It’s a similar refrain every time.
“How are you?”
“Well, you know,” with a knowing eye roll or nod. “Everything is so chaotic.”
On the one hand, it’s true. I wake every morning to heartbreaking news, hope that comes in slivers, and graphic videos of public violence readily accessible online that dim the rest of my day. In recent weeks, people in Iran have been brutally murdered in public by their own government. Here at home, we recently witnessed the murder of Alex Pretti, using tactics disturbingly familiar from those same videos abroad, directed at someone who embodied what we claim is the right way to stand up for one another.
And still, we are expected to send emails and pay bills, to wash the bathroom floor, and continue on our days.
Amidst all of this, I wonder if we are in fact living in a time of unprecedented chaos. When my grandmother left Italy at twelve, in the aftermath of World War II, did the world feel less fractured? When my grandparents built Jewish life on the margins of white society in South Philadelphia, did chaos feel more manageable? I actually don’t know. Chaos is not new. What changes is how we are asked to live inside it.
One of Torah’s enduring gifts to each of us is its insistence that when we find ourselves painstakingly alone in our human experience, all we have to do is look back to the stories of our ancestors. We just need to turn the pages, and we will encounter the people who have questioned, grappled, cried, yearned, just like us, albeit with different settings—to remember that our lives are a part of a much longer story. We are not alone.
It feels like no accident that we are now in the season of the book of Shemot (Exodus), which includes Moshe’s first speaking parts in the whole Bible. Upon going out on a Monday morning, he sees two Hebrews fighting, and he says to one, “Why are you striking your kindred?”
From our people’s first days, we’ve been going out on Monday mornings, wondering “Why are we doing this to each other?” In this line, we see a life of heartbroken awareness at its beginning.
While I consider myself an optimist, I’m not convinced the question ever resolves for Moshe. What follows instead is a lifelong practice of moral awareness, seeing clearly even when it breaks the heart. Once you see clearly, you are responsible for how you respond. So the pertinent question for us now is not why, but how. How do we live with this knowledge? How do we make meaning amid chaos?
Our sages wrestle with this, too, and I have found the two places I swing back and forth from most often in two different stories. In the first, the Talmud, in Tractate Brachot 60b, records a teaching of Rabbi Akiva:
One must always accustom oneself to say: Everything that God does, God does for the best.
Rabbi Akiva is the irritating friend who pushes you to find a silver lining. However, the teaching goes on to share a story in which Rabbi Akiva suffered compounding misfortunes, but he held tight to this blessing. Even in the darkest moments, when life around him unravels, he maintains a spiritual practice of reminding himself that the losses he endured are for a greater purpose. I imagine this was his practice of hope in dark times.
By contrast, in another place in the Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin 39b, we meet Rabbi Ya’akov, who has the shocking realization that the mitzvot we hold sacrosanct may not reward us in this life. After witnessing a young man attempt multiple mitzvot at his father’s direction and tragically die, he cries out, “So where is the good he was promised? And where is the long life he was supposed to receive?”
In response, all the Sages of the Talmud can do is promise a good outcome in the World to Come. Rabbi Ya’akov continues to live a life of mitzvot. The rabbis do what so many of us do every day: hope our actions lead to reward, and when they don’t, strive to make meaning anyway. Rabbi Ya’akov pushes us to elevate our spiritual practice in the face of everyday pain. Our job as human beings is to maintain ethical obligation, even if it doesn’t guarantee we will receive good things in return.
I often find that halacha (Jewish law) gives me a framework and path to walk in my life. I long for a clear halacha in times like these. But as shown in the two stories, my ancestors didn’t have that clarity, and neither do I, and I take solace in that. What I can tell you is that we need to stay in this together; that’s what’s gotten us through up til now.
Lately, I have been guided by the words of Joanna Macy, who releases us from the demand to feel hopeful. She said in an interview on September 16, 2010:
“The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding evermore capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.”
Presence, she suggests, may be enough. Showing up. Staying. Loving a world that does not resolve, because it will not be healed without that love. Further, she argues that some of our greatest spiritual innovation may just come from the moments of our deepest pain—when the fracture feels unfixable, and the road seems desolate.
Despite tremendous challenges, our Sages and people stayed through struggle and built and renewed themselves, their lives, and their relationships with G-d. The rabbis don’t shy away from asking the hard questions or trying out different ways of living inside the chaos. We need to use both their grappling and their persistence through uncertainty in the project of building a more just world as models for us today. Our ancestors did not move forward because the struggle was inspiring; they moved forward because they remained committed to building life from within it. Innovation, safety, and renewal emerge not simply from what breaks us, but from the courage to remain present long enough to imagine a different way through. We just haven’t gotten there yet.
Our greatest spiritual innovations ahead may just come from the moments of our deepest pain. When the fracture feels unfixable, and the road seems desolate, we may just be the person who builds the vehicle we need to navigate it.
We are living in a time of Shemot, a time of naming what is broken and refusing to turn away. Chaos does not absolve us of responsibility. It sharpens it.
May we have the courage to stay.