There Will Yet Be Singing

Every so often, we encounter stand-up moments—opportunities to, well, stand up and show (to yourself, to your children, to the world) if you actually hold the values you claim to espouse, if you are the person you think of yourself—and wish others to think of you—as actually being. I had a moment like that last week, which I thought I’d share with my readers this week. Life doesn’t dole out these opportunities so often. But this this was my moment and, because Joan was part of the discussion and the decision, it was hers too.

Like every student of Scripture, I have my favorite Tanakh personalities. I actually identify with bits and pieces of lots of different biblical personalities and regularly have “wow, that guy in that story is just like me” moments in the course of which I suddenly see the text before me as a kind of mirror in which I suddenly—and mostly unexpectedly—find myself reflected. That is a feature of all great literature, I suppose: that ability to function both as a gateway into the author’s world and, simultaneously, as a mirror in which the reader (or, in the theater, a member of the audience) is suddenly possessed of the conviction, impossible yet fully real, that the play being watched or the book being read is actually about him or herself. Historically speaking, of course, that conviction is lunacy. Shakespeare lived and died centuries before I was born and there are no secret messages meant just for me in any of his plays. But that is not how it feels when I am seated in the theater and my level of engagement with the dialogue makes it feel precisely as though King Lear has stepped out of time to speak directly to me. Or, far more disconcertingly, to others about me.

For me personally, the biblical personality I’ve always identified the most meaningfully with has been the prophet Jeremiah. And, yes, I understand fully well that this makes no sense at all. For one thing, his life could not have been less like mine. He had no wife and, as far as anyone knows, no children. He spent a serious portion of his adult life under arrest or in jail. His was the epitome of bravery in the face of impending doom, speaking the oracles of God aloud and in public regardless of the danger that he knew fully well inhered in doing so. He was beaten, mocked, pilloried. He was brave, but he paid a gigantic price for that bravery and was considered a traitor to his king and country by most of his fellow Jerusalemites. He was nothing at all like me.

But he was also just like me. Or rather like the version of myself I would like to think I could yet become. He was fearless. He was righteous without being self-righteous. He was the both articulate and eloquent. And he was secure in his faith, unrattled by the existence of phony prophets who insisted that their good-news messages were the true oracles of God sent to guide the people forward and that Jeremiah’s jeremiads were just the depressive ravings of a seriously depressed person blinded by his own pessimism. Despite it all, though, the man had it in him to stand up in public and speak honestly—and that is the quality I'd like to find reflected in myself, in my own preaching, in my writing. I want to be secure in my faith and unequivocally honest. And I want also to be suffused with hope—which Jeremiah also was, and at the same time (this is the big trick, at least for me) that he was both realistic and honest.

The prophet had been vouchsafed a double-screen vision of the future. There was still time for the people to avert catastrophe by embracing the core values of their faith, but otherwise destruction and devastation were on their way. And this was a make-or-break moment: the destiny of the nation was in its own hands if they had the courage to seize it. But even if the people refused to mend their ways and proved unable to avert catastrophe, there would always be a future for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. There would be exile. But there would also be return. There would be devastation, but there would also be renewal. There would be a miserable past, but there would also be a future.

And then the opportunity presented itself to put his money where his mouth was. It was the last year the kingdom of Judah would exist. The Babylonians were already at the gates of the city. The king had put Jeremiah in jail for refusing to lie to the people about what the future was about to bring—to them, to their city, to their nation, and to their king. And then, out the blue, a cousin of Jeremiah’s named Haname’el showed up in prison with the news that a parcel of land outside the city in a place called Anatot was Jeremiah’s to purchase if he wished it. Why exactly this offer came to Jeremiah is not made clear; probably he was the closest male relative to the recently deceased owner of the field. But the point was that this was the worst real estate deal imaginable, buying land in a nation at its lowest point, facing implacable foes, its very future uncertain. But Jeremiah had it in him to look past the moment and see a bright future for the land and for its people. He closed his eyes and saw bridegrooms and brides standing beneath their chuppah, children playing in the city streets, young people out together drinking and singing. And so he bought the land, using his fellow prisoners as witnesses to the transaction. (The whole story is in the thirty-second chapter of Jeremiah for those who wish to read it. Shul-goers will recognize part of it as the haftarah  assigned to the Torah portion called Behar.)

So the other morning, Joan and I had a Zoom call with our kablanit, a nice woman whom we have engaged—but without yet signing a contract—to undertake some renovations on our apartment in Jerusalem. When we first conceived the project, it was just fun. We are hoping soon to spend a lot more time in our apartment and there were repairs that needed to be made. There were some cracks in the flooring. There wasn’t enough storage space in either of the bathrooms. There wasn’t the kind of closet in which you could hang coats or winter jackets. The oven wasn’t big enough. There was no shade on the balcony, which problem we wished somehow to address without making it impossible to build a sukkah on the balcony. That kind of stuff. In the world of renovations, small potatoes. But not to us: for us, this was a way for us of staking out our future in a part of the world we love and in which we want to spend maximal, not minimal time as the years pass.

But that was last summer. Then we had the chagim. And now we have Gaza. The stories we’ve read are horrific. The story is nowhere near over. More loss is, I’m afraid, on the books. The IDF has shown remarkable forbearance to date, but who knows what tomorrow might bring? And the stories of the pogrom itself—the violence, the Shoah-style brutality, the almost unimaginable savagery of the attack—all that has made the bathroom storage space issue seem—to say the very least—strange to worry about, almost bizarre to discuss seriously. We were going to sign the contract before Rosh Hashanah, but then the contractor’s father died and she was busy with shiva and dealing with her loss. We obviously stepped back, told her to take her time, promised her we didn’t mind waiting a few weeks to settle things up.

Should we move forward as planned? Are we being ridiculous to worry about the sukkah-on-the-balcony issue at a time like this? We both dithered for a while, unsure how to proceed. But then I caught a glimpse of Jeremiah, my guy for all these years. I noticed him in a few different places, actually. He doesn’t speak—at least not to me personally—but I somehow know who it is. And then I somehow see that poor man in his jail cell pondering his own real estate decision and, somehow in my mind’s ear, I hear him singing his own words to himself: od yishama ba-makom ha-zeh…b’arei Yehudah u-v’chutzot Yerushalayim, kol sason v’kol simchah, kol chatan v’kol kallah. There will yet be heard in this place, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, sounds of joy and merrymaking, the voices of bridegrooms and brides. And that was enough.

The man bought the property in Anatot. And we signed on with the contractor.

Israel is facing tough times. The enemy is savage and violent. The devastation left in the wake of the massacre will take years to repair, the psychological damage to the national psyche even longer. But I am possessed of the unshakeable faith that the state will endure, that Jewish life will never again be uprooted from the Land. And we will yet—one of these years—enjoy our Sukkot dinner in our own sukkah on our own balcony overlooking Gad Tedeschi Street, and I know that just as surely as I also know that God will yet spread out God’s own sukkah of peace over the land and over its people.