This year, I took a peer-led class on the teachings of Yemima Avital. Born in 1929 in Casablanca, Morocco to a family of Kabbalists, Yemima moved to Be’er Sheva Israel at the age of 20. She completed a degree in psychology at Tel Aviv University and began sharing her psycho-spiritual teachings to groups of women, then men. She was a Hassidic rebbe in her own right, and developed her own teaching method, Shitat Yemima. She would only speak her teachings [halakim] orally, and students would write them down. There were no source sheets--whatever ended up on their page was the text they received.
In class a few weeks ago, something shifted in me as I wrote this line:
כוח התיקון גדול מכוח המשגה
The power of the repair is greater than the power of the mistake, the bad thing.
Something in the process of hearing it and writing it down on the page in front of me made it feel undeniably true in my body, even if I hadn’t thought about it yet. More than that, hearing this primary text through the voice and pronouns of a woman made me excited about its authority in relation to the canon of primary texts--all written by men--that I study on my path to become a rabbi.
Yemima scarcely referenced Torah or any other Jewish text. Her teachings are meditations on emotions, relationships, and our inner life. She goes on to describe embracing our inner child, allowing ourselves to make mistakes, and the need to turn toward--not against--ourselves. She reminds us of God’s love and flexibility. She would say at the end of her lessons, “You are good. You are so good. Be good to yourself.”
The Jewish concept of teshuvah--of returning, also described as repentance--is sometimes hard to grasp. Right now, we are in the season of teshuvah; it involves striking our chests and asking God and those we have wronged for forgiveness. And, in this year, when we cannot physically return to the Javits Center with our CBST community or even stand within six feet of one another, teshuvah feels especially distant and strange. Part of the larger theological and interpersonal process of teshuvah is tikkun. Tikkun comes from the verb letaken; to fix or to repair.
Something I’ve learned and tried to integrate this year is that reckoning with internal change--tikkun, is necessary before interpersonal teshuvah. Otherwise, the brokenness we feel within ourselves somehow makes it way into our dearest relationships. This is most clear in the book of Bereishit, Genesis, the first book in our Torah. In the beginning, we have brokenness. The first humans, Adam and Eve, are kicked out of the garden. Cain kills Abel. God asks Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?” Cain answers:
לֹ֣א יָדַ֔עְתִּי הֲשֹׁמֵ֥ר אָחִ֖י אָנֹֽכִ
Am I My Brother’s Keeper?
As a devoted learner of Torah, I hear the answer in the book of Genesis to be a resounding no: Sarah banishes Hagar. Jacob and Esau fight in their mother's womb. Jacob steals Esau’s birthright. Lavan switches Rachel for Leah on their wedding night. The brokenness is passed down from generation to generation, without tikkun.
And then, to bring the book of Bereishit to an end, comes Joseph. Many of us know the story of Joseph’s technicolor coat, how he was cast into a pit by his brothers and sold into slavery in Egypt, is imprisoned, rises as a dream interpreter and becomes Pharoah’s chief advisor. Joseph’s body and life are marked by rejection from his family; a story Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer people know all too well.
Joseph’s brothers return to Egypt because of a famine, and approach him. He recognizes them, and is faced with a choice; either reject his brothers and send them back, likely to die of starvation, or step out of the closet of his new Egyptian identity and tell them who he really is. I imagined Joseph considering Yemima’s teaching:
כוח התיקון גדול מכוח המשגה
The power of healing is greater than the power of the harm
His first reaction is to turn away from his brothers and weep; perhaps at the reality that his family is all still alive and standing right in front of him, perhaps at the pain and loss their presence raises in him. As readers, we get to see Joseph's emotional life! He cries more than any other character in our Torah. It reminds me of another Yemima teaching I wrote:
אני רואה בכי – תוציאי, מותר לך, מותר לך לשגות כל הזמן עד שתחליטי לתקן
I see crying - get it out. You are allowed. You are allowed to make mistakes all the time, until you decide to repair.
