Emotional Traffic Jam

April 23, 2022

Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,

Listen Watch


Pesach Day VIII
April 23, 2022 — 22 Nisan 5782
Emotional Traffic Jam—A Yizkor Sermon
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA

          

                 

            There is a famous vignette in the Talmud that resonates mightily for our time. It concerns a traffic jam.  One morning a bride and her retinue go off to her wedding.  A happy procession.  There is singing and joy in the air.  It is palpable.  The bride is so happy.  She can just imagine the rest of her life, building a life with the love of her life, the good times they will have, the family they will build, the home they will create, the good that they can do together.  But at the exact same time, a funeral procession takes off.  A wife is now to lay her husband of many years to his resting place.  There is sadness in the air.  Worry. What will be? The widow weeps:  I cannot imagine life without my husband. We have been together forever.  I have never been alone. How am I to live alone?

            The bride’s laughter, the widow’s weeping, collide.  The two processions cannot make it through at the same time.  What should happen next?

            Of course the Talmud is not only talking about a traffic problem.  It is talking about a human problem.  The issue is not too many cars on the road on the verge of colliding. The issue to too many conflicting emotions swirling in our hearts, at the same time.

            We felt an emotional traffic jam—happiness and sadness colliding—during the pandemic.  Many of us felt that we did just fine during the pandemic.  And yet our private contentment collided with the ubiquity of deep suffering in our country and in our world.

            We feel an emotional traffic jam now, Passover while the Ukraine war is going on.  How could we not feel that traffic jam when we sit down, free and safe, to tables full of love, food and drink at our holiday meals, when we know that millions of refugees have had their lives upturned, when we see daily evidence of atrocities and war crimes that evoke our own people’s darkest hour?

            We will feel an emotional traffic jam during Yom Hashoah next week, as our memories of our own suffering in the 1930s and 40s collide with the current reality of atrocity and suffering today.

            But the emotional traffic jam is not only a national story.  It is also very personal.

            You’re celebrating a wedding of one child, but another child still cannot find love.  One child is a radiant bride or groom, while the other child faces the brutality of online dating, bad date after bad date, no mazal.

            A new birth. A new life. A new bris. A new naming. And other families for whom that dream is not yet realized.

            One family member just got the best job, the biggest raise, a new promotion; the other family member’s career is stuck, stuck, stuck.

            One loved one just ran the Boston Marathon this week, their best time ever. Another loved one is struggling with chronic illness.

            Happiness and sadness always find new ways to collide, a perpetual emotional traffic jam.

            Today is the eighth day of Pesach.  Should we be happy or should we be sad?  We are happy.  Our generations came together in person.  We shared meals. We shared love.  It is spring.  At the same time we are sad.  It is Yizkor.  We remember who is not here.  We feel the empty place at the table.  Happiness and sadness collide.

            Which brings us back to the vignette in the Talmud.  The bride and her procession and the widow and her procession are about to collide.  It’s a narrow road.  The Talmud’s ruling is that the bridal procession take precedence.  The funeral procession has to wait until the bridal procession gets through.

            We learn several things from this vignette.

            We learn, first of all, that most of us do not have the luxury of feeling our happiness in a perfectly happy world.  We have to find our happiness in a manifestly complicated world where other fine people are not happy.  The bride goes to her wedding knowing that on that very day a widow is going to her husband’s funeral.  Should the bride say how can I be happy today when another woman is burying her husband? Of course not.  The bride is entitled to be happy.  But that happiness requires her to exercise a muscle of the ability to find, to feel, to create joy in a world where suffering also exists.

            We can’t wait for the world to be perfect before we find happiness.    We have to exercise that muscle that allows us to find our happiness in the midst of an imperfect world, because that is the only world we’ve got. 

            And, we have to make space for the funeral processions in life.  There are times when we are going to feel sad, times when we are going to wonder how we’ll go on without the people we love, times when we just need to stop and let the celebrations pass us by while we feel our pain.  That’s okay.  The widow goes to her husband’s funeral knowing that at the very same time, a bride will stand with her beloved under their wedding canopy.  The widow’s most painful day is the bride’s most joyful day. And that’s okay too. It just is.  Life just is that way.

            I want to tell you a story about a man who has had to negotiate an emotional traffic jam.  His name is Dr. Jacob Gaissinovitch,  and he is a 46-year old Ukrainian and mohel.  In fact he is known as The Mohel of Dnipro.  Since 1998, he has performed 8,302 britot, an average of one per day.  Six weeks ago the Mohel, and his wife Lisa, and their three young children, became refugees.  They had wanted to stay put in their home in Dnipro, but one morning their 4-year old son got close to a window in their home as sirens were growing louder because of Russian shelling.  When Jacob Gaissinovitch realized that his son could get killed by staring out the window of his own home, he and his wife decided it was time.  Like the Israelites, who had no time, but had to go now, this family of five left their old life and their old home and got in his Nissan SUV, and they started driving, refugees in search of a new home.

            The driving was harrowing.  Shells were falling. Sirens were blaring. Checkpoints were causing delay. And the traffic of other refugees trying to flee was endless.  Five hours became 10 hours became 15 hours.  It was Friday night, the sun was setting, Shabbat was coming in, but they kept driving because it was a matter of life and death.  Their 11-year old daughter started singing l’cha dodi in the car, the family joined in, and they felt anchored.

            The family of five was in the car for 25 hours to get to one town, Chisinau, where mattresses were hauled into a local synagogue, and where refugees were piled on top of one another.  This situation was so grim that after 25 hours in the car, and utter terror on the road, the family decided to drive another 800 miles to go to Vienna, which is now accepting Ukrainian refugees.

            Talk about complicated.

            Vienna, the birthplace of Hitler, Vienna which murdered, massacred and expelled its Jews, is now a city with a growing Jewish community.  There are now 8,000 Jews, 25 synagogues, a dozen kosher restaurants, two Jewish day schools, a Jewish university, and now a Ukrainian Mohel, who after the terror of fleeing Ukraine and a forever ride in the wilderness, has now found an odd promised land.  Outside the apartment that his family has been relocated to, is a sidewalk that has the stepping stones with the names of Viennese Jews who used to live in these buildings who were murdered by the Nazis.    He and his family live in the apartment now, oddly safe, safer than Dnipro, safer than on the road, better than Kishnev, but as he walks the streets of his new home, of Vienna, he sees  stones incised with the names of the victims of the Shoah.  Sadness and happiness  collide.

            In the pages of the Talmud. In our lives. At our seder tables. At our weddings. At our Yizkor service now.

            There is no such thing as happiness in a perfect world.  There is only creating our happiness in an imperfect world.  Once the Mohel got relocated in Vienna, with his wife and children safe and sound, he got a call.  Another Jewish boy was born in Dnipro.  He got in his Nissan and drove back across the border, to go back to Dnipro, to welcome another Jew into our eternal covenant.   He revisits the terror of the long road, the hours and hours of driving, his personal mitzrayim, in order to do another bris for another Jewish family, because happiness is not only what we feel.  Happiness is also what we do to make meaning—especially when we are in a traffic jam.  Please rise.