Hold Space For Your Pain
Yom Kippur 5783
This is a reminder to hold space for your pain. Twenty minutes before Shabbat Shuva, my head racing with competing priorities, my foot urged the accelerator to get me home faster - I suddenly felt chills creeping up my body. An image from a dream I’d had the night before flashes at me - a head on collision with another car. I had woken up with my heart racing, my palms sweating, my breath rapid, and my whole body tense - an unfiltered fear response.
Bringing myself back to where I actually was - safe, in my bed, I returned my frightened soul back to my body with deep-into-the-body breaths, and the very same emotional embodiment tools that I teach in classrooms. It works (of course it does), and I settle enough to be able to go back to sleep. The image, however, stays with me. The split second before my dream self plowed into a black sedan with tinted windows plays over and over in my brain. I am powerless to stop it, as I was in the dream - as I was on the eve of Yom Kippur one year ago, hurtling down the road in an ambulance, with my son who had stopped breathing. My dream was a reminder of how suddenly, how terrifyingly everything can stop.
However much we’d like to, we have no control over when images from our past - or their representations in our dreams - will wash over us, cause us to freeze momentarily, perhaps panic. We might be in the middle of a meeting, in an intimate conversation, or rushing to put dinner on the table - and suddenly, there it is - that moment we’d rather forget, but that lives deep within our muscle fibers. As Yom Kippur is upon us, we are invited to travel into those deep places within us, the ones that hold our fear and our pain, and seek - within them, within us - forgiveness. We are invited to look into those crevices that we have papered over in “I should….” and “I should have….” and wonder how we might emerge lighter this year.
We are asked on Yom Kippur to supplicate for our redemption, and to deprive ourselves of food, water, and physical comfort, so that we can do the hard work of reflecting on the moments we lived in the past year that we might need Divine compassion for. We think about the times we questioned God, or perhaps even lashed out from a personal, or global injustice. The liturgy of this time - where we repent, and ask for redemption - invites us to look at those moments and wonder whether they deem us worthy of the book of the righteous, or the book of the wicked, or the book of the in between. They ask us to peer into wounds that may still need healing, that may still be bleeding.
At the very beginning of the year, we are asked to ponder who will die, and who will live, and in what manner their lives will continue - or end. When we read Unetaneh Tokef, we are asked to see images in our hearts of the most fateful of fates - “who by fire….who by water…who by sword…who by plague.” - Images that we can also see reflected back to us from footage around the world, from our own neighborhoods, perhaps even in our own families. We begin the season of repentance with a recitation of our pain.
As the liturgy pours over us, awakening our spirits with a prickling caress of moral contemplation, we wonder about which book we have been written in, whether we are deserving or undeserving, and how our fate will be sealed. We ask ourselves where the decisions we made fall onto the scale, and which way it will tip by the time our fate is sealed on Yom Kippur. We think back to the big moments that left emotional imprints in our hearts.
The Talmud (Yoma 83a), in a discussion of who should and should not eat on Yom Kippur, quotes a proverb from Mishlei (14:10) that we can use as a guidepost for making decisions -
"לב יודע מרת נפשו …"
We trust people to hear their hearts, trust their own bodies, and heed their own needs. While the soul may be pulled towards fasting, the body may hold a different reality. Perhaps one of illness, perhaps one of danger, perhaps one of potentiality that sits just beyond our understanding. Perhaps one of pain that lives locked within our hearts.
On this Yom Kippur, I invite you to make space for your pain. This past year, although not as plagued as the one before it, was still tremendously difficult for many of us. We have made it, though some of us are much worse for wear. We head into this day of atonement with the awareness that our pain comes with us into the sanctuary, carried in our hearts.
I invite you to be okay with the struggle that lives within you, without making excuses for it. I invite you to notice the voice inside you that calls out for your own needs, and not quiet it. I invite you to hear the pleading for forgiveness from within your heart, and meet it boldly - if quietly.
Over the course of a year, we make decisions that help us heal our pain, or help us keep it hidden. We decide whether to talk about the thing that is on our mind, or let it go, or let it fester. We decide between sweet and salty, reading or watching a show, going out or staying in. We decide whether the world’s pain becomes ours today, or whether we leave it just on the edge of our awareness. We make decisions between pushing our bodies, minds, souls - or choosing to stop, rest, recover. We make the decision to listen to our inner critic’s nagging, or ask it to please, for the love of G-d - stop. Some of us make the decision every day to keep fighting battles, even though it would be so much easier to lay down the sword.
Unetaneh Tokef ends in a crescendo reminder of how we can escape a severe decree - we echo out repentance, prayer, and charity - pleading in unified voices for our own salvation, and that of our community. For some of us, this is how we live every day - aware of our decisions, careful to do the spiritual and physical work, and intentional about our giving. For some of us - this is the one time where we ponder how we could reach this ideal. For some of us, the liturgy is deeply painful, as we fight battles that people don’t see, as we envelop deeper in our pain.
Our hearts know the bitterness within us - even that which we don’t show.
Yet, if we continue on reading in Proverbs 14, we see the other side of the coin:
"ובשמחתו לא־יתערב זר"
“And no outsider can share in its joy.”
While our hearts are the keepers of our pain, they are also the beacon of our joy. In the same memory, I can hold the bone chilling fear of my son in a hospital bed - and the joy at seeing him relish his oreos in that very same bed. In the same memory, we can hold what we are most ashamed of - and what we most seek forgiveness for. We can hold our deepest, most searing personal pain - and within it, hope for healing. As you recite Kol Nidrei tonight, letting go of all the promises you might have made over the course of the year, I invite you to let go of the many….many…many times you have layered your heart with “shoulds”. An “I should” or an “I should have” is as binding to the heart as an “I promise to.”
This is a reminder to hold space for your pain. This Yom Kippur, I invite you to hold space for your pain, and to climb into that space as the day washes over you. Allow yourself to sit within your heart, to honor that which it whispers to you. Allow yourself to ask the questions that you most fear, to accept the parts of you that you most battle - and to take tentative steps into, also, holding this space for your joy.
Shana Tova ve Gmar Chatima Tova