Resilience in the Jewish Tradition June 2020/Sivan 5780

The Broken Tablets

Estelle Frankel, Sacred Therapy

Estelle Frankel is a contemporary psychotherapist and spiritual director whose work is rooted in the intersection between psychology, Kabbalah, and Mussar.

The myth of the two tablets suggests that mistakes and even failures are a natural, inevitable part of development. In fact, failure is often a gateway through which we must pass in order to receive our greatest gifts. It was only after Israel's greatest single act of folly -- namely, worshipping the golden calf -- that they were able to truly receive and hold on to the gift of Torah, or spiritual illumination. Sometimes we learn to appreciate life's gifts only after we have lost them. If, however, we are lucky enough to be given a second chance, with the wisdom we have acquired through our experience of failure, we learn how to cherish and hold on to what we are given.

A contemporary parallel can be drawn from the fact that people cannot make constructive use of insights and early memories retrieved in therapy unless they have adequate internal psychic structure. Without the necessary psychological capacities, momentary insights are often forgotten or misunderstood. In fact, when the ego is not strong enough to bear certain psychic contents, their availability to memory can be more harmful than useful.

The new revelations at Sinai can also be seen as symbolizing the inevitable stages we go through in our spiritual development. The first tablets, like the initial visions we have for our lives, frequently shatter, especially when they are based on naively idealistic assumptions. Our first marriages or first careers may fail to live up to their initial promise. We may join communities or follow spiritual teachers and paths that disappoint or even betray us. Our very conceptions of God and our assumptions about the meaning of faith may shatter as we bump up against the morally complex and often contradictory aspects of the real world. Yet if we learn from our mistakes and find ways to pick up the broken pieces of shattered dreams, we can go on to re-create our lives out of the rubble of our initial failures. And ultimately, we become wiser and more complex as our youthful ideals are replaced by more realistic and sustainable ones.

...The second tablets represent our more mature visions and dreams, which perhaps are not as lofty as our youthful visions and dreams but are more viable. The myth of the broken tablets teaches us that is important to hold on to the beauty and essence of dreams we once held dear, for our initial visions contain the seed of our purest essence. Gathering up the broken pieces suggests that we must salvage the essential elements of our youthful dreams and ideals and carry them forward on our journeys so that we can find a way to realize them in a more grounded fashion. For ultimately the whole and the broken live side by side in us all, as our broken dreams and shattered visions exist alongside our actual lives.

Roger Kamenetz, "The Broken Tablets"

Roger Kamenetz is best known for his book The Jew in the Lotus, about his trip in 1990 accompanying Jewish leaders to meet the Dalai Lama.

The broken tablets were also carried in an ark. In so far as they represented everything shattered everything lost, they were the law of broken things, the leaf torn from the stem in a storm, a cheek touched in fondness once but now the name forgotten.How they must have rumbled, clattered on the way even carried so carefully through the waste land, how they must have rattled around until the pieces broke into pieces, the edges softened crumbling, dust collected at the bottom of the ark ghosts of old letters, old laws. In so far as a law broken is still remembered these laws were obeyed. And in so far as memory preserves the pattern of broken things these bits of stone were preserved through many journeys and ruined days even, they say, into the promised land.

The Story of Yavneh

Avot d'Rabbi Natan 4:5 (edited c. 700-900 C.E.)

When Vespasian came to destroy Yerushalayim, he said to them: "Fools, because of what do you seek to destroy this city, and you seek to burn the Beit Hamikdash? And what do I seek from you? Only that you send me one bow or one arrow, and I will go from you." They said: "Just as we went out against the first two who were before you and we killed them, so we will go out before you and we will kill you."

When Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai heard, he sent and called to the people of Yerushalayim and he said to them: "My sons, because of what are you destroying this city and you are seeking to burn the Beit Hamikdash? And what is he seeking from you? Indeed he is seeking from you nothing other than one bow or one arrow, and then he will go from you." They said to him: "Just as we went out against the two before him and we killed them, so we will go out against him and we will kill him."

Vespasian had men present opposite the walls of Yerushalayim, and each and every word that they would hear, they would write on an arrow and hurl outside the wall, to say that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was among the lovers of the Caesar. And so they would mention to the people of Yerushalayim. And when Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai would say this to them one day and two and three, and they did not accept it from him, he sent and called to his students, to Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua. He said to them: "My sons, stand and take me out of here. Make me a casket and I will sleep inside it." Rabbi Eliezer held its head, Rabbi Yehoshua held its feet and they would bring it around until the setting of the sun, until they reached next to the gates of Yerushalayim.

