Rabbah Gila Caine: My Rosh Hashanah essay

By Rabbah Gila Caine

(Edmonton) – Don’t Panic! This essay has a happy ending.

Cheshbon Hanefesh: An accounting of the soul. A mapping out of places, people, and occurrences our spirit was involved with over a period of time, and the reaction of our spirit to these encounters.

One of our mystical traditions describes the time between Rosh Hashanah and Shemini Atzeret as a process in which our spirit rips apart to observe itself. If we do our Cheshbon Hanefesh properly, our spirit fuses back together on the very sacred day of Shemini Atzeret. In that tradition, the deeper meaning of the High Holidays relates to uniting various parts of ourselves into one coherent and harmonious structure. Tragically, we never had that moment of fusion last year.

Shemini Atzeret 5784, and the following year, have been a series of cuts and rips, and tear upon tear. So much so that I can barely recall last year’s High Holidays, apart from a few looming moments which in hindsight were a sign of things to come.

I clearly remember waking up that Shabbat morning to my husband telling me “גִּילָה, יֵשׁ מִלְחָמָה בָּאָרֶץ”  (“Gila, there is a war at home”).

As the day progressed, war fog descended on my brain and huge fear started growing and taking over my whole self. I had never felt like this. It was physically painful, and it took months to get used to carrying the pain around. This wasn’t happening only to me—it happened around me in our community and beyond. As the year progressed I discovered myself moving deeper, seemingly below ground, to a primordial source of tears. Luckily for me, before this year’s events, I’d only ever read about this place of tears and I pray never to have to re encounter it. I physically understood what keening means, when my wailing seemed to come from a place beyond me, beyond this time and place, beyond my own body.

Many people use the term “intergenerational trauma”, but I’m not a psychologist so won’t comment on that. Besides, we Jews have an intricate toolkit to facilitate conversations about our nefesh, about joy and grief. Let’s use our own tools for a change.

There were times this year when I felt my nefesh (spirit) become so ragged, it was as if nothing was left. There were times when my wailing seemed to come from a place beyond me, and gradually I understood we are all once again in the presence of Rachel Imeinu:

“קוֹל בְּרָמָה נִשְׁמָע נְהִי בְּכִי תַמְרוּרִים רָחֵל מְבַכָּה עַל־בָּנֶיהָ מֵאֲנָה לְהִנָּחֵם עַל־בָּנֶיהָ כִּי אֵינֶנּוּ”

A voice in Ramah is heard / lament and bitter weeping/ Rachel weeps for her children / she refuses to be comforted / for her children / they are no more.

Rachel, our Matriarch, died in childbirth but she is forever standing with us, crying for us, and ultimately, speaking up for us. She is the embodiment of Shechinah, an aspect of the Divine that accompanies the Jewish people in our times of emotional, physical, and spiritual exile and pain. It might be hard to imagine, but being in the presence of our Matriarch Rachel allows us to be in total grief and total hope all at once!

An ancient midrash teaches that once the Mikdash (Temple) in Jerusalem was destroyed, all the gates of prayer were shut. Once the “portal” to connecting with the Divine was ruined, it was as if all communication shut down. But then, the midrash reminds us that the gate of tears will remain forever open. Tears are a way to approach the Divine, to approach that which is more than here-and-now, I would say a wider perspective. Real tears—not manipulative or performative tears, but those that come from a deep place of truth—are a key to opening our heart and moving onto healing.

“Grief is the work of mature men and women. It is our responsibility to be available to this emotion and offer it back to our struggling world… Grief stirs the heart. It is indeed the song of a soul alive…” (Francis Weller, The wild edge of sorrow. 2015, p. 113)

I used to wonder why, while the other Matriarchs and Patriarchs were buried in the Cave of Machpelah (Hebron), only Rachel was left outside. We read the story of her death and subsequent burial on the road to Ephrath/Beit Lechem, as she leaves behind a newborn baby and grieving son and husband. After reading and rereading this story for years, it suddenly made complete sense to me: Rachel is the Gate on the Road, not hidden in a cave but rather out here in the world where she can continue caring for the family she had to leave behind so abruptly.

The prophet reminds us that Rachel weeps for her children, and we are called to join with her weeping, much like the wailing/keening women of the past who helped Jews around the world as they grieved their losses.

In her writing about lamenting, Rabbi Rachel Adler  teaches us that a broken and violently disordered world is, in a sense, a wordless world, while healing is about rebuilding meaning, which for humans most often moves through language. Adler then explains: “ In lament, the boundary between the made and unmade universe is thinnest, for it is the cultural form closest to the preverbal howl of pain” (Adler, R. For these I weep: A theology of Lament.  2014).

The powerful thing about her teaching is that if we move correctly through lamentation, we are enabling ourselves to rebuild our world.

And that’s why being in the space of Rachel Imeinu is actually a hopeful thing! Arriving at a communal space of pain is powerful, not because it teaches us that each generation carries the wounds of its parents, but because it helps us go back and recall how our ancestors always found ways of fusing the nefesh, our spirit, back together again.

Shana tovah u’metukah.

Rabbah Gila Caine is the spiritual leader at Temple Beth Ora, Edmonton’s Reform Jewish congregation.