, and asked her for her mailing address. It went in the mail the next day. After all, it was not ever really my book. It was hers all along.