A Theology from the ER at Bellevue Hospital

by Rabbi Aaron S. Weininger, 
Rosh Hashanah Sermon, September 2017 / 5778

​“God held me in the palm of His hand.” These were the first words Michelle spoke when I sat down at her bedside in the Emergency Room at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Michelle jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge the day before and survived the ten-story leap. I was the hospital chaplain on call.  

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​Michelle went on, “I’m so used to doing everything myself. I don’t like getting help. I think that’s what pushed me. I was getting out of a meeting from work and decided to head to City Hall. I got myself a Metro Card and got on the subway heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge. There were tourists at the bridge. I can imagine they were thinking, ‘What’s with that crazy woman?’ Then I jumped. I didn’t want to make a scene.  I jumped but God saved me. God held me in the palm of His hand,” Michelle repeated. “I couldn’t escape His grasp. Even in the water, God saved me. When those police got me from the water and the paramedics brought me here, I knew God was holding me in the palm of His hand.”
 
I have shared Michelle’s story from this bimah as part of the story of how I became a rabbi. I spent two summers at Bellevue training as a chaplain. You could say the hospital is like boot camp for seminary students of different faiths. A Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian walk into Bellevue… and the rest is history. It truly is as Bellevue is the oldest public hospital in the country dating back to 1736, with the largest Emergency Room in the world. I hear Michelle’s words as loudly now as I did ten years ago above machines beeping and staff yelling and prayers emerging from the din toward the Holy One we call different names but out of the same depths.
 
As we read the haunting words of unetaneh tokef in the musaf service, and in its words: “who shall live and who shall die” I heard Michelle’s story once again. I pictured the police officers of the NYPD Harbor Unit who jumped in after her. I thought about the paramedics who rushed her to Bellevue. I felt Michelle’s gratitude to God who sustained her in life moments after she tried to take it. It is Michelle’s story in all of its parts. And her struggles to belong and to believe, to stick with it, to keep coming back, to be lost and to be found, are the struggles of being alive and being in touch with our humanity.
 
This morning I hear Michelle’s story alongside the stories of people hundreds of miles away in Texas and Florida and Georgia recovering after the devastating floodwaters of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. I hear Michelle’s story in Puerto Rico from the destruction of Hurricane Maria, in Mexico City from the earthquake, and still other places nearby and far away that know too much suffering. I hear Michelle’s story alongside the stories of people in this community who face the trauma of physical illness and mental anguish, from those grieving a loss and from those enduring heartbreak that never goes away. I hear Michelle’s story from people who feel isolated because of how they look or because of whom they love or how much money they have or don’t have or how educated or uneducated they feel at synagogue.
 
Because it can seem that everybody else has their faith in better working order.
 
I hear Michelle’s story alongside the doubts of Bar and Bat Mitzvah students asking what to do when they don’t believe in God, and their parents who wonder the same. Where is God? How do I still believe in a world of suffering? What do I teach my children if I myself don’t believe?
 
Even in the important differences among stories, I hear in Michelle’s story a theology for our time. I hear a way to understand God, to fill the expansive space of our sanctuary as much as the cluttered ER of Bellevue.
 
“Mee’maamakim k’raticha Adonai, Adonai shim’a v’kolee.” Out of the depths I call You, Adonai. Adonai, listen to my cry, the Psalmist writes in Psalm 130. It is as if he too heard Michelle’s words, or Michelle heard his.
 
Out of the depths of the water, out of the depths of our lives, how might we find God? Is there a way forward, a way to believe when we find ourselves crying in despair-- trying to give all power to God to make everything right–or a way to believe when we find ourselves rejecting God altogether?
 
One way to understand God is through a theology of desperation. A theology of desperation explains that God rewards those who are good and punishes those who are bad. If you see suffering, wait, that theology insists. There is a way to explain it. A theology of desperation grows out of a need to make order of a chaotic world, as certainly our ancestors knew from expulsion and exile, destruction and dispersion across lands.  This theology gave hope when the world around them was hopeless. When it crumbled and threatened to upend belief amidst the most devout, there had to be something to hold onto.   
 
Like a clock dragging us out of a deep sleep, our High Holy Days prayer book sounds the alarm of theological desperation in unetaneh tokef, a powerful prayer that we return to every Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Wake up. It is time to be judged. It is time for God to determine whether we merit being written in the Book of Life. It is as if we go from counting sheep peacefully at bedtime to being judged as sheep this morning in the solemnity of the mahzor. We read in Lev Shalem:
 
“As a shepherd examines the flock, making each sheep pass under the staff, so You will review and number and count, judging each living being, determining the fate of everything in creation, inscribing their destiny. On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on the Fast of the Day of Atonement it is sealed!
 
How many will pass on, and how many will be born;
Who will live and who will die;
Who will live a long life and who will come to an untimely end;
Who will perish by fire and who by water;
Who will be impoverished and who will be enriched;
Who will be brought low, and who will be raised up?” (144)
 
And then the guarantee is stated this way in many mahzorim, “But teshuvah- repentance, tefillah- prayer, and tzedakah- giving to those in need—change the evil decree.” If we do those things, then order will be restored. If we practice repentance, commit to prayer, and give to those in need—then we avoid being written into the Book of Death.
 
Who can allow such a theology to wreak havoc in our sanctuaries? Our experience proves time and again that life is more complicated than being promised that three things change the decree from death to life. That good people suffer and do not get written into the Book of Life. That bad people flourish and are inscribed nonetheless. I cannot believe in a God who sits above judging us as we pass by, inscribing our destiny, locking in our fate as the New Year begins.
 
How can we responsibly say those words and then look into the eyes of a child in Texas who is like a lost sheep in the flock of the flood, barely keeping her head above the waters consuming her bedroom? Don’t worry, proponents of such a theology say. Good deeds will reverse misfortune.
 
Such a neatly packaged theology smooths out the creases in a world that is messy. There is a way to undo the pain and guarantee life here and now.
 
Another way to understand God is through a theology of rejection, or more commonly known, atheism. Atheism denies God’s existence. It seems to be a response to the theology of desperation—that neatly packaged theology in which good people receive God’s blessing and bad people suffer God’s wrath. A theology of rejection is the opposite of a theology of desperation. Atheism leaves no room for God. God is absent. Faith in God is foolish at best, manipulative at worst. Proponents of such a theology, if you can call it a theology, point to the hurricanes and see no possibility for God. They point to tragedy and ask, how could a God allow for this to happen? They maintain a strict division between science and faith. They have an orthodoxy of disbelief as passionately held as the most unflinching believer.
 
Where does that leave us? Enamored by a God who rewards and punishes OR no God at all.
 
I want to suggest a bridge between the two extremes: a theology of relationship, a way that is traditional and contemporary. A theology of relationship is rooted in the sources of this very mahzor, and the real life experiences of people who want to believe but cannot be trapped by fundamentalist fear or complete rejection.
 
The very last words of the section of unetaneh tokef form the basis for such a theology of relationship. “U’shmeinu karata veeshmecha.” You, God, have linked our name with Yours.
 
The editors pose the question in our mahzor, Lev Shalem. To which name of God is our name linked? Yisrael, they suggest. The ending of the word Israel, Yisrael, is el. El is one of God’s names. (144)
 
The assertion that our name as Yisrael is linked with God’s name El means we are commanded into relationship, to take responsibility for being God’s partners in Creation. We do that best by being partners to one another through teshuvah- repentance, tefillah- prayer, and tzedakah- giving to those in need. God may not have been in Michelle’s fall but God was in her catch. God was felt in the response and rescue of the police and paramedics. God may not have been in the winds of the hurricane, but God was in the work of the clean up. God was in the stamina of the debris removal teams and chainsaw crews, those who went from this community, from Nechama: A Jewish Response to Disaster. They sought out uninsured and underinsured residents, as David Kaplan, its executive director told a group of rabbis last week, “to be the face of the Jewish people in communities of need.”  I would add to David’s description and say, to be the face of God. Of showing up through countless hours in what is now Nechama’s largest deployment, handling two category 4 hurricanes at the same time.
 
