Loss and Love

One of the most deeply compassionate and engaging texts about the place of God, the Temple and community in the lives of the Jewish people is found in a little known rabbinic source, almost 2000 years old.

The text speaks about how a visitor is to approach the Temple mount. As with all sacred places, there is an etiquette of expectation guiding how we are to behave there. Such expectations are not meant to constrain us, but rather to prepare us. We do not go to such places to simply pass through as observers, voyeurs. We go to be transported, to see what lies beyond the quotidian, to see what anchors and prods give meaning to life, and to feel how we can connect to them. We go so that we will learn both who we are, and who we can ultimately, and most fully, become.

Let other texts speak about the laws of sacrifices, who brings what, and how the Temple should be cleaned.

This text speaks to the heart of the visitor:

“These are the ones who, when visiting the Temple in Jerusalem, enter by circling around counter-clockwise (everyone else enters clockwise):

A mourner, an outcast, one whose loved one is ill and one who lost something.

[In meeting someone walking towards them, those walking clockwise inquire:] What is it that causes you to walk that way?

If they answer: I am a mourner, the inquirer responds: May the One who dwells in this house comfort you.

If they answer: I am an outcast, the inquirer responds: May the One who dwells in this house turn their hearts so they may take you back.

To the one whose loved one is sick, they respond: May the One who dwells in this house be merciful to your loved one.

To the one who has lost something, they respond: May the One who dwells in this house cause the one who found it to return it to you.”

(Massekhet Semahot 6:11)

I am captured each time I read this. For each time I wonder, “Which direction am I walking in now? Which of the visitors have I become today?”

Somedays, I am the unremarkable one, moving routinely, perhaps even hurriedly, clockwise through the affairs of my day. But in meeting someone approaching from the other way, I remember that I am blessed, and tasked with asking the question and offering the words of comfort. Other days, I am the one seeking comfort, waiting for someone to notice and offer their kindness and blessing to me, grateful that there is a place to go to with my sorrow. This is not a static text. I must choose who I am every time.

It is easy enough to know if I am a mourner – thankfully, I rarely am. It is harder to know if I have a loved one who is sick. How far in my circle of warmth need someone stand to be called my “loved one?” And do I really have to love the ones close to me that I seek prayers for? Is this a legal category: parents, spouses, siblings, children, etc? Or is this a matter of choice and feeling? Perhaps both?

As for outcast, we hardly know what the word means today, with boundaries and voluntary communities being as pliable as they are. Excommunication has little resonance for us. But what if outcast also means a child who is estranged from a parent; a friend who is shunned by a friend; siblings who no longer speak to one another? There are far too many of us who suffer such alienation to imagine that this category is obsolete.

This text absorbs us. From the moment it opens itself to us, we tumble in – body and soul.

But then, in the midst of such imagining and comforting and healing, we read what seems to be almost petty, and jarring: “To the one who has lost something, they respond: May the One who dwells in this house cause the one who found it to return it to you.”

If we lost something? How can that compare to death, illness, exile? Do we really want to gather the full spiritual energies of our sacred community, and invoke the compassion of the Heavens, simply because someone lost their keys? Their earring? Their sock? Yet it hardly seems possible that coarse materialism could have seeped into this tender, tearing text. How, then, can we understand it? Perhaps in two ways.

So perhaps, rather than demonstrating a misplaced obsession with possessions, this call indicates just the opposite: that households were generally spare; that possessions carried greater value and import; and that objects largely carried the identifiable imprint of their owners, either through craftsmanship or use. And that in a way perhaps even greater than we can know, people's possessions were an extension of and keeper of their identity. To lose a piece of their belongings was akin to losing a piece of their sense of self. It is so even today; perhaps it was even more so in an era of fewer, and thus more precious, belongings.

But perhaps there is even a more profound purpose for this part of the text. Perhaps it is reminding us, ever so gently, that loss is not always material. We can suffer loss of affection, loss of faith (in ourselves, a loved one, God), loss of a job, loss of home, loss of confidence. Placing this unnamed loss among the other three penetrating, fundamental losses, calls forth an awareness of the inevitable shadow that trails us. Life brings loss. Perhaps it is we who experience loss today; it will be the other who suffers tomorrow. There is not a one of us, on an almost daily basis, who can avoid bumping into or experiencing the sad sense of loss. And so there is not one of us who can refrain from offering blessings of return and wholeness on a daily basis, and seek our share of blessings in return.

“Loss is what we begin with...” writes Robert Pogue Harrison in his poetic book Forest: the shadow of civilization. “We may define the loss mythologically, as a fall from the garden of Eden, and Eden, in turn, we may identify with this or that dream of lost plenitude. One way or another, longing is the loss of life, and loss the life of longing….” (p. 231)

Despite all our blessings and moments of celebration, we live in a world of constant loss. There is no way to fight it. We live, therefore, also in constant need of the comforting presence of each other. We have no Temple today, and no one is approaching us from the other direction, demanding that we notice their hidden pain. But all the more reason we should attend well to the possibility of someone’s loss as we wend our way through the chores of our day. We needn’t make a big deal of this. The midrash itself tells us that in our daily rounds, at work, at home, at the gym, we are to ask one simple question, and, if appropriate, offer one single-sentence response. Anything less would be cold. But anything more may potentially be too much.

May the One who dwells among us, and in whose house we all live, bring you the comfort that you seek in the year ahead.

(written in the inaugural light of my wood burning stove, 12/29/09)