Joseph’s cries intensify--he is really “getting it out”!-- and we feel him moving toward repair. He cries again upon seeing his youngest brother, Benjamin. The verse says: “Joseph hurried out, for he was overcome with feeling toward his brother and was on the verge of tears; he went into a room and wept there.” The third cry before all his brothers is the most intense, the verse telling us he could no longer control himself. When he finally lets out his sobs--
וַיִּתֵּ֥ן אֶת־קֹל֖וֹ בִּבְכִ֑י וַיִּשְׁמְע֣וּ מִצְרַ֔יִם וַיִּשְׁמַ֖ע בֵּ֥ית פַּרְעֹֽה
His sobs were so loud that Egypt could hear, and so the news reached Pharaoh’s palace.
Joseph’s sobs are like the Rosh HaShanah shofar blasts, stirring something inside all who hear--a wail of loss, and a call to action.
I imagine Joseph’s face, hot and red and wet with tears as he finally steadies himself with a breath, and, in the silence after those Shofar-blast sobs, finally says to his brothers what he has been holding inside:
?אֲנִ֣י יוֹסֵ֔ף הַע֥וֹד אָבִ֖י חָ֑י
I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?
It is here, through tears and disbelief and touching what is broken that Joseph can make tikkun. More importantly, I think, is that Joseph creates an opening for his brothers to do teshuvah. After a moment of shock, they touch what is broken and they cry, too. They repent and take accountability for the ways they wronged him; they welcome him back into the family.
It's amazing to me as a gay man and lover of Torah that it is Joseph--the rejected brother, the queer brother, the imprisoned brother, the one who should have lived as a slave or even died--is the one in our people’s story who finds this power in himself to open the door for healing. He switches the answer to Cain’s question “Am I my Brother’s Keeper?” to a resounding yes. Joseph frees the generations before him by cutting this thread that runs back to Adam and Eve and, in doing so, gives the book a new ending; Yes. Joseph is all of his brothers' keeper, and his tikkun does not end there; he vows to sustain his siblings and their children, and gets to see his father Jacob before he dies.
In the words of Rabbi Adin Steinzaltz, of blessed memory, “...A rope that is cut and re-tied is doubly strong at the point where it was severed....All forms of teshuvah, however diverse and complex, have a common core: the belief that human beings have it in their power to effect inward change.”
Rosh HaShanah, this entire High Holy Day season, is an invitation for us to do some of this work ourselves. I know many of us are weary, and have done a lot of internal reckoning just by nature of our circumstance. There is so much teshuvah needed to be done in our communities, in our country, and in this world that is literally and figuratively on fire.
Personally, the process of teshuvah can be very fraught. I am already a very self-critical person. Sometimes teshuvah can feed a masochistic tendency in which I am only seeing what is broken in myself and in the world. I am constantly focusing on tikkun that I rush and repair in haste, setting myself up to break again. I do not get to appreciate the beauty in the process. I skip over the disbelief and the tears. This is why I needed Yemima and Joseph’s Torah. They have shown me that feeling what is broken does not mean I am broken beyond repair. It also does not mean I have to know exactly what that repair will look like. It means I might make mistakes again and again until I am ready to repair, maybe until I let out those loud, Shofar-blast sobs. It is in feeling those hard things without banishing them, and tending to the brokenness with compassion that I can move closer toward inward change, toward tikkun, maybe even creating an opening for teshuvah like Joseph did. I can change the fate of my own story and, perhaps, others.
When I doubt myself, I imagine Yemima encouraging my vulnerability, saying “You are good. You are so good. Be good to yourself.” I imagine Joseph and his brothers eating together during a global famine, after all of their tears have dried. I think of the string back to Adam and Eve--which Joseph re-tied, now twice as strong--and how the story of Genesis changed course. Mostly, I feel the bravery of Joseph’s tears. My blessing and hope for us this year is that we all merit that same bravery as we face the brokenness in ourselves and in our world.
Shanah Tovah.