Said to them the gatekeepers: "Who is this?" They said to them: "It is a dead body, and do you not know that one does not leave a dead body overnight in Yerushalayim?" They said to them" "If it is a dead body, take it out." And they took it out and they walked it around until the setting of the sun until they arrived next to Vespasian. They opened the casket and he stood in front of him. He said to him: "You are Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai -- ask what I will give you." He said to him, "I do not request from you anything other than Yavneh. I will go and teach there to my students, and I will set there prayer and I will do there all mitzvot said in the Torah." He said to him: "Go, and all that you want to do, do."

He said to him, "Would you like me to say before you one thing?" He said to him, "Say." He said to him, "You are about to become king." "How do you know?" He said to him, "Such has been a tradition of ours, that the Beit Hamikdash will not be given into the hand of a commoner but rather into the hand of the king, as it is said, "He will cut down the forest thickets with an ax; Lebanon will fall before a mighty one" (Isaiah 0:34).

They said: It wasn't one day or two or three days until a dispatch came to him [i.e. Vespasian] from his city that the Caesar had died and they had appointed him to stand in kingship....

When Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai heard that he had destroyed Yerushalayim and burned the Beit Hamikdash in fire, he tore his clothes and his students tore their clothes, and they wept and shrieked and mourned, and he said [quoting Zechariah : ], "Lebanon open your doors" -- this is the Beit Hamikdash -- "and let fire devour your cedars" -- these are the kohanim who were in the Beit Hamikdash who took their keys in their hands and threw them toward on high and said before the Blessed Holy One, "Master of the Universe, here are your keys that you have handed to us, since we have not been trustworthy stewards to do the work of the king and to eat from the king's table"....

Daniel Libenson, ELI Talk: "The Jewish Innovator's Dilemma"

Daniel Libenson is president of the Institute of the Next Jewish Future and co-host with Lex Rofeberg of the "Judaism Unbound" podcast.

...Disruptive change...comes from the outside in, not from the inside out. So what does this have to do with Judaism? The first thing that I want to note is that Judaism has seen patterns of disruptive change over and over again in its history. One of the most dramatic ones was the fact that although people think that Rabbinic Judaism came about after the destruction of the Second Temple, that's actually not right. It began while the Second Temple still stood in Jerusalem -- because there were people living far away from Jerusalem who didn't get to experience the grandeur of the Temple very often..

What the Rabbis were offering was more frequent, more meaningful to them, and it could take place in all kinds of areas far away from the center in Jerusalem. Sure, it lacked the grandeur of this building; it lacked the beautiful chorus of singing Levites; but it was also a lot cheaper -- you didn't have to have a fancy building like this with all the cleanup costs of blood spattering everywhere, and you didn't have to maintain an entire tribe of Jewish professionals whose livelihoods were met by sacrifice-bringing and heavy taxation. So people who were participating in Second Temple Judaism begin to migrate to Rabbinic Judaism again from the periphery and into the core. Obviously that's accelerated by the fact that the Temple is destroyed, but it probably would have happened anyway...

Angela Duckworth “Grit”

Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.

The Limits of “Grit”

By David Denby

The New Yorker, June 21, 2016

Jack Shonkoff, the director of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, put it this way to Tough:

If you haven’t in your early years been growing up in an environment of responsive relationships that has buffered you from excessive stress activation, then if, in tenth-grade math class, you’re not showing grit and motivation, it may not be a matter of you just not sucking it up enough. A lot of it has to do with problems of focusing attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. And you may not have developed those capacities because of what happened to you early in life.

In this light, Duckworth’s work regarding poor children becomes irrelevant or even unwittingly abrasive. In effect, the children are being held responsible for their environment; low character scores become an accusation against poor kids that they cannot possibly answer.

“At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.” Through much of “Grit,” she gives the impression that quitting any activity before achieving mastery is a cop-out. (“How many of us vow to knit sweaters for all our friends but only manage half a sleeve before putting down the needles? Ditto for home vegetable gardens, compost bins, and diets.”) But what is the value of these projects? Surely some things are more worth pursuing than others. If grit mania really flowers, one can imagine a mass of grimly determined people exhausting themselves and everyone around them with obsessional devotion to semi-worthless tasks—a race of American squares, anxious, compulsive, and constrained. They can never try hard enough.

