A Narrow Bridge - Yom Kippur Day 2019/5780

      Today is a day of forgiveness, and so I am going to begin with saying I am sorry. 

I am not going to talk about what is going on in Washington.

I am not going to talk about the Israeli election. 

My apologies.

Can you forgive me?

Instead I want to continue talking about the theme of walking through the world, individually, as a community, and as a people.

I read a moving story recently that I couldn’t wait to tell you. Unfortunately, I’ve since learned that it may not be exactly -- what’s the word??? – True. But I’m going to tell it to you anyway, because sometimes a myth can be just as valuable as the truth.

By far the most terrifying Yom Kippur of many of our lives occurred 46 years ago today. I was just six years old when Egyptian and Syrian forces came crashing into Israel from north and south on this, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. All across America, Jewish people stood in synagogue parking lots, huddled around transistor radios, straining to hear the latest news from the Middle East. 

Israel’s survival was hanging by a thread and everyone knew it. “The Third Temple is in danger,” General Moshe Dayan warned his military colleagues.  At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had a standing order that she was to be notified immediately any time an Israeli soldier fell. But now, there were too many -- over the next three weeks, more than 2,000 Israeli soldiers would die. The situation was bleak and getting bleaker.

And then came the news that General Ariel Sharon and his armored brigade had blasted their way through the Sinai, thrown a pontoon bridge over the Suez canal and rolled into Egypt. 

Now here is where the truth gets fuzzy. According to myth, as Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers were advancing over that bridge, General Sharon ordered a song to be played over their radios. That song was:  Kol Ha-olam kulo gesher tzar me-od.  The world is a very narrow bridge.  V’haikar lo lefached klal.  The thing to remember is: Do not fear. It’s said that this song electrified the soldiers. The world is a narrow bridge, they sang, as they drove over the narrow bridge, and we are not afraid. And so, the third temple was saved. 

Now, I must say, we have at least one member of our synagogue who lived through that war.  And he politely tells me he doesn’t remember the song being played. But he and his wife do recall how popular the song was throughout Israel after that dramatic victory. And it continues to inspire us today. Sing with me if you know it.

Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar meod, v’haikar lo lefached klal.

All the world is a narrow bridge.  What is most important is to not fear at all.  

This song is based on a teaching from Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, who came up with it sometime in the early 1800s. He lived in a time of horrendous antisemitism and widespread poverty, made worse by the personal losses he suffered, especially the death of a child. Rabbi Nachman taught us how to live with suffering, loss and fear, and even how to experience joy in spite of it all.

It is easy to see why the metaphor of a “narrow bridge” rings so true with the Jewish people.  All of us feel this way from time to time -- as if we are walking across a narrow bridge that’s swaying back and forth.  Step by step, you make your way, adrenaline pumping through you.  You’re not sure you’ll make it. You’re not even sure what’s on the other side.  You look down, and you freeze, terrified that if you move again the bridge will give way.  

Our survival as a people has been just as treacherous. Our ancestors learned to step with caution as they made their way across the bridge. Time and time again they stumbled, and it looked like the journey was over. But somehow, they made it across.      

Life, we know, is wonderful, miraculous. But it’s also dangerous, unpredictable, and, at times, terrifying.   That is the reality of living on this earth as human beings. But in addition, as Jews, we have our own multilayered experience of fear, passed on to us over generations of Jewish suffering, oppression, and genocide.

I grew up in a time and place with very little antisemitism, in a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago.  Most of my friends were Jewish.  We had the high holidays off from school and attended each other’s bar and bat mitzvah celebrations. I didn’t have a particularly religious home, but my parents wanted me to get a Jewish education -- never dreaming what it would lead to.

Religious school was a revelation to me -- in some ways, a brutal one. I will never forget when I was around 8 or 9, seated in a darkened classroom in Hebrew school, when a film began to flicker on the screen before me. There were the haunting black and white images of corpses piled like cord wood, the sunken faces of the starving, the emaciated bodies of the dead. That’s how they taught the holocaust back then, holding nothing back, and then telling the story of the improbable founding of Israel, where Jews, at last, were able to fight for themselves. 

