On Suffering
Friday night, December 10, 2021
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Santa Barbara has been particularly beautiful this week. We had a few drops of rain earlier in the week, and the air has been crisp and clear; the gravitational pull of sun and moon have produced dramatic king tides, and the warmth of the sun has lured us all outside, to sit with each other under blue skies and our beloved mountains.
Yesterday afternoon I sat outside with a friend, surrounded by all this beauty, while she shared with me that she knew personally one of the family members left behind by the murder/suicide that occurred in the Best Western hotel on Calle Real on Thanksgiving. My friend wanted to talk because she is struggling to come to grips with what happened. Personally, I tend to limit my consumption of the news, and until my friend told me about it, I was completely unaware. If like me you missed it, here is what happened in our town, on Thanksgiving: a man found his ex-wife, with her three children, staying in the motel….over there near Trader Joes and the Goodland, and he shot and killed her and then killed himself, in front of the three children. At this point, my friend began to weep, as we sat there in the warm sunshine, thinking of what those three children will not be able to forget for the rest of their lives.
How do we live with this knowledge? My friend apologized more than once for telling me what had happened. She was apologizing for bringing me such a sad story, for making me sad. But the truth is that we are not meant to be happy all the time. There is vast suffering in the world, more than I ever imagined when I was young. And I think that one of our greatest challenges as human beings is to somehow make room in our hearts for both all of the exquisite beauty and joy, and also the suffering that is all around us. Is that even possible?
The poet W.H. Auden wrote about this problem in a poem entitled Musée des Beaux Arts. In that poem, Auden speaks as though standing in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, looking at a painting by the Flemish painter Pieter Breughel the Elder entitled Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In the painting, Breughel presents the Greek myth of Icarus, the boy who flew using wings his father had made out of feathers and wax. But the boy Icarus flew too near to the sun, melting the wax, and the wings failed and he fell to his death. The painting itself is extraordinary. A pastoral landscape, with a farmer ploughing the rich earth, and a shepherd with his flocks, and the sun shining on the ocean, with a ship sailing on the ocean. And in a tiny corner of the painting, we catch just a glimpse of the boy Icarus who has fallen out of the sky into the water, and a tiny splash in the water, made by the falling boy. Here is how Auden’s poem begins:
About suffering, they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…
Auden is wondering, as we do, how is it that we go on with our lives in the presence of all the suffering? Here are the final lines of the poem:
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
When I was younger, one of the first things I heard about Buddhism is that the first noble truth taught by Buddhism is the truth of suffering. I heard the story about Gautama Buddha, and how he was raised in a sheltered existence of privilege, and then one day went out and he saw an elderly person, and then a leper and then a corpse, and through those encounters was first exposed to the truth of suffering. I don’t remember how old I was, maybe in high school, but I do remember thinking “what a miserable religion, to start off with the reality of suffering. So depressing!”
It took years for me to see the irony, that the story could have been about me, supremely protected from any real suffering, wrapped in a cocoon of privilege. It took many years, and sharing many tragedies and hours spent with families in deep grief and facing immense challenges, before I understood that there is so much more suffering in the world than I had ever imagined growing up.
It took even longer before I learned that Judaism also tells a story of a young man raised in privilege, who knows nothing of suffering until one day he goes out of the palace. Moshe Rabbeinu, our teacher Moses grows up in the palace of the Pharoah, where he surely must have believed that the entire world was perfectly ordered, and full of the finest food, art and music. What could young Moses know of pain, of hunger, of sickness or suffering?
But one day, we are told, he went out of the palace.
Out there beyond the palace walls, he saw the suffering of his brothers. There are some beautiful commentaries on that crucial moment in Moses’ life, picking up on a tiny grammatical peculiarity. The Hebrew is vayar b’sivlotam, which literally means “he saw in their sufferings.” The grammar is slightly strange. A number of the traditional commentators explain that he did not only see with his eyes, but he opened his heart to feel their suffering. He experienced some of their pain. This is the moment that Moses becomes Moses.
But how does Moses’ story help us comprehend and live with the tragedy of what happened on Calle Real on Thanksgiving Day?
On the day that Moses went out of the palace, and came face to face with the suffering of the world, his first response was to lash out in rage. He kills a man, then he flees to Midian, where he lives for 40 years, shepherding flocks, far from the brutal reality he had witnessed in Egypt. Then one day at the Burning Bush Moses hears his name being called, and he responds “Hineni.” I am here. An angel speaks to Moses out of the burning bush. The angel reminds Moses of the suffering which he had witnessed, and from which he had fled. And the angel offers Moses a vision of a land flowing with milk and honey. A vision of a better future.
Moses’ work, from that moment until he dies 40 years later, is to share that vision of a better future and to lead the people toward it.
Our work too, is to see clearly the suffering all around us, the unbearable brutality, and to open our hearts to feel that suffering. And then with love, with courage, with faith, and with help from above, to envision a future for those three heartbroken children, a future for all of our children. L’taken olam, to heal this broken world, we need vision and hope.
This is how we live as whole human beings, in the midst of a broken world. Ken yehi ratzon. May this be God’s will.