faith & narrow bridges

There is a Hebrew song I love that contains these words: “kol ha’olam kulo gesher tsar me’od, v’haikar lo lefached klal” which translates as “the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing to recall is not to be afraid at all.” In most renditions that I have heard, the first part of the verse is sung quietly and slowly, even meditatively, and the second half builds up to a joyous release. Lately I’ve also been listening to another song that begins with the last half of the verse, and then adds the line: “mi she’ma’amin lo mefached et haemunah l’abed,” loosely translated as whoever believes is not afraid to lose their faith. Sometimes I ride around on my bike with headphones on and catch myself singing along loudly, oblivious to how crazy I must look (sound) to anyone who hears me on the Boulder bike paths. This is likely as close as I’ve come to any practice of hitbodedut, a kind of individual prayer or meditation advocated by the Hasidic master, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. I used to talk about hitbodedut with my friend, Rabbi Gavriel Goldfeder, who also happened to have once been a Talmud student of my brother’s at a yeshiva in Israel. At the time, I found the practice of talking aloud to God incredibly hard, maybe mostly because it made me feel foolish (or I feared I would look or sound foolish?) As the years have gone by, I care less and less about how foolish I sound or look, and although I still find the practice of talking to God extraordinarily difficult, I deeply yearn for it. Gavriel once told me that I wanted a telephone booth to God — i.e., a direct line. We were discussing my difficulties with prayer, especially within a synagogue context. He was right, and I have grown even less and less able to connect to traditional liturgy or to feel anything sacred in a synagogue setting. I feel sadness about that, and yet: I am taken aback by the deep joy I feel when I hear that song, and how when it rises to a peak in that second half of the verse, I feel the release in my own body — as if somehow I have let go of my fear and have awareness that I possess the ability to be present in the moment, i.e, alive and in my life. I am praying then.

To whom or what I am praying is another story. Perhaps that is why I like that other line: whoever believes is not afraid to lose their faith. The complexity of the thought resonates with me, because it accepts the truth of doubt. If someone had asked me five or six years ago if I believed in God, I would never have wavered in answering affirmatively. Even in my darkest moments of depression, or times (months and years) where I read nothing but Holocaust literature, history, and memoir, I never questioned the existence of God. I was not naive. Like anyone else with a faith system, I built a philosophy to reconcile good and evil, one partly bound up in a fairly simplistic understanding of quantum physics, chance, personal responsibility, free will, and a rejection of a clockwork universe. I never related to the liturgy’s metaphors of God as king (or male), but I also don’t think I had a great need to focus on God as anything particular — it was more like I felt certain of a Godly presence in the world, whatever that was. I did, however, feel that there were times in my life where I had a rare, intimate connection with that presence — a moment by the sea, a moment in that dark 4 am hour, a very specific moment in my early pregnancy with my oldest daughter. And then, it drained out of me. I have described it before as having a canteen full of water, and you are unaware of a hole in the metal from which the water has been drip, drip, dripping, until you reach to take a sip — parched — and are taken aback to find there is nothing left to drink. That is how it felt to me.

There was a specific incident that led to the puncture wound in the canteen, but I will not share it here. Suffice it to say that something terrible happened — but not in the bigger world (i.e., not the evil of genocide, which is sufficient to puncture anyone’s faith), but something in my smaller world, in my own “story” and the story of the people I love most — my tiny universe of beloveds. My actual full awareness of the end of the “leak” was at a funeral for a young man who had committed suicide, and I found the prayers unbearable and told a dear rabbi friend of mine that I needed to leave immediately. I did not think I would be able to walk if I stayed in the cemetery a moment longer. She blessedly held my hand as we walked to the car together. It was an incredibly visceral experience.

But that lack of faith is not what I am writing about today. I have been thinking, as always, about how we make meaning, and our role in this gigantic and vast universe — the big questions of why we are meant to be here and what we are meant to be doing. All that alone time I had driving cross country allowed for a lot of belly-gazing. But for the past few weeks, I’ve had the gift of settling back into my house, surrounded by my books, and especially the gift of my daughters’ presence (my husband, unfortunately, is back at sea). I’ve been able to take my regular walks, (sadly not on the vast beaches of the Cape that make my heart feel almost full to bursting), but still in a place of magnificent natural beauty, and I’ve had some time to quiet, to listen to what my body needs, something I absolutely was not able to do in all my temporary dwellings over the past few months. And I’ve been able to sing along to that song, loudly and freely, claiming that I still believe in something even so. Maybe all I believe is that the world really is a very narrow bridge, and that if I turn my gaze from looking downwards, and instead just focus on the step right ahead of me, and the hands holding me — my husband’s, my daughters, my parents, my siblings, and some very, very good friends — the world will not feel such a terribly scary place. Very lonely sometimes, yes, but as Nabokov said, “Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.” Maybe people pray in community as medicine. I don’t see that working for me now, but I do feel a lift in my state of mind, an awareness of the incomparable difference between being alone and being lonely. Joy and aloneness can go together just as succinctly as aloneness and pain. When I told my brother Josh today how good it felt to be around my books again, he reminded me of the lyrics to Simon and Garfunkel’s mournful ode to loneliness, “I Am a Rock”:

“ I have my books/ And my poetry to protect me/ I am shielded in my armor.”

Those are at least some of the least depressing words of that song… and yet, there is also this line:

“If I never loved I never would have cried.”

The same can be said of faith. I will be most afraid if I ever stop being able to cry. We are not meant to be rocks, and holes in canteens can be repaired, even if they have some big dings in them.