Av - How to Turn Towards Grief
I am witnessing a human being experiencing loss for the first time. My youngest has learned that his best friend in preschool will be moving away in just a few weeks and won’t be returning to their classroom in the fall. There have been major meltdowns after coming home, throwing toys, and hitting for indiscernible reasons. He’s mad, he’s upset, he’s confused, and the vocabulary he possesses to express it is all in his body. These emotive eruptions come in waves, and now that my wife and I know a bit about which way the swells break, we are gently guiding him to feel whatever is coming through him as much as possible and that every feeling he has is welcome. It is such an honor to be attentive and hold space for one beautiful microcosm’s grief in this moment of his development, especially during this particular moment of tremendous uncertainty throughout the Jewish and global community. Like the generations of our Sages teach us about the destruction of the Temple, l’havdil: turn toward it. Do not look away.
How many of us as children were coaxed out of some natural, healthy emotional response we were having, at least once or repeatedly? Our adults needed us to be doing something else, acting some other way at that moment, “getting with the program,” as my stepfather used to say. Perhaps out of a desire to protect them from pain, or to protect themselves from emotions they cannot hold as adults, parents can unintentionally be teaching their children that cognitive bypassing behavior is desirable and rewarded while emotional regulation through their own or others’ acknowledgment and validation is inefficient or intolerable. It is no wonder so many of our integration careseekers remark on feeling emotions in journeys they either have never felt in their lives or haven’t felt since some traumatic episode when they were children—at some point, we learn to put on a mask to survive in a world that was not created for us to feel fully free within.
Paying attention to the pain of loss is encoded in myriad ways during this season, starting last month with the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, intensifying during the first nine days of the beginning of this month, and reaching the apex of their embodied intensity on Tisha B’Av, the ninth day itself. Grief can come in waves like this, beating harder and harder, when it feels like no more pain can be could possibly be encountered. In my journeys, I am learning to hold space for myself, but mostly for my pain. It often sneaks up on me during moments of ease or pleasure, like a thief trying to steal light. My whole body can be consumed by these waves of intense and full heat, expanding pressure on every part of my skin. How can I hold space for myself when this is what it is? Why do I always have to be the one to hold it? Why me? Why? The questions, I have learned, are my mind trying to take care of myself by going to the story of how I got here, and the best way to ride these waves is to turn toward all of that tightness and distress, to feel what it is like to lose all of my hope, and to begin to not identify with it. “I am not my pain. I love you,” I said, while I began the practice of turning toward, while tobacco smoke fills the room.
When a Jew turns toward pain, we encounter God’s suffering as well, writes the Piaseczna Rebbe. We might imagine that our suffering is an impediment to true connection and encounter, but the Rebbe spurns this idea: “There are times when a person wonders about himself, thinking, ‘I am broken. I am ready to burst into tears at any moment, and in fact, I break down in tears from time to time. How can I possibly learn Torah? What can I do to find the strength not just to learn Torah but to discover new Torah and embodied reverence?’
“Then there are times when a person beats their heart, saying, ‘Is it not simply my arrogant heart allowing me to be so stubborn, to learn Torah in the midst of my pain, and in the midst of the pain of the Jews whose suffering is so great?’ And, then they answer themselves, ‘But I am so broken. I have cried so much, my whole life is fraught with grief and dejection.’ They are lost inside their introspective, self-analytical confusion.”
“But, as we have said above, it is the Holy One who is crying within the inner chambers, and whoever presses themselves closer to God through Torah is able to weep there together with God and also to learn Torah with God.
“This is the difference. The pain and grief they suffer over their own situation, alone, in isolation, can break a person. They may even fall so far that they become immobilized by it. But the crying that a person does together with God makes them strong. They cry and take strength. They are shattered and are then emboldened to study and to worship.”
It is the recognition that we are not holding our pain alone, and that expressing our pain, through crying, screaming, moaning, we move closer to the place where the Divine is weeping for us, and we are not holding space for ourselves anymore, but for Her as well. The Piaseczner urges us to be broken by our pain in order to approach Torah and Divine service from a place of identifying with the God who collects every tear that is shed.
I am holding my son, his body limp and his cheek on my shoulder. He’s made it through this wave of ineffable grief. Through our bodies, I’m giving him a language of intimacy and connection during a moment of sorrow. He’s crying for his friend, I’m crying for him. We’re coregulating in the Holy One’s inner chamber of love through grief. It feels like home.
