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10-12-01
The Power of Community to Comfort
By David
Kraemer
In theory, I
suppose, we all recognize the power of our chosen communities to comfort us when we have
experienced loss. Ideally imagined, a
community plays an essential part in remedying grief.
Upon the death of a loved one, members of our community will approach us
with words of consolation. They will support
us, and draw us out of our cocoons of mourning. If
part of the pain of loss is the feeling of being alone, our communities remind us that
this need not be so. “We are with
you,” they say, “and we will be there as long as you need us.”
We imagine and hope
that communities play this crucial role, but—thank God—we rarely find ourselves
in a position to test this imagination. We do
not often find ourselves as mourners and, when we do, we are generally alone in that
position. But recently, in the aftermath of
the events of September 11, we have all been forced to assume the position of mourners,
and we have been given the opportunity to discover, once again, the power of our
communities to guide us from profound grief to glimpses of genuine comfort. I will describe my own experience, but I know that
I am not alone in what I describe.
As the awful news
of that September morning became known, it became clear that the community in which I
found myself, at the Jewish Theological Seminary, had to gather together, to respond in
prayer. At the midday gathering, which
brought together students, faculty, administration and staff, matter-of-fact announcements
were followed by the recitation of psalms. At
that moment, I admit, I felt more outraged than comforted because the pain was too raw
and—figuratively speaking—the dead were still before me. One does not mourn—let alone offer or seek
comfort—when death has just occurred. I
left the auditorium, seeking out my wife and daughters, just to make sure they were all
right.
But by that
evening, it became clear that we had to gather together, and the only place we could do
that was at the synagogue, the ancient gathering place of the Jewish community. We reported personal losses (thank God there were
very few) and joined in reciting psalms of sorrow and complaint. However we felt about the words—whether we
paid attention to the words or not—it felt right to be together with friends and
neighbors. It would have been too awful to be
alone.
That Friday night,
we gathered in front of the synagogue before dark to sing and light candles. At the fireman’s monument down the block,
there was to be a community memorial service later that same night, but we could not light
candles on the Sabbath, so this was our opportunity.
As fighter jets patrolled overhead, we joined our voices together, weeping
for the many in our city who had been lost. We
groped together toward meaning, again taking comfort in knowing we were not alone in our
grief. Somehow, the multiplicity of voices
found just the right tone. As an individual,
I remember, I was powerless to do the same.
Come the next week,
we were still, as a community, numb with horror. And
Rosh Hashanah services were weighed down by that numbness.
Though we sang, we did not soar. Anyone
who walked by and heard our voices might have diagnosed us as suffering a collective
depression. But, of course, this was exactly
right because, just a week later, our mourning could not be over. We lived the emotion together, discovering that we
were not alone in our inability to recover joy. This,
too, was comforting.
Yom Kippur was a turning point. The day began with the somber intonation of Kol
Nidre—the melody, if not the words, expressing our collective, somber mood. Following the rituals of the day, we
all enacted our own deaths. We neither ate,
nor drank, nor bathed, nor had sex—precisely as we will not when we die. But as the day came to an end, and we realized we
had survived, we felt ourselves taking the first small steps back to joy. Our quiet voices became louder and more emphatic. “Next Year in Jerusalem” felt more a
defiant aspiration than an idle hope. We were
resolved to go forward! How comforting was
that?!
And now, as I
write, we find ourselves in the week between the first days of Sukkot and Simhat Torah. This, we are taught, is the holiday of our joy! And so, in small measure, it is. The community gathered again to celebrate the
birth of two new babies and the engagement of an old and dear friend. Of course, we sang “siman tov u-mazal tov” with enthusiasm. Here are the promises of a world rebuilt, a world
better than before. And though our Simhat
Torah joy will be muted—New York City is not permitting dancing in the streets for
security reasons—I have no doubt that there will be joy. Because our community is regaining strength and
recovering hope. And in this we are
comforted.
This is the path I
have followed with my community in these recent weeks.
I could not have moved forward without them.
So, what we imagine is true. Together,
as a community, we have far more power than we do when alone. The whole is far greater than the sum of its
parts.
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