
I was taken aback by the framing of the question, puzzled at
its puzzlement to the point of being incredulous. The answer seemed obvious,
held in the very web of factors presented to us. It was at a recent gathering
of rabbis, whose programmatic title was: “The Age of Anxiety: What Rabbis Need
to Know.” Clearly, anxiety is a serious mental health challenge, one that will
always need caring and skilled intervention toward addressing the internal and
personal dynamics of one’s own experience and chemistry. While this was part of
the program’s focus, there was another dimension, and it was in the approach to
that other dimension that I felt so troubled.
Referring first to the high incidence of anxiety among
Americans today, the introductory material we received then went on to say:
“Yet, ironically, we have fewer reasons to be anxious today than ever: Advances
in technology, economics, medicine, and other fields make us more productive,
connected, affluent, and privileged than any period in history. Why is the
modern world such a ripe context for the development of emotional disorders,
and more importantly what can we do about it?

I sat at the edge of my seat for much of the talk, feeling
distress, and, indeed, anxiety, as the presenter offered the same framing as I
had read in the written materials. In the positing of a question that utterly ignored what is right
in front of us, I nearly screamed, “the world is falling apart, how shall we
not be anxious?!” It seemed so clear, that for so many people there is a
painful awareness of the jagged edges of external reality as felt within
themselves, that cuts to the quick of every tender, caring heart, of every heart
that holds the world’s pain as its own. How not to feel anxious, for people and
for the world, and for the fate of future generations that hangs in the
balance?

The presenter asked, “how many of you know someone who lives
without plumbing, or who has never been on an airplane?” Struggling to contain
my feelings, I wondered, does it really matter if I don’t know anyone
personally without plumbing or without the worldly experience that was somehow
assumed to mitigate anxiety? I thought about all of those who live in wretched
poverty in this country and in so many places in the world, all part of the
human family. I thought of all the migrants suffering at our southern border,
their pain inflicted in my name. I thought about the intrinsic lines of
connection that join us to each other, of the teaching that emerges from the
very beginning of Torah, that all people are created in the image of God. How
can I not feel anxiety in knowing how many in my extended human family live
lives that are so filled with pain and struggle?
When the time for questions finally came, I couldn’t believe
that what seemed so obvious was not addressed. As time went by and my hand
seemed unnoticed, I felt like I would burst. Near to the end, as someone else
pointed to my raised hand, I finally shared my distress, telling of the
anxiety, as it were, that I felt in the disconnection between inner and outer
worlds. I challenged the speaker’s suggestion of privilege as a bulwark against
anxiety, pointing to it, rather, as the very cause for such collective anxiety.
With privilege in regard to wealth and justice, to health and opportunity, to
happiness and fulfillment, we come to be divided from each other as human
beings.

Privilege separates, even from those who are near and dear to us, each
one caught up in their own pursuits. In the grand scheme, the environmental
disasters that threaten the earth’s future are a consequence of privilege, of
living without constraints, of living as though we can do whatever we want and
take from the earth and others whatever will satisfy our own presumed needs. I
thought of all those who feel so deeply the pain of the world, who struggle
with such anxiety of conscience to respond with awareness of our own privilege
to the profound disparities in relation to others. It is privilege itself that
becomes the source of our existential anxiety.
Feeling the pain of others as a source of anxiety runs deep
in Jewish tradition. In a very different context, not as a matter of privilege,
but in regard to an intrinsic human bond that is frayed by privilege, we are
challenged in at least two settings in the Torah portion read during the week
of the gathering, the portion called
B’shallach (Ex. 13:17-17:16), in regard to how we respond to the suffering
of others. When the Israelites have crossed the sea and are standing on the far
shore watching the Egyptian soldiers drowning in the returning waters, they
couldn’t sing at first, the verses suggesting that they stood in dumbfound
silence. A powerful Musar teaching
notes the silence before song could arise:

‘
And God saved Israel on that day from the
hand of Egypt, and Israel saw Egypt dead upon the seashore.’
They had not yet uttered song, they had not sung their redemption song nor sung
concerning the downfall of the Egyptians, for they were greatly distressed; for
all this, how is it possible to sing and to rejoice with complete joy when
seeing a great camp of human beings strewn upon the seashore, writhing in
terrible agonies, the dead and the dying?
From
much longer ago than nineteenth century ethical teaching, in the Haftorah of that week from the Book of
Judges (4:4-5:31), the Philisitine general Sisera is killed, one who plundered,
raped, and destroyed. Near the end of the Haftorah his mother waits for her
son’s return, looking through the window, coming to realize that he will not
return. The rabbis likened the sound of her weeping to the weeping sound of the
shofar’s broken notes. From the weeping of Sisera’s mother, vat’yabev em sis’ra/and the mother of Sisera
wept (Judges 5:28), Rosh Hashannah came to be called by its least familiar
name, Yom Yabavah/Day of Weeping,
honoring the universal cry of one mother whose son will not return.
Each
of these cases offers an extreme instance of identification with the pain of others,
even of those who would harm us. So sensitized to the breadth of human life, we
are meant to feel anxiety at all harm done to others. In doing all that we can
to repair the world in which we live is a path to our own wholeness. Activism
is therapeutic, not only in its successes on behalf of others, but for
ourselves. We are strengthened and given meaning in the empowering realization
that we can do something about all that weighs upon our hearts. Holding in our
hearts those without plumbing and benefits of privilege, remembering those who
are knocking at America’s doors, those who suffer war and famine, holding with
love the earth herself, so may our own souls and psyches be made whole, as we
learn to breath through and act upon the healing imperative of moral anxiety.
Rabbi Victor H. Reinstein
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