Kol Nidre 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
It seems this moment to talk, Kol Nidre at FRS, can be rather more powerful than I ever imagined. When I convinced Jonni, a really very private person, that in 2017 I needed to share the pain of our infertility journey, in the hope that by being open about something that is so often hidden, that I could help others, I never for one moment imagined that it would change my life and in time, please God, British Jewry forever.
Six years ago, I stood exactly here on this makeshift bimah and admitted that I had learnt the hardest lesson of my life: I learnt that I wasn’t in control. That however much I planned and imagined my future with my two children, however much I assumed that one day Ben would have as wonderful a relationship with his sibling or siblings as we do with ours, that we had finally admitted to ourselves that our family was going to look different to the one we had imagined and we were going to stop putting ourselves through the punishing pain of more failed pregnancies and enjoy our little, but perfect, family of three.
I wasn’t saying it because I thought that this was the biggest sacrifice or trauma that anyone could face. I knew then, as I know now, that plenty of people in the room had faced and are facing far, far greater setbacks in life than this one. I know I am talking to people who have had their “perfect families” and watched their own children struggle with terrible ill health, or have had to keep living after their child has died, those who have never had children who quite rightly can scoff at my so called pain of only having one, and those who live with the countless other painful and traumatic realities of their lives.
Yet I didn’t share our story then, and I don’t today, because I needed or wanted people to feel sorry for us. I shared it because I wanted to share what it had taught me and that teaching opened a floodgate to the new reality I find myself in.
It was the liturgy of “Ki hinei kachomer”, with the beautiful melody that Cantor Zoe and Daniel Cainer wrote, bespoke for us for that moment, which summed up my message. We are not in control. So, stop fighting, lean into being the clay in the hand of the potter and realise there is so much of life we cannot control. Stop fighting. I immersed in the psychologically healing waters of the mikveh at Mayyim Hayyim in Boston and committed to myself to embrace the life I have, to choose life, and not rage against my life for it not being as I wanted it to be. Like clay I am malleable, I’m not in control so I have to be able to change.
Following that sermon I was overwhelmed with people asking me to help them create a moment like I had in the mikveh, to enable them to accept the realities of their situations. They shared their stories. They had tried so hard to live with their partner’s infidelity that they could say they had forgiven but they couldn’t put down the hurt. They were living with abuse they had suffered decades earlier and knew it was still a presence in current relationships and with the relationship they have with their own body. Living with the fear of being in remission from cancer and unable to move past the feeling of impending doom with its return. People who were struggling with the loss of identity after retiring from a job which gave them status and fulfilment. So many broken hearts from betrayal, a sense of their own failings and so many open wounds left gaping by the suffering of bereavements.
Whilst trying to create spiritually uplifting moments for people at the woefully inadequate mikveh at the Sternberg Centre or in the chilly water of Hampstead Ponds, ceremonies for people to take on holiday with them to use in the sun in secluded lakes and beaches around the world and those to be used on patches of blustery coast line around the UK, the concept of needing to build a purpose-built facility for creating immersions with such a purpose, a fully halachic mikveh to be used for times we already associate with mikveh and for times we will learn to associate with mikveh, began to emerge and the fantasy of Wellspring, and my upcoming chapter was born.
What I have realised over these last years in developing my idea are three things:
Firstly, that Judaism needs to be radical and create rituals which respond to today’s moments of transition, of change, of acceptance.
Secondly that our mental health provision needs to be radical to deal with the here and now, the momentary stuff.
Thirdly that we need to live as individuals with the radical balance of being malleable whilst also being fully present.
What does all that mean? How can our Judaism be radical? Maybe life was more straight forward in millennia gone by, but our ancient Rabbis knew that we needed to mark moments of big change in our lives by creating rituals and support around those events. The perhaps simpler life trajectory meant they identified those moments predominantly as birth, becoming a teenager, getting married, having children and suffering a bereavement. Mikveh was ordained since biblical times as a way of marking both going from one state of being to another and acknowledging unfulfilled potential. The language around this may have been caught up with purity and fertility but we have language now which allows us to take these concepts and give them the breadth that they deserve. Our lives are not as linear as they once were, there are many other paths open to us and therefore whatever paths we choose or whichever paths we are saddled with, each route should have such ritualised markers, we have to find the language for each one.
