Console Us?
Pinchas Leiser
My teacher, Rabbi
Daniel Epstein, occasionally quotes the words of Franz Rosenzweig, saying that
the weekly parasha is like a personal letter sent to us every week, meeting us
in the place where we are at that time.
Five years
ago, in the leaflet on Parashat Vaethanen, which was published during
the second Lebanese War, I referred to the concept of consolation. Contemplating various appearances of the word
in the Bible, it became clear to me that at least two nineteenth century Bible
commentators, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in Germany and Rabbi Isaac Samuel
Reggio in northern Italy referred to the dual meaning of the word in their
commentaries, and also to the apparently contradictory meanings of the root N. H.
M.
At that time
I mentioned two nearly adjacent uses of the term in Parashat Bereshit:
And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,
and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth,
and it grieved him at his heart. And the
LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth;
both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it
repenteth me that I have made them. (Gen. 6:5-7)
In contrast to:
This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil
of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed. (Gen. 5:29)
The Holy one, as it were, regrets having created
Adam and Lemech, Noah’s father, but he is consoled by the birth of Noah, of
whom it is said that “he found favor in the eyes of God.”
Nevertheless,
in modern Hebrew, we use the root N. H. M. only in the meaning of
consolation, and not in that of regret.
When
we speak of consoling the mourning, the ordinary formulae are: “May the Place
console [yenahem] you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem,”
or “May you be consoled [tenuhamu] from heaven.”
Rabbi
Samson Raphael Hirsch on Gen. 29:5 points out the dual meaning of the word and
the common denominator between the meanings: “This root as an extraordinary
meaning: in the active sense it means to console, but it can also mean to
repent of a decision regarding the future.
“There
is a third meaning, to regret what has been done, as in Jeremiah, “No man
repented him of his wickedness” (8:6), and later, “After I returned and
repented” (31:18).
“The
basic meaning is to change one’s mind, and from this we get regret and a change
in a decision. Consolation also changes
the feeling of the heart regarding an event that has taken place. Nahem [console] is similar to Noah
[the name Noah]. The regretful one
changes his mind and turns in a new direction, that is to say, he changes the
direction of his motion, and thus we have nahem meaning regret: a
person who has experienced a loss will walk and move to fill in the void;
someone who has received consolation is someone who is at rest; consolation
will put his mind at ease, will fill the void, will silence the murmur of his
heart.”
To
sum up, even when we refer to the different, Utopian outlook of Rabbi Akiva,
when, in contrast to other Tannaim who went with him and wept seeing a fox
leave the Holy of Holies in the destroyed Temple, he laughed, in faith that the
prophecy of the renewal of the destroyed and abandoned city would be fulfilled
(“Old men and women will yet dwell in the streets of Jerusalem.”)
Then
we wrote: “Rabbi Akiva’s strange response and his ability to console his
fellow Tannaim could be connected to his ability to console himself, that is, to
contemplate reality in a different way, to take into account not only
static reality, but also the possibility that reality might change. Rabbi Akiva’s ability to see reality in a
dynamic way derives from his attitude toward historical reality as a developing
and changing text. On this matter one
can ask another question: what enables a person to adopt that way of
contemplating, and is this possible in every instance, or could there be
situations regarding which there is no possibility of being consoled? We remember the Patriarch Jacob’s response
when Joseph’s brothers showed him Joseph’s cloak, stained with blood:
And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon
his loins, and mourned for his son many days.
And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he
refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my
son mourning. Thus his father wept for him. (Gen. 37:34-35)
Rashi interprets Jacob’s refusal to be consoled
with a Midrash found in Bereshit Raba: “And he refused to be comforted” - B.
R. A person does not accept consolation for someone living and he was
certain he was dead, for of the dead it is decreed that they are forgotten from
one’s heart, but not the living.”
The
Midrash apparently assumes that there is a heavenly decree, meaning a mechanism
that doesn’t depend on oneself, by very nature, that permits one to be
reconciled with death, and that mechanism does not work when the person one is
mourning for is not actually dead.
It
is as if finality (conscious or unconscious) helps us to be reconciled with
difficult events and circumstances.
The
insight that Rashi adopted from the Midrash is interesting and paradoxical,
because if we adopt it and try to read it, following Rosenzweig, as a letter
addressed to us today, on the personal and also collective level, six years
after the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and five years after the Second
Lebanon War, or even when in these days Israeli society is coping with political
problems not only in the regional and international arena, but also with
serious crises in the social and ethical area, and it is enough to read the
headlines of the newspapers to be aware of it, each of us as an individual or
members of a community has the possibility of choosing between two positions:
1.
To view the situation as irreversible and to
accept it as a decree from heaven, meaning, “we shall eat the sword forever” -
the conflict between us and the Palestinians and the Arab world cannot be resolved;
social gaps are inevitable, and we have to be reconciled to them; there is no
money in the public treasury to assure decent housing at a reasonable, or a
public health system, etc. Does such an
acceptance offer consolation? Can accepting a worrisome situation be
consolation?
2.
It was Rabbi Akiva who did not accept the existing
situation and did not regard it as an irreversible decree, who was the
consoler, who was able to see the dead as living. Indeed, not accepting the
situation is what enables him to be consoled and to help the others to see not
only the present situation, but also the possibility for change, and this was
by virtue of his hope and faith.
Rashi, following Midrash Rabba, interprets the
words of Judah, “let us live and not die” (Gen. 43:8), after which Jacob agrees
to send Benjamin with his brothers, as being connected to the holy spirit, and
here are his words:
And we shall live – the holy spirit
flashed within him. By means of this
going, your spirit will live, as it is said, “And the spirit of Jacob
their father lived.
And on the words, “and the spirit of Jacob their
father lived (Gen. 48:37), Rashi wrote: “And the spirit of Jacob lived –
the Shekhina came to him, though it had gone away.”
That
is to say, the holy spirit had left Jacob when he thought that Joseph had been
devoured by a wild animal. Rabbi Akiva
was graced with the holy spirit when he was able to see through gloomy and
discouraging reality.
Since
we have no prophets, and we have no information “from behind the screen”, we
are in a situation of constant uncertainty, and therefore, in order to be
consoled, paradoxically, we must not, following the example of the Patriarch
Jacob, relate to the living as dead, which would not enable us to be consoled,
but rather we must adopt the approach of Rabbi Akiva, who enables us to relate
even to what seems to be dead and hopeless as something living, and in order to
do so, we need a different way of looking, a holy spirit. As Maimonides said (Guide of the Perplexed,
2:45), this is the first stage in the ladder of prophecy, that to which any
person can attain under certain circumstances:
The first level of
prophecy is that which lends a person divine help and motivates him and
induces him to do a great and valuable good deed, such as saving a group of
excellent people from a group of evil people, or to save a great and excellent
person, or to benefit many people. And
in his soul he will feel an impulse and drive to act. This is called the spirit of God.
The spirit of God is meant to inspire us with hope
and faith for a better future, but it also permits us to act for such a future,
and perhaps it also demands that of us.
Pinchas Leiser, the Editor of Shabbat Shalom, is a
psychologist.
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