A Song From My Father (on the occasion of his yahrtzeit)

 I want to tell you about a song I learned from my father.  (To hear me singing it, click here)

Koh Amar, Koh amar Hashem, Matza Hen Bamidbar . . .     

I learned this song from my father as a young child.   I didn’t understand the words at the time, but looking at them now, they seem to be speaking about my father and his life, and at the same time also about all of us and our lives.   

The words are from Jeremiah 31:1: 

כה אמר ה'

Thus said God:

מצא חן במדבר

They (the people) found favor in the desert

עם שרידי חרב

A people who had escaped the sword

הלוך להרגיעו ישראל

 I, God, am going to help them to rest, Israel

The literal sense of the pasuk is that the people of Israel, upon running away from Egypt with their lives in their hands -- escaping the sword -- go on to find favor in God’s eyes in the desert and eventually to be led to a place of peace and rest,  the land of Israel.

The pasuk describes a journey.  There is the backstory to the journey --  where the people came from -- and this backstory is one of trauma and suffering and persecution.  They -- we -- are a people defined by our constant surviving or escaping the sword.   Am seridi harev.  This phrase stands in the center of the pausk because it is the heart of the matter; these are survivors; they live with the sword running after them.  

With that suffering -- and survival -- as the backdrop to their story, the people’s journey forward is necessarily one of healing.  Their destination point, the last phrase of the verse -- halokh lehargi’o Yisrael --  is peace, and they are en route to this resting place.   In the meantime, they are in the desert, an in-between no man’s zone that is in some ways ideal for such a healing process, a barren place, yes, but also a place of quiet and contemplation and, for the Israelites, of divine protection and care, a spa-like existence away from the hassles of the world.

But how do they heal?  How do they get to that peace?   The pasuk, with the word halokh, meaning “walking” or “going,” makes it clear that it is a process, this getting to a place of peace.   And the key to this process, it seems, is the first phrase of this pasuk --- matza hen, “He found favor.”   The way you get from a place of being defined by the hanging sword to a place of peace -- the bridge between them -- is hen, “grace” or “divine favor.”   

There seems to be a link between hen and peace elsewhere in the Torah as well.  In the priestly blessing, the second phrase talks about hen --  veyekhunekha, “May God deal graciously (with hen) with you” -- and the third, final phrase talks about peace -- veyasem likha shalom, “He will grant you peace.”    We get to peace somehow through the means of hen.  

In Parshat Noah, too, there is this association between hen and peace.   The first time we hear of Noah we are told that “Noah found favor (matza hen) in the eyes of God.”   Noah, the first person to be described as having hen , has a name that means “rest.”  What is so beautiful here is that his name actually contains the same letters as the word hen.  Written forwards, his name means “rest,” but written backwards it means “grace” or “favor.”   

Hen and Noah, grace and peace, are interrelated, flip sides of the same coin.  They are both about relaxing into what is without too much effort, feeling the calm that comes our way when we accept the gift of divine grace, when we accept that we are loved without or beyond reason. To “find favor” in someone’s eyes is not a rational process, but an inexplicable gift.   When Moshe begs God to enter the land, the word used for his beseeching is related to the word hen, va’ethanan.  Rashi explains that, although Moshe had plenty of good deeds he could have relied upon, he understood that the best way to approach God was not to say that he deserved the favor, but to ask for it to be given freely, hinam, to ask God to show him grace.  

To live with a sense of this divine grace in one’s life is to be at peace.  Our restlessness stems from a sense that there is something we desperately need to do in order to earn this life, in order to keep the earth turning, in order to make sure everything is ok.   Peace comes when we can feel the hen, feel the inexplicable favor we are held in above, know that we need do nothing to deserve or earn it, but simply learn to allow it.    And in a self-perpetuating cycle, this relaxing into divine grace also opens and magnifies in us the natural gifts and charms we have each been given, turning us into creatures of hen, charm and charisma, appealing to those around us through no effort other than that of being at peace with ourselves.  

For an am seridei harev, a nation that lives with the sword at its back, feeling the hen is especially important and difficult, and probably the only way to ever achieve peace.   To live with a memory of the sword and a sense of impending doom is to be anxious and restless; there is a constant need to control, an urgency and a striving even about small things, as if life itself depended upon them.   There is also a gnawing guilt at having survived and thrived while others did not, a feeling of not deserving and therefore needing to perpetually earn the right to one’s good fortune.  Hen removes these burdens, answering restlessness with the peace that comes from unearned love, asking us to relinquish control, feel the embrace of inexplicable divine grace, and relax into being ourselves without effort.    

Through an experience of hen , then, perhaps we can begin some kind of healing with respect to our traumatic history and begin to approach a place of peace.   But it feels important that we not abandon the pain, which is, as this pasuk makes physically clear, the essence, the middle, the heart.   The healing that happens is not one of abandonment, but one of embrace.  We surround the raw wound of being an am seridei harev with the unearned love of hen and with a never ending peace that is beyond the world of swords.   We surround pain with love and peace and in this way move forward.  

My father lived a life that mirrors the journey described in this pasuk.  His prehistory -- before I knew him -- was an escape from the sword of Europe.    That sword sat in the background of his and our lives, casting a pall, giving some urgency to the life that came afterwards.   I wouldn’t say we lived in a desert, but America felt like a haven for healing in its own way, fresh and clean and empty of the weighty resonances of either Poland or Russia or Germany or Israel, a relative no-man’s zone in terms of difficult Jewish history, a place to remake oneself.   

And my father had so much hen!   Hen carries the sense of being specially chosen --  in Noah’s case as in my father’s, specially chosen to survive a disaster -- but also specially chosen to carry some extra spark, a kind of charisma, a twinkle in the eye that shows a spirit of humor and wisdom and life force that is from another world, the kind of spirit that lights up a room with presence.  This is hen, a mark of God’s favor.   God favored my father.

And yet he still suffered.  There was, just behind the twinkle, anger, sadness, hurt, depression, anxiety.  He had escaped the sword but it still hung there in the background.  The hen helped.  It was a sign of a spirit that would not be dominated, a light that would not go out, a sense of -- yes, but beyond the sword there is still joy somehow, lightness, even, a relaxing into the grace of having survived and thrived.  

Did my father make it to the calm described at the end of the Jeremiah verse?  It was a process and he was certainly on his way.   I imagine him now, completely at peace, knowing and basking in the full experience of having divine grace, feeling the freely given love and never doubting it, finally resting in it.   

For him the journey is surely complete now; he is at peace.  But for us down on earth, it feels like we are still on the journey, still restlessly living in the shadow of the sword.  We continue this work and this journey, slowly healing the suffering through grace and love, slowly developing a sense that beyond it all, there is no earning or striving, but only free flowing favor.  I can feel my father looking down on us now and smiling with that special twinkle in his eye, sending some of his own hen and love so that we, too, can feel the peace.