Duckworth’s single-mindedness could pose something of a danger to the literal-minded. Young people who stick to their obsessions could wind up out on a limb, without a market for their skills. Spelling ability is nice, if somewhat less useful than, say, the ability to make a mixed drink... But I’m an owlish enough parent to insist that the champion spellers might have spent their time reading something good—or interacting with other kids. And what if a child has only moderate talent for her particular passion? Mike Egan, a former member of the United States Marine Band, wrote a letter to the Times Book Review in response to Judith Shulevitz’s review of Duckworth’s book. “Anyone who would tell a child that the only thing standing between him or her and world-class achievement is sufficient work,” Egan wrote, “ought to be jailed for child abuse.”

Our Stories and Our Resilience

The Stories That Bind Us - Bruce Feiler

The New York Times

March 15, 2013

...After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.

I first heard this idea from Marshall Duke, a colorful psychologist at Emory University. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Duke was asked to help explore myth and ritual in American families.

“There was a lot of research at the time into the dissipation of the family,” he told me at his home in suburban Atlanta. “But we were more interested in what families could do to counteract those forces.”

Around that time, Dr. Duke’s wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students.

“The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges,” she said.

Her husband was intrigued, and along with a colleague, Robyn Fivush, set out to test her hypothesis. They developed a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.

Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached an overwhelming conclusion. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

“We were blown away,” Dr. Duke said.

And then something unexpected happened. Two months later was Sept. 11. As citizens, Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush were horrified like everyone else, but as psychologists, they knew they had been given a rare opportunity: though the families they studied had not been directly affected by the events, all the children had experienced the same national trauma at the same time. The researchers went back and reassessed the children.

“Once again,” Dr. Duke said, “the ones who knew more about their families proved to be more resilient, meaning they could moderate the effects of stress.”

Why does knowing where your grandmother went to school help a child overcome something as minor as a skinned knee or as major as a terrorist attack?

“The answers have to do with a child’s sense of being part of a larger family,” Dr. Duke said.

Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative, he explained, and those narratives take one of three shapes.

First, the ascending family narrative: “Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you. ...”

Second is the descending narrative: “Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.”

“The most healthful narrative,” Dr. Duke continued, “is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”

Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they belong to something bigger than themselves.

Leaders in other fields have found similar results. Many groups use what sociologists call sense-making, the building of a narrative that explains what the group is about.

Simon Rawidowicz, "Israel: The Ever-Dying People" (based on an essay he originally wrote in 1948)

Simon Rawidowicz was the founding chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.

...we are confronted here with a phenomenon that has almost no parallel in mankind's story: a people that has been disappearing constantly for the last two thousand years, exterminated in dozens of lands all over the globe, reduced to half or third of its population by tyrants ancient and modern -- and yet it still exists, falls, and rises, loses all its possessions and reequips itself for a new start, a second, a third chance -- always fearing the end, never afraid to make a new beginning, to snatch triumph from the jaws of defeat, whenever and wherever possible. There is no people more dying than Israel, yet none better equipped to resist disaster..

I therefore say: we may not split up the people of Israel into two spheres of reality. The people of Israel is one. Neither may we approach the Jewish problem from an optimistic or pessimistic angle. Optimism and pessimism are only expressions of our fears, doubts, hopes, and desires. Hopes and desires we must have; fears and doubts we cannot escape..

A people dying for thousands of years means a living people. Our incessant dying means uninterrupted living, rising, standing up, beginning anew.

Rabbi Aaron Panken Z”TL

While presiding over the graduation ceremonies this month he noted that the world was “particularly challenging and painful” in a way that “transcends anything I have seen in my lifetime.”

“But here’s the thing,” he continued. “The Jewish people, and our religious friends of other faiths, have seen this before, and we have lived through it, and thrived and built again and again and again.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/nyregion/rabbi-aaron-panken-plane-crash.html

Hannah Arendt. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a German Jewess. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,1974)

“What a history- A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. With real rapture I think of these origins of mine and this whole nexus of destiny, through which the oldest memories of the human race stand by side with the latest developments. The greatest distances in time and space are bridged. The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life-having been born a Jewess-this I should on no account now wish to have missed.”