We cannot always change what happens but we can change our response to it. God does not dictate a person’s last breath but we read in our liturgy that God is the breath of all life, nishmat kol chai. That breath stirs members of our congregation to prepare meals and volunteer for our Chevra and sit lovingly as shomrim in the middle of the night, sometimes for people they never met, or mobilize – as congregants did this summer—to make a shiva minyan in Maple Grove for a family, new to town, in mourning. This summer I read When Breath Becomes Air, the memoir of Paul Kalanithi a neurosurgeon who at the age of 36 was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. At a certain point he faced acute respiratory failure, his carbon dioxide level was rising, and death was imminent. In the epilogue to the manuscript that his wife Lucy finished, she writes of his final moments: “The family gathered together… We all expressed our love and respect. Tears glistened in Paul’s eyes. He expressed gratitude to his parents. He asked us to ensure that his manuscript be published in some form. He told me a last time that he loved me. The attending physician stepped in with strengthening words: ‘Paul, after you die, your family will fall apart, but they’ll pull it back together because of the example of bravery you set.’” (210-211)
 
God, I believe, was in that moment. God was not responsible for the cruelty of Paul’s loss. The pain could not be minimized in any way. But God was invited into the room in how Paul’s family surrounded him with love in his dying moments and honored his wishes.  
 
A theology of relationship allows us to walk on the narrow bridge between the extremes: in between faith in a cruel God who decides our fate on the High Holy Days and a faithlessness that denies God altogether. And such a theology of relationship allows us to walk, simply to walk. It allows us to function at the most basic level, to have the strength to get up each morning, to have the peace of mind to go to bed each night and not deny the real struggles that make it hard for many to rise and hard for many to sleep.
 
And what happens in the moments in between waking and sleeping? Those are for us to reinforce relationship. To not let one moment go by when over food or over prayer or over study or over love we don’t stop and build our theology as we build our lives. 
 
Our blessing formula in Judaism builds that theology of relationship: Barukh attah Adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam. Praised are You God, Ruler of the world. Yes, God rules, but God’s rule comes through the link to the world. Yes, God is sovereign, but God’s sovereignty depends on the compassion of strangers rescuing one another from the hurricane’s floodwaters and rebuilding life. God’s sovereignty depends on the advances of medicine and the hands of doctors and nurses and therapists who heal. God’s sovereignty depends on the voices of scientists who warn us about the dire impact of climate change and urge us to act now. When human beings choose to take responsibility for God’s world, God’s sovereignty comes into focus. We live into our name Yisrael and our name becomes linked with God’s. Surely we can throw our hands up in despair or we can put our hands to work, to open hearts and open minds and open doors to life that is intentionally lived, thoughtful, and grounded with purpose.
 
A Hasidic tale drives home the point: “Where is the dwelling of God?’ This was the question with which the Kotzker Rebbe surprised a number of learned students who happened to be visiting him. They laughed at him. ‘What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world filled with God’s glory?’ Then the Kotzker Rebbe answered his own question: ‘God dwells wherever a person lets God in.’”
 
“Who will live and who will die;
Who will live a long life and who will come to an untimely end;
Who will perish by fire and who by water;
Who will be impoverished and who will be enriched;
Who will be brought low, and who will be raised up?
But teshuvah- repentance, tefillah- prayer, and tzedakah- giving to those in need—change the evil decree.”
 
Or we might ask instead,
How will we live and how will we die;
How will we live a long life and how will we come to an untimely end;
How will we perish by fire and how by water;
How will we be impoverished and how will we be enriched;
How will we be brought low, and how will be raised up?
But teshuvah- repentance, tefillah- prayer, and tzedakah- giving to those in need- help us decide how we will face the world, how we will face what we can control, and how we will face what we cannot control.
 
These three pillars will help us decide in all situations where we let God in, by letting others in, and where we keep God out, by keeping others out.
 
“Kol ha’olam kulo”… The whole world is a narrow bridge, Rebbe Nachman reminds us. The main thing is not to be afraid. To not be afraid as Michelle was that day on the Brooklyn Bridge. To not be afraid when fear can consume us and placate us in the short term. When we are afraid, may we be ready to find God and let God enter from the depths of the water or from the depths of any place we are striving to be human. In compassionate relationship to one another and therefore in compassionate relationship to God.
 
“God held me in the palm of his hand.” May my hands be open to catch you when you fall, and may you hold me gently when I need your embrace. Then we will be linked to God because we are linked to one another. And let us say: Amen. 

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