In the words of William and Susan Bridges, “The gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us—the first is to deny us our dreams, and the second is to grant them.” If you’ve realized your dreams, you ask yourself, “Is this it? Is this what I’ve been trying to reach?” And if you’ve failed to realize them, you have to face what the existential psychologist James Bugental called “the nevers”: “I guess that I’m never going to be the head of the firm… never going to have children of my own… never going to be a great writer… never going to be rich… never going to be famous.” For many, this is when they come to terms with the recognition that they have been chasing a carrot on a stick. These discoveries are thought provoking, to say the least, but they sometimes open the door to new activities and new achievements that were impossible when you were under the spell of the old dreams."
(from "Transitions (40th Anniversary Edition): Making Sense of Life's Changes" by William Bridges, Susan Bridges)
At these moments of realisation, our Judaism needs to step in with the ritual to help open the doors to the future with positivity, open up the possibilities to choosing life rather than leave people to spiral into the rather more self-destructive or unhealthy responses we have become sadly all too aware of.
Yet ritual alone is not enough. With the radical opportunity this gives to our Judaism also needs to come a radical response by our mental health practitioners.
Maimonides understood back in the 12th century that, as he commented “A sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible and therefore humankind, according to their nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which they were accustomed”. – Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Guide for the Perplexed 3:23).
We know that those sudden transitions are thrust, usually unwelcomed, into our lives. They come with bereavement, diagnoses, divorce or even by accepting that we cannot cope with the level of care needed by a loved one and having to move them or having to move ourselves into residential care. Maimonides knew that human nature is to struggle at such points and Wellspring’s radical mental health provision, supported by Consultant psychiatrist Mark Berelowitz along with many others, will be bucking the trend of the modern long therapeutic journey in favour of a much shorter, very focused look at the here and now and building the capacity to deal with life as it is, not necessarily as we would want it to be.
Just as sitting shiva isn’t all one needs in terms of support following a bereavement or benching gomel won’t suddenly cure one from the trauma of having been in mortal danger, many will need the support of mental health professionals to hold, guide and move them towards this place of acceptance and into marking that transition in the way that feels right to them.
Six years ago I was ready to roll over, see myself “ki hinei ka’chomer b’yad ha’yotzeir”, “as clay in the hands of the potter” but how long can we let life happen to us and not recognise that we also need to step into life. We may not be able to control life but we are in control of how we respond to the hand that we are dealt. We can live in our grief, we can live in our frustration, our hurt, our disappointment, or we can “choose life”. Many of us will need professional support to change our mindset but everyone commits to something more fully and more successfully if they do so with action, with determination and in the sight of God.
We must be supported to find a balance in life. To be malleable enough to be clay in the hands of the potter unable to control what life throws at us and be strong enough to weather the storms by saying “hineni b’tzelem Elohim”, Here I am, in the image of God and therefore I too am able to be a creator of my destiny, to use my wisdom to its greatest benefit, to acknowledge the power of my body and my voice to influence and partner in the repairing of the world, to choose what it means to me to say each day, I am alive, hineini.
Cantor Zoe Jacobs and Sam Evans sing
Hineini b’tzelem Elohim
N’kavim n’kavim
Nishmati t’hora hi
(Music by Peri Smilow, Lyrics based on the kavanot of Mayyim Hayyim Living Waters Community Mikveh (Newton, MA)
I declare Hineni, here I am, present and understanding just as our biblical forebears did, that this word contains within it an acceptance that life can often feel painful and testing. Hineni B’tzelem Elohim, here I am, made in the image of God, with the Divine strength to choose my destiny within the framework of the life I cannot control.
I can be both the clay and the potter, the stone and the mason, the iron and the smith.
Hineini b’tzelem Elohim, Here I stand made in God’s image, ki hinei ka’chomer, for I am like clay, b’yad hayotzeir, I partner God, destiny, fate, the unknown as together we take on the role of the potter.
