Living with Longing

I first heard this song at the Ashkenaz festival at Harbourfront in Toronto back in the 1990s, performed by the wonderfully-named Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band. It was the kind of gathering that is almost unimaginable today: a crowd of people, cheek by jowl, listening to music and sometimes even singing. I was a teenager then, towards the end of high school, wondering about the next chapter. And the song expressed something that seemed like the perfect soundtrack: a yearning, a deep yearning, for love and for life.

Usually we outgrow our soundtracks. But this one has stayed with me, reemerging at different moments in my life. And I am feeling it so strongly this year.

A rabbi in an empty sanctuary, like a doorknob without a door.

A grandparent unable to see their grandchildren, like a doorknob without a door.

An elder in a residence, separated from their caregivers, like a doorknob without a door.

You get the idea.

For each of us here tonight, the longings are different, sometimes even contradictory. A parent with school-aged children might simultaneously long for schools to stay open, in hopes of a precious moment of quiet and calm; and they might also long to keep their children home, safe in a smaller bubble. Empty nesters might long for a dinner out, but are unsure whether it’s worth the risk. And the restaurant owner and the teacher and the medical professional and the maintenance worker and the bus driver, each of us with our own conflicted longings, as we try to navigate the balance between surviving and thriving.

We long for what we have lost.

In an op-ed piece entitled, “Missing the comfort of ‘my’ seat in synagogue when the whole world is askew,” Tom Fields-Meyer writes:

“That’s what I long for now,” he concludes, “more than the familiar tunes or the cookies afterward. When we’re feeling unmoored, it’s natural to yearn for the familiar."

It’s true, I miss the Danish; but what I long for is being together. It’s true, we have opened our tent flaps in new ways; but I long for our in-person connections. So what do we do with our longing? I was speaking with a friend who was lamenting the state of the world. “I’m sad I won’t get to physically be in shul,” she said. “I miss people. I long for things to be back to normal. But really,” she continued, “I guess longing is a useless emotion.”

But is it?

“Many great civilizations,” one educator writes, “share this sense of human longing and give it various religious and poetic expressions.”

Longing is a powerful human drive – it drives people to change the world, to make it a better place… A suffocating man will long for air, a hungry man will long for food, a refugee will long for a safe haven and a home, and a person who "has it all" will long for self-fulfillment and love. (3)

Here’s the good news: We Jews are experts at longing. It comes with exile, unfortunately. Whether the original expulsion from the Garden of Eden or the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem not once but twice, this is an area in which we have some experience. The reason that Reform synagogues calling themselves “Temples” was so radical at the beginning of our movement – and even, for some, still today – is that our Orthodox neighbours kept praying for the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem. Secular Zionism reoriented that longing to the modern state of Israel. Theodore Herzl, whose passionate political activism was the foundation for that state, wrote: “Longing creates the Messiah.” And Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, when asked by a twelve-year-old school girl when in his life he felt the greatest satisfaction, said this in reply: “What is satisfaction? What is the good of it? If a man is satisfied, he no longer yearns, no longer dreams, no longer makes demands. No. I have never known a single moment of satisfaction.”

The creation of the modern Jewish state was always understood not as a new invention, but as a fundamental return. That’s part of why the charge of colonialism, despite having historical context, rings emotionally and spiritually false. Zalman Shazar, born in Minsk, in 1911 at the tender age of 22 visited the Land of Israel for the first time. He wrote of his visit to the Western Wall like the culmination of an ancient dream, bringing together political and spiritual longings:

In our High Holy Days at Home Kits, we included an original drawing by our congregant Jordanna Vamos, which is based on an ancient Jewish art form: the mizrach, which synagogues and homes would hang on the eastern wall. Ours evokes our Temple’s ceiling, encircled by Leonard Cohen’s words: Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in (you can find it on our website if you didn’t get one at home). (5)

Certainly, as much as many of us are connected to Israel, we are at home here in Montreal. But the art form of the mizrach itself points to yearning, for longing for something beyond where we are right now. Leonard Cohen can be seen as our modern psalmist, and there is no more beautiful poetry than the psalms, which express the soul’s yearning for God. How the soul yearns, the Psalmist writes! Like a thirsty deer yearns for a stream; like a watchman yearns for the dawn. The soul envies the sparrow and swallow with their nests, yearning to be at home. (6)

And so yearning is not simply for the past. It is part of the human condition; and, like that Yiddish love song, there are times in our lives when that longing comes to the fore. This is one of those times – not just because of the pandemic, but because of Rosh Hashanah. We are meant to be longing right now; not just for normalcy, but for our best selves. In the timeless words of Rabbi Soloveitchik: “The whole essence of the precept of repentance is longing, yearning, pining to return again. Longing develops only when one has lost something precious.” (7)

The question this year is, how might our longing move us forward, and not just back? How might it propel us, not just to return to who we were, but to become who we ought to be? How do we make it more than nostalgia? Certainly, we want to ensure that the things we value are still around on the other side; in the words of Margaret Atwood, we should “Think of all the things you hope will still be there in [the] future when we get across. Then do what you can, now, to ensure the future existence of those things.” (8) Whether it is independent media or local bookstores, favourite restaurants and cafes, music and theatre, and yes, synagogues - if we want them to exist on the other side of this, we need to support them now. But this moment gives us the opportunity not just to recover, but to reimagine. As my Hartman teacher Rabbi Dani Segal says, “We always say change is possible. This year, we are experiencing it." (9) In other years, the familiar can get us stuck; we see familiar faces and we sit in familiar places, and it’s too easy to stay the same. I long for that familiarity; I can’t wait to be back. But this year, and truly, every year, we also have the opportunity to change.

Zalman Shazar – who saw the Western Wall at the age of 22, who eventually became Israel’s first minister of education and its third president, who spent his life surrounded by people – Zalman Shazar was also a poet, and here is what he wrote:

Let me suggest tonight, at the beginning of the new year, that we take this time – which we never would have chosen, which has come with so much loss – and focus on our longing. Let me suggest that we use this time to discover what is truly worth longing for. Perhaps what we most miss is something we never actually had. Perhaps we are yearning for a soul more actualized, love more lived, a world more fair. Perhaps we take this time and realize that we have been living like a doorknob without a door, and not just for this past six months. And when we have that yearning, well; to go back to our Yiddish song, we will do anything. We will learn to smile with our eyes and hide our mouths behind masks; we will step more gently on our earth; we will reshape how we care for the most vulnerable among us; we will find new ways to connect to each other and become our best selves. We will choose to change our lives.

Shanah tovah.