My cousin Carol, unaware that she had cancer, plummeted suddenly, was in intensive care for two weeks and died on Oct. 5, 2023. On the phone from Virginia to Israel just a few days before her death, she asked me to pray for a miracle. I immediately said I would. But almost just as suddenly, I shrank from the task. Knowing what I knew (or knowing what I thought I knew), how was I going to pray for her life?
So I forewent all words, all will, all direction from my prayer. I simply sat, her face before me bathed in light. I stood or sat in this pose three times a day, feeling both her and me infused with light, diffusing light, suffused with light. I felt my light mingling with hers, my face inhabiting her face. I saw her in glowing health and power. I knew for certain that she would be able to move through anything with love and ease. These encounters always ended with a feeling of healing warm throughout my body and a smile on my face.
Little did I know how sitting in the light with Carol would prepare me for what was to come in just a few days.
On Oct. 8, I was in shock, confusion and horror, trying to wrap my mind around our new reality: the infiltration of the attackers, the humbling of the delayed response, the butchery, the burnings, the kidnappings. Mishnah Tractate Berakhot teaches that praying for something where the outcome is already known is considered a vain prayer. The character Maria in “West Side Story” cries “Make it not be true!” when she hears that her beloved has killed her brother. This vain prayer, Make it not be true! was broadcasting in my head alongside This can’t be true and This has actually happened. In that immediate aftermath, Israelis were jumping into action to help the displaced persons, the wounded and the survivors. The country was on shutdown as the infiltrators were tracked and captured. We were all in that strange combination of terror response: flight, fight and freeze.
What is the prayer that penetrates that state of body and mind to awaken to the Power that makes for Connection, the Power that makes for Salvation, the Power that makes for Truth? Pirkei Avot 4:23 cautions us not to appease someone in the midst of their anger and not to comfort someone while they’re dead lies before them. I was in a stupor. But my very recent practice was on my side. I did what I had been doing with my cousin Carol the week before.
Light is indiscriminate. It is beyond the categories of right or wrong. It surprises me. It calms me. It shows me a picture irrelevant of victim and perpetrator.
In the privilege of my safety, in the privilege of my sunlit porch, I felt my way back to that light. Into it I brought with me the dead and the dying, the terrorized, the abducted, the bereaved, the wounded, the medics, the fighters. The miracle for my cousin was the miracle of light and transcendence, the ability to find oneself holding and held in the Wholeness of Light while the body is breaking down. I brought the faces of the kidnapped to my mind’s eye (this is before the plastered photographs were everywhere to be seen). As I imagined them in dark tunnels and sat with them, the faces of their captors naturally also came into my mind. The light had no problem holding all of them together.
There is a wonderful scene in the movie “City of Angels,” where the two angels (Nicolas Cage is one) are in a convenience store where a hold-up is unfolding at the cash register. One angel has his hand on the shoulder of the storekeeper calming him down as he hands over the money. The other angel has his hands on the shoulders of the robber with the same soothing tone.
I don’t recall how the scene is resolved, but I was so deeply moved by the presence of the angel over the person perpetrating the crime. Of course, it would be this way! Light is indiscriminate. It is beyond the categories of right or wrong. It surprises me. It calms me. It shows me a picture irrelevant of victim and perpetrator. In the container of Light, anything can be borne.
Of course, I continue to be beset with, even overwhelmed by, worry, fear, grief, frustration, argument, justification, pain, anguish — wishing that some things I hear could be made Not True. But the Light is still larger than all of it. Many days my access is denied, and I have to go through the gates of tears, the detours of distraction, the reset of sleep. But even when I can’t get to the Tremendous Light, I know that I have been there, and that gives me the patience to wait until I return again.
In the 1990s, I studied at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College with Rabbi Arthur Green, who summarized the enterprise of Kabbalah as addressing this question: How does the Many proceed from the One?
As I live life every day, it seems that the question is flipped: How, in this world of separation and refraction, might I reach for and glimpse and taste the One? In the world of separateness, the fact that I might have been sitting in peace just hours ago is no guarantee that I will not be invaded by the next urgent call to panic. The glimpse and the taste of the One occur inside separate moments of time. And then I move on to whatever presents itself next.
But the existence of Teshuvah is an ultimate comfort when I lose what I have reached. I write this on the 353rd day since Oct. 7. Three-hundred and fifty-four days constitutes a lunar year. The first rain fell yesterday, although we are not yet mentioning the rain in our prayers. Coming to Rosh Hashanah after this past year is full of heaviness. As I personally come around to the yahrzeit of my cousin Carol, Henya bat Alice ve-Peretz, I pray for all of us to be able to sit together in the light, to pray for the miracle that we cannot yet articulate, that we cannot yet imagine.
On Rosh Hashanah, we crown the Creator as the ultimate Melekh (King) of existence. We place God upon a throne. We bow and bend and surrender to the recognition that, for all our powers of Tefillah/Prayer, Teshuvah/Repentance and Tzedakah/Generosity, we do not call the shots. Let us pray for a miracle and return again and again to the Light that has the capacity to hold us All.
