Torah and Toothaches

Torah and Toothaches

In 1969, Norma Rosen was one of the brave firsts who began to fictionalize the experience of the Holocaust. More than a dramatization of events, the writings of Rosen and others like her dared to enter into a universe of curiosity. Novelists cautiously embarked on quests to discover the deep truths lying dormant in the lives of survivors and historians. Life in the ghettos before the death camps, the terrors of losing children, the lives of survivors after the war were perspectives that a novelist gave shape to, molded and contoured from experience.

When the new generation of children who now carried the burden of memory and the facts of Nazi terror were too graphic to witness, fiction gave them, and us, an opportunity to see the truth more clearly. We needed to see the truth through a prism. We cannot always comprehend unmitigated truth. It can hurt too much. Fiction has this prismatic quality. And for Rosen, she called her work of fiction on life after the Holocaust, Touching Evil.

One of the poignant revelations of her main character, Jean, is when she turns inward and surprisingly observes, “I write that. How satisfying! Probing the toothache with my tongue. Tapping the uterus with my pen.” (p.28)  Now, many years after I first read those words, do I return to their stirring image to describe so many experiences in our lives today.  

Friends, there is a thick tension in our midst. There is no one source of this tension, though many would point to one or the other as the unequivocal source of our ‘problem.’  We will do well to identify the tension, to acknowledge its presence, and to respectfully address it.  The incessant barrage of social media feeds and conversations with friends in the parking lot or dinner or parties are the toothaches of our reality.  We don’t always know what to believe or know what is true, because an equal and opposing truth is just one click away.  Perhaps we are “probing toothaches with our tongues,” where soothing our distress has unavoidably become a part of our daily experience. We’ll fumble around this discomfort with our tongues, figuratively and literally, because there seems to be nothing else to do.

But, there is something else to do.

A synagogue community is not just the place to have a Bar Mitzvah, to get married, or to say Kaddish for your loved one. Indeed, these are the moments that make life sweet. A synagogue community, better defined by its Hebrew appellation, Beit Knesset, is a gathering place.  It is a home where there is no division of us and them. There is no poor or wealthy, educated or ignorant, liberal or conservative. Here, we are permitted, even privileged to fulfill our goals as a community to study together in the Beit Midrash. Here we are given the opportunities to worship/aspire together in the Beit Tefillah, and here we can embody all the definitions of what our community ought to mean.  We can and should make our community a meeting place for our probing consciences.  Not to make our Beit Knesset, our Beit Midrash, our Beit Tefillah our home is to let the harrowing truths of the world outside exist without a fiction to enlighten the truth.  Our community must do this better.

Probing our sensitivities is voluntary response. It is as natural as blinking an eye.  We do well to feel concern when we hear voices which threaten our values. We do well when a community gathers to listen and be heard, to ask and explore, to learn and to teach, to receive and to give.  No amount of probing is going to soothe the pulsating ache of our present experience. But acting in community is the first great step to let the healing begin.