February 19, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Ki Tisa
February 19, 2022 — 18 Adar I 5782
Lightning Rod
by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
How are we to understand the many stories we have all read about anger run amok in public places; about bad behavior on airplanes, at restaurants, at the bridges that connect Canada and the US blocked by angry Canadian truck drivers? This anger victimizes innocent people, the passengers and flight attendants on the plane, the waiters and fellow diners at the restaurant, drivers trying to cross the bridge who are stuck in traffic for hours on end.
A helpful category to understand why somebody would want to victimize the innocent is the lightning rod phenomenon. A lightning rod is a metal rod attached to a building which diverts lightning so that it falls onto the ground. The rod takes the heat, takes the lightning, so that the rest of the building can be spared. It is a physical phenomenon—but it is also true in the world of relationships.
When I was a rabbinical student, my teachers warned us about the lightning rod problem. It is a classic problem that happens to clergy, but it does not only happen to clergy. It happens to all of us in different ways. Mrs. Cohen loses her husband of 60 years. When shiva is over, she is angry. Angry that her husband died. Angry that she is alone. Angry that her life has changed. But what can she do with that anger? Where can she place it? She could be angry at her husband for dying. But it wasn’t his fault that he died. She could be angry at her children for living so far away. But they are doing nothing wrong. They are just living their own lives. She could be angry at God, but she has never really had much of a relationship with God anyway. She feels all this anger, but has no place to let it out. That is where the rabbi comes in handy.
The rabbi becomes a lightning rod for her anger. Mrs. Cohen will express anger at the rabbi, who will take the heat, who will take the lightning, which enables the rest of the building, her husband, her children, her connection with God, to be spared.
Anger that builds up has to be released somewhere. The lightning rod is about displacing that anger onto innocent people who happen to be at the wrong place in the wrong time, including fellow travelers, flight attendants, diners, waiters, and drivers.
There is of course a cost to the person on the receiving end of displaced anger. But there is also a significant cost to having so much anger that you displace it onto people who did you no harm.
I want to tell you a story.
When I was in Israel with my father in love, we passed many hours listening to a podcast from JTS called What Now? The premise is compelling. The narrator of the podcast, a woman named Sara Beth, shared that several years ago she had been engaged to a fifth-year rabbinical student at the Seminary who passed away tragically. She was a widow before her wedding day, a 20-something widow. She was also a student at JTS. And she wondered: what do JTS scholars have to say about how our sources help us cope with life’s hardest moments?
On one podcast she interviews Rabbi Mychal Springer, who runs the pastoral psychology program at JTS. She trains rabbis and cantors how to be with people in their most vulnerable moments.
Sara Beth asked Rabbi Springer what is the hardest, most painful thing that ever happened to you? What was your your Book of Job moment?
Rabbi Springer shared that she grew up in Boston, attending Solomon Schechter Day School, and her classmate was Aaron Kushner, who passed away from progeria. While Mychal Springer was a young teen, she saw firsthand the pain and loss that Aaron Kushner’s passing caused for their whole community. She decided then and there that she wanted to become a rabbi so that she could work on a space that would, as she put it, hold people in their hardest hours. In high school she knows, I want to be a rabbi, to create that space. In college she knows, I want to be a rabbi, to create that space. She goes to the Seminary. She knows I want to be a rabbi, to create that space. And then, while she is in rabbinical school, suddenly, tragically, a dear friend of hers dies at the age of 30, leaving a daughter who is 18 months old. And Michael Springer realized she has absolutely no idea about how to create this magical healing holding space. She feels bereft, lost, confused—not empowered.
What did you do then, Sara Beth asked her? What did Jewish sources say to you when your life was turned upside down?
Mychal answers that her favorite text, which she teaches to her pastoral psychology students, is a Yehuda Amichai poem about the prayer El Moleh Rachamim:
God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead.
If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.
I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy…
I, who must decipher riddles
I don’t want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.
Mychal Springer teaches this poem to her pastoral students to make two points, and she felt both of these points in her own season of distress.
It is okay to feel anger. Amichai is angry with God. Mychal Springer is sometimes angry at God.
We need to channel that anger in a way that is productive, helpful, healing. If God if so full of compassion that there is none left in the world, we have to be that compassion. We have to bring that compassion. Find a way to channel our anger that heals, not inflames.
Here is what Mychal did when she lost her best friend. When she was in rabbinical school, there was no Jewish pastoral training program. Pastoral programs were run by Christian clergy. Seminary students had to go outside the Seminary to get pastoral clinical experience. She created a Jewish pastoral program, run out of the Seminary, that brings Jewish texts to the sacred work of being a pastor in life’s most challenging moments. The disquiet she felt when her best friend died—how can she channel that to teach generations of rabbis and cantors how to be compassionate pastors.
At this point Sara Beth is genuinely moved. You can hear her emotion. She says to Mychal Springer I have something to tell you. Ten years ago, when my fiancé died, you were teaching him pastoral psychology. I don’t know why, I just got so angry at you. I studiously avoided you for ten years. What you said about Amichai’s poem, how we need to channel our anger in ways that make the world better, not worse, I really needed to hear that ten years ago. But I didn’t because I was avoiding you. That was my loss.
In other words, Sara Beth lightning rodded Mychal Springer. Sara Beth did not get angry at her fiancé, she did not get angry at the doctors or the hospital, but she did get angry at the teacher who was supposed to teach him how to face life’s tragedies. By lightning rodding this teacher, Sara Beth lost a connection that could have helped her. The good news is that was not the end of the story. Ten years later, she brought healing into the world.
By doing the podcast and sharing the story of how she lightning rodded her fiance’s teacher, Sara Beth helped her listeners not make the mistake she made.
There is no shortage of things that can stir anger nowadays. That is why there are so many stories of anger run amok. But when we resist the temptation to lightning rod, when we channel our anger into healing, the world will be better off, and so will we. Shabbat shalom.