Those images of horror have always stayed with me. I had nightmares for years in which I was a child stepping off of a train, shoved along with everyone else into a dank horrible place, waiting to be gassed.  Or I was a child in hiding from the people who wanted to kill me just for being me. Those dreams would come and go well into adulthood.

I will say that we do Jewish education differently these days. We don’t want children to be Jewish out of guilt and fear, but out of joy, love and connection.  The Holocaust can come later, when kids are better equipped to handle it. 

 But I wonder a lot about those dreams.  Did they really come from those movies in Hebrew School?  Or from somewhere else?

I never heard much about the Holocaust from my parents or grandparents. It wasn’t until relatively recently that I discovered we had extended family who never made it to America, and were all murdered. I’ve always felt that my deep love of Judaism and Israel came through my two grandmothers and their stories and celebrations of Jewish holidays and rituals.  But perhaps they didn’t give that to me; perhaps they just awakened it in my soul.

For all the joy and interest I had there was also this nagging anxiety. Those fearful dreams actually felt like memories.  Why do Jews so often have a particular kind of radar that picks up antisemitism and other threats to human freedom and rights, even if we have not experienced them ourselves? And why does a trip to Israel feel like coming home, even for those Jews who are visiting for the first time?    

Long ago, when I was a psych major in college, I encountered Carl Jung’s controversial notion of a Collective Unconscious. Part of our unconscious mind, he argued, is not shaped by personal experience but, rather, is genetically inherited from our ancestors. This rang true to me -- the more so as I started to get more involved in the Jewish community and discovered that many Jewish people have had dreams and consequent  feelings similar to my own.  And it now appears that there may be some scientific evidence suggestive of something like a collective unconscious.

Dr. Rachel Yehuda, is Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Research by her and others strongly suggests that the stress experienced by survivors of genocide can be transmitted to subsequent generations through their DNA. 

Is this really possible? To answer that question, researchers  exposed mice to acetophenone – a smell like cherry blossoms – while simultaneously shocking them in the foot.  In Pavlovian style, the mice became fearful when they experienced the smell, regardless of whether anyone was threatening to shock them. That’s not surprising.

But scientists discovered that the offspring of these mice reacted the same way, showing panic and fear whenever they sniffed acetophenone. What’s more, even grandpups who had never interacted with their traumatized grandparents, panicked in the same way. 

Does it not seem likely that the same sort of thing could happen in humans who are descendants of people who went through centuries of mass trauma?  The science is still pretty preliminary, but it’s nonetheless compelling and has much to say about how we walk through the world as Jews.

We know that our ancestors who survived exile, war, pogroms, and God only knows what else, were shaped by their experiences. Perhaps, like those nervous little grandmice, we carry a touch of their fear and trauma in our DNA -- even in this relatively safe country at this relatively safe time. “A Jew’s joy is not without fright,” runs an old Yiddish proverb. And it may well be a special kind of fright, passed down l’dor va dor -- from generation to generation.

But now let’s return to Rebbe Nachman. He tells us that the world is a narrow bridge, which it certainly is. But what  does he mean that we must have no fear?   How is that possible?   How can we not fear for our children? For our community? How can we Jews keep walking on the path, in our times, and not fear?

Well, the answer might be that if we look carefully at Rebbe Nachman’s original text, we see a difference from how it is usually quoted and sung.  Rebbe Nachman’s exact words were: 

וְדַע, שֶׁהָאָדָם צָרִיךְ לַעֲבֹר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד, וְהַכְּלָל וְהָעִקָּר – שֶׁלֹּא יִתְפַּחֵד כְּלָל

Know that a person needs to cross a very, very narrow bridge.  The essential thing is to not yitpached, not make oneself afraid; not continually be afraid.

Aha! It doesn’t actually say the whole world is a narrow bridge; it says that a person needs to cross one.   And the most important thing is, to not frighten oneself; lo yitpacheid.  It’s a reflexive form of the verb for be afraid, the root is pachad.

Now, Rebbe Nachman used an older form of Hebrew and he may have meant essentially the same as thing that was later sung in that song. But I believe Rebbe Nachman was urging us to distinguish between real danger and the tendency we have to frighten ourselves by anticipating catastrophes that we may have some power to prevent, or at least render less likely. 

We depend on our realistic fears to protect us from harm. But when fear displaces our other capacities of heart and mind, we may have irrational reactions that are harmful to ourselves and to others.

Let's look at an example from the Torah.  Remember how, in Exodus, the Israelites fled from famine into Egypt where they prospered and multiplied? Well, that's when Pharaoh "made himself frightened." We see no evidence in Torah that the Israelites posed a threat to his rule or to his prosperity. Nonetheless, we read that “he said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelites are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.’”

Here we have the bible's first recorded instance of a type of irrational fear, a fear of the “other”, the foreigner, which we would now call xenophobia, and antisemitism.

The idea is: We had better not take any chances with these outsiders, because, while they look like good citizens, deep down, they're different from us and they mean us no good.

Sound familiar?

When Pharaoh turned against them, our sages teach, the Israelites were so deep in despair that they couldn’t even raise their voices to God for help.  Their pachad, fear, had overwhelmed them.   They were not only trapped physically, but also spiritually.  

All these centuries later, on a new continent, we are experiencing how powerful this kind of fear can be. We hear it in xenophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-trans rhetoric -- not just from extremists on both the left and the right, but even from our own government. The result: Pachad, fear, spreading throughout our community and other beset peoples as well.

Pachad, basic fear, has its place. But if fear overtakes us, we will never make it across the narrow bridge.

So let’s return to the fear that many of us are experiencing in our own times, connected to our people’s history and all we carry with us.

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, in her  book Antisemitism: Here and Now,  describes how difficult it is to define antisemitism.  But says that “it is like a stubborn infection – medication might alleviate the symptoms, but the infection itself lies dormant and may reemerge at an opportune moment in a new incarnation…” And, she says, we know it when we see it.  

We are indeed in a perfect storm, where antisemitism is being manifested across political boundaries and throughout Europe and the United States, and beyond.  It is based on absurdity as it always has been:  Jews control or want to control the world. 

We also control everything from mass immigration to terrorist attacks.  We are behind military failures, economic downturns, even bad weather; we are to blame for both the crimes of authoritarian communism and of exploitative capitalism.  

White supremacists say we Jews are puppeteers, bent on replacing decent white Christians with people of color and other "freeloaders."  “The Jews will not replace us” they chanted in Charlottesville, as they marched with torches in their hands..

The maniac who murdered the Jews of Pittsburgh did so specifically because he despised HIAS - the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society - and their slogan, “Welcome the stranger, protect the refugee.” 

Under such circumstances, it makes sense to be afraid.  But what’s even scarier is that we are extraordinary divided. Too many Jews on the left are willing only to call out antisemitism on the right; and too many Jews on the right are willing to call out antisemitism on the left.   We need to come together and not be used by political firebrands who rouse our emotions precisely to divide us and feed more hate and lies, but in the end, care little what happens to us. 

But Professor Lipstadt also cautions us to not let antisemitism become the sole focus of our concerns. If we do. we run the risk of seeing the entire Jewish experience through the eyes of the people who hate us.  We also may lose perspective on looming threats to humanity that will only make antisemitism and all bigotry worse.

This is not a new message.  It has been noted for decades how negative experiences in our collective memory have loomed so large that they eclipsed the multitude of positive and noteworthy accomplishments that fill Jewish history.   Professor Lipstadt calls this the “oy” rather than the “joy.” We must find the courage to walk across the bridge with a firm step, hand in hand with friends and neighbors.   I believe we have also inherited the courage to do so, for without that ability, we would never have survived.

Each day, we make the choices that define us, as individuals and as a people. We need to hug our children in a way that conveys our love but not so tightly that they fail to develop the self-confidence they will need in this dangerous world that they will inherit.  We must not hide our fears from them, but we must show them that our fears do not immobilize us.  We must “walk on” with optimism, alert and vigilant, but not paranoid.

Let us aspire to face our fears.  Let us trust in our heritage and walk proudly, finding balance in our lives, and connection as a community. 

May we walk in God’s ways through acts of kindness, love, and justice. 

And, by walking across the bridge as bravely as we can, pass on the courage, hope and love that is our inheritance.

G’mar chatimah tovah, may you and your families, and this community, be sealed for a good, meaningful, healthy new year.