The Unbearable Lightness of Being Jewish

There is a lot of pain that comes with being a Jew. I've learned that our task is not to numb that pain, but to heighten awareness of life’s tragic nature and the inherent beauty of survival.

The headline reads, “You are not alone.”

The novelist Milan Kundera, who died this past July, asked in his classic novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “What shall we choose, weight or lightness?” 

From time immemorial, the Jewish people have cast their lot with meaning over comfort, weight over lightness. Israelis have always lived a life saturated with significance, and at times great risk, where every trip to the corner market becomes an affirmation of faith.  For them, we have often wished more lightness, a little more lightness, a simple inconsequential spat with a partner or a flawless dance recital, or a good, crispy boureka. God, just a trip to the mall without having to consider the security implications of taking route 1 vs. the 443.

Things are very heavy now, over there.

But over here, in our understandable desire to shield our children from all the horrors, we have often mistakenly not enlisted them fully into the battles that will determine their future. We dealt with some heavy topics during the Trump years, but it somehow felt surreal enough for kids not to bear the full brunt of how consequential that moment was (and could well be again).

If we failed to guide them before, they are being given a crash course now, in how unbearably weighty it is to be a Jew.

In speaking with some of our young adults this week, several have commented that they've never felt this way before as a Jew: isolated, conspicuous, confused, with a crying need for companionship and support - and especially, intense. Being Jewish has never felt with such intensity before..

This has been true for older folks too. That's why there has been such disappointment when friends, bosses, school administrators and cultural icons have failed to recognize the pain of this moment.

Here's a perfect example of how everyone around us should have responded:

Ah, if only every non-Jewish organization, school, business or politician could just have said that. Personally, I'd have added some more about caring for the fate of innocent Palestinians, but I quibble. The SBL wrote precisely what I needed to see. And what you needed to see, too.

No one was prepared for this; nor should we have been, for this.

But aside from that abject horror, in a more general sense, none of us was fully prepared for the Jewish-part-of-us to become so all consuming, so demanding, so heavy, so consequential - so dense.

People have come to me to relieve that burden, but there is very little relief that I can offer. Religion is the "Opiate of the Masses," according to Marx, the great numbing agent of civilization. But Marx got it wrong. While life can be unbearable, Judaism exists - thrives, really - in our ability to take consequentiality and use it to heighten awareness, not deaden it behind comforting cure-alls and pastoral balm. My role as rabbi is to be present and comfort people, but not to deaden their pain.

“Life isn’t meant to be easy," writes James Michener at the end of The Source, summing up the Jewish experience. "It’s meant to be life.”

There is a lot of pain that comes with being a Jew. A comforter’s job, I’ve learned, is not to numb that pain, but to heighten awareness of life’s tragic nature and the inherent beauty of survival.

Lightness, then, is in fact what is truly unbearable and consequence is meaningful. And despite this, or because of it, as surveys have shown, Israelis are among the happiest people on earth - number four on this year's scale.

Come again? It's true, and it can't just be because of the weather, the food and the taxis. Let's assume that the country may have slipped a few notches this year. Or maybe not. Every time they are knocked down they keep getting back up. They are so happy because, given the choice between a Birkenstocks and Barbie Land, they choose the shoes, they opt for a meaningful life, a life of struggle, of weightiness and ultimately, a life of triumph and love.

Fear is all around us and often within us. But if we can respond with a clarion prayer and an extended hand, we're going to get through this.

And it's a good thing we have such moral strength in our DNA, because this thing is just beginning and it's going to be a very rough